Ryan Ramos is no (bailarin) wrote in rooms, @ 2015-07-15 07:09:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, ryan ramos |
Narrative: Marvel
Who: Ryan Ramos
What: Welcome home.
When: Now
When she woke up she was home. Home-home. Ry woke up slow most days. By parts, cheek crushed up against a pillow rucked, the sheets twisted around her legs. Her mama used to say she woke up from sleep like she'd been fighting a war, like she'd been trying to dance through her sleep. Maybe both. Awareness first, then scent. It smelled like the polish rubbed into the wood by the lady who came and listened to music on the radio that made Ry homesick for a time, 'stead of a place. It smelled like burned candle-wax and far-off take out and sheets that washed with something picked out because it smelled good and it made them soft, instead of cheap. Unexpected: none of the aggressive clean that assaulted you on waking and when she cracked an eye open and saw sunny yellow instead of some chalky non-color people thought was all sick people could cope with, first thought was dreaming. Dreaming it all. Dreaming the hospital part and the part before. Relief drained in like a cup of coffee, a cold soak in the shower, waking the rest of her. Home meant none of it happened: the accident, the anonymous hotel room, the humiliation of bed-baths and the gritted-teeth humiliation of tears in the shower when she could crawl in there in that motel room. Home meant nothing was over and hope slid in beneath her ribs and bloomed her heart into a slam-slam-slam against its cage. Right up until her leg woke up too. Brokered pain for awareness, sly trade-off: sitting up for the hot knife jabbing into her hip, slicing down from hip to knee as smoothly as a scalpel. Cold sweat washed greasily over her forehead, nausea bubbled up in her throat acidic with panic. All that relief drained right out of her as pain washed over her like the shower-head, real good at leaving nothing behind. She squeezed shut her eyes, palmed out a hand over the cabinet blindly: home without anything to make getting up possible was worse somehow than waking up under strip-lights scraped raw from cheap sheets. Some kind of trade-off, deal with el diablo. Go home, the way she'd been wishing like a little girl, late nights. Go home, but lie in bed until you rot. Wasn't no one coming to see her. No one who thought she was home. Palm caught something small, plastic, that rattled. Couldn't work her fingers good to start with, thumb and forefinger shaking as she tried to prize off the cap; things weren't made for kids, things weren't made for when pain had spiked you blind. One-two-three and she swallowed dry. Didn't need water now, but her throat was full of sand and the cold sweat clung under her arms, sticky strands of hair glued to her forehead. And there was the brace. Propped against the cabinet like an old boyfriend hanging around outside your door, waiting for an old routine you couldn't fucking change, no matter how much you wished you could. Unbuckled, waiting. Ry lay there, sagged against the pillows that smelled treacherously like safety, like familiarity. Inhaled without none of that chemical sterility threading up her nose, heaved out the need to throw up with one breath then another. One at a time, up and down, heel of her palm against her sternum as panic drained, left the pain white-hot until it dulled down to an ebbing, throbbing glow. Wasn't nothing the little pills could float away clean. But enough, to get up. Enough to figure out how she'd gotten from a Vegas hospital, motel-room all the way clean across the country without one memory of how she got home. Reached out to pick up the bottle of painkillers, the bottle next to it untouched, way she remembered. Her name printed on the label but all thirty of the little white pills rattling around in the bottom. Fingers brushed over something, silky glass and cool metal and her phone was a piece of shit, right? Couldn't part with enough cash for something ritzy: who the fuck needed a phone practically plated up with gold that could check email and remember shit everyone had forgotten without trouble for all the years they had phones before? (She was tight, right but long enough without money you don't spend what you got stashed under the mattress whether it was really there or in the bank) So it wasn't her phone. Wasn't hers and she looked over the other side of the bed like she was expecting someone else to be there, which was a joke. Couldn't walk right, can't even sit up, but going to get down and dirty with some man who left his phone lying around. Right. Experienced with those little pills now. Twenty minutes before the last spike evened out, before she could begin the process of easing herself outta bed, slow like a cripple. Tapped on the screen, opened it up. No passcode or pincode, or fingerprint shit, her name on the screen like it was a gift or something wiped out of her memory along with the ride home. |