Paint

Blood Poison R H. Blood Poison R F.

This isn’t where I want to be, but what choice do I have? Spending days feeling nothing short of claustrophobic in the white washed walls of what they call a hospital but what feels eerily similar to a mental institution without chains.

Severed artery R H.

I drink purple juice out of a cylindric plastic cup with tinfoil at its jagged edges. I am waiting for Dr. Parisia to return and say “Good work, John. Knew I could count on you, John. Excellent, John: why don’t you take the rest of the day off and get rid of those bags under your eyes? Don’t want to see you on one of these beds.”

Diphtheria. Drowned. Box Car. Knife.

I want to go home forever, but I’m not creative enough for that. My mother always saw such potential for a surgeon. Little Dr. John Eckerson: stabbing people until they got better. I want to go home forever, but when I stand in front of my easel at home and the blue and black and yellow paints stain the canvas white I turn to the real world and the colours that stain the white walls of the hospital. When I return home, I’ve learned every colour out there, but it all looks red.

Swamp. War- Bad heart. Ammo dump.

My father knows, I think. He knows I want to quit. My sister definitely knows. She knew before I left St. Mary’s High School. She’s always kept my secret, but maybe she told my father. It wouldn’t surprise me, and I wouldn’t be angry. I knew Laurie didn’t do it to spite me. She would’ve done it to save me. She sees the paint when it dries, on my hands and on the canvas. “What’s this for?” She croons in her strong, certain, 7-year-old voice. “It’s a picture of a man and a woman that were at the hospital the other day,” I reply, and she shakes her head. “No,” she says, “what is this for?”

Operation Heart. Overdose couminum. Blew artery in eye.

What is it for? I would shake my head like she and reply that art is for the artist, but I know that isn’t true. It’s not for me; it’s for the innocent that don’t walk into the asylum every day. It’s for those who still think red is a romantic colour, and that hospitals are a place where people get better.

Stroke 93- Insulin 93. Sugar reaction.

I didn’t quit that year. I had wanted to until I reached the door of my house, 14 blocks from the hospital. I was so focussed on my phone screen, squinting through the glare of the sunlight, looking up how to write a letter of resignation. I hadn’t noticed the flashing, oscillating lights in my driveway.

1 survivor.

But I had never really cared about the survivor up until then, had I?

1 survivor.

For months after, I saw the colours I had wanted flash in authoritative eyes as our home shape-shifted into black. The air in the hospital became too thick to breathe, and yet was thinner than the air at home.

1 survivor.

But I guess that it wasn’t my sister.