Untitled
Justin Hollis
I am in the hospital. No one has been in to see me for days. I flip through the dozen
channels on the TV bracketed up in the corner and slip further into delirium. When the nurse
finally comes in to check on me, I don’t have much time. She takes off her clothes and huddles
next to me in bed. She is cold, colder than tightly packed snow up against my skin. “For the
fever,” she says, and I feel the fever flow out of me and into her. Lying front to front, passing the
heat between us like divers sharing breath, we reach equilibrium. Then we are basking in the sun
on an island drifting through the arctic. Then the island crumbles into the sea and we tread water
among the ice floes. Ships pass us by on either side. We wave to the people on deck to throw us
a life preserver and they smile and wave back sipping hot chocolate in their warm jackets. We
wrap our arms and legs around each other and sink down below the water, as beautiful and dark
as the silence we inhabit.
channels on the TV bracketed up in the corner and slip further into delirium. When the nurse
finally comes in to check on me, I don’t have much time. She takes off her clothes and huddles
next to me in bed. She is cold, colder than tightly packed snow up against my skin. “For the
fever,” she says, and I feel the fever flow out of me and into her. Lying front to front, passing the
heat between us like divers sharing breath, we reach equilibrium. Then we are basking in the sun
on an island drifting through the arctic. Then the island crumbles into the sea and we tread water
among the ice floes. Ships pass us by on either side. We wave to the people on deck to throw us
a life preserver and they smile and wave back sipping hot chocolate in their warm jackets. We
wrap our arms and legs around each other and sink down below the water, as beautiful and dark
as the silence we inhabit.
Justin Hollis has an MFA from Hofstra University and currently teaches language and literature at Palm Beach State College. His work has appeared previously in the Querencia Press Quarterly Anthology, Action, Spectacle, Cholla Needles, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Eunoia Review, GAS: Poetry, Art and Music, and The Chiron Review. His debut collection, Ferrying the Stars, is published by Half Inch Press.