A Few Last Words

This is fiction.

In my hospital bed, I remember the great oaks that had given us shade on lazy Sunday’s at the park. The great oaks we had so admired. The great oaks that were torn out to stop the spread of disease sleeping in their intertwined roots.

I imagine myself as one of those great oak trees. I see park workers in orange vests walking across the landscape of my naked arms, examining my flesh and veins. “Sorry, we can’t save this one,” a worker says, and a team sets about cutting away my leafy twigs, then my branches, then my trunk until I’m small enough to be ripped up. I wonder if that’s what it will be like to die and tell myself I’ll know soon enough.

“Are you sure you’re feeling up to this?” she asks.

“Yeah, yes, let’s do it,” I say, and that lie gives birth to a smile, and that smile gives birth to a laugh.

It hurts to smile, like it used to when we would visit her friends in Greenwich Village for dinner parties. I would hide my resentment under layers of plaster. I would adopt their affectations and mannerisms, an empty pantomime of the bourgeois protagonists of shows and movies I grew up with, fictions I always longed to be a part of. “Look at you, you look fa-bulous!” I would tell our host, my vowels dragged out to approximate affluence. The night grew long, and the plaster faded and flaked.

It hurts to laugh, each rib closing tighter around my lungs like a snake constricting its prey. I’m lips and teeth and gums painted on an island of gray stone, sinking in the rising ocean. I want to laugh so she can see me as paradise again, but my body punishes the dishonesty.

When we reach the tattoo studio, the sterile clinical trappings disappoint with their familiarity. The artist arranges tools with practiced and graceful movements. Dusk fogs the windows and obscures the falling snow.

In the infinitely small space between cold needle and warm flesh, her name appears in bold, black ink, a few last words to carry to the grave.