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Ned's Last Stand
by Barbara Blake

He walked into the hall looking like a bean too thin for its shell. His camel’s hair overcoat hung loosely on his frame. The hollows of his cheeks matched his coat, his eyes peering out from ashen sockets.

Let me take your coat, his wife seemed to say, as she lifted scarf and coat gently, barely needing to slide them off his shoulders.

Ned smiled at her and sat down.

Next to Ned, his wife shone in blonde and black, not a trace of brown. But her hand was intertwined with his, and it would have been impossible to tell where one set of fingers began and another ended.

I tried to imagine how long it had taken them both to make the trip. It was just a few miles from home to church, but just getting dressed must have taken hours. It seemed as if Ned were moving on something other than his own willpower, which had kept him going for 28 years on a diseased, then transplanted, liver.

A high school kid sat down at the piano and began to improvise. The notes ran up and down the keyboard in meditative play. Sometimes, the pianist’s hands almost stopped, as if he were listening before playing the next note, waiting to hear a song beyond our hearing.

I didn’t want voices to break through the music, even though I knew we could not go on listening forever.

What was Ned thinking? He stood to sing, his wife’s arm at his elbow. His skin looked even more sallow than it had just minutes earlier, as if someone had taken wax from a melting candle and smoothed it thin.

The wick might be snuffed out, I thought, but he glows with an eerie light, almost phosphorescent. He looked faraway, out to sea, but he made it through the hymn and sat down.

Not long afterwards, he motioned to his wife, and they got up to leave. She held his coat while he slowly struggled into the sleeves, getting twisted up in his scarf. She unwound the woolen knot, straightening it in one movement with the palm of her hand. With her other hand in his, they walked out. Ned leaned against his wife now and then, as if steadying himself between steps, but it wasn’t easy to detect. They could have been just brushing one another in a mutual gait they had been practicing for a long time.

Ned went to Maryland, then to the hospital, then home. He died suddenly on the Saturday afternoon before the next Sunday service.

10X10X10 is Barbara Blake's first fiction publication since she had work accepted by her high school literary magazine about a hundred years ago.