Road Rage

            Terry limped out of the car, finding his way to the shoulder of the road before collapsing to the rough asphalt with a loud thud. The rain grew heavier as his consciousness wavered, the sounds of the road, cars kicking up rainwater, and sirens blasted intermittently.

            “Sir, can you hear me? Mr. Sutton?”

            Terry opened his eyes finally, feeling the rush of blood to his head and pain searing down the front of his body. Almost everything was numb or hurt so much it might as well have been numb.

            “You’re in an ambulance Mr. Sutton. We’re taking you to Memorial back in town.”

            Terry tried to sit himself up but as he braced himself against the stretcher, before the EMT had the chance to ask him to lay back down, his wrists gave way. Both of them.

            “Do you know what happened to you Mr. Sutton?”

            There were needles already in his arms, his head sandwiched between puffy pads on the stretcher. He really must have been out of it when they loaded him on.

            “How bad are my injuries?” Terry coughed a bit of blood onto his cheek, finding it harder to speak than he thought it would be.

            “Nothing punctured. Lots of bruising and broken bones. There could be some internal bleeding though. I have to ask again, Mr. Sutton. Do you know what happened?”

            “Saw my Ex-Wife next to me on the freeway. Flipped her the fuck off. Must have lost control of the car.”  

The Not So Emergency Room

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.”