Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

 

THE OLD LIE

1.  CMP died on a Sunday when the world was wet.  Not with teardrops but just with sleet, though the frozen beads slithering against the window seemed enough like tears to the daughter who found him.  Slumped against the wall, already gray, wheelchair empty by the bed.

2.  CMP died remembering the harsh brightness of that morning when he’d learned what paraplegic really meant.

At times, they’d said, he would feel his pain creeping up alongside him like a phantom, would find himself half irritated at its icicle fingers and half longing for the hurt to be whole—real.  He’d crave the deeper throbbing of legs that could squirm out their discomfort.

But they weren’t entirely right.

The worse ghosts had been shimmering, partly formed figures: glossy-haired women who had smiled at C—wanted him—just days or maybe even hours before the universe had exploded into light, heat, throbbing, stillness.  Women who, if they could see him here and now, would shudder thinking what it meant to be unwhole.  See only this thing engulfing him.  Forget the demands of their mothers: Be a lady, Annie.  Want to run and run and run.

(He saw them always in the real-life passersby flinching as they tried to nod and smile, eyeing the stars and stripes bobbing up and down behind him like a kind of tail, murmuring to themselves the same sad chant as if to ward away a plague.

Just thank God it isn’t you, it isn’t you, it isn’t you—)

3.  CMP died trying not to think of all the barrels striped in orange, the faces of those miniature humans so naked and skinny as they cried and ran.  (Impossible to think of them as children: too cruel, too unreal).

He died fighting jungle warfare with the antiseptic hospital bed in which he’d coughed and coughed until they took a scalpel to his throat.  In which he’d lost his hair and then his dignity.  Then his belief—faith—hope.

4.  CMP died wondering where the victors were when every mite of reason in it that he had tried to find was dashed against the rock-hard truth of all the things that he had had to fight so long just not to see or say.

Be a patriot, C.  Love your country.

5.  CMP died straining to speak, straining to move.  Straining to think how it had once felt to wriggle his toes against the grass.  Almost wishing he were blind.

CP

Suzanne Marie Hopcroft is a graduate student in Comparative Literature and spends the bulk of her days reading and writing about twentieth-century narrative in a decaying pudding factory across the water from New York City.  Her work is forthcoming in Grey Sparrow Journal and BluePrintReview.  She also cooks a mean lasagna.