Speed Bump
by Bára Hladík
I was just among the whales. I hang somewhere in water or mud listening to whales move through water until the snakes weave my muscles. They swim up the center of my spine and fill my Lymph with soft poison. They tie knots in my skull and lay eggs in my temples. There is nowhere for them to go so they push and coil, push and coil. I rise carefully because I’m so full of snakes. They flex and roll and bite as I move to the shower to calm them with hot hot water.
My roommates are working at the hotel or jack-hammering concrete. I am home, a balancer of spoons. I balance a spoon on my windowsill for getting out of bed, a spoon on a pile of laundry for getting dressed. I save ninety spoons for the doctor’s appointment. If you balance a spoon everywhere you go and never run out, you don’t pass out.
I leave thirty spoons between cans of beans at the store. My roller is a ball and chain of heavy roots. Every step up the street leaves an imprint the size of France. The speed bump is a tragedy, I contemplate death. In another time women who lived with snakes were burned. Now, they are forgotten. I get tangled between my cane and my roller and leave my body near Salsbury. The season is changing; I sit by a Witch Hazel. The thin yellow flowers reach to me. A drop of water winks even though there hasn’t been any sun in months.
I wake up on the couch and my spoons and roots are scattered on the floor. I collect the spoons, then the roots. I put them on shelves. I rest, I breathe. I cook a heap of protein between naps face down on the kitchen table. I move my hips slow to the onions singing in hot oil and Joni’s soft voice on tape. She had something like snakes, or was it bugs? I’d rather have a whale. One big slow whale.
On the bus I glimpse the chicken processing plant. It smells wrong. Up the alley there is a row of workers in stained yellow rubber aprons marching out one door and in another. Some of them must have snakes they don’t talk about. I leave a pile of spoons in the priority seating for someone with piranhas.
The waiting room is in a far-off nether region of the hospital; an old TV on mute, a couple of people wearing fleece, some carpeted chairs, a clock. I take a seat and balance thirteen spoons on the armrest. I frown at the clock because it doesn’t tell the time, it tells contrasts. Like, you vs. your birth, you vs. your appointment, you vs. snakes. But the planet spins around the sun in an ellipse and time slips around like light, like when you are waiting for relief and the only thing you can do is count the days you’ve been alone with your snakes.
“‘Course I don’t give a damn about what I’m wearing,” said the woman to her old man. “I’m dying.” He was looking at a magazine he picked up from the stacks of last year’s Cosmopolitan. He flipped twice and put it back. “But shit, so are you,” she laughed and patted his thigh.
The clock was moving, we weren’t. My leg was sticking straight out beside my cane. The man stood up and marched to the counter.
“Our appointment was an hour and a half ago,” he said to the secretary. She nodded and clicked around on her computer; her stringy blond bangs arched above her drawn eyebrows.
“Sorry sir, there’s nothing we can do.”
I laugh. Well, I laugh without laughing. In silence, with no joy. There is nothing you can do in the white-walled chamber that schedules pain. The administrator clicks, the clock ticks. Patient, yes, I am.
The man returns to the woman’s side and they lean their heads together. She is dying and her time is spent amongst rubber plants and posters of skeletons. She could be at home amongst her Dahlias. A cockroach slips out her ear and scurries up the wall. We all sit here, contained in our bodies, our thoughts afloat. My thoughts take a vacation to the desert. It’s too hot and the sky is so big it burns my lips.
A mother brings a boy into the waiting room. They check in with the administrator and sit down. His legs stick straight off the chair. I picture him in a lounger, eighty-three years old. He looks wide at his mother who hands him a kid’s book from the stack next to the Cosmopolitans. The dying woman asks the boy what his name is. His little hands clutch and rub and pat the thin metal arm of the chair. He looks to his mother for directions. She raises her eyebrows.
“Why cockroaches?” he whispers.
My aunt had had an undiagnosed condition. They gave her anti-depressants and said her thought patterns were to blame. Years later they found she had maggots in her Thyroid. Maggots who are now addicted to antidepressants.
The administrator calls my name. I shuffle to the counter, lean my cane on the wall. She peers down at me with her vacant blue eyes. “Follow the nurse,” she says. The nurse walks three steps ahead of me through doors down a hallway to another waiting room. I drop too many spoons along the way, but she doesn’t notice. “The doctor will be with you shortly,” she says and leaves. Waiting room 2.0.
Every chair was filled except one. I took it. People were looking at their phones, sleeping on the floor, reading magazines, whispering. Some people looked at the wall, others looked at the floor. There was an older lady with large thick glasses who kept pushing her thin hair out of her face and looking at me. I wondered if she could see my snakes. A couple in their thirties who both wore white collared shirts were doing a crossword. I wasn’t in the mood for watching. I wanted to be deep in warm water listening to sounds of whales. But I’d been waiting for this appointment for nine months.
I couldn’t breathe so I read a diagram of a diaphragm. The diaphragm, it says, is the musculomembranous partition separating the thoratic and abdominal cavities. Do the doctors know how to breathe? Do their diaphragms relax convex, but flatten as it contracts during inhalation? They fill paperwork for dying people, they glimpse thirty-two devastating lives in eight hours. Do they breathe?
Another nurse gave me paperwork. Name, address, medical history. A document of my phenotypic variations from the average human. I finished quick and sat with my completed document on my lap. I read the document five times. I whispered to the snakes and massaged my hip. I stood and stretched and sat down. I drew triangles above the word PATIENT, and circles above INTAKE. People came and went. A young girl with a red shirt who had come after me was already with a doctor somewhere. Even the lady with the fanny pack had come and gone. I’d been forgotten.
I wrestled snakes down my back as I went down the hall to the nearest desk. The man told me I was at the wrong desk and I should go to the check-in counter down the hall. The counter down the hall was closed. I made my way back to the original waiting room and checked-in for the second time. The woman told me to take a seat.
“I’ve already been here for hours,” I said. “I had an appointment at one.”
“You’re just going to have to wait,” she said without a glance. I clenched my fist on the counter, then laid down my palm. She was probably just as tired as I was. The most successful part of the system is that no one is to blame.
I watched the clock, seconds spun, minutes merged. Every minute more snakes. Mindfulness, they teach you, is great for chronic snakes. So is medical attention.
“Why are you here,” asked the doctor, finally. He looked at me through a fishbowl.
“I have snakes, I’m full of snakes,” I said.
“On a scale of one-to-ten, how bad are your snakes?” he asked while a blue fish circled his nose.
“There are ten snakes in my hips, thirteen in my spine, four in my ankles, two in each knuckle on my hands. In the morning there are thirty-two snakes in my neck and twenty-five in each elbow. I’ve had snakes for six years, two months, three days.” I said sitting neat, like my mother taught me so that professionals would believe what I say.
“Your tests don’t show any evidence of snakes,” the doctor said through the fishbowl. “Come back in eight months.”
When I get home the mail tells me my income was eight thousand dollars last year and it was all debt but now I can apply to go to the pool for free. I climb the stairs one step at a time so I stay aerobic. The snakes are fighting with each other. I tell them to get their shit together, it’s just a few more stairs. A snake bites my hip and my eyes fill with water. I breathe in to tell them there’s no danger, it’s just me, trying to get up steps. In group therapy they say, love yourself, forgive yourself. I love you, I tell my snakes. They swim and coil and burn me under my skin. Thank you, I say to my snakes and I swim with them, at last, to join the whales.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Bára Hladík (c.1992) is a Czech-Canadian writer and multimedia artist. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Literature from the University of British Columbia and her work can be found in EVENT Mag, Hamilton Arts and Letters, Bed Zine, Empty Mirror, Cosmonauts Avenue, and elsewhere. Bára’s microchapbook Book of Mirrors was selected for the 2019 Ghost City Press Summer Micro-Chap Series and her collaborative artist book Behind the Curtain (Publication Studio, 2018) was an honourable mention for the Scorpion and Felix Prize (2017). Bára is the founding editor of Theta Wave, a digital magazine of experimental arts. She was born in Ktunaxa Territory and is now a guest in Esquimalt, BC. Her first book New Infinity is forthcoming with Metatron Press (2022). @baratereza on Twitter. @ba.r.a on Instagram.