Next Room.

Next Room. Next Room She called it a hate-fuck, the young woman dying in the next room. We would listen to her when she would feel well enough to come out and tell us stories of her life with Cystic Fibrosis. Gordie thought she was almost too pretty to die that summer. She told us of her hate when she was a child, for those who would not play with her, and for those who would stay away from her because she was going to be dead in a few years. And how when she was older she would try to fuck them so they would feel someone who was going to die. She started with the teenaged boys she did not like, then men in their twenties and thirties, then much older men, then her girl classmates. She was twenty two (but seemed younger). She said she had done a cabbie before going into the hospital, an "older foreign man, I could not hate." She would not talk much of her ex-boyfriend who left her for a healthy girl. She seemed to have less hate over the days she kept getting worse. Her stories stopped. One morning she was not there. She would say, "I was always alone. One day you will be alone." Ewan Whyte is a writer and translator. His short stories, poetry,translations, reviews and essays have been published in literaryjournals and magazines. His translation of the poetry of Catullus waspublished in 2004. He recently completed a book of poetry and isfinishing a memoir about his early life in extreme religious cults inthe U.S. and Canada. He is currently rereading The Road to Oxiana byRobert Byron and the collected poetry of Allen Tate.