Nick has (wheels) wrote in repose, @ 2016-10-29 01:21:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | *narrative, nick morgan |
Late reveals
Who: Nick Morgan
What: Belaaated reveals
When: Immediate post-party lapsing into now
When he came to, the fucking chair was parked five foot from his prone body like a mocking punchline to a fucking great joke. A fuck-you, a night escape burning the world down in company and the timer had officially ran out and fucked him worse than he began. Doomed youth grew the hell up, got old. Got crabby. He'd started the night in the chair, a pack of cigarettes stuffed in a drawer rolled up and packed into the sleeve of his shirt, a leather jacket that still smelled like the city dug out the back of the wardrobe. He didn't smoke now. Vessel constriction and blood flow and lectures from the pretty physical therapist that he'd tuned out of deliberate because being pitied by a woman who looked like that in a uniform didn't do nothing for Nick's self-esteem, but he didn't smoke. He could remember the smell and the papery roll between his forefinger and thumb, he could remember the way it felt, breath ballooning in the space under his breastbone.
He could remember the fuck out of walking around too but he hadn't done that in two years near enough. He remembered it now, not faded like something out of a photograph. The hospital bed, the months of lying prone until sitting up felt like memory and walking felt far off. He could remember the ground hard underfoot as October set its teeth in and bit down, he could remember the feel of his feet slapping, the spring-loaded sensation of running. The kid he'd tracked along with him, Nick couldn't think about that because he put fingers and thumb to the bridge of his nose and sobbed like some fucking kid in grade school, the hot salt tracked sideways because some how this sonofabitch was gonna have to get his ass back in the chair, but Nick wasn't a rebel with angry optimism no more. It was cruel, right? The taunt of one night, and he pounded his fist into the dirt until he was goddamn good and done.
They lit out of there, all of 'em. The guy who owned the place, he'd cut on through eventually and Nick didn't want the indignity of having to ask some guy who had the town running through his back yard to lift him. They did this shit, back in the facility. They called it practice, real-life scenario shit. How to crawl, how to take your weight on your hands, how to fucking pull until your arms screamed and your hands flexed and your ass was sat. It hurt. It hurt like someone had taken his spine and hammered it back together, taken the deficient part out like taking the back out of a broken radio and tuned it to the wrong station. And some ugly sonofabitch had smashed the fucking thing back to hell after.
Wasn't a lot you could say to the front-desk of the little hospital local that they didn't understand because the town was small and the people talked and nobody didn't see nothing of the parties that went on in this place. This whole body changing business was weird, but Nick didn't have an existential crisis, he drove himself to the place in the Capital with the rehab beds and the gym for cripples same way he was, because nobody in the Capital knew shit about the diner. About living local. They put him in a bed and they talked about phantom pain, about therapy he hadn't showed up to, and Nick's diner sat locked and empty because the keys were in the pocket of the leather jacket slung over the empty visitor's chair.
Got a lot of thinking done lying on your back in a bed. Lot of thinking about small towns, people in 'em, the Morgan floating around in there too. He relearned the taste of anger, flinty and chalky on the back of his tongue until they ran themselves through tests and spat him back out, a chair and a guy stitched back together again like there'd been no party, no night of hellraising with a kid on the make. The diner stayed shut first set of days and the keys, if somebody was gonna work it, were on the outside of Nick's door behind, which stayed shut.