Chair

“Me Jane, you Tarzan,” he said that morning, appraising his inflated gut in the mirror. There was no laughter. I played computer games trying to ignore his accustomed retches from the bedroom.

Then mother called me in there, for he had fallen: together we hauled him by those weak hook wrists, guiding the taut gleam of skull, smoother than a baby groin, until he lay harrowed on the mattress and I could leave.

Near the end I wavered several paces from him, struck by the momentous rattles of his chest: dazed, urgent, he asked what that far-off shape was, and I replied: “A chair, daddy, that’s a chair.”