"gone" by David Bankson

Not the word but the space after. Not the weight but the lifting. This corridor has no clock, this waiting has no waiting in it, a fluorescent hum with a smell of, an antiseptic pause with a pause of breath. Match two doors, neither one. No. Only in buildings without windows, only in rooms with machines. I will not sit down again. I will not. Someone is speaking.

She pressed her back against the vending machine and it shuddered, humming.

Found, in the pocket of association—the beach?

Remembered a summer when the waves came in sets of seven and she'd counted them, betting against herself. Sand under fingernails. The beach was her uncle's idea, was the only time she saw her mother sleep past eight, was a sequence of roofs seen from the highway, was the sound (was that gone too?) of ice clinking in a thermos. More often, the beach was her uncle saying five more minutes for an hour straight, was the particular exhaustion of sun.

Uncle? Broad hands, yes; mostly driving; well, not just driving—the rest stops, the odd jobs in odd towns; always leaving. Where was he last? In one of four states, on one of many couches. Uncle was movement, Uncle was standing still, Uncle was the difference between what he said he'd do and what he did.

The hallway stretched. She walked it.

Somewhere a phone rang with that particular insistence that means someone isn't answering, and her shoes—one squeaking, one silent—made a limping music on the linoleum. She'd lost the rhythm of her own walking sometime in the last three hours. Or the last three years. The squeak. Then nothing. The squeak.

She matched it: here, gone, here.

A child slept in a plastic chair, head listing, mouth open. An old man in a gown the color of dishwater stood gripping his IV pole like a microphone, addressing no one. She passed them and they did not pass.

The walls were the yellow of old piano keys. She touched one and it was cold and that was information, that was her hand on a cold wall, that was proof she was somewhere, and the squeak of her shoe said here and the silence said gone and she kept walking.

She found the window at the end of the hall. Outside: a parking lot, then a strip of grass, then a road, then a fast-food sign turning its slow rotation. The sign was red and yellow and the sky was the grey of almost-rain and between them a single crow sat on a wire and watched her watch it.

"You waiting on someone?"

The nurse had a clipboard and a face designed for bad news.

"I don't know yet."

"Room 514 is back the other way."

She knew. She turned anyway, because turning was easier than explaining that she had already been to 514, had already stood in the doorway while machines performed their various breathings, had already seen the shape in the bed that was and was not her mother.

The hall had new colors now. Blue doors, green doors. A cart stacked with linens that smelled of heat. Somewhere, a television was showing a game show, and the audience applause came in waves, canned and ecstatic, and she thought: that's not joy, that's the sound of joy, and there was a difference, and she was learning it.

She found the stairwell.

Seventeen steps down, a landing, seventeen more. The math of descent. Her hand on the railing left no mark. At the bottom, a door with a sign that said EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY - ALARM WILL SOUND, and she pushed it open and no alarm came, only daylight, wet and sudden, and the smell of cigarettes from the three men in scrubs who turned to look at her.

"You can't come out this way," one said, but she was already past them, already walking across the parking lot toward the road, and her one squeaking shoe said here and her silent shoe said nothing and the fast-food sign kept turning.

The road had a sidewalk and the sidewalk had cracks and in one crack a weed was flowering, small and purple and impossible. She stopped. She crouched. She put her face close enough to smell something green beneath the exhaust and the rain-coming.

A bus passed. In the window, a woman was sleeping with her cheek pressed flat against the glass, and for a moment their eyes almost met, the sleeping woman and the crouching woman, and then the bus was gone and the flower was still there and she stood.

Okay, she said, though not out loud. Okay, and she meant: I am here and there is a flower and a woman was sleeping and the sign is still turning and none of this is the thing but the thing is still the thing and I cannot go back to 514 yet.

She walked toward the sign.

The fast-food place was mostly empty. A teenager mopped a floor that was already clean. An older man sat in a booth by himself, stirring coffee he wasn't drinking, and when she came in he looked up and she saw that he had been crying and then she saw that he had stopped and then she saw that he would probably start again.

She ordered nothing. She sat in a booth by the window. The sign, from inside, was just a glow at the edge of her vision, and she let it pulse there, let it be a heartbeat that wasn't a heartbeat, let it time something that didn't need timing.

The teenager mopped closer. The mop made a sound like whispered agreement.

"You okay?" the teenager asked.

"I'm here," she said, and the teenager nodded like that was an answer, and maybe it was, maybe here was the only answer, the only word that held.

She looked out the window. The parking lot. The road. The hospital, its windows stacked like questions.

In one of those windows, 514.

She pressed her palm flat on the table. It was sticky with something sweet.

She let it be sticky.

She counted the windows: one, two, seven, twelve—lost count, started again.

She would go back. She knew she would go back.

But not yet.

Not with the sign still turning.

Not with the mop still whispering.

Not with the man in the booth still holding his spoon above his coffee like a question he couldn't ask.

Here, said the table.

Here, said the window.

Here, said her one squeaking shoe when she finally stood.

She went back.

David Bankson's work has appeared in Concīs and BYU's Inscape.