Bedlam

He lay on the hospital bed, all at ease. She, who had been pacing around the celestial room for a record-breaking number of hours, did not know why. To her, he seemed perfectly alright. She kept breaking speed at the door, believing a nurse would barge in and burst out a profuse apology, reaffirming that this was a case of mistaken identity, or the result of something laughable. Vitamin deficiency. No, wait. Bicycle accident. More than anything, she believed he would look at her. A thousand times she gripped his hand and kissed it, tearing up each time he didn't.

Her first step away from denial was towards the bathroom. She was barely gone long enough for her thighs to touch the edge of the seat. When she came out, the room looked no different. He was undisturbed, except for two small details: his eyes were open wide and glued to the ceiling.

She screamed in pure joy and almost leapt at the bed, slowed by her mind jumping to two conclusions at the exact same time. Number one: no living being could possess that stare. Two: his left arm was no longer at ease. It was clutching a scalpel.

A gasp escaped her lungs and caught his attention. He turned his head in her direction and glowered, as though warning her to stay put, to resist her impulse. Five seconds later, she understood why. He lifted his shirt, placed the instrument squarely at the center of his abdomen, and cut himself open all the way up to his chest.

Until this moment, the room's silence had been driving her insane. Now bursting with a pitch of voice she would otherwise deem herself incapable of achieving, shockingly, it remained devoid of doctors and nurses drowning out each other's demands for crash carts and the Chief of Surgery. This had to be the part of the dream where she was supposed to wake up. But as he continued slicing his torso open with mechanical precision, she understood there was only one way out: she had to sew him back together.

Unable to make it stop, she bolted out the door and into her friends, who were huddled over the bench. The sight proved too much, and she began to sob freely.

Their efforts at making sense of her blubbering stayed ineffectual. Several minutes after sitting down and grasping at breaths, she managed to string together a sentence whose absurdity could not be dulled by enunciation. Returning to panic and hysteria, she stood up, ready to drag down a doctor. As her eyes rose above the shoulder of one of her friends, she saw him, walking into the room he had never left.

Her gaze lowered to his stomach, and once again, she gasped. He was spotless, cleaner than she had been for a year now. No sign of wreckage. And this time, he did not look at her. Trailing off in the middle of a sentence, she raced him to the room. She could not let him see what he had done.

It was empty. No bed, no bathroom, no sign of them ever being there. It was then that she fell over the edge. All she heard was a howl, the kind someone might make when they cut their own stomach open.

It stopped as abruptly as it began. He was holding her tight, stroking her disheveled hair, promising over and over that he was right there. Right there. Right there!

She opened her eyes and stared as several people held her down and attempted to seize the scalpel out of her death grip, coaxing her calm with gentle authority. She looked around the room, and remembering, she let go. The last thing she saw before losing time again was his face, wretched with pain.

Visiting hours were over.

___

This story was first published in Sleep Aquarium.

You Are My Christmas

Sprawled across the couch, I watch you saunter across the cheerful mess in our living room, the snowballed fur at the edge of the Christmas hat I forced you to buy wiggling with every unnaturally long stride you take. You look rather endearing tonight, even though your favourite striped-tee-paired-with-boxer-shorts-that-barely-cover-your-pronounced-buttocks attire renders you highly under-dressed for the occasion.

You walk, wearing the Christmas hat, toward the Christmas tree, with your Christmas spirit illuminating the atmosphere more dazzlingly than the Christmas lights, and you twiddle with the Christmas ornaments – the baubles must be aligned and coordinated according to their colors in just the right sequence for it to feel like Christmas, after all, mustn’t they? You asked me if the tree needed any more attention, and I shook my head. How silly you are, I said to you. How silly you are, I thought to myself, to wish you were a tree.

My parents never narrated to me stories about Santa Claus and his elves, and how they took care of Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, and Blitzen, before bedtime. They never told me about the significance of mistletoe, of silver stars, of beautifully-wrapped presents festooned with perfectly-shaped bows, or of little flakes of snow gathering on the sill of the window. Candy canes held no festive meaning, other than the fact that being presented with a swirly red-and-white stick in the shape of Grandma’s constant companion as a child because I finished my homework in advance was a reason to celebrate in itself. As I grew up and began to realize the importance of this commemoration, I would silently curse my parents for not having constituted a graphic imagery of this day into the mind of a little girl who wanted to grow up to weave descriptions of important things as graphically as possible.

Tonight, as you find me gazing at you, spread-eagled upon this lumpy couch, and I find you tinkering in the liquor cabinet, seeking an impeccable variety of alcohol that would bring this occasion another step closer to the perfection that you are yearning to accomplish, I send an equally silent word of gratitude upward, to my parents, for not telling me what Christmas has been like for the last hundred years, or what it should be like for the next hundred. For the reason that, if I were to write a book about the day of the birth of Jesus Christ, and if I were to have millions of children all over the world seated in a soundless library, reading the words that I have composed and the sentences that I have strung together, describing an ideal Christmas night, I would play this instance, and the few that are about to follow – which may or may not make an appropriate bedtime story for children – in the eye of my brain over and over and over again, without pausing for breath, until I am convinced that my fingers have done the exquisiteness of these moments complete justice.

You walk back toward the couch with two glasses filled halfway with my beloved white wine clasped in your hands, and you gesticulate for me to scoot over. The glasses pursue their place upon the glass table, and your body pursues its place into my arms. I wish this sofa was less cumbersome, though, for the rest of the night is a prospectively rickety one, and it wouldn’t bode well for either of us to flip-flop onto the floor in the middle of a chapter, or two, that shall render this book unquestionably inappropriate for the children of the world.

As you present me with an especially enticing candy stick, one that no child would want to be given as a reward for the completion of their homework, and the Christmas lights decorating the Christmas tree dance upon your face, and as you run your fingers gently through my fragile spine, I gasp. I gasp because I grasp that I have found my personal description of an idyllic Christmas night. A description replete with mistletoe and silver stars, with candy canes and fairy lights, with cheeks that glow and bodies that flow with a shared warmth; a description that trumps twenty-three preceding Christmas nights’.

And the nights of hundreds of years past.

This story was first published in Thought Catalog.