Ticking Clock Bed — Fiction (Published)

The hospital bed was the most uncomfortable of performance stages. Dad needed me to show I was gonna make it, all while the bells and whistles attached to me disagree, doctors and nurses doing their best to hide their true expressions. I don’t think he wanted to notice. The scent of the sickening cleanliness of the hospital room made it hard not to grimace, so I usually blamed any harsh faces on that. Any time they wanted me to eat, even when I wanted to eat, the smell filled me, trying to make me as clean as it was, trying to invade my filth. I longed for our dirty apartment, I longed for home.

Dad was trying not to cry whenever I saw him. His chin was always stiff like he was holding himself back from shouting. Whenever he came back from his breaks, his beard would be coated in salt, his depression coping method of choice. The smell of McDonalds clashed with the cleanly smell, and in a way comforted me. But the way he looked at me took every comfort away. He looked at me in my sorry bed the same way he looked at mom just before she left. He knew there was nothing he could do, nothing she could do, and nothing I could do.

We usually sat in silence. It was easier on me than I let on; I would say my white lies that I was okay to talk, holding back another face. My lungs ached with each word. I kept pushing.

Everyone felt incredibly useless and nauseated. I didn’t want to die, but I was so tired all the same.

When the doctor came in to tell us that the next surgery, a lung transplant, had a low survival rate, so low that she didn’t want to even say the percentage, my dad still smiled. There was a chance, still enough that they would try. I couldn’t look him in the eye when I nodded that I wanted it. I needed to try because he needed me to.

When I opened my eyes after the procedures, I thought I was waking up in my small bed at home. I could hear dad’s snoring from outside the walls, the window cracked enough to let a breeze through. I heard birds for the first time in what felt like years in the early morning. I took a light breath inward at my silly realization and my eyes widened when it didn’t ache. My room was different, surrounded by flowers. The sickening clean was overwhelmed by the scent of flora.

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This piece was published in 2017 in Horizons.

https://www.waubonsee.edu/sites/default/files/docs/2019-05/Horizons%202017%20for%20Website.pdf

Thank you Horizons for this opportunity.