Scene Two: The Others Today, they brought him to a new room. One He’ve never seen before. One outside, beyond the confines He knew so well, of his own room. Tall, clear windows at least twelve feet high looked down on him from behind white painted metal mesh. Streaming light pooled on the floor around the legs of the few chairs and tables bolted to the stained wood floorboards before it evaporated into the shadows. The big hands shoved the gurney roughly sidewise to one window and cranked the back up to let him see out. Dazzle, shift, squint, and glare. Bend of the neck and lift of the chin; seeing one eye clearly and one through the block of his nose. Out the window, color, polyprismatic aberration, shade, lunatic tint, hue, patterned yet wild; the man who had the hands said, “Flowers. Put ‘em in couple weeks back when you was still knocked out. Began bloomin’ yesterday, an’ the doctor said for you t’ get a look at ‘em.” He did not move. He pointed and said slowly, “Flowers.” He saw them instantly as if a shutter had flicked open and there the small courtyard was before him; whitewashed walls, tall windows facing inward, and the narrow series of flower beds laying one after the other. Tulips, snap dragons, marigolds, irises, alternating in rows. Comprehension in a single moment; the brain getting around something without precedent and setting it sidelong with something in its own experience. Comprehension slamming down like a solid chunk. The courtyard slamming down like a solid chunk of the world. Too short the time runs down. The hands gripped the rail next to his own white knuckles, and turned him away from the window. Then, going out, propped up, He saw the depth of the room, extending overexposed on the window side, gloomy to the left. There were two right triangles splitting the room with a single hypotenuse between them. Along the line of demarcation dust swirled in eddies and currents. Shadows crawled across the left wall. They creep over the rows of single doors, pushing just over the lip of the trim and wainscoting to suck the flat surfaces before squishing as worms do to the ceiling. The knobs were only hints projecting into the negative space created by the shadows. A dull red coal flared then smoldered at the tip of a cigarette under the lintel of one such door. The curl of smoke writhed passed a worn and hollow face in which sat two shining black eyes, the perfect reflection of the room in miniature. When the coal flared again, the red glow lent the already sinister face a satanic leer. Caved-in cheeks and skin hanging from the frame of bone in the face pulled and waved like heavy curtains draped before a stage. The smoke continued skulking upwards, dividing and twisting as it went – an enchanted rope with frayed ends or maybe a many-headed monster. It spread and thinned until it became part of the general shadow covering the walls rising high to a coffered ceiling; dusty, oddly bleached and stained. He couldn’t quite see it all. Something in his eyes kept getting in the way, swirls and dark curls slinking around. We sloughed passed the coal, which became just a dying spark in the periphery of his left eye. Another attendant pushed another gurney in the opposite direction into the long room. On the gurney lay an old woman strapped down just like him. She smiled with just her upper lip, the turn of her head matting hair over one eye. Deep canyons opened in the fat on her cheeks and under her chin. There was something about the way the light from the windows shone through her that was disturbing. He closed his eyes to darkness and felt the wheels of the gurney bump over the door jamb. Once in the hallway, we turned, and He opened his eyes to look back into the room. It was empty. No tracks but those left by hard rubber wheels and leather soles. He smiled to myself. But before He had a chance to start chuckling, a bright flame kindled another cigarette to life. He could not see the smoker, but He did see the coal, trailing a dancing snake of smoke, walk out from the doorway and across to a window.
Posted on: Sun, 08 Sep 2013 07:00:01 +0000
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