When God Expires

Kaila Young

She opened the cigarette pack with ten trembling fingers,

dropped the empty box in the lap of her stained sunflower dress.

She raised the last one to her cracked lips.

A red-tipped matchstick swiped against the magic strip

five times, caught flame on the sixth.

Her hand slid to the gin bottle,

labeled $6.99, four swallows left.

Smoke steadied her breath, filling her chest

That moved up and down under the brass

Cross hanging from her neck.

It’s four points had tarnished under

her mother’s anxious fingers, leathery like

the Bible under her pillow.

The pastor told her illness finds strength in faith.

I watched the smoke float past the wallpaper,

hang in her loose gray strands,

cloud her widowed eyes.

She stretched her bones across the scratched oak table,

palms turned up as if begging for bread.

“Pray with me, sweetie.”

I closed my hands over hers.

She rested her forehead on the table,

ear nestled into her arm.

“God — they found a tumor, again. My stomach.

But you know that.

I told them no treatment again; I told them I can deal with the pains -

You get it.

Can you tell Stan I’m wearing the dress he likes?

Tell him I’ll be seeing him soon, I guess. Thanks.”

Her grip loosened to small white circles left on my hand.

I opened the blind to let the sun bathe her limbs,

smoothed her dress and fixed the strap that had fallen on her shoulder.

For seventy years she mixed blood with butane,

drank the crude liquor straight.

She preached from pews in her sunflower dress,

out singing the choir and organ both.

I heard her gritty hymns like daydreams at midnight,

whispered “Tell Dad I say hi.”