Read Online Circling the Drain by Amanda Davis - Free Book Online

where things made sense.
    She placed heel to toe and held herself erect, chin up. I can go from here to there. I will reach the other side and find perfection. Something will spill from the sky, erasing all this bleak, empty gray. I’ll step off the end of the bridge and when I reach land I’ll eat my apple, exhale, and rejoin the world already in progress . Heel to toe, palm flat as paper. Heel to toe, palm flat as Montana. Heel to toe, palm flat as a cracker.
    She could hear the messenger approaching, feel the grind of his wheels into the swaying bridge. As he rushed past her, his handlebar caught her wrist, sending the apple soaring up into the air where it hung and then plummeted to the lower deck of the bridge. It splattered and stayed, a smear of red and white. She stood, arms down, game forgotten, and watched it for a moment, then kept walking, arms by her side now, chin still up.
    7.
    It is dark and quiet when the angel comes. He has the horrible face of a gargoyle with silver eyes and huge luminousfeathered pale blue wings that twitch and stretch independent of his sparkly body. He stands still and his wings make quiet raspy noises that seep from under Ellen’s head. She tries to open her mouth but her muscles rebel and instead her nose twitches. She tries to lift her right arm but her right eye blinks and then he is gone.
    Ellen stares through the space he held and down a long dark hallway toward the nurse’s station. All the lights are out and only candles, hundreds and hundreds of candles on the linoleum floor, along the walls, illuminate the hospital and then her eyes close.
    8.
    Ellen wants to speak. It is tiresome to lie still and float around on the sea of consciousness, immobile except for occasional prodding or turning or poking. She wants very much to say something, to ask a question or two of Dr. Ben. If not about her condition, then about the candles and the hospital, but she can’t remember how. A nurse comes in and stands writing on a clipboard near the foot of the bed, then moves closer and fiddles with the bag of liquid suspended just out of sight to Ellen’s left. Behind the nurse, the walls erupt into a grassy plain. A vine explodes with drunken purple flowers and snakes slowly towards her. Ellen tries to signal with her eyes, to raise her eyebrows, but she can already feel her lids slipping, her mind turning soupy. She fights it and pushes, squeezes deep inside at something to move, move, shake, wiggle, dance! And just as the nurse walks out, Ellen’s left foot jumps! The sheets twitch but the grassy door clicks shut.
    9.
    How did it all begin? It began before New York. It began with Billy.
    After sorting the mail, watering the plants, answering the phone, making travel reservations, tracking a package and typing the last of her boss’s dictation, Ellen had gone to a bar. She’d walked out of the office and headed straight there. It was stale and empty, the perfect place to collect her thoughts after a long, dreary day. She didn’t notice the place begin to fill until she saw the film crew come in, all in black jackets and baseball caps, sticking out in the bar crowd as overtly as if the jackets had read Not From Around Here , in their fancy stitching, instead of the names of production companies.
    She had seen them shooting that morning when she got off the bus by the office, a street corner illuminated by white light and populated by scruffy people with walkie-talkies. She’d turned around to look, joined the crowd watching the crew wait around until she realized what time it was and had to run the last two blocks so she wouldn’t be late.
    She recognized a man down the bar to her left as the subject of all the hubbub. When she’d walked by he was surrounded by lights, his blond hair coiffed, his smile sparkling. He saw her glance and she looked away quickly.
    Then he sent her a drink but she still wouldn’t look at him. What could this