Our Share of Darkness

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Inside the room the hospital sounds faded. Dad lay unmoving, in appearance already a corpse. Two weeks since the stroke had hit him, and the sight of him still shook me to the core.

I went to the headboard monitor and ran a check. A ritual; the most I could do for him. Everything was nominal, as I d expected. Any change would have triggered alarms at appropriate terminals. It was a good system. Not cutting-edge, but it did the job. I should know—I’d installed it.

This close, I could hear his breathing; impossibly light, a faint whistle at the bare edge of hearing. There was a pause—I gritted my teeth, but the slow rasp resumed a moment later.

Backing away, I found a chair. At first I thought the deathwatch would be a torment. But it wasn’t that bad. Sitting there as the memories rolled by, things I’d forgotten years before. The racquetball that he loved but wasn’t very good at. The way he’d laughed when I lost control of an ice cream cone and wound up with most of it in my lap—Christ, that had to be one of my earliest memories. The first time he’d taken the casing off a computer to show me what was inside, saying that you could put a whole world in there.

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