Cemetery Lake by Paul Cleave

survives a plane crash is considered lucky. Is he considered lucky to have even been on that flight? Or unlucky?
    Does the bad luck of being seated on a doomed flight cancel out the good luck of surviving? I don’t get it that people are lucky to have lost only an arm.
    My wife was lucky. That’s what people say. An inch here or
    a second or two there, and things would have been different.
    I would have ended up burying her, and the flowers I keep buying would be going to a grave. Inches. Seconds. Luck. Good luck for her. Good luck for all. It doesn’t add up. She wasn’t lucky. Not at all. Wasn’t lucky when the car ploughed into her; wasn’t lucky that her head hit the footpath at forty kilometres an hour and not fifty. Wasn’t lucky when her legs were shattered, her ribs broken.
    Lucky to have lived, yes, but not lucky.
    The care home is out of the city where suburbia kicks in and
    city noise dies away. It covers five hectares of land, widi grounds scenic enough to be used for a wedding. The buildings are forty years old, grey brick with the occasional flare of polished oak windowsill — a combination of bad ideas or perhaps good ideas that didn’t work. The driveway is long and shaded by giant trees that flourish in the summer and look like skeletons in the winter.
    I pull up outside the main office and for a few seconds try to imagine that this world hasn’t gone mad.
    The main doors are heavy and made from oak, as if to stop the
    weak from leaving or tempt the grieving to turn away. The nurse behind the reception desk smiles at me. Her dark red hair matches the sunset in the painting behind her.
    ‘Hi, Theo. What have you done with the weather?’
    I fake a smile of my own, the type anybody with social skills
    would apply when the weather suddenly becomes the topic of
    conversation. ‘Tomorrow I’m organising sun. God owes me a
    favour.’
    She nods, maybe agreeing that yes He does. ‘Flowers for me
    this time?’ she asks, like she always does.
    The nurses and doctors are always nice, always friendly, always professional, their questions and pleasantries always cliched. The alternative is unthinkable. You’d ask how their day was going and they would tell you the truth and you’d never come back.
    ‘Next time,’ I say, which is what I say every time. ‘How is
    she?’
    ‘She’s doing fine, Theo. But what about you? Is that you I saw on the news?’
    “Yeah, it’s been one of those crazy days.’ A fairly accurate
    summation, I feel.
    She nods. ‘Every day this city shows us a little more how things don’t make sense.’
    ‘Sometimes I think Christchurch is broken,’ I say, ‘and nobody is ever going to fix it.’
    I walk down the corridor, passing empty seats and closed
    doors and a nurses’ station that looks empty but most likely isn’t.
    The entire floor is speckled green linoleum, the sort that is easy to clean blood and vomit and shit off and will last two hundred years. The day is cold but the air in here is comfortable. It’s always comfortable, and so it ought to be. Some of the people in care here don’t know how to complain, and some who do know simply don’t have the ability any more. There are more paintings with water and sunsets, peaceful scenes that are perhaps supposed to help calm the residents here before they move on from this
    world and into the next. There are pots full of artificial plants.
    And there are decorations for the people who come here who are on the verge of losing it.
    I climb a flight of stairs, and halfway down another corridor
    I stop at Bridget’s room. The door is open. She is sitting by the window, looking out at the misty rain and the trees and the lack of good weather that the nurses mention every time I arrive. She seems interested in all of it. I don’t know whether she hears me come in. I close the door behind me. She keeps staring outside.
    ‘Hey babe, I’ve missed you,’ I say, but she doesn’t answer. I take yesterday’s flowers out