Chiaroscuro

By Barbara Krasner

PROMPT—Never will I forget ...

My mother would have called it a nishtgutkeyt. I lie in the ICU, mumbling, “I don’t feel good.” I’m rolled onto my side. Medical staff surround me. My sister is there. She’s summoned my son from Long Island to the Jersey hospital. The ICU nurse repeats, “Good thing you came in.” A grad student of mine called 911 for me after a horrid night of stomach convulsions and pleading with my dead mother in Yiddish to help me. In my mind’s eye, I see Caravaggio’s round-faced lute player. Play for me, I say. My strings are broken. My blood pressure, the EMT announces, is 84/42. I am shivering. I never shiver. Someone cuts off my nightgown, scrubs me clean of last night’s uncontrolled movements. I am in and out of consciousness. I am outfitted for surgery to insert a stent to drain the hole in my bile duct. I say to my dead mother, Come get me. The lute player plucks another chord, then another and another, until I close my eyes to a blinding-light melody. Play for me. Intravenous antibiotics strum the notes from Caravaggio’s survival songbook.

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Barbara Krasner holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been featured in more than 70 literary journals, including nonfiction in The Journal of Expressive Writing, Collateral, South 85, The Manifest Station, and Vassar Review. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives and teaches in New Jersey.