Daily Sip - How Bad News Comes

A telephone rings
like an emergency
six times each minute
in a room down
the hall. I think
of the one to whom
bad news is coming.
At the market,
she touches fruit.
Driving home,
she strums her fingers
on the steering wheel.
She hums with the radio
and thinks of her lover,
the one she's left
behind, or the one
she will see again,
remembers the soft heat
of his breath, the urgency
of his belly against hers.
This is the way life
insists on itself, his scent
still on her as she reaches
for the phone. Happy
to catch it in mid-ring,
she comes through
the door, leaves her keys
dangling in the lock.
She leans in, unclips
an earring, to hear
the voice on the other end
saying, I've got some
bad news, feeling
in that long moment
before the words come,
the difference between
the way it was
and the way
it will be, that moment
before the groceries
fall to the floor.

"How Bad News Comes" by Debra Marquart, from From Sweetness. 2002

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Found on the website for Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac

This is beautiful, and so sad, too.
Thanks for posting it, Sibs.

Oh.

Oh.