Fiction Fix Seven

Fiction Fix
I should have talked her out of it. I wouldn't have stayed had she not stayed. And if I
hadn t stayed, she might not have. But we decided to be heroes. We would defend our
country. Everyone else was fleeing, carrying possessions that they would later abandon
in a ditch, but we would stay. I didn't feel like a hero. I just wanted to be with her. I
felt I needed to be with her. I didn't really think of anything else.
Mrs. Whitman’s pain became unbearable. She could no longer sit. She tried
to stand from the bench and fell over onto the dirt at the side of the bench,
where the dogs lifted their hind legs. Mr. Z. helped her up. She was wincing and
groaning. He got her into the wheelchair. Her mouth hung open. Saliva drooled
down her chin. He took his handkerchief and wiped the saline from her face.
He straightened her touque. He tucked the blankets around her bony legs. He
pushed the wheelchair back to the hospital.
When he finished pushing wheelchairs for cancer patients, Mr. Z.
would eat his dinner in the hospital cafeteria. The food was bland, but cheap
and convenient. After depositing his tray and nodding to some of the staff who
recognized him the wheelchair pusher came three times a week for more years
than many of the staff could remember he walked a half hour to the factory
to begin his night shift. He drilled holes into a metal sheathing, and sent this
sheathing down a spur to be picked up by Millicent. Millicent attached the
sheathing to a snow blower coming along the main track. She used the drill
holes Mr. Z. had made. He had learned to slow his hole drilling so the metal
sheaths wouldn’t pile up beside Millicent. If they piled up, Millicent would
complain. It made her look bad, she said. It made her look as if she wasn’t
working very hard if he could drill holes in the sheathing faster than she could
attach the sheathing to the snow blower. So he paced his drilling to match the
creeping pace of the plant. It suited him to slow his thoughts. Tonight, though,
because he had begun to tell his story, he found it difficult to keep up. When
Millicent yelled at him, he forgot a step, and the drill warbled, creating a hole
too large and too warped for Millicent to use. And then he did that a second
time.
When the shift was over, at five in the morning, Mr. Z. walked back to
his apartment. He enjoyed the early morning walk the best, even when it was
bitterly cold, or raining. No one was out. He could hear the echo of his own
steps. His breath. His heart beat. The silence and the dark were comforting. He
would focus on where his feet go, and not much else.
You didn’t finish your story, Mrs. Whitman said when he pushed her
chair through the park the following week. He thought she had forgotten. At
any rate, he hoped she had forgotten.
He regretted beginning the tale. Nor was it a vain hope. The pain was
often too much for her to worry about remembering things. At other times, the
drugs she took to combat the pain clouded her mind. It was rare when neither
the pain nor the drugs incapacitated her. Because Mr. Z. didn’t respond, Mrs.
Whitman goaded him. You were in illicit love with your cousin. And the two
of you decided to fight the enemy. What happened that day that you punish
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