entitled: weeks after they had told us that my father had a tumor in his brain, 
the results were in   they'd caught it by accident and if they hadn't he would've 
died in a matter of days      how frightening and humbling it was for that man 
i will never know    when we finally went to see him they'd told us already that 
they couldn't get it all out    it had spread and branched out to the point where 
they would have had to gouge at his brain to get it all out    he had staples on 
the side of his shaved head    he cried like a baby as soon as i walked into the
room   but he spoke more clearly, and used bigger words than i'd ever heard 
him use before    he said he was "in a turmoil"    he complained about the stench 
of his body rotting--which he could smell--when the doctor told my mother and i 
that they'd also taken his prostate he was already missing half a lung or possibly 
more from two summers before when he had that car accident "why, your not even 
a human being anymore!" my mother said    i wondered how she'd let that slip    he
walked us to the elevator door stumbling all the way    through the fat tears in the 
corners of his crow-footed eyes he said the exercise was good for him and that he'd 
miss me terribly and to give him my number at school so he could call me up    he said
that the medication gave him hallucinations    i worried that it was him and not the pills
he didn't remember things as well anymore, he said    and random garbled sentences 
and non-sequiturs spilled forth from his lips all too often but, he said he tried to keep 
his head about him and that he played little games with himself to make sure that he 
was in some respect still sane . . .






he said

that it was

two hundred and twenty-two
 
wobbly



steps

around the nursing home

and back



again.

• Chy Ryan Spain

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