Marbles

[摘要] Not a room left for doubt in the midst of the shadow photographs; squares of film with lumps tightening into plump radii of grapes. The information breaks at the doctor’s office —the diagnosis confirmed— where he resigns into a slump, draws a heave, sighs, all the while his steady eyes transfixed at a pot of papery, dead orchids on the other edge of the room. Then he drives back home and knows to sit us down at the dinner table— my sister and I, aged four and five— and say, in a measured way, how marbles are growing within his lungs, fast— and how, in days to come, they will multiply, make more of him, press hard against his cage of ribs, grow so unbearably heavy that he will have no option left but to leave our town to find a fix.

[学科分类] 呼吸医学