‘You'll have to do it,’ my wife said.
I hesitated. My brother had said the same thing almost fifty years earlier. I shook off that almost-forgotten memory and focused on the present.
I had removed my wife's fentanyl patches the day before because she needed to be lucid for this moment. The pain had been too much for her, though, and I had to practically drown her in morphine every couple of hours throughout the night.
She was now in the bathtub. Water as warm as a summer day.
That day nearly fifty years ago had been a summer day.
‘We'll have to kill them,’ my brother had said.
He had been fifteen—two years older than me.
The morning had been cool. Later it would give way to a hot summer sun.
‘They'll probably die before nightfall, but it'd be wrong to let them suffer any longer.’
There had been the rhythmic sound of a rubber ball striking concrete.
‘We should put them out of their misery.’
Next door, nine-year-old Katie had been playing Two Square with her little brother, Connor.
‘How should we do it?’ I asked.
My brother and I were crouched in our backyard, staring at what we had teased out of the thick weeds.
‘We'll have to come up with a humane way,’ he said. ‘I'll get the shovel. After we dig a hole, we can figure something out.’
The abrupt roar of a lawn mower spooked us. A neighbor, hoping to finish yard work before the air turned heavy with a sticky heat, was getting an early start.
‘I know how we can do it,’ I told my brother when he came back.
‘How?’
‘Let's dig the hole first.’
The dry, clay soil had been stubborn, but taking turns, we eventually carved out a little grave.
‘The best way to kill them,’ I said, ‘is with a guillotine.’
My brother knitted his brows.
‘It would be quick and painless,’ I said.
‘You're right. A guillotine would be a good way to do it. But where would we get one, Einstein?’
‘You're holding it,’ I said.
He looked puzzled, staring blankly at the shovel in his hand. But then his eyes lit up. He understood. ‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, bringing the blade up to his face and running his finger along its flat, sharp edge—the perfect instrument for cutting off small heads. ‘This could work.’
‘Since there are two of them,’ I said, ‘you do one; I'll do the other.’
He nodded. ‘Okay.’
We had found a litter of abandoned kittens. Three were dead, but two still gripped life with needle-sharp claws. Their silent mouths opened and closed in a grotesque imitation of mewing. They couldn't have been more than a week or two old, but they looked so much older—centuries older.
Their patchy fur was stretched taut over sharp bones, their limp bodies practically flat, like they'd been run over and left out to bake in the hot summer sun. They could have been roadkill. And just like roadkill, they had ants and maggots swarming their flesh. Nature had gotten an early start.
Cancer had gotten an early start on my wife. It was everywhere. Her skin stretched just as taut over bones just as sharp. Her body just as limp and flat. No ants or maggots swarming her body, though. She'd at least been spared that insult.
Using the shovel, my brother scooped up one of the kittens and moved it over a few feet, away from its sibling. Could one sense what was about to happen to the other?
My brother was now ready. With the blade facing down, he tightened his double grip on the shovel's smooth wooden handle. My own fingers clenched in response. He pulled in a deep breath, and I did the same. He raised his arms high, and I felt the arch of his back in my own.
But before he could thrust that hard, sharp blade into soft, dull flesh, our neighbor finished cutting his lawn. The abrupt silence rattled my brother, as if a voice had shouted out, ‘What the hell do you think you're doing?’
My brother held that shovel a long time. I could tell he was having second thoughts. He finally lowered it. ‘I can't do it,’ he said, shaking his head.
I couldn't believe it. My brother had chickened out. It wasn't like him.
He held out the shovel. ‘You'll have to do it.’
My wife held out the razor blade. ‘You'll have to do it.’
That blade had become Plan B when we realized Plan A (end-of-life medication) would be an impossible task for her. She wouldn't be able to swallow the three-ounce cocktail of Diazepam, Digoxin, Morphine Sulfate, and Amitriptyline in two minutes, not without gagging anyway. Surgeons had aggressively manipulated her throat during her two surgeries to remove cancerous vertebrae from her neck. Swallowing was painful. If she swallowed only a portion, she might simply end up in a coma—worse than dead.
I took the shovel from my brother, intending to show him how it was done, but I couldn't do it either.
I had shot house sparrows, prairie dogs, and field mice with my .22 for no other reason than sport. Why couldn't I now kill for a legitimate reason, a humane reason?
My brother and I took the cowardly way out. We put those two miserable creatures back into the thick weeds where we had found them and left it to nature to finish what it had started.
I accepted the blade from my wife, held it between my fingers. I thought of those kittens. Mercy had been on the horizon for them, a gentle rain falling in the distance. But that rain never reached them.
My wife extended her arm, a pleading pouring out from her eyes. It tore at my heart. Had fifty years been enough to give me the courage to make it rain?
About the author
Héctor Hernández received a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. He lives in California and is now retired. His short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, After Dinner Conversation, Bright Flash Literary Review, Five Minutes and Literally Stories.
Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the writers and half towards supporting the project (web site maintenance, preparing the next Best of book etc.)
No comments:
Post a Comment