‘Help. Goodness. Oh Heavenly Father, I can’t get up. Help.’
Father does not hear anything, and yet he hears it, quite loudly. The nurse in the room has dropped the stethoscope and it has clanged against the floor. It is loud but not that loud. What is louder is the patient complaining that a doctor is giving a prescription for something he does not need, as another is demanding he be given some money - just any - to be able to afford his treatment. Father has heard the clank because he is in a hospital room and it is him and it is the nurse and it is the patient. What a blessing, this Chinese hospital. How much more modern it looks than the one he used to work at, the one that used to be right under this one.
Father has his own mother and her name is Grace. If she were able to receive treatment in a hospital just as she had fallen she would have had a better cast, or access to medical therapy, or a proper bed to rest in. She certainly would not be ailing to herself on her cot, wishing that she could somehow get up.
How the straw smells. How the musk of the goat intrudes into the bricks of the hut. There are little baobabs suckling air out of the fields, unfurling their branches into tumbled directions, hoping to breathe what they can out from the dirt. The door to her house is open. There is her cot and some pots and some posters and that is all. She sees the baobabs. She wishes to be like them, out in the open, having the sweat of her skin evaporate in the hot day’s wind.
‘Why oh why can’t I move?’
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