Content warnings

Homophobia. Parent illness. Car accident. Violent death. Grief.

After an overnight double shift, I was in the shower when the phone rang. Dad had fallen and couldn’t get up. I kept him on the line while the truck ate up the twenty miles to his house.

“I told you a million times to come live with us.”

“I’m not living with a stranger,” came the familiar rebuff, weak and strained over the handsfree speaker.

“Talal is my husband.” What was the use? He’d never change his mind. Never accept it wasn’t a phase. Never admit his little man is queer.

I burst in to find him sprawled on the kitchen floor, with the paramedics arriving on my heels. The ride to hospital passed in a whirlwind of questions and decisions that didn’t stop on arrival. From emergency room to radiology, surgery to recovery, and at long last, a bed for the night.

By the time the nurses raised his bed rails and shooed me out, it was well past midnight. I’d been awake for two days and could barely keep my eyes open. Facing the unattended nursing station, an oversized green button next to a red fire door invited me to Push, which I did, passing instantly from the murky gloom of a sleeping ward, and into the full glare of the corridor outside. I squinted and checked left and right, trying to divine the way out, unable to shake the feeling something had gone terribly wrong.

Everywhere I looked, walls melded into floors, ceilings, and one another, shimmying and morphing like desert mirages seen through a sheer veil. In a haze of unreality, I walked the snaking corridors of shiny steel and glass that fused onto cream sandstone crisscrossed by timber beams blackened by age. Up helical staircases and down swirling ramps, occasionally interspersed with chaotic murals of arrows: left to Hearing Loss, right to Prenatal Support, up for Cardiology, down for Nephrology, an architectural maze with few exits revealed by arcane lore I didn’t possess.

“Hello?” I called out when I tired of my aimless roaming. Only echoes answered. Crackling static spilled from the grille of the nearest fire door’s intercom in response to my pleas. Frustrated, I kicked the door’s shiny kickboard only to discover my bare feet. What happened to my boots? What would Talal say if he saw me befuddled by a hospital door?

I’m willful and wouldn’t have it any other way. I don’t negotiate obstacles; I blast through them. Except when begging for dregs of acceptance from dad, like a kicked, slavishly devoted pet.

I didn’t belong in a fluorescent-lit white-walled labyrinth. I belonged at home with my husband. If only I could find my way back.

Back to my truck, left on dad’s driveway, where a storm passed through, and soaked a now unresponsive phone, forgotten on the passenger seat through a window left half-down.

Back onto rain-slicked asphalt pockmarked with undulating puddles, reflecting street lights and traffic lights and shop neon signs, clashing and merging into a mélange of eerily festive fireworks that faded in the rearview mirror as I fled the glittering arteries of the slumbering city for the unlit infinity of a highway.

Back to weaving through serpentine phalanges of eighteen-wheelers making up time on overnight runs, answering my honks with exuberant airhorns.

Back to filling my lungs with euphotic ozone-laden air, my eyes closed, grinning in the stiff breeze like a puppy on his first car ride.

Freedom, from it all.

No longer would I buffer my world for dad. No longer would I lie by omission to assuage his unconfessed prejudices. His fault-lines were not mine to salve, nor his guilt trips fodder to sift through for traces of love and acceptance. No longer.

I’d never felt freer.

As if to celebrate my emancipation, an orchestral crescendo drowned out my thoughts. Cymbals and horns kept rhythm while a lonesome violin screeched against the bone-jarring rumbles of a moaning cello. Suddenly, I was free of the metallic vice, passersby fussing over me, glimpsed on the periphery of a red and blue fringed great dark void that beckoned me yield to its cold and tenacious tentacles.

Suddenly, it no longer felt like wishing, but remembering.

One world receded as another engulfed it, like an oil slick on parched bitumen, a veiled reality faintly perceived through closed-eyelid unreality.

Too late I realized what had happened and my thoughts leapt to Talal. I’d never again hold my husband, nor bask in his grin, nor tremble at his touch.

I snapped to, supine on a hard cold slab, one of many in a room lit only by what little light filtered through an interior window under a sign reading:3 East: Morgue.

On the other side of the glass, Dad sat in a wheelchair sobbing, the angry gash of his hip surgery peeking from under the hem of his loose hospital gown. Talal stood next to him, his tears trickling out of wide, glazed eyes, down an unshaven face, to drip off ashen cheeks onto dad’s bare, liver-spotted arm.

I flinched from their pain and turned my head, only to wish I hadn’t. My body, mangled and bloodied, lay naked on a stainless-steel table covered to the neck with a milky white plastic sheet that left only my head trauma on display. Under the blood-plastered hair, my clenched jaw and pursed lips looked grimmer than I remembered feeling, and I wondered if I’d always looked this hard.

The wheelchair’s squeak pulled me from my remains to Talal turning away from the viewing window, a reassuring hand on dad’s shoulder. Slowly, dad raised his and tentatively rested it on Talal’s.

“Stop,” I screamed at them. “What good is your peace now?”

What good is coming together, only to mark my passing?

I wanted it to be a nightmare I could rouse from.

I wished I could choose again, and choose Talal.

I shouldn’t have sacrificed my future to my past.

I shouldn’t know where 3 East is. Not yet.

END

Author's note

After a long day, I rushed to my mother’s place, accompanied her by ambulance to the ER, then to a ward, before getting thoroughly lost looking for an exit in a massive Sydney hospital. When I finally got home in the early hours of the morning, I wrote this story!

Ramez Yoakeim

A one-time engineer and educator, Ramez Yoakeim writes mostly about outsiders finding hope in dire circumstances, including ‘Rise Again’ and ‘More Than Trinkets,’ selected for Reactor’s Must-Read Speculative Short Fiction. Find more of his stories in Cast of Wonders, Baffling, Heartlines Spec, UtopiaSF, Translunar Travelers Lounge, and Kaleidotrope, among others.