Fiction

When David Henly arrived for his shift at the pub, he felt as if the place were ready to explode. He felt it in the air. He felt it in the snow. He felt it well before he stood before the door.

Hop, two, three. Hop, two, three. Hop, two, three seconds of air time. He soared, he flew, he sailed over the sun-baked field.

“The plaque wasn’t in. You were sick. The weather’s too cold. I’m swamped at work.” He’d made many excuses, my husband, but now we were finally here, in the cramped office, a quaint, white-shuttered brick building with two oversized desks crammed with papers and coffee mugs. 

Dr. Demi Diaz, Chief of Psychiatry at the University of Miami’s Jackson Behavioral Hospital, loitered by my office door as I exited the elevator, acting like all was fine. But a rigidity of form and a manic bent belied her dark purpose. I greeted her like nothing was amiss, but when I put key to lock my door wouldn’t budge.

Rusty Rainsford, lead officer in narcotics with the Edmonton Police Service, gathered his team of officers at his house one Saturday in April. Earlier that week, the team had arrested a group of drug-pushing brothers, seizing more than a thousand pounds of marijuana and cocaine each, plus more than $9,000 in drug money. Now, they were preparing another takedown, one that saw them making anti-drug signs, slogans such as “Keep pot illegal” and “You can’t turn illegal drugs into medicine.”

The first thing he recalled on that fateful day that changed his life is the blinding white. The walls, the lights, the ventilator even the doctor’s coats. The memories came thick and fast.

The kitchen table was cold to the touch as the old man wiped crumbs that had fallen from his rye toast onto the tile floor below where the old dog waited patiently to gobble them up, just as she had done every day for the last fourteen years.

In Granford, if you need a doctor, don’t bother consulting the yellow pages. 

It’s early July. I seem to be calm and cool, but this track across the glaciers needs good weather, and who can guarantee that?

“I don’t think I can do this,” Alstrom said, the words directed at his own lap.

“A notice period!” Reggie shouted to an empty room. “Are you kidding me?”

He was alone in his den, reading through the final bills from the Sunset Village Retirement Complex. A stack of condolence cards lay unread on the side of his desk.

Without remorse, Melvin’s alarm announced the arrival of seven a.m. Seven would have been sleeping–in three years ago. Three years ago, he’d lived in Maumelle, a 20 to 30-minute drive to his practice in downtown Little Rock, depending on traffic. But now, living in a loft directly over his clinic, seven arrived earlier each day. The seven & sevens he’d knocked back at McKeen’s last night weren’t making it any rosier. He flopped an arm to the other half of the bed without opening his eyes.

His hair is long and thick, shining, and curly. But at school, some kids tease him, “You look like a girl! What about braids?”

At first Rick thought: who cares, tough guys have long hair with tails or buns. But after a bad night, he tells his parents, “I want a change. I’ll have my hair cut.”

He opened his eyes and found himself strapped to a gurney, in a swaying vehicle, a siren screaming. A masked person, probably a woman, stared down at him, pressed a stethoscope to his chest, and took his vitals. A plastic mask covered his mouth and nose. He pawed at it; his arm trailed a clear tube that dripped fluid into a vein.
“He’s back,” the woman said.

The man and the woman looked out of the window together. They watched the rain dance on the glass then slide down in jagged little serpentines until it collected in shallow pools along the brick ledge outside.

His young wife rolled him in to the clinic room on a motorized wheelchair. Review of records indicated that he was here for a follow up after a prolonged hospitalization for cardiac arrest.

It was December and snow was falling on the parking lot. Big lights, to ward off carjackers and muggers, made the white ground twinkle. A line of snow-covered cars slumbered.

“There you are,” he says each morning. He seems amazed she is still there.

“Here I am,” she smiles back.

It was a blustery day in November. The wind whipped across the front steps of Avon Road as I made my way towards the front door of my house. I’d walked in chilled to the bone.

During the night, the wind picked up. By early morning, spume-covered waves churned the steely, grey sea. Near the island of Skopelos, the waves and the wind had gained enough strength to divert the ferry to the Agnontas port on the western side of the island, sheltered from the open Aegean, where the cove tended to be much calmer on such days.

Alice squeezed her eyes shut and turned her face to the passenger window when her father began singing. Rudy, who always sang as soon as he turned over the van, crooned a Sinatra tune, an old favorite from his Rat Pack repertoire. He sang in the car the way other fathers sang in the shower.

On a sunny morning in June, Marge found an empty seat on a bus in Arusha, Tanzania. This bus contained several other middle-age white males and females, all from the United States. Marge, a retired botany professor now traveler, propelled her body into a window seat on the left side, where she landed with a thump.

2014 was a bad year for birding. An avian virus infected and sickened birds. Hundreds collapsed and fell from tree branches as if they’d been shot by what Dr. Albright refused to call “sportsmen.” 

“I can clean the house, right?” It was Chuck’s self-imposed, allotted day to clean his apartment, now that he and his longtime cleaning lady had mutually agreed it was too risky for her to work during the shutdown. He paid her anyway. 

To my dismay, I found I had high blood pressure shortly after I retired as an elementary school principal at the age of sixty-three.

A sharp pitch pulled me from my sleep. I sat erect and turned to the small crib nestled beneath the window beside me.

Grace noticed the girl’s fingers first, stubby with chewed nails that looked sore.

I often wonder about what happened to old friends or acquaintances. What was their story?

I am eating almonds. These days, I can’t seem to get enough of them. Something about the bland crunch of them pulls me in. Biting into an almond is like snapping a twig. It is firm until it is not anymore, solid and then suddenly broken.

Coach said “no excuses.” And what was he going to say anyway when no one wants to hear the word “cancer”?

Ikenna stared longingly at his wife. It has been what now? Eight months. Not even a touch. He kicked his feet aimlessly in a failed attempt to release the tension welling between his legs.

Darrell leaves on a late spring bicycle vacation in Hawaii. Maddie angrily, reluctantly, stays behind.

“Spare me some change, would you?” a homeless lady calls from the street corner. Her thick Southern accent shows me that she has come a long way from home.

It was almost time to go home after a busy clinic day seeing patients with a wide variety of heart diseases. I looked at my schedule – there was one more patient, a woman.

It was the first day of clinical in my Bachelor of Science in Nursing program. Time to actually bring real patients into the picture! We were visiting a local nursing home to work on our communication skills. Each student was assigned a nursing home resident. We were to spend the day with the patient, interacting, laughing, and assisting them with their daily activities. This was a time for making memories!

Before COVID-19, I had a daily routine: Leave for the hospital at 7:00 AM, return home at 9:00 PM or later. Days were filled with treating cancer patients, writing academic papers and proposing projects. Evenings were filled with meetings, potlucks, restaurants, and workouts at the gym.

His daughter had insisted he get a room with a view. The manager had promised her to find her father the best views of the whole complex.

He wanted to be scooped up in the ocean wave of new discoveries and to ride the wave for as long as he could. Anything, anything to have a chance.