San Pedro, California
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Rachel’s Bio:
Rachel McClain is a freelance writer and stay-at-home mom currently living in Los Angeles but has vowed to find something to love in every new place the Air Force sends her family, even if the next place isn’t so sunny. She was recently selected as an honorable mention in WOW! Women on Writing’s Winter Flash Fiction contest and has short stories published in Fuselit and in the forthcoming Cup of Comfort volumes for Breast Cancer Survivors and for Military Families. She has just finished work on her first young adult novel.
Ode to a Grecian Urn
My wife is on the kitchen table. A proud woman, she offers no explanation for this inexplicable event. In the many years we’ve been married, I’ve learned keep mum if she’s not talking; so I don’t question. Still, I don’t like watching her totter in the wind blowing through the open window. I take her arm.
When I’d left for my walk, I’d left her watching birds on the bedroom window seat. She doesn’t get around anymore and I can’t imagine how she’d gotten to the kitchen. But, finding my car at the supermarket lately has become challenging; so, I shrug off this peculiarity as another oddity of aging.
Lifting her, I am no less surprised at her lightness than I was the first day after illness finally engulfed her. I carry her to the living room and while she doesn’t protest, we don’t speak of what has passed and I wonder if she is angry with me for her being on the table.
Sipping bitter coffee the next morning, I brace myself for my doctor’s appointment. Our son, upon his insistence, is accompanying me. She didn’t argue when he persisted and her acquiescence spoke volumes, lending credence to his case against me.
As not to allow any undignified crinkling from the paper beneath my backside, I sit still on the table while the doctor and my son discuss my future. My son sits in the far corner and the doctor has rolled his stool to him, keeping his back to me. Occasionally, my son looks up, but only in assessment, not in inclusion. I examine the spots on my hands, swinging my heels to the Muzak.
On the drive home, I’m given the news. Community living. My son uses the same excited tone I’d used to get him to use the toilet when he was two.
Weeks later, unpacking, I can’t gauge my wife’s reaction. She looks as she did on the kitchen table, strong and proud; but small. I talk as I unpack, assuring her that she’ll warm up to the place; but she’s quiet.
I have to find a spot for her where she’ll be as at home as where we’d lived for sixty years. But, I need a place where she won’t wander off, finding herself on the table or on the floor of the shower, as I’d found her last month. I need a place safe from my own mind. The thing I fear most is allowing my mind to wander off with her and losing her forever.
I gingerly place her atop a shelf that I need a ladder to reach. From the ground, she stands aloft and her slender arms curve toward her body in two beautiful arcs, swirling in tiny, ornate, ceramic finger-leaves before meeting the rounded hips of her urn. The blue ceramic stares down with the color of her eyes and without words, always without words, letting me fill in her conversational gaps, assess our new home.
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