A S H O R T M Y S T E R Y : THE FUGITIVE MAGICIAN
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Two days before leaving, I bustled around my messy, basement suite bedroom. Soft clothes underfoot, my bare bottoms grazed fabrics and carpet (chafing friendly and familiar). Suddenly, side-stepping into an impossible corner between dresser-drawers and a shelf, an unexpected fang pierced an unexpected portion of my fleshy left heel. Immense pain--a horrid sting--but a figure called from the door and so I hobbled away.
"What is it? Can you see anything?"
A ghostly body: invisibly floating in my foot-fat.
The next day was too busy to care too much. I walked to the laundromat, dropped off keys here and there by bus, and attempted to rescue a broken bicycle--which I eventually abandoned at the onset of a very steep hill. The whole time I hobbled on the ball of my swaddled left foot; it became a lopsided rhythm.
Later on, I soaked in scalding hot salt-water and scrutinized the small hole in my heel, but could not see a thing.
The day after that, I flew over the mountains and ate borscht. Such a reunion: the whole family huddled around my foot for answers, though it gave them none. Susan prepared epsom salt baths and pried gently at the entry point, while three days passed.
Despite collected years of stale air, the doctors office had not changed much since my childhood. Unturned memories hung with ancient machines that sat discarded in the waiting room. I read D.H. Lawrence while Susan knitted Christmas presents, warm fuzzies almost birthed.
Rising angularly upon request, my hobbled form shuffled through X-ray offices where the metallic parasite was finally discovered. The sewing needle itself was quite comfortable floating in my heel, while I winced in pain from the thought of penetration. Before going to the Grey Nuns Hospital that night,
I ate more borsht.
Bruce and I were cheerleaders for the first surgeon, though reluctance was his face. We shouted encouraging slogans, while he searched for the needle in my foot-fat. He pushed and pulled, pummelling my poor appendage in pursuit of the sickening thing. He claimed blindness--the needle floats and therefore evades. Our episode turned into quite a carnival; at a point, there were three doctors and three nurses conversing around the strange circumstances. My surgeon offered another to take a turn at the game of operation.
But nothing was found.
Dejected,
deflated, Bruce bought me a pair of crutches and we departed.
The Sturgeon Hospital was more assuring. They were to complete my second surgery with an X-ray/ultrasound hybrid of a machine. The needle would not be missed again. The words "YES" and "NO" were scrawled on either appropriate leg in permanent marker. I was wheeled into the appropriate operating room and gassed with the appropriate amount of forgetfulness. However, upon awakening from under anesthetic influence, the first thing that the nurse could utter was that "they couldn't find a thing."
He was the apparent superstar of foot surgeons, quite unaffected by my perplexing fate. Cooly, he explained that they triple checked each leg--all the way up to my knee caps--in search of the floating figment. I was parasite free, and also free to groggily go, sadly without my metallic souvenir.
I quested my memory through that first cut and paste, when bits of flesh were blindly torn from heel and carelessly tossed into hospital bin. Was that singular, climaxing moment of emancipation in my imagination--or was that when I truly bode farewell to the invading, alien body? I could not give full credence at the time, my carnival a disappointment to those who chose not to sift through blood for bone.
I quested my memory through that first cut and paste, when bits of flesh were blindly torn from heel and carelessly tossed into hospital bin. Was that singular, climaxing moment of emancipation in my imagination--or was that when I truly bode farewell to the invading, alien body? I could not give full credence at the time, my carnival a disappointment to those who chose not to sift through blood for bone.
The infamy of the metallic form grew exponentially in my mind. I became more invested in the object's narrative than in my own perceivable plight. Hidden with precision--vertically poised in my carpet--disappearing inside my heel without a trace, only to elude two surgeons (the second of which was completely baffled), this needle was a magician at best, and a fugitive at least. I left our collective laughter behind with my flummoxed family.
Stitches became the only foreign object in my heel, which I removed myself ten days later using paint-stained scissors.
One blue stitch slipped away from my tweezers, and I will never forget the tremendous, t r e m b l i n g t e r r o r of watching it r e c e d e i n t o the d e p t h s of
my newly healed wound.