In the middle of the night my mother called to say Emma, who had been OPU (officially pronounced undead), had resurrected, removed from a body bag with the tag still on her toe.
My sister called shortly after. Then my brother. Then Emma’s daughter, who had been interviewed by the press. She said she saw her mother wrapped up like a baby, her head lolling. “Is that what a dead person looks like?” she had asked. My dad simply said, “Somebody screwed up.”
In the grey gloom of the hospital room, everyone had gathered like it was a pilgrimage. Machines were beeping. The cloying scent of flowers drugged the air. Emma was paler than usual. Her hair, always dyed orange-red, stuck out in fierce, stiff flames. She had a plug in her throat.
At the same time Cousin Dickie was in the hall, retelling for the newspaper the scene of their “final goodbyes,” while hospital officials at the Palms of Pasadena were announcing it was a “miraculous recovery.” Some in the news called it a “premature” obituary; the St. Petersburg Times ran a 386-word, obituary-like non-obituary. CBS proclaimed it a “revival.” The hierarchies of death assailed me. Clinically dead. Brain dead. Legally dead.
Emma’s breath rattled. She whispered for me to come closer. She wanted me to stop by when she got out of the hospital because there was a piece of art she wanted me to have. Something she had painted when she was a member of the Treasure Island Art Society. She squeezed my hand, smiled feebly. A month later, she was dead. The St. Petersburg metro report said she died at the hospital after her blood pressure dropped. Cousin Dickie said it was like “losing her for the second time.”
I hung the painting at the top of the stairs. It showed a girl with a flaming orange ponytail, her back to the viewer’s gaze, in a ballet skirt a dull orange. Her arms reached up, black and sticklike, out of loose purple sleeves. Over her head, a serving platter of grapes, bananas, a murky-yellow pineapple. Her thin black legs like shadows were poised at the threshold. The room she would enter was empty.
Kathleen Hellen is the author of three collections and three poetry chapbooks, the latest young girl in the flower of time from Lily Poetry Review Books. Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Four Way Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Awards include prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review. Hellen’s work has been nominated multiple times for Best of the Net, the Pushcart, and recently, Best American Short Stories.
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