The following is an excerpt from a work in progress titled ‘Lucille.’ For inquiries regarding the full piece, please contact writer@ryanorivera.com.
Her chest stopped its labored rising and falling. I ran my fingers through dry strands of her gray-streaked red hair. The doctors and nurses consoled her husband, Tris, while I held her hands in mine until her warmth receded and I recoiled from her cooling flesh. My chair stuttered as my legs instinctively catapulted me up. My body went rigid and my back muscles tensed so tight it felt like my chest would crack open at the sternum—heart, lungs, and guts exposed to the world. I grabbed my bag and mumbled my way out of the room and out onto the street, the hospital doors banging behind me as they repeatedly closed and opened.
***
Crossing the park’s perimeter felt like I’d breached the event horizon of a black hole. Time stretched and my movements felt elongated like I was stepping through thickened space which oozed around me like flowing molasses. Trees and tall grass bristled in the September breeze, the sun blinked through a cloud-spotted sky. Hues of green shifted and waved, flashing gold as I stepped along asphalt paths. Bicycles and runners whizzed by me but I was un-flustered. I reached the lake and looked out onto the water, a mix of deep blue and dirty bathwater-brown with glints of platinum when waves crested under the sun. Ducks descended and launched from murky ponds, forming Vs in the sky like fighter jets on the 4th of July.
***
I moved past the carousel and found myself at the tail-end of a zebra, whose tail slapped at flies on its meaty haunches. I listened to it bray and whinny and trot around an arid scene of sandy-brown cracked dirt: African savanna at the edge of my city. The zebra darted with whimsy, unbridled and free, pausing now and again to chew on tiny patches of browning grass. It preened and stomped. I tried to count its stripes, see if I could find a pattern along its body. What did its skin look like behind the alternating frenzy of black and white? Was it pink, vibrant red blood coursing through a web of capillaries or was it pale and gray, clammy and cold like Lucille’s skin in the end?