OCR Text |
Show 20 Blue Blanket I am awake suddenly. The room is dusk and I immediately understand that it is night. There are no windows in this intensive care unit and time is reckoned only by the dimming and refreshing of hallway lights. My body craves a true dusk. Echoed laughter is bouncing down the hallway into my room but not before it leaps on and over the top of a blue thing I suddenly notice parked in front of my doorway. The nurses are passing the long night in each other's good company and I do not disparage them their good humor or even their macabre humor but my eyes are night eyes and I can read "Turner's Mortuary" stenciled in gold letters onto the fuzzy blue blanket draped over the gurney parked in front of my doorway and I can see the points which are the feet at one end of the gurney and the roundness that is the head at the other end and I do not understand why they have left a dead body parked in front of my doorway in the middle of the night. I cannot move. It is not because I do not wish to move or even because I am frozen in some sort of paranoia at having a dead body parked in front of my door. I cannot move because my body simply cannot move. There is a technical reason why I have flipped from being absolutely stiff to totally flaccid, I am sure. That very good technical reason is unknown as yet, but there is a very good technical reason why I cannot now move. I am sure. |