"My feet hurt," said the old man.
"What?" replied his old woman.
"My feet! They hurt!"
"Well I just massaged the right for you, and the left one's got a
carbuncle on it."
"Well-- I know!" The old man snorted and lay back in his yellow-covered
arm-chair.
"So what do you want?" The old woman twiddled her reading glasses and put
a jigsaw piece where it didn't fit.
"Not to hurt." The woman held the misplaced piece up to the light and
stared at it hard.
"That one's not going to work," she told one of the horses in the puzzle.
The white one, on the left.
"What."
"Nothing, dear."
"What's not going to work?"
"This piece wasn't fitting where I had it, is all," she said.
The old man hurrumphed.
"You have an appointment tomorrow."
"For what?"
"The dermatologist. For your carbuncle, dear. Doctor Garibaldi is going
to take a look at it."
"Dr. Garibaldi just wants our money."
"Of course he wants our money, everybody wants money."
"Health plan my, heh heh, foot. What time?"
"At three." The old woman went into the kitchen to make some tea. The old
man cleared his throat. The old woman tucked a white hair behind her pink ear
and opened the cupboard. She hated tea. With a passion. But it had
antioxidants in it, and she had oxidants in her. So she drank green tea. She
filled the kettle with water from the tap, and boiled it.
At two-forty the next day, the man was asleep on his chair, A large-print
edition of A Clockwork Orange open on his folded, liver-spotted
hands. His wife roused him, and after some significant amount of
walker-wrangling and grunts of exaggerated debility, the pair was comfortably
seated in their small red Honda. The old woman turned the key. Shafts turned
and sparks sparked and gasses burned in the shining machine, purchased with
great thrift from a grandchild for the small and punctual sum of twenty
dollars on birthdays and Christmases. The grandmother propelled herself and
husband down the hedged avenue onto the freeway. The grandfather fell
asleep, snoring ruggedly as the car bounced on new and old highway asphalt.
When they pulled up in the hospital lot, the grandfather woke up.
With some struggles and complaints, the wife navigated her bitter spouse
into the waiting room. She took up her knitting, and he took up a magazine
with pregnant and semi-nude celebrities on the front.
A tight-bunned nurse opened a door. "Dr. Garibaldi will see you now, Mr.
Burgdorf." Mr. Burgdorf mounted his walker and ambled after her and into the
proffered and vanilla waiting room. Mrs. Burgdorf miscounted the stitches
on her sweater. Mr. Burgdorf took off his shoes and sat on the examination
table. Doctor Garibaldi entered, and cleared his throat. He was a fat man
with an ironical skin problem and thick glasses.
"That's a nasty one you've got there. Hmm," he said.
"Can ya fix me?"
"How long have you had it?"
"Couple weeks," said the old man. The doctor scratched his nose with his
prescription pad, and sat down so as to better examine the purple appendage
punctuating the vein-woven fabric of Mr. Burgdorf's skeletal foot.
"It sure is ugly, let me see." The doctor poked it with the back of his
pen. "Has it been pussing?"
"Biblically."
"Two weeks you say? It should clear up of itself, but I'll give you some
pills for it, and you can soak it in some warm water." The doctor stood and
wrote a prescription.
"What sort of pills?"
"Antibacterials."
"It hurts."
"Okay, I'll give you some others too. Let me see. The nurse can getcha
these if you wait here, and if you need more, just get them from
Schwartz's."
Mr. Burgdorf waited, and the nurse brought him two little bottles.
"Take one of each, morning and evening, with a meal."
"Thank you."
Mr. Burgdorf pilfered the pregnant celebrities on his way through the
waiting room.
"What did the doctor say?" asked Mrs. Burgdorf in the elevator.
"He gave me some pills," answered her husband.
The old man's marriage ended that afternoon when his wife was thoroughly
decapitated in a violent car accident. The scene was a rather red one,
their little red car having been crushed by a little red convertible
containing a late professor of sociology with a heart condition and hearty
quantities of blood. Mr. Burgdorf, unscathed, hitched himself and his walker
a ride back home in the back of a police cruiser, took one of each pill,
warmed some water on the stove-top and soaked some pus out of his boil, cried
quietly for a couple of minutes, took two more of each pill, and fell
asleep. Four men in suits sat on the other side of a long desk. They spoke in
unison, but he could only understand the one on the far left, who wore a bad
toupee and had a bitter smile, and what he understood, he didn't remember
when he awoke the next morning and pulled his foot out of the tepid,
blood-pus-tinged water.
The old man took another pair of pills with some black coffee and sat
down in front of his late wife's puzzle. The frame was set out, with two
jagged-edged horses protruding into empty space: that jigsaw purgatory to be
filled with homogenous grass and blue sky with a few stringy clouds for
ambiguous but merciful guides. Burgdorf took a piece and examined it. The
card had separated from the image around the edges.
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