The Cacographer

Sunrise

The morning sun trickled through the window and splattered noiselessly and unevenly across The man in the chair’s khakis and sweatshirt. It dribbled past the saw edged maples, evaded the entangling twines of bindweed, fell past the dust smeared window and finally, unable to avoid the end, crashed onto The man in the chair’s stubbled face and low murmuring lips. Oblivious to the acrobatically suicidal sunlight, the hospital room remained still, with the sole exception of The man in the chair’s thin lips, spreading and mashing back into themselves.
The myriad tubes and electric graphs, oblivious to the morning and the sun hurling itself against them, methodically repeated themselves. The pastel green curtain didn’t flutter. No nurse carrying coffee or patient stretching his legs ambled up to them with morning eyes. Nothing moved, save the forgotten graphs on the monitor, the respirator’s tired breathing, and The man in the chair, asking again and again, “Why won’t you die? Why won’t you die?”
The sunlight saw The man in the chair’s down creased eyes, overlarge hands, drooping mouth, but heard nothing. It saw the redundant graphs, saw The man in the bed, nearly invisible for the tubes covering his mouth and nose, and saw that The man in the bed looked a lot like The man in the chair, only The man in the bed was much older, and would die in 761 days.
With an indifference only the ever passing sun and the ever falling sun can possess as they sweep over Croatia or picnickers making love or graveyards or 49th Street, the sun saw The man in the chair’s tattered hair and disheveled clothes, saw the two day old Egg McMuffin wrapper beside The man in the chair, and saw that The man in the chair wanted nothing more than freedom.
So, in a moment of mercy rare for inanimate objects, the sunlight gathered and pressed like a quilt upon The man in the bed’s chest, pressing with heat and light, until, among alarms and suddenly rabid graphs, The man in the bed died.

posted by OrangeDrink @ 2:18:00 PM