Green

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Green walls. Green because it’s soothing. And it had to be soothing, the hospital room. Not that the room’s resident would be noticing the walls anytime soon. Dated Venetian blinds on the room’s far window were cracked to let the hope of sunshine stumble in. Little dust fairies swam through thin shafts of light streaking through the area. A ceiling fan pretended to circulate forever-stale air through the cramped room, and a sink was perched outside an impossibly tiny bathroom on the far side of the room. A man lay prone in the bulky, plastic hospital bed in the room’s center. I ignored the tubes, machines, and IV cords, the too-neatly folded blanket tucked under his frail arms; and it was easy to imagine he was simply taking a nap to pass the heat of the day. After 60, it’s hard to pinpoint a person’s age, but he was probably 80-years-old, give or take a decade. Like dark streams down a mountain, his wrinkles cascaded from his snowy widow’s peak down to the cleft in his chin, and dribbled down the fissures that creased his neck. His hands were gnarly old roots anchored at his sides. Maybe he’d worn a wedding band at some time, but he must have sacrificed it for the pristine ID band around his wrist. Harold, his name was Harold.

A nurse walked in, dark skin that clashed with her pasty pink scrubs. She stopped abruptly when she saw me sitting in the corner.

“Are you visiting Mr. Dubois?” her voice was strong and she spoke with the unhurried drawl of everyone in Tennessee.

“Yes ma’am”

“Oh…”

“I’m his god-son”

“oh”. She pertly introduced herself, Mary Belle or something ridiculous like that. She’d been his nurse since he got hooked up to the extensive life-support system. There was no note of relatives in his chart so she was surprised to see a visitor after all this time. I laughed and apologized for startling her. If she wondered where I’d been the past 5 years, she kept it to herself as she frowned and went about her task. I gave her substantial hips a respectful berth as she glanced over vitals flickering across the labyrinth of machines at the headboard of her patient. She checked the monitors, making sure he had every possibility of being comfortable. She left the room, sliding the long-forgotten privacy screen closed behind her.  I sighed.

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When I was a kid, I remember going to the park with stale bread and Vienna sausages to feed the ducks. The little, man-made lake was on the far side of the park, just behind a troupe of trees that had escaped from the thick woods behind the park fence. I would crouch in the sticky mud beside the lake and throw bread at birds and psycho squirrels. The kamikaze mosquitoes and eye-sucking gnats kept happy people away in the deep summer. Feeding ducks gets old fast, but I entertained myself with snapping mushrooms and breaking old tree branches. I played with tadpoles and crawdads, a towering tyrant with life-munching fingers and apocalyptic light-up shoes. It was my own little Narnia…minus the magical creatures and allusions to Christ.

Every once in a while, I’d strike gold and find a bird’s nest with fresh eggs. I never touched them; I knew the mother bird would smell your fingerprints, and break the eggs to spill her tampered babies.

Elementary school was total bullshit and I’m pretty sure I was over the System by the time I was in third grade. Around 14 I realized how convenient my little grove was. And by “convenient”, I mean convenient when I hit puberty and desperately needed a romantic locale to feel-up my girlfriend. I’d push her against a muddy tree and kiss her like I knew what love was. Cicadas sang like fairies as we crushed their dead wings under our clumsy feet. At the time, I thought it was the greatest. Then in High School, I came to the conclusion that women lived to suck out your heart with their glossy plush lips. So it became a solitary spot once again, though I matured to vandalize trees in place of feeding ducks.

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There was less light in the room now. I glanced at my watch like I didn’t already know I was too late to save my s**t job at Bank of America. Things take precedence. I half-heartedly busied myself by tidying up my mess: a paper Dixie cup, two sugar packets and an un-opened thing of creamer. I imagined he watched me from behind glass eyelids. Trapped like a butterfly in a shoebox someone forgot to poke holes in.

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I was seven. It was a day so hot all the teachers had sweat stain maps under their arms, and no one forced the fat kids to run in PE. I went to the lake and donated my kiddy sweat to cool the tree I sat against. The ducks weren’t present, up to whatever shenanigans ducks got up to on the other side of the lake. I was bored but too steam cooked to do anything. The bugs were ferocious, attacking every orifice, and even the squirrels were hid in their secret shaded nests in the biggest trees. Of course there wasn’t a breeze, there was never a breeze in the glorious Deep South. The air was stagnant as it slowly stewed my little body.

I was trying to decide if my hands were already too dirty to transfer the jolly rancher in my pocket delicately into my mouth. Blue is by far the best flavor, so I’d decided to go for the plunge when I saw movement. On my side of the lake there was a floppy, wrong thing moving in the mud. As I got to my feet, I could feel every part of my body, from the mosquito bite on my forehead to the twigs collected in my socks. Inching forward, the heaving thing thudded into a log. It was the size of my remote control car at home, and somehow vaguely familiar. I crept forward in the mud, careful no slide my feet and avoid the snapping twigs. I could just make out the creature; enough to tell it was an animal. I suddenly got that feeling you get when you know something’s gonna pop outta your closet and f*****g tear you to shreds; that frozen panic feeling that sneaks in when you hear a sound in a house that you should be alone in. I froze.

The thing was a turtle, or still trying to be a turtle. It was carefully adorned with the flap of a tarp held on by silver duct tape on all sides. The flap covered half the turtle’s shell and pulled over to its stomach, arranged so that the turtle’s head was forced inside its shell with the tarp blocking the hole where his head should come out. It must have been super glued, because the plastic veil showed no signs of pulling off, despite the water and mud painting it. Silver spray paint covered its body except where it had slammed itself repeatedly into the dead log. The animal crawled in circles, slipping and jerking like a dying robot. I could hear it desperately struggling inside to break out. Trapped inside and unable to escape, I watched it suffocate in its shell. I’d never seen anything dying, but now, my body suspended in the muggy air, the surreality of death clawed its way through me. It was dying in there, being consumed inside its own body. As its dance became more erratic I panicked. I staggered up the eroding bank and caught myself as I tripped on a branch. I broke free of the trees and collapsed on the neglected grass field. I opened my palm and didn’t cry for the sticky, muddy, blue treat in my hand.

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The nurse returned and informed me that visiting hours were over in 15 minutes. Mary Belle paused and pivoted to face me from the doorway. Fluorescent lights from the hallway outlined her heavy frame.

“You knew him before the accident?”

“Yeah”

“You don’t mind if I ask…what color are his eyes?”

“They were green”, I replied with a smile. She nodded and shut the door behind her thick, swaying hips. Her shoes softly squeaked away down the hall.  I stood to watch over the old man and listened to the machine inhale softly and exhale slowly. For all I knew, maybe his eyes really were green. I smiled and reached over the unused feeding tray, pulled two plugs, disconnected a cord, and freed the old man from his shell.