Ed Munch of Massapequa, suffering much with Kaposi’s Sarcoma and pneumonia, suffering half-moon bone cysts and then some, with spotted bald head thrust between his knotty knees, on the floor of the sick room— Ballard Hospice, bars on stained glass—Edward with jowls the color of sunflowers, advances upon end-stage liver failure, tossing his lunch on the tiles, Ed begs, between shallow, frothy rasp, heave and retch —for egress, for egress. Only a year ago he’d been stocking shelves at a Pensacola gallery when the illness bloomed, — a scab on his wrist, which he picked, and rubbed, like a scratch-off lottery ticket, he bled in streaks, like Pollock upon the polished cover of a Nolde print, he swooned, and stumbled from the curator’s room, a dozen slack-jawed stares in his wake. Only a month ago, they’d been pumping him with Dilaudid at night, to adjust his palette for what was coming, in the soft lamp light he watched his long fingers sprout pinkish caterpillar fuzz, the knuckles morphed into hinges for Monarch butterflies, and Edward laughed, thinking to simply shake his bone erosion and jaundice like a common cold. Now, they’ve taken the opiates away, in favor of some time-released analgesic paste with no magical properties, better for the injured spleen while the squeaky-toed nurses come and go in their loose white shifts, with pursed lips and a practiced judgment behind professional eyes, they’ve come to watch Edward die. “Are you alright, Mr. Munch?” one of them inquires; she stacks the bedpan brimming with cocoa-colored stool atop an untouched cafeteria tray, she lets the plates clatter with a lackluster hate, simply because she can, “Can you stand?” she asks coldly, “we really need to get you back in the bed.” “I was a painter,” Edward says, hours later, to the quiet night, quaking then, at the sudden sight of a pint-sized extra- terrestrial intruder with almond tear ducts and celestial breath-plumes arcing like comet tails through the pool of moonlight in his tiny room; the creature nods appreciatively at a charcoal landscape etching Munch had made in a moment of lucidity, one afternoon last month, or was it the month before? “I saw you,” Munch whispers, “on the bridge, the vanishing point, the most innocent eyes ever in the universe. And I wonder... is it done? You know I’ve already begun a series in copal, called Star Spatter Deep Space, and I am so very ready to be gone from this place... Any time, really, any time you are.”
Dennis Mahagin’s stories and poems appear in publications such as Exquisite Corpse, Juked, Thieves Jargon, Storyglossia, Pequin, 42opus, 3 A.M., Absinthe Literary Review, Stirring, FRiGG, and Underground Voices. He lives in the state of Washington, and is currently at work on his third full-length poetry collection. Dennis’ website can be found here.