night nurse

I walk into intensive care and see my sister laying on fluoresent white sheets. Glowing under the green monitors. Talking with little beeps. I sit down. She is silent. Her breathing is as loud as the machine doing it for her. She is still. Her blood moves to the whirring dialysis machine. And then back. She is here. I am here. I see all this machinery. These computers and tubes. We all seem to be suspended between life and death. We daydream. We are all hovering above a vast green plain with a blue sky and dusty roads. I sit and watch her breath for hours. The nurses come and go. I feed dollars to the coke machine. We sleep on sofas in the family waiting rooms. We wait for the doctors to tell us something. Anything. We go home to our beds. The night comes. The stars come and cover her. She breaths them in and out. She spits them like meteors. She is in her bed but also far away waiting with bated breath. The night nurse touches her brow. We lie awake. We are still. We listen to the falling snow as it covers the prairie like sleep. We wait for it to cover us. For its numbing soft cold. We fold our hands. We bargain. We wait.