My Cardboard Balcony

by Belinda Roddie Even her smile creaked. Everything about her creaked. It was uncanny because I was certain she wasn't any older than sixty. I would expect women or men in their seventies onward to start getting rusty around their hinges or squeaky in their joints. But she in particular had aged too fast. When she sat down on the couch, everything squealed, like the brakes of a car wearing down very quickly on a bumpy country road. This was my wife's aunt Zoley, the woman we were meant to look after while my inlaws were away on their annual, stuffy vacation to the east coast. Where we were, it hadn't rained adequately in a good seven years. My once everyday routine of taking a five minute shower was now every other day. I substituted cider and whiskey for water a lot. My wife insisted on bringing her aunt fresh avocados, even though they were twice the cost of what they used to be since we had met. We would split the things open and scoop their innards out into bowls...

My hopes had been flattened upon entering the hospital room. Evan, contrary to everyone else's optimism, was getting worse, not better. I swore that the number of tubes surrounding him increased, the hum of the machines keeping him alive becoming more and more unbearable the closer I stepped to him. It was all the more disorienting, therefore, when he smiled at me from beneath his feeding apparatus and flashed me a lazy thumbs up.