"Less than Nothing"

 

It was another morning in the hospital, and thoughts were coming and going through April's mind like insects flitting around a leaf, or nervous little birds hopping along branches. Some she understood why she had them. Like the one about the day she learned about mass versus weight in one of her early science classes. She could see the old memory play on a screen somewhere inside her head, see the pug-nosed boy sitting next to her--was his name Roger? or maybe Greg?--punch her arm and declare for all the students to hear that there was no difference between mass and weight when it came to April; she had a lot of both. And then she could follow the thought back around and recall what had brought it to mind in the first place. In this case, it was because she had glanced at her wrist. It was so thin now that her plastic ID bracelet, fastened on the last hole as it was, kept sliding down onto her hand.

Moments like those were becoming rarer, April could tell. Most of her thoughts arrived and left without giving any indication why they came. There were holes in her memory that she wished she could avoid. Inevitably, needing to know why her mind had chosen to drift this way or that, she would go a few steps backward along the path that her thoughts had taken and stumble. It was almost too much. At times, when she was aware that something was missing but couldn't say what, she imagined herself losing her mind at the same rate she was losing fat tissue and bone mass, imagined the subtraction of her memories from the world occurring alongside the depletion of substance from her body. In those moments, she saw herself at the end shrinking and shriveling beneath her blankets until she weighed nothing and then, as her last thought dissipated, shrinking even further until she weighed less than nothing, becoming a tiny disruption in the air, a bit of negative space that tugged at the people who passed the hospital bed and made them pause for a second, wondering if there was anything there that should have mattered.

An image of a bird flickered across the television screen. It sang its song and darted away, the camera following its flight. April had known once what kind of bird it was by that song. She would have sworn on it.

"Bright Little Blossoms"

 

I think I noticed Dorelle and Keith at the reunion the same moment they noticed each other. Ten years after the last time we'd all been together in that gym, and there they were, looking at each other with new eyes and offering each other smiles that neither one would have had the chance to see the other wear before, given how things had gone in junior high.

It was like this: some trees start out in spring with a show of bright little blossoms, the kind with petals that curl under perfectly, the kind that make everyone who sees them feel lighter and happier. That was Dorelle. Then there are the trees that, instead of flowers, present buds at the tips of their branches, dull, difficult things all covered with scales. That was Keith, and he'd had terrible acne. Yet none of that mattered, not ten years later, when they both had had time to grow and flourish. You doing okay? I saw Dorelle mouth to Keith. I am, I really am. You? Keith said to her. And suddenly it felt like the end of summer, when no sounds were greater than the whispers between tree leaves, and everything was about to happen.

"Board Games"

 

He lifted the lid of the old cardboard box, with its splitting corners and the artwork decorating it faded to a thin yellow. Inside, there were the game board and the game pieces, but there were also pieces of his childhood that had been stored away, for some reason, here: class pictures from grade school and candy wrappers. Handwritten notes from a friend.

"How did you play this game, Dad?" his daughter asked. She cast a frown at one of his green plastic soldiers as she took it from the box.

"You know," he said slowly, "I'm not really sure. I'll have to see what I can remember." In the corner of the tray, next to where the dice rested, he saw two of his baby teeth.