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Light sifts through the broken bits of plastic and glass and metal. Twist, and the pattern falls apart, forming a new one. See how it looks like a snowflake? No two snowflakes are alike, did you know that? Never two the same. Snowflakes from the sky, snowflake patterns in the magic tube, no two alike.
The magic of a kaleidoscope blocks the kaleidoscope of the hospital around her. Hospitals are full of fragments, life and death in pieces, unexplained requests over the intercom, urgencies with no beginning or end visible to people trapped in the sterile waiting rooms. The little boy sitting next to her is a stranger, but not as strange as the figure of her own mother. That's not Mother sitting there, clenching a soggy Kleenex, chewing the lipstick off her bottom lip. It can't be. If that's Mother, then the wasted man in the hospital bed was Dad. His face against a harsh white pillow was too haggard, unfamiliar.
Better not to remember that. Much better to share a toy with a child. The little boy sits apart from his own fragments of family, a father who exchanges a few worried words with Mother, a slightly older brother. Pieces of two unrelated families, lives jumbled together forever by whatever patterns led each to this conjunction. Memories of the face against the pillow will always be mixed with this young stranger's face smudged with forgotten tears, lost in the wonder of a cheap cardboard-and-plastic kaleidoscope bought on impulse at the hospital gift-shop.
Around them, the patterns of the hospital shift and turn. Nurses pass, orderlies, doctors, all moving with a speed that says Purpose, but the purpose is never explained. Mother talks at the boy's father, who talks at Mother. Neither listens; the comfort is in the speaking. The brother begins to whine, wanting TV, wanting Nintendo, wanting the attention his father, busy talking at, can't supply now. She ignores them, ignores the changing patterns of the hospital, and plays with the little boy, showing him infinity trapped inside a cardboard tube.
But the patterns coalesce around a doctor who does not hurry by, a doctor in a blue hospital smock, mask pushed down and hanging loose around his neck. He confronts Mother, his face grave.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry."
And all the patterns fall apart as she realizes her father is dead.
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