It waited for the happy ending
to end, for the kiss
and light touch, waited for the door
to click, her breathing
even, and then, before the stuck-
open, night-lit eyes
of her stuffed animals, and despite
her pink blanket
in her arms, it took her.
We’d made a show of checking
the closet and under the bed,
but not until months later,
in a far city where a team of neurologists
sent her to the third floor
of a children’s hospital, did we see.
As she lay with wires
tied into a multicolored cord dangling
umbilically from her gauze-
wrapped skull to the wall,
as night fell
through eight days of nights, we saw
something like a breeze
enter her sleep, then her eyes
fly open at a gust
heaving through her chest, her eyes
two blips of black water
unseeing us. Then legs
jerked and arms shivered up
like plant stalks in fast-forward,
desperate petals of fingers un-
clenching. Then one—two—
three convulsive gasps
and the gurgle of a squeezed fish.
This brute puppetry
of our girl’s body every night,
these seizures of bone
and blood stuttering—over how many
months?—and growing
more shake and snap, more gouged
in epileptic gray,
while one floor below, we were sliding
a finger down a page
or thigh, or letting our eyes
close, possessed by our certainty,
even laughing at times
when we promised
no such thing.