O:JA&L Flash Nonfiction
Vignette
N. Graham
Thanksgiving, Florida, 2022
His body, as he sees it, has been returned to the way it used to be. In the high-rise apartment we’ve rented down here for two weeks pre- to post-op, he dozes, dreams movies, follows the schedule of meds, eats what I bring.
Every day I go out to wander in the heat along the river that cleaves Fort Lauderdale. Here’s a pavilion where unhoused people hang out while people of means zip by on Segways. Here’s a neighborhood of cottages blocked from river access by gates and spiked fences. Here’s a park the width of a car wash, with one bench overlooking the tidal estuary. Moored along the upscale promenade known as Riverwalk, yachts so white they’re an eyesore fly MAGA flags. A motorized tiki hut putters upriver, trailing laughter. Leaning against a cart jammed with everything he owns in the world, a man plugs his phone into a streetlight by the water. To return to the high-rise, across the drawbridge that spans the river, I pass this man and head up a switchback ramp, halfway to the top of which I hear a sound I might ignore even as it dawns on me that it’s the thud of a body hitting pavement from a height.
When he hit puberty and his body changed, he mourned his childhood, and I felt that loss on his behalf, but I didn’t fully get it, that transition and that grief. Curiosity is the quality most likely to have saved me moments of failing people I love.
Halfway down the ramp, I peer over the railing to the spot where I stood not two minutes ago, where now splays a prone figure six feet from the phone-charging man, who moves toward him along with several volunteer passersby. Must have come off the bridge, fell or jumped.
When I call 911, dispatch sends messages through me to the cluster of helpers: Put him on his back. But they already have. Blue eyes stare toward the bridge he dropped from to the sidewalk, maybe fifty feet. His color fades, then a new horror blossoms, the bruising from the fall.
He bleeds from his mouth, so the bystander-first-responders turn him on his side. My hands take an ankle. His paunch swells and trembles beneath the hiked shirt, once the belly of a baby, there like a double exposure. A phalanx of strangers’ hands gently rolls him. Blood pools on the bricks under his head but his mouth, the roof of it inside—why roof not ceiling?—is pale gray-pink. A cop announcing himself as Sergeant Diaz begins CPR, breaking a few ribs so loudly that someone to my right says, “Ooh, he’s going hard.”
EMTs relieve Diaz. Twenty feet away, people of good cheer lunch at an outdoor café. “I’m a doctor,” says a new passerby, but the paramedics are already fixing the chest compressor to the unresponsive body for the trip to the hospital. There’s reason in their perseverance. When my brother had a heart attack in a shopping mall three years ago, someone called security, and they called paramedics, and all of them in turn pumped his chest for forty minutes, hitting him with the defibrillator thirteen times. Apparently, he was dead, but imperceptibly, he remained revivable, and miraculously, he lived.
But there will be no miracle today. Who failed this jumper apart from all of us? The bystanders move on. Diaz wants to question the owner of the now-charged phone, who packing up his cart, but he shakes his head.
You wouldn’t talk to the cop, I say.
Absolutely not. He pauses. That was the second time I’ve seen someone take their life, he says. The other asked me for a cigarette, walked back toward the hospital she just came out of, and minutes later jumped from the seventh floor.
This muggy, bifurcated state, run by one of the most hostile governors in the country—reelected in a landslide—is also home to one of the most experienced surgeons in the procedure that brought me here with a person I can’t bear the thought being unsafe. There’s still blood on the sidewalk and a person needs more than a shopping cart and a phone to survive.
Got people to go to? No. Shelter? They kick you out after a few days. Where will you be tonight? The streets. Alone? I’ll be all right.
About the writer:
Nancy O. Graham’s (she/they) practices range from film/theatre performance to writing and image making. Short stories: Pindeldyboz, The Café Irreal. Somniloquies—poems based on sleeptalk—have been published in Eratio, Invisible Cities, BlazeVOX, and in the books Listening in Dreams and InFiltration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley. Recent theatre and film, under the name Noa Graham: House of Telescopes (Off Broadway), Indecent at Playhouse on Park (winner of Conn. Critics Circle Award for Best Ensemble, 2023). Film shorts: Elegy for a Glacier (2023, Amazon) and You Know Where to Find Me (2023, Vimeo).
Image: At the Fountain of Salmakis (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2025. Public domain via MidJourney AI.
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