There's Got To Be A Morning After

Friday night/Saturday morning were indeed memorable. The hospital morgue filled to capacity and the overflow was being sent to some kind of "E Corridor." Don't even want to know what the hell that is or where it is. Driving home Saturday evening after work I passed five police cars encircling some new drama at the No Tell Motel and at the only open gas station on the wrong side of the expressway where I stopped for my empty tank a group of girls were screaming, scuffling and getting into some serious fistacuffs.

Sunday was better in terms of admissions, but the work of repairing the damage done occupied everyone's day. Getting hold of the Ortho service, or portable XRAYs for that matter, was like receiving an audience with the Pope. CT scans multiplied to give visual reassurance that the pool of blood in Tommy's head wasn't any larger and that Grandma's ischemic stroke(from a blood clot)hadn't converted to a hemorrhagic one(the damaged, friable blood vessels in the injured part of the brain break down/tear apart/dissolve creating a bleed in the brain).

And, whatever bad juju created the havoc over the last 24 hours was now affecting all the visitors and setting everyone's teeth on edge. But it is done. I am off. Hubby is off. Would like to take him clothes shopping before his Christmas Gift cards expire, but the two of us are barely moving and loath to be far from the coffee pot today.

AFTER THE FLOOD—
by John Pursley III

We walked around the lake, down through the runoff to take pictures of the damage—where, even after the rain stopped, water still ran over the dam & down into the gully, weaving among the rocks. My father took pictures of washed-out fences, each field left fallow, the pine trees uprooted, their black roots a rot of contorted tangles, blazon—just slightly—with whatever light jack-wedged its way beneath the gnarled brushwood of sycamore & spruce, the firs & whatnot. While birds rebuilt, we busied ourselves with dying—destruction’s formidable effects: the water bent back against itself, burbling up over the dam in green curtains of spray, rising through the lock like a blown gasket, or a kitchen imbued with smoke—all the bobbers & beer cans, those blue plastic bags, just gathering there—that small dog, washed around the trunk of a tree, stripped of all flesh, as if by scavenger birds—how beautifully the bones held the shape of his body, like a hull of a ship—the sun, bleached white.