Irenosen Okojie - Butterfly Fish

The nurses became interchangeable, bearing half smiles as winter set in. They brought cups of tea, terrible, tasteless sandwiches and no hope of my life ever going back to what it was. When they washed me, I avoided looking in the mirror. I couldn’t bear to see my bandaged stump, still covered to protect the skin. Sometimes I saw it uncovered, leave my body; roll around near the plughole on the grey floor. Once Anon wore it in the mirror. I spotted her through the steam in the glass crying, her moist, pink tongue heavy with some knowledge. She knew something and she wouldn’t tell me. Flecks of gold spun in her dark eyes. Her crying became so loud I felt my heart stop. Rivulets on the mirror watered her stump that cruelly grew whole again before my eyes.

An image flickered in my mind’s eye. Anon and I were walking on the darkened train platform, the sound of an approaching train surrounding us. Two pigeons at the far end of the platform were losing their colouring to a sky she’d already built. She pointed to a gap. I edged forward into a heat so palpable, my skin burned. The tracks became hot soil beneath my feet. I was caught in a procession of some sort. Men dressed in traditional African clothing were dragging a bound man and woman through a trail. Stray branches snapped. I tasted a metallic flavour in somebody’s shortness of breath. Sweat slicked trembling hands, a rope dug into skin. Short glimpses of light between trees were blinding. Suddenly, the sound stopped. As if I’d gone temporarily deaf. I imagine pressing an ear against a surface of water must be like this; faint, traceable, individual murmurings but you cannot make sense of the whole.

The train wheel, black and heavy burst through the water onto flesh and bone, crushing it. The pain was so deep, so agonizing I would know it forever. I screamed, falling from the wheelchair onto the wet, shower floor. The nurse scrambled to her knees. I cried into the plughole, into the train tracks. Anon turned up the noise in the steamed mirror and the surfaces of water we shared.

On the day of my release, I woke up to discover the man three beds down had died in his sleep. All evidence of him had been removed, only the crease in the silence indicated he was gone. I felt guilty sleeping through a death like that but he must have passed quietly, without any fanfare. It was a cold and surprisingly bright morning. Sunlight streamed through the small window. From the bed, I saw people milling about outside, facing the start of their working day. I was nauseous with dread and anticipation. The last time I’d been out in the world, my life had been different.

I sat up in bed cursing things I’d taken for granted in the past. Even the dark had been a constant companion. My body had adapted to it’s modes of infiltration; it’s silencing of stones in the jar on my kitchen desktop, it’s power to hold my limbs hostage on those heavy days I could barely crawl out of bed. The dark treated Anon like a prodigal daughter, allowing her to spring in pockets around me, carrying bits of a puzzle that disintegrated whenever I reached for them. I missed the movements my body used to make without a careful thought but how was I to know what was to come? Now, I was an injured woman wandering through a collection of battlefields, feeling the softening skin of rotten fruit in my fingers. Frustrated, my eyes swam.

The Doctors took ages making their rounds so I didn’t get discharged till after midday. I left one rotten pear and a leaking blue biro on the dresser as gifts for the next patient. A white napkin I’d fashioned into a plane was hidden under the pillow, already touching the edges of another life. The nurses had given me fresh clothes to wear; new cotton underwear, a pair of black jeans a size too big, a grey t-shirt and a snoopy sweatshirt, its long right sleeve dangling pathetically. As if it was waiting for my right arm to come back through the human traffic surrounding us.

The Doctor, a severe looking auburn haired man with a dented nose had informed me that due to my “history” they’d assign a health worker to my case to check up on me every now and again, help me adjust to living with my disability.

“Just for some support,” he added diplomatically. “So you can transition back to living on your own with these changes. It can be… emotionally overwhelming at first,” he said, smiling distantly, tapping his pen against the clipboard, mentally already onto the next patient. I sat there picking lint from my new jeans, blinking up at him as if he were a mirage in the wrong setting. Soon enough, one of us would shrink into a slithering of light.

“You’ve prescribed more sleeping pills?” I asked, weary of the constant cycle of medications.

He nodded patiently. “Yes, to help you in the meantime. Your body needs rest. If you’d been consistently taking the pills you were originally given, you may not have had that unfortunate incident I’m afraid.”

“But what about finding out why I’ve been sleepwalking?”

He sighed audibly, rocked back on his heels. There could be all sorts of reasons. Dr Krull knows your history. He can advise you best.”

I stuffed coins slick with sweat in my pocket. “What do I do if I lose time again?” Panic seeped into my voice.

“Take the pills Joy,” he instructed patronizingly, as if I was a small child who couldn’t quite grasp the obvious.

Dr Krull knows your history . I imagined the ink pen he held scratching one pale, blue iris out, a stethoscope strangling his neck and the struggle to breathe making him take some other form. The paper plane beneath the pillow sprouted an extra wing.

I sat in the compact, white, waiting area downstairs by the sliding doors. Tiny wax women bearing injuries hitched rides on the wheels of ambulance beds, headed towards death or reinvention. Only a handful of people were sitting down, in varying stages of illness. My left hand was jittery. I caught the tail end of a conversation a rail thin blonde was having at the phone box. She puffed on a cigarette in between gesticulating wildly. Smoke curled around the outline of a scorpion tattoo on her exposed midriff while a haggard man in a worn, black leather jacket with thinning, dark hair rushed by holding a bouquet of daffodils. I pictured the recipient, a wife or lover sitting on an uncomfortable bed eating the petals.

Then that image was replaced by one of a brown-skinned woman swimming in a river, kicking hard against a tide. The blue petal in her mouth floated like a rootless tongue. My chest tightened. My mouth became dry. The man was a fleeting thing who’d brought an unlikely passenger through the sliding doors. He jangled a set of keys nervously in his pocket. I pressed my ears against the sound, still gripped by the knowledge that unsettling things could slip into moments of weakness and holes in your day. A trickle of blue water ran down the middle of my vision, bookmarking the two worlds.

An ambulance van pulled up outside by the kerb. The doors slid open. An empty bottle of rum rolled towards heels clicking. The sharp clicking heels trapped a crinkled Trebor mint wrapper, a five pence coin with the Queen’s head spinning, a torn multi-coloured woven bracelet. My mother had made a bracelet like that for me once, weaving the material between her fingers expertly, and humming.

The cracked ambulance siren was silent. Its doors smacked open and closed. Inside the ambulance were future scenes waiting to find their way into my life; trying to tie my laces one handed, cracking eggs on a shiny black desktop, watching the yolks slide down to the floor, becoming small chickens clucking erratically. I saw myself lying on the ground by the open freezer door, a cold mist on my face. I cried over the ache and loss of my arm. My body shuddered. I reached into the freezer pulling out yellow fish whose mouths kept moving after they spat out the same brass key, before melting into bright water in my hand.