by Raydia Osborne

Created on: June 13, 2008

Silence is never golden. It's black. Black like the color of a cloudy midnight sky. Black like the color of pasty soot left over after a fire. Black like the color of my wife's small eyes as she stares at the same wall, at the same spot, sitting in the same chair she's been sitting in for weeks. Her eyes used to be dark brown, the same color as her smooth Italian skin, but as her mind sinks deeper and deeper into darkness, so do they. I kiss her every once in awhile on the lips, but of course, kisses will never be the same. Her lips are always dry and cracked and shut tightly. But I kiss her anyway in hopes that maybe the love I hold in mine, so much that it spills out in my every word to her, will seep into her skin and into her blood and awaken her mind.

I'm afraid to move her. I'm afraid to carry around her dead weight. It scares me. It's like holding a dead dog. A dog that used to be so cute and sweet, now lying stiff in your arms. It's horrifying. I can't imagine what it would be like lifting my wife out of her chair and dragging her to the bathroom. So I pay her best friend, Denise, to do it. She's a retired nurse, so she comes over to the house every morning and stays all day. She caters to her every need. Somehow she always knows what they are. I can never tell. And I'm her husband. I've been her husband for fifteen years.

"She's cold, Brian," Denise says. "Will you get her a blanket?"

"How do you know?" She looks at me, lifts her eyebrows and then sighs. I hate it when she does that. She makes me feel like a helpless child. I doubt that everything my wife needs is so obvious, but Sally makes me feel so small and stupid for not knowing what a woman who cannot talk needs.

"She's shivering. Can't you see that?" My eyes moved away from Denise's stare and looked at my wife. She was sitting absolutely still. She wasn't twitching. She wasn't shivering. She was just sitting there staring at the wall as she always does with her head propped up with a sofa pillow. Maybe I wanted my wife to have no mind. Maybe I wanted her to sink deeper and deeper into unconsciousness. Maybe that's all my mind would allow me to see. I got up and shuffled to the bedroom to get her a blanket.

"Here, Denise."

"Thank you." She got up from her seat on the couch, stroked my wife's forehead and spread the blanket over her legs. "Now, you just let me know if you need anything else, Rita."

That's her name. Rita. But I rarely say it. There's no need to since the accident. She can't hear me.

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