Hands

The room was too hot. The dark stained wood of her dresser and side table were painful to look at, swollen. She hadn’t been out of bed yet, her pillows bore the scent of nighttime sweat. Rachel imagined the bed animalic and maternal, grounded in something familiar and vaguely disgusting. Not that any animal could love her correctly. When everything was already suffocating, (like right now) the cat laid on her feet. When all she wanted in the world was to be touched, the cat was shitting or hiding or destroying something valuable. It is wrong to wish your pet was different, to find it inadequate and difficult.

Rachel had technically been on the clock for an hour at this point, but she’d only had one email to respond to. A customer wanted a refund on their sheet set but didn’t want to return the items. Seven hours left. The top of her right foot itched. She tried to worm her left big toe over to scratch it. The cat left.

And so it goes until five p.m. The back of her knees and her scalp itched as she unstuck herself from her damp bedroom. She longed to feel spent or exhuasted. The words exhaust and relief played in her head as she showered, somewhere between a conscious mantra and tune stuck.

“Exhaust, relief, exhaust, relief” she repeated to herself. This is usually when she first speaks for the day, warming up her voice and mouth in the shower. She can not speak out loud alone unless there is a louder noise behind her. She relishes in occasional nearby construction. That, and long car horns are the only times she can get herself to cry, beginning beneath the noise with “I JUST THINK-” and can never finish the statement. Rachel stepped out of the shower and appraised herself in the mirror. She considered the lottery ticket of her body. If it was a scratch off, it would probably be a $150 prize won from a $30 ticket. Whenever she looked at her naked body, she thought about her brief stint in porn with her ex boyfriend Beck. They had a running joke about not shitting where you eat.

“Eat it bitch,” said Rachel, for no reason other than to break her own silence.

The rest of her routine was brief, she layered nipple clamps under a pink blouse and slacks. She ate a Lean Cuisine on her unmade bed with the television, grabbed her bag, and headed to Sunrise House and Healthcare.

The hum of the car engine and occasional bumps in the road sent a melancholic ache from her breasts through her body. She wished she was a glass of water drinking itself.

Fridays were always game night. Dinner was either chicken tenders or pizza. Degrading. Wednesdays were her favorite, yoga night. Mondays, movie nights, were her least favorite because she didn’t really get to engage with the residents. Tonight she had settled on a classic: charades. Rachel felt that it was good for the residents to get up and move around a bit. And she would be lying if her own personal enjoyment was not considered. An awful screech sung out between the overgrown tree branch and the hood of Rachel’s car as she nestled into the enrichment coach designated parking spot. It was only designated to and by Rachel, she loved secret luxuries. The wet air hit her when she stepped out of the car. It was warm, the driveway radiated steam.

The typical cast of characters assembled in inpermanent chairs with ripped faux leather backs. The youngest amongst the group, save Rachel, was around 75, the eldest was up in the 90’s. Earlobes stretched, hair gave up or doubled down. Limbs cried their last desires for touch. Everyone’s hands shook and the room was alive. The floor was entirely carpeted with the intention of looking like anything but grass. This is where she wished she could spend all of her time, inhaling wafts of periodontal breath and cleaning supplies. After Rachel announced they would play charades, Patty shot up to go first, she loved all the games that held the room in a collective illusion of a performance. Patty was never interested in adhering to the parameters of what she was playing. She always took the opportunity to pace back and forth the length of her imagined stage. One hand held up a massively certain index finger, shaky. The other hand held an invisible microphone a foot from her mouth. She always sang the same song

The angels in Heaven done signed my name

Oh, follow me down to that old Jordan stream

Angels in Heaven done signed my name

I stepped in the water

And the the water was cold

The angels in Heaven done signed my name

Oh, it chilled my body but not my soul

Angels in Heaven done signed my name

I know I've been changed

I know I've been changed

I know I've been changed

Angels in Heaven done signed my name

If the room was not already vibrating enough, Patty’s hymns always shot through Rachel’s core. She was so gorgeous. The negative space between her nose and lip was shaped like a dew drop. Her heavily hunched shoulders gave her collarbone a sensual tilt, like she was constantly posing in an 80’s supermodel fashion. She wore leggings that clung with hungry desperation to the socks which clung even harder to her calves. The leggings lost their will around her hips and ass, knowing their own unworthiness. As she sang, the wet heaviness outside gave way to a storm. God was the percussionist of Patty’s performance. She didn’t crack a smile, there was no moment of surprise or gratitude in her face, but she stepped with greater buoyancy.

The storm raged through Dan’s attempt to act out the lion king. Lightning was a spotlight. Dan reared and bucked with what little mobility he had. His face contorted and stretched into mimed roars. The thunder filled in the blanks. Because Dan had no teeth, his open mouth, accompanied by the thunder, became a terrifying bottomless hole. It was impossible not to lean in. Rachel felt that the elders’ attempts at charades had very little to do with movies or winning. They moved their sick bodies to communicate something entirely inaccessible to them when they were younger and firm. What it was, she assumed she wouldn’t know for another 60 years.

Corey had just begun his turn, counting words silently on his fingers, when a boom shook the entire Sunrise House and Healthcare. The windows shuttered, electric blue, then everything went black.

Light, two, three, four, sound, two, three, four, light, dark, three, four, loud, quiet, three, four. For an entire twenty seconds, Rachel forgot about her position as enrichment coach, an employed member of this caretaking facility, and waited for someone else to speak. She continued counting the space between lightning and thunder before she realized she should address the residents.

“I guess we’ll have to pause charades for now. SHH has a ton of generators, so the power should be back on momentarily.”two, three, light.

There is no need to describe the way rain sounds. It has been articulated a million ways and they are all wrong. It tickles, massages, presses against the water in your own body. It is God’s one thousand fingernails rapping on the window pane. As if Patty could hear Rachel’s thoughts at this moment, she began humming her tune again, barely discernible above the storm. Rachel’s third fist, the internal one that always clutched her lung, released his grip a little. She found that familiar comfort of noises louder than her own. She began to hum along with Patty, singing the words she could remember, hoping to radiate at a frequency beneath white noise.

I know I’ve been changed

the angels in heaven done signed my name

I know I’ve been changed

The next sound was one Rachel had never heard in SHH before. A long wheeze followed by a succession of shorter sweet wheezes, wet and high, in the direction of the ceiling. Someone was belly laughing. Not a chuckle, not a polite exhale, a belly laugh. The fullest silence in existence is that of someone laughing so hard they can no longer make noise. In the darkness, Rachel could not see anyone. The lightning flashed again and there was Linda, her head tilted back, eyes closed, mouth open. She felt she should be embarrassed, maybe Linda was laughing at her, but she couldn’t seem to locate embarrassment inside herself; she couldn’t locate herself at all.

“Oh, YES!” Linda shouted, and clasped her hands together.

Although she seldom spoke or participated in the enrichment activities, Rachel was also quite captivated by her. Linda was one of the oldest and sickest in the group. She spent most of her time staring out from her wheelchair at some fixed point across space. Her eyes were not vacant, they caught and snagged on Rachel’s sleeve.

“Oh this is perfect!” squealed Linda.

“What is?” said Rachel, slightly louder than rain.

“Those awful lights are out, my oxygen concentrator stopped working, the song, the rain,”

FUCK, she’s trying to die.

“NURSE!” called Rachel.

Why were all the other elders silent? Patty hummed, I know I’ve been changed, I know I’ve been changed.

“Wait, changed how? Nurse!”

“Oh come on, relax, relax.” Linda couldn’t stop laughing long enough to release the sentence without waves breaking on her tongue.

The wind surged and the lightning began to strobe. The storm was directly on top of them. Light, two, three, light, two, light, dark, light, dark.

“You have always been such a handsome young man,” said Patty, she was now sitting right next to Rachel. In between blinks of darkness, Patty was breathtaking. A perfect pearl of sweat collected above her pout. The smell of rain and Florida trees thickened the room.

“Always so handsome,”

When the darkness fell again for that brief interval, Rachel felt the wetness of the room on her face; on her mouth. She almost thought to check for a leak when she realized Patty had kissed her. A light peck, over before the room illuminated again. Patty went on humming. Linda laughed. The ground moved. Rachel did not call for the nurse a third time. She shook and shook in pleasure and disbelief. She felt relief in the loudness of the room, but had nothing to say.

Then, a mechanical whirr. A clicking, a blinking. Rachel’s cheeks were hot when the lights came back on. Patty seemed unaffected by any of it in the overhead lighting. Linda.

Linda. Leaned back, slow and small in her wheelchair.

”My teeth are still to white,” she said. Her eyes misted over, fixed on an even further away place.

Rachel drove home in the hot water, her eyelids heavy and her panties slick. She fumbled around in her bag for the house keys. Dark wood, the cat was there.