A young man crept down the urine-pained hallway,
visiting a stroke-wrecked grandmother in an old folk’s home.
Went into the room of the once vital woman
who could no longer speak, only move her eyes,
blink yes or no when questioned.
Outside Grandmother’s room, from the main room,
a sound, a sound he did not want to hear,
repeated over and over, indecipherable
from a white-haired woman—thin as paper,
rolling her wheelchair around as if she were dancing with an invisible partner,
the sound, the sound, like the rasp of a sick crow,
two words, repeated, repeated,
ears straining to understand the frantic crone’s plea.
As if turned into a harpy, she would start
and not stop, never stop, like a bed pan sloshed across nerves,
like tripping over a stringy mop,
the caw would never cease,
making him want to scream as he ran out into the hallway,
driven mad as if Poe’s raven lit on the doorjamb once more.
‘Nurse, Nurse, what is she saying?’
“Forgive me; she is saying: Forgive me. That’s all she ever says.”
‘For what! Forgive me for what!’
“We don’t know. She says that every day. Forgive me. Forgive me. Drives us crazy.
The more she says those two words, the more she swirls her chair around,
sometimes in a frenzy. She was once a famous ballerina.
That’s all we know.”
Years later, he forgot the ballerina, after his grandmother died.
In his own nursing home, pulling a comforter over his gray head,
from the ever cold, he remembered,
understood.
Originally published in Eskimo Pie