By MEGAN PINTO
Excerpted from “even in silence”
My father is perseverating, moving around the edges of rooms. On repeat, he asks, but how will
we pay for it? How will we pay for it?
He follows me, my mother, then me, then my mother. Inside my childhood home, there are only
so many rooms.
On Christmas Day, I bake a loaf of frozen bread. I feed slices to my father with my hands, then
catch each chewed up bit he pushes back out with his tongue.
He is speaking.
I am numb.
***
Because my father refuses to drink or eat, we try to feed him ice chips with a spoon.
The chips melt and pool in the pink plastic bowl we hold under his chin, as he turns his face from
side to side. Was I like this when I was a child?
I lean over the table to help my father stand. My heart beats in the doldrums, saying
I
can I
can I
can
***
In the hospital, I tug the patterned curtains closed. A man laughs in the next bed over. I cannot see his face, but I imagine round, soft cheeks. He has a kind of laugh like that, full, sent up from a belly that must protrude.
The nurse will keep the man until he sobers up. She reminds him not to drink so much. The man smiles and says of course, and thank you, and please don’t go–
I sit beside my father and watch his IV drip. Each drop of saline hydrates his veins, his dry cracked skin. Today my father weighs 107 lbs. and is too weak to stand.
I pop an earbud in his ear and keep one in mine.
We listen to love songs.
***
In the hallway, the doctor gives me a working diagnosis, Major Depressive Disorder with
Psychotic Features.
He describes ECT treatments, the QT interval, how the brain will seize up but that doctors know
how to relax the body. My father should feel no pain.
Because the door to his room is cracked, my father calls my name. He wants to know what I am
saying.
I ask the psychiatrist if this will end, and when.
He smiles. Psychosis is cyclical, it crests like a wave.
I think of a storm coming over my father’s body, like how rain floods the neighborhood pool in
the summer.
All that displaced water.
***
Some mornings I wander barefoot into the backyard. In the spring, small animals stumble forth
onto the lawn.
Once, in grade school, I found a baby bird that had fallen from its nest. I brought it water in a
shallow bowl. The bird steadied itself, walking forward to wet its beak.
At school we were taught to let nature take its course. You could not play God to every living
thing. The bird had its sovereign right to thrive or die.
So did I.
Megan Pinto’s debut collection, Saints of Little Faith, is forthcoming with Four Way Books in September 2024. The winner of the 2023 Halley Prize from The Massachusetts Review, Megan’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, Ploughshares, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Megan has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, Storyknife, and The Peace Studio and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. She lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.
