Scene One
By Don Marlin
My body ached along my right side and kept bleeding through the bandages. My right shin and knee had six-inch gashes that bore markings like a bear paw being slowly drawn down along my flesh. My right thigh was almost twice as big as my left, turning blue, and bore the same claw-like markings. The upper ribs below the only hairs on my chest had an outline on the gauze bandages that could be identified like the Shroud of Turin. The 13 titanium screws in my clavicle had to be loose because I could hardly hold the Reader’s Digest from December of two years ago. Maybe the blame should rest on the granite gravel, my mountain bike, or my weakening metabolism.
My wife keeps up with every month of the Reader’s Digest while I reach for them whenever I am sick or hurt, lying in bed. It helps to confuse my mind and make me forget about my medical condition. Tonight was no exception.
The “Christmas Gifts on a Budget” article didn’t offset the throbbing and my eyes were tired, so I turned off the light. A faint cobalt blue glow filled the room as my eyes began to adjust to the room with the outline of the gable trusses across the ceiling, the oak slats in the walls, and late 18th- and early 19th-century furniture we had picked up on our travels around the country.
The light was pulsating at about the same rhythm as my injured muscles were swelling. The ebb and flow of the light rays made me wonder if the dishwasher was causing some of the suppression in electrical flow. If I put the machine on the antibacterial mode, this was going to be a long night, but all Mary made me for dinner was chicken soup and olive bread, washed down with some vintage zinfandel, so I became puzzled in the darkness. We didn’t have a dishwasher.
The LED numerals on the clock and the humidifier were blue, but we normally cover them up with a hand towel to keep it dark, and the security panel is a dull orange. I was even more bewildered since we had those items at our last house and not in this one. She didn’t wake up as I rotated my legs out of bed, or when I exhaled loudly to stand and walk across the floor, but the muffled scream that I made as I saw the sleeping faces of my friends in the cobalt blue of the oval 18th century mirror on the wall made her fall right out of bed.
To be continued…
