By Florence Homolka
My brother wants to jump from the roof. Funny, it's up there I feel closest to the god I borrowed from a medicine man who hangs by his nipples from trees when he sundances in Arizona. The bleached terra-cotta is the desert where the shaman taps the spirit world, and with ether filling my eyes and mouth, there's nothing between us. Me and that god, whom I picture as a wizened Indian man with a fat back and strings of feathers hanging from his hair. Sometimes I sleep against the broad wooden slats of the lawn chair and have odd dreams about ritual and sacrifice and a necklace strung from shards of green shell. And an energy that isn't mine pulses against the back of my neck.
But this is where my brother wants to die. He wonders whether skydiving eighteen stories without a parachute would leave him dead or just irreparably maimed. I tell him it isn't worth the risk. I tell him, if you think you want to die now, try staring at some anonymous hospital ceiling with the same damned mess of doubt and displacement and sheer terror slamming against your skull, only you can't move your lips or force some bastardized croak to tell a doctor with fourteen other patients still walking in the psych unit, "I'm feeling anxious now. I'd like some more Ativan." No. And the irony is, you'd want to die far more than you think do now, but good luck knocking yourself off as a quadriplegic or muted vegetable. I see a tight and shiny eggplant swathed in one of those dizzying pajama patterns, motionless in the sweet stink of disinfectant and metal bars of a hospital bed.
And I tell him to wait, check out that woman combing her hair in the window of the Trump building across the street, while I go get a bottle of cheap Chianti so we can just sit and breathe with the potted mums. So I go. And he waits. For me, or maybe for the right moment. I'm not sure which. And the woman pins back her hair and sifts through her pocketbook for her keys.
