This isn’t one of those stories where someone has cancer. In this story, everyone has cancer. Everyone is sitting in a room with an old friend, while the sunlight fades behind a stretch of Victorians and old oaks, and the room goes dark and only the candle light illuminates their faces, and they talk about cities in Eastern Europe that they haven’t been to, but have seen in pictures and dreamed of like the invisible cities of Calvino. Everyone in this story is in a hospital room, watching the yellowed water in a vase of flowers — fat-headed sunflowers, bunches of pink yarrow, lilies, and sprays of indistinct white flowers with small, plentiful blossoms. Everyone is looking out the window at the rain falling fast on a brown hillside, pooling in the low places that used to be channels for a river. Everyone in this story is calling a loved one, or thinking about calling a loved one, and regretting the time they said they didn’t love their mother, their father, the Mets, the Thanksgiving turkey, a family trip to Arizona; made an idle remark about the Grand Canyon being overrated, which wasn’t even true. It was a wonder! Everyone in this story is sitting beneath a tree’s yellow and orange leaves on a picnic blanket reading a story in which someone, maybe a child, has cancer, or a pig that needs to be slaughtered, or a dead parent, or a series of obstacles to overcome in order to achieve adulthood, which is, upon reflection, if the book went on, not all it’s cracked up to be with the bills and mortgages and children who build train tracks and then abandon them without having once pushed Thomas beneath the series of intricate bridges. Everyone in this story is laughing at a gif, warming a sleeping child on their stomach, waking up for a short swim, a long run, or to call someone who is living briefly in an Eastern European city. Everyone in this story is conflicted about the nature of their lives, wondering what philosophy to follow, what show to watch, thinking that they’ve heard good things about The Wire, but who knows, wondering what hobby to take up or start doing again, wondering about their wives and husbands their children and their lovers, whether they’ve loved or been loved as they wanted. Everyone in this story just got a call letting them know that their life is going to end someday. Fuck. Fuckity fuck. Everyone in this story is taking the car in for an oil change, changing the light bulb in the garage, masturbating to a picture of an ex on Facebook, crying in the front seat of a car at a funeral, a wedding, stopping off on the long dusty road sheltered by a copse of trees and thinking about a day when they were very young and their father, now dead, took them to the zoo and held them on their heads when they were tired of walking. Everyone’s father holding their chubby white legs as if they would never let them go.
Andrew Bertaina currently lives and works in Washington, DC. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in more than thirty publications including: The Three Penny Review, Hobart, Fiction Southeast, Sierra Nevada Review, Apt, OxMag, Prick of the Spindle, Bayou Magazine, Catamaran, and Isthmus. He is currently a reader and book reviewer for Fiction Southeast.