Near dawn the doctor looked at the woman and raised his arms, then let them slap sorrowfully against his fat sides. She felt the first screw turn in an iron collar that was being afixed around her throat, the tight cold band that never again was fully loosened, so that even when she was an old woman she sounded her words tightly and coldly, as if through heavy iron.
That morning her husband still lived, after a fashion. He had withered and his lips were drawn back snarlingly from his dry teeth. As men lifted him onto the stretcher his arms clawed the air with short despairing movements, like that of a newborn child. The woman looked at him and he at her, but did either see?
After the operation she lay on a narrow hospital cot listening to his sick wretching in the next room. Doctors came in and told her of incisions and embolisms and then lifted their hands and let them fall, like philosophers.
The next day, however, he still lived, still after a fashion. As the stretcher took him toward the operating room he smiled dreamily and she felt one more screw settling into place in the iron collar. She smiled at him and then lay down carefully on the bed to wait for the doctors to come in and raise their arms in their helpless way.
She waited several hours without moving and she’d planned that when they came she would not look at them. Just as she opened her eyes she saw their hands, still covered with the thin spotted gloves, fall slowly toward their sides and slap faintly agaisnt their aprons. She smiled. She kept smiling even when they said the man was still alive.