just the end part of the story 

Two saline bags like the eyes of a window bug we wouldn’t bother with. One Cytarabine injection every six hours. Perfect opioids. Vitamin C. Vitamin D. Ginger. Selenium. The more eccentric homeopathies: the balms and powders, the selenite charging box and the sound machine had been moved towards the back of the dresser. Everything sat unmoved in the afternoon light. This week and last week’s tulips. Pouches of liquid food –– chicken-n-rice, wild salmon, hotpot beef –– were stacked in the corner like war rations. There’s no food during this part. And then there’s this new yellow medicine we’ve forgotten the name of but we wrote it down for later. This is the ending. The doctors told us that, basically. “You seem to have a strong family…a good family,” said the one who drove the black car with no bumper stickers. We no longer know what’s easing. What’s killing. What’s deferring. We don’t know if this new yellow thing we forgot the name of is helping or hurting but it certainly makes her dream that Sid Melton has signed over the Copa Club to her; mom; and there’s a truck full of bluegill at the loading dock; but the dockworkers have gone on strike; and the mayor’s here; and he will only eat the club’s famous pan-seared Alaskan Halibut in dill butter; but he also wants Bollinger; only Bollinger; and Mom needs the mayor to rubber stamp the new parking lot before summer; but the club is all out of Bollinger because the Yankees clinched the AL pennant on, of all nights, this night; so; all Mom’s got is the bodega brut that the dishwashers hid out in the
snowbank; yeah; it’s all a mess; and she’s dying; bending over to cough; bending over to talk for some reason; holding her heart to breathe.

“That Micky Mantle can really drink,” she says off the edge of the bed, her nose almost touching the carpet. “But a nice man.”

And that’s the way this will go.

Is going.

Sometimes she’s dying while running the Copa Club and trying to get a wine stain out of the Sultan of Brunei’s thousand thread-count tablecloth. And sometimes she’s dying while not running the club. Sometimes she’s just found her way out to the swing set, praying for a truck off the interstate to cut through the durum stalks, so that she might disappear quickly. Or the shower curtain has fallen again and she’s holding the rod, standing again out in the yard, in the same place where she hopes for a long-haul driver to lose his airbrakes, but she’s counting clouds, waiting for the heat of an electrical storm. Until one of us runs out there and puts an arm around her, explaining the rod’s aluminum and she has no better chance of getting struck by lightning than a fox or mouse does, so she might as well go back to dreaming about how to thaw the lamb before Lucille and Desi show up, because it’s a cross-over episode in her mind most of the time. Because she’s crossed up most of the time. Do you understand? This is really how it ends.





Sam Berman lives in Boise, Idaho. His stories have appeared in Hobart, Soft Union, Joyland, Expat, and dozens of other outlets. In 2022, he won Forever’s Unconventional Love Stories contest.