Blood_and_Circumstance by Frank Turner Hollon

Author:Frank Turner Hollon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Blood_and_Circumstance
ISBN: Blood_and_Circumstance
Publisher: Dzanc Book
Published: 2006-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

SESSION IV

(Thursday, January 27th)

I slept a lot the days after my mother came to visit. Have you ever fallen down, physically? Maybe slipped on a wet spot on the floor, or tripped over something you didn’t see, and fell to the ground so fast there was no time to try to break the fall? That’s how it felt when my mother told me the things she told me. There was no time to break the fall.

At first, I didn’t want to think about it. When I was alone, my mind would play games with me. Was it a dream, just like the dream of Ann sitting in the bleachers of the Little League field with flies covering her breasts?

After a few days, I started looking forward to seeing the doctor again. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the craziness is inside of me or on the outside, the craziness of the world. A world with no rules except the artificial, man-made rules we create. They’re so fragile and brittle. One push, one hard push, and the first rule falls. After that, after the knowledge of the fall, there’s not much to hold it together. What’s next? Maybe Dr. Andrews isn’t a doctor at all. Maybe he’s my father, or my brother, or my mother’s new lover, and I never really killed Danny, and this is all just a bad episode where I should have taken my medicine. But then my mind would come back to the day my father carried me into his home, and laid me on his couch, and touched my hair with his hand, and I knew it was true. His eyes were like mine. I had come from him, but that’s all.

And then I couldn’t catch my breath again. And my chest pounded with the hotness that rose to my head. It’s hard to forget about the blue jelly balls. They’d been with me for so long. They don’t just go away because they’re supposed to. They don’t just disappear when you learn they were never there at all.

I waited in the room for the doctor. I slowed down and thought about nothing until the air came easier, and the hotness melted away, and I couldn’t feel my insides anymore. Dr. Andrews entered the room.

“Hello, Joel.”

“Good morning.”

He sat down to get organized. The doctor wore a white, button-down, long-sleeved shirt. More formal than before. Maybe it was his attempt to draw the line between us, doctor and patient, free man and inmate. He looked tired again, not clean shaven, with those dark circles under his eyes. The wedding ring was still missing.

“I guess you’ve had a lot to think about these last few days.”

“I was hoping you’d tell me it was just a dream.”

I watched him shuffle the papers around.

“Is time the same for everybody?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Something weird happened last night. It felt like time was speeding up and slowing down, just jerkin’ back and forth. So I laid down on the bed and positioned myself to see the clock.

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