methodist

You wake up in the middle of the night twenty-four hours after prom and you are vomiting a pool of crimson. Your side feels like something is jutting and kicking and trying to give birth through your abdomen in succinct little gnaws. You can’t stand up straight. You can’t move.  Your hand is pressed into your side as if you are pantomiming a little tea cup and spout.

The moment you stand your legs give out. You tell your mom you don’t know what’s wrong. Your mothers suggest appendicitis. Your father suggests indigestion. Today is the senior class picnic at Bradley park and you really didn’t want to go in the first place. You can’t stand up. You fall back to sleep. It is spring but the atmosphere outside is the color of hand-me down argyle socks.  Mother keeps padding a rag on the top of your forehead. She inquires if you are having trouble urinating thinking that perhaps maybe you have gall stones. You think about Doc Horndasch, your personal OSF shrink who has pretty much glided you though the finish line of senior year. You think about Mr. Washer the school social worker who has become your best friends. You think about how everyday in senior high school you wore black turtle necks to manual and felt like you were treading underwater, ferrying a copy of Walt Whitman and Anne Sexton, hunched over like a prehistoric cocoon, sipping from my Mister Donuts coffee mug.   You think about how every morning you couldn’t get out of your room without listening to Morrissey’s WHY DON’T YOU FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF from Vauxhall and I. You think about how Boys for Pele was supposed to be your savior and how (after being pushed back for six months) when you purchased a copy of it from Co-op in Campus town you were seminally disappointed.

 

 

The day continues to bleed ribbon s of gray. You think about Hale’s grandfather who died six weeks ago and how you jipped school to be with him and m he asked you if you thought he was going to heaven because he didn’t go to church before saying FUCK IT, handing you a Dutch Master, informing you that he is smoking in the house. It feels like various rodents and hepatitis-ridden marsupials  are endeavoring to hatch from the side of your body as you are wheeled into the shushing doors of Methodist emergency care. Your mom is scribbling out a slate as if she is being petitioned for an autograph by roadies. You are lysing supine in a gurney that is skeletal cold and wobbly. A nurse whose mouth is so white it looks like she just gargled with a vat of bleach prodding various serpentine tubes into the side of your right arm informing you that it was do nothing short of assuage the seething pierce echoing half past your naval.  The doctor is wheeling you into a room that is extra-large, telling you that you will have the commodious room all to yourself. You blink several times. You think about two days ago how you didn’t just dance with Kitty Pekowski you more or less waded across the wooden glint of the ersatz dancefloor.  You think about how much you like kissing her even though she is introverted and coy yet Valedictorian of her class. You think about Germany and Neuschwanstein and smoking black Russian at Lums.

Briefly you think about making out with Megan Snow at the youth gathering in Chicago on St. Patrick’s day.

You wonder what Appleton Wisconsin looks like.

 You topple down into a blinking trapezoid while staring up at the heard lights of the room above. You can hear the mellifluous chime of your sister who has just learned to drive as she enters the room and asks your progenitors if her older brother David is going to be okay.