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Volume 2 Number 2 • Fall - Winter 2010-2011
A five percent chance. What kind of odds are those?
Did he calculate the risk when he downed the diazepam, voided the vodka bottle and swallowed the aspirin? Only five percent, not as low as one, but not a fighting chance.
Did the doctors think that through? Did they measure the brain waves, weigh the heartbeats and estimate the hours he had survived so far to come up with that tiny, but not impossible number?
Can he hear them now as they hover over? The beep of the machines counts his ticks on the clock, counting up or counting down. Can he hear the medical speak of nurses as they measure and check, measure and check?
Did he tally up the friends that would mourn his choice, weeping, holding hands, praying in the choir room? They would stay all day, too lost to find their way to their next classes. When he was missing, in their memories, he held them together.
Could he feel the brave smiles that his teachers wore? Maybe he thought that they were lying, playing the courageous card of hope. It was the only way they knew how to act, but thoughts rushed to him like messengers once the students all went home.
Would he ever hear the words of regret, the tears his father would cry begging him not to die? Father would choke on the words he wanted to take back now: “No faggot will live under my roof!” If only he could live, father would build roof after roof after roof just so that his son would never be unsheltered again.
Mary Wlodarski is currently working on her MFA from Hamline University. A Minnesotan, she teaches in Andover and lives in Oak Grove with her husband and three horses.