Tiny

My mouth went dry and I held the receiver away from my ear a second. I looked around the room, dead and silent and all too white. A fly puttered upside down on the ceiling above me – the only sign that life inhabited the apartment, that and my heart beating like a drum in the valley of the Nile. Slow and marching toward unstoppable death.

“Cardiac arrest, like all of them. Principle cause. Secondary, renal failure. Shall I list you as the informant?”

I cannot recall what I muttered to the high-tenor-voiced resident, probably something about the hospital, where I could have the funeral home pick him up. But I could picture the green-eared fool, half happy to give important news to the next of kin, half jaded by the ordinariness of it in medical life. I could picture him – curly brown hair, a cowlick on his temple, fair skinned with a receding chin, and wearing big black glasses because if he didn’t, he’d squint all day long and his nose would end up looking like the one the Wicked Witch had. But he wouldn’t be green.

Ah, doctors. I guess they compensated for being plain and homely by making turd loaves of money so they could laugh at us behind their Mercedes-Benzes and their Louis Vuitton steamer trunks. Well, more power to Obamacare, all I have to say.

I hung up the receiver and forgot everything about the resident except the receding chin. And then I walked to the bedroom, prepared to collapse and have a good, long cry. But my dry mouth soon had the room spinning – and the bed went from gargantuan to tiny and back to gargantuan again – and when I next woke up, Charlotte stood above me, a crease in her brow and her lips in a round O, and question marks in her eyes.

“Charlotte –“

“Yes, darling,” she said, her voice velvet smooth, “I know. Just lie still, we’ll take it one step at a time. No rush.”