ANOTHER EPISODE
The risotto was still on the floor.
I noticed it from the doorway after I got him to his room — the thick orange mess of it spread across the hardwood in a wide arc from the point of impact, the pot on its side against the baseboard, the wooden spoon somewhere under the kitchen table. I had walked past it to get him down the corridor, and I hadn't looked at it. Now, standing in the doorway of his room with him on the bed, I was thinking about it in the disconnected way you think about peripheral things when the central thing is still being managed.
The risotto could wait.
He couldn't.
He was on the bed on his side.
Not curled — he didn't curl, even in this state he maintained a certain physical dignity, the body holding itself with a straightness that the mind had tem
