Repose Memories (reposememories) wrote in repose, @ 2017-06-05 18:46:00 |
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Entry tags: | ~plot: memories |
What: Memory
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing
Warning, this memory contains: Vaguely upsetting medical stuff.
The room smells like TCP. It smells like when you got your palms scraped to hell trying to outrun some asshole kid who chased you out of school because your lunchbox was limited edition and he wanted it. You didn’t care nothing about limited edition, it was just the one your mom swept off the shelf of the grocery store into her cart. You remember the smell, when your mom dug the bottle out from the back of the cabinet and you hissed sting through your teeth when she poured. Gravel-grazes and skinned knees and you wish they were the least of your problems right now.
You had a lot of scrapes as a kid and you’re thinking about the way the chemical sits in your nose because otherwise, you’re not sure you can hold all this shit in. The room’s clean. Clean in a way that takes out everything that makes a room normal until there’s nothing left but spotless corners and whatever’s in the room, under a spotlight.
The papers sit on the top of the bedside cabinet. Pen on top. It’s expensive looking, the kind that’s all metal, with a clip on the side. You don’t fucking sign your life away with a ballpoint Bic with a chewed cap. Your lips kinda pull at this: it’s a joke. It’s a really shitty joke and it’s in your head but you’re ignoring the papers. Because maybe if you ignore them a little longer, the doc is gonna say it’s unnecessary. He’s gonna say it’s fine, they can go back to the shitty little hospital where the walls on the kids’ ward are painted with starfish and bubbles, like you’re not hurt and sick, you’re just underwater. That shitty little hospital where you know every single face and when they clock on and when they clock off.
You’re quiet. Anxiety hammers like a heartbeat but you’re quiet. She’s sitting on the bed, her feet swinging in striped socks, pink and red and she’s reading one of those books. Fat, the kind with a spine that cracks, you can see from the cover that it’s about space or something, it’s a planet or some shit like that. She’s swinging and she’s watching you over the top of your book as you pace the steps in between the bedside cabinet and the window, squeak of sneakers over clean, TCP-sharp floor.
She’s giggling. Least, you know it oughta be giggling. It’s husky, rasps a little too much on the way out, breath not sound but she’s giggling.
“What?” you say, looking at the striped toes she’s squirming, at the way her braid is unravelling slowly, baby-blond hair and a stray elastic working its way out of the strands. You’re shit with braids. You’ve been braiding hair as long as you can remember and you still can’t keep it in the elastic.
“You’re concentrating,” she says, and her smile is wide, wide open like the smell of TCP is home and the white sheets like paper are home. “Lighten up - it’s no-”
She stops. You can hear the glottelstop of caught breath in her throat, the heave as her lungs try to work. Her head thrashes back and you’re across the room as her eyelids flutter up and her head jerks back and she’s seizing, she’s seizing, where the FUCK is the nurse, you don’t understand as the wash of cortisol licks greedily over your sense of time, your sense of space. It’s minutes or it’s seconds or it’s hours watching her thrash, watching her fight to breathe. You slam the button beside the bed, you jam it until your palm holds the indent of it and you mash it down and again and again until you hear the slap of rubber soles over linoleum, until there’s an army of people in the room in white.
They crowd her. They crowd her with efficient snaps of jargon across the crisp white sheets and you’re pushed back by sheer displacement to the foot of the bed, out of reach. You watch her toes jerk helplessly, striped pink and red, as her book slides sideways and to the floor, splayed open on pictures of planets and stars.
“Help her,” your voice is harsh, guttural. “Help her,” to the guy in the shirt, in the pressed tie, in the white coat with the embroidery of the name of the clinic on his lapel. The guy with the pen, the guy with the papers. You don’t mean right this second. They’re intubating right this second, hooking her up to machines. You don’t mean the results of the tests, the shit that’s immediate. You mean help. Long-term. The kind where they held out promises that they could stitch all the broken parts of her back together.
He looks at you, and he puts a hand on your shoulder. It’s weight, and you can feel it, the connection of it, drawing you out of the chaos at her bedside. They’re brisk now. They’ve got the routine down and you can see her subside, limp on the bed and the pink and red socks are still.
You sit in the chairs outside until a nurse comes, until she says she’s OK. She’s OK for now, is what that nurse is saying and you nod mutely, the clipboard beside you and the expensive pen thoughtfully collected from the bedside cabinet.
They take an hour. From the second you sign, they take an hour. It’s sterile in here. It doesn’t even smell of TCP, it’s plastic and the smell of nothing and the doc looks at you with the kind of sympathy that belongs on posters, on leaflets for the clinic. Because we care, and you hate him. You hate him when you never hated anyone in your life, when you don’t know what hate feels like, hot and rich like blood down the back of your throat. It tastes like salt, like copper and you look at him and you look at the signature on the form. Yours. In expensive ink.
“If you don’t mind,” and he’s put a ball into your fist, there’s the prick of a needle and you hiss, slow between your teeth.