Ever: Old English ǣfre, of unknown origin.

little men, everywhere

I was getting Sophie ready for bed tonight — the diapers, the pajamas, the wrestling with tight arms and folded legs and Sophie’s stares, she stares right through me, I thought I heard her say what fresh hell is this or maybe I was thinking it and she read my mind and her eyes spoke. She’s seemed so anxious of late, and I wonder if it’s the time, the very atmosphere polluted with the perverse (little men everywhere, I wake each morning wishing they were dead, all the little men) and then this memory washed over me, it was her eyes I think that triggered it. We were in the ICU at UCLA in March of 2023, and she’d just been intubated and admitted with two collapsed lungs, a large abscess in one, a deathly infection and she was, basically, if not dying than just really not good at all. I was in a daze, things moving too fast, so fast, I’d sat on a folding chair in the hallway when they brought in the crash cart and the little doctor whose underwear showed because his scrubs hung so low, too low on his tiny frame, I’ll have to intubate your daughter, he said, and I thought he was cocky and arrogant and someone ushered me out of the room and onto the chair where I sat for how long? I don’t know, but another doctor, this one tall and baby-faced, he had blonde hair and he sat down beside me on another metal chair and asked me in some odd arrangement of words whether he should use all powers to keep her alive if something should happen. And I said that I would need to ask her father and he wasn’t there (of course, he wasn’t there), so we (the doctor and I) decided that yes, use all measures. Later, we saw this doctor again and again he sat me down in a gray pleather armchair in the family room and this time Sophie’s father was there, and he asked again, and we both said yes, I guess. And the doctor looked at us with clear blue eyes, I remember his eyes more for what they lacked than anything else, because he said your daughter might not be the same when this is over. Her brain might be damaged. And for some reason, although I didn’t laugh, this was funny to me and weird and stupid because he didn’t know her at all. It’s a moment that stood out, and tonight I remembered it like water washing over me, like a stone thrown into a still pool, the ripples, like Sophie’s eyes, ever outward, through. Ever.