Nathaniel Mordue
November 27, 2019 7:45 PM
The Following Dark by Nathaniel Mordue
He should get up, he knew, but it seemed such a long way up, and his arms and legs were so heavy. He kept glancing at them, half-expecting to find them grotesquely swollen, or else encased in casts of cement, but each time they looked completely normal, despite not feeling that way at all.His hands, by contrast, felt too thin, and hurt. It felt like the flesh was collapsing on the bones and like the bones were bruising the inside of the flesh. His knuckles burned, as though the bones might actually cut through the flesh, whenever he moved them. Not that he wanted to move them, because he didn't want to move at all. It seemed like a sure step toward being thrown back into the world, where he would have to make decisions he was not strong enough to make, and anyway, his head felt like a lump of rock, both in weight and in the peculiar sense that it wasn't actually supposed to be attached to the rest of his body at all. So he lay flat on his back, studying the ceiling.
At first, this had seemed a very dull subject of study. After his second long spell of medicated sleep, however, Nathaniel had started to see tiny variances in one inch to another. There was a sort of pattern in it - it looked like uneven paint had somehow dried into the shapes of waves here and there. He thought it must have been stamped at one point, but that the original ceiling had been painted over enough times that parts of the pattern had become obscured, leaving only the highest ridges visible. Stamped tin turning into creases in tissue paper, a white frothy ocean of tissue paper. The paint had very slightly passed it limits in one place, extended its white line onto the very edge of a piece of the molding which eased the transition between the ceiling and the wall. Waves escaping the ocean onto the paneled shore, he thought drowsily, eroding the paneling, one day the ceiling would fall on them all and they could drown....
He, however, could not. The medic pushed aside the curtain which formed a sort of door between the two privacy screens around his bed a lot, he noticed. He could see a clock over her head, above the section of the wall blocked from view by his screens; he figured out quickly enough that the check-ins happened at regular intervals, which made him exert the minute effort needed to roll his eyes. If she actually wanted to ensure his continued survival that way, being extremely predictable in her interruptions was probably not the best strategy.
He should get up, he knew. Some of these aches and pains were just from spending too much time idle - and worse, spending it idle on a hospital cot, which was designed more for pure function than for comfort of any kind. The sheets were papery-feeling, thin and strangely rigid in odd places, if moved just so. But it was such a long way up.
The screens were not tall enough to block all view of the world outside his temporary abode - he could see the ceiling all around, and even a sliver of floor beneath, between the mobile feet of each screen. Feet passed by sometimes. He was mildly surprised to hear a noise off to his left, though. Usually noises were either further away or directly in front of him. He managed to turn his head far enough to look toward his left screen.
"Is someone out there?" he asked.
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Nathaniel Mordue
The Following Dark
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