After the Broken Thermometer
Mercury
doesn’t stain, but blood does. The say they say the quicksilver’s hold
comes later, though-- in cancer. Even now, nurses surge antlike around
the room. Glass is snapped up via vaccuum, and the mercury is herded up
into a molten silvery puddle; the vaccuum gets that too. Facinating device,
that appliance is. It scares me to death. But I leave bloody handprints
on the otherwise immaculate sheets. And in my hand there is a bright bead
of mercury, cupped close.
I wonder how no one knows
I have it; I smile like an expectant mother. I am bright-faced and withdrawn.
Is that not like screaming out the existence of a secret?
But just as men evolve, so
nothing can remain covert for long. Secrets are temperate things, they
shed their hiding and grow base, or fade into the woodwork as facts.
I know, because I was walking
my way in the asylum’s hall, the liquid silver ball smiling and smiling
into the closed palm of my hand.
I looked out, out the window--
suddenly surprised that there was a window. There was a river in that window--
what was it named? And suddenly not knowing made me sad. I dropped the
little mercury drop, and it skittered away into a thousand others on the
floor.
I didn’t know.
How deep that water was, how
glinting with the shining on it! It was a ripple of metal and color and
wetness, blushing a bit with the sun on its cheek. It cooed and gurgled
with life, yet it was likea lock of silvery hair, running shorn down the
hillside.
I fell in love with the river.
It had churned its way into my Soul. For the first time in a time out of
my mind, I was without the walls, without the gates, without the long arms
of Chrysalis Asylum for Mental Patients.
It was a new feeling: alone
and naked, but smilng. I felt I was aloft on the water, sliding and buckling
with the waves, away far away. . .away from any place else.
But the the sun slid down
the clouds, it was night. Curtains were drawn, I was steered like a drunken
liferaft to my little cell.
I blink, and I am back. in
waking dreams once more. Or did I dream then? I remember a river, vaguely,
like help through a blazing house, but I have not the strength to comprehend.
I can only sit here with the other insane-- inane and watch the clouds
rain birds and snakes, and the nurses talk in Harpies’ voices. I am in
a place where I want nothing to change.
And change for what? I peer
down into my hand, hoping to find my little mercury silvery globe, but
it is gone. There is only a tiny circle burned into my palm, blacker than
black.
--J.P. or whatever else you plan to call me.
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