She doesn’t let herself think about it anymore. She has a schedule now, a timetable, something that might look like a life if you don’t scratch the surface too hard.
Wake up, call the hospital. Tend her garden, call the hospital. Get driven to the hospital and sit with Dean for hours, hours, hours, go home, cry. Lather, rinse, repeat. The only thing that changes in her life is the sky and the inversion it brings.
She walks on the sky when it clouds, because it’s more solid and sure under her feet than the traitorous ground that swallowed her children whole.
She bargains when it rains, to God or Big Brother or Allah or the deity of the day, because if the Jehovah’s Witnesses are right and their god is a merciful god, He will give her family back.
Once there was an earthquake and she smiled so wide she thought her face would hurt, stood between two rickety, heavy bookcases, prayed that she would die.
The most tragic part of her life is that she doesn’t. She knows this, knows it runs through the marrow of every bone in her body, which has to be why they all ache when they see the sunrise, as if to say another day, another tragedy .
Today she wakes before the sun and hugs her knees to her chest, sits there for a good three hours after he’s called the hospital and heard the same thing as always - the only thing that changes in her life is the sky - “We’re sorry, Mrs. N----, he’s the same.” Every day it’s the same, the same, the same-
-but that doesn’t make it any easier.
Same dingy cab, same crotchety driver, same stale cigarette smell. She lets herself smoke in here because if she’s lucky that’ll **** her first, but she doesn’t fool herself into believing that. Her luck ran out the moment she heard that shot from the door, heard her husband scream and saw all the blood staining the foyer-
But she’s not thinking about that. She’s smoking and she’s listening to the sound of the tires pummeling the ground mercilessly and she’s thinking maybe I should be that ground and she’s not making much sense at all, because she doesn’t sleep anymore and she thinks she might be halfway to insane by now.
They pull up outside the hospital. She’s always surprised her feet haven’t worn a track in the ground yet that leads straight to Dean’s room. She supposes she doesn’t need one.
She pushes the door open and the spark of hope he can never suppress dies with a silent scream, because Dean is the same, her life is the same, she’s the same and the same and the same and she hates it.