Trajectories
She rang to say you’d collapsed the night before at the snooker club in the village. I was marking exam papers on the sofa. The ambulance had been delayed, she said. You’d died on the way to the hospital, she said. Technically, or officially was the word she’d used – I can’t recall which. I had started thinking of the balls left rolling on the table. And you, down on the floor, oblivious.
The fire exit doors were jammed. The paramedics struggled to get the stretcher out properly, she said. I saw your lean breath leave your mouth, charging the cold car park air. Your chest trembling like barbed wire in scant breeze. I looked away from the thought of you blue-lipped and half-dressed and dead as winter.
The family had followed the ambulance and had all waited outside the operating theatre. I imagined them ricocheting about the dimmed corridors, staring back at themselves in the midnight windows. They were all so unlucky, she said.
While she was quiet, I thought but did not say that most meteors heading for Earth burn up on entry to the atmosphere, where their threat shrinks to a distant streak of starlight, as sharp but as brief as a scratch from a cat. The comets we dread worse than cancer are the size of kidney stones when they’re collected in the Outback, or the Steppe. I wanted to reassure her how close we come to our ending every day, every night. I could do nothing but imagine the snooker balls, all asteroids on a chart, following their infinite trajectories.
She began to cry. And then so did I. Then she stopped and I couldn’t.
Glyn Edwards’ Vertebrae was published by the Lonely Press and In Orbit will be published by Seren in 2023. Glyn is a PhD researcher in EcoPoetry and Activism at Bangor University, and has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from MMU. He works as a teacher in North Wales.