Issue 22 - 1992

Tuna on White
Matt Osing
Coe Review • Issue 22
I’ve got a sandwich. Tuna on white, wrapped in wax paper
so they’ll know it’s mine, won’t eat it for me. This sandwich is gonna
get me beyond the thank-you bleat of the limited egress system,
through a door, another shift, eventually a payday. It’s the reason I
never bitch, why the nurses all like me, why I get stuck with all the
enemas.
I get to watch failed career jocks with serious doubts smirk
behind my back. Me with the hot water bottle and hose closing the
doors one by one, thinking about my sandwich, how the kitchen staff
should knock off the commodity cheese and surplus bananas, as
these foods are binding.
The residents are glad to see me because I tell them it’s all
garden dirt to me. I like Sheila the best. For one thing, she agrees
with me on things. Like when I say how nobody really knows the
backs of their hands. “Faces maybe,” she says, but Sheila agrees,
most people are lost. Shelia admits she is, says she’s tired of all the
other aids speaking mother-ease as if she were an infant. Sheila’s 32.
I tell her how I’m sick of the smirkers calling me big-guy, thumbing
me up, high fives, telling me, “Hey, Rock-n-Roll Big Guy, Rock-n-
Roll.”
Sheila closes her eyes as I put her in the left Simms position,
on her side, her one atrophied leg bent just so. Gloved, I stimulate
her bowel with my index finger, insert the nozzle and unclip the
flow. Sheila smiles to herself, and I know I’m right, right about
people.
Sheila has developed a hemorrhoidal tag, her anus like a
tightly clustered raspberry pushing out one of it’s drupelets to ripen
faster. People don’t really consider the backs of their hands.
Sometimes when we wipe we get shit on the base of our thumbs.
I showed Sheila a trick. If you splay your fingers, and press
palms and fingers with another’s hand, then stroke two of the fingers
as one, one yours, one theirs, it’s exactly what it feels like to touch a
dead man’s finger, in exactly that way. Sheila will try it with one of
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