OCR Text |
Show fallen apart. At those moments he finds it unfathomable that I cannot shine the flashlight where he needs it. In the hospital I become a different person, a wounded body, a sick girl. Negotiating my way through the maze of double vision has exhausted me. I sleep a lot. In the bed next to me rests a girl, a few years older, in a full body cast, head to foot. They have left a perfectly round hole at her belly, like a hole in a sheet of ice, perhaps a place for her skin to breath. For entire afternoons her mother rubs softly on her stomach, drawing her fingers in increasingly smaller circles, following an invisible vortex to her center. The girl in the cast cannot turn her head to look at me, but I know she knows I watch her. The nurses bring her meals that she can drink through a very long straw. I leave my food untouched. When my mother comes to visit, she usually says hi to the girl in the cast, her eyes gazing for long moments in her direction. I cannot tell if she is relieved my body is not broken or if she wishes my injury could be healed as easily as setting a bone. Sometimes while my mother is with me, I wiggle my toes and run my hands back and forth under the stiff white sheet, moving to make up for the girl who is as still as death. Other times I wrap the sheet tight around my legs and imagine what it feels like to be encased in plaster. I keep my head facing forward and only move my eyes. After a few minutes of this, though, I grow bored and quickly unwind the sheet. No one signs her cast; it remains blank like a beach after the tide. At night, long after my mother has left and the nurses' station is quiet, I cry in the darkness. Having overheard the doctor say that the very worst thing you can do after a 77 |