Ethan Switch - Tuesday, 26 July 2011
Bedridden in a state of bedsores. Rife with a capital city of aches and dull throbbing. Chicken soup clogs up the nose when blowing streams through each nostril. They don't make soup for cleaning that part of your body. Time now for the morning routine. If only it was daylight outside.
Under the bedside he reaches for the reaching stick. It's really just a broom where the head fell off. Nobody bothered to go to the hardware store to pick up a new shovel to bury the regret of being unable to buy a new broom.
Never mind that, however, he had socks. And you can sweep and slide in even the crustiest of footmasks. Besides, you can't buy a metaphor these days. Certainly not with figurative expressions.
"Nudge, nudge," said the reaching stick, tapping the wood of the desk, the bureax and the clothes rack. Flailing its non-existent arms across, its dreams only carrying its hand so far before dropping into despair and laying on the floor with a pathetic groan.
The floor, you see, was made of boiling hot lava. Only the throw pillows and everything else, the chair, the TV set, everything else not touching the floor with bare feet was impervious to its magmaliciousness. Socks would burn up in a second.
He peels back to feel the ring of the bedpan to hear the sloshing. Now he has to blame incontinence for the mess.
Spread open on an advertorial about the ecumenical council in Anglican England, the newspaper was ripe for reading. Glasses sitting by the lamp, he reaches for his cup of ginger and purple schnapps. His élan vital.
It tastes like urine. It is the wrong side of the bed.
There are so many cycles you can go through of drinking your own before you see withering results.
Today it appears we have reached the tipping point.