-Excerpt from the short story, A train goes by from the section Catherine’s house of love
She had switched from the stance of benevolent, capable overseer to a state of professional distance, a transition that came almost automatically. As a nurse most of Cathy’s internal life running up to this point had been spent with people at a low point, a defining moment in their lives. Her mind had been slowly molded by taking in countless examples of life’s disregard for certainty. She was, as with most things about herself, purposefully unaware of this. Hiding from herself was her most practiced skill, more than removing blood, more than penmanship. The foundation underlying her career of helping people was a terrible mystery.
Catherine was a woman who was, and had, for as long as she could remember, been prepared for her own great tragedy. She expected her loving and devoted husband of twenty seven years to disappear without any word, one of her scholarly and successful children to be the victim of a drunk driver, or a stray bullet while walking late in one of the neighborhoods where they did their outreach work, killed by one of God’s bitter acts of randomness after taking his word to people who, she thought, could barely read. Maybe she would hit a child with her car while distracted one morning on the way to work, and then spend the next few weeks silent and still as she watched the machines monitoring the child’s crushed head and reluctant heart until both eventually gave out and her remaining years could be spent in repentance and regret. She didn’t long for any of this. She expected it.Â
She would die surrounded by her children and grandchildren scrutinizing their faces as those belonging to strangers. Her mind gone soft and sputtering with age, she would receive what she expected and be incapable of understanding the death of her own mind before her body followed, a tragedy that was wholly hers. Her last lucid thought, chosen at random from the billions upon billions of abstract filing cabinets the human brain consists of, would be one thin slice of memory welded to another by the heat of dying electricity. The smell and stain of a mulberries in her eight-year-old hands as an august sun reddened the bridge of her nose spliced at the hard border of a dark winter night from her early twenties. Her mind would stand in both places, snow flying out of the dark and melting instantly, her body straddling the line between both memories at both ages and both sizes. Â Two different people in the same deformed dream-made body trying desperately to look at each other and then nothing.
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