Fight or flight, I knew about those options. Fight like my father, who waved his beer and shouted, his face bright red. Flight, like my mother, who left the house for long stretches of time. It turns out there’s another option: Freeze.
Early in the morning one high school summer I woke to loud wheezing from downstairs. My sister, I thought, the one with the allergies and congestive problems, the tics and the sniffs and the throat clearing. It got louder. Should I go down? But my mother is always up early, and anyway, my parents’ bedroom is on the first floor, where the sound is coming from. I picture my mother leaning over my sister, checking on her after setting up a humidifier to ease her breathing.
The wheezing gets worse, really loud now, combined with gasps for air. Is this sound even human? Could it be the dog? I hear loud footsteps, my mother is at the wall phone in the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs, the stairs that lead up to my room, and I hear her punch buttons, then punch them again, then again, then curse, then finally reach someone. I hear “ambulance” and my heart bolts in my chest. My sister is sick. My sister needs an ambulance. The breathing is louder, louder, then stops.
What is going on.
In the distance there is already a siren, getting louder.
I stay in my room. I’ll only get in the way if I go downstairs. I don’t want my parents to yell at me. I don’t want to see my sister sick. I freeze.
Out the window of my room I see the ambulance pull into the driveway. Two men hustle a gurney into our house. Noises and voices downstairs, metal bumping walls, men’s shoes against the wood floors, the blood pumping in my ears, so loud. Then quiet.
I hear them come out the front door below my window, which is open to allow the early summer air. My forearms on the windowsill, supporting my chin. The rattle of the gurney, then I have a view of my father’s red face, the rest of his body under a sheet. “This one’s a goner,” one of the men says.
Meg Senuta’s essay “Bad News 101” was a finalist in Fourth Genre’s Michael Steinberg Memorial Essay Contest in 2020. Excerpts from her memoir-in-progress How to View an Eclipse appeared in River Teeth’s “Beautiful Things,” and were selected as featured reading at Grub’s Street’s annual gala fundraiser. Her work was chosen for Tell-All Boston, a reading series sponsored by Grub Street’s Memoir Incubator program, of which she is a proud alum. Flash pieces appeared in 55 words and flashquake. She is a fiction reader for Solstice Literary Magazine. She has an MFA from Antioch College and a degree in textiles from Saterglantan, Insjon, Sweden.
Meg has participated in empathy training for first-year medical students, and has served as Patient Advocate for research grants at a major medical school. Her story was featured in the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation newsletter in August 2020. She texts, phones, postcards, and votes.
