Tina Kimbrell
A Rattle from Somewhere
It wasn’t cinematic. There was no death rattle, no last sigh before the head slumped to the side,
no gentle lowering of the eyelids with a swoop of palm across the face. The tube was removed,
and we watched her slowly suffocate, her body already deflated, her lungs already done, voice
gone, skin dry. The body’s a drought as it prepares to die, a sandpit. The doctor said it could take
anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. So we waited and watched. Just last week she was
eating Lemon Heads from a box, sitting up on her couch, the candies clinking as she tipped the
box and rolled the sugary orbs into her hand, into her mouth. She was still in proportion then,
still made mostly of water. Lying down in the hospital bed, it seemed like her head was too big
for her body, a boulder atop twigs with an animatronic mouth. It kept trying to grasp for air or
open wide for a meal from a spoon, like the most inappropriate puppet show I’d ever seen, like
Pacman or like a Hungry Hungry Hippo. It was slapstick, almost, and it felt wrong to feel that in
that place. I breathed and watched her not breathe anymore. When she was gone, when her head
stopped opening the mouth for nothing, I felt a knot in my gut, then in my chest and in my throat
until finally I coughed up a single marble. Then another. And another. In my palm there’s the
little rattle of smooth glass glistening with spit.
Lightning Bugs
The lightning bugs are out. First I’ve noticed them this year. At the curve of highway ahead they
flicker and fizzle out, float up and fade above the ditch. Tiny beacons, beckoning: This way. This
is the way we’re going. Tonight, you are in the hospital with a tube in your throat. I am driving
your car to your house. It was once my home, too. Back then, we’d spend the summer dusks in
the yard and wait for the bugs to jut up from the grass and down from the trees with their
bioluminescent beats. While it was still light enough to see their bodies between the blinks, I
caught them, cupped them in my hands. Little lanterns green and glowing, pulsing. When I
started putting lightning bugs in jars, it took time to get the holes in the lid right. Sometimes they
were all dead by morning. Sometimes still a subtle thud of wings against glass, lightless in the
sun. Back then, I didn’t understand that the wonder was in the expanse, the backdrop of distance.
At the hospital your body is a metronome of air. An up, down, whoosh, hiss. Irregular in its
regulation. I know that you will never feel the humid sunset, see the peripheral spectacle of
glowing abdomens again. I know where this is going. I know how time works. I know that if I
filled a jar with anything at all it wouldn’t keep. In your car, in the driveway, I turn the ignition
and feel the silence of the engine, check the rearview mirror for what’s left of the horizon.
Tina Kimbrell is from rural Missouri and now lives in eastern Iowa where she works from home in the educational technology industry. She received an MFA from the University of Washington. Her work has appeared in X-R-A-Y, The Citron Review, and The Good Life Review. She loves visiting roadside attractions and hanging out with her dog, Frank.
