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Luke
It started, as most things started for me these days, in the chair. For the exercise I had in mind, all I had to do was keep my leg straight and lift it up, but there wasn’t a lot of room in Cassie’s apartment to bend my good leg and spread my hands for balance. So I’d asked Rita to help me down the stairs and keep an eye on the backyard in case the pain got to be too much.
As slowly as I could, I lowered myself to the ground.
When I got there I was already breathing hard. But now I had space. I had clear vision. I had no cloud head. Just one, I told myself. Just one and you can be done.
I imagined my leg was the tree I thought it was in the hospital, when my thoughts were eclipsed by pain. It was the trunk of a tree cut down, and I was back in Buda, still young and happy, at the landscaping job with my brother. I visualized him at the other end, lifting. Let’s get this out of the way, I said to him. One, two, three.
It was up two inches, and it was down.
The pain was there, but it was a calm line of waves, back and forth, lapping. This seemed to work, the practice of attaching everything my body was doing in this yard to objects outside this yard, to moments of peace.
In my mind, I was standing in the makeshift garage on the FOB, my hands resting on the door of a jeep, listening to Clark test its engine.
In my mind I was running.
