“Rehearsal” by Ken Long

‍Nora sat in her husband Tom’s easy chair, eating buttered toast for dinner.

Gracie, her sixteen-year-old corgi, was digging her pillow on the floor and circling. It took her a good while to settle, but she finally curled up and went to sleep.

Gracie liked to sleep. A lot. “Rehearsing for death,” Tom used to say.

Gracie slept deeply most of the time. You had to look at her closely to tell she was breathing.

On rare occasions though, the dog moaned in her sleep like a ghost in a high school play, making a high-pitched wail, her eyes rolling under their lids, and her legs flicking back and forth.

Nora had spent most of the day sorting through her husband’s clothes, putting them in bags to drop off at Goodwill. She left a single pair of his pants and a faded blue cotton shirt in the closet, and a pair of his glasses on the dresser, as keepsakes.

She also went through her budget, updating it for the recent drop in monthly social security payments. It’ll be tight, she thought, but I’ll manage.

In the evening, she set her clothes out on the chair in the bedroom, and put a box of Cheerios, bowl, and spoon on the kitchen table, so she could sleep in a few minutes more before getting up for dialysis tomorrow.

After taking Gracie out, Nora gave her a treat and put the dog in her bed next to her own. “Goodnight, Gracie,” she said, which made her think of George Burns and Gracie Allen, the dog’s namesake.

Nora turned off the light and slipped under the covers. She sometimes pulled a rosary out of the bedstand and prayed a decade before going to sleep, but was too tired to do so tonight.

When she finally drifted off to sleep, she dreamed about shopping with her sister; dreamed about work, though she hadn’t held a job in years; and dreamed about standing in line outside the ladies’ room at a concert hall, having to pee. When she finally got inside a stall, other women in the room began to yell. A chipmunk had gotten in and was running around. Nora looked down. The chipmunk was standing at her feet.  It looked up at her and screamed.

Nora pushed the off switch on the alarm. 6:15. After going to the bathroom, she took Gracie outside to pee. It was chilly and drizzling, and the dog did her business quickly. Nora brought Gracie back inside, then dressed and ate breakfast. Gracie watched her eat and then waddled back to bed. Nora slipped on her shoes and coat, picked up her dialysis bag, and stepped outside. She pulled the car out of the garage, glad that she had talked her husband into getting an electric garage door opener as she pushed the button on the remote. The door stuttered close, and she drove away in the cold rain.

It was 6:48 on a Saturday morning, and traffic was light. She pulled into the parking lot of the dialysis center at 7:00, just as the blinking yellow traffic light at the intersection a block behind her turned red.

Nora grabbed her bag, walked to the dialysis center door, and pushed the intercom buzzer.

“Kkkk-Fresen-kkk,” a voice said.

“Nora Bron,” she replied.

“Kkk-come on in.”

A man in a wheelchair was sitting in the lobby, holding a stuffed animal. He had a shoe on his left foot and a bandage on his right. Nora smiled at him and said, “Cute dog.” He looked up at her and said nothing.

The automatic door to the treatment room clicked open, and a masked and paper gowned tech walked over to get the man as Nora went in ahead.

There were eighteen vinyl covered recliners next to blinking dialysis machines around three sides of the fluorescent lit room. Four of the chairs had patients in them, and two of the patients were being worked on by techs.

In the center of the room were nurses’ stations with computer terminals, a padlocked refrigerator, and wheeled hazardous waste and trash cans. A crumpled blue nitrile glove lay next to one of the cans.

“Morning, Mrs. Bron,” said Tess, the head nurse. “You’re in chair eleven today.”

Nora weighed herself on the platform scale near the entrance and walked to her chair on the other side of the room. She smiled at the other patients she passed.

“Hi, Mary. 69.2 kilograms,” she told the tech standing by the chair, pulled a book and blanket out of her bag, hung her coat and bag on the wall, and sat down.

Mary strapped a cuff on Nora’s right arm and took her blood pressure. The cuff tightened, cutting into her forearm, before finally releasing and going limp again.

Her tech today was a good one – sharp, friendly, and efficient – though she sometimes called Nora “Joan”.

Nora lifted the left sleeve of her blouse to uncover the fistula on her upper arm, a discolored, mottled beanbag of raised flesh that served as her access site. After asking Nora how she was feeling, Mary wiped down the fistula, dried it, and pulled out the two needles she was going to insert in Nora’s arm, one to pump her blood to the dialysis machine and one to return it to her, sparkly clean again.

When she saw her looking at the needles, Mary smiled. “When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I stab people.”

Nora smiled back.

Sizable needles are used for hemodialysis, each a little thicker and longer than the business end of the projectiles used in a game of darts, with a V-shaped cutting tip. Sometimes it felt like a dart going in, and sometimes Nora could barely feel it. She tried to think of other things during the procedure.

After inserting the needles and taping them in place, Mary connected each one to a tube going to the dialysis machine, which did the work her damaged kidneys used to do. “Sign off,” she said.

When the head nurse came over, she pressed her fingers into Nora’s ankles to make sure she wasn’t retaining water, checked her heart and lungs with a stethoscope, and reviewed the machine’s settings.

“You’re good to go,” she said as she turned to leave.

Mary pressed a button on the machine. A plastic wheel began to turn, and blood flowed down one of the tubes coming out of Nora’s left arm. In a couple of minutes, the return tube turned pink and then dark red with filtered blood.

“Let me know if you need anything,” Mary said after raising Nora’s footrest and then walked away.

The worst of the dialysis process was over, and Nora looked forward to reading during the three and a half hours she sat strapped to her electromechanical partner, since she found it difficult to get herself to sit still for that long any other time.

She got dialysis three times each week, so she was slowing making her way through the stack of books that had been on her to-read list for anywhere from one to forty years.

Today she was reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a surprisingly unsentimental story about a girl growing up in the big city.

Two hours into her treatment, the facility was relatively calm. The only sounds Nora could hear were voices murmuring on another patient’s TV, the occasional video-game-style warning bleep of a dialysis machine down the room, and the rhythmic pumping of her own unit.

Nora yawned and felt her rib cage expand. This was quickly followed by a painful cramping in her abdomen. She closed her eyes, put down the book, and began to breath slowly but not too deeply.

After a few minutes, her stomach muscles relaxed, and she suddenly felt tired. She put her head back and was asleep in a couple of minutes.

Nora dreamed she was floating weightless, twenty feet above her house. Tom was next to her, holding her hand.

She looked around. It was a cloudy, moonless night, and pools of light from the streetlamps below were the only source of illumination. Wisps of smoke were coming from some of the chimneys on the street. A light wind tousled her hair and skirt.

A couple of blocks to the north, it was completely dark. That was Lake Erie. ‍

Slowly at first but then faster, she and her husband began to move toward the lake. They flew silently over Lake Road and then over the school on the other side.

Soon they were above the lake. All was black, though Nora could hear the waves below. They continued to move faster, and the wind picked up. After some time, she was able to see in the distance the faint glow of the greenhouses on the south Ontario shore. She turned to Tom and smiled.

“Two minutes to go,” Mary said, waking her. ‍

Ken Long has been writing short stories for a number of years, but only recently decided to seek publication after receiving positive feedback from a well-known poet. His work has been published as well in The Bookends Review. Long also writes poetry and is a photodigital artist whose work has been exhibited at a number of galleries.