I was losing my leg, and I had to spend Saturday and Sunday at home until then. I couldn’t run to make myself feel better, and I couldn’t escape the house, I had to just spend time in my living room (because if I spent time in my bedroom, my parents would thing I was avoiding them, and the issue. Mom was a wanna-be psychologist thanks to Dr. Phil, and would over-analyze me and my mood if I just laid in bed for 2 days.) numbly losing xbox games like madden, again and again, as I really couldn’t force myself to care about the little avatars running on the screen.
I didn’t want my friends to see me and ask about what was going on. I didn’t post it on facebook, and I didn’t tell anyone what was happening. I sat on the couch, playing, watching movies, trying to just make it seem like I was functioning, but it wasn’t. My body was in one place and my mind was in another. The place my mind was in, however, was not much better than the one my body was in. I think that my leg, was in better health than my mind was.
It was unfortunately a lot of time in my shell of a body to think, and I was thinking too much, and about too many things that I couldn’t handle thinking about, not in a delirium of sadness. My life was falling apart.
By Sunday I couldn’t live with myself. I also couldn’t live with Durango scratching my leg at every possible moment, because he knew something was wrong. It was Durango who told me that I had cancer in the first place. Of course he was a god, so he couldn’t really tell me anything, but he could sit there and scratch and claw at my leg, which he did do. If the pain didn’t tip me off to know that something was wrong, Durango told me.
And he was doing the same thing, and he’d been doing it since Wednesday night. My leg was scratched to shit and bright red from his persistence, which was starting to hurt. I just had to get out of the house that cancer built.
I packed my crutches, and told mom I was heading to Sam’s, so she wouldn’t ask where I was going and wouldn’t ask what I was doing. I had a cell phone, the damn inventions made it so much easier to lie and not go anywhere that you were supposed to go. I remember when Jason and I would go on wild adventures just to be foiled when mom called Jason’s mom to ask where I was. Now…I wouldn’t have to worry about that, she’d call me, and I’d just say that we were on a walk.
I drove to a park and stopped the car. Despite everything in me that wanted to leave the crutches in the car, I pulled them off the back seat of my pale blue-gray Taurus that I wasn’t allowed to take to school because of my leg. I wondered how I would drive once my leg was gone, or how much a custom car would cost, so I could drive.
I started hobbling, that was really the only way I could describe how one moved with crutches. It was also, kind of like swinging, being a human pendulum between two titanium legs. Being a miniature pump jack, siphoning up oil from a dry well. Rusting up, and being useless.
But I couldn’t run, so I could swing, back and forth along a side walk, trying to keep my crutches on the sidewalk. It was a wide stance, something I wasn’t fully comfortable with, because I never used them, and I still didn’t like using them, and I probably never would. I should get used to it, because I’d be walking with them for the rest of my life.
I ended up in a cemetery, I didn’t know how or why, I kind of lost track while I was just walking. I was staring at a head stone of Rosemary Carrigan. There was no birth date, or no death date, one of the two. There was just, date. May 7, 1902.
And I stared at the date, I stared at the name, I stared at the tiny little headstone, that was crammed next to countless other tiny little headstones that had slid down the side of the hill where the babies were buried. They were shifted and crooked, sliding down the side of the hill, like crooked teeth. I thought they could use braces, be reset to perfect rows of…headstones marking the gravesites of dead babies.
It’d been a hundred years since these babies died, and their bones weren’t there, and their memories weren’t there. I didn’t now Rosemary Carrigan, and even if Rosemary Carrigan had died a week ago, se wouldn’t mean much more to me than she did now. It was just sad, because, a baby had died. But Rosemary Carrigan would be dead by now anyway, if the very idea of being born in 1902 might have killed her.
Cemeteries suddenly seemed so silly, and the idea of being permanently remembered, but not for any reason, just because there was a slab of marble with a name and a date. I realized that Rosemary’s family loved her, but the marble slab didn’t do much for Rosemary. Rosemary was gone, and her mother, father, her siblings, who there were probably 10 or 11, cause of the time she was born, cause of the time she died. They all were gone too, and they didn’t remember her, all who knew Rosemary existed, was probably me, a sad boy who accidentally staggered into an abandoned edge of a cemetery.
If I ever died, I wouldn’t want to be shoved on some edge of a cemetery for someone in 100 years to find my headstone and wonder who the hell I was, and what I ever did. Or what I could have been. I crossed myself, the father, the son, and the rest of it. It seemed like something Michelle would do, something she’d like.
“I dunno you Rosemary.” I whispered. “But I’m sure you coulda been a great girl.” I wheeled on my left crutch, carefully negotiating through the worn pathway with my titanium arm extensions that I swung my way about with. I looked at the ground as I hobbled back to the car. With a new thought process, my mind realized how far I had walked between the park and my destination. I also realized I’d left my phone in the car.
I slid my crutches into the backseat after an hour of hopping. My left leg was sore from bouncing back and forth for so long, and it was only when I plopped down in the driver’s seat and unlocked my phone to see that I had been gone 3 hours. I shook my head and was boggled, and was just as boggled to see the missed text messages. I checked them, replied, and relaxed for a moment, letting my leg just hang and look at the trees, with rusted leaves barely hanging onto the bare branches.
Tomorrow, I was going to wake up with two legs, and then I would fall asleep, and wake up with one, and a knee. I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to make it through…but…I was sure I was going to find a way…
