Steve Gerson

Terminal

Look it up. Webster’s defines it as “end of the line, Bud. You’re on your way out.” My doctors agree. Lung cancer, terminal. And I feel it. I’m breathing like a 1957 Ford truck with a bad carburetor, huffing, puffing, wheezing. Every bone in my body rattles. My tires are flat, and moss is cementing me to the asphalt. My side panels aren’t just rusting. They’re eaten through as if my innards are corrosive. That’s not even the worst news. No food. I get no steak and potatoes on my way out. I get no lemon meringue pie or even sweet tea. Nope.  Instead, I get a plastic tube through my nose, pumping something yellowish into me, like Satan’s sulfur. It reeks of seaweed flavored with acetone saturated in the chemical waste from a water purification plant peppered with hand sanitizer and a whiff of putrefied compost. 

But I’ve put one over on them. My friend, the only one who visits me in my hospice cell, sneaks in booze. I’d say, “rot gut,” but that would be a pun, given my body’s status. So when the nurses are off doing their nightly recordkeeping and the place is morgue quiet, usually around 2:47 p.m., I creep out of bed, dragging my various wires, tubes, and hanging bags, my accoutrement, as my long-gone, French-teacher wife would say, her nose all primrose and lavender, twist open the metal cap from my secreted bottle of Johnny Red, take a tasty slurp, and feel the burn from the third circle of Hell. And I say, “Come and get me, you damned Harpies. I’ve had enough.”

crashing waves
a voided message
in an empty bottle

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About the Author

Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life’s dissonance.  He has published in CafeLit, Panoplyzine, Crack the Spine, Decadent Review, Vermilion, In Parentheses, Wingless Dreamer, Big Bend Literary Magazine, Coffin Bell, and more, plus his four chapbooks: Once Planed Straight; Viral; And the Land Dreams Darkly; and The 13th Floor: Step into Anxiety (Spartan Press).

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