The note won’t tell you about the straw pointing straight up or the snow falling, in clumps, outside the window. The plastic cup of ice water, full on his bedside table. Untouched, the way all those expensive radiation treatments didn’t touch the cancer in his lungs and brain. It’s a shame; the things we waste. The things we let waste us. Better drugs cost less. He’s crinkled up in bed, all bones and clammy skin leaking heat. Still in the same sunglasses he wears in all his pictures on the wall. Cool like Joe Camel. Always dangling a lit cigarette from between his lips, bluer by the puff.
In the bathroom mirror, it’s me who’s sweating. Even with the lights set dim, my glossy eyes shine as black as pits. The faucet pours into the sink. That’s warm water crashing before it fades into the background like everything else.
My heart thumps like his couldn’t anymore. Me, grinding my teeth. My thoughts, shredded and scattered like a smashed ashtray. The phantom taste of cigarettes I’ve never smoked still lingers under the fur on my tongue. I never even wash my hands.
When I open the door, the hinges squeal and chaos floods the bathroom, filling my quiet place with noise. The fake light of the nursing home. The beeping heart monitors. As I step out into the real world, it shames me into fake, professional calmness.
Every time my leg bounces, you can hear the springs in my chair squeak. Sitting down at the computer, my mind is drowning in the messy things I could never type.
Writing a nursing note, you cut everything real out and leave whatever’s left. Clinical, sterilized words. Someone croaks, you skip all the poetry and roses and don’t call them dead. It’s expired. Like meat. Like a lease.
I type “Patient unresponsive. No apical heart rate or lung sounds noted. Skin tone pale, moist, cold on palpation.”
You don’t touch. You don’t feel. You palpate.
What I don’t say is that, with his purple lips and gray skin, he doesn’t look like he lost. No more struggling. No more fighting for every gulp of air. Is this the secret to beating cancer?
I didn’t need to check his pulse to find out. I don’t type how I poked two fingers like a gun against his wrist, barely trying before moving to his neck, then ribcage. Pretending to look, like playing hide-and-seek with a toddler.
I type “diaphoretic” instead of bullet sweat soaked.
“MD notified” means I texted the doctor. “Responsible party notified” just means I left a voicemail in some trailer park somewhere.
When I type “Post-mortem care provided by nurse’s aide”, I leave out how the first thing Shelly did when I called her in was open the window. Shelly, who wears pink leggings that pack her flabby thighs into the shape of a lumpy ass. Cellulose Chic. Her long green nails, her extended eyelashes flapping, poorly glued. Twirling around in her ruby red crocs, like it’s “Projects Run-away.”
She asked, through her partial dentures, who I think the last of the cycle will be. She means, two dead, one to go.
When Shelly dies, her note will leave out how her breath is like a fruit salad with onions mixed in. It won’t say her star sign predicted her untimely death, but it’s not like no one will see it coming.
My leg jumps harder. Every joint in my fingers locks in place, trying to keep it all in. Trying not to type anything about the burning in the back of my throat. How my nose went numb in the sudden menthol stink before I even took my hand off the window frame. The smell that flooded the room out of nowhere and then disappeared.
Nothing I type in my note talks about the idiot stories people tell themselves. The lowlife myths are like old wives’ tales for the never-married. Thirty-year-old grandmas. Looking at Shelly’s lip piercing, Marilyn Monroe is spinning under Hugh Hefner’s grave.
How the full moon is like bath salts to Alzheimer’s patients. How if you don’t crack a window when someone dies, it means their ghost gets stuck here. Can you imagine? Your immortal soul, caught in a trap. Locked behind a barrier that obviously can’t even keep flies or mice out.
Dumb as they are, superstitions soak in this place as deep as the rancid piss of the demented, wet-locked into the fibers of the carpeted floors. Stains beneath me, so defined that not even the lie of lemon-scented carpet scrub can hide them. Crushed like the pure white snow that collected on the windowsill before I slammed it shut one heartbeat after Shelly left the room.
Until then, the air in that dead man’s room smelled frost-fresh. That’s the moment before your life crumbles. The last clean breath, right before everything changes. Then it’s cancer. Sniff. Then it’s cirrhosis of the liver.
I leave out how, alone in that room, his body lay calm while I hunted for the source of it. The orange light of the man’s oxygen machine glowed like an ember in my peripheral vision. That cigarette smell came from everywhere and nowhere. I looked for smoke, for a cause.
I found none. The nursing note way to describe this would be “idiopathic”.
Now I’m telling myself, “Souls aren’t real,” the same way Mr. Marlboro Man told himself, “Just one more pack, one more week, one more month.” Like Shelly always says this is her last cartridge. After that, she’ll be back to just breathing bland air.
While I document what happened, the aides get to sit around. Lounging on the job. They gamble on their phones and talk shit about whoever isn’t here. To my left, Shelly shuffles her tarot cards, tapping them loud on the desk. Waiting for someone to notice. Her breath crackles sometimes. Wheezes every now and then.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Scrape.
Outside, the white powder piles up heavy on the ground. It smothers everything alive under it. Mother Nature’s frigid librarian, shushing up the night. If you held it in your palm, though, you’d feel numb, blue nothing melting in your hand. Light and white and soft as powdered sugar.
The tapping, cutting, chopping. Shelly fishes for attention in a room full of weed-brained TikTok addicts. Dalia catfishes on Tinder for another baby-daddy to sport-fuck her way into a subsidized three-bedroom with free utilities. The ugly green walls of the place are hidden behind plastic Christmas wreaths that hang from command hooks. This time of night, nobody’s screaming for help down the hall, jamming on their call bell button. Everyone’s asleep but us.
Again, I’m in the bathroom, trying to breathe, slow as I can, through my mouth. My nose still sniffs for any paranoid trace of menthol smoke. Sniffing scared like Russian roulette. It could happen at any time, without warning. My thoughts scatter, contemplating what it meant. The water runs steady, hiding my secrets behind the noise.
The chance of souls being actually real. The stupidity nested inside the fact that I’m even considering it. The way dumber stupidity of the possibility of the degenerates I work with being accidentally right about this. The fact that they don’t even have the IQ to understand—
“SLAY!!!”
Isabella’s Dominican accent punches through the wall with Gen Z slang brass knuckles and says, “Slay!”
She says, “You read futures, the fuck!?”
Her intonation. Her energized tone bumps, voice pounding the bathroom door like a drug bust. Like I’m at a club. Like her voice box is decked out with stolen sub-woofers. Through the wall, I listen to Shelly dealing her tarot cards, so sacred that they have a “made in China” stamp printed on the box.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Sweep.
“Your first card,” she says, “is the fool.”
“Like a Idiot!?” Isabella declares, subtle as a nosebleed.
The fool. Like what I’m surrounded by.
I tell myself souls aren’t real, even as I sniff around like a bloodhound.
Shelly’s voice washes out, disembodied and muffled on the other side of the door. Shelly, who calls herself a medium, even though she’s easily a 2X.
“The Fool represents a person who thinks they know more than they do,” she pauses before adding, “a dismissive person, heading for disaster. Too much ego.”
Like Shelly knows a damn thing. Like she doesn’t blow her money on lottery tickets, saying, “You only gotta win big once.” Counting deaths in cycles of three.
In the bathroom mirror, my frown starts to laugh. I sniff until my nose is back to numb. The anxiety, the fear evaporates like the menthol cigarette scent. For now, I’m safe.
According to Shelly the wise, the first one this time was the alky who drank herself yellow. In the documentation, the jargon word is “jaundice.” Even her dead eyes looked as if they had been colored with a highlighter. Everywhere that wasn’t yellow was purple or black.
Her plastic cup was tipped over, with the straw hanging out sideways. The tip was caked in red. That was death number one if you think three is the magic number.
In that one’s note, I never mentioned the red lipstick thrill of blood rolling down, dripping off the straw. The self-destructive glee of smiling, sucking it off the end. The bad decision taste of your life ending. Dirty like makeup running down your face. Like anal sex in your parents’ bed.
The lonely whino died that night, in the same room as Joe Camel did now. Expired like whiskey into vinegar. Her walls were empty, except for her cosmetology certificate, thumbtacked above her head. The makeup on her dead face was strategically applied so that, even rotting from the inside out, she looked healthy as ripe fruit. The type of bar-fly who wears a skimpy dress in winter.
The note left out how her arm hung off the side of the bed. How warm her skin still was when I tucked it up under the blanket.
She blended her purple mascara to the perfect shade to match her bruises, because telling the truth meant tears. It means you have to wipe off the mascara and start again. In the note, those are “ecchymotic areas” because saying it like it is means living wild and sexy one day, shitting mucus in your deathbed the next.
Lying was all she had left.
Behind my back, I heard Shelly opening that window to let the lady’s soul out. To sneak a banana-flavored pull from her vape out into the cold night.
Back in the bathroom mirror onions couldn’t make me cry. My own eyes stare at me, tracing around the rim of my pupils for yellow. The sink runs and runs and pours and pours. I’m waiting out the tarot reading. I’m sniffing, fearing the return of the liver stench smell. Fearing the menthol. My heart goes nuts in my chest.
The note would call it tachycardia.
When I closed the window on the wasted woman’s yellow body, BAM. Like apple cider vinegar searing up my sinuses. Like the rust on beer cans. The essence of what killed her was locked inside with me.
There’s nothing in the note about how this makes it a pattern. Tonight makes two dead. Two windows slammed shut. Two rotten smells. The word you use in a note would be “malodorous.” Dead Latin, expired like an Olive Garden coupon.
But I never typed that, so when it came and went, fast as the snow falling in the parking lot outside, I chalked it up to sleep deprivation and Dalia’s trap rap lip-synching voice, laced with Henny.
Twist the knob. Shut the water off. My hands quiver, shaking and sweaty. My thoughts snap in my skull and spiral down my spine, down the back of my throat, bitter as medicine. Is it warmer than before? Are the lights brighter? Why am I drenched in sweat, red as a firetruck? Are the tarot cards finally over? Is it finally time for Shelly to shut the hell up? Am I sniffing too much? Am I crazy?
The first thing I see, back outside at the desk, is Isabella’s next card. That’s two down, one to go.
It’s a picture of a green bottle shaped like a skull. The card could mean the make-up lady’s Irish last name. It’s the second guy’s thousands of smoke breaks, pressed together like a dumbbell inside his black lungs. It’s Shelly’s sour apple vape.
“The poison,” she says, softly, “is a mindset. It’s your hatred of others, really of yourself. It’s the barrier between you and peace, like a closed window.”
My time outside the bathroom is getting shorter, faster. Is the water still running? Did I even shut it off? Outside, the snow falls in silence.
The way they always look after they die, that’s the peace I’ve never had. My eyes dart spastic, side to side. Minutes take hours. The computer screen looks like a snowcapped mountain range. It’s beautiful except it’s not. Really it’s only glass.
“You don’t look okay, is something wrong?” Shelly breaks character and looks me right in the eyes.
What do I even say?
“I’m fine, maybe a bit hypoglycemic.”
Low blood sugar. In real life, that means I’m hungry.
The truth is I’m starving, but that’s not the issue.
Run the water. Sniff. Back to nothing. I could make naked snow angels right now. I could melt it down to the grass, the way ice cubes melt in soup. Blood as thick as syrup crawls up the veins in my neck. The sounds from the desk, the scatter-shot TikToks and gossip all blend together so that nothing stands out, except Shelly’s scratchy voice.
Her note, when she dies, won’t call it popcorn lung.
She flips her last card, scraping it across the desk like a flat razor. She says, “The death.”
Without even seeing it, I know it’s the Grim Reaper with a scythe in the picture. In my reflection, my veins are thick as noodles under my skin. Face red, bleeding sweat. I’m breathing faster than it feels like. My chest strains, twisting tight like wringing out a washcloth full of blood.
Dart out the door. Walk fast up the hall, sniffing the whole time. I need to get away.
The death probably means some woo-woo, manifesty, self-help bullshit. New beginnings. Finding yourself. But whatever Shelly has to say about it, I’m not sticking around to listen.
Death means dead. Not expired. Not passed away. It means nothing, ever again. I sniff for menthol. I sniff twice for skunk beer. Dalia’s Tinder picture is filtered like a goddess because telling the truth won’t get you pregnant. She doesn’t even turn her head when I shoot past her. Isabella is locked in, focused on the death card. The only one who sees me is Shelly.
Her look says I snorted something I shouldn’t have.
The window is closed from when I shut it. The foam bed is an empty blue rectangle. There’s no sign left that anyone was ever here at all. No weird odor. Like the room’s been factory reset.
That’s death.
You’re here, then gone forever.
Whatever note they write about me one day, it won’t say anything real. It won’t talk about how I’m going berserk. Panicking. Heaving and wheezing. How I’m clawing madly at that window. Compelled beyond my own reasoning. How every muscle in my body tears apart, fighting to pry it open.
The window stays stuck shut. I’m trapped in here.
My left arm is weak. Tingling.
Blood vessels pop under pressure, and the pain slices down the sheath of every nerve.
My vision is a strobe light of white snow and black behind my eyelids.
When my nose starts gushing hot blood, the note will use the word “epistaxis.” The back of my throat tastes like rust.
Then a tiny, groggy voice starts to speak, way in the background, under the screaming in my head.
“The Death,” it says, “means giving up everything to feel nothing. It’s the one thing you can’t escape.”
Way down at the nurses’ station, the bathroom sink overflows, spilling like a waterfall. It’s all so close, like I left my ears behind. Like part of me is still in there.
Alone in the room, the stuck window could be a mirror. I’m practically invisible, washed out in the static of white snow.
But then, it’s Shelly. Her face appears right up close where mine should be. Her eyes stare back at me from the glass, as if she’s my reflection.
She lifts her mango-splosion vape to where my lips should be. With her other hand, she lifts the window open and leans in to breathe a chemical cloud. She barely has to try; it just pops open.
Then, I don’t smell anything at all.
No blood or smoke. All that’s left is the soothing cold air, calling to me. Behind me, the scented vape cloud pushes me forward into the blizzard. I’m already drifting toward the tree line.
It’s all one sound now. The sink. Dalia is sipping Red Bull. Isabella cries in Spanish outside the bathroom door.
Ahead, almost out of view, a man in leather nods hello. Beyond him, a woman in red sequins blows me a kiss. Her arm is pale and soft and unbruised. They stand still, waiting for me to catch up.
The note will call me “expired,” and it’ll say what time. It’ll have words like “Cardiopulmonary arrest.” The toxicology report will say cocaine mixed with levamisole. But those notes don’t tell you anything. Not really.
Somewhere behind me, a voice says, “That’s three.”
[Image Credit : Photo by Josep Martins on Unsplash]
by 
So proud to know this fucked up, talented genius! I can’t ever get enough!!!
I enjoyed this. Nice work!