It’s not rational for a man to hate his legs, but Marc does. He miscalculated the length of the gap and the height of the hill, but every day, he accuses us of betraying him.
Marc tries to flex our toes and bend our knees, but we don’t respond. Made to move, we are muscle, tendon, bone, and blood, but Marc’s brain and willpower can no longer command us. Our purpose is defeated. His spine, broken at the first and second lumbar vertebrae, makes our paralysis a life sentence.
“Work! Work, you useless things!”
Marc shrieks and thrashes in bed and hammers the mattress with his fists. Then, he sits up and beats us. Layered with grief, sometimes high on weed, other times despondent, he weeps, begs, and sometimes, like now, Marc roars, punches, and is lit with rage. He claws us. Though he can’t feel the pain he inflicts on us, we suffer each blow and every scratch to our skin.
“Marc!”
His wife Amber grabs his strained, forceful arms.
“You must calm down. Stop punching yourself.”
“No. No, I can’t do this!” He rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms.
We want to connect with him again. Stitch a miracle together and send signals from the bottom of our feet through our calves, hips, and into the tailbone of his lower spine and, having restored severed nerve and bone, be one body again.
While Marc weeps, Amber whispers, “I can’t do this.”
The last time our strength propelled Marc forward, we raced on the trail along the mountain bike jump path. He burned bright with joy and anticipation of a day belonging only to him, to us, climbing ledges, jumping his mountain bike, and exerting intensity.
When we left the ground, before the crash, midair in a gapped double hill jump, Marc sailed weightless into the apex of freedom.
But he had miscalculated. Colliding with the rock, igniting a lightning burn that seared and severed our nerves, we lay coiled on hard-packed soil and roots.
Marc’s phone, GPS pin location, and texting saved his life. As he lay there, unable to move us — he suspected, denied, and prayed against paralysis.
The neurologist said, “I’m afraid it’s not good news.”
Marc spoke over him, “I’ll walk again.”
The physician placed his hand on us on purpose because while Marc could see the doctor’s hand resting just below our knees, he could not register the sensation of his touch. “There is some technology we can discuss after you recover, but you’ll never walk on your own.”
Now, Amber sits on Marc’s bed. “After you heal, you’ll be able to get that brain-spinal interface.”
“I don’t need that.”
A brain-spinal interface will allow Marc’s brain to send signals to a computer on his back, transmit those signals to a device in his spinal cord, and permit Marc to walk. We worry about being reconnected to his brain. The same brain that told us to jump that gap. The same brain that hates us now.
“You can go back to rehab,” Amber says.
“I know that!” Marc signed himself out of the Physical Rehabilitation Institute. Came home. Now, he rails against fate.
“Okay, then.” Amber stands. Her tone forewarns an ending.
Marc grabs her arm.
“Stay,” he says.
“I can’t do this.”
“Get me a drink,” he shouts after her.
“Not with your anti-depressants.”
During a Zoom session with his psychologist, Marc says, “I’m alone. No one comes. Friends text me —maybe. I’m crippled. Counted out.”
The psychologist calls it situational depression.
“Yeah, and this situation sucks,” Marc says.
If we were not just muscle, tendon, bone, and blood, if we could shout, we’d tell Amber and the psychologist that Marc stopped taking his anti-depressant. He palms it, hides it, trashes it.
Marc has books, video games, a sports wheelchair, and a basketball he bounces against the wall. But he misses what he loved — running towards our body’s limits and into the burn.
If we could talk, we’d beg Amber not to leave him. But she does.
His mother becomes his caregiver.
“Everything is gone. My legs. Job. Wife.”
Mom prays over him.
Marc stares into emptiness, vacant of prayer.
Mom lays hands on him to heal him and demands he move his feet and rise from the bed. After prayers, she says, “Let’s take care of those deep scratches on your legs.”
She brings rubbing alcohol and cotton balls and cleans his wounds.
He holds the bottle, reading it, studying it. “Leave that stuff here,” he says. “I can take care of it.”
For the next two days, he talks to us, begs, pinches us, pummels our thighs, folds his torso over as near to us as he can get, and whispers with a rumble in his throat, “You are useless.”
Marc’s bitterness churns. He tells Mom, “I think a candle might help me sleep.”
She brings him the handmade one she gave him when he first came home, infused with calming lavender, and lights it for him.
“No, not over there. I need to be able to blow it out if it keeps me awake. Put it here on my bedside table.”
After Mom leaves, he waits. Watches television. Hums. Doesn’t curse us, punch, plead, or cry. We attempt to reach him. To have him understand, we bear his anguish.
Marc looks at his watch, “2:00 AM.”
He removes the blankets so that only the cotton sheet covers us. He bundles it on top of us, uncaps the rubbing alcohol, and pours it over us, saturating the sheet.
We plead.
Marc says, “Now you’ll feel something.” And he lifts the candle.
Patricia Ljutic writes fiction, essays, and poetry, with work in Bards and Sage Quarterly, upstreet, Lunch Ticket, and various anthologies. Her story “Life’s Work” is a finalist for the 2024 Rash Award, and “Do or Dash” was awarded Second Place in the Mainstream/Literary Short Story category for the 2024 Writer’s Digest Competition. She’s also a Glimmer Train finalist.
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