Ally Malinenko

Radiation Day 15

Anna, the old Italian

is shouting again.

I realize she has little choice

as the television is so loud

but still she is shouting

Did you hear about the lady who died?

Anna starts so many stories with this sentence.

Dying ladies are a favorite topic of hers.

She was in a coma, Anna says

and she dreamed that Jesus

told her to wake up

and go get baptized.

And Jesus said, you’ll see me again in three hours.

Anna holds up three bony fingers.

So she wake up

and she tell her husband

and he call the priest

Right about here I start to wonder if this is a joke

and put down my book to listen,

So they get the priest

and the priest he baptizes her

and then,

Anna slaps her hands together

in three hours

she was dead!

Anna looks around the room,

can you believe it?

Jesus is Lord,

someone says

and I wonder if that was the punch line after all.

Wait a second, Betty says, from the corner,

why wasn’t she be baptized?

The new girl chimes in

sitting like a hen in the chair across from me saying

Oh many religions aren’t baptized, you know.

But between the three of them they can’t think of one

before Betty shouts, what about atheists?

They don’t believe in nothing, Anna says

and they nod.

How do they not believe in nothing, she asks the room

when Maria,

who usually doesn’t shut up

with non-sequiturs and things

says with her heavy Brooklyn accent

Well, to each their own. Whatever you gotta do to get through this life.

And for a moment they are all quiet

together in this room,

together in the pointlessness of this existence,

full of questions we should not ask

for we shall never have the answer

not even in death

and

it touches them just now,
I feel it

the unknowable unfathomable

darkness that stretches just past the stars

and then Betty says

Hey, anyone going to Bingo?