Blood

      Here's my newest fiction story--first draft                                                              

                                                                              Blood
                 

       “Dad zipped in the driveway coming home from work one day and ran over our cat, Marge. I was nine. That was the first time I had ever seen real blood. He heard the thud and got out of the car, but I had already ran and picked her up. My dad was slumped over vomiting, shaking his tan finger at me with his head down, telling me to hurry and get inside. I remember my yellow sweater was wet with her blood, she was still warm, and I was squishing her mangled face onto my cheeks. I started sobbing. . . I think that was the first time I ever experienced dying.”
       Dr. Walters cocked her grey head. This was only my third meeting with her. Her ruby earrings reminded me of my mom. Dainty and sophisticated. She kept her eyes on me, pulled a bowl of black licorice out of her drawer and offered me a piece. I took one, pleasantly surprised by the choice of candy, rather than the gesture.
       “Scarlett, I think you meant death. Not dying. Marge dying was your first experience with death.”
    I bit and yanked the licorice from my mouth and started smacking loudly. For how long this was going to go on I don’t know.
       No, I told her. By the time I was seven Dad and I had dissected everything from frogs to fetal possums to cow testicles. He took me to the lab at the University some nights when Mom went to my Aunt Sally’s and showed me where the Aortic semi-lunar valve was in a sheep’s heart. I remember he explained to me how, like the sheep, the left side of my heart was stronger because it has to pump blood through the whole body. All the blood had been drained from the sheep’s heart, but it used to be there keeping the sheep alive.
    “Those animals were dead,” I said. “That was my first experience with death.”
      
      You’d think nowadays psychiatric hospitals would have that relaxed ambiance to them, but, dude. . .  They really don’t. You are content knowing they no longer use electric shock treatment and the walls aren’t painted blow-your-brains-out white anymore. Nope, not Einstein's-hair white. Think cream. Try: hazelnut. At best, you’ll find a room in organic eggshell beige. At Sparks Mental Clinic the rooms with decorated walls are sectioned off from the rest of the patients’ halls. Maybe it’s only like that in Kentucky. Maybe Mom couldn’t squeeze an extra nickel from her purse to send me to a hospital with central heat and air in every building.
       When arts and craft time rolls around every Tuesday and Friday at 3:00 they take the never-quite-finished water color or off-brand-acrylic paintings from the cooperating patients and hang them in a separate building. This is in case the emotions expressed on the page that day were in some way dark or negative that day. Most of the pictures are taken away at the end of the session, because they don’t want them possibly spooking another one of the patients or the very person who created them. It’s therapy, not an art gallery for the mentally defected. You want to try your best not to “set anyone off,” because tranquility doesn’t come cheap around this hospital. Most of the paintings are tacked onto the lobby walls or they go straight to the parents or  relatives of the patients.
      On visitor’s day, after all the patients are herded back to their specific buildings and before the relatives are called back to meet with one of the head psychiatrists for updates on the progress their loved ones have made since their last visit,  Nurse Bell takes the paintings off the walls and randomly distributes all the ones without names or signatures on them to the anxious, empty handed families. Here is Scotty’s painting from last week, Mr. and Mrs. Hines. He said he made it for you, ma’am, for your birthday. Then Scotty’s mom takes the picture from her, loosely cups her hand over her mouth and shakes her head, water filling up her eyes as she stares down at the smiling turquoise elephant with a smeared pink bow on its head and what looks like socks on its feet. Her thirty-four year old son, painting pictures of feminine zoo animals. Meanwhile, some proud Mrs. Jane or Mr. Doe is on their way to a craft store to get Scotty’s collage framed. The brilliant one he made for his mom’s birthday with nearly one hundred various shaped sets of green eyes from magazines glued on it. He’d been sneaking Seventeens and Home Living magazines from the visitors lounge for weeks, stashing them in his room, looking through them late at night, studying each model’s eyes and tearing each set out by hand, those that were the closest shade to his mother’s. However, it is Mr. Somebody who gets to  stop and admire the work every time he walks into his office. He even lets out a little laugh over it now and then. Happy very early birthday to him from his bipolar daughter who he believes must be getting better, while Scotty’s parents sit at home guzzling wine because their grown son, the one with relatively mild schizophrenia, their baby, must be getting worse. Think misled. Try: this kind of thing happens all the time here.
       
       I miss my Dad, especially with all of this psychotherapy shenanigans, I can’t seem to get him out of my head. We used to play Battleship or Monopoly, while Mom paced around the house, towel-headed, dusting everything on our shelves and behind the TV, vacuuming the carpet under our feet, then finally she’d sit down on the couch beside Dad, and exhale loudly, so do you want to hang the paintings I bought today or not, all the while scanning her eyes over the couch, picking off individual specks of fuzz or string or hair. It’s late, I’ll do it tomorrow and Dad was right. So Mom would get up and go to the kitchen searching for a lent roller with her silk robe swinging on either side of her, revealing tennis shoes and ankle weights. Those fucking ankle weights. It’s funny how people get attached to things. Material things. She sat them right beside her freshly laundered matching pajamas, taking them off only to shower. Her doctor told her she had to stop wearing them because she was going to cause permanent damage to her joints.
      One day my Mom was cleaning and threw away some of the friendship bracelets I had made and left sitting on the coffee table. My dad immediately went out the front door to the end of the driveway and returned with garbage muck up to his elbows. He said damn it more than once to Mom, told me he couldn’t find them out there, and said he would buy me some new string or beads or whatever I needed to make more. Then my mom came over, put her arm around me, and said you know what they say, nothing lasts forever. I remember not knowing then why the skin on the pads of her hands was peeling off. It looked the same way it does a couple of days after a getting a bad sunburn, except Mom’s skin was peeling off from excessive showering.
 
    The third Tuesday of my stay I ask Nurse Bell if I can take my colored pencil drawing of a big red speed boat with me back to my room. Nineteen years old, but yes, I still have to ask for permission for things like that. She tells me I can as long as I keep it in my desk and off the walls. The bland, swiss-coffee colored walls. Yes, we have desks. We’d all swam a little too far away from shore, but we’re not complete degenerates.
      Back in the seventies there were a couple of experiments done by putting different shades of paint on the walls, ya know, to see how the patients got along with the colors. Most proved to be unsuccessful, usually backfiring. Eventually, everything just depends, when it comes to how the human mind functions. One person’s soothing pink sent another into a screaming tantrum. The patient may have looked around, intrigued at first by the bright color, as if he or she were having some sort of deja vu type experience, then before too long they were biting, scratching, and and slamming their fists on the walls, yelling about being stuck in the womb. I make Sparks sound extreme, and at times it is. It’s not like you think though, not like back then, not like the movies and their stock characters anyway. There are plenty of young and old people here that are doing just as good as any average Nancy outside of here. And I hate to drop statistics, but one in five people in America have been or will be diagnosed with a psychological disorder at some point in their lives. If that scares you, call it a psychological malfunction instead. Think brain blip.
    There are only a handful of shit-in-the-water-fountain crazies and they have their good and bad days just like you. Some people are just depressed. Which I decided is just the American way to describe that you’re sick living your life, because you’re constantly reminded that there is someone else out there whose life is exceedingly better than yours.
    On the other hand, a lot of folks are just good ol’ fashion burn outs. One Phish fry too many. Taking as much as one hundred hits of 21st century LSD and going on a permanent vacation. Think speech impediment. Think paranoia and tremors. Think fighting dragons forever. For example, I met this attractive dread-headed guy named Kado. We were laughing and throwing pieces of ice at one another, fishing it out of our Styrofoam cups at one of my first group therapy sessions, until he casually poured his whole glass of black cherry Kool-aid on the floor for whatever reason and I was ordered to help him clean it all up. He’s become one of my favorite people here, and he’s one of the up and down patients. A year or so ago he was part of a group of “new age” hippie kids who tried to take a bus fueled by vegetable oil across the country to California from southern Florida. It was some sort of environmental activist project to use waste vegetable oil they collected from deep fryers in restaurants and fast food joints to cut back on US oil consumption. Think psychedelic buffet. Think ten or more barefoot vegans stopping at a sacred Indian burial mound and Kado, along with one of the others, losing his fucking mind forever. Altogether happier though, if you ask me. Kado reminds me of my dad, not because he stammers or spills shit all the time, but because he smiles even when no one is watching.
    
     When I was growing up mom was quick to bring up Dad’s teacher salary on any occasion she saw an opening to, complaining about things like she’d never been to Europe. She didn’t understand why he never went back to school so he could teach college, and all I remember about their relationship was them fighting about money and making up over gifts my dad would bring home form her. A couple times a week she’d remind us that she had never seen Big Ben or Tower Bridge, she hasn’t even seen Acropolis, bless her heart, at least not for real anyways; however, she had that stunning picture of the ancient ruins lit up and accented in gold as the screen saver on her and
Dad’s joint computer for nearly six weeks prior to my summer vacation once, but Dad proceeded in buying us all tickets to Universal Studios. Mom gave her ticket to Uncle Ed. Universal Studios wasn’t going to give her anything profitable to write about.
        A lot of the people here at Sparks checked themselves in, with a few forced to come by law for anything from infanticide to horse brutality to the God made me do its. Of course there is a surplus of people who feel crazy or have been made to feel they’re going crazy, and the sad bunch of people who were brought in by an exhausted family member who just couldn’t take it anymore. Think retirement home for elderly persons with dementia. Think Kado. Think me.
      
       My dad is dead, by the way. So if you were planning on feeling sorry for me, this would be a good time. My mom lives with her new rich boyfriend, but I’m not surprised that she got with someone else only eight months after Dad died. She needed someone to help her forget what happened to Dad. My parents and I had a beautiful little lake house a couple miles off the Mississippi River and every Sunday after church when the weather was nice, Dad and I would drive down to our local marina and take the old fishing boat or the wave runners out. Before we left Dad would spend half an hour digging in our flower bed for worms to use as bait, putting them in a floral tin stuck with my mom’s labeler: WORMS. We weren’t rich, and we definitely weren’t broke either, although Mom thought so. Dad just saw no reason to purchase something that was available right there at our house. He’d load up the car with a cooler full of beer and blue gatorade, fishing poles, floats, and my knee board.  He always made us dry bologna and swiss sandwiches, and I’d watch from the living room as Mom followed him around the kitchen in her ankle weights wiping up bread crumbs and fruit juice off the counters, bending over each time she saw a trace of mud or dirt come off his boots, saying things like I’d go with y’all but I’ve got some writing I need to do. What she meant was she planned on reorganizing the dishes and tuba ware in the kitchen cabinets again or arranging everything in the storage closet by it’s specific color. She meant she had a three hour shower to take, because she needed to scrub off all the germs she’d contracted since her bath before church and she didn’t wanna get any hell about it from Dad or me. Dad would always put my art supplies in the trunk just in case I’d want to draw or paint while we were on the boat. I usually never even got them out of the car, but when we got out on the water he’d remind me that we could go back and get them if I wanted to.
        We’d hang out on the lake and he’d drive the boat and drink beer while I knee boarded or got on the inter-tube, and then we’d drive back and switch over to the wave-runners when we felt like it. Last June, almost one year ago, my Dad and I were racing the wave-runners down a slough and a bright red, 30-foot boat hit the tail end of my Dad’s wave-runner, sending him flying off the craft. Whatever that fucker’s name was who was operating the boat proceeded to turn around, trying to figure out what exactly had happened. Dad was knocked unconscious by the time the boat moved completely over him, and the lower half of his body was mangled by its propellers, slicing him open like scalpels. Trying to breathe was like sucking ice cream through a straw. It all felt like a scene from an Alfred Hitchcock movie, except I hadn’t been watching or acting, but playing the real life part. The blood spilled out of him into  the murky waters, while the left side of his heart worked twice as hard to get that blood back to the rest of the body. I swam out to him like I ran out to Marge. I put his face up to mine, sobbing, hugging his life-jacketed chest as we bobbed in the ruddled lake water, a thin sheet of Dad’s red liquid, his life, circling around our bodies. I heard people screaming somewhere for help. Boats in the distance coming closer. Over all of these drowned out noises, I heard Dad’s voice talking to me the day Marge died, sitting beside me on my light blue bedspread with little fishes on it. The one Mom made me throw away the very next day just because Marge’s blood had gotten on it.
    “Scarlett, I’m so sorry about Marge, honey.” He kissed my ear and tucked my hair behind my ear.
    “There was a lot of blood, Dad. There was blood pouring out of her stomach.”
    “I know,” he said, “but you want to know something, something I tell my students, that will make you feel a little better?”
    I looked down at the white carpet peppered with blood under my feet.
     “Yes.”
    “No energy is every lost or ‘destroyed.’ I only ‘assumes’ another form. Marge isn’t gone, she’s just somewhere, anywhere else. Energy makes up all things, Scarlett. I don’t want you to ever forget that.”
There wasn’t blood in the fetal bigs or the goat spleens we dissected. Marge lost all of her blood in my arms. I felt her dying. Dead. Then I held my dad, felt him dying until people came to help, his words echoing over and over in my head.
   
       Dr. Walters watched me, observing my every movement and facial expression like a specimen under a microscope. Her eyes scanned over the fresh scars on my wrists and up my arms, then back to my drawing of the big red boat. I told her I wanted her to have it. I didn’t want it anymore. I talked to her about my mom, because she wanted to know more about how I felt about her and her new relationship. She had decided it had been the catalyst to my “downward spiral.” She said my mom wasn’t allowing me to heal over my dad’s death. However, my mom was probably as good now as she’ll ever be and I was happy about that. She had someone to put her fake eyelashes on for her now and someone to pay for her a personal trainer so maybe she can part with those damn ankle weights. She was fine.
    “We can’t ignore the fact that I’m here on suicide prevention, but my mom didn’t understand why I cut myself. I didn’t want to die. I don’t want to die, and I never wanted to kill myself.”
    Dr. Walters looked at me, her face still confused like my mom.
    “It’s the opposite. I was just making sure I was still alive. I like knowing there is still blood pumping through my veins, because sometimes you can’t always tell. If you go long enough without seeing the life that’s inside of you, you forget that it’s there.”
    The flushed cheeks that previously complemented the ruby earrings began to lose their color.
    “I miss my Dad, that’s all, and all this time away has helped me to remember that my Dad isn’t gone. All things last forever, ya know. He’s within me, flowing and pumping and pulsing and beating. He’s been in my blood all along, a part of me, my life, as long as I let him stay.”