HOUND

xxxviii

"I'm dying." Nina sighs suddenly, her strong and aged hands resting in her lap.

Jack's wife had been sitting by Nina's bedroom window, because Nina was sitting up in her bed. Nina said she didn't feel like games or stories, so the two friends just sat and saturated in each other's company. They didn't need to speak or play, they could simply exist: together. And that was enough.

"What?" Jack's wife breathes, her voice breaking. It was as if chilly hands had snuck up and wrapped around her thin throat, squeezing. The air in her fragile lungs had frozen--Jack's wife forgot how to breathe, how to live, how to exist.

But at Nina's random revelation, the veil of hope was torn from Jack's wife's eyes. She saw how the life was seeping out of Nina. She wondered how she never noticed it before. Perhaps because Nina had never forgotten her youth, in all her years, and she still held the inner glow of a wildly fierce girl. Jack's wife often forgot to remember that Nina was very old, and that no one is immortal.

"I've been dying for years." Nina's eyes are dull. "I wasn't even supposed to be born, you know. I came out, dead--suffocated by the umbilical cord. By somehow, I burst to life and ever since then Death has been after me. I've taken so many risks and kissed Death so many times, and eventually he impregnated me with cancer. It's a slow suicide, cancer is. My own cells, multiplying like crazy. Funny, isn't it?" Nina's gaze rages, her silvered hair frizzy and bouncing as she talks, animated. Jack's wife vaguely muses that Nina looks like a puppet--but puppet for who?

"You can't die." Jack's wife mumbles, a cloud settling on her shoulders. It felt like rain and thunder, even though the brilliance of the sun shone straight through the window. It was the only light in the room.

"I think I want to die, I think I'm ready." Nina sinks deeper into her pillow, leaning her wrinkled head back. "I've seen the world, I've done enough. I've lived my life."

"But--"

"Sometimes, I just wonder if any of it was worth something. As I lay here on what is essentially my deathbed, I find that there wasn't much a point, was there?"