The sheets wrinkled against her skin. She tried to flatten them out with her right hand but realized the paperweight deadness of her left arm was stuck against the sheet and the bed and her progress. The boots that the nurse had velcroed around her feet reminded her of some futuristic rocket boot though she knew she would hardly move again. She had drop foot and looked like an injured pigeon laying flat on its gray feathered back. The boots only reminded her of what she could not do. Only in her mind. She pinched her eyes and reopened them. She looked out the window at the rose bush and the peonies, the lamb's ear and the columbine. She saw herself flying high and low and high again. If the choice was offered she would choose to remain flat on her back in her rocket boots flying through the sky but not too high and not too low for eternity instead of stagnant and low to her bed. The air and sun breathing life into a lifeless form revealing a smile long gone. She would fly where she used to play and run and swim and hide. The space between her now cold bed and the warm sun excited her to a place that had died when she realized she would never walk again. She circled and did figure-eights over her elementary school. She moved so close to the rusty merry-go-round that it moved with the force of her flight but only slightly. She flew face down through the swings swinging them to and fro and she flew through again face up to the sky. She flew the length of the slide five whole times almost touching the rough pavement. She played hopscotch between its faded form and four square and funnel-ball. She imagined herself playing kickball kicking a home run and flew the length of the bases cork-screwing her way to home plate. She took a last look and flew away.
The rip of the velcro ended her flight and she fell back to the ground back to the bed where she felt the weight of what had been what was and what will be. Her feet both turned inward making a triangle of bone and flesh that heeded her command no longer. While her husband was charged with removing the boots she never turned from the windows and her reimagined life.
If presented with the option of losing everyone from her husband to her sons and daughter to her seven grandchildren and the days of birth and the days of death or walk again independent and free from medical tape and drugs and dependence on someone who needed someone to depend on she would choose the latter. It would be bittersweet and selfish but now she only felt bitter. The choice she offered herself in her mind didn't allow for her to forget her memories or their faces. But the pain of remembering a life once loved and hated with her family compared nothing to laying immobile and only looking up and side-to-side. The absolute layers of swelling lassitude and desolation that she was born in day after day. To finally leave that wretched place at the expense of her family lent itself to a kind of sweetness that she so longed for but knew deep in her soul she would never taste again. At least she could walk with a smile on her face instead of laying flat and faking an old life. Where the power comes from to fool oneself day after day?
