The Malleable Morning Bruises
Installment Two
by Nance Van Winckel
The doctor’s turned off his cell phone and pager. Third night in a row, Delia closes the closet door on him, gently. He’s perched in her lawn chair in there amid the industrial-strength everythings: cleaners for glass, for chrome, and for the marble hospital foyer it’s her job and hers alone to make shimmer.
“The doctor’s sick,” she told the night nurse on Two West when she asked if Delia had seen him. Where had she seen him last? As if he’s a set of lost car keys. Delia mopped around her, swish-swish right up to the tips of her tidy white shoes.
“Up on Four West,” Delia told her. “He’d didn’t look good. I think he’s sick.”
He was old enough to be Delia’s father.
Oh: my father is sick. That’s what Delia thought—third night running—dragging out her pail and mop and closing the door on him. His face in his hands. Like her own father’s. Years back. Her father, sick.
There would be tears for a time. In there behind her door. While the radio still radiated the war news, death scores followed by ball scores. After the weather forecast, the door would open. The secret door. Ha! Some secret. From her own dreams she felt again the many eyes staring out at her from peepholes in fences. Her bed had bounced her awake and into her uniform and then up up up St. Boniface’s pre-dawn stairwells.
In Room 213 the blotto-boy’s parents wait for the verdict. A leg to go? Or to stay? The frost bite inches up. First the toes had gone, then the foot. The doctor’s saws got bigger.
Doctor Swift, the paging voice is shrill. The weather is snow. In Delia’s earphones she hears there’s to be more. More snow. In her mind her father stays unwell, although he’s long gone, she has to remind herself, long gone under a blizzard of silver knives beneath a shot-out crime light on D Street at ten below.
Doctor Swift, please dial 213.
The secret door opens. A face peers around it. He nods to Delia then closes the door. She thinks: we own the night hallway. Only steeped inside the closet’s ammonia stench may sad become sick. But that’s okay. That’s the necessary alchemical change needed to drive a decision through to its end. She watches the doctor’s face and sees what he’s decided. Now the boy’s knee shall go. No doubt he’d known that all along. And now to make it happen.
Stepping into the shadows and out of his path, she tries not to look into those eyes that have the hard black shimmer at the center, those eyes ablaze with what—who can say?—ungodly or most holy fire.
The forecast is snow. The boy’s parents will go out into it later when the boy’s asleep and the sharpened-up saws have done their work and the hallway is pristine again and Delia’s door is locked and the gloves snapped off and the mop propped up and the bucket kicked. Kicked hard. Little fucker.
- Click here to read ”The Malleable Morning Bruises: Installement One” by Philip Graham
- Click here to read “The Malleable Morning Bruises: Installment Three” by Larry Sutin
- Click here to read about the Exquisite Corpse Project
- Click here to read more fiction
