The Coming Bad Days by Sarah Bernstein

Author:Sarah Bernstein [Sarah Bernstein]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-10-31T07:04:37+00:00

After a time I found that my body, to which on the whole and for most of my life I had barely given a second thought, was beginning to twinge in unexpected places. I woke in the morning not in pain, exactly, but in a state of bodily awareness that was entirely new. Although I continued to walk around the city and its outskirts on a daily basis, it was with a feeling that my legs would give out at any moment, my muscles cease to work, that little by little, the prickle I had noticed in my fingertips would resolve into a numbness that by and by would spread through my nervous system until I was rendered completely insensate. Each time I stood at the top of a flight of stairs, preparing to descend, I imagined my collapse, legs crumpling beneath me, my dead weight propelling me fleshily down flight after flight, blood pooling at one end of my skin and then the other as my body folded and folded over itself. The feeling came over me also, at dusk, waiting for the bus home, standing near the kerb surrounded by people, so little between any of us and the oncoming buses that pulled in and out of the station constantly if not always on time. I wondered what it was holding any of us back. If I fell, was it that I had been pushed or only that I had allowed myself to give in to the multiple collisions that make up life and oneself, reminding us of our body’s surfaces, its essential and complete separateness. At times I could see just behind the knife-like smiles the men at the bus stop directed at me, and I hated them. All the same their ill will, as well as my own, came from somewhere, perhaps had even originated with me, with my showing up in the same place day after day, refusing to vary my routine in the slightest even in spite of the common wisdom voiced daily by the news media, or one’s family, or one’s friends, my very presence at the bus stop at the same time each day amounting to an expression of derision and disgust for these men who shuffled about, pathetic in their coats, ridiculous in their posture, I felt all of this, the old saying that the word for a group of men was a threat and that my contempt would kill me. Some evenings I inched closer and closer to the men who stood nearest to the edge. What after all was holding any of us back.

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