Waiting
by Hannah Holborn

In a trailer on the village outskirts, community support worker So-Wah Fang praised her favorite client, Henry Bose, for his independence. The brain-damaged man could button a red flannel shirt or pull on a pair of navy slacks. He could lace his steel-toed boots (mementoes from his years at Helpert Mines), and prepare instant Nescafe, sugared and creamed. He could pour cereal and milk into a bowl, microwave a TV dinner, use the toilet, wash his hands, lock the door at night and unlock it each morning to let her in.

But the homemaker's surface view was the calm of a pond in summer. She did not venture beneath the surface into the viscous stuff of his deeper life. And so, So-Wah could hum as she prepared his lunch (a ham and cheese bun arranged with sliced Steinfeld's pickle on a plate), and not suspect that the love song's melody pained him.

So-Wah deposited the plate in the purring refrigerator and then quartered a pear and placed it on the table. She boiled water to fill his thermos. After lending the heat from her hand to the back of his head for a moment, she left. She would bill two hours for the twenty minutes spent securing an old man's comfort.

***

Time passed slowly for Henry Bose. Between So-Wah's visits he felt lonely. Vastness and lack of motion defined his days. He entertained the notion that his trailer floated mid-air, that hand-over-hand the slant-eyed woman hauled it back to earth each morning. Small things regulated the tempo of his existence: a clock's tick, the furnace cycling, his heart's erratic beat.

Henry angled forward. His fists formed the shape of a heart. Pear scent, sweet and juicy, tickled his nose. An hour passed. His fingers closed in on an oxidized section of pear. His mouth slackened. Drool pooled. He ate.

A sound issued from the bedroom. Emily, he thought. Rising, he shuffled down the narrow hallway. With his head cocked, he considered the unpainted wood and rusted screws that made up his bed's headboard. His mind wandered to lustful thoughts of ham and cheese and the coffee he could make with water from his thermos. He turned towards the door and a flash the color of a young woman's hair appeared in his peripheral vision.

A forgotten box in the room contained a single photograph. Emily Barker fished a Yukon lake for grayling beside Henry's elongated shadow. Below the contour of her breast, her womb sheltered another man's progeny - that of her suspicious husband. 

The sandwich hardened. The water in the thermos cooled. Night fell. Henry became a living statue immersed in the cool blue light of the moon. Night waned as black turned to gray turned to gold. A finch trilled. A wheat-colored rat slipped through a hole, eager to bed down for the day.

Henry Bose, the grieving lover, waited on.

______________

Hannah Holborn’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Front & Centre, Room of One's Own, Words Literary Journal, The Paumanok Review, The Danforth Review and the Avatar Review and in Sights Unseen: New Writing From British Columbia. She has also placed in the Surrey International Writer's Conference Writing Contest, and the Cecilia Lamont Literary Contest.

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