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The Hands

August 15, 2011 at 11:35 pm (Short Stories)

Walking into the room she can hear a child happily babbling in the hall. The sounds seems out of place in this institution. Most of what she hears are hushed whispers and quiet whimpers, the sounds of hearts breaking and lives ending. The bubble of life that floats her way through the open door seems foreign and unwelcome and yet it is like the smell of flowers at a funeral; something happy amidst the gloom. It lights on her for a second leaving a warm golden glow in her heart and then, as the door shuts, it is gone.

There at the end of the row is a woman whose face she has known since birth. The very woman that hung the moon and lit the stars. So frail, so pale, so very lifeless even though she breathes. The spark has left her red hair making it a pale orange against the pillow it lay upon. The fire has left her eyes making them watery pools of despair behind rose tinted glasses. The blush of life has left her skin making it a pasty white flecked with brown kisses of the sun. There was something in her voice that is now gone leaving it resigned and meek. This once great woman is now just a shell and they both know.

The younger one approaches the elder calling her Grannie. A word only she has ever used, a word with meaning only to them. It is so much more than a title, so much more than a place held on the family tree. It is their love, their bond, put into a single word, two syllables; one for each of them. She places her hand on Grannie and a tear falls from her eye, she’s not much for crying but with this she cannot help herself. To her right is a machine that is attached to Grannie. It’s hard plastic tube is jammed in Grannie’s left arm and Grannie’s blood flows through it. She tries to ignore it but the whirring it makes demands attention. The blood goes in the machine whirls around and is returned to Grannie’s body by another tube. The scrubber, that is how she will always think of it.

She is standing by shear will power, she lost her strength long before that door closed. Standing there with one hand on Grannie and the other at her own throat rubbing the pendant from her necklace for some sort of solace. She feels the breathing of Grannie, slow and shallow, beneath her out-stretched hand. Her breathing is far from slow, it is fast and short matching the speed of her heart beat. She almost wishes she had not entered the room at all.

The white walls seem to close in on her squeezing the very life out of her. The row of beds seems to go on forever and blur in the distance. The whispers and whimpers fill her head until they are like sirens blaring out, threatening the very ears that capture their sound. The room becomes confusion, a prison of misery that claims her very heart. She feels it will swallow her whole and then she feels a hand on hers.

The long, thin fingers caress her hand and she looks at them and sees Moonstone. A ring she is so familiar with that it brings her back from her nightmarish situation. Those hands, the very ones that hung the moon and lit the stars, they are holding her hand now. She knows every line, every sun kiss and they bring tears to her eyes again. One patch on the wrist of Grannie is soft and smooth and pale as it has always been. It is that spot she kisses now, the very spot she sat and stroked as a child, the one spot Grannie always hated and she always loved. The skin is like silk under her lips, cold and soft.

She looks into Grannie’s eyes and they smile a knowing smile, the final smile. They both know, they both agree and they both surrender. Through tears she says her goodbye and conveys her love one last time. There is nothing more to be said, there is nothing more to say and there is nothing more to know. She finds her legs and moves them one in front of the other never looking back. She opens the door and lets life back into the room through the playful babbling of the child in the hall. She stops at the door, holding it open, to regain her composure and dry her eyes. Stepping into the hall she smiles at the child that throws its arms out to her calling her Mommy. She takes it in her hands, the hands that hung the moon and lit the stars, and they walk down the hall together.

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The Room

August 15, 2011 at 6:10 pm (Short Stories)

No comfort is to be found in this room tonight. This is the room for being alone, the room for pain and fear. This chamber speaks of its purpose and not of the people it has seen. It tells nothing of the woman inside it now. Its purpose is told to her in every detail, every thing that she sees, hears and smells. She can feel the room close in upon her.

She is sitting on the bed, if it can be called that. It claims the comfort of an adjustable head and foot, but there is no comfort here. there is only the blue mattress lying in the steel cage of cold metal that is the bed frame. It is a stone-hard slab, brought here from an age long forgotten, that offers no comfort to the pains in her back. She finds no pillow to rest her head upon, no sheet to fight off the chill.

Looking below her, she sees that unforgiving hard-tiled floor. It is the color of split pea soup and permeates the air with the rank, harsh odor of ammonia. There is no comfort to be found there. It echoes the sound of the long hallways outside of the room. She can hear shoes running upon it behind the heavy door. Her bare feet touch the numbing tiles and she begins to pace its length.

She stops in front of the door. they walked her through this door. It is sturdy and made of heavy wood. There is but one small window in it.  It is covered on the outside with paper and she cannot see through it. At the bottom of the door is a gap and through that gap comes shadows and the sound of people’s running feet. She turns to look at something else. There is no comfort here.

Looking up she sees the walls, white-washed cinder blocks. they reflect the coldness of the room. They appear to have been blanched by the arctic chill in the air. They stare at her and at each other, icy and immobile. They speak only the echoes of what they hear. They cannot speak comfort to her. They block her from the outside world. They retain her in their grasp, just as the firmly hold the tiles of the floor beneath them while they reach for the ceiling.

Lying back on the bed, she finds the ceiling. The harsh lights drench her with their brightness. Halogen tubes hide behind sheets of plastic embedded in the ceiling. It is like a pock-marked mother and protector to them, but it cannot protect her. It hovers above her with a million indentations that she transforms into horrific images. She cannot look long into the face of that protector for the lights burn her eyes and it seems to push towards her. It pushes its weight against her chest making it hard for her to breather; she has to turn away.

She looks instead to the only sounds that generate in this room and finds machines. These machines she knows well. she has seen them a hundred times or more. The screen of the heart monitor looms in front of her. It shows, with every jump of its displayed line, the pace of her own heart. It lets out the sound of a beeping metronome. that sound represents her own heart beat. Next to it stand the stately figure of the blood pressure machine, its face covered with numbers that mean little to her. It breathes in and out sporadically. With each inhale of the machine it places her arm into a vice grip and with the tick, tick, tick of releasing air this grasp lessens. The beeping and breathing of these machines fill her ears until she hears the steadily increasing sounds of foot falls on the tile floor just outside her door.

The nurse hurries in, slamming the heavy wooden door behind her. She blocks out the arctic blanched walls. Her face claims comfort by the smile it holds, but it is she the patient fears most of all. More than the burning lights, more than the numbing floor tiles, and more than the hard slab she lies upon, she fears her. She sees the nurse through the spots that the harsh lights have put into her eyes. She hears her through the heart beat that roars in her own ears. The nurse is the courier of fate, the one that reigns supreme over the entire room. All attention is on the nurse as she looks through the patient and says things at her. The nurse then turns and leaves, her heals clicking over the hard tiles.

This is the room for being alone, and now our patient is feeling truly alone. Sitting there on that stone-hard slab, lights bathing the tiles below her feet, she stares. She stares at those unforgiving tiles and breathes in the rankness of ammonia. Through her distress the tiles begin to swim. No comfort is to be found in this room tonight.

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