In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • View of Birds
  • Lenore Myka (bio)

When the woman tells you her husband is dead, you nod and say: I’m a widow too, nearly four years now. It’s not until you pull your eyes away from the front page of the newspaper you’ve just picked up and glance back at her, see her shivering though her skin glitters jewel-like with sweat, the pajamas she’s wearing encrusted with raisin bran and milk, the way she keeps staring at her own newspaper still on the ground between her bare feet as if it were something she’s never seen before, that you realize she is talking about now. Right now. She’s only just discovered him.

Because you don’t know what else to say, you tell her it’s going to be okay, even though you know that while in a sense that statement is true, it is also very false. You tell her you’re there to help her, even though you know with the same certainty you once felt about Hugh that you have no interest in helping her through this, that you’re not even sure if you have the strength in reserves to truly provide her with the help she is going to need. Still, when she turns and heads back through her open doorway, there is no question in your mind about following her.

Once inside the condo you are aware of the air conditioning kicking on. In your haste, you left the door open behind you. It has already served as an invitation to the bees that usually live in the bougainvillea surrounding the condo units, because you can hear them beating themselves against a mirror or window in one of the rooms somewhere. You wonder about other forms of Florida wildlife the open door might invite--lizards, dragonflies, mosquitoes, perhaps even a red squirrel. They all might decide they want to know what the inside of a retiree’s rental looks like. But the woman is moving ahead toward the bedroom and now, you know, is not the time to circle back, soothe the compulsion that, ever since Hugh’s death, insists on triple-checking the lights, the coffeemaker, the stove and oven, each time you leave home.

In here, the woman says, opening the door to the master bedroom. Later, you will wonder about that: the door she closed behind her after she realized what had happened. But then part of you understands it to be a physical response to an emotional reaction, the mind’s quick trip to fantasy. Like a magician with a box, the beautiful assistant disappears but with the promise that eventually she will reappear unharmed. The fantasy is that all of us are blessed [End Page 116] with such a skill in our most desperate hour of need. Maybe, like the rest of us, this woman closed the door and thought that when it was reopened things would have magically rearranged themselves into the way they’d been before: tidy bedroom, sleeping--not dead--husband. You cannot fault her; you’ve done this yourself before, are deeply familiar with the desire to right an irreparable wrong.

The woman holds the door open for you, not looking inside but down at her pajamas. She scrapes an uneven thumbnail along the crusted cereal on her clothing. When she does this you put it all together: Considerable time, several hours maybe, have lapsed between the discovery of the husband’s condition and now.

You murmur thanks as she holds open the door, though you’re not sure why you have. If anything it is she who should be thanking you for stepping into a situation you have no business or desire being a part of. But better it be you than the facilities manager, the golf or tennis pros, the administrative director, and all the others who work for old people despite the fact that they despise and fear them, the way that old people force them to face the question of their own lingering mortality every Monday morning on the courts feeding balls into the machine for backhand practice; every Friday afternoon reviewing form at...

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