Apnea

by Laura Adamczyk

They are all of them adults, but even so they will bring stuffed animals, pillows shaped like hearts, and scraps of blanket with satin borders hanging on by threads. The technician will, one at a time, hook them up, turn out the lights, and through a Plexiglas window watch them sleep. It is dark but for the blue from a streetlamp outside, the tiny lights of the polysomnograph beside the bed, electrodes running out like arteries from their chests and forearms. A different man or woman each night but the same restless sleep; they thrash and shift over the machine wires. He makes sure they stay connected.

Diagnosis

They are inevitably all diagnosed with the same condition. Simply, that while asleep, they stop breathing. In doing so, their bodies wake them. It happens dozens of times per night, though they do not remember most awakenings, if any.

Their bed partners tell them they snore. How the snoring churns, churns louder, and then seems to catch. A popping, struggling motor. A piece of string pulled smoothly from a knot, then stopping, knotting again. The catching is the awakening and the awakening is the apnea and this is the diagnosis.

On Not Seeing Whales

by Nikki Schulak

My mother wanted to see a whale before she died. In a boat off Montauk, Long Island, we puked over the side railings for the entire four-hour tour. No whales. We went on an Alaskan cruise—absolutely guaranteed to see whales—but we only saw harbor seals and a few scattered eagles. Then my mother died, without seeing her whale, which left me bitter.

Whales. They’re so evasive with their beady little eyes. They sing and get all this attention. Every time one of them is stranded on a beach, there’s another story in the press. Please.

For my mother’s honor, however, I’ve continued to look for whales. I’ve even made a proclamation: I will see a whale before I die! At first, I didn’t try very hard. Swimming with dolphins in the Florida Keys didn’t count. The water was murky, and our time with them was choreographed and trite. You could tell they didn’t care about the money we’d spent. But when we moved to the West Coast and found everybody hiking around in vintage sportswear drinking kombucha, casually talking about whale sightings, I knew that someday soon I would be able to die fulfilled.

A Suspicion

by Ricardo Pau-Llosa

of ailment breeds
a new season in flesh.
As if snow were suddenly
caking subtropical thatch roofs,
or the desert sogged up
with bitter rain. Something
hope wishes to keep nameless
might well be welling up
in what now seems a body
with an alien will,
a yearning to surrender
despite the call to arms,
to fold when the cards sirened
ambition. And one sits
through the embroidered
language of comfort
tearing the Latinate of science,
hoping there is no name
for what, therefore,
cannot threaten.