Congrats go to Mike Penkas, who took second place in our Jingle Hell contest on 15 December. Below is his story, Midnight Cappuccino.

MIDNIGHT CAPPUCCINO
by Michael Penkas
Wendy Williams flinched as the cappuccino burned her lip. She closed her eyes and let the tears come. She always cried a little when she burned her lip. Every day, she got a cup of vanilla cappuccino from the machine at the end of the hallway and every day it was too hot. But the routine was comforting.
She drank some more and then rested the paper cup on the window sill of her son’s room. Outside, it had begun to snow.
Wiping the tears away, she looked at the clock beside her son’s bed. It was 12:08. “Merry Christmas, Jack,” she whispered.
Her son didn’t answer, but she didn’t mind. The steady rise and fall of his chest was enough. His condition over the last seven months had stabilized nicely, the monitors around him showing that heart, lung and brain activity matched that of a man sleeping. Besides the slim feeding tube stretching from his nostril, there were no other machines to support him.
Wendy closed her eyes. She heard the patter of footfalls and the buzz of distant telephones down the hall. She felt the heating vent she sat against rumble to life. She smelled the vanilla cappuccino fill the room, nearly overpowering the scent of ammonia, floor polish and fresh bread.
Her eyes shot open. The smell of fresh bread was new to the hospital room.
She considered her son more closely. He was twenty-nine last month, his handsome features turned gaunt over the past half-year. His skin was pale because the room didn’t get enough light. But his hair was neatly trimmed and his face smoothly shaved. Wendy made sure that her boy was at least well-groomed.
There was a deep sigh that, for only a moment, she thought had come from her son. A face, paler than her son’s, flickered in and out of view. Wendy began to stand up, then the face flickered back and she sat down again.
In the chair on the other side of her son’s bed was a man in his late fifties, heavy-set but still handsome, with gray hair and thin lips. He smiled weakly. “Merry Christmas, Wendy.” Those thin lips didn’t move as he spoke.
Wendy sat across from the pale man, taking in the smell of bread that had given him away before she’d even seen him. “Norman.”
He seemed to nod, but the gesture didn’t translate properly. One moment, he was facing her, the next moment, his head was bowed and the moment after that, he was facing her again. It looked like a flip book with pages torn out, an imperfect illusion of movement.
Her husband had died four years ago in a car crash, similar to the one that had left their son in a coma. Norman had run a bakery and every day he would come home from work smelling like fresh bread, a smell that had always comforted her.
Wendy was surprised at how happy she felt to see her dead husband once again and said nothing for a while, just staring at his flickering image beside their sleeping son. And it was almost like they were a family again. She closed her eyes and let herself cry just a little more. Not so much that she’d lose control of herself. Just enough so that it would be real to her.
When she opened her eyes again, her husband was still there, one hand still resting on their son’s bed, but his eyes fixed on her.
“How?” she asked, without really caring. It didn’t matter. She just wanted to hear him talk.
Again, there was a flicker as Norman’s head suddenly shifted down to their son, then back up to her. Again, his lips didn’t move as he spoke. “Jack. His accident … brought him closer to me.”
Wendy didn’t think too much on the answer, but smiled. It would be Jack, of course. Despite her differences with Norman, they both loved their son very much. It was one of the things that had kept them together over the years. Sadly, by the end, there had been little else besides Jack, but she didn’t want to think about that now. “I’m sure he knows … that you’re here.”
Again, his face flickered from Jack to Wendy, his expression static. “I’m here for him.”
She smiled. “So am I.”
“No.”
She shook her head without thinking. “Yes. I am. You know I love him as much as you did. Do. As much as you do.” She stood up.
His voice dropped to a whisper and his whole body seemed to dim. His side of the hospital room dimmed. “Wendy, our son is dead.”
“No.” She moved towards her son, placing a hand on his chest, but not touching her husband. “He’s alive. He’s breathing. He’s dreaming.”
“Wendy.”
“Shut up, Norman!” She closed her eyes, drawing strength from the steady rise and fall of her son’s chest. “You think you’re the first to come at me with this Right to Die shit?” The doctors, her sister and Jack’s fiancee (ex-fiancee) had all said the same thing. That her son had died that night on the road. He hadn’t been wearing a seat-belt and been thrown through the windshield and onto the street. When the ambulance arrived, his skull had cracked open and parts of his brain had already dissolved on the blacktop. The doctors had frankly been amazed that they had been able to stabilize him.
“A miracle! Were you there when they were operating? Did you hear what the doctor said? He said it was a miracle that our son had survived.”
“Only the body.”
“He’s dreaming.” She pointed to the monitor. “He’s dreaming right now.”
Another flickering nod from her husband. “Death is dreaming, Wendy. Let him go and he’ll be at peace.”
“He’s at peace now! He’s comfortable. He’s not afraid. I read to him every day and he’s safe here. Why isn’t that good enough?”
“It’s not right.”
“He won’t let go. I’m not holding him here. There’s nothing holding him here. He’s still alive because a part of him still wants to be alive. He’s still fighting and I won’t give up on him. I will never give up on him.”
“The feeding tube –“
“So what? Half the people here are on feeding tubes and most of them will be walking out.”
“Take it out. Let him move on, Wendy. Please.”
She almost reached for Norman, but held herself back. He was barely visible now, looking like an overdeveloped photograph in his dark half of the room. “You want me to sit here and watch him starve to death?” She laughed, couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re some piece of work, Norman. After the way you abandoned us, to come back now and ask that. As if I’d ever –“
“I couldn’t help it.”
She stared into the darkness, caught her husband’s eyes and stared him down. She stared into the ghost’s eyes until his face flickered and he looked away from her. “Jack could have said the same thing, but he’s still here. Remember when the doctors gave me six months? Remember that? That was six years ago, Norman. You can live if you really want to.”
“I was decapitated. I couldn’t –“
“I mean before that. You were gone from us long before the accident.” Shortly after Wendy had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, Norman had begun drinking.
“I’m sorry.”
“I forgave you a long time ago. But I’m not letting my son die. You’re wrong about him.”
“Wendy.”
“Only you would come back from the dead just to ruin another Christmas, Norman. Why don’t you leave?”
“I couldn’t stand to see you suffer, Wendy. It was all too much for me to –“
“Yeah, I had a hard time with it too. Puking radioactive blood after every treatment, watching my hair fall out and my skin go yellow. It might have been easier for me if you’d been there, but you were always out … not dealing with it.”
“I thought –“
“You thought I was going to die anyway, so why bother wasting any more emotion on a lost cause.”
He said nothing, didn’t move.
“It was for you and Jack that I fought to stay alive. If it was just me … I wouldn’t have bothered.”
“I know.”
“Then why didn’t you quit? When you saw I was getting better, why didn’t you just quit drinking and come back to us? I would have … I would have understood.”
“I couldn’t. I knew I’d abandoned you. Every time I looked at you, I knew I didn’t … deserve …” Again, he flickered, looked to Jack, then looked away from them both. The shadows seemed to blur the edges around him.
“Was it an accident?”
He grew more distinct, looking at her again. “What?”
“The car crash. Was it an accident? Did you do it on purpose?” She couldn’t believe she’d said it out loud. She’d always wondered, but had never voiced her suspicion to anyone.
There was a flicker and a nod. “I was drunk. A deer ran in front of my car. I turned to avoid it and … yes, it was an accident.”
“You’ve never lied to me, Norman.”
“No. There’s … there’s no point to lies. When you die, you see that truth … always comes out. Eventually.”
“Do you know the future? Is that something you can see?”
There was a pause, then, “No.”
“You don’t know that Jack will never wake up.”
“His brain was –“
“You don’t know!”
“No.”
“So he could come back. He could wake up.”
“I know what parts of his brain were lost, Wendy. If he did wake up … let him go.”
“What?”
“Let him go.”
“No. What. If he did wake up … what?”
“The part … the part of his brain that would remember you, us, is gone. He wouldn’t know how to speak. He would never be able to understand any words. You couldn’t even teach him. It’s lost. Every night, when you read him the newspaper, if he hears at all, it’s just sound to him. Whatever his dreams are, they’re not of you.”
“You don’t know, Norman.”
“I know what part of him is already dead, Wendy. I know that he’s closer to where I am than where you are.”
“No! I mean you don’t know about me. About living. It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t remember me. It doesn’t matter if he can talk to me. He’s my son. Whatever survived that accident is my son and I will not let him go.”
“Wendy, please.”
“Just leave, Norman.” She took her hand off her son’s chest and walked back to her chair by the window. She sat back down and closed her eyes. “If you’d lived, if you hadn’t given up on me, maybe you’d have the right to decide. But you gave up on both of us and now it doesn’t matter. It’s my decision to make and it will always be the same. I will never give up.”
She opened her eyes to find the other side of the room was empty and properly lit once again. She reached for the cup of coffee, still on the window sill, and sipped it. The cappuccino had gone cold from sitting near the window for so long, but she drank it anyway.
Even cold coffee was better than an empty cup.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 11:54 pm and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.