Rachel Rothstein’s Flying Leap (failed) Part II

Jeez, we’ve got the cops here now! Dying’s bringing more looky-loos than the time I left a potato kugel in the oven for nearly ten hours and the hallway filled up with smoke and all the alarms went off. Of course when I fell down in the living room and broke my hip and yelled for two hours solid, nobody could hear that; nobody heard a thing.

‘You might not want to go in, ma’am,’ the cop outside is telling Debra. She pouts, spoilt brat. 

‘My father died from a fall, and to tell you the truth I wish that wasn’t my last memory of him. It wasn’t really my father, y’know?’ 

- Yeah, I know. 

Debra’s in tears now. ‘We’re waiting for the Coroner’

- The Coroner?

The cop takes Debra to a private sitting room downstairs to await my son, late (so what’s new) on his way back from court. 

Debra, perplexed, asks: ‘The Coroner? Is there something wrong?’

‘Well, it isn’t clear how – or, why – Mrs. Rothstein died, if it were an accident I mean, so I’m afraid there’ll need to be an autopsy.’ 

- An autopsy? Over my dead body.

Suddenly the light shifts, here’s Sofiya’s bulk in the doorway. Look at these two hugging, shaking, rattling, Sofiya’s blubber rolling.  

Finally Sofiya wipes red and swollen eyes and says: ‘She’s gone, Debra, I cannot believe it. Gone.’ Debra’s sitting her down, asking what happened. Sofiya moans loudly, like a man.

‘It’s – my – fault,’ she chugs, ‘I give her – ice-cream day before.’

‘No, no,’ Debra assures her, ‘of course it’s not your fault.’

‘She always goes on asthma machine after eating through her mouth. She had been on asthma machine.’ She blows her nose again. ‘She must have maybe fallen asleep, and then fallen on ground. Maybe on floor all night, no help,’ Sofiya breaks off in large sobs. 

‘Sofiya, were there any empty pulvules on the table, from the asthma machine?’

‘Yaaaaahhhhhhhh. Yaahhhhhhh.’ Debra holds her, waiting for this new grief to subside before asking:

‘Do you have any idea how many?’

‘Seventeen. Seventeen. I killed her, Debra, I killed her.’   

Freezing, schmeezing - not at all! I can’t feel any cold in this refrigerated chest they’ve had the gall to slide me into, like a goddamn horizontal file. I can’t feel anything for that matter. Which is just as well as I’ve been truly cut and dried, slit and sewn, poked and prodded like you wouldn’t believe. They let an intern slice in to me, an intern, the nerve of them, letting some idiot fourteen-year-old cut me up. You’d better watch him closely, Mister, Mister Coroner, Mister C. The boy, knife in hand, announces: ‘Her lungs are full of food. Consistent with oral consumption instead of G-tube.’ Ach, what the hell. So I had ice cream and a few cookies. Big deal. They’ll never find the cookie wrapper anyway; I took it all the way to the garbage shoot and dropped it down so they’d never know.

Here’s Mister C now with his Cause of Death. Yes, Mister C, my heart stopped at approximately 5:25 a.m. on Friday October 8th, you got that right. He’s filling in a form. ‘OD albuterol.’ 

OD schmodee, it felt good to me! Inept the Intern is reading some report now and looking puzzled, no surprise to me, child docs. My old asthma doctor was the best, I should never have let my son send me elsewhere. I mean, if one doc treats you for asthma for ten years plus, then some kid barely able to grow a beard tells you you don’t have asthma, you have a faulty valve which is letting part of what you chow down down into your breathers, which one would you trust? Well, I did what he told me to do for the most part, and when I didn’t, I disposed of the wrappers and I got on my asthma machine.

So what’re the boys gonna put on my certificate?   Ha: ‘Accidental death.’      

What’s this commotion? Sliding out again, here’s a gurney. Removing, it seems. Thank God I don’t have to pack a bag. And there’s Debra, going into my apartment, shedding a tear – get over it Debra. I shouldn’t be so harsh; she really is the best of the bunch. She’s genuinely missing me, perhaps I could have been . . . nicer, ach. What the hell’s she doing? Rummaging through my closet, pulling out trousers and laying them out like the dead on the bed. Could this be my burial outfit? No, no, not that blouse, it’s too low, it shows my old hen’s neck . . .