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Colonoscopy
by Kenneth Pobo

My partner’s getting one at 1:30. Hospital rules insist that I drive him since he might be wobbly after the procedure. Pills clean you out the day before; then the doc snakes into your ass and declares you clean or not.

We aren’t clean men.

The Queen Mary could float on rising tides of old papers. Our garage has boxes full of crap we’ve never sorted through. Unknown items multiply all day and all night. A rusty pan mates with a stapler. Their offspring are mailers albums won on eBay get sent in. We have a big record collection. You, Tommy James, with your Shondells in tow, singing “Crystal Blue Persuasion” among gas rags and ladders, do you relax in our squalor?

He’s not scared, but he wants me to enter the hospital with him, wants me to know where to pick him up. After he’s declared clean. When my messy car and I can transport him back home, five minutes away.

Hmmm, one day I might die in this hospital. If not because my colon is unclean, then a heart attack. Beats stop. You stiffen up. They haul you away.

I made him lemon jello so he could eat something while pills married him to the toilet. Lemon’s my least favorite flavor, but cherry’s not allowed. No problem. I haven’t been cherry for several centuries anyway. He barely touched it. Jello, when left out of the fridge, looks like jaundiced eyes in a puddle. Is the hospital more dissolving lemon Jello, oozing toward us? We try to escape, barely hear “We’re losing him!”

My soul will be a nickel that slipped out of my shorts pocket when I was riding my bike up to the Cock Robin almost forty years ago, leaving me a nickel short--no lime cone. The lady laughed, closed the ice cream case. Frizzy-haired harridan! A nickel and she grinned, walked off.

When you die, the hospital burns much of your body in a pyre of forms. They save enough skin for the funeral home, but stuff pieces of you in file cabinets or databases. It’s like your heart never had an attack, just started beating in triplicate. The state needs records.

Yet I may not come here. Maybe I’ll be in the garden chasing a groundhog away from canterbury bells, and I’ll collapse. Snap. Just like that. No Code Blues. Just shoved in an ambulance like bread dough into an oven. Only I won’t rise. The driver pulls away, a routine call. Forms will get me either way.

Clean. As a whistle. That’s what the doctor says about Matt’s colon. I drive him home through the mall parking lot. He’s not wobbly but hungry. Healthy capitalists dash between Pennies and Sears. The hospital’s grin is so wide it captures everyone. I speed up. I’m turning to Jello. We blast the CD player. Home to our house, the too-full litter boxes, the sink holding several glasses. Relief. Temporary. The hospital can wait us out.

Kenneth Pobo believes that if he had saved his rejection slips, he would have no room left in his house. His work has been rejected since he was 19 and he is now 52.
He doesn't mind rejections as much as he minds editors who hold work for several trillion centuries, especially those with "no simultaneous submissions" policies. Even bad news is news.