From Fluorescence

KILBY SMITH-MCGREGOR

He’s asking me what day it is, day of the week and date, the year. I’m doing well. The parking lot swims in and out of focus. There are still several knots of students and now some parents and news vans pulling in behind him, I think. Still flashing lights from somewhere but not a lot of sound, even though I’m expecting some ringing or something but there’s not that either. It was a box of textbooks that tipped off the top of the supply cabinet, it seems. The blast from the class next door did that or somehow I hit it, or someone else did in the ricochet of panic. “How long was he out?” the guy’s asking Naveed. VP Phipps flares into view, breaks his stride by the ambulance bumper, ducks down, drops his sports coat on my lap, disappears. They think I was out maybe five minutes, ten.
      “Tuesday,” I say, “Tuesday,” adjusting the bag of ice above my ear. Charlotte’s there too and has somehow entered the open flap of Naveed’s unseasonable parka, twisting into him until she’s just a shock of blond at his throat, her back to the world and her taped-white hand anchored at his belt buckle. My kids.
      “But what about—”
      I want to say: the others. The ones in the other room. The exploded ones. I’m not sure what comes out, exactly.
      Charlotte starts to sob and the blond shock bucks back, parka creature rippling. The paramedic points them away from me.
      I worry about the girls sometimes.
      “Naveed!” But they’ve gone. His lab notes and makeup test are still in my office.
      “Sir? Let’s just focus on you for the moment,” and there’s a hint of something harder here, so I shut my mouth, I let him manage me. He’s very tall and brush-cut, pressed hunter green with front creases, shirtsleeves rolled up to under a little crest patch a bit like what Addie collected for swimming in those last levels. Lifesaving I, II, III, then the Bronze Cross pin you could fasten to felt. I first thought rent-a-cop or even a bit army, but he’s more like one of those smart-aleck swim instructors she had. Boys who go to camp, who go to private school, unwitting date rapists, debate team members, the ones who flame out in pre-med and will somehow stay young forever but never win their fathers really. He’s looking at me like I’m old and I am—to someone twenty-five, tops, who’s settled on running up hard against death for a living. He’s wasting his time on me.
      For a while after Addie was born, Joan’s brother Mac used to visit us from Ajax, before he moved out east. Off shift, he’d arrive on our porch with a two-four in his arms and some small gift balanced on top: a fuzzy bear or cardboard book full of pictures of trucks and trains, or types of horses. Joan would prop open the screen door and stand there for a second, not a flicker across her face, as if taking the time to scan him for traces of other people’s blood neglected near his hairline, maybe in a crease of skin. There was something there. And it struck me that she never seemed to let him actually hold Addie, which can’t be right, but maybe they just weren’t close. Mac and I always got on well and sometimes I remember to be sad we never kept in touch. I was in a real shithole of a school those first two years and ready to quit, and he was wanting to make the move from EMS to the fire hall, like a lot of EMTs, but worried about his bad knee. We’d rail all night about drunks and teenagers and he would say about the job how much patience gets ground out of you, actually. The forgone conclusion Domestics and mostly shovelling stinking bodies off sidewalks into shelters. I wonder what this one thinks about the banality of a flying textbook concussion, glass extracted from fabric and skin, or the kids entirely in bits, which they must be—whether we’ve brought it on ourselves.
      “But we are the saints,” Mac would say, getting sappy and loud enough to wake Addie. He’d slap his palms against my chest like those metal paddles: clear. “It’s true. As long as someone still believes it, buddy. Doesn’t have to be you.”
      Phipps’s jacket is light, like cotton wool in my hands, like the stuffing out of something.
      “Mr. Parnell, is it? Les?”
      God, what does he want from me?
      “ . . . good. Follow here.” Now with the little flashlight. Up. Down. Left. Right. I know exactly what those black zippered bags look like from television. I know all the different kinds of swabbing and scraping and how to glow blood blue in the dark. It’s impossible not to. One of my grade tens asked last week if he needs a senior math to be a CSI and I lied to him.
      “Tuesday,” again, as if this could explain everything.
      Ask me a harder question.

(From Brick 84, used by permission of the author)