Sherri Alms
The Night Before
She paints her toenails stop-sign red. She takes her time, puts separators between her toes, little piggies. This little piggy goes oink, oink, oink all the way home. She waits ten minutes between two coats and then a top coat, carefully erasing the red on her skin with a q-tip.
She knows no one will see her toes tomorrow. They will be in those thin socks with the grippy rows that keep patients from slipping. Why, she doesn't know since patients are in bed, wheeled on stretchers, or sitting up in wheelchairs to be pushed out to the entrance where someone will pick them up.
She plays a game when she is wheeled out to wait for Danny's car. This will be her seventh wait at those hospital doors in the past year. The game is to judge the other patients going home, decide who is loved and who is not, make up a short story. It makes her feel less like a sick sweet angel and more like a regular person, a cranky bitch.
The old lady bent over in the wheelchair, mouth open, snoring? She will go straight into a nursing home van. The only people left to love her are nurse’s aides, the ones who bathe her as gently as they bathed their babies, who talk to her as if she is not a patient but a woman. It’s a few grams of love, the old lady supposes, a mediocre consolation prize for outlasting everyone she has ever loved. The van comes. She is wheeled in and the door slams.
The tall bald man in a green sweatsuit? His oldest daughter will pick him up, the only one of his four children who would take him because he had deserted them when they were little. She did not love him, but she acted like she did. Except she calls him Carl. She never ever touches him. She asked him what his favorite foods were she brought him to her house. You’re a saint, he told her. She huffed. You could have tried on a little more of that yourself. He laughed as she turned away from him.
The little girl with brown french braids and a cast on her foot with her mother steering the wheelchair? She will be gently set into the car her dad is driving, to head home, lamplit windows the same color as warm honey on her mama’s biscuits.
That story stopped with the honey and the lamps, the window curtains closing as in a schlocky movie, happy ever after. She sits up on the side of the bed and gently touches the first big toe she had painted. Dry. Then the last, also dry. She is done. Ten pretty pleases. As much praying as she was willing to do, this ritual that requires precise strokes to create red enamel rosary beads.
She remembers the most perfect day ever. She and her mama in Galveston, both lying on beach towels in bikinis, both with polished toes, color of watermelon, her mama said, strawberry Kool-Aid, she said. They laughed and rolled over in unison. It had always been the two of them even when Daddy was there in his black t-shirt with Led Zeppelin glaring out from his belly. They clinked Dr. Pepper bottles the day he left for good and toasted to the power of two.
Home from the beach, she stepped into the shower, sunlight pouring through the adjacent window, turning the stream into prisms. She stood face up to the shower head, eyes closed. Sticky grains of sand slid off her body. How she wishes now she had loved it more, uncrossed by sutures, undotted by small scars from laparoscopies, bones hidden under young flesh, not Halloween skeleton ribs jutting under gray skin. She remembers the light settling on her, mind sinking into a warm sense of being held, sounds of her mother in the kitchen fading. It is what she often imagines as nurses wheel her into an operating room, as the anesthesiologist puts the mask over her nose. And when she wakes in the post-op bed into amnesiac terror, she hugs the memory of warm water, the safety of the sunlit shower, and her body is prismatic for a few minutes.
Sherri Alms writes weird, sweet, and occasionally angry stories, poems, and essays. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Cosmic Daffodil, Dorothy Parker's Ashes, and other publications. She is a freelance writer who lives with her husband and two cats in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
