By Phebe Jewell
The nurses tell Sally she’ll go home once she can count all the ceiling tiles in the room. Each morning Sally starts the count, but as soon as she makes it past the first row, she forgets the number and has to start again, especially the days her fever climbs to 104. Her roommate Alice tells her it’s impossible, but Sally keeps on. Alice has cross eyes, so no wonder she’s stopped trying.
Alice and the TV mounted on the wall are the best part of the hospital. The TV is tilted at an angle so even Alice can follow what’s on the screen. Their favorite part of Laugh-In is when the girl in the miniskirt announces “Sock-It-To-Me Time.” What’ll be tonight? Water from a bucket? A trap door opening beneath her?
Every day Sally is wheeled into a different room with a machine. The machines are never the same. Sometimes she is placed inside the machine. Sometimes she is laid on top. Sally lets her body fit each machine.
Tomorrow Alice will have surgery to correct her cross eyes. There’s almost always at least three people sitting by Alice’s bed, joking, holding her hands, their fingers sticky from the pizza and fried chicken they’ve smuggled in. Alice tells Sally that cross eyes run in her family, and now “It’s my turn,” giggling as if she’s going to Disneyland for the first time. Sally’s parents whisper with the doctors at the door, her mother trying not to look in Sally’s direction.
One morning Sally is wheeled into a new room, crowded with nurses and doctors she’s never seen before. Beeps and bright lights and words she doesn’t understand. She stares up at the ceiling tiles as a nurse rubs her arm, tells her to count back from one hundred. Surrendering to
the darkness, Sally hears Alice’s voice, a mocking “Sock it to me,” sure she’ll wake to Alice’s smile, both eyes steady as they hold her gaze.
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Phebe Jewell’s work appears in numerous journals, most recently Molotov Cocktail, Reckon Review, The Disappointed Housewife, JAKE, Does It Have Pockets?, and elsewhere. A teacher at Seattle Central College, she also volunteers for the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a nonprofit providing college courses for incarcerated women, trans-identified and gender nonconforming people in Washington State. Read her at https://phebejewellwrites.com.