Body of a Doe [short stories]

pernicious (all my fault lines laid bare)

i.

He can feel himself getting old, is the thing. Hears it when he lowers himself to his bed, feels it when he leans his weight on his feet.

Tick, tick, tick — says the clock

Crick, crick, crick — sound his bones

On best days, Morgan can still convince himself he is young. He is only twenty-six, not even half-way to sixty yet. He has plenty of time—to skate, to live, to play hockey.

On bad days, the bones and fractures ache in the cold refrigerated air and ice. It's harder to convince himself he's young like Mitch or Autston and Willie because all he could think every time he gets checked is how long the bruises are going to fade.

Tick, tick, tick

He lies on the sterile cold metal medical table, letting the podiatrist probed at his feet. His knee unconsciously jolts when the doctor's fingers ghost over the fracture spots.

Crick, crick, crick

ii.

Morgan is twenty-six, and that makes things worse.

He stops going to parties now, stops drinking shitfaced and starts thinking before he acts. Invitations trickle down to almost nothing. He spends most time in the ER, wheezing past the pain seizing his lower body and staring up at the white ceiling counting different shades of paint, imagining the game narration playing somewhere off his right. When he is discharged, he buys a six-pack from a convenient store three blocks down his condo and puts it next to his side, prying one opens with his teeth and falls on his back, the ceiling fan rotates leisurely above his head as he nurses the tender muscles, looking down at his casted foot as if waiting for a miracle to happen.

He falls asleep thinking of his trade. When he wakes up, the word refuses to go away. It stays, lurking at the corner of his mind. Sometimes it skims to the surface, imprints on the back of his eyelids every time he closes his eyes, manifesting into tangible clot in his throat, his lungs.

He is not a fool, he knows there is an expiration date somewhere at the edge of his skate. The boys on the team start ribbing him as an old man, and the grain of salt rips wide the shitty part of him that wants to deny the truth till his death.

There's a difference between twenty-five and twenty-six, and he thinks he still hasn't accepted the changes yet, pretending he hasn't figured it out. But he figured it out a long time ago.

He's not old enough to consider his mortality, but maybe it's not a midlife crisis in name but in spirit. He has been playing hockey for more than eight years, and maybe by this point something in him just starts to drown amidst the scheme of losses and out-of-reach wins. The frustration that stacks up in

He's young. He keeps fighting, because that's what he does and how they do it, but he's tired and wrung out, and hope is a fleeting concept.

iii.

He doesn't know whether blaming it on bad luck would have tamed the pain of loss, but he does it anyway. The Stanley Cup is out of their reach again, and Morgan briefly wonders why anybody on the team still repeats the same words of sorrow and regret. It rips the wound further, making it unbearable to look at. The Press still broadcasts the same shit, and sometimes Morgan just wants to rip the paper into shreds and yell at them: Jesus, we get it. We are letting the city down. But he never does that. Instead, he sits in his car and listens to the sports radio blabbering about these latest losses and tries not to cry. He punches the steering wheel, then drives home and scrolls through the internet, staring at more articles mocking their inability to live up to the legends. It seems like a vicious cycle he can't pull himself out, a terrible feedback loop of him agonizing and laughing at his own pain.