Pill-White Light by Kip Knott

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Pill-White Light
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    This isn’t the first sleepless night Doug has snuck out of the house and into the darkness, but he knows it is the last night. After more than forty years in the same house, he’s taught the front door to merely whisper whenever he opens it and to say nothing at all when he pulls it closed so as not to awaken Aiden asleep in their bedroom, someone for whom “insomnia” is a made-up word. When Doug stops to catch his breath beneath the streetlight little more than a block away, he notices how the shape and darkness of his shadow looks like a negative of the bright shadow the doctor had circled on the X-ray last week when she gave him and Aiden the news, an uncertain timeline, and a hushed apology. 
    Before they left the doctor’s office, Doug made sure to request the strongest painkillers to see him through, even though he had no intention at all of seeing anything through to an end he couldn’t mark definitively on his calendar. And tonight, just after Aiden had fallen asleep, he made sure to count the pills out one by one until they added up to a full week’s worth, and to pour enough scotch to wash them down one-by-one until his palm was empty. 
     Doug thought when he left the house that he could make it to the river only three blocks away, but already he finds his breath leaving too quickly. The hum of the river in the distance reminds him of the sound of the dishwasher in their kitchen that he sometimes turned on and slept next to when a late-night walk would not cure his sleeplessness. The water swishing inside the machine called to mind the gentle waves of Buckeye Lake sloshing against the hull of his father’s skiff during the pre-dawn fishing trips they took when he was a boy. He remembers how quickly he would fall asleep on the way to their favorite fishing hole and how his father’s voice as he recited the names of constellations would drift away like the light of the stars themselves in the growing glow of sunrise. 
     Those were the good days before cancer brittled his father’s bones to the point where his legs could no longer hold him upright. It took his father three years to die. Three years for Doug to witness the disease whittle his father from the oak tree he had always perceived him to be, down to nothing more than a twig that could be snapped in two across his adolescent knee. And three years for Doug to witness his mother whittle herself away by refusing to eat anything more than his father could manage to eat, until all that was left of her was the weight of her bones that pulled her down to the bottom of the lake.
     And now, weakened by his own disease, Doug slumps in the pill-white circle of the streetlight that halos his whole body as he tries to find the strength to make it to the river. He looks up through the light and wishes he could see the star he named for his father last year on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, and the star Aiden named for him last month when he turned seventy. As Doug closes his eyes against the brightness of the light, he knows exactly the kind of ache Aiden will begin to bear tomorrow. He also knows that the three-word note he left next to Aiden’s favorite coffee cup doesn’t say enough even though it says everything.

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Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared in Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His most recent book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott.



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