Sunshowers

Harsh scents and keening wordless dirges

Meena doesn't even notice me when I approach; she's hunched over her phone in the break room, surrounded by a couple of friends whose names I never learned. They look at me with sorrow in their eyes, but when Meena recognizes me there's no sorrow. She looks at me as though I were some wild predator so deformed with injury or disease that it's impossible to know whether it's dangerous. A trim nurse in maroon scrubs pulls Meena back to the table by her elbow, warning me off with a look. "It's Jack," she says, as though I'm supposed to know what that means.

I know what that means. I leave.

It's easy to find out when I ask around. Betty, a trauma nurse I know, takes out her phone and shows me the articles. MISSING PROSECUTOR FOUND BURNED TO DEATH IN YESLER TERRACE BLAZE, and variations; and the same photo of John—broad-faced, to be sure, and easy-eyed, but the same John whose last name I never bothered to ask.

Not much later, Meena goes to the locker room to leave early and then explodes out of it, naked to the waist and screaming, haloed in clothes and jewelry and cosmetics. She regains her composure quickly enough, but not before she embraces some radiology resident in terror and sobs about the wolf that lunged for her.

I'm not there for that, of course, but when I wake from my blurred grey dream of harsh scents and keening wordless dirges, I hear it like echoes off mountains. "Meena saw a wolf." Some cruel shit mutates it to "Meena cried wolf," which everyone repeats preceded by "They're saying."

The hate I feel when I hear those words is easy to understand. There's something else I feel that isn't. I tell myself it must be relief—Meena is losing her mind, no one's going to believe her if she accuses me of something, which she seems disposed to do. But I've felt relief before. Relief is a sudden space, an openness. This is a presence, not an absence, some hot sweet liquor dancing in my veins.