The Inverted Forest by John Dalton

Author:John Dalton [Dalton, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Contemporary, (¯`'•.¸//(*_*)\\¸.•'´¯)
ISBN: 9781416596035
Goodreads: 10790262
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2011-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

He was a lurching and clumsy runner. He stumbled over furniture, bolted through the swinging screen door of The Sanctuary. It was still a lovely afternoon, sun-dappled and warm, a few distant strolling figures on the open meadow and a wave of happy voices rising from the pool in the woods—except now, near the picnic tables, there was Jerry Johnston’s slumped form in the grass. Not motionless, not a still body, just a pear-shaped man in overalls lying on his side and rocking back and forth.

Wyatt hurried to him and bent down. “Jerry,” he said. “What’d you do? What happened?”

From Jerry a low gurgle. He’d gone red in the face. His fists were squeezed into tight paws.

Other people had begun to take notice: several counselors crossing the meadow turned toward the Sanctuary yard. Nearby, Leonard Peirpont looked up blinking from his stacks of checkers. Thomas Anwar Toomey crawled over from where he’d been smoking and gazed down upon his stricken friend. “No, no, no,” Thomas Anwar said. “Not good! Not good!”

One of the kitchen girls appeared suddenly over Wyatt’s shoulder. She stared down at Jerry Johnston. “Oh shit!” she said and took off running for the infirmary.

“It hurts. It hurts. It hurts,” Jerry moaned.

“Where?” Wyatt asked.

Jerry put a plump hand on the bib of his overalls. “Here,” he said and patted his fingers atop his chest.

A simple gesture, but it made Wyatt cringe in dread. He could picture Jerry Johnston’s heart, a swelled and probably misshapen vessel. It had deflated somehow or frozen midbeat. Jerry had dropped to the ground. While this had happened, Wyatt had been away on the phone claiming to be a responsible counselor.

Someone shouted, “Here she comes. She’s coming now,” meaning, of course, the camp nurse, Harriet Foster. There were several minutes, as long and as intimate as any Wyatt had known, in which he gripped Jerry Johnston’s hand and listened to his anxious breathing.

The crowd had begun shouting for her, “Hurry, please. Hurry up, Harriet,” until at last the throng of onlookers parted. How odd. They’d all wanted her here so badly—they’d longed for her—that once she’d arrived and knelt in the meadow grass beside Jerry, she seemed entirely too ordinary for this emergency. They wanted someone else. “All right, Jerry. All right,” she said and, rather than brandish any tools from a canvas bag of instruments slung over her shoulder, she rested her hand on Jerry Johnston’s forehead, then his cheek, and finally in the crook of his fat neck, as if he were a feverish child. “Don’t breathe so fast,” she said. “Slow it down, please.”

“I can’t,” Jerry panted.

“Can’t because it hurts? Or can’t because you’re scared?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

From her canvas bag she extracted a stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff, which she wrapped around Jerry Johnston’s arm. “Tell me where it hurts,” she said.

He patted his chest.

“Does it feel heavy? Does it feel like weight on top of you?”

He closed his eyes and shuddered.

“Does it burn?”

“Yes.”

She pumped the blood pressure

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