Minus The Questions by Emily Harrison

Minus the Questions


I watch from a plastic chair as the nurse, Jessica, gently wipes saliva off my younger brother’s cheek. She talks to him as she does it, running the cloth over his lips and down onto his neck.

“Does that feel better, Joe?”

He’s twenty-seven and she asks it like he’s a child. He offers no response, just gazes at her. This is him now, thanks to the accident. A car crash resulting in head trauma, resulting in a loss of brain function, resulting in a period of recovery that could take a lifetime. He can’t move his limbs. He can’t speak. Who knows what he thinks? We were given the choice. Or mum was. The choice no parent should ever have to make. She went against medical advice.

Jessica picks up Joe’s hairbrush and turns to me.

“You want to do it?”  

No. But I don’t want to disappoint her, so I take it. Mum tells me to ask Jessica questions when I visit – learn more about Joe’s life in the hospital. I only see him once a week, and always on my own. Joe is a wound that splits itself deeper the more time I spend with him. He doesn’t have a life here; not one he’d want to live.

“Your mum tells me he mouths ‘hello’ to her sometimes.”

Mum makes things up to help her cope and I want to ask Jessica whether she believes it. I want to ask her other things too, like whether she thinks I’m a bad person because I never ask about my brother. I can’t. To be absent is safety and to ask is to be present and it all hurts too much for that.

Jessica has a white scar that dips from the arch of her brow down onto the top of her right eyelid. I want to ask her about that. I leave without asking anything.
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On the drive home mum calls to see how Joe is – if there’s any news, any updates she might’ve missed. I want to ask her if she thinks Joe should’ve been allowed to die on the night of the accident. But I don’t ask her that, because then she’ll want to know what I think, and I’m not sure I can live with my answer.

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A young writer from Yorkshire, Emily has recently discovered that she actually likes creative writing, despite everything she may have previously said. She can be found on Twitter @emily__harrison, and has had work published with Ellipsis Zine, Storgy, Soft Cartel, Retreat West and Riggwelter Press to name a few. 

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