Aphasia
By Aston Lester
There was a car crash then there was a hospital bed. There were doctors and nurses and family and friends. There were sounds, but they didn’t make any sense to me. I couldn’t communicate with my words, verbally or written. I had forgotten them. They were there in my mind, but not in the world. The whole thing was very confusing to me because I was there too, along with the words, only in my mind. The outside world was a place in which I didn’t belong anymore, and there wasn’t a way to communicate what this new reality was.
My kids sat bedside, grown and no longer kids, with eyes filled with grief, as if I were already dead. They made noises at each other, and I stared at them blankly but not empty. I wondered if they knew that I was in there, or if they thought me some dull animal. At night, I unplugged myself and slunk out of bed. I wandered the halls, a ghost, and found the exit. I stepped out under the night sky, and the stars peered down on me in my predicament, and the preacher would say my deceased wife did also, but I held my doubts. If she were but a watcher, like myself, I pitied her.
An empty street lay still, nothing to do or say. My gown blew with warm wind against me. I had watched a Mardi Gras parade here, not long before, when life was full and made of people. Now it was the loneliest place I had ever seen. My feet were shoeless against the hard world underneath as they padded toward home.
On my way, a dog barked at me from the corner of my eye. I turned to him. I don’t know what you are saying, I thought. I don’t know what you want from me. He looked like a stray. The world was as cruel and lonesome as can be to something like him, something no one can understand. I kneeled and watched the unsureness arise in his demeanor. I smacked my lips in friendly introduction. It is hard to know if a being has ever experienced an instance of kindness and understanding in their small life. The dog sat, and we watched each other for a while. There was nothing else to do. At some point in his mind, he made the decision to approach me, to trust me, but for what benefit did he have to gain from that.
I put my hand out for him to decide, and he sniffed it for whatever reason a dog sniffs, and then eased into it. I petted the dark black mongrel in the night. We understood each other. We communicated.
He left me there, a kneel, off to live his life. I think about him from time to time.
I walked along the shoulder. Rocks stabbed into my naked flesh, weak from modern living. Cars passed in flashes and disappeared into darkness and silence. Too much silence for a man not to think, remember. Caroline on the porch singing pretty songs, or me telling old stories, and some of those days not a minute uncherished, even the quiet ones. The kids playing on the tire swing and filling the yard with laughter and yelling. A day alone at the pond and coming back to them. Twenty-eight-year-old me falling in love and being scared to admit it, even to myself, until she said it, and I could finally let it out. Then the distance I would put between us through the years from fear of something I didn’t understand, drinking myself into incoherence, but then I learned to talk to you and to listen and to not bottle so much up.
There are so many songs, Caroline.
I found myself standing in our yard, all the years I looked at it through complacent eyes were gone, and now the only sight worth seeing stood in its place. I didn’t have my key to open the door, so I sat on the porch in my rocking chair, looked over at yours, and waited for the sun to rise.
THE END
Author Bio: Aston Lester is a short story writer from Greenwood, La. His work will appear in the upcoming July edition of Down in the Dirt Magazine.