By Ellonyia Yenney
Growing-up, my father had a few stock phrases. Little tidbits, if you will, of sayings that, when said, immediately brought an entire conversation or lesson to mind. As I got older some of the phrases changed and evolved, but they were always there, lurking, waiting for a moment to strike and to make me smile. Phrases like, “Never eat yellow snow” and “Eva Perone remains dead.” Probably the first such phrase I remember hearing over and over, revolved around bears. Ask school children and they will all happily tell you that bears hibernate. Not true. Bears sleep through the winter, and reach an almost hibernation-like state, but bears will get-up sometimes during the winter months. Bears don’t hibernate. Ground squirrels, on the other hand, do hibernate. What’s the difference? Startle a ground squirrel and their bodies are so on the brink of death anyway, that you topple them right over… cold dead squirrel. Startle a bear during winter and you have one pissed off Teddy who will toddle on over and show you his irritation. The moral of this story? “Never Slap a Sleeping Bear.” Now that you know this, the story makes perfect sense and this is a lesson that I intend to pass on to my son (as soon as he is old enough to care). But you know what? That’s not really an end-all statement. Sometimes life throws you a curve ball and no matter how much you want to do the safe and easy thing, sometimes you just have to slap the sleeping bear. My father drank. I really didn’t think anything of it most of the time, because it was usually a few beers and that was all. But there were other times when a few beers turned into many beers. Then he and my mom would fight. I loved my father… didn’t have much use for my mom. Don’t get me wrong, my mom didn’t do anything wrong. She just wasn’t the person who came home every night with a little something in his pockets for us. She was the one who would say “no” to building boats out of toothpicks and bars of business-trip soap from hotels, while dad would pitch right in and make the sail for us. Dad was affectionate, mom was aloof. When I was in third grade, she asked me to defect to her side. The night was particularly bad. I don’t know what all had happened, and it’s really not that important. I was in my room and my brother was in his. My father had been drinking and sometime during the evening my mother had locked my father out of our little rental house. So, my father put his hand through the glass window of the door and simply unlocked it and let himself back in. My mother fled the house. I remember thinking, “Good, now that she’s gone he won’t be mad anymore.” My father (even drunk) would never have hurt us kids and it never even entered my mind to be frightened of him; I just wanted the fighting to stop. I wanted to know that the neighbors would not pity us. After about 20 minutes or so, there was a knock at my bedroom window. Nothing good taps at bedroom window in the dark. I didn’t go see what or who it was. I simply stayed on my blue corduroy bedspread. The knocking stopped. Then my brother came into the room and the knocking began again. “It’s mom,” he said, and opened the window. I honestly think that the opening of that window caused me to change. There was a fork right there (we have a few in each life) and that was my first fork. “You need to come to the front of the house,” she said through the window. I think I actually stared at her with my mouth open. At seeing my face, I’m sure she conceived of the entirely wrong impression. “You don’t have to be scared. Just go through the living room and out the front door. He won’t hurt you!” At that moment I could have slapped her. Of course he wouldn’t hurt me… that was my Daddy! Then I understood; the fighting was only postponed. There was an eye to this storm and we were in it. It wasn’t over; it was merely swirling around us. The other side of the eye is the one that gets you in the end. “I will meet you both out front in the car,” and she disappeared from sight of my window. It was then that I did the thing that broke my heart for the very first time in memory. I became a traitor and began to walk out of the house. My father was standing in the living room and we had to walk passed him to leave. As we walked out of the room, my father keeled, “Oh no… she has gotten to you too!” I didn’t look around. I didn’t look to see if my brother was following. I didn’t cry. I simply betrayed all that I had known up until that very moment and walked out the door. As we were driving away I sat in the back seat of the car clutching my beloved teddy (the one with the Velcro paws that had once cradled a long-gone baby bear). As we drove away, I heard my mother crying as she steered. I am sure that I must have heard it before, I must have… I can’t recall ever registering my mother crying before. In that narcissistically innocent way that only an 8-year-old can have, I bravely decided to forgo my own anguish and let her know that everything was forgiven and that somehow I was not blaming her for any of this. I took a deep breath, hugged my bear tighter to my chest and let her know that, “It’s OK, Mommy. We can get other toys.” There, I had said it. I knew we were going to be going away and that there was no turning back now that somehow I had managed to cross the picket line. My Daddy was gone. Then she laughed. “Oh, we aren’t going away. Daddy needs to go away for a while.” I was floored, astonished, and confused. I had just done the bravest, most traitorous action of my life; I had tried to comfort my Mother in the most obvious way that I knew how… and none if it seemed to have mattered. After about a week, my brother and I drove with my mom to Swedish American Hospital in Rockford, Illinois. That’s when I found out that my father had been there this whole time getting better. We walked in and had to go to a special elevator that only stopped at certain floors. Some really tall buildings have elevators like that. Swedish American was not that tall. It was just one of those “special floors.” By special, I mean people waited out in the hall to get their medications. There was an old woman who no longer knew who/where/when she was who merely sat in a wheelchair and wanted to hold my bear. There were people who rocked, people who talked to themselves, the elderly, the suicidal, and those dependent on substances. When we got there, my Dad showed us all his room and gave us a tour of the floor. There was a room for arts and crafts! We had dinner together and we talked. He seemed much better and very relaxed. When it got later, it was time to go home. So I got my jacket and my Mother, Brother, Dad and I walked to the door that separated the “floor” from the elevator. As we were going to go through the door, I noticed that my Dad was no longer walking. Then I knew. I had been tricked. We were here to visit and we were expected to see the nice hotel room, have a dinner talking about what we had done that day, see the neat grown-up arts and crafts room and then we were supposed to leave him there. I had already left him once and he seemed to have forgiven me for it but I was not going to leave my Daddy again. No one told me that I was going to have to leave him again. No one said we were visiting. He needed to come home with us or we needed to stay there with him! I can’t do this again! I walked out once before with this woman and I don’t want to do it again. I can’t do it again. He is my Daddy! He saw what was happening and suddenly understood that I didn’t know he was staying behind… again. He knelt down and gave me a huge, gentle hug and told me that everything was ok. That we would see him tomorrow and that he would have a surprise for me. It was ok to leave now and that he loved me very much. I left when he told me it was ok to go…and I knew I was betraying him all over again. Every night for weeks we went to visit my father in the hospital. We drove the hour each way every night once my mother was finished with work. We stayed until visiting hours were over and then we drove the hour home again. The exit to the hospital from the interstate had a large Wendy’s sign peaking over the top of the overpass. I was 8, but I know that I could still drive that route blindfolded. On the 4th of July, I was told that we were going to be watching the fireworks with Daddy in Rockford. All day everyone was so excited about seeing the fireworks and everyone kept saying that we were really lucky to be so many floors up because we would have the perfect view. But, we didn’t. There was a perfect view through one of the meeting rooms until you noticed that there was an exhaust chimney for the hospital visible through that window. Every one of the fireworks was covered by that damn chimney. In retrospect… it’s so sad. These people who had the most desire and honest need to see these fireworks were only allowed to see the remnants of the joy that everyone else got to see. The posters meant to represent the mental health establishment should have a picture from that very window on the 4th of July. Dark window, stark chimney, tiny bits of brilliant light escaping around the edges. So much for independence.
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By Nicole Cater
I was getting checked in during a shift change. This was very aggravating as it meant I had to sit in a waiting room for an hour. Considering I was on the verge of snapping someone’s neck or just tapping an artery, it really wasn’t an ideal situation. But it turned out to be a lucky one. Because Barb, about 65-ish, toothless and with crazy pop-out-of-her-skull eyes took advantage of the shift change to go streaking on the Quad. Well, there was no Quad, but I hear there was plenty of streaking. No one wants to see Barb naked. Men on Death Row who haven’t seen a woman in years would be blinded by the site of her bare flesh. It’s not so much that the lights are on, but nobody’s home, it’s more like the house got repossessed and someone forgot to turn off the electricity. In any event, by the time I am being admitted, Barb has at least been covered with a robe. But she is also standing at the admitting room window staring at me as if her life depended on it. It may have. With her, you never really could tell. But helloooooo creeper! I never fully got a grasp on what Barb’s diagnosis was. My best guess was lobotomy. Most times, she just sat quietly and made hand gestures like she was doing complicated mathematics in her head. And then she would randomly say weird stuff, like “fruit salad” or “my lunch is retarded” when no one was talking to her. Or she would just lay her head down on the table and clap. But here’s the interesting thing. Everyone just ignored her! The nurses, the counselors, the other patients, we all acted like she was just part of the scenery, like some very exotic parrot kept on the floor as a pet. I’m as guilty as the rest, but really, not top-notch healthcare there. And then there was Roger. Who I’m pretty sure was from another planet. I know two things about Roger’s home planet. 1) The alien’s from there that try and pass as people suffer from Parkinson’s-like symptoms. 2) They have shower fetishes. As in they think they shower frequently, but they don’t. Being newly hatched from his pod, Roger had to be constantly reminded of his name by a gentle tap while saying it, similar to a clicker with a dog. He clearly had not studied his English well enough on his trip, also, since he could not answer a direct question to save his life. The nurses did make an attempt to care for him for at least a day, but after that, they abandoned him to the kindness of the rest of us messed up earthlings. We did our best, but you can only feed meatloaf to an alien for so long before the funktastic fumes begin to overwhelm you and you have to take an illegal smoke break. Roger did do his best to hide his body odor by trying to convince people he was actually in the shower at that moment. And then he would steal his roommate’s clothes. The nurses, on that side of the invisible line, in their caring and compassionate way, advised Clayton, his roommate, to get his clothes back. During an earnest heart to heart with Clayton, I advised him to consider them lost, or burn them upon return. Tales from the Whack Shack, Vol. 2: Checks, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Ward9/2/2014 By Nicole Cater
Checks are a loony bin's way of stimulating the economy by creating a job. In essence, your friendly, local booby hatch has just helped six people realize their own little slice of the American dream. And here’s how it works: Within the ward, there is some line that is only visible to sane people, e.g. nurses, doctors, techs, so on. It divides the ward into two parts, Ward A or Ward B. I never saw this line, but then again, I’m crazy, so why would I? Theoretically, there is a big board on each side of the line explaining who is who, what is what, and the meaning of life. But it’s all written in nurse-ese hieroglyphics, so the best you can hope to do is find your name and the nurse you are assigned to nag that day. Included in the board of dubious information are the shifts of techs. Techs are people who spend eight hours of their day, one per each side of the invisible line, checking your whereabouts EVERY 15 MINUTES!!!!! This is their sole existence in life. If your door is shut, they open it. If you are in the bathroom, they are knocking on the door. They have notebooks so that they can check off that they have physically witnessed you. You don’t talk to the check techs; they are not there to help you; they will not help you; and if you should make direct contact, they will vaguely point to a nurse's station and wander off on their never-ending task. And I do mean never ending. At night, when you are trying to sleep, despite all the noise and chaos, check techs are prairie dogging in your room all night. You’ll know a shift change has occurred because a new face is holding the all-powerful notebook. When they finish their rounds of counting you and make sure no one has escaped (a ground-floor facility with opening widows...some planner was not too bright), their whole process starts over again. I actually feel a bit sorry for these people. They must have some sort of "in" with the God of Comfortable Shoes, because as far as I could tell, sitting was a fireable offense for them. Believe it or not, the check techs actually become background white noise much sooner than you would imagine. Which is a bit scary. |
AuthorThis is our new Wicked Short Stories page with submissions from various Authors. Please look for bio-snippets about the Author at the bottom of the various pieces. Enjoy! Archives
February 2018
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