Bunny and Shark by Alisha Piercy Page B

Your words coming out tinged with venom even though you’d love to believe him. You’d love to return to the time when you thought the dolphins had chosen you, when you thought the sea was your ally and would never cause you harm.
    â€œWell, they’re sayin’ it’s a form of crossing over. But without having to go all the way. That you’re supposed to stay in this world but now have access to some other place.”
    You have no idea what he could be talking about. “Hmmm,” you mumble, noncommittal. If only you could get up and talk to him properly. His look is sympathetic, it pains you to not be able to get better from that look. But you don’t want his pity. And you can’t help him to help you. So you prefer to be alone and, acknowledging your shooing hand, he nods on his way out, and you put your head in your palms and let yourself cry hard.
    / / /
    You are encouraged by the women, in particular Thule, to get up and move around with a crutch. So you take it from them, though wonder why they don’t give you two. Why not a pair? They watch expectantly. As you become vertical, their hands dart out at you with each uncertain jerk of your body. For the first time in days you face the other side of the room. The back wall is covered in wallpaper of a Miami sunset. Two crooked palm trees in silhouette seem to be leaning out towards the pink ocean, as if their roots might give. Drips from the ceiling have stained the paper, and the corners pull away from the wall, showing gaps of blue paint behind it. You fix your eye on the ball of orange sun in the distant Miami scene – the place you were supposed to swim to, but didn’t – as the white bulb, the egg of your bandage, swings violently, throwing you off balance. You slow down to reel it in, to make it lurch less.
    â€œFuck it,” you whisper, grabbing at random the hands that flap and lunge at your sides, trying to catch you. Their touch is light, their hold not altogether there, and they pull away, wanting to help you to find your own way. Verbal reassurances fly up around you and drift into the other rooms of the blue house. Through snatches of conversation you hear about “a foot that will come.”
    Whispered: “magic” and “lady.” Then put together: “lady-magic.”
    â€œYou just have to keep up your shape and your muscles,” Thule is saying, as you hop a little, “so when the foot comes, you’ll be ready to walk with the grace of a lady deserving like yourself. With your head high.” Finally you lean on a young girl who, unlike the other women, is willing to take your weight.
    Do they mean a prosthetic? Each time it’s mentioned, they praise the maker so highly, show such reverence for him – her? – that you wonder if there isn’t something more behind all this, perhaps a political motive? All you can do is nod and stare and agree. And wait. Several times a day you look at the bandaged hump but it is rare that you direct emotions of any kind, hope or anger – worst of all, humiliation – towards it. The doses of morphine help, but are infrequent, and you are weary of falling back into any drug-conditioned darkness.
    Innocent white bulb, so quiet at the foot of the bed that you coo to it, tell it to shush, say it’ll be fine. You feel the sparkling mass of stars taking the exact shape of the missing foot. Shut your eyes, let it tingle itself out, it will. It usually does. Then all, including the green snake who sits at your ear in these times, agree there is nothing there. That the foot has flown away. That it will lead the way.
    The young man speaks little when he comes, but you hear him going over things with other family members in the kitchen, and then on the phone with his wife. He came here with his own concerns, private concerns, you remember.
    To cheer you up he reminds you of the party on the island.
    â€œYou’re