BACKSTORY: This story is inspired by a Johnny Cash song, “Sunday Morning Coming Down”; though it is based loosely on my father’s own battle with cancer. Cash’s song is about the emptiness the narrator feels waking up hung over on a Sunday morning and, I believe, the loss he feels over the life he’s squandered away. This story tackles the similar theme of life’s losses from the point of view of a man dying of cancer.
THE DILAUDID WEARS OFF WHILE HE SLEEPS, and it is the pain that wakes him on this Easter Sunday morning. The pain that says, in case you’ve forgotten, you’re dying of cancer. Like it does most mornings since “Dr. Doom” gave him six months to live—it’s now month four—the word terminal arrives in his mind first.
He lies there for a moment, staring at the ceiling trying to decide if he should swallow another capsule and sleep most of the morning off, or get up and deal. Deal it is. He works his eroded frame up off the mattress, sits up with his feet on the floor.
There’s so little of him now, and yet the pain keeps getting bigger. He stands slowly and shakily, then turns and checks the sheets. It’s a rare night when he doesn’t wet the bed or worse these days, but it seems he was fortunate enough the night before to do neither. He ignores the urge to piss, knows nothing will come but that embarrassing trickle until it feels as though his bladder will burst.
On his way to the kitchen he peers into the guest bedroom where his wife now sleeps to avoid the nocturnal disasters, his not often quiet sobs of pain. She’s still asleep, and there’s no reason to wake her.
In the kitchen he grabs a bowl, fills it with cereal and milk. Grabs a warm beer from the six-pack on the counter. He hardly drank beer before now, but uses it now along with his veritable pharmacy—both prescribed and obtained—to numb the constant pain. He eats a few bites of the cereal before deciding he doesn’t want it. Brings the beer out onto the porch where, for a nice change, the paper is actually waiting for him. Most days he has to shuffle out into the yard to fetch it.
The front page features a photo of the cemetery, trees covered in white blossoms. The caption mentions something about a sunrise service being held there this morning and it is only then he realizes, first, that it’s Sunday, and second, that it’s Easter. He finishes the beer in a few gulps, thumbs through the paper though nothing really interests him. Local news is always boring, and he’ll be gone long before this war is ever over.
The pain is only at a low hum, so he decides that another beer is all he’ll need for the moment. That and a cigarette. He’d never stopped, didn’t see the point now. He lights one, pulls the smoke into his lungs and exhales slowly.
After a second cigarette he goes back inside to dress. Grabs a pair of jeans from the pile on the floor and a shirt. He sniffs the shirt and decides it smells clean enough before pulling it over his head. Checks himself in the mirror, and he looks like a kid wearing his dad’s clothes, a skeleton draped in sheets.
On the way out the door he snatches up the last two beers, still held together by the plastic ring. He hopes the Little Store is open this morning. He’s got about a two-mile walk ahead of him, both ways, and if at the end of the first half his efforts prove fruitless he might just give up altogether right there. Throw himself into traffic if that’s what it takes.
As he walks, a slow rolling shuffle that eases the grating in his hips, a church bell tolls. The sound of it takes him back, though it’s to somewhere he’s never really been. His parents were religious and his wife, too. He’d gone to enough services in his life to know what went on behind those doors. Seen baptisms and prayer sessions, sipped coffee with a deacon or two in the fellowship hall. In both his parents’ church and the one he’d gone to with his wife and their two sons when they were younger, he’d been a target. One of the lost. He’d never really considered their offers of salvation, wasn’t something he needed.
He’s near the church now. Boys in suits and girls in pink and yellow dresses are crisscrossing the church lawn, eyes to the ground, baskets swinging wildly. There’s a few parents trying to subtly hint at the location of an egg or two but not really succeeding.
On the front lawn older couples are gathered, their outfits just grownup versions of their opposites in the rear. The pastor stands out front beaming, shaking hands. For a brief moment their eyes meet. It is as though the pastor can sense his desire, his need to be in that place rubbing against his tendency to reject everything the pastor stands for. He is now more confused than ever and it’s as if the pastor knows this, too.
For a moment he considers going in. He remembers the lyric to an old hymn his mother used to sing, “Just as I am, though tossed about, fighting fears within, without.” A little girl, all blonde hair and pink chiffon, runs up beside him. “Can you reach an egg for me?” she asks. “Sure,” he says, but before he can, someone, presumably the girl’s mother, runs over, says “No honey, not him.” Her daughter turns to join the others and the mother delivers a look where every emotion is plain. “You’re not welcome here,” it says.
He stands on the sidewalk near the church lawn for awhile after everyone else has gone in, and begins to pray. “Lord I wish I was stoned, because then I wouldn’t have to feel this . . . this loneliness, this emptiness.” He stops there, full knowing that if the Lord won’t answer the prayer, there’s a bottle on his nightstand that will.
By the time he reaches the store he’s finished both beers. He makes his way back to the cooler to grab another sixer. “Morning Ken,” Carl, the storeowner, says as he puts the beer on the counter.
“Morning.”
“You walk here?”
“Wife hid the keys. I fall asleep sometimes. Went into a ditch last week.”
“The meds or. . . .”
“Both,” he says, knowing Carl couldn’t say cancer in front of a man dying from it. He’d found hardly anyone could. They’d call it the sickness, or his condition, but never cancer, as if by not saying the word they reduced its power to take him away from them. Carl just nods.
The two of them stand in the quiet store. The sun is just appearing over the tops of the houses across the street and beginning to shine through the big front windows. Someone out front is pumping gas, and the smell drifts in through the door propped open with a broomstick.
“You got any cards?” he asks.
“Playing cards?”
“No. Easter.”
“Got a few left. End of the candy aisle.”
“Flowers?”
“Two lilies left. Haven’t even bloomed yet.”
“I’ll take them. Be right back,” he says and goes to the card rack. The selections are few but he finds one that will do. Up front he pays Carl, grabs the paper sack, turns to leave.
“Take it easy, Ken,”
“Yeah,” he says, going out the door.
He takes a different route back home to avoid the church. Doesn’t want to feel it pulling on the hollow space inside him.
He reaches his front door sweaty, buzzing from his fourth beer of the morning. The pain has risen from a low hum to a symphony. He’ll need the drugs soon. First he finds a pen to write a message in the card. He rereads what he wrote, and can see that even his handwriting has changed into a weakened scrawl, a shaky facsimile of his usually bolder script. The cancer leaves no aspect of his life untouched.
He puts the card and the flowers on the dresser where she can see them when she wakes up. He is so near his own room he has to fight the urge to return to his own bed and spiral down into opioid bliss. He somehow manages and instead returns to the porch with the beer, his smokes, and a paperback thriller.
He’s still sitting there when she comes out in a robe and slippers. Kisses him on the mouth, says “Happy Easter.”
The hole he felt earlier, the longing to sit on a pew in that church is burnt up by the flame of her kiss. He hadn’t known what to write in the card, bought the damn thing so he didn’t have to know what to write, but it had not been enough. Thanks for all you’ve been doing for me is what he scribbled down, which still wasn’t exactly right, but he could see in her eyes that she knew what he meant.
He knows she is frightened lately. Knows there are days when she could just punch him in frustration at his reluctance to discuss anything with her. His cancer, his death, his funeral, he’ll speak of none of it. But now she comes around and sits on his barely perceptible lap. Her weight is almost too much, he feels its crush on his bones. He can smell the shampoo in her hair, the sleep smell of her skin. “Happy Easter,” he says back.
He doesn’t feel so alone now. In this moment he can pretend he has back all the yesterdays he squandered. He can pretend the moment their love first faded and then disappeared has yet to occur and that he won’t let it this time.
KYLE DUANE HEBERT lives and writes in Lexington, Kentucky. His fiction has appeared in The Glut, Sexy Stranger, and Mitochondria’s First Anthology of Rarities and Loose Ends. He is also the fiction editor for Nougat. His first manuscript for a novel is sitting on an editor’s desk waiting to be read.