Rich Youmans

Code Blue

If I ascend to heaven, you are there
—Psalm 139:8

The heart monitor chimes wildly. From a ceiling corner, I watch the day nurse rush through the doorway. She’s followed by the doctor with the black goatee. They lean over my body, which looks so peaceful lying on the bed’s pale sheets. The doctor pulls apart the flimsy gown, exposing my white chest hair. Now the scent of flowers mingles with the chimes. You appear in the opposite corner, looking the same as you did at 16. The same cocked smile and blue-gray eyes, wearing the stained Motley Crüe t-shirt that your mother and I always tried to throw away. You’re moving your arm back and forth, as if washing a window, and I can’t tell if you’re saying hello or waving me away. Below, the doctor holds up two paddles. I turn back to you. “Is this it?” I ask. “Finally” is left unsaid, but we both hear it. I’m ready to leave it all. The sadness, the drinking, the meager paychecks put to no good use. Being unable to look your mother in the eye, the hurt that I see when I do. Most of all, I want to stop reliving that night: the drive back from the mall, your changing radio stations just to annoy me, my yelling at you and not paying attention to the road until those oncoming headlights fractured the windshield.

junkyard wreck
twisting the night
into a new shape

The chimes are still cascading, loud as church bells, and the smell of flowers is overpowering. It’s like the garden that your mother planted at our first house, before you were born—roses and hyacinth and honeysuckle. You stop waving and hold out your hand. Your smile widens, its brightness blossoming through me. The doctor places the paddles onto my chest, but I don’t care. I start to cross over, but a jolt stops me, and in that moment I think of your mother—the way she’d cut those flowers and arrange them throughout the house, her eyes the same blue as yours. You’re waving again and getting smaller. Another jolt and I’m staring up at the ceiling’s dirty white tiles. But still, those flowers…

slant of sun
through cut glass

                            breathing in a rainbow

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About the Author

Rich Youmans lives on Cape Cod with his wife, Alice. His books include All the Windows Lit (Snapshot Press, 2017) and Head-On (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018). He is also the co-author, with Roberta Beary and Lew Watts, of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2023).