Fading in and out, listening to the wet music my lungs played, sloshing air in and out of my body, I watched television, learning of Hale-Bopp – how the skies of the world were afire with twin comet tails. Alan Hale spotted the comet from his driveway in New Mexico and Thomas Bopp happened to look through a borrowed telescope in Arizona in 1995. As the comet became more visible, I faded. When it finally blazed onto the canvas of the night in January of 1997, they shut off my brain.
The night sky burned as I lay in a room with no windows, listening to the ventilator, acquiring a new vocabulary without awareness. When my eyes opened with sight, sliding out of a coma like the tube from my throat, and the two things I wanted most in life were a bathroom and a cheeseburger. I asked in words making perfect sense to only me. They didn’t understand so I repeated myself. The voice bleeding from my mouth sounded like rocks scraping against asphalt, tarry and thick. I lived inside my head, no longer distinguishing my thoughts from reality. My brother asked if he could get me anything, something to eat perhaps and I mouthed a series of tongueless vowels he correctly interpreted as:
I want a cheeseburger.
Hale-Bopp streaked across the sky like some monstrous shooting star. I watched pictures of it and eavesdropped on conversations. I felt connected to it, as if it meant something to me. My brother said, “You have to see this thing. If you can, get somebody to wheel you up to the roof.”
The colors traced the morphine haze I floated through, and my eyes made everything glow like Monet’s vision. The comet, a benign presence brought from the coma world, a place where dreams played in endless loops, firing synapses like oil dripping on machines, hurtled through my space. I wanted to leave those dark dreams. Nine days after they brought me back, one of those pierced through, exploding into the world.
I would have changed the channel if I could, but my fingers froze.
Applewhite.
I never saw the comet.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rosanne Griffeth lives on the verge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and spends her time writing, raising goats and documenting Appalachian culture. She holds an MFA from the University of South Carolina. Her work has been published or accepted by MsLexia, The Potomac, Now and Then, Pank, Night Train, Keyhole Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, Thieves Jargon and Six Little Things among other places. She is the blogger behind The Smokey Mountain Breakdown.
