Daniel sat in the aromatic waiting room.
Each page turn of last October's Forbes Magazine made him all the
more aware of the blood pooling in his grocery bag galoshes. The nail had run
right through attaching his foam thong to the bottom of his foot like flypaper.
The dried blood between his toes was the biggest reminder. There wasn’t even
pain anymore, just a dull itching that made him look back down at his foot
every ten or fifteen seconds.
“It’s not gushing. It’s a clean
through, you’re gonna have ta wait.” The nurse hadn’t even looked him in the
eye during her diagnosis. “Short staffed taday, Jesus is a-comin’.”
He noticed the television, older than he
or anyone he knew would own hanging precariously above the dented water
fountain in the corner of the room. The local weather was scrolling across,
clipped and distorted by the dinosaur machine, subtitled in Spanish even though
the volume was muted. “Un sistema de baja presión se moverá desde el norte por el
Martes.”
The timer on his phone read: three
hours and fifty six minutes. He had almost been there four hours on Easter
Sunday. He was wasting away two thousand miles from home in an unfamiliar
hospital, waiting for a doctor unlucky enough to be called in to pry Daniel’s
stupidity from his foot. He stood, balancing his weight on the right, less
punctured foot and hobbled back towards the exit sign.
“Mistah Kelly, the Doc 'ill see ya now.”
No comments:
Post a Comment