It’s a cold blue dawn, and the distant call of some early avian rouses me from my slumber. It was a fitless rest, torrid and insubstantial. The tears have congealed into pockets of crust which I take the time to remove. Above that, my bandage has slipped off, it lies two inches above my bleeding scalp. I get up, taking special care not to disturb her, go to retrieve more gauze from the medicine cabinet.
Got to properly dress the wound. I find it amusing, momentarily, that some households never have access to this vast an array of first aid.
The pus deposits don’t seem to have grown since yesterday, but I feel the urge to drain them. I hope they leave of their own accord, they’re somewhat painful by now. Not too bad, especially is pressure is applied to all of it. I cut the strip at the appropriate point, and then deposit the old one in the trash. Don’t know why I didn’t do that earlier, I’m asking for an infection.
I check the top of the drawer- my heart medication is lying on its side, next to both of Todd’s. I suppose she found them and placed them there so I’d be prepared for my daily regimen. I don’t remember whether I took the heart stuff yesterday or not. Better take two, just to be safe. It’s not pounding in my ears like usual, but upon further inspection, it does carry a certain dull thud which I find unpleasant.
“You need to see a doctor,” she rouses from her dregs.
“Already did,” I mutter. “Didn’t help much.” I don’t tell her about my visit to her supervisor- considering his name is all over the sides of the bottles, scrawled in his illegible chicken scratch, she already knows.
I open the curtains. The skies are a clear blue, the clouds thoroughly depleted, and there are noisy rivulets of condensation still cascading down the gutters, which likely haven’t seen service in decades. Somewhere to the far left down McCulloch, an ambulance siren blares profusely, and several of the houses now sport moderate holes in their roofs. One telephone pole has been knocked over, but it seems we were spared the worst. All across the ground, a sea of hail stones remain, depleted from the rising sun yet still vast and distinct.
“This is surreal,” she observes, joining me. “Shit, the repairs-”
“Let’s go take a look.”
I swing the porch door wide, take special care not to slip as I wade ankle-deep in the icy ocean our driveway has been transformed into, my bare feet welcoming the refreshing chill and the way it contrasts with the heat. It’s like the videos of those cranberry farms. She follows, smiling with wan reservation and taking special care not to get any mud on her gown.
She wasn’t kidding about the Camry. The door, which lies incapacitated on the ground, has become a metallic bowl holding several large balls of hail, and the back left tire has been popped. If that wasn’t enough to spell the end, the windshield is a veritable asteroid of spattered pocks and debris, glass chips loose in several areas. The frame has been dented in five places by my count. It’s entirely done for, but I have neither the incentive nor the energy to get it towed today, or deal with the paperwork. I avert my gaze.
Luckily, her car- which has a lot less features than the Camry and has been on its last legs for the last 6 months, and which she only uses to get to and from the ER, because the mileage is running up- is in for repairs at the shop downtown. It would have been spared the assault.
She notices something, stoops down to gather a loose collection of the icy pebbles in her cupped palm. I’m not sure what her point is, but as she nears it dawns on me- the stones have a distinct infused fuschia hint. The water in which they gather has also taken on this hue- and if she can discern it, it must not be entirely in my head.
“Never seen anything like this before,” she says. “Have you?”
“No,” I counter. “But there are stories like that, of red rain at certain points in history. Iron particulate in the atmosphere, I think, is what does it.”
“These aren’t red,” she whispers. “They’re hot pink, more like.”
I shield my eyes from the sun, which has crested the horizon and now hangs like a fat teardrop one inch above it. I do this because I’ve noticed how, aside from the stones which have fallen onto our lot specifically, all the surrounding lots have pure white- and ours, meanwhile, looks suspiciously like a cranberry farm.
“Look here,” I shout over. “Would you look at this-” I’m pointing forward, genuinely shocked for once, because right where our property ends and Ms. McCluskey’s begins, right at the designated border, which at this point is marked by some decorative slabs of sandstone, the stones lose their hue. Not a single pink stone has fallen in her yard- and not a single white one in ours. They have been placed with seemingly deliberate intent.
“Well, that’s bizarre-” she bends down near me, brings one of the pink orbs to her mouth, extends her tongue, licks it.
“I wouldn’t suggest that. You don’t know what’s in these.”
“Well, iron,” she replies. “Like you said, and it has a distinct type of flavor.”
“Do you notice any?”
“No.” She folds her arms, sick of the whole affair, sick of overthinking it, and then trudges through the swampy morass towards the front door. I hear the entrance click shut. Now it’s just me, ankle deep in the produce of my lunacy.
The color, of course, is significant somehow. Something is being communicated. I’m blanking on the esoteric wisdom bestowed upon me in my course on color theory, and what fuschia in particular signifies. I stuff a few little globes into my mouth, swirl them around, bite down hard and savor the crunch. I’m consuming my own brain, in a sense.
Someone else eats their brain-
The ambulance makes a pronounced turn at the corner, its tires kick up slush as they cut through the muck, and the light on top spins. I’ve always found the ambulance siren to be an elegantly designed thing, akin to the wings of a butterfly, or those of the angel of death. No doubt the paramedics driving are some of Sheila’s colleagues from Parkview, she knows them or at the very least has made small talk with them a few times. Injury is a small world.
“No-” I stutter as it swerves nonchalantly into Ms. McCluskey’s driveway. I wade across the division and stand out front to see what’s happened.
From the interior comes a woman around 55, dressed in sweatpants and a jacket with turquoise ovals. Her hair is slicked-back into a bun and she has prominent jowls. McCluskey’s resident nurse, I presume, although I’m too far away to hear what’s being said and I don’t presume to interfere. I get back on the middle of the road where the ground is less entrenched to dry my feet.
The nurse is holding what looks like an old flip phone in one hand, she hasn’t been the recipient of much sleep. The paramedics jump down from the platform, one of them is holding a clipboard and the other goes around towards the back to carry out a stretcher.
The nurse doesn’t say much, only talks in short one-syllable replies while they ask rudimentary questions. I recognize some of the rhetoric, brief snippets of the usual protocol. The attendant, a tall Hispanic man with sideburns, jots down the relevant details, while his colleague, a shorter androgynous type in their early twenties, stands aside the stretcher disinterested. They’ve already seen a lot today, and on top of that there’s some kind of repetitive beeping noise drifting from the main chamber of the ambulance, which both appear to ignore.
After a few minutes, the nurse leads them both inside. While they’re gone, I peek inside the meat wagon- no other patients to be found. I run my palm over the glistening chrome. It’s been so long since I felt one of these things, up close. Not that it was ever even my department- but they were such a symbol of pride at Swedish, and the temps would race each other, try to beat each other’s time with various cases of cardiac arrest or asphyxiation across the city.
I back up again once the team comes out, and it’s no surprise what they’re hauling- Ms. McCluskey’s battered carcass, there on display atop 5 feet of fabric. I had expected the worst, and upon second thought it was no wonder the bird couldn’t survive such an onslaught. But what I’m not prepared for is the way her body looks- her mouth is full of icy chunks, her eyes seem to have been gouged out, replaced with sunken pools of liquid, and all across her arms and legs there are patterns of what appear to be bullet holes. I dart forward to see this macabre spectacle up close, but the androgynous medic pushes me away and shuts the latch.
“Sorry, Pal. Going to the hospital.” And they both promptly get into the seats up front and roar off. The nurse stays behind sitting near a potted frond.
“Hi,” I proceed, extending my hand. “Jerry. Jerry Kessel. Are you her caretaker?” She leans up and takes me in. I imagine I’m a sight- my hair isn’t combed, my attire is modest, and she doesn’t seem to have much time for nonsense. She has more places to be now, more senior citizens to watch over, and more positions to chase.
“Yeah. You knew her or something?”
“Sort of,” I grin. “I was her neighbor. That’s our house over there. My wife- she was friends with her, you could say. Invited her over sometimes. Very congenial.”
“Uh-huh. That’s impressive, considering McCluskey had hostile dementia.”
“Well, my wife’s a nurse too. Emergency room, not live-in.”
“Oh, one of those,” she scoffs. “I’ve dealt with some preppy ones before. They don’t have to do near the amount of work I do. We change the sheets, bedpans, soiled clothing, catheters...your wife probably didn’t know what she was doing.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I concede. “Say, uh- incidentally, you don’t mind me asking, how did she die? How’d she get like that...?”
“Like what?”
“You know, you saw it. With all those hailstones in her mouth, her whole body ripped apart like shredded beef. Did they fall through the roof?”
“That’s really fucking insensitive,” she snaps. “But if you must know, I found her outside in the backyard around 6 A.M. when I usually get here. Lying on her back, extremities splayed out to either side. They asked me if I thought there was foul play involved. You ask me, I would say no. There were no wounds except those inflicted by the weather. She probably wandered out sometime in the night, slipped, and couldn’t get up. And they just kept raining down on her. Or maybe- no. No, that couldn’t be it.”
“What couldn’t?”
“Like snow blindness,” she posits. “I can’t say I’ve ever heard of this particular affliction, but theoretically, if she was tired- tired of living, of all the suffering she goes through all the time, if you knew what kind of life she led- she may have voluntarily chosen to leave. To march out, set up shop, and let it kill her. Facing up the whole while.”
“What a horrible way to die. I’m truly sorry. If there’s anything I can do-”
“No,” she raises her hand. “You- you’ve said enough. It’s time for me to leave.” She tucks the flip phone into a zipper pocket, silently departs toward her car half a block away. I’m at a loss for words, unsure how all these stray pieces fit together as of yet.
I trudge through the sea of pink which surrounds our little abode. It’s getting to be mid morning by now and some of it has evaporated into the gravel. I look up at the sun, stare directly into it against the advice of all licensed optometrists, shift my photoreceptors such that it becomes a swirling halo of blue. Then I enter.
The scent of hash browns and arabian blend wafts from the kitchen, Sheila is using the spatula and absentmindedly sprinkling on pepper, and while I watch her go about her business I consider that, tomorrow, I should definitely check on Nil, try and attain some results. It would certainly be in our best interests. That resolved, I grab my cup from the receptacle of the coffee machine and take up my usual position at the granite island.
“I saw the ambulance pull up next door,” Sheila says. “Is Ms. McCluskey alright?”
“Yeah. She accidentally fell down some stairs in the night and got a hairline fracture on her hip, but they’re going to help her. Her nurse says she’ll be back home in about a week.”
“That’s good,” comes the response, back still turned to me. “And she’ll hopefully be able to finish that mural she’s been working on. Last time I checked, it looked like it was about 95% done. Maybe she’ll invite us over to see it.” Three minutes pass, then the hashbrowns are thoughtlessly heaped onto my plate and she dashes out into the backyard.
No words are exchanged between us, none need to be.