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"I will personally challenge anyone who wants to get rid of fighting to a fight."
—Brian Burke
1
Long before I could open my eyes, I could hear the nurse talking about her bad date.
My head swam. I kept sinking back into the darkness, no matter how much I tried to pull myself up. Sometimes it felt as if I were sinking into a fathomless black pool, the water closing over my head.
But sometimes, her voice threaded through my dreams.
“It’s the absolute last time I let my sister set me up. I’m pretty sure she’s pranking me now.”
I couldn’t hear the other voice of whoever she was talking to. Maybe they had just accepted it was best to let her go.
“I think it might be because once, when we were teenagers, we double dared each other to go streaking. And I chickened out, but she doesn’t believe me. It was just in our backyard, but we had the meanest next-door-neighbor who happened to be picking her tomatoes just then. She was ringing our doorbell to talk to our mom before Chloe even got her clothes on.” She let out a deep belly laugh that made me think she was still not sorry.
“Anyway, I think she’s still mad, because when I called her about this date to ask why she did this to me, she said it was to help me get over my fears. Fears of what? Having a nice time?”
The darkness seemed to be pulling me back down. But I really wanted to know what this bad date was like, so I forced myself to surface, trying to open my eyes.
My lashes fluttered, but no one noticed. There was no one waiting at my bedside. I’d figured that out already. I was alone most of the time.
But not always.
There was just this nurse, moving energetically around to take care of me, chattering all the time to the friend I never heard answer.
“So she sets me up, and it’s supposed to be a picnic. I usually would say a big no thank you to going anywhere less crowded than Costco on a Saturday with a first date. You never know if a guy is a creep or not. But this is my sister, right? She’s looking out for me. He’s not going to be a serial killer, and even if he was, he would know better than to unalive me. Because obviously, someone knows where I am. Well, unless the serial killer had low impulse control. I guess I really shouldn’t have agreed to a picnic.”
“But anyway, I did, and there I was. We go off into the woods and he’s just got this backpack, which is a little less than I expected. I was thinking of one of those baskets like they sell at Crate & Barrel with wine and cheese…hopefully brie, I love brie. I’ve always wanted one of those baskets. But whatever. I’m not like high maintenance.”
“Then we sit down, and he’s got like… two bottles of water and a bag of chips. He tells me it’s a snackwick. First of all, that’s not a thing, and second of all, brie makes for a great snack. You don’t take a girl on a date and feed her store brand potato chips.”
“And yes, you’re right. The way to my heart is through cheese. And not murdering me in the woods. At this point, I’m like, if not cheese, what’s in the backpack? Is it an axe? But no! It was not an axe! It was worse!”
I’d drifted in and out of consciousness for the past few days, never quite surfacing enough to get anyone’s attention. Once I’d blinked my eyes open to be greeted with bland ceiling tiles and apparently my brain had decided it could not even, and I’d fallen back to sleep.
But now when the darkness tries to claim me, I fight it.
I need to know what was worse than an axe.
“It was puppets! This crazy motherfucker pulled out two puppets. Puppets! And I’m like, oh no, I shouldn’t have come out here…and he puts a puppet on each hand and they start having, like, a ventriloquist's duel. Over which one likes me more. One puppet likes my eyes a lot, but the other puppet is just all about my tits. Which is pretty fucking intense for a puppet, may I say? I’m a nurse. I can deal with gore and death, but I cannot deal with whatever that was…”
I finally managed to blink my eyes open. The light burned.
She made eye contact with me as she was fixing my blankets.
A look of complete shock crossed her face, then resolved into joy. “You’re awake!”
I just wanted to ask her how she got away from the puppets.
My lips moved, but the sound that came out of my mouth didn’t sound human.
It was better than facing the sterile hospital room and the fact that I had no idea how I’d gotten here.
Or what was wrong with me.
Or who I was.
