Balance
She sings with her eyes open. The steam in her dark shower, slowly replaces the aroma of morning eggs. She goes to work, a receptionist who never says hello, but works harder and faster than the seven figure robber barons. When her husband comes home, she devours him, and then rolls over without a word, he is confused but happy. She draws everyday, she doodles, she paints, and she traces the spoon in the soufflé, but only draws spirals, and never fills in the cracks. She slowly tries to unbind herself from her life, like a spider’s prey, as the world shakes to an eight legged drum beat.
She didn’t have the heart to tell her friends, so she told the operator it was inoperable.
Her trashcan fills with crumpled notes to starched acquaintances. She lives a minute less everyday. Each night she holds an epic gathering in her head, she dances, and drinks and laughs and shares stories with her happy memories, but she didn’t want to see anyone.
She finally finished a long letter to the director of a funeral home, she asked a single favor from the mortician.
When she coughed up blood she stopped eating, and drove herself to the hospital. When she couldn’t see them, her friends gathered around her. When she couldn’t hear them they were there with an endless string of words of encouragement. She told her husband one night where she wanted her funeral.
At the wake, some said, It took her too early, others, They found it too late. From the open end of that tapered box a beautiful woman stared with her eyes closed, but impossibly, she smiled.