Fiction

 

HOUSE ARREST

The date was July 25, 2012. A Wednesday. The kind that begins with routine and ends with a scream.

She remembered none of the in-between, only the blur of a street, a vehicle, and a sudden plunge into a dream-state that was anything but restful. One moment she was upright, and the next—dragged, crushed, bleeding, her foot offering its bones to the open air. The jelly shoes, chosen for comfort, betrayed her. Their dainty holes welcomed the tire spikes like unwelcome guests.

The big toenail was gone. Shattered, the doctor said with humor. Scattered like confetti—an uninvited celebration on asphalt.

There were two surgeries. Pins. Screws. Words she once associated with hardware stores now permanently fastened to her bones. The skin wounds—raw, deep abrasions that made her flinch at the breeze—were the worst. They stripped her of movement, modesty, even sleep.

Outside, her students threw an acquaintance party. "Titanic" was their theme prop, a nod to something grand and sinking. She was supposed to be there, dressed in black and white, teasing the kids as "Mrs. Moo." Instead, she sat in her living room turned infirmary—one foot bound, the other dangling over regret.

“They’re doing well,” her colleague texted. Her students were described as “responsible and independent orphans.” It made her laugh bitterly. “I’m not dead,” she whispered to the ceiling. “Just temporarily erased.”

 Still, she imagined them dancing, laughing, dipping into teenage joys while she wrestled with a body that refused to forget. She tried to write about it all, to capture the absurdity of pain and the mundanity of being still. But her mind wandered.

“Rewind,” she whispered. “Please. Just a few minutes before I crossed that street.”

She had once envied a classmate who survived a shipwreck. There had been romance in it—a tale to tell. But this? This wasn’t poetic. It was piss in a bedpan and pain that made you cuss at the wind.

Her wish for a long, paid vacation had come true—through a loophole of misfortune. She now lived in a sentence: confined to a wheelchair, sustained by insurance and sympathy.

Outside, the world spun. Inside, her receiving area had become everything—bedroom, dining room, confession booth.

She tried walking twice. Both times, she cried.

But she also wrote.

Because when the world took her movement, she took its moments—and turned them into stories no one else could tell.