Assistant Editor Lisa Low: At the beginning of Ulrica Hume’s “Scales,” a father and daughter drive together to a hospital the father believes is a jazz club. Through the juxtaposition of settings, along with white space after most lines, Hume evokes a hospital scene that’s alternately stark and nostalgic, filled with both jazz favorites and “intolerable” Muzak. Here in this layered space, we’re reminded of the slipperiness of loss and how jazz—as entertainment, as art—can intensify and ease the experience of grief.
To hear Ulrica read her story, click here:
Scales
Say, can you give me a ride to the jazz club? he asks. This is because he has been arrested, now finds himself in jail, or in the rehab center because he has broken a hip. He is almost ninety and thinks you live in the TV now.
Sure, you can give him a ride to the jazz club. So you travel together in darkness to a hospital some distance away.
You wheel him down a long hallway to a little room filled with sanitized spirits.
Are you hungry? you ask.
He nods that he is. A wan smile.
Maybe there’s something in the cafeteria, you say. That is, if it’s open this late.
We must weigh him now, a nurse interrupts.
Soft shuffle of her shoes, the lights are dimmed.
Jazz club.
Polka Dots and Moonbeams.
Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.
You Don’t Know What Love Is.
The body sling is expertly maneuvered under him.
Where are the drinks, the fancy girls? asks the father, who appears to be mostly bones.
Is the patient alert?
Is he agitated, resistant, or combative?
Place the protesting father in the torture device.
If the sling is too large, the father may slip out. This can cause injury, death, loss of time spent at the jazz club.
Check the hook, the chains, the many straps.
At last he is in the humiliating cradle. He bears it well, or has no choice.
The Muzak is intolerable and there are forms to fill out while your father is being raised overhead.
There he is! His wild expression like a raptor’s. He is fearless, not smiling.
Remember to keep the father at a safe angle.
Nothing is safe.
He does not know where he is.
Do you want a cracker? Some juice?
I’m Just a Lucky So-and-So.
Take the A Train.
Ensure the sling is balanced as you guide him through the air.
He is flying away from you.
Do not let the sling bar hit the patient.
Detach the sling.
Roll the father back into the world, where he will not stay for long.
In ancient Egypt the heart of the dead was weighed on a scale against the feather of truth.
Let the father go.
Ulrica Hume is the author of the spiritual mystery novel An Uncertain Age (Blue Circle Press, 2011) and House of Miracles (Blue Circle Press 2013), a collection of stories, one of which was selected by PEN and broadcast on NPR. Her flash pieces appear online (Barren, Lunate, Short Édition, etc.) and in anthologies.
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Loved “This can cause injury, death, loss of time spent at the jazz club.”