Where the Forest Meets the River by Shannon Bowring

Author:Shannon Bowring
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Europa Editions
Published: 2024-07-29T00:00:00+00:00

REGIMEN

It starts with Trudy dragging him by the elbow around the yard one evening. Clouds like spun sugar. Birds chirping and shrieking in the forsythia bush.

“I’m not a pony,” says Richard, trying to break free from her grasp.

“You’re right,” she says, “you’re more of a jackass. But you need to get out of the house. You need to exercise.”

It’s the exact thing, minus the part about the jackass, Richard would tell his own patients post-MI. The heart is a muscle that needs to be trained. If he keeps lying in bed watching TV all day, he risks permanent damage. Without movement, the heart grows thick and the blood festers, pooling to form clots that could travel to his lungs or his brain. Kill him.

Richard hasn’t yet decided if he wants to be alive—if, in fact, he even is all the way alive—but that kind of certain death isn’t particularly appealing. So he allows Trudy to corral him around her flowers, follows along as she scowls at her climbing hydrangea, which isn’t so much climbing the fence as it is slumping up against it, like a heat-weary farmhand gasping for breath.

“Bastard thing,” Trudy says, weaving the white flowers around each other, forcing them in the direction she thinks they ought to grow.

He wants to tell her to leave it, let nature take its course. But his wife has never backed away from a fight until she can be certain she will come away the victor.

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