Close To The Boneyard: A Near To The Knuckle Anthology (Archives Book 1) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Near To The Knuckle
Published: 2016-09-29T23:00:00+00:00

Finley J MacDonald

Finley J. MacDonald grew up in Wyoming and Montana. He has published two books, House of Violence (poetry) and Angels, Delirium, Liberty(fiction). For a number of years, he split his time between areas of Montana and New Mexico. For the last decade, he has lived in China.

Vigil

Tom Pitts

The room looked sterile, smelled sterile. It had a piney scent of disinfectant. Light strained through the window, stale and yellow as the old man’s skin. John looked at his grandfather and felt nothing; he barely knew the man — what was left of the man.

John’s grandfather lay with his head back and his mouth open, feeding tubes snaked up each nostril. There were wires and more tubes fitted to an obsolete–looking piece of medical machinery that beeped softly every few seconds. A wheeze came from his mouth, an awful dry oval that housed his stained teeth and a swollen tongue thickly coated with white. It was the sound of — what John knew to be — a dying man.

He hadn’t seen his grandfather face to face in three years. He’d been off biding his time at some boarding school his mother had stuck him in. Out of sight, out of mind. John didn’t even recognize him when he first entered the hospital room. He thought the frail, withered shell in front of him bore no resemblance to the man that he’d known to be the strong patriarch of his family, the hero of his mother’s stories.

John spied an uncomfortable looking chair in the corner near the window and decided that, if he could sit quietly, the hour his mother had designated for him to bond with the old man would tick by painlessly. He sat down. The chair creaked loudly and the old man stirred.

At first there was a raspy groan and John hoped he was still asleep, lost in some lusty memory from yesteryear. But then he heard the old man’s voice.

“Who’s there?” the old man said, barely audible.

“It’s me, grandpa, Johnny.”

“Giovanni? Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Come here, boy. Let me see you.”

As Johnny got up the chair squeaked again. He stood between the window and the bed, casting a shadow over the old man like death itself.

“Christ, Giovanni, I can’t see you. Come closer.”

He leaned over the old man and let his grandfather’s eyes adjust to the light.

“Sit down, boy,” he said, patting a brown–spotted hand on the hospital blanket beside him. “Sit down and let me talk with you.”

John sat down and got a closer look at the old man. A Sunday dinner never went by without some kind of talk about Grampa Joe. No matter what his family was doing, how well, how poorly, no subject ever passed without some comment on what grandpa Joe might think. A new job, a move from the city, a marriage or divorce, the first thought in all their minds was, What was Grampa Joe going to say?

“Gio, you look good. What are you now, twenty–four, twenty–five?”

“Nineteen,” John said.

“Nineteen? What an age.

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