Flick

Zachary Ostraff

I can’t stop thinking about the flick. I can’t stop seeing the way the contact pod flipped, through the air to land in her suitcase, haphazard but not. Wearing a violet velvet robe that zipped from top to bottom, my aunt shuffled back and forth from her room to the living room. At fifty-six her back was so bent from premature aging that she moved at a right angle. Her arms hung at her side, too heavy to hold up. An overnight bag lay on the couch. While I waited to drive her to the hospital, she filled the bag, little by little: pills, clothes, the masking tape she used to plaster her dark curly hair to her forehead—so it wouldn’t get mussed up while she slept—her bathroom bag for the morning. These deliberately slow movements from room to room, object to object, were as precise as the folk dances she used to perform as a younger woman. Shuffling across the room, her frame teetering left then right, to a Ziploc baggie full of disposable contacts, she reached in, pulled one out, and tossed it into the suitcase with that flick of her wrist. It was the kind of flick that spoke of tiredness, practice, and inevitability. No complaints—who even knew what it was all for anymore anyways—this was just one more visit to the hospital, one more study, one more night’s sleep away.

Zachary Ostraff received his MFA in creative writing from the Inland Northwest Center for Writers at Eastern Washington University (2016). He has work in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, High Desert Journal, Longridge Review, Hippocampus Magazine, and more.  He is currently a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University. You can follow him on Twitter @ostraffz or view his joint website with his artist partner, Elise, at ostraffworks.com.