The Waiting
A short-short story.
The face of Sandra's mother was still frozen on the cracked smartphone screen. Sandra tapped and swiped her finger at the screen several times, hoping the phone would recognize the movement and spring back to life. But there was nothing. The hospital wall behind her mother was pea green and the paint was darkened by the poor lighting of the hallway in which she sat. Tears fell from her eyes in two streaks suspended on the curves of her cheeks.
Sandra set the phone down on her desk and turned her head. Outside her window, it was chilly but sunny and the American sycamore in the backyard moved gently with the wind. She turned back to the laptop in front of her and gazed at the blank word document on the screen before standing and snapping the laptop shut.
She had tried to write about it before giving up, feeling the senselessness of it, the physical and metaphorical isolation of it. Then her eyes would wander to the shoes by the door -- untouched for days? Weeks? -- and she would think about going. But you can't come, she had been told. Because of the risks. And don't go to the bodega because you don't want to get coughed or sneezed on. Wear the mask we sent you. But then, in the end, it hadn't mattered anyway.
Sandra took the plate from her desk and carried it across her tiny studio apartment and into the kitchen. As she walked she took the last bit of bread crust and popped it in her mouth, chewed and swallowed. Her cat, Ethel, licked at the water in a small bowl by the doorway. Sandra bent to scratch her soft curved back before delicately placing the plate into the morass of dishware and silverware that rose in a food-encrusted mound in the sink. The idea of cleaning the dishes felt just as distant as the thing she couldn't write about, the thing on the other end of the smartphone screen. She thought of her mother's face, the tears, the pea-green paint meant to calm those cooped up for hours in hospitals and waiting for answers and, sometimes, getting the answers they wish they hadn't waited for at all.
Sandra hadn't been idle. There had been phone calls. She had sent four letters, though she wondered whether her mother had actually brought them into the hospital room. She smiled at the thought of her grandmother's inappropriate asides about her particularly handsome nurse, whispered into the phone receiver in that somewhat ashy voice that Sandra had inherited and now would speak no more.
But then the idea crept back. There would be a waiting, she was told. It just couldn't be done, her mother had said. None of the places will take her, not yet. But even when we can, it might not be safe for you to leave. Those were the last words before the screen froze and the world with it. Grappling with this idea, this waiting, scrambling for any kind of foothold around this waiting, Sandra looked to the window. She heard a dog bark at something, heard children yelling at someone, heard the distant roar of an airplane as it pushed upward and away from the city.
If there was to be a waiting, there could also be a choice, she thought. A choice to remember the good. A choice to remember the wrinkled smile and the ashy voice and the inappropriateness. Those things were warm, antithetical to the coldness of the waiting and the frozen face of her mother on the phone. There was warmth in remembering. Sandra would remember, and when she could, she would go and see the place where the earth had finally reclaimed her grandmother.
Sandra left the kitchen and walked back to her desk and picked up the phone. The screen was still frozen, her mother was still frozen. Sandra opened one of the desk drawers, placed the phone inside it, and slid it shut. Then she sat down and began to type.