Blue Cotton
By Emily Spacek

Once in Quincy, Illinois, I sat with your father
outside the Dairy Queen. 

We hung tight in the car, CD player
humming low, the tune barely recognizable. 

The overflowing trash can to our right held greasy fish bones,
disposable face masks, and ketchup-stained napkins—crumpled, futile, a
trail of defeated red and white. 

The new April warmth invited a flock
of clusters fly around the mess of garbage.
The CD player blinked blue and the last track played out. 

Your father whacked key from ignition, then
snapping my head back inside the two-door, rusty-white
Ford Escort. 

He began to speak:
New test results, flights
to Palo Alto, this could be the night. 

I can’t seem to remember the name of the street I grew up on
but I remember the boys—Two of them
riding by on their street bikes laughing. 

It’s late afternoon in California, where you lie in a hospital bed.

Your father wears plaid and tweed in all of its scratchy,
clashing combinations. But you—lying still—in thin blue
cotton. The fabric fastened around your waist by twill ties. 

Your father addresses me directly now, asking
about the last night we spent here. 

And I close my eyes. And
I let the beads of sweat trickle down my temples.

I remember Johnathon’s house. I remember music. Then you,
running outside because the noise was too much. I follow you
to the porch and stand by with nothing to offer.

Your eyes closed, your breath
heavy, musty. I think now you are ashamed and
maybe scared and what
utter loneliness comes from a mixture of the two. 

I came over the next day to find you grinning
a most Sunday grin and holding for me three blood oranges
and a pound of cake flour. We are to bake and love only
you said.  

By sunset, if you are to go and your mother calls, I will ask
what they plan to do with your body.

Your eyes will be closed once more but I will see you breathing. Your chest
rising and falling and

inside of you, not your beating heart but our budding secrets, the most precious
of vanishing fires.