I take off my coat and stomp the snow off my shoes.
Trip over the rug and instantly bruise.
Glance up at the stack of medical bills, next to the various bottles of pills.
Crawl into bed to drift away.
Ready to escape another horrid day.
and right when conciseness started to vanish.
There's a knock on the door,
A little Spanish girl I'd never seen before.
"Sorry, wrong house."
She says in a heavy accent.
I notice her knit gloves are frozen
On her hands, made perfectly for imprints in cement.
And I wonder
If she ever made art with her hand prints when she was a kid,
I don't know, maybe she was better than that.
But for some reason, I want her to make me one of those hand print crafts.
So I say, "But this house has a fireplace, come on in."
She steps inside and laughs.
I pull the frozen knit gloves off her tiny cold hands. and breath into them to make them warm.
My stomachs butterflies are flying in swarms.
Then she sees the the pills and asks "what are all these?"
My heart sinks
"Don't worry about it, just forget it...please"
Her eyes drop and get wide when she sees the bruise on my knee.
And for the first time she really sees me.
I know how she must feel.
getting in on the short end of a sick deal.
Or maybe she can't believe that it's real.
she just pulls up her sleeve, and shows me her wrist.
A hospital bracelet with bold type reading flight risk
I start to tell her she needs to go back.
And feel my cheek turning red from her slap
she says "I'm sorry, Just don't make me go..Nobody want's to die alone."
I don't know if it was the needy look in her eye,
Or the helplessness in her tone.
But you should know that
She didn't die alone.


© copyrighted Nicole Ann Osborn