The Disconnect

A Story by Ellsworth

Assignment: point of view of a body part experiencing trauma

It’s Sunday, and the scent of garlic and basil floats through the kitchen, weaving through memories of dinners past. Familiar warmth, the hum of voices, laughter echoing in waves from the table�"it’s all there. She moves with her usual rhythm, stirring the sauce, tasting it, always perfecting. But there’s a sudden snag, like static interrupting a favorite song, and I feel it first.

It’s subtle, at first. A flicker, a brief disconnection, like a light bulb sputtering. She lifts the spoon to her lips, but her hand wobbles, and her fingers lose their grip. It drops, splashing red across the countertop, but no one notices, not yet. The kids are talking, their laughter bouncing around the room. She blinks, puzzled, wondering why her hand feels foreign, uncooperative. I scramble, sending urgent signals down the familiar paths, trying to reconnect the broken line, but they bounce back, disrupted.

The garlic burns in the pan. A few moments slip away, lost in a fog thickening fast, clouding her focus. I try to reach her with a jolt, with alarms, with anything to shake her attention. “Move, grab the spoon, say something,” I urge, but words tumble around inside, grasped for and forgotten. It’s as if her vocabulary has been dumped onto a dark, unfamiliar floor, letters scattered, unreachable.

She tries to speak, to call to her husband across the room. But her voice won’t shape the words. The syllables, usually so clear, refuse to form. They sit thick in her throat, as if language itself is failing her. A prickling sensation crawls up one side of her face, spreading down her arm. Her left hand hangs heavy, a cold and foreign limb, as though her body is splitting, one half fading, becoming something other than herself.

I grasp for memories, trying to anchor her. The dinners, her children, the conversations�"they’re all here. Each one a carefully kept record, pathways forged by habit and care. But they’re blurring now, slipping from my reach. Connections that took years to create flicker and fade, and there’s a helplessness I’ve never known. I shout inside her head, as loud as I can, but the signal is weak, faint against the storm.

Her husband looks over, sensing the silence, seeing her standing there, spoon fallen, sauce bubbling and forgotten on the stove. She wants to tell him, but all that comes out is a faint, fractured sound, like static through a broken radio. He crosses the room, questions in his eyes, his face paling as he realizes something is wrong.

There’s a rush now, voices rising, the scrape of chairs, hands steadying her. But I’m fading, slipping further. Time stretches, seconds bleeding into one another, every heartbeat a drum fading in the distance. I try to reach out, to bring her back to this Sunday, to her kitchen, to the laughter, to the smell of burning garlic. I want to say, “Hold on,” but I’m not sure if she can hear me.

For now, I am a voice drowned out, a familiar rhythm unraveling, a system faltering, piece by piece. And all that’s left is silence, creeping over the warmth of the Sunday light.