The Greenest Place
Here is the father and here is the son and here is the midnight emergency room. If there was a mother she would be here too, but there is no mother, not anymore, just the father with the liminal-spacy eyes and the boy with the fluorescent mouth, a fractured glowstick dangling on a string around his neck. July 4th, northern Vermont—ten minutes shy of Stowe, fifty-four child-sized paces from the Putnam State Forest—and the night is a damp sort of quiet. Next to the boy sits a stranger, a young man with a bloody dish towel cocooning his left hand. The stranger isn’t screaming or moaning or gurgling like a hooked trout as you might expect from someone whose pinky has recently been eliminated by a Roman candle. Rather, he sways. Denim pant-seat whining against blue vinyl. From the TV above the registration desk, the prelude to a Yankees game. What so proudly we hailed, and so on and so forth. The pinky-less man whistles along, pausing every now and again to look down and examine his dish towel, clucking his tongue as if to express a droll kind of displeasure with himself. If there was a mother, she might cluck back.
The neon-mouthed boy is seven and nauseous. The father is forty-four and slightly less nauseous. They’ve been waiting for an hour. Twice, the boy has vomited bright into a plastic CVS bag. He could probably throw up again, but his father is filling out an important-looking form and the CVS bag has been discarded and the boy doesn’t want to interrupt the whistling of the dish-towel man. The dish-towel man is an excellent whistler. The dish-towel man whistles like one giant blade of grass.
The boy closes his eyes. Tries to pretend he’s a bush cricket in a very green place. No use—the hospital overheads shine straight through his eyelids. Still, the waiting room has an insectile feel to it, with all the shoes click-squeaking around like night beetles and the monitors passing mating calls between blue curtains and the dusk outside the revolving doors, black as a snuffed firefly.
The father gets up to turn in the forms and do whatever else fathers in waiting rooms must do. He surveys. He idles in a way that whispers, I don’t know what to do with my hands or feet or face. He drifts from the registration desk to the vending machine to the men’s bathroom.
And now it’s just the boy with the neon mouth and the man with the dish towel. If there were a mother, she would have moved her son left a few seats, away from the reek of yeast and warm copper, but there is no mother, none at all, nor will there ever be a mother again, so the boy is free to tap the man on the shoulder and ask, with his strange sticky lips, “Do you hurt?”
The national anthem is long gone. One out, a runner on second. The man turns to the boy and grins.
“Not sure,” he says. “Ask me tomorrow.”
“I won’t see you tomorrow.”
“How do you know?”
Which is true, the boy supposes. Who can say what he’ll encounter tomorrow? He might be a chinch bug tomorrow. He might be slurping Zoysia grass.
“My throat feels green,” says the boy, and he burps fluorescent. “I can’t get it out.”
“Where’s your CVS bag?” asks the dish-towel man.
The boy’s insides become one enormous lurch. “My dad threw it away.”
And then the dish-towel man is on his feet, bang-snap, like the bang-snap firework toys the boy crushed between his fingers at the barbecue earlier this evening, before sparklers, before Aunt Cathy’s lemon bars. Before his cousin Jack dared him to suck the ooze out of the glowstick, promising it would taste just as good as Aunt Cathy’s lemon bars.
Bang-snap. The dish-towel man bulldozes through the waiting room, shoving every obstacle—a nurse, a stanchion, a stray backpack—aside as he staggers for the trash can. Dissension from the hospital fauna. All, “Sir,” and “Your poor hand, sit down,” and “Mother of God, that’s my backpack!” But the man isn’t listening. The man is shoulder-deep in the trash can. A crushed tall boy of Coors glints in his back pocket. For a moment, the boy forgets the pungent gleaming in the back of his throat and gawks, lemur-eyed, at the fracas.
The dish-towel man sprints to him. He passes the boy the bag just as the boy starts vomiting again. He drapes himself around the boy’s retching body, whispering warmth and nonsense, stroking the boy’s clammy hair. The dish towel leaves streaks of gentle crimson across the boy’s forehead.
Something close to quiet. The waiting room’s eyes spotlight the ablution like a twilit everglade of gators. Otherwise, static. A burbling air conditioner. A curtain swoosh. A distant strikeout. The boy, decontaminating himself. The man, steadying the CVS bag.
“Is it all out yet?” the dish-towel man whispers when the boy’s heaving slows.
“I don’t know.” The boy licks his sour lips. “Ask me again.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No. Now.”
“Oh. Okay. Is it all out yet?”
A gulp of a pause.
“I still don’t know.”
“That’s okay. We can wait and see.”
“Even if it takes a long time?”
The dish-towel man shrugs. Itches his nose with his dish towel.
“Ask me again,” the boy says.
The man and the boy dance this fragile dance like waggling bees, as if they have known its thrum, its heat, its precise exchange of energy since the beginning. The very beginning. Before birth and before mothers.
Outside, fifty-four child-sized paces away, the night forest sings its reedy old songs.
And outside the men’s bathroom, as his son rests his cheek on the shoulder of a stranger, the father tastes acid. It feels matte, dull, not a brilliant, chemical green, like the boy’s vomit, or a hard, vital red, like the stranger’s dish towel. And so the father swallows. Keeps all of it down.
Eliza Gilbert (@elizagilbs) is an undergraduate at Vassar College. Her fiction can be found or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online and The Forge Literary Magazine, and her poetry can be found or is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, and others. She received LitMag’s 2023 Virginia Woolf Award for Fiction and Frontier’s 2023 Hurt & Healing Prize. She was born and raised in New York City.