Free Milosz by Cordelia Strube Page A

thumb and index finger together to suggest the serious coin awaiting Milo. ‘Three fifteen.’
    â€˜Today?’
    â€˜That’s what I’m telling you, chief. They’re hot to trot.’ His phone rings again. ‘I’ve got to take this one. Let me know how it goes. You look great, seriously.’
    The black eyes and swelling make Christopher almost unrecognizable. His nose has been splinted and bandaged. A plastic tube, poking out from his ribs a few inches below his armpit, drains into a plastic container. His right lower leg is encircled in metal hoops. Wires attached to the hoops pierce his skin, presumably to hold the bone fragments in place. His left upper leg is splinted. A clear tube runs from under the blankets to a receptacle filled with urine, marked with gradations. Christopher doesn’t seem to recognize Milo, or maybe doesn’t want to recognize him. Hooked up to an IV , he is probably disoriented by morphine. The patient in the next bed has numerous visitors who bump against the dividing curtain, speaking loudly in what Milo thinks is Portuguese. He sits on the vinyl chair beside Christopher’s bed, staring at the metal hoops on his leg, unable to imagine his pain. At least he still has both legs. Milo didn’t ask the nurses for a prognosis because they knew he wasn’t a relative. He did inquire if any relatives had been notified. The nurses remained poker-faced, just as they did when he was six and his mother was rushed to emergency. They wouldn’t let him see her. Years later he assumed it was because Annie was already dead and they didn’t want a six-year-old crawling over the corpse. His father even forbade him to go to the crematorium. Milo didn’t know what a crematorium was but he wanted to go. At the funeral, falling temperatures had turned the melted snow to ice. The pallbearers repeatedly lost their footing, causing the coffin to tip and the white flowers to tumble to the ground. Milo wanted to put them back but his father restrained him. The pallbearers tried to retrieve them but each time they managed to put the flowers back another foot would slip, the coffin would tip and they’d have to begin the process all over again. Milo thought it was funny except that his mother was being slammed around in the box and he feared her bones would break. After they pushed her into the hearse, Milo scampered around collecting the remaining flowers, most of them trampled. He put them in a glass of water when he got home but they turned brown and died anyway. Mrs. Cauldershot threw them out. Milo wanted to visit his mother’s grave, to take flowers and sit beside it and talk.
    â€˜There is no grave,’ Gus said.
    â€˜How come?’
    â€˜Because I scattered her ashes at Grandma’s farm, in the orchard. That’s what she wanted.’
    â€˜Can I go to the orchard?’ He knew his grandmother was very ill and found his visits tiresome.
    â€˜Eat your meat.’
    Milo hated his father for burning his mother. Chewing on pork, he decided to make a grave for her in the backyard behind her lilac, where no one could see.
    â€˜Milo?’ Christopher mumbles, sounding nasally. ‘What did they do to my nose?’
    â€˜Splinted it.’
    â€˜I can hardly breathe.’
    â€˜There’s probably swelling. Your face is pretty bruised.’
    Christopher closes his eyes, clearly exhausted from being trapped inside a fractured body. The Portuguese behind the curtain chortle.
    â€˜Milo?’
    â€˜Yes?’
    â€˜Did you fuck my wife?’
    â€˜Of course not, how could you think that?’
    â€˜I have to piss,’ Christopher says.
    â€˜You’re hooked up to a catheter.’
    Christopher grunts slightly. ‘Is anything coming out?’
    Milo looks at the tube. ‘Nothing yet.’
    Christopher winces.
    Milo sees yellow. ‘Bingo.’
    A nurse with a limp shuffles in and examines the urine