Alone in the Moongarden Brett Finlayson She lies in her hospital bed, skin orange with jaundice and the stent hanging from her hip a bile cigarette. This is not velvet darkness; this is wooden. Somewhere down the hall a door opens and a television whispers new wars. Its muffled dishonesty is a sad confession. Another is afraid to sleep, she thinks. The wet meandering of hospital slippers across the corridor, a horse’s tongue along the rosy exterior of a child’s palm. It licks towards her room as if magnetized. The morphine makes melted plastic of her memories, molding them into tiny pictures she hangs on the wall beside the machine beeping slower—slower—slower.          A man enters, his knees rattling beneath the weight of his back hunched against the smell of decades—The First World War, The Great Depression, The Second. His tuxedo, the faded hue of New England soil, is incomplete, the bowtie confined to the lonely corner of a cedar closet in backwoods Maine. His beaked nose lifts and he looks familiar, like the patient down the hall who always says hello, only thinner.          “You look so afraid,” he says, his voice paler than his lips.          “I’m so afraid,” she answers.          He nods and there is a strange comfort in his whiteness, like the sporadic shades from workday suns. She realizes there is no paleness in him, only light. “Have you seen all your children?” he asks.          “Yes, Gregory flew in from California this morning. Third time in the past month,” she says. “He’s lost weight. He’s so beautiful.”          “Good…good,” he says.          “This isn’t right, this machine, its beeping,” she says. “Should I page the doctor?”          “What doctor? They’ve all gone home to families.”          She closes her eyes to test the darkness, but the television’s laughing static is a cold pin beneath her fingernail. His reeking breath, a slow waltzing of digesting onions and cherry Jell-o, does not allow for wading up to the knees. It is like learning how to swim all over again, when her father threw her into the heavy currents of Beardsley Pond and walked away. When she felt the stiffness of a forgotten boy floating beneath the surface like an unhooked Sunny and was too afraid to answer the policeman’s questions.          “I wore this tuxedo in my wedding, sixty-seven years ago. She died eleven months later; pancreatic cancer.” He laughs. “My son brought it to me without understanding. It’s like talking to her again.” A short chuckle, sad, as if he has invited it from the Roaring Twenties and it cannot stay very long. “When we see our children now,” he muses, “we can only wave.”          She scans the pictures on the wall: Niagra Falls from the Canadian side, a pound mutt named Bootleg who bit her father, three pairs of baby shoes glazed in bronze, a fourth pair still in the box, her father washing dirt from his fingernails saying, “Bootleg ran away,” and a certain oak tree asleep beside the tire swing it once cradled, felled by a precise bolt of lightening.          “I think we can talk to each other,” she says.          “Oh yes, we can talk to each other. We have to talk to each other,” he agrees.          She closes her eyes again and the metal bar locks into place. He sits beside her, a pimply teenager with teeth too big for his mouth.          “All aboard! All aboard, you children!” yells the ride operator, a black mustache framing his call for passengers. “Going up! Going up, you children!” and the ferris wheel jolts backwards. The mechanical arm raises them smoothly into the stratosphere. Flying frogs and rusted, metal lily pads. Bowled goldfish. Oversized stuffed animals with black smiles and broom whiskers. Cotton candy, oh, so much cotton candy. Smiling, this awkward boy hands her binoculars. She looks through their shallow basin glass at the magnified lights flashing yellow into the sky like heat lightning. She thinks it would be possible to see this carnival from space, from further. “Up! Up! And up, you beautiful children!”          Below, Gregory lifts the wooden mallet above his head as if he’s yoking an ox to his biceps. He pauses. Every muscle in his neck is taught and pressing through like the cartilage in the roof of her mouth.          “Up, you gorgeous ones!”          She holds her breath as the giant hammer swings down onto the bull’s eye. A silver ball so fast it is chrome lava towards heavens. The night-bell ringing, shattering the clouds and singing one lullaby for the moon who has sung so many before.          “Up! Up, you children,” as the ferris wheel crests its highest point—“and over!”