Mending and adapting

This short story was originally a response to a poem called "Without hands". I wrote about how people adapt with a physical disability.

Sometimes, I go out onto the beach, and I find a starfish with a missing limb and make him a story. Everyone deserves to have a story…Something to keep them from one day boring themselves, and just giving up. I gave Carmen, the starfish, a story. She fell out of a four story building and survived, but she had to have her right leg amputated. And Andrew, he had a tumour and it spread so far that both of his legs were removed. But, my favourite story is Robert’s. He’s a hell of guy. Had honours in the navy and everything. He had this gorgeous wife who left him after the accident. Everyone and I mean everyone, thought they were the perfect couple. The last people to split up would be these two. Well, that’s what I thought. They were high school sweethearts, had a backyard wedding, two point five kids…The whole deal. But, in the end she just couldn’t take it. To be honest, I don’t really blame her. Other than that, Robert did not have a shortage of friends, that is, until spending time with him became a chore. Nobody wanted to have to spoon food into his mouth like a mother to her infant, or chauffer him around town. Well, it was, in a way, his fault. What I’m saying is that, it could have been prevented.

Although, when his friends left him he didn’t know what to do. How does one occupy oneself when all through life someone else has been there to do it? Television was never very interesting to Robert. Why would it be? Life was his entertainment. At first lying on the couch was what took his entire bank of time captive… Sometimes the bed to switch it up… The floor, if he was feeling really sorry for his sad life. Eventually he was so angry with his woes that he would torture himself with the world he could no longer call his own, and lay on the grass. He would watch the people driving from home to work and see how long it took them to return to their running and playing children and the wives setting the tables for dinner. Every once and a while, people would speak about how weird he was just loud enough for him to hear. But, who really feels threatened by a man who never moves? One day, he told me, that there were times he forgot he was physically there. That he thought he was a spirit, a guardian of the street, perhaps. Lying for hours until his nurse came by to make sure he wasn’t choking on his own drool. Every day she came by, once in the morning, once at night. She would always say, “Well, you’re not getting better. But, you’re not getting any worse either.”, when she took his blood. And he always wondered if perchance, his blood was getting a little darker every day. One day it would turn completely black.

In time a man came up to him while he was laying nose deep in his sorrow. He enquired

“Can I drive you somewhere?” Robert didn’t answer. This was his first human interaction since the accident. Well, other than his nurse’s daily one-woman conversation. After a few moments he said, “I know a place you can lay down that will make you feel even worse about yourself.” And he gave a friendly grin as if Robert were in the mood for such a foolish joke. After another couple of noiseless minutes the man got up and drove off. Though he came back the next day, and said the same thing. Robert barked that same nothing back at him. And again, he drove off. This happened over and over for about a month. Then, all of a sudden it didn’t. He lay there the whole day and the streets were quiet. It seemed the habitually rambunctious children were tucked away or hiding. He counted a mere three cars that left and came back the same day. You would think it was deserted compared to its regular rowdiness. People rushing around town, late for work, school, swearing sometimes in a frustrated panic. He knew many things, the people across the street were getting a divorce, the father refusing to care for what was his and demanding everything that was hers. The old lady, who lived next to him, would not leave her house because she did not know how to live without her husband who has been deceased for two and a half decades. She claims he does indeed live and she talks to him next to the open window when she sits on the loveseat crocheting a blanket.

If he were given one more chance at what was lost to him, he would relish in the haphazardness. The imperfection of the world was his sanity, would be his sanity. But, the crushing mass of his own self-pity imprisoned him, forbidding him from moving a muscle. After two more days of again the painful ring of silence in his ear the man appeared on the blank canvas of a neighborhood of people which appeared to have all passed in the night and forgotten to invite him.

“Can I drive you somewhere?” He sung with a wide grin. Robert didn’t answer. The man shrugged and nearly turned to leave, when a voice grumbled.

“You are three damned days late.”

Robert told me before that he didn’t remember the way his own voice sounded. He felt as though his body were inhabited by somebody else. But, after Robert finally agreed, the man dragged him into the passenger’s side of his truck and threw the wheelchair, used by the nurse for Roberts’s transportation onto the front lawn, into the back. The man tried to talk to him multiple times. But, Robert just stared out the window. Once they got to their destination the man picked him up and Robert thumped into his wheelchair. The man tried to roll him over the sand without the wheels digging in. Then, Robert plopped onto the warm ground and lay there. He watched the swimmers and the surfers and noticed all the people in happy relationships with other people who weren’t missing arms or legs, or anything important. And he watched the crabs with both their pincers and the fish with both fins and a tail, the flies with both wings lying like him but, on rotten seaweed. They were chewing it away.

And there were the starfish, some missing one leg or two from a kid’s cruel joke. Or maybe he was a meal for some hungry sea creature, which wasn’t quite that, hungry and didn’t get his leftovers packed up for him. Before they left, Robert got the man to collect, for him some friends with appendages like his. And he did. So Robert then, began to house five poor souls without friends, like him. He got an aquarium and brought with him a bucket of sand. He began to love them. They were brothers and sisters. He didn’t lay in the front yard as much. He didn’t people watch. And he talked, and he tried to move on his own to visit his friends when his nurse or the man was not around. On the thirteenth day, he noticed that pieces of his friends were beginning to grow back. For a while he was content. But, they just weren’t the same. He didn’t really have friends. He was just a child playing a stupid game that pleased him temporarily. They were not peas in a pod as he had thought. But still, he nursed them until they were better. He then went back to the beach and the man placed them near the water and then collected more of the “disabled”, as he called them, for Robert to befriend and then grow out of. Robert made more friends than anybody I knew. But they were pretend, they all changed, and all left him abandoned.

Author's Note

Go ahead! Be cruel, viscous. I will be strong. You won't hurt my feelings. Also, excuse the "ou's" in some words I am Canadian so there are slight spelling differences to America.

Reviews

[Marie]

I liked this story very much. I worled with adults who had special needs for 17 years, and I can relate. I like robert and wish he could get past his disability. Maybe in another story.