by Jerome Krajnak
Our neighbor Deb created quilts for the homeless, stuffed them with a batting of love, stitched on each a dozen pink hearts. Eager for Christmas, she allowed herself just one early gift, a trip to the clinic where micro-lasers would slice away parts of her body she no longer loved, sculpt a new holiday Deb. The doctors called what happened a pulmonary embolism, a clot that moved from a leg to her lung.
Granddaughter Patricia tugs at my newspaper, wants attention, frets over Deb’s yappy chihuahua. An awful thing, but he’ll be so sad. Who will watch over him now? She went with me today, her first time to a funeral home. Searched Deb’s face, held my hand tightly, struggled to understand.
Back in the 50’s, when Dad was chain-smoking Camels, we’d flock an Austrian Pine each Christmas. My brother and I would help spread drop cloths, drag out the canister Hoover, hook up the foamer-sprayer attachment. Dad would then send us out of the room, turn on the blower, and cover that tree with pink and blue asbestos snowflakes. We’d set up the tree in the living room window, shine floodlights upon it. How Tom and I both hated those trees! The snickers they raised from friends who passed by, the way our whole family coughed until spring.
Two of her neighborhood friends were waiting when Patricia and I came home. The three raced up to her room and huddled in muted conversation. I spoke just this morning with their mother, Aliya, learned that while shopping for Christmas toys, she was followed by store employees, suspected, surveilled just for being an incorrect color in our little town’s Walmart. Upstairs, her daughter and son are laughing with Patricia, creating sympathy cards for Deb’s family. What would become of them, I wonder, upon some Aliya misfortune? No family around, would they be discarded like pink and blue snowflakes once Dad began coughing through summer and fall?
The three kids barrel down the stairs clutching the cards they’ve created, push them at me, block my view of CNN. They beg for a ride to Walmart, want dog treats for Deb’s chihuahua. As we don coats and head for the door, an ignored tv screen displays an artist’s rendering of some rich man’s garish gold ballroom.
Rapidly approaching octogenarian status, Jerry Krajnak is a Vietnam veteran who later earned degrees from UW Eau Claire, Wichita State, and Kansa University. He shares an old cabin in the North Carolina mountains with rescue animals and, when lucky, a grandchild or two. He is a Pushcart nominee whose recent writing appears in numerous places including Eclectica, Sheila-Na-Gig, Book of Matches, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.
