(Page 1 of 2) Improvisation by Sean ReganSUMMARY: For the July flash fiction contest. Theme is "freedom."Six hours after his wife died, the clarinetist returned to the corner apartment where they had lived for the past twenty-two years. He'd packed for their trip to the hospital with the knowledge that he would be returning home without her.
He opened the windows behind the dining table to allow mid-autumn morning air to enter the apartment. He filled a glass with tap water. To his surprise, he was hungry. His daughter would soon arrive with his sister and brother-in-law. He hoped they'd bring takeout for lunch.
He stood over the counter, sipped from the glass, and looked over their living space beyond the kitchen. It looked strangely tidy, a product of his anxiety in the final days, but around the apartment lingered relics of disease. The oxygen tanks in a corner of the living room. The one wastebasket, filled with his wife's used tissues, he'd neglected to empty. The adjustable bed, visible through the doorway, that had invaded their bedroom. The pile of magazines from the American Cancer Society. He and his wife read them at first but soon found the survival stories too full of hope. It was better to see things clear-eyed, they'd decided.
Now he felt that, if anything, they'd been too clear-eyed, too ignorant of the benefits of self-delusion. At the multitude of appointments, after the endless tests, they met with doctors in perfect offices beneath perfectly framed degrees and enjoyed what they called "moments of clarity." In these moments, filled with bad news piled upon bad news, doctors quantified her fate in desperate percentages. And it was with incredulity that he went for his own checkup, and the doctor said he was in great shape for a man of sixty-eight and that he should take up an active hobby, such as golf. The clarinetist had played golf - miniature golf - once in the last twenty years. He left his appointment stunned: how could his future be so frivolous?
As he bore daily witness to his wife's decline, he recognized that there is a last time you will see each person in your life. The last time he saw his wife was in the early, dark hours of this day. He'd heard all the expected phrases at the hospital. That she was in a better place, that at least the pain was over, that it was wonderful he was there to comfort her as she died. To him, the sentences were the lines of a ritual meant to ease their separation. Tomorrow they would be separated by more than life and death; they would be separated by a box on the calendar. God did not grant them eternity, at least here, and there would be a portion of his life in which he was a widower. He whispered the word, "widower," and for the first time it was a truth.
Another person, similarly introspective, may have employed paper and pen to express feelings. But he did not feel in words. So he set down the glass, took up his concert clarinet, stood with his characteristic good posture, wet the reed, and began the andante of Copland's clarinet concerto. He'd thought of the piece many times in the last days. It was a composition others had described as "somber." He disagreed, but he rarely voiced his disagreement.
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