Moonglow by Michael Griffo

to me, and I fight the urge to lean back. “The world as we know it could begin to implode, and Essie still wouldn’t get off her chair until her shift is over,” she whispers. “Stay as long as you need to.”
    This time I’m prepared for contact, but none comes. Obviously, our relationship hasn’t entered the touchy-feely stage, and our brief encounter truly was accidental. Nadine just smiles and starts to walk down the hall, the clicking of her pen creating a steady counter-rhythm with the squeaking of her sneakers. Suddenly, I’m overwhelmed with the desire to follow her to wherever she’s going, go on “rounds” with her, visit some other patient that I don’t know, but Nadine turns right at the end of the hallway and disappears. I miss my chance. Guess I’ll have to visit my mother as planned.
    The room smells like it always does—a mixture of antiseptic cleanser and cheap perfume, both compliments of the hospital staff. If my mother’s sense of smell is working at all, I can’t believe the appalling aroma hasn’t roused her from her coma by now. I reach into my shoulder bag and take out the small bottle of Guerlinade, the perfume my mother always used to wear, and spray a very tiny amount of the scent into the air like I always do. I only spray a little bit, because my father gave this bottle to my mother shortly before she fell into her coma, and it’s rare and expensive. But whoever made this stuff knew what they were doing. Even after all these years it’s as fresh as the first time I smelled it, a delicate blend of lilacs and powder. When my parents were going out to a party, she would spray a little extra on her body and I’d walk right behind her inhaling her scent and make believe I was floating on my own private cloud over a field of flowers. Originally I sprayed it in her room because I thought she might be able to smell it and it somehow would act as a link to bring her back to me from wherever she’s hiding out. Now, I just spray it so I can remember how the air smelled when she was alive instead of sleeping.
    I’ve been coming to The Retreat since I was six years old, and I still can’t relax. My mother’s been in this particular room for the past four years, so by now you’d think that there would be some level of home-away-from-home, but every time I come here it’s like I’m coming for the first time. The sight of my mother lying motionless in this hospital bed, covered in thin white sheets stamped with the facility’s official name in blue ink, ink that’s faded from being washed a thousand times to erase germs, blood, and disease from the endless parade of patients who check in either voluntarily or because they no longer have free will, turns my stomach.
    So what that she looks as beautiful as I remember, as beautiful as she does in her wedding picture, the one in the ornate gold frame on my father’s bedroom dresser. So what that she looks like she’s sleeping or dozing off in front of the TV. Looks don’t matter, not in my mom’s case. She’s in what countless doctors and specialists have diagnosed as an irreversible coma, the aftereffect of a possible stroke. Possible, because all the kazillion tests those same countless doctors and specialists performed on her all came back inconclusive. The only thing the brilliant medical practitioners can agree on is that even though she’s my mother and she’s right here for me to touch, she’s farther away from me than if she were dead. If only she were that lucky.
    I drag a chair next to her bed; the cushioned parts of this one are mostly gray with only some blue circles in different sizes randomly placed throughout. I sit next to my mother, take her hand, and wish that she were dead. That way she’d be in the ground in a coffin, done. The happiest scenario would be that her spirit would be free to travel the