Short Story By Else Cederborg: "Floating" (Previously published)

Floating

This wasn't the best way to start the day. Everything went on in slow motion and Valerie couldn't make herself move. She just lay there, stuck, flat on her back even when trailing her arms and legs over the white sheets of the bed. The sharp, metallic sounds from nowhere and everywhere blended in with the wallpaper quality of anonymity in this room that wasn't hers, not even her choice. She was brought here and vaguely remembered when they lifted her off the pavement and put her on the stretcher.

"Careful, careful," someone yelled, perhaps the one who had called 911, when he found her, "poor creature, looks like a stroke."

Yeah, she thought with something like a subdued giggle, more like a blow to the head. More like something-out-of-nowhere that made my head spin, my legs fold, and my soul slither down my spine, untying each chakra as it went. When I fell, I was dead, and when someone grabbed my purse and kicked me in the stomach before running off, the pain brought me back to the bleak realities of being robbed and not being able to move.

She had a feeling that she ought to be grateful for that revival, but somehow she couldn't and later on, when those two came to visit her, lying there, she even regretted having got hold of her chakras and survived.

Over and over she thought of their visit and she kept repeating one sentence that had harbored her mind: Were those people really her close relatives? The one in black and purple looked nightmarish, like a ghoul or a vampire, and she even kissed her and called her "My dear". The other one, so stiff in her facial features that they almost creaked when they were set into movement with something that vaguely resembled a smile, called her "Mom". 

 When Valerie thought of her she was appalled: This creaky one came from ME? Then what was - or am - I to have produced anything like that robotic creature?

This thought made her spin in the white room with all the instruments, the syringes by the bed, and all those the people in white whipping in and out the door. How did that happen in my world of wavering colors, sounds like deep sea murmurings and floatings in and out of flowery realms? Not me, no, not the one without any anchors in the world of necessity. All that was left on that pavement and now brought back as a rerun of old movies, something in black and white that was so far back in the past that it felt quite creepy as all the actors were gone long ago.

Still, that stiff face did hurt, only she didn't know why.

They talked of chances, life expectancies, of treatments, hopelessness and of insurances. The discussion even got heated, stiff-face cracked and the word "money" escaped those thin, thin lips, but black-and-purple said "hope". Valerie knew that meant new syringes, new treatments and new floatings somewhere out of their reach and into that world of colors and sounds, anchored by chakras.

 

Else Cederborg

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