Hospital Beds

by Tracie Renee

I teach my son to dance, his feet on my feet and the record skipping each time we laugh in a room bleached with pale rays of dawn, I mean the room

where red stains white sheets. My son rushes into this world with blue lips and tight fists, then a scar like a promise stretching from manubrium to xyphoid process, same as my father’s.

After my father dies, the saddest thing is my son’s small face pressed to our front window, his small hands pointing at the place where my father used to park. Then the saddest thing is the day he stops pointing.

In my head, memories bleed together. I am trying to remember, because that is what daughters do. I am trying to write them down, because that is what mothers do. Life is: a list of milestones. Or a book of blanks, a run-on sentence that ends terribly. I rearrange bullet points like words in a poem. Last dance, last hug, last word. First word, first step, first laugh. Twelve pages before my father dies, my son says, We live in a circle and he means a round, infinite thing that begins where it ends and ends where it begins; and repeats itself

like the records our dancing warped. Red stains white sheets and my father’s breath rattles. Then my son’s. His heart stops. Then my father’s. One heart is a comma, beating on and on; the other, a period. My son runs, spins, sings: ashes to ashes. My father breathes through a tube and sleeps and sleeps and never wakes. The nurse we caught waltzing in an empty room at shift’s end notes the hour of his fixed gaze as we all fall down. I study all the blanks left to complete. I study them in a room

bleached with pale rays of dawn. My father teaches me to dance, my feet on his feet, the record skipping. Each time we laugh.

Tracie Renee is a librarian, a Publishers Weekly book reviewer, and an award-winning poet from sort-of Chicago whose mid-life crisis has spawned a novel that no one wants to publish (yet?), a bunch of short stories, and some stuff for kids.