Strange Vigil

Description

Taking its title from Whitman’s vigil, kept through the night in a field beside a dying soldier, Scott Frey’s Strange Vigil spans the three years of his daughter’s life, shortened by a brain injury received during her birth and complicated by intensive medical needs. With short prose pieces, lyric essays, and praise poems for G-tubes, nurses, and coworkers, this chapbook invites readers into a wakeful circle of suffering and small heroic gestures of care. Grief and memory echo in the concourse din amid hurried hospital exits and final flights, funerals and all-school assemblies, football games and horror movies, pushing into fraught mixtures of loss and laughter and, ultimately, the wonders that are breath and presence.

Plot Spoiler

My wife’s screams behind the bedroom door thicken like blood in a pot. Spots fill my vision like bile. Our five-month-old doesn’t sleep more than half an hour, night or day. We’ve gone months like this. Sometimes she cries; sometimes she screams. Sometimes she sits wide-eyed in my arms, which is why I stay up all night with her and watch horror movies. Plot spoiler: she’s having small seizures but we don’t know it. Friends recommend the one where the mother moves into a haunted orphanage, the one where the girl is a witch who murders her family, the one where the girl with my daughter’s name gets decapitated. The cinematography’s brilliant when spirits reanimate her body.
That’s another plot spoiler. I can’t stop writing them. The psychopath is already in the house, hiding in the basement. The twisted brother will carve the hero into a hideous sculpture. It reanimates something in me that died when they told us of her mangled brain. The two of us are bonding over the young woman drenched in her friend’s blood, pausing at the cornfield’s edge. Framed against a pale farmhouse, tortured screams echoing in the night, she takes a deep breath. The chainsaw squeals.