A STORY by MATTHEW DEXTER
Hell Is Hugging My Grandchildren
I bribe my hospice nurse with fistfuls of fentanyl to let me smoke Marlboros through my tracheotomy hole in the shower. She cradles me naked, massages my veiny skull with bloody cuticles brushing fingernails full of baby shampoo—moaning gently—exfoliating an orbit of dead skin through an obstinate cloud of ecstasy. My grandchildren are sitting in the living room crying like whiny infants. If they saw me naked and dwindling to dust their eyeballs would explode. I inhale an unsettling funk of eeriness when they hug me. A defective generation. My hospice nurse touches me in places my husband never knew. Godless dungeons of inattention where treasures burn brighter than dying stars. I can see Lilly through the smoke snorting the pills in her Ford Fiesta before backing into traffic happier than childhood. Lilly dries me with the majesty of a young child building a snowman. The inside of her nostrils glow orange like a carrot and her eyes shine like fresh pennies.
“Your grandchildren want to see you,” Lilly says.
“Hell do they want?” I ask. “Why did they come?”
Lilly combs my hair and moisturizes my body and squirts my favorite perfume, my shoulder blades a glazed strawberry donut.
“I love my grandkids,” I say, “but they’re failures and losers.”
I hug my grandsons and tell them what they want to hear: their dreams and ambitions will come to fruition. David will become a rich and powerful attorney and Kyle will become a famous writer. (Kyle will never be famous. David is a drunk degenerate.) I hug them harder and inhale the hole in the ozone layer oozing through the razor burn ornamenting their Adam’s apples. Why do my grandchildren smell more pitiful than a dying woman?