We listened to Floyd Cramer’s slip note style song on the radio, she slid on the vinyl bench seat closer to me, and I put my right arm around her and steered the Nash with my left. We pulled into the drive-in, got popcorn and Coke, and watched Hitchcock’s latest The Birds. We pretended we were scared when we knew some of the birds were mechanical and likely wouldn’t attack the way they did. We married the next week, worked all day, sunk into the second-hand sofa at night, and watched TV because it was free with the rabbit ears antenna. Then, she got pregnant, and we had our first. Life moved even faster when we had our second the next year. Our events and outings were about them all their way through high school and even college.
Now, she’s cocooned in a blanket, like a newborn baby, her mouth open, and I feed her ice chips, and as they melt in her mouth, drool pools in the corners, and I dab them with a cloth. She swallows, her eyes briefly flutter open, and I know she wants to smile though her lips don’t move. I play “Last Date” on the Pandora app of my phone (we’d moved from vinyl to eight-track to cassette to CD’s to streaming in our life together), and then, I see it. Her smile forms just a bit, the lips spread and crack open like ice in a spring thaw, and she squeezes my hand and holds it tight like she did when the birds attacked, like she did when the oncologist told her it was back and there was nothing else they could do.
Niles Reddick is author of a novel, four short fiction collections, and two novellas. His work has appeared in over five hundred publications including The Saturday Evening Post, Citron Review, and Vestal Review.
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