Elsie sat at the table in the dining room where she was assailed by Polly, the manager of the nursing home where we lived. “You didn’t finish your beets,” Polly said. She was in her thirties, with hair of straw and a face lined beyond her years.

“I don’t want them,” Elsie said.

“But they’re so good,” Polly said, rubbing her stomach as if proof of their goodness.

“I said I don’t want them.”

“You must eat, dear, to keep up your strength.” Polly leaned in, near Elsie’s face, as if a familiar, family, an old friend, when she was none of the above.

“I don’t care,” Elsie said, and promptly overturned the saucer of beets. The juice ran down the table and dripped onto the threadbare carpet beneath.

Polly stared at the juice like it was her own blood escaping. “Now look at what you’ve done. You’re a very mean old woman.”

“Someday you’ll sit in this chair and do the same thing,” Elsie said. She rested her chin on her elbow. I could see that her eyes were welling up but she fought back the tears. The latter could lead to new marks on your chart, a visit from the consulting psychiatrist, a rash of new pills to settle you down.

“No, I will behave,” Polly said, and steamed off to locate the housekeeper to rid her eyes of this mess.

Meanwhile Elsie left the table as it was and headed toward her unit in the facility, hers right across from mine, patio to patio.

I followed her a while, then spoke up. “You were right, back there.”

“I was what?” she said, stopping, grabbing the rail on the wall to make it easier to turn around and see me.

“Polly shouldn’t have pressured you to eat something you don’t want to eat.”

“Polly’s condescending and treats us like fourth graders,” she said.

“She is,” I said, but Elsie had already turned to go forward again, and did so apace.

I continued to follow, not saying anything, not seeking to catch her, but simply to reach my own unit where I could breathe free of the fumes of mashed potatoes, of human feet, of sweat and damp clothes and the candlewax scent of death that permeated the papered walls. I found my way to the bathroom, undressed slowly, carefully, like peeling off a bandage from a moist wound, and entered the shower where the water broke against me.

And so it began: the foot damaged by stones, cut open by shards, the bitter red and raw and ragged skin of it, as it sought to find its former steadiness but couldn’t. It flexed, true, it bent a bit but then returned to sad shapes: hammer toes and gout swelled and bent and corrupted it. This was not the same sweet foot dipped in ink, sole pressed to paper for posterity, hung in a frame on my mother’s mantel. This was the foot of my age, seventy-seven years gone. It defined the geography of the rest of my body, its onset, its outset, its setbacks and its settlings.

I turned off the water after a time, stepped down from the footstool by the shower and nearly slipped on the wet and soapy floor. The facility’s nurse had long left for the day and still I tried to do things she had placed off-limits to me. Reduced mobility, she said. Reduced stability as well. It was my tottering weight, my long bones, my shaking hands, that threatened to do me in, even as I clung to the grab bars and used all the forces in my body to steady myself.

My body: mottled and hairless, the skin nearly a translucent white. You could see the veins beneath it, the blood beating its final hours away like Poe’s pendulum at work. A long laceration filled my chest from where the surgeon opened me and set my heart to beating properly again. There were days when I almost wished he hadn’t.

I flattened my hands against the wall and with slow steps made my way to the door, then exited the bath entirely. The heat was on outside it, like a volley of cannon fire against my skin. I rubbed myself with the towel, coarse contact of fibers on skin that bruised easily, on genitals long unused. I dropped the towel when done on a pile of laundry on the floor near the vent.

It felt strange to stand so naked there, as if revisiting my birth. It was with this love, this gentleness, this guidance, that I took my naked body in the here-and-now and clothed it with a simple robe and slippers. I pressed my face into the glass of the patio door and watched my breath turn into steam, as if it alone could power a ship along the mighty Mississippi. I am still breathing, damn you, I told the world. And the world listened, and nodded, and moved in its infinite circle, aware of me and distant from me just the same.

Beyond the glass lived Elsie, only slightly older than me but seemingly just as wounded by the betrayal of her body. I could not speak to the exact wounds of it, for I had never seen it naked, but she spoke of bouts with shingles, blistering her skin, and arthritis, which turned the joints to knots. Her cheek was bruised from a fall, reaching for a slice of toast, a simple innocent gesture that once would have been completed without a second thought but now contained great peril. Elsie and I sometimes talked through our patio doors, opening them to invite the heat of summer sun, and we struggled for each word, the mind slowing some with age, or rather, the processing of language from brain to tongue. The mind continued its work unimpeded.

She arrived at her patio door and opened it with the requisite whoosh. Her hair was pure white like a mountain cap, her eyes as blue as a pristine stream from back in my youth. The bruises were healing, going from purple to a fading yellow, unless my eyes played tricks on me. In another time, long past, we might have become lovers, and perhaps we still could. It was hard to imagine either of undressing without some palpable fear around it, that the infirmities we carried in our bodies would turn against us. Then again, to touch, to hold, to embrace, may have healed much of that infirmity, or at least reduced its influence on us.

There were rules to the facility where we lived, and among them was that we remained sexless. Never stated explicitly, that rule existed in the hours that we must close our doors and at least make an effort at sleep, that we must not have company in or past those hours. Darkness outside belonged to them. They closed our doors, our eyes, and expected us not to object. But I strenuously did. I stayed awake in the shadows at night and scribbled unhappy words down, another act that confounded our guardians. We were to only write kind things, pretty things, that we could share with them and neighbors, as well as our relatives, if any remained to us. Otherwise we were labeled as dark or negative or problematic.

I elected to be a problem. Though I trembled and faltered in my steps, I dared to speak. “What if,” I started, faltering a second as I sought the right words, then continuing, “we do more than just say hello tonight?”

“And what might that be?” She replied, a gust of laughter emerging from her, deep from within her, as if she had been holding in that sound for years as residual from her youth, thinking that she might never laugh so loudly and freely again.

I leaned over the rail that separated our patios. “This,” I said. I closed my eyes and offered her my lips, hesitating the way one might over the breath of a flower, unsure what scent might arise, or what reaction to it.

Her reaction was this: she gave me her lips in return.

It was a kiss that lasted mere seconds but was rejuvenating. I couldn’t speak for her, and wouldn’t have dreamed of doing so, but for me I could feel my skin grow warm with the kiss, a sensation like the sun opening its golden eye inside the center of my body. I felt my pulse race, the gallop of horses on an oval track heading toward victory over time and elements that sought to slow them.

The kiss was a start. I opened my eyes and Elsie remained blushing there. “More please,” she said, a smile like the sweet buds of May blooming in her face.

So we kissed again, this time slowly, less surface and more depth, noting the moisture of her lips, the taste of mint behind it from her mouth. I placed a hand to her shoulder as if to steady myself. She placed her hand over mine there. And even though it wasn’t the depths of lovemaking we once knew as younger people, there was union and fusion there, a hunger of sorts lurking behind it, a desire to break the bonds of loneliness assumed for us by our guardians and return our bodies to a time of pure autonomy. I owned my body, she owned hers, and we now bound them together in an act of defiance and independence and, yes, even love.

– Michael Fontana