The Last Leaf
The man down the street is dying. I don’t know him. I don’t know his wife. I don’t know his daughter. But I know he is dying.
The news has passed along the neighborhood vine, whispers in chance supermarket encounters or dog walks. I wonder how the story has changed as it left so many lips and entered so many ears. A man with a cold can be on hospice with just a few iterations of his tale.
There are two construction trucks parked on the street outside their home. They take up almost an entire lane of traffic, causing cars to pause for oncoming traffic like on a narrow street in an old European town.
The trucks belong to him. He owns a company and he made his wife promise that she wouldn’t move the trucks until he died. He wants to be able to look out the window from his bed and remember what life used to be like. People complain about the bottleneck. The city complains about the complainers. The trucks stay. He stays and remembers.
Every day, as I turn the corner onto my street, I hold my breath. Will the trucks be gone? But so far, they are still there.
This sounds like The Last Leaf by O. Henry. A woman is sick and is convinced that when the last leaf falls from the vines on the wall outside her window, she will pass away. A frustrated painter who lives in the building hears of her prediction and, while she sleeps, paints a leaf on the vine where she can see it. When all of them have fallen, his leaf remains. Convinced it is a sign that she will survive, the woman gets better.
I wish I could paint. I’d rent a giant billboard, paint his trucks on it and put it outside his window, hoping it would sustain his purpose in life, the reason he believes he is still here.
Life isn’t a clever short story, it is just short. We will grasp at whatever we can to survive in the same way that loved ones will uphold our superstitions to keep us here.
