Flip the switch.

(Don’t flip the switch.)

The voices follow her everywhere. She hears them in her apartment, on the subway, in the elevator. They’re a constant undercurrent whenever she listens to music.

A subliminal message of indecision.

Turn it off. Turn everything off.

(No. Leave it on. Let things happen as they will.)

It’s been a week, and then two, and she still can’t decide, and the voices – the whispers of her own subconscious – grow louder, more persistent.

Ordinary switches – lights, power strips, her computer – seem to be urging her toward a greater choice.

The simple act of turning off a light is exhausting.

Cut the power.

(Keep the power on.)

She walks through the rain, holding the pink umbrella she’s has since childhood, imagining switches everywhere. On car doors, on mail boxes, on the sides of buildings.

Finally, her soggy feet carry her inside the tall building, to the private room at the end of the hall on the seventeenth floor.

“Any change?”

The attendant in lavender scrubs shakes his head. “No; I’m sorry.”

She sits on the side of the bed, staring at the monitors, listening to the steady beeping and the machine driven intake and outflow of air.

“Can you call the doctor, please?”

The attendant nods once and disappears.

She lifts the still-warm, wrinkled hand of the man who has been her lifelong constant, providing her with a pink tool set, a Fisher-Price car, petite garden tools so she could work along-side him.

“Pop-pop?” She uses her childhood nicknamefor him. “I know you never wanted this. I’m sorry. I should have listened.”

Her tears wet his skin, roll into the crevices of hands that could braid hair or hang a tire swing with equal finesse.

“I found my old fishing pole in the garage. You taught me how to bait my own hook, and how to stun the fish we caught. I hope… I hope there’s fishing in heaven.”

She knows he can’t hear her words. She understands that there’s no longer any THERE, there.

But she keeps on talking.

The attendant returns with the doctor in tow.

“It’s time,” she tells the woman in a lab coat over a blue suit. “Let him go.”

It’s a solemn moment and yet it’s also mundane. The doctor flips a switch.

Silence falls.

In zero point three kilometers make an upward turn onto Higher Sixth Avenue.

“Mommy, is it true that in the olden days, cars could only go left or right and not up or down?”

“Yes. I remember when I was your age, taking long drives to the beach, and being stuck in bridge traffic for hours.”

“What’s bridge traffic? Does it have to do with that weird card game Gramma and Grampa play?”

“Card ga – oh! No! They play Canasta.”

“Canasta sounds ca-nasty.”

“It’s really not, sweetie. It’s just a card game.”

“Oh.” The child took a beat. “You were going to ‘splain me about bridge traffic.”

“EXplain,” her mother said. “And yes, I will. When I was a little girl, the only way to cross the river to the road that ran along-side the sea wall was to go over a bridge. That’s a road that’s suspended above water.”

“I KNOW what a bridge is. “

“Well, this wasn’t just any bridge, it was a draw bridge.”

“So, there was traffic because everyone stopped to draw the bridge?”

“A draw bridge has a section that gets lifted up when a large boat has to go up or down the river. Some boats had masts that were too tall to go under the bridge when it was down. So they’d crank up the center, and traffic would stop and wait.”

“That doesn’t sound ‘ficient.”

“Efficient, sweetie, and no, it wasn’t. But we didn’t have cars that could go up, or Aerial Highways that went to the Tiers, so we had to wait.”

“I don’t think I’d like that.”

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad. We didn’t have guidance systems and TotalGPS like we do now, so sometimes we could turn down – “

“But you said you couldn’t GO up or down!”

“You’re right. We could turn ONTO a street we weren’t familiar with, and just see where it took us.”

“You mean, you could dev’ate from your set Travel Plan?” The little girl’s voice was full of wonder.

“Deviate. And we didn’t file travel plans. We just went wherever the road might take us.”

“And you weren’t afraid?”

“No… it was wonderful. Any trip could become an adventure. Sometimes we’d find parks or playgrounds or just neighborhoods with cute houses we didn’t know existed.”

“Do you miss it?”

“Very much. I wish you could experience it, sweetie. Life was so much more relaxed.”

“Even the bridge traffic?”

In one point three kilometers turn Down, then merge into the exit flow for Mid-level Forty-fifth Street.

“Yes. Even that.”