My wife reaches for my hand from the hospital bed and asks me to remind her about the greatest thing that happened in my lifetime.
“Tell me the story again,” she says, her voice dry and shaky, and so I recount the time when my brother, Ian, nine years old and unable to walk or breathe by himself was abducted by aliens, and reporters came out just to gawk at the place they had landed, and my parents, with none of their usual embarrassment, in their beaten-down slippers, greeted the press happily and we all ate cherry pie together in the bright kitchen, or at least that’s how I remember it, but I was pretty young.
How we missed him in the years to come, but there was the glow of his great leave-taking that came back to us.
“How exciting it must have been,” she says, then stares at me for a while— eyes glassy and bright.
I figure she’s thinking about my brother’s great exit because when she closes her eyes, she whispers, “Can you describe how the spaceship looked?”
I gaze out the ward 2 window. Small cloud formations appear pregnant, like a smattering of overripe figs.
“I remember how the light was rising and falling that afternoon, and when I looked up into the sky, I could see the mothership’s nipple.”
In the old days this would have made her laugh, but now she had fallen asleep.
I kept the blinds open and stood at the window, hoping for an arrival. Already, the sky had changed; fat, disparate clouds drifted into one long globular body, finding it impossible to exist without each other.
