Halves
by Angeline Schellenberg
My brother’s feet are what shock me most: turned outward like he’s forgotten they’re attached.
He never did anything about the fungal infection. Who cares now? He hasn’t left this bed in a month. Probably doesn’t even feel it.
“Did you notice his toes?” Mom asks. “He must have had shoes that were too tight at some point, but never told me.” She strokes them tenderly, as if he were four instead of 40.
It’s easier to look at those feet than his eyes. The whites have taken over the space between his lashes, making him look perpetually shocked. It’s impossible to tell if he’d been expecting me.
He’s still conscious. I don’t want him to think I’m oblivious to all of this—the morphine pump, the bag of bloody urine—so I try not to grin with relief.
He makes a ceremony of sitting up for supper, positioning the tray just so. Asks for lotion. What I wouldn’t give to make him groan over something other than pain.
My singing usually does the trick. Suggesting bananas for dinner. Or touching his cupboard handles with my grubby paws. Even now, the little germaphobe uses his hand sanitizer religiously. Who does he think he’s protecting?
It’s too late for me to give him half my liver.
When he was little, he’d yell at me every time I cut him an apple: the halves were uneven. But they couldn’t be called halves anymore then, could they, genius?
Mom dabs a slice of pizza on his lips but they don’t open. “I think my eating days are over,” he says, as his head falls back onto the pillow.
A flair for the dramatic runs in the family. I wait until I get back to my car.
There is an apple on my passenger seat and all I have is my teeth.
Angeline Schellenberg is the author of Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020)—shortlisted for the KOBZAR Book Award—and the Manitoba Book Award-winning Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016). She has recently published microfiction in Six Sentences, Fewer Than 500, Ekphrastic Flash Fiction, Café Lit, South Florida Poetry Journal, and The Drabble. Angeline hosts the Speaking Crow poetry open mic in Winnipeg, Canada.