Michael Malone - Weebly

heads in hands, wills yielded to the wait, submerged in
pain or fear, as blank-eyed as if they waited for buses.
Down the corridor came five people, a family,
awkwardly clinging together even as they walked. All
were crying, the males without a sound, as behind them
a doctor tried to herd them along while appearing to
comfort them. As they passed, the man supporting the
loudest weeping woman turned his own teary eyes,
embarrassed, from Winslow. Even now, thought the
lawyer, even in the midst of death, he is ashamed to be
exposed in the weakness of grief, in his failure to keep
the woman from tears. But hadn't Winslow, too, feared
women's tears?
Tonight at the nurses' station when he had arrived
after 1:00
A.M., a woman nearby, manic and noisy, had
heard him asking for Judith Haig. Under the lights her
hair was lime yellow around the enormous green plastic
curlers. She was a woman in her early forties who wore
a boy's lettered football jacket, a black and white
housecoat, and straw sandals. Eyes puffed red, tears
running from her nose, she introduced herself to him as