I want to commit the details of this winter to memory and next year I will be able to figure out small differences. All around where I sit at the bar, this black and steel enclave, the roasting of coffee beans is taking place in gleaming metal barrels attached to flashing panels and space age exhaust piping. I can’t tell skill levels of the staff. I cannot tell if I will recover my ability to distinguish.
The ambulance came for my ex two days ago and I should really stay home to enjoy the house. I have discovered an ability to relax in the face of someone who is dying slowly and painfully. My sister said that the world is the reflection of my internal space. I am okay with her saying this. I perfect the art of the relaxed, so much so that I worry about being too grave.
A student of my ex has given him a Bugs Bunny and he took it with him in the ambulance. When I came into the kitchen in the morning I found splashes of pumpkin soup on the floor and fingerprints of it on the bench. When I passed his room he had been curled up, shrunken. Then I heard yelping like a puppy. I relaxed the muscles in my face and went to ask if I should call triple zero.
Please don’t talk to me like that, he said, and began to cry.
I was at a loss to know what he meant.
~
Girija Tropp’s fiction has appeared in several Best Australian Short Stories editions. She has published in The Boston Review, Agni, and has also won or been short-listed for major awards. Recently, her work has been anthologized in Café Irreal and Smokelong Quarterly: The Best of the First Ten Years. She lives in Australia.