Scrambled Eggs

After, but slowly, she composes her irreverent state of mind and walks out of the room for the last time. She struggles to shrug off the room, the hallway, the stairs. Knees betraying her, she buckles at every crack.

Henry’s apartment is three doors down. It’s not exquisite, but it sure is something. He’s simple and sweet and completely finite. She’s been floating towards his room for months now. She knocks curtly, and stumbles inside.

It’s a strange apartment complex. Paint-splattered people, pasted into the decorations: replacement decorum for the lack of furniture. Yet she’s never felt more at home. Or so she’s told.

“Are you the gal that loves motorcycles?” Henry quivers through nervous veneers.

“Henry, come on now. She doesn’t even remember her own children, let alone a motorcycle her husband owned thirty years ago,” Isabel says.

Then, out of the silence, the girl’s eyes break through the mascara-grown ivy of her lashes and she opens her mouth, having no idea what might come out. Her pupils dance and leap, pushing the swing of her former young self up, up, higher and higher, cradling its youth.

“She wouldn’t remember how to brush her hair if I didn’t show her how every morning.”

Isabel’s throw-away jargon fractures the girl’s budding thought bubbles and she quickly closes her mouth as Henry brings her to his window and murmurs, “Look how bright the stars are tonight.” She looks. The stars form a1963 Royal Enfield Interceptor motorcycle; she’s wishing, for the hundredth time, that her head wasn’t scrambled eggs. Her eyes shrink back into their fortress and she trudges back to her room: witness to nothing.

But no one comes clapping, praising this final, sad epiphany. No one comes except Isabel, the nursing-home nurse. Isabel tucks her in her bed, puts the bed-pan in plain sight, and arranges the picture frames cradling her smiling family she hasn’t seen in years. “After my nap, I’ll tell a wonderful story, Isabel,” she swears as she slips into dormant nothingness. She stays that way for a long time, and then, she dies.