Tea Party #17 ~ Nonfiction
Toys, Robert Fuentes larger version
The Black Sticky Stuff That Band-Aids Leave Behind | Felix Lucero
The doctor held the stethoscope firmly to my chest and listened intently, while a light from a giant silver bowl glared directly overhead. She was a small Latina woman wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, not the standard white pants and overcoat. At the end of the long, narrow room, past the tiled floor, which may have been white at one time, past the rows of tiny drawers filled with a variety of pills and past a floor scale that sat next to a steel desk, there was a window, stuck half open and half closed. The bars behind it let only a faint smell of freedom blow through.
The doctor’s expression changed. She shouted to a nurse to start an IV and to make preparations to transfer the patient to an outside hospital. The patient? I thought, She must mean me. Nurses in different-colored uniforms—pink, blue and white—began to run around as if someone had pulled a fire alarm. They were making phone calls, filling out paperwork, while one was having trouble inserting a needle into my arm.
For a moment, I thought about my mother. She had cried the last time we said goodbye. That same day, my daughter offered me a bite of her ice cream, and it had spilled onto my jeans. The drummer inside my chest had lost all sense of timing. Now, on the monitor beside the bed, a tiny digital heart blinked and beeped. Underneath, it read 160, and only moments later, it read 45. My heart felt like it was stuck in rush-hour stop-and-go traffic, only I had no control of the gas pedal.
Just then, two blue-uniformed paramedics—one tall and clean-shaven, the other shorter and older with a graying mustache— ran through the door pushing a gurney, which they moved me onto. They asked how I was feeling. Before I could respond, two burley guys in green uniforms who looked like NFL football linebackers, barged in holding an orange two-piece jumpsuit and shackles.
Though everyone wore their own distinguishing uniforms, it was time to change into a new one. Not that there was anything wrong with my prison-issued piece; it was perfectly suitable in my world, but in the world I was about to enter, blue denim just wouldn’t be distinctive enough.
After changing into the orange jumpsuit, the two linebackers “ordained” me with the silver regalia of chains, which wasn’t as shiny as the badges on their shirts, but both served the same purpose. They reinforced the conventional roles of the prisoner and his captive.
The paramedics and guards quickly moved to an ambulance outside the prison hospital. We passed five checkpoints before the grudging sound of two giant steel gates opening hung in the air. Before we drove away, a knock on the ambulance’s side door prompted one of the guards to open it. Someone outside handed him a metallic-gray handgun. As we drove away, the noisy gate came into view from the back window of the ambulance. It snapped shut like a crocodile trying to prevent its prey from escape. » next page »