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Show severe head injury is to allow the person to sleep, I am scared to drift off I worry that I will not wake up, that I am still in danger, that I will end once again, while the girl in the cast learns to walk, her body bound by plaster no longer and her skin tingling at the touch of the sun or cotton or the bubbles in her bath, and my brothers become old enough to visit the children's ward in the hospital, although there will no longer be reason to, and my parents grieve for the death of their daughter but eventually return to tending the garden, picking up the groceries, and reading the morning paper, while the babysitter spends her days working in a tiny booth in a parking garage and wondering how Alexis will ever work things out on Dynasty. Writing now of my fall, I think of other falls, moments where we dropped from trees, from couches, from the air; how easy it was to slip. Some years after the hospital, my parents would elect to fall on purpose. The summer after eighth grade, my family drove across the country on our way to live once again in Virginia. We stopped, as we always did, in Cozad, Nebraska to see family. My Aunt Donna and her then-husband Steve had a sky diving business and convinced my parents and my Aunt Sondra to try it. For several days, they practiced landing in the living room where all the furniture had been moved to one side. Squatting atop the kitchen chairs, the three of them would leap the foot and a half to the ground, rolling onto their sides as if they had been shot. Landing, my aunt told them, is where most sky diving injuries occurred. Everyone worries about the parachute opening, she went on to say, but you what you really need to focus on is the ground. My brothers and I practiced with them, the entire family falling from kitchen 78 |