• “Mrs. Wright?”
    I slowly turned my gray head toward the beautiful young candy striper. I smiled weakly and replied. “Yes, love?”
    “It’s time for your medicine.”
    “Thanks, Darling. How are relations between you and that beautiful man of yours?”
    “Just fine, thank you for asking.”
    “That’s wonderful.” Turning towards the whitewashed hospice window, I quickly swallowed the countless pharmaceutical excretions that were keeping my heart from spoiling well past its original expiration date. The palest green on the walls was of no beauty or decoration: a disappointing last sight for doomed eyes.
    tab An orderly was shuffling a corpse on a gurney to its drawer in the ungodly freezer in the basement. I sighed, putting myself into its cold body and rolling away. God, what would I have done to be in his now unclaimed shoes, which, I saw, a psychiatrist had his eyes on. This place suffers so much loss. I closed my eyes, hoping to catch an hour of sleep before Jeopardy! aired. My tired mind bursts with untapped knowledge that my body left for me as a parting gift. It was not my mind that was ailing; it was my heart that failed to thrive. When the heart stops, the brain no longer serves any purpose, but it is no like story for the heart. When the mind goes, the heart says Live! Survive! Continue Learning! The body is not based on want, it is based on need. How many times has my mind wanted to die and my heart gave me life with no respite. This is why the mind goes rather quickly in old age. I like to make use of mine while I can by soundly giving the appropriate response to Mr. Trebek, question form and all.
    tab I have a hard time getting to sleep on most occasions. This blind summer afternoon, was an exception, however. It was a quick, restful sleep, and my mind wandered.
    My dreams, so sweet and sentimental, are my one escape from my ancient body. They find me in my mother’s arms, stroking me so sweetly, gently singing a lullaby. In my father’s lap, I relive the hand games we used to play when I was but a wee blonde; the color that has not graced my skin for many years vibrant on my young likeness. My brothers, my sister, shared time with aunts and uncles, the times spent crying and the times spent laughing like there was nothing sad in the world and we are the only people alive and we own the earth.
    So many scenes skip across my mind’s eyes like quick, slanted raindrops or the flickering majesty of a roaring fire. Each one takes me farther from the individual time stamps. Some of the more joyous ones repeat themselves, making them far more enjoyable in their own right.
    tab None appear as often as one.
    tab My only love.
    tab My eternal love.
    tab My forbidden love.
    tab The memory resonates in my mind, a ripple through the fleshy labyrinth.
    Years ago I married a man. He was good and kind and brought in money. I was never what he deserved. He was never what I wanted. I never loved that man. I should have told him so. He died at forty-one. The kids left when they were eighteen. I love them but not like I should. Lauren was my only piece left of Her, and when my child Lauren died they left me emotionally void.
    tab I had four children with that man, only three of which survived my harsh womb. One did not breathe a breath of the cruel air that encloses this Earth. I call her my hate child. She had been conceived in hatred, in regret, in tears my husband never saw. I had named her Lauren before she was conceived. She will live with me in the next life, I’m sure. Soon, when I’m gone, wherever I’ll go she’ll be there, and I can have my baby at last. Our baby. She was going to be our baby. But she died in me. She wouldn’t come into the world without her mother. The mother who wasn’t me.
    tab I married Harold when I was twenty-eight. I married Anna when I was eighteen.

    tab I was twelve when I met Anna. She was kind and sweet. I was only then going to public school, my mother was a teacher on leave until her children were old enough to be put in school so she taught me at home. She had three more children now, and she was with child again. (This one would be her last, she swore. And it was. Mother doesn’t break her word.)
    tab I entered shyly, tears of separation running down my cheeks. It was not a full class; at least eight seats were empty in the back. One girl in the very back row had her hair cut short and looked uncomfortable in her skirt, she kept adjusting the waist and messing with her shirt buttons. She was about three rows back, separated from her classmates by the empty seats. The teacher grabbed me by the collar of my dress and introduced me to the class.
    tab “Sit where you like,” said the teacher in a harsh voice, “The back row’s almost full, there’s a couple seats open by Paul. Go; have a seat.”
    tab “But ma’am,” I said, remembering only the ‘address the teacher as ma’am’ part of my mother’s rules and not the ‘don’t contradict the teacher’ part, “The back row is empty, ‘cept for the girl right there.” Anxious tears still fell.
    tab “Mmm,” the teacher grimaced, “That’s Anna. I wouldn’t sit next to her. Sit by Paul, he’s a nice boy, come on.” He pushed me toward the boy and resumed her lecture. I slumped, dripping, into the seat next to Paul. He sat and talked to me simply to call me crybaby and to spit in my face. He was, if fact, not a nice boy. Obviously he was old enough to trick the teacher that all those kids had given themselves black eyes and bloody noses.
    tab Recess came and I sat alone on the wall counting how many pebbles I could pick up with one hand. My eyes fixed on the ground. I was practicing in my mind how I would tell Mommy I would never want to go to school again. Tell her about how the kids were mean and how the teacher left every twenty-six minutes exactly to go out for a cigarette. My eyes still leaked. I could not make them stop. Two worn shoes appeared in front of me, and a voice, smooth and sweet, gentle, like a little wave that breaks and your feet and tickles you, found itself so close to me I could feel its speaker’s breath on me.
    “Hey, are you alright?”
    I looked up at the tan face of Anna, holding out her hand for me to take. I took it, and sniffled.
    “You’re a little old to be crying, aren’t you?”
    “Yes,” I said. I had known this already. Mother told me not to cry for that very reason.
    “It’s alright. Everyone cries, don’t they? First day of school is hard, I know. But you shouldn’t be crying, okay? ‘Cause you’ve got me here!” The tears slowed, but did not stop. I felt better knowing I had someone at school who didn’t think I was a baby, or a dumb girl for being introduced into public school at twelve. A few tears remained on my cheek, but Anna dried them with her skirt hem. Her legs were skinny and bruised, but she didn’t seem to care.
    “There!” She said, and flattened the front of her skirt. “Now we can act like adults, right?”
    “Right,” I said. My shy, toned-down voice sounded strange and foreign. I cleared my throat and spoke once more. “Thank you, Anna.”
    She winked. “Don’t mention it. And here,” she cooed, brushing the light hair out of my eyes, “people deserve to see your pretty face.”
    She offered her hand to me in an extra gesture of support and we walked back to class.
    “I knew you weren’t awful. Miss Hansen, I knew Miss Hansen was wrong about you. Why do you sit in the back like that?”
    She shook the short dark hair from her face, and looked at me coolly. “My friend and I got in trouble. Nobody wanted to sit near me, for what we’d done. I didn’t see what was so wrong. At first I thought, maybe it’s because I’m a Jew, and my friend was Catholic but Henry Bernstein sits up front and he goes to my Temple with his Catholic friend sometimes. I guess I’m just the kind of person that people don’t like.”
    Staring blankly forward, she released my hand and quickened her pace. I furrowed my brow at her and struggled to keep up.
    “Anna,” I called, calmly. “I like you. If you have none, we can be friends. It’ll be easier on me. I’m a little socially inept.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Sure. You’re very genial. I especially like your voice. It’s beautiful.”
    “I like you, too. And you speak very well,” Her eyes smiled softly.
    It sounds awkward the way it started, but we were friends. Through time, it was slowly revealed through bits of tailored gossip what she had done that made everyone despise her so much.
    We lived in a very devout Catholic town. The school was Saint Barnaby’s. The town hospital-- St. Anthony’s, the private school-- the Immaculate Virgin. There was one Hebrew district in the center of town that was greatly prejudiced against by most of the older generations, but most of the younger Catholics worked for the Jews, and the prejudices were kept to a minimum as they were paid well.
    Devout a town as it was, the occasional outlier was shunned and hated.
    Anna was a sinner. She was not a girl like the other girls were. She was a unholy and unblessed in the eyes of the town. Anna was getting to the age where she was developing, getting bigger in areas and smaller in others, like the other girls were, all a flitter about who likes what boy. But she was not interested in boys.
    And neither was Lauren.
    Lauren Hoffman was now long gone, out to a convent in Mobile, Alabama. But her memory lived in Anna. The girls had been best friends since Lauren had moved from her old town of Bourbon.
    Bourbon had killed the normal child in Lauren. Bourbon sent a man for her: A nice man with a stutter and a car full of candy. The candy did not come free. “Come here,” Said the Bourbon man. Come here and let me see the pretty braid in your hair.”
    “How beautiful,” said Bourbon, playing with her hair and just gracing her neck with his big, nervous, otherworldly hands.
    And he was restless. He let his hands wander her gentle skin.
    And in being restless and confused, Bourbon watched as the man took her innocence away. The Bourbon man bruised her very severely about the head and arms and placed her limp, unconscious body roughly on the front stoop of her home.
    In search of guidance, the parents sprinkled her bleeding lady with holy water and tucked her in the backseat of their car and Drove west to St. Catherine, the town where the soon-to-be-devil Anna Lynn had been born. Here she met Anna, and the two injured souls fell in love with women. Fell in love with the sweet scent they offered, the beauty they shared, the precious emotions and compassion that men seemed to lack. They shared a moment when the spirits intertwined and the lips touched. A young mother passed and saw the two through the open window and the yellow summer air very soon after the first kiss, about a month, and about 1/6 of the time overall that the Hoffman Family had lived in St. Catherine.
    tab That meant the end for Lauren. The young mother reported to Mrs. Hoffman. She was again sprinkled with the holy water. Her lips and cheeks and hands were touched by the brunette devil and were subsequently doused, as was her lady for good measure. She was beaten and sent to a convent in Mobile.
    Each day she cried while praying to the absent Lord. Each night when there was meat she stole the knives at the dinner table as the others were thanking Jesus for the gifts they were about to receive. She did this until she had enough knives for each kiss she had given her love. She acquired one hundred and thirty-seven knives, and dug each one into her body on the night of her lover’s birth. The act was blamed on a possession, and this was agreed upon by her parents. She had a proper burial. Anna was never notified.
    Anna mourned and grieved over her lost love and her parents, while religious, were Jewish, and, as such, more forgiving than Lauren’s Catholic parents. They never told her it was perfectly natural, which is what they believed, but instead they told her to keep it to herself, and not to show it off, and to apologize to the minister at Lauren’s church. They dare not say anything that contradicted the Catholics’ beliefs on the matter, as they, too, would be shunned and discriminated like a sacrilege.
    tab Anna did not talk about Lauren. I didn’t dare ask her. But she said that she once fell in love, and that she would fall in love again, for her love’s sake. I saw nothing wrong with what Anna did. My parents were of the unreligious sort. Father racially Jewish and Mother racially Dutch Catholic, we lived on the rather far end of town to avoid the prejudice for the sin of intermarriage. Father took me to school each morning in the car to his work in the Hebrew district. And on the corner of Mary and Chapel is where Anna and I met each morning
    tab Anna and I grew together. We grew up together. We went into high school together. And I think, somewhere between thirteen and fifteen, we fell in love. We did not show it. We grew into the 1950’s in love.
    tab Anna was a year older than me. I was introduced to studies at a year younger than those who went to public school. This was not a problem as I was seen as young and therefore naïve and unsuspecting of her monstrousness.
    tab At my fourteen her fifteen, we talked about living together in a house far away from everyone and everything. In the cold areas of Maine we would find a house and lie without being judged by churches or governments. She, bright as she was, working for a law firm as a lawyer and myself as a writer of long, desperate novels with intricate plots.
    tab At my fifteen her sixteen, we sat alone in her house very close, and talked about adopting a child. One child. And her name would be Lauren. She would have big brown eyes and beautiful blonde curls, and we would never let anything hurt her or take her from us.
    At my fifteen her sixteen I told her something I knew I was supposed to tell her from the moment I met her.
    “I love you, Anna.” I looked down, rearranging my words. “I don’t know how it can be but I do.” I said, burying my head in her chest.
    Anna lifted my chin and met my eyes. She was radiant in the light of the fading sun. Her beautiful blue eyes welled up. “I know. But you’ll see. We’ll leave this God forsaken shitty town. When you turn eighteen, we’re leaving. Together. And we can be in love all of our life. I’ll die in your arms, or I’ll die and with me my spirit. My soul will rot with my body. But when, I die, love, live on and we can meet up again in whatever form of the afterlife exists. Just make sure you hold me as I fade away.”
    Time passed slowly waiting for my eighteenth birthday. We slept anxious for the sun to rise on another day. We managed to keep our love a secret from everyone. We were friends to the public. I went to church each Sunday and Wednesday to keep up appearances, and in confession never listed her as a sin. She purchased a car, and each day we sat in it, knowing that the car would be our escape from the town.
    The car had belonged to a couple with no successors recently deceased and the neighbors were selling it for next to nothing just to get it out of their sight. It smelled like pipe tobacco and floral perfume. The car was our way out of the mess the town brought.

    There was a policeman I would learn of later, who kept a watchful eye on Anna. He was the husband of the Young mother who had seen Lauren and Anna share a kiss on that fateful day, and, by the request of his devout wife and mother-in-law, did not let Anna or I drop from his sight until we rested safely in either of our homes. One day though, coincidentally through an open window in summertime, he witnessed the kiss between us sinners that brought the end to his watch.
    On the eve of my eighteenth birthday, we were sentimental and cautious. She and I had ventured to bend the rules and sneak from my home in the dead of night and join Anna in the car. We had parked it at the edge of a town and climbed atop a hill. We sat looking out into the world we were to leave the next day. She sat snugly in my arms. There was no sound for hours.
    “I love you,” she said.
    “I love you, too,” I whispered, and kissed her firmly on the forehead.
    I closed my eyes. A tear escaped. It fell into her hair and I left it there, not wanting to disturb the night that would never end.
    But everything ended.
    But not with a glamorous sunrise and a kiss to shatter the chill of the new day.
    Not with a glorified getaway with stops in neighboring towns for gas, maps, and food.
    Not with a house in Maine.
    Not with the glowing, laughing, bubbling child named Lauren.
    It ended with spite, cowardice, and a very clear homicide.

    It was not the kiss that broke the stars that morning, it was a gunshot.
    And not happiness came from Anna’s loving me, and not happiness that came from her heart. From her heart pulsed pints of blood that would never return.
    The policeman did not lower his weapon.

    “Kill me, too,” I whispered. Not to the armed God-fearing man, but into Anna’s body, now becoming cold and lifeless.
    “You are of the Church,” when he spoke you could hear him shake with uncertainty, “you can go.”
    Anna trembled and shivered in my arms. She was losing blood quickly.
    “Anna, My Life, will you love me forever?”
    She lifted her head to look at me once more. Her big, blue, radiant eyes now were dull and listless. She smiled.
    “Yes. I will love you forever.”
    I cried, seeing now in my mind the life that I had seen so many times that would, now never happen.
    I heaved and gave air but it brought me no soothing oxygen.
    “Then we’re married,” I said through tears, holding her and caressing her gently, letting her know that her life would end the way she said wanted it to.
    “I love you,” I said, one last time.



    I take solace only in knowing she didn’t die in spirit. She had what she wanted. To die in my arms, and I was to live on.

    - - -
    The memory replayed in my mind as I took my final breath. Now every mistake can be corrected, every false step undone. A tear fell from my closed eye and my smiling cheeks fell into naught. I am to rest and she is to rest with me once more.

    End.




    ALTERNATE ENDING ONE
    I couldn’t hear anything but her breaths grow heavy.
    I was not startled by the gunshot.
    Only by the cease of her breath was I to know she had ended.
    My tear now small compared to the thick red warmth that fell from her chest.
    She struggled to make the words I love you but I would never know this.
    Her thin hand went limp and her limpid blue eyes fell dead and listless.
    She was the only reason I had to live and she was gone. I didn’t want to live on.
    But I promised her I would.




    ALTERNATE ENDING TWO
    I didn’t hear the gunshot.
    I didn’t hear anything.
    Her hand squeezed mine once, and fell.

    One hundred and thirty-seven practice shots were fired into human substitutes to attain accuracy like he had. One hundred and thirty-seven knives were never returned to the convent kitchen. One hundred and thirty-seven different obscenities were used to describe Anna at the policeman’s trial. One hundred and thirty-seven times since that day I’ve wanted to end my mortality and reunite us.