Free Three Days by Russell Wangersky

THREE DAYS
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    Arthur Simmons thought about just staying put this time and urinating in the bed.
    Wondered if that would be going too far.
    He was taking short, shallow breaths, aware that breathing more deeply would rattle the phlegm in his lungs and start another round of coughing. He’d heard somewhere that, once you got old, you could easily cough hard enough to crack a rib. He believed it. Every time the coughing started, he felt like an old bellows with its handles being pumped too hard: air rushing out, rattling back in again , shaking things loose and starting the whole cycle all over again. Each coughing spell was exhausting; afterwards, he would feel as if he was unable even to lift his arms. He stayed as still as he could, breathing flatly through his nose. It had started as a cold on Sunday; by Monday, he could feel the weight of it shifting into his chest, settling there, and he knew he was really sick, the kind of sick that is more a forced march than a nuisance.
    It was five o’clock on a late June morning, a Thursday, and there had already been light outside at four-thirty; he could see it edging in through the blinds in thin stripes, the night lightening to a pale grey.
    Would wetting the bed make the point any more clearly? he wondered. Would it make them pay any sort of attention when they got around to finding him?
    He imagined the feel of brief, welcome warmth, the rest of the day clammy, the room filled with the particularly sharp stink of old man’s urine.
    He’d been getting up to go to the bathroom, but that was the only time he’d been getting up, shuffling slowly down the hall, leaning against the wall when the coughing overtook him. He would stop afterwards to get a drink of water from the sink faucet and at the same time hated himself for that weakness. But that was it, he thought — the only times he’d moved from the bed. He hadn’t been downstairs to the kitchen, hadn’t picked up the phone to call anyone. Outside, there might well be mail waiting for him in the mailbox, a handful of flyers and one or two bills. They could stay there, he thought. He wanted every hour to count, each minute on the clock to be a precise measure of guilt.
    There had been six others as well as him, three brothers, three sisters, but they had all died. All of the wives and husbands gone too. A dead generation. Was that too harsh? Arthur thought. Should I be thinking they’ve “passed”? Or maybe that Salvation Army thing, “promoted to Glory.”
    But they weren’t promoted to anywhere, he thought. They just winked out, there one day, packed up and gone the next. Perhaps it would be closer to say they were fired to purgatory.
    There was one part he kept coming back to, though: the fact that everything they were was just gone too. And he was the last, the final custodian, the keeper of all the information. Memories? Facts? Experience? All folding in on themselves, he thought. All wasted. Trapped in the last remaining memory of someone who couldn’t find anyone who cared enough to stop and listen.
    The birds were starting up outside, Art noticed. Nothing wrong with his hearing. Crows out there for certain, raucous, and robins burbling along. Other smaller birds fleshed out the chorus.
    He’d been two full days in bed already, and this morning would mark the third morning that no one had come, that no one had even called to check.
    He looked over at the phone, a flat 1970s push-button, cream-coloured, silent, sitting on the table beside the bed. It wouldn’t take much effort to call, he thought, neither for me nor for them. But he had resisted. Art was following the rules he’d set for himself from the very beginning: wait. Wait for someone else to make the first move. Wait, for as long as it took.
    There wasn’t any prize for being the survivor, Art thought. But he didn’t miss his siblings, not any of them. Not Anne