Thursday, October 30, 2008

Lost things

There was a man in the bed beside him with a dent in his head. Evan tried not to stare at the man but it was difficult. The man's skull had caved in in the perfect shape of a fist. He paced. Evan felt the pent-up energy spilling out of him and into the room, infecting everyone as if it were viral. The man would groan and swing his legs off the bed and suck breath in and walk the length of the room and back before expelling the breath and swinging himself up onto the bed once more. Sometimes the nurses took him by the arm and led him gently back to his little area of the world, dragging the curtain around the bed and the sound of their voices would be calm and soothing.

Sometimes he felt like pacing. He felt the drag of his body on the hospital bed and wondered if he would ever lift himself out of it again. He remembered running, running for the ferry, running to catch a paper taken and played on a breeze. The surprising pleasure of a fast pace. This would be lost to him now.

There was another man, this one with no visible damage, just a certain slowness when turning his head, an unfocused glaze when asked a question. Evan found that this vague other worldly look disturbed him. The man was in a wheelchair and he manouvred it slowly from one side of the ward to the other. Sometimes he wheeled the thing towards a wall and stopped there, staring into the light green paint as if an image of the Virgin Mary had suddenly emerged from the fingerprints there.

Evan knew that quiet searching stare. He caught himself halted, wondering, struggling over the things that he had lost. The names of people he had known until a handful of days ago, the confusing progression of days and weeks mapped out on a calendar, numbers, fragments of conversation. Television shows. He could hum entire theme songs and not bring the name of the show to the front of his mind.

Lost things, all of them, lost things.

2 comments:

Jodi Cleghorn said...

Hi Krissy,
I'm a Brisbane writer and found you through your facebook group (via Melissa F)

I'll be really interested to follow the progression of your new book on here.

Saturday is kick off for National Novel Writing Competiton for me and I'm tossing around the idea of chronicaling it all. Haven't decided yet.

Apologies if none of this makes any sense - I'm recovering from having my wisdom teeth removed.

Love & light

Krissy Kneen said...

NANORIMO (?) has always seemed tempting. Good luck with it.