aphasia

I closed my eyes and waited for the caress of the x-ray, wondering what would happen if I tore the protective sheet from my body and let the fragile light mutate me.
--

The therapist smoothed the creases in his pants, running two fingers along his upper thigh. It was four hours later and I was still in the hospital, trying not to stare at the coffee stains on the carpet.

"I have a little joke that I think you'll enjoy."

He told one of these jokes at least twice a week. They usually lasted eight to twelve minutes and he probably thought that they helped break that awkward therapist-patient boundary.

I sat back in my chair and thought of car wrecks. Whenever I had to wait I'd play this game, crafting intricate scenes and then watching them from behind my eyelids like a movie. The wrecks were separated from successful drives by the most insignificant events. The difference between an accident and safety could lie in the exact second your phone rings or your contact tears. I liked to think of scenes without consistency, free from human error and mechanical insecurity.

This time I pictured a woman with muted, watery eyes having an epileptic seizure while driving. She drifted delicately, past the white slashes and then off of the seamless boundary of the highway, splintering the steel guardrails and making a death roll down the grassy hillside. The ensuing silence was broken only by the scream of random police sirens and drips of leaking gasoline forming dark, filmy puddles that threw a tandem of colors into their depths. A college student trying to hitchhike had been videotaping his girlfriend doing somersaults on the side of the road. Slowly zooming in past her upside down face, he focused on the reflection of her somersaults in the car's rearview window. Spider web cracks distorted the red sunset's reflection. The guy smiled, then started laughing, his eyes a milky red in the dusk. "Your time is up."

The psychologist was wiping the corner of his eyes with a pale finger, still chuckling.
"Your time is up. You can go now."

valeca

Well, there is some really great imagery in here. Awsome.

But it doesn't really go anywhere. As the reader, I got lost part way through. Jumping from hospital tests to shrink to joking (which btw, would be very unprofessional and I found it too unbelievable) to traffic accidents... It would take some pretty heavy convincing for me to continue reading the story.

Give it a little more direction And check some spelling. But the description was great

__________________
"...make your own nature, not the advice of others, your guide in life." --Pythia, Oracle of Apollo at Delphi

I'm here.

Scratches

Your descriptive skills are excellent. The style carried me through. I get the feeling they've been working through the guy's symptoms for a long time, perhaps, and have grown a bit attached to each other, thus enabling such an atmosphere to be created, but then, there would be no "awkward patient-therapist boundary." I don't know. But this wouldn't have occured to me had Valeca not mentioned it.

I think this has a lot of promise. I liked the last extract of this piece, and I'm sure I'll like those to come.

__________________

Never get so attached to a poem
you forget truth that lacks lyricism
and never draw so close to the heat
that you forget that you must eat
- En Gallop, Joanna Newsom