Last Laugh

She stood at the end of her brother’s
hospital bed. “I’m not going to take care
of you any longer, Tom,” she said.
“When you’re discharged tomorrow

you’re going to a halfway house.”
She squeezed a tissue in her hand,
flattened it like a flower pressed in a bible,
dabbed her eyes, and turned

to leave—her bunting-blue overcoat
worn on that frosty January evening,
a curtain closed on years of sacrifice.
He’d been ill since childhood. His

spinster sister had given him her life
and now our hospital midwifed this
kind woman’s rebirth at fifty-five. Tom,
whom we orderlies at Denver General

called Mr. Johnson, took his sister’s averment
in silence. When I brought his dinner tray
he nodded in receipt, never meeting my eyes.
Next morning, I took Mr. Johnson’s breakfast

to his bed and found him dead. We called
a “core zero,” stretched an ambu bag
over his mouth, and pounded on his chest,
but he was long gone. It fell to Michelle,

the charge nurse, and me to take him
to the morgue. His body lay on the gurney
between us. “One less bell to answer,” we
softly sang, “One less man to clean up after.”



Charlie Brice is a retired psychoanalyst and is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016), Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), and An Accident of Blood (2019), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net anthology and twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, The Main Street Rag, Chiron Review, I-70 Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and elsewhere.