Our Last Hour— By Emily Marie Seibert
Artwork by Arlene Tribbia
Naked, I lie face-down on the table amid the cool, crypt-like room.
I haven’t changed much since I last saw Blossom, which is why I’ve been avoiding her. By the end of my first massage, Blossom said she’d be on me like a Jewish grandmother.
Three years later, my craving for comfort overrides my shame for not having followed Blossom’s wellness advice. I feel inklings of the lava-soaked-spine-sensation, reminiscent of the flare-up from five years prior – the one that smacked me into temporary paralysis and erupted in a Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis. Today, I want to feel Blossom’s healing hands, and perhaps I need her to press me.
“The arches of your feet haven’t changed,” she says upon entering the room.
“They haven’t further flattened?”
“There’s no way they could’ve gotten any flatter.”
“I browsed orthotics, but they were pricey.”
She touches my face.
“You still clench your jaw.”
“I’ll look into mouthguards now that I have dental insurance.”
Blossom reminds me that meditation is free.
I don’t exercise the patience to practice it. I drink and smoke to cope.
Blossom kneads my back and says, “I’ve learned that it’s best to look things squarely in the face.”
“Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt,” I reply.
I think about me and Dan. A decade ago, a psychic said we’d someday part amicably. I think about our separate beds, how we peripheralize painful things to self-protect, how we’re afraid to be alone.
“I get what you mean about looking things in the face,” I tell Blossom. “I’m confronting the fact that I’m not so special to thwart death, and I’ve stopped fantasizing that I’ll live to see a cure for M.S.”
Blossom says, “There’s a river that every sentient being floats down – we all must share in this.”
I consider my 76-year-old mother doing her damndest to defy death as she lives with my father’s morbidity. He decorates their property with giant granite skulls. He makes ravens and vines with sharp-clawed hands come to life on canvas. I think of the cancer which grew from his mother’s liver like a toxic tree that branched into the rest of her body. My father watched the overgrowth consume her, and my mother watches him spend his days smoking and killing weeds with a chemical purported to cause cancer in lawyers’ commercials. I consider how a 76-year-old man who was lucky enough to see his mother to 76, still grieves her death and calls God an “evil puppet master.”
I imagine if I outlive my mother and father, I’ll rely heavily on Dan, who I once witnessed lamenting the loss of his parents as he sat red-faced in the bathtub, brain-soaked in the “dew” distilled from his birthplace of Tullamore. “Everyone is gone” he cried, a naked 48-year-old orphan.
“How’ve you been?” I ask Blossom. She lifts her hands from my skin.
“There’s been a shadow over me since I’ve last seen you.”
I breathe deeply. “How’s your sister?”
“She passed away three months ago,” Blossom says.
“Jesus, I’m sorry.”
Blossom reminds me that her sister had long suffered bipolar depression.
“She lived like a homeless person. If you were strolling the sidewalk and saw her, you’d cross the street to avoid her.”
When I first met Blossom, she’d told me about her twin. “She refuses medication, which is partly why she’s such a mess.”
I blurt, “Our cat was diagnosed with mammary gland carcinoma.”
“Impending doom,” Blossom says.
I consider my fear of decline – how a psychic told me that my sickness was becoming Dan’s sickness. I hope he won’t someday grapple with letting me and my wheelchair roll into the Hudson River, and I think that if my strength permits, I should off myself before it comes to that.
“Impending doom,” I echo, wet-faced.
“Crying is good,” she says. “I’ve cried every morning since my sister’s death.” Blossom admits that despite missing her, the passing has freed a space inside.
Three slow knocks sound through the wall. I assume it’s the masseuse next-door.
“Stop that,” Blossom says.
“It’s the grim reaper,” I jest.
Blossom lifts the sheet, I flip, she drapes it over my body and says, “I’ve often invited the grim reaper to sit with me at my doorstep.”
I envision the stone church foregrounding farmland a couple miles from my childhood home. During Bible school recess, I’d cartwheel between the graves, up the path that led to the crypt.
Blossom slivers around my knees, repaired several times from tears that occurred when I was a real gymnast and a washed-up barroom acrobat. Throughout my twenties and thirties, my alcohol-fueled desire to flip like a carefree kid ripped against the reality of my aging body. My most recent tear was repaired with a cadaver’s ligament. The flesh of a dead person is inside of me because I’ve exhausted my body’s own resources.
Our hour is almost up. Blossom pushes into the divots between my jaw and cheekbones. I wonder if I subconsciously think I can control things by clenching.
Blossom releases me, and I imagine what her legacy will be – all the ways she’s touched people.
I recall seeing Paris is Burning with my college students. We watched the aged drag performer Paris Dupree muse, “I always had hopes of being a big star. But as you get older, you aim a little lower. Everybody wants to make an impression, some mark upon the world. Then you think you've made a mark on the world if you just get through it, and a few people remember your name.” I wonder, Will I have left an impression on my students – as positive as the one they’ve made on me? An undergraduate’s words resound in my head, “We’re all vulnerable once we peel back a thin layer of skin.”
The electric massage table-lift creaks and groans.
“Like the sound of a coffin door,” Blossom says.
“Death seems to be our theme du jour,” I reply.
“Which is okay,” Blossom says. “Because it’s real.”
Emily Marie Seibert is an Associate Professor of Humanities at Mercy University in New York. She cares about women’s empowerment, saving stray cats, and helping people tell their stories. Her essays have appeared in december magazine, X-Ray Lit Mag, The Fourth River, and South Dakota Review (forthcoming Oct. 2024).