“You’re so handsome, honey! You’re so handsome!”
My mother sits in her wheelchair, leaning forward and smiling. Her grin reaches out towards me and wraps around me like a warm, wet hand. I am visiting her, in the Nursing Home where she now lives out her life. It is my Easter visit.Donate to Read
NO ONE IS INNOCENT
“Get ready,” the voice said. “Watch out.”
Martin was stocky with his hair brown and cropped short. He sat staring at me from his bed, wrapped in a blue hospital gown. Around him, the bedspread was wadded up into a ball and there were books and papers scattered on the floor between us.Donate to Read
“I pace through the house talking to them. I feel them in the room and they talk back to me, just like they did when I was living with the bastards!”
Miriam stopped and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead. She squinted at me across the table at the Starbucks, and took a sip of her Americano. Miriam is a good friend of mine, the wife of one of my colleagues. She had called me the night before, and asked me if I could meet her to talk about something that was bothering her.Donate to Read
It was frozen. Frozen solid. I had never seen a water bed that had frozen like a giant ice cube before.
I rolled over and felt the sharp jagged ice pressing up from inside the bed, jabbing into my side. I was dressed in long insulated underwear – long johns, we called them – and wearing a heavy coat with a Wolverine fur collar. It was the winter of 1975 in Minnesota, and I could hear the wind howl and scream outside the windows of the trailer.Donate to Read
“How does it work, doctor Benson?”
“That’s the thing, Trent – we don’t know how it works.” I said.
“You’re kidding. You don’t know how it works.”
“Nope.”
“Then how do you know it even does?’
Trent sat on the couch across from me, next to his wife, with his arms folded across his chest. He pushed his jaw out and stared at me.Donate to Read
Oliver had been hospitalized many times, each time coming in to our Emergency Room through the sliding glass doors drunk and flailing away at the world, roaring and screaming that he wanted to die.
No one liked to see Oliver’s bald and shiny head appear, but there it was this early Sunday morning, his lips twisted in a frown that pulled his thin mustache down over yellow stained teeth..Donate to Read
Looking at my patient, I see cuts and slashes parade up and down her arms like holiday ribbons. She is 15, sitting on her hospital bed with her head bent forward staring down at the quilt. Her hair is blonde with a tinge of red dye going down through the middle of it, and her skin is pale. This is Ashley.Donate to Read
I never saw the truck. It came down the hill, running the red light and passing in front of me just as I entered the intersection. I pulled the steering wheel to the right and pushed my foot down on the brake, as hard as I could. The back of the car slid to the left, and I felt a vibration as my car slammed into the curb and rolled up onto the sidewalk and then the grass on the edge of the road.Donate to Read
Metal hitting bone is a dead, sickening sound. This is what Isaiah heard before he saw the man roll up over the hood of his car and slam into his windshield.
The rain fell in long sheets from the sky, covering the windshield. Outside it was dark, and Isaiah could see nothing as he peered into the blackness to see what had happened. He slammed on his brakes, and the Mercedes skidded to a halt several yards beyond the stop sign.Donate to Read
“ I don’t know why I did it, Doctor Benson.”
“You have no idea?”
“No idea.”
I took a deep breath. “Tell me what you remember.”
John reached up to twist the end of his mustache. He rolled it between his fingers, until it became a sharp point. Outside, the light filtering through the window in my office was fading into grey.Donate to Read
“She would never tell me my father’s name! She refused to tell me who he was, doctor.”
This is how Michael Elton started the interview, when he first appeared in my office. Michael was a single man who lived alone, in a small apartment on the East side of town. He had been referred to me by his Family Practitioner, Eric Chu. All Eric said, in his notes, was that Michael was depressed.
Behind me, the grey light of the late Northwest Fall slanted in through the window over my head. It was raining, and I could hear the drops hitting the roof in a slow patter, tap, tap, tap, like fingers drumming across a tabletop.Donate to Read
The image was like nothing I had ever seen before; white spaces surrounded and interwoven with dark black. The Neurologist pointed to a bulging in one of the threads of white on the MRI scan of my brain. He spoke in a monotone.
“You see here, this space in these arteries. This is called the Circle of Willis, and this is an aneurysm in the anterior communicating artery in this connection of vessels.”Donate to Read
Dennis O’leary was a small, wiry man with pale skin and a thin wispy mustache of blonde hair. He looked to be in his late 40’s, and he had combed his hair up over his head to cover a gaping bald spot.
“Doctor Benson.” He said.
I nodded, and gripped his hand. His skin was dry and cracked along the fingers.Donate to Read
The man was sitting on the edge of his bed in his room on our psychiatry unit. Tatoos ran up and down his arms, the green and red colors mixing in with his dishwater dirty skin color, and on his face his mustache curved down over his lower lip, partly covering the gaps in his teeth. As I leaned forward to grip his extended right hand, his odor spread out around me like an unwashed blanket.Donate to Read
People hover above me in the room—I hear a low murmur of conversation but can’t make out any of the words. Across the way curtains seem to flutter in an open window, flapping. I can’t move. I try to reach up with my right arm, but the message from my brain somehow won’t reach the muscles and tendons to make it move.
My vision fades, and I’m back inside my head floating like a diving bell in deep water—I still think about that book about that Frenchman.Donate to Read