The ventilator hissed with a rhythm that felt both mechanical and strangely alive. My mother lay perfectly still beneath the white hospital sheets, her chest rising and falling with the machine’s artificial breath. A green line pulsed across the cardiac monitor in steady peaks and valleys—the only visible proof that her heart still remembered its work.
‘These things happen,’ the cardiologist had said, his voice carefully neutral. ‘About one in a hundred open-heart surgery patients experiences a perioperative stroke.’ His words hung in the air like condensation on the ICU windows. One percent. The same odds as guessing a coin toss correctly seven times in a row. The same odds my mother used to calculate when we’d play our made-up lottery games during rainy afternoons.
Her eyelids fluttered faintly, the rapid eye movement of someone dreaming beneath sedation. I wondered if she was back in her childhood home by the Baltic Sea, where she first learned to fold sorrow into poetry. At four, I’d believed her hands could fold anything—even time. She’d creased a sheet of typing paper into wings for me, the left one slightly crooked where she’d laughed mid-fold. ‘All poets need wings,’ she’d said, pressing the makeshift harness over my shoulders. The memory surfaced now with the sharpness of cardiac monitor alarms.
The hospital room smelled of antiseptic and the waxy fragrance of the Get Well Soon balloon bobbing near the door. Outside, December should have been sharp with cold, but the air clung warm and damp to my skin when I stepped out for coffee. Grey clouds sagged low over the parking lot, the color of the sea in her poems about her father’s fishing boat never returning.
Back inside, the respiratory therapist adjusted the ventilator settings. The machine sighed like a tired whale. I touched my mother’s hand—the same hand that once pressed a stethoscope to my chest so I could hear my own heartbeat at age six. Her skin felt cool, the veins bluer than I remembered. The cardiac monitor continued its steady chant.
Somewhere beyond the hospital walls, people walked dogs and bought groceries, their voices carrying that particular buoyancy of those untouched by ventilators and percentages. They moved through the parking lot like characters in an overbright animation, their laughter syncopated against the rhythm of the heart monitor. One in a hundred. The phrase looped in my head, each syllable measured against the green line on the screen.
The Green Line and Fluttering Eyelids
The ventilator hissed with a rhythm that felt both mechanical and strangely alive, like some ancient creature breathing through iron lungs. I counted the intervals between each mechanical inhale and exhale, matching them against the jagged green line crawling across the cardiac monitor. Up. Down. Up. Down. The numbers flickered – 72, 71, 73 – small rebellions against the flatline we all feared.
Her eyelids trembled occasionally, those paper-thin veils twitching as if trying to lift. The nurses called it “sundowning” when I asked, that twilight state where consciousness flickers but never quite ignites. I pressed my thumb against the inside of her wrist, feeling for the pulse beneath cool skin, needing the tactile confirmation that the green line wasn’t lying.
She wrote about rain long before she knew me,
about how it fell like silver needles
on the day they buried her father.
The poems smelled of wet earth
and unanswered questions.
Beeps from the IV pump punctuated the room’s artificial stillness. A plastic tube taped to her cheek delivered oxygen with a faint whistle, the nasal cannula leaving angry red marks that would’ve made her complain about vanity even now. I remembered how she’d dab at her face with a handkerchief after crying, always careful not to smudge her mascara. The heart monitor’s steady ping became a metronome for my thoughts.
When the neurologist mentioned “perioperative stroke,” the term hung in the air like an unwanted guest. One percent chance, he’d said with the careful neutrality of someone who’d delivered such statistics too many times. The numbers meant nothing until they became your mother lying motionless in Bed 12, her childhood poems about mortality suddenly prophetic.
I traced the blue veins visible beneath her translucent skin, following their branching paths like the streets of a city we’d once explored together. Her hands – always moving when awake, shaping words in the air as she recited poetry or folding origami cranes for my birthdays – now lay heavy and unresponsive. The cardiac monitor chirped its relentless reassurance as outside the window, an ambulance siren wailed toward some other family’s crisis.
At some point, the rhythmic sounds blurred into white noise. The ventilator’s sighs, the monitor’s beeps, the squeak of rubber soles on linoleum down the hall – they formed a discordant lullaby for this limbo between waking and whatever came next. The green line continued its jagged journey across the screen, each peak and valley a silent argument against surrender.
Folding Time Between Her Fingers
Her hands moved like origami birds when she made those wings for me. I was four, convinced that if I ran fast enough down the hill behind our house, the wind would catch me. She didn’t laugh at me. Didn’t tell me about gravity or broken bones. Just took two sheets of typing paper from her desk—the same kind she used to write her poems about mourning doves and wet sidewalks—and began folding.
The paper whispered as it bent to her will. I remember the sound more clearly than the wings themselves. That soft crinkling, like footsteps on fresh snow. She’d pause sometimes, holding a half-formed crease between her fingers, staring at some middle distance where poems took shape. Then she’d return to me, to the wings, to the impossible faith of childhood.
Now those same hands lie motionless on hospital sheets. The ventilator does their rising and falling for her. When I touch her palm, it’s cool as the paper was all those years ago. Nurses say coma patients might retain hearing, so I tell her about the wings—how they lasted exactly one glorious afternoon before the rain came. How I cried not because my flight experiment failed, but because the rain dissolved her careful folds back into pulp.
She’d wiped my tears with her thumb. ‘Nothing’s ever really gone,’ she’d said. ‘The wings are just waiting in the paper.’ At four, I thought she meant magic. At twenty-eight, standing beside this bed with its beeping monitors and antiseptic smell, I understand she was teaching me about transformation. About how love persists even when the form changes.
The green line on the cardiac monitor spikes when I squeeze her fingers. Coincidence, the rational part of me insists. But the child who once wore paper wings presses my cheek against her motionless hand and waits for the whisper of folding paper.
The Wrong Kind of Warmth
The hospital doors slid open with a sigh, releasing me into a December that didn’t know its own season. The air hung heavy with moisture, the kind that clings to your skin without the decency of either winter’s bite or summer’s sweat. Above, the sky stretched like damp gray wool, so low I could have reached up and left fingerprints on its underbelly.
At the bus stop, my body remembered to perform the rituals of waiting—shifting weight from foot to foot, checking a phone that held no new messages. Around me, the world continued with its brutal normalcy. A woman laughed into her scarf, the sound muffled but unmistakable. Two teenagers shared earbuds, their shoulders moving to some private rhythm. Their motions had the exaggerated clarity of stop-motion animation, every gesture perfectly articulated yet fundamentally unreal.
I watched a man peel an orange. The citrus scent hit me from three feet away, absurdly vibrant against the hospital smell still nested in my clothes. His fingers worked with methodical precision, separating peel from fruit in one continuous spiral. When he offered a section to the child beside him, the boy’s mouth opened like a baby bird’s—automatic, trusting. The entire scene glowed with such vivid detail it hurt. This wasn’t how the world was supposed to look when your mother lay two floors up with a tube down her throat.
Across the street, Christmas lights blinked on a storefront. Red, green, red, green. The rhythm matched the ventilator’s hiss I’d left behind. A bus rolled by, its windows revealing passengers in tableau: a woman applying lipstick, a man dozing against the glass, a student highlighting pages in a textbook. Each frame perfectly composed, utterly divorced from my reality. I half-expected to see animation cels littering the sidewalk where they’d passed.
My hands felt foreign in my pockets. They still remembered the cool resistance of my mother’s skin, the way her fingers neither grasped nor pushed away. The hospital’s hand sanitizer had left them sticky, the alcohol smell cutting through even the bus exhaust. I rubbed my thumb against my fingertips, feeling the ghost of her papery skin. Forty-seven years old. One in a hundred chance. These numbers floated in my head, weightless as the medical pamphlets left untouched on her bedside table.
A drop of rain hit my cheek. Then another. The clouds finally making good on their threat. Around me, people unfolded umbrellas or quickened their steps. Their movements took on the jerky urgency of film sped up slightly too fast. No one looked up at the sky. No one paused to consider the wrongness of this warmth, this wet December air that smelled like April. The bus arrived with a hydraulic wheeze, its doors opening like the mouth of some great mechanical beast. I stepped into its belly, leaving the animation world behind—for now.
The Sound of Tides
The ventilator kept its rhythm, a mechanical tide pushing air into her lungs and pulling it back out. That green line on the monitor continued its jagged journey across the screen, each peak and valley measured, predictable. Her eyelids fluttered occasionally – tiny tremors that made me hold my breath. I found myself counting between them, like waiting for distant lightning after thunder.
Could she hear the tide too?
In the quiet between machine cycles, I remembered how she loved the ocean. Not the crashing waves tourists admired, but the hidden patterns beneath – the way currents carried stories across continents. She’d written a poem about it once, comparing the sea’s memory to old women braiding each other’s hair. Now her own memories floated somewhere beyond the hiss of pressurized oxygen, beyond my reach.
Nurses came and went, adjusting tubes, checking numbers. Their shoes made soft squeaks against the floor, a counterpoint to the ventilator’s steady song. One paused to straighten the blanket across my mother’s shoulders with a tenderness that made my throat tighten. The gesture seemed too intimate for strangers, yet completely natural here in this liminal space where bodies became landscapes to be tended.
I pressed my palm against her forearm, feeling the coolness of her skin beneath my fingers. The contrast startled me – that relentless machine pumping warmth into her while her limbs stayed stubbornly cool. Her hand lay palm-up on the blanket, fingers slightly curled as if waiting to hold something. I slipped mine against it, careful of the IV line taped to her wrist.
Outside, daylight shifted across the window blinds. The angle told me hours had passed, though time felt suspended in this room. The monitor continued its electronic pulse, the ventilator its artificial breath. And beneath her thin eyelids, those occasional flickers – proof that somewhere beneath the stillness, tides still turned.
A nurse brought me coffee in a paper cup. The heat seeped through the thin material, almost too hot to hold. I wrapped both hands around it, letting the warmth anchor me to my own body. The first bitter sip tasted like reality.
One in a hundred, the resident had said. Not terrible odds unless you’re the one. Now we floated in that statistical anomaly together, she beneath the surface and me keeping watch where air met water, waiting for any sign that she might breach again.
The Gray Sky When I Stopped Waiting
The ventilator kept its rhythm, a mechanical tide pushing air into lungs that no longer remembered how to breathe on their own. I watched the green line on the monitor, tracing peaks and valleys that meant nothing and everything. Outside, people moved through their lives with hands in pockets, their laughter slicing through the hospital parking lot like something from a poorly dubbed film.
Her eyelids fluttered the way they had for three days now. The doctors called it reflexive movement. I called it proof. Somewhere behind those closed lids, the woman who once turned newspaper into wings still existed. The poet who wrote about death before she understood it now lay wrapped in its shadow.
One in a hundred, they’d said. A statistic that tasted like cold metal when spoken aloud. I pressed my palm against her wrist, feeling the thready pulse beneath paper-thin skin. The same hands that folded origami cranes from candy wrappers now lay still as folded linen.
December air pressed against my cheeks as I stepped outside, too warm for the season. Cars passed in streaks of color while pedestrians moved at half-speed, their mouths shaping words I couldn’t hear. Reality had developed a slight lag, like watching a streamed video with inconsistent bandwidth. The green line of the heart monitor became my only anchor – that steady proof of life amidst the unreality.
Back in the room, the ventilator’s hiss merged with the beeping IV pump until they became a single mechanical breath. I wondered if she could hear it too, this artificial tide. If somewhere in the dark, she was counting the spaces between waves like she used to count syllables for her poems.
The sky never did fall that day. It simply stayed gray – the indifferent gray of hospital corridors and winter mornings. People kept walking past windows with coffee cups and shopping bags, their faces smooth with the luxury of unbroken days. And the monitor kept drawing its green mountains on a black screen, each peak a whisper: not today, not yet, not now.