"Pandemic ICU" by Claire Sherwood

four a.m.

the dream is back, the one with the bloodied shirt and the wasps. Ermoli knows she is a creaky old woman with slow feet but in the dream she is a girl again, dancing from room to room in her mother’s house. the shirt belongs to her brother Ksan:garh, and the blood is the coughing sickness that followed him home from the Green Plain. the wasps in the dream are as big as her outstretched arms. they nest in the Tree That Never Flowers, tree of a thousand gray branches. she can see the movement of her brother’s chest as he coughs and her feet as she dances, but there are no sounds in the dream. everything is silent until the wasps start singing, a strange choir of insect sounds and even though she knows this is only a dream, she runs. they are still wasps and they will sting.  Ermoli wakes wet with tears and an old woman’s fear.

       it is time

five a.m.

ribs sagging into sleep

how far?

how far?

one mile two miles

past the dump

crones fight over maudites bouteilles de merde

Coors Lite

road kill

pseudacris crucifer silenced, pseudacris maculata promoted

boreal to heavenly choir

rana clamitans no longer clamouring with other green frogs

how far?

one times two times

clothesline tightens

around the knitting needle

he was the limp parcel my mother carried

wrapped in newspaper

evening edition

face up to the red leaves

compost

not compost

six a.m.

cracks delicate as spider webs appear at the base of the rock near her right foot. the rock on her left splits with a sound like winter thunder, and a crevice taller than Ksan:garh appears oozing ochre goo. tiny hands emerge from the ooze, claw at the rock face. arms follow hands, more and more hands, until the crevice is twice her brother’s height.  two eyes appear, hands grab her ankles. sticky slime fingers slide up her calves to her thighs. the eyes are fixed, unblinking, not multiplying like the tiny hands. slow as a snail’s journey the walls close in and the sky clouds over.

       it is her time

Claire Sherwood is a Montreal writer, visual poet, and storyteller. Her short fiction has appeared in Minority Reports (Vehicule Press), and her poetry in Kola Magazine, carte blanche, and Helios. Her collage-poems have been exhibited in Morin Heights, Cape Breton, Ottawa, Toronto. She has appeared in storytelling lineups at Blue Metropolis with “This Really Happened” and with Confabulation.