Devil's Spawn by Manda Mellett

Author:Manda Mellett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-912288-59-5
Publisher: Trish Haill Associates

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Lizard

Vanna’s gone to get my son. The boy I’d forgotten about for twelve years. How the fuck could I do that? Twelve years!

I’m a biker? A member of an outlaw gang? Jeez. If she’d told me I’d flown to the moon, I could just as well believe that.

“You feeling okay, Mr James?” A nurse comes in and checks the readings of the machine beeping beside me. “It looks like you’re becoming stressed. You really should try to get some rest.”

“I’ve forgotten twelve years,” I tell her. “I remember my wife as a twenty-two-year-old, she’s now thirty-four. And I’m apparently nearing my forties. How the fuck do you think I’m feeling? I’m scared I’ll forget even more.”

“Calm down, Mr James.”

“Calm down? How can I fuckin’ keep calm when I don’t understand what’s going on in my head?”

She looks at me for a moment. “I’ll get someone to talk to you, okay?”

“I don’t need fuckin’ therapy. I need to know what’s wrong with my head.”

“I can help you with that,” a deep voice says. “Mr James. I’m the consulting neurologist. I performed your operation.”

“I’ve woken up remembering my wife who I’ve apparently forgotten I had for twelve years, Doc, as well as everything that happened over that time. Am I going to forget again?”

He pulls up a chair and regards me seriously. “I work on brains every day, and things never cease to surprise me. You originally suffered a TBI, a traumatic brain injury. It’s not unusual that triggers a loss of memory. Sometimes it’s physical damage to part of your brain, sometimes it’s PTSD, or simply that you want to forget. For example, if your marriage wasn’t happy, you could have hidden it from yourself.”

“No fuckin’ way,” I tell him. “I love Vanna, and she loves me. We’ve got a son…” my voice trails off. I have a son who I’ve apparently neglected for a very long time because I didn’t know he existed.

“You know we only use a fraction of our brains?”

I recall hearing that somewhere. I raise my chin.

“You’re an interesting case, Mr James. Sometimes memories are still there, but locked away, unable to be accessed. There have been cases of people who’ve forgotten who they are, then get flashbacks and finally remember years on. You suffered a traumatic event and injury to your temporal lobes. If I was a betting man, I’d place money on that being the cause of your initial loss of memory, particularly as I understand that after your original injury your short-term memory was affected as well. That you started to be able to lay down new memories suggests the brain healing itself over time.”

“If I was healing myself, why didn’t I remember my wife and kid before now?”

“Because of the tumour. One the size of yours would have been growing for quite a while. That you remember now suggests its removal, or maybe the surgery I did to correct a small bleed, was the trigger for your memories coming back.”

“So why can’t

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.