Anya Silver

As the doors glide shut behind me, the world flares back into being— I exist again, recover myself, sunlight undimmed by dark panes, the heat on my arms the earth’s breath. The wind tongues me to my feet like a doe licking clean her newborn fawn. At my back, days measured by vital signs, my mouth opened and arm extended, the nighttime cries of a man withered child-size by cancer, and the bells of emptied IVs tolling through hallways. Before me, life—mysterious, ordinary— holding off pain with its muscular wings. As I step to the curb, an orange moth dives into the basket of roses that lately stood on my sickroom table, and the petals yield to its persistent nudge, opening manifold and golden.

I stand in Walgreens while my mother sleeps. The store is fluorescent and almost empty. My father is ailing in a nursing home, my friend is dying in the hospital. What I want tonight is lipstick. As pure a red as I can find—no coral undertones, no rust or fawn. Just red. Ignoring the salespeople, I untwist tubes and scrawl each color on my wrist, till the blue veins beneath my skin disappear behind smeared bars. I select one. Back in my mother's apartment, silence. I limn my lips back out of my wan face. There they are again: smacky and wanting.

The dryer, uniform and squat as a biscuit tin, came to life and turned on me its insect eye. My t-shirts and underwear crackled and leapt. I was a tourist there; I didn’t speak the language. My shoulders covered themselves up in churches, my tongue soothed its burn with slices of pickle. More I don’t remember: only, weekends now when I stand in the kitchen, sorting sweat pants and pairing socks, I remember the afternoon I did my laundry in Budapest, where the sidewalks bloomed with embroidered linen, where money wasn’t permitted to leave the country. When I close my eyes, I recall that spinning, then a woman, with nothing else to sell, pressing wilted flowers in my hands.