To Refrain from Embracing by Jeffrey Luscombe

Author:Jeffrey Luscombe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590217481
Publisher: Lethe Press

 On Saturday after a lunch of bologna sandwiches on white bread and coffee in the hospital cafeteria, Ted showered, trimmed his beard with a pair of cuticle scissors from the nurse’s desk, and put on a clean pair of blue jeans and a mustard dress shirt with the arms rolled up past his tattoo. As he signed himself out for six hours, he asked the nurse at reception to cut off his hospital bracelet, but she refused, saying it was better for him to leave it on since they would just have to make another when he came back.

And as easy as that, Ted walked out the front doors into the July midday sun a practically free man. Crossing West Fifth Street, he ripped off his hospital bracelet and tossed it in the middle of the road.

He leaned up against the bus stop pole, lit a cigarette, and ran his fingers over the scar across his throat. He had inspected it closely that morning in the bathroom mirror while trimming his beard. The black scab had finally fallen off, and it was now mostly pink except for about two inches of thickening dark red scar tissue where he had made the first and deepest cut below his Adam’s apple. Dr. Shackelford had said this raised hypertrophic scar would eventually regress.

The bus stopped in front of Ted and the driver looked suspiciously at him as he dropped an adult ticket, one of two that Nurse Debbie had given him before he left, into the fare box and sat by the back door of the near-empty bus. Ted had not been on a bus since he was seventeen years old. It may be different in big cities like Montreal, Toronto, and New York, Ted thought, but in Hamilton, the only people who took the bus were either too old or too poor to drive. The bus headed down the mountain and Ted stared out the window at the city below. It was beautiful in its own way. Thousands of houses on treelined streets sprawled out from the foot of the mountain to the steel mills that hugged the bay. More and more apartment buildings and a few large office buildings had popped up in the late sixties when the city thought the good times would never end. Good times always end. Now they were in the midst of another recession. Layoffs. Unemployment. Inflation. Stagnation, The same old same old.

Ted stepped off the bus on Herkimer Street and walked toward St. Joseph’s Hospital. He already decided he would only stay with the Old Man for an hour— tops. Then he’d walk the few blocks north through Gore Park to The Windsor Hotel and grab a few drinks before he had to head back up to the loony bin. Ted had over forty bucks in his pocket, collected from his wife and sisters for hospital vending machine junk, and was tempted to stop for a drink now, but if he did, he’d never get to St.

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