Pain Relief

Fran Blake

Word Count 443

I am in bed. The bed marks the parameters of my life. One month. The nails in my toes are as big as those used on an old railroad track. I try not to look, but my legs are raised as if I am a dead cow in a meat locker. 

Because I am in pain, I am given frequent doses of a morphine derivative. The room swirls in shades of gray so it looks like the cyclones I have seen on TV that sweep across cornfields and lift barns and farm animals into the air. Faces of people I know blur by as if they are on a carousel.

When the surroundings become clear, when the objects in the room are too defined, it is a signal that the medicine is wearing off. The pain will intensify and I suddenly know the desperation of an addict. I will do anything to get the medicine. I am even willing to die.

In this period of time, I am neither awake nor asleep but in some in between world where truth is difficult to decipher. Is it a dream when my friend appears in a black cape, spreads his arms like wings and gestures for me to join him safely within that blackness?

A moment passes and I can’t remember if I’ve gone with him. The fogginess of the room doesn’t make the space familiar. It might be a new space. A nurse puts a cold steel pan beneath my body. She tells me to urinate. To relieve myself is humiliating and I feel sorry for the nurse’s aide who cares for me. I stop eating hoping I will no longer need to use that pan. I am all bones. I imagine the Halloween skeleton that hung from a branch in our yard and the sound it made when the wind blew through it.

My sister visits and brings me red shoes. “So you can dance,” she says. I am dreaming, I say. I haven’t been able to stand on my feet. How would I dance? “You loved your red shoes,” she says. She smiles. I think of the girl whose red shoes would not stop dancing until she died. I close my eyes. I open my eyes. Nothing stops, the visions, the voices, the fog in my head. 

Am I asleep? Awake? Dead? If my body is lifted out of this space will it leave a shadow of absence? Will the world become vivid again with clear delineation like the numbers on a clock that tell us the time that has passed, the time that will be. Will I awake from this netherworld?

Fran has traveled extensively to study world cultures & worked with many affected by political upheaval and natural disasters. She initiated writing programs in several facilities to help people process their trauma. She maintains a psychoanalytic practice in NY.  Fran was offered fellowships at VCCA, MacDowell and Byrdcliffe Colony of the Arts. Her work has appeared in Oxford Magazine, The Denver Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, Poem and others.