The Forgery by Ave Barrera

Author:Ave Barrera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: the forgery;ave barrera;charco press
Publisher: Charco Press
Published: 2022-07-06T10:44:58+00:00

PART TWO

I hear birds twittering as they wake. Some tree must be teeming with them, beset by birds and their noise. Beyond them, far in the distance, I can hear the wail of an approaching siren. It comes round the bend in the road and stops as it reaches me.

Someone pries my eyelids open and shines a torch into each pupil. It’s a woman. She speaks to me. She asks if I can hear her, asks my name. ‘My name is José Federico Burgos, I fell from that wall over there, I’ve hurt my right hand, help me.’ She asks again if I can hear her, and I realise the words are stuck in my mouth. ‘My hand’s in a bad way, fix it, don’t amputate it. Please don’t cut it off, I’m begging you. I’m a painter, please don’t amputate my hand.’ I try desperately to explain, but my tongue is knotted, like when you’re paralysed in your sleep and try to scream but your voice never leaves your throat.

‘Wake up!’ She shakes my head back and forth. ‘Try to open your eyes. Look over here! Can you hear me?’

‘He’s about to have a seizure,’ says another voice, a young man’s. ‘Give me fifty grams of phenytoin.’

A seizure? But I can’t feel anything. Are they talking about me? I feel an electric current crackle through me from head to toe, as if I’d touched an exposed wire. Right, that must be it. How odd – it feels like someone is tickling my brain. An unbearable tickle that erases everything I am and plunges me into total silence. I take a deep dive into the silent pool and sink there, floating in the darkness.

I don’t know how much time has passed, but somehow I’m sure it’s long enough for the doctors to have fixed my broken body. I know I’m safe. I rise like a bubble to the surface of sleep. I’m so light that I rise and rise, effortlessly ascending through the clear water of a glimmering sea.

I break through the surface, but my eyes are still closed. I decide to stay there, absorbing everything I can before anyone notices I’m awake. Human murmurs, a baby’s cry, the clicking of heels, all reverberating against the floor of a cavernous dome, the echo of a church or colonial building.

The air smells of fresh bandages. The stench of blood and waste tries to conceal itself, but antiseptics are too shoddy a garment, too worn, nauseatingly eager to hide the affliction of sick flesh. A cool breeze wafts in from the side. Trees shifting in the wind. The drone of a bus engine on the street.

I’m in a high-ceilinged wing with limewashed walls. A scrap of sky shines through one of the barred windows near the ceiling. There must be about twenty beds. The compartments are divided with curtains that barely reach head height, and they’re no wider than half a bed across. I immediately glance at my hand to make sure it’s still there.

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