He’s fallen again. I am in the bathtub, hooking my arms under my father and dragging him up, slick tile and sweet blood smell, but I am also a three-year-old as he, young again, heaves me toward the monkey bars in Herăstrău Park, where fall purples the ash leaves—too weak to hold onto the bars then, like I am too weak to lift him now, and with each pull he becomes a year older until he’s eighty-eight again, and I’m still middle-aged, arms locked against gravity.
His legs are too stiff to walk on, his mind too muddled to know it. He jerks away from my grip, resisting the help he once gave, and I say, stop struggling or we’ll never get out, like he once told me, stop jumping or you’ll bust your knees. He reaches for the towel, ashamed of his nakedness, but I fixate on the blood trickling down the back of his head. Are you sure you don’t want me to call an ambulance? I say, though I see how the mention of another CT scan freezes him. He shakes his head and jerks upward, assisting my pull to get him to his feet. He steadies himself on the grab bar, winded. But he’s standing, old strength flickering back, and I can be a child once more, lifting my arms toward the monkey bars.
Andreea Boboc is a writer and professor of medieval literature in Northern California. Born in Romania behind the Iron Curtain, she has published fiction in Raleigh Review and Valparaiso Fiction Review, and nonfiction in River Teeth – Beautiful Things, La Piccioletta Barca, and Scribes Micro. She is currently at work on her first novel.
Image Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/frenchie’s photos
