The Sea-Wave

by Rolli

  In the end my parents broke down and ordered a pair of Arm Buddies plus a Motorized Claw Petite, which is the smaller model. It was maybe two months before they were ready because they had to be custom-moulded. The day the call came, my parents were so nervous, it made me nervous. Dr. Fritz strapped on the left Arm Buddy, then the right one. He attached the Motorized Claw Petite to the extension port on the Arm Buddy on my right arm, which he decided was my dominant arm. Then he wheeled me in front of the mirror and waved my parents over.

  I looked at myself in the mirror. My parents . . . They looked like raisins, or dried up and defeated. Which is basically how I felt. Dr. Fritz asked me to go ahead and try picking up a stuffed rabbit, which I could keep, and as I closed the claw around its head I remember thinking: I am the claw game.

  I actually cried that day. There was a bit of moisture. I didn’t think I could ever really cry.

  After a month or two, I gave up on my devices. Because I can grip things fine myself, I’ve improved, just squeezing thick things is difficult. I can hold a pen or a pencil fine. I don’t think I’ll ever make orange juice.

  My devices helped a little with certain things. They weren’t worth it. It’s not worth feeling like you take batteries, even if life is 10% easier. Because I’d rather it was tough. I’d rather it was just so horribly tough, and I was just a little less pathetic.

  I guess it’s my dream.

  Jaycee

  My dad watches the news and reads the newspaper at the same time. If something on TV really interests him, he lowers his newspaper for a minute, then goes back to reading. One night, my dad lowered his newspaper, then he folded it up and set it on his lap. This made me curious so I set down David Copperfield.

  There was a wheelchair girl on TV wearing a birthday hat. It was just some fuzzy old footage. Then they showed an older man in handcuffs being taken into the court house. Her father. He’d smothered her. He claimed she was suffering and didn’t want to be alive so he euthanized her. He was just a farmer, he said, not a criminal. His daughter wanted to die, she didn’t tell him this, she couldn’t communicate, but he just knew it. She had to take morphine, so he gave her all of it.

  They showed the footage of the girl again. She was thin and opened her mouth a lot. She looked like me. Someone, probably her mother, held a cake in front of her, then blew the candles out for her. The girl just kept opening and closing her mouth. I couldn’t tell if she looked happy or sad.

  I looked over at my dad and he turned his head away from me quickly and picked up his newspaper. Then he disappeared inside it.

  Lurleen

  There’s this wheeler Lurleen who despite her name is a lot more popular than me. Popular kids will sometimes talk to her if no one else is looking. Normal kids will push her if she’s lagging behind. I’m late for class every day.

  I sometimes want someone to push me but at the same time I know I’d be offended if they did. I’m independent and I’m not pathetic but that’s different from being a tree or a statue. Pushing a wheeler isn’t just helping them, it’s saying that despite being the way you are I recognize you, that what all those spokes are sticking out of is clearly human. People don’t realize how much that means.

  Even though the old man stole me . . . Part of me feels grateful. He hasn’t hurt me, he’s scared me a lot. It’s more attention than I’ve gotten in a long time. His stories are weird but like being read to. I’ve gotten used to falling asleep while he’s talking, even though I’m never sure . . .

  If I’ll ever wake up again.

  A Thought Cloud

  You will never understand me. Don’t even pretend to understand me. The best you can do is sit in an armchair too long till your legs go numb. Not being able to walk is the least part of being a wheeler. The chair is just furniture. It doesn’t matter.

  There’s a thought cloud around me, of my own thoughts and other people’s thoughts. There’s what I think about me, and what I want to think, and what people think about me, and what they tell me they think. It’s all different, it mixes together. It’s a head storm, and all that blowing storming is what makes me a pretty complicated kid. I have trouble understanding me. So you better, too.

  I Hate Myself

  I guess I hate myself. I’m a snob because I hate myself. Being an advanced reader makes me pretty superior. Reading David Copperfield. If I liked myself I’d like other people and I wouldn’t gaze down from my wheelchair like it was Castle Dracula.

  I’d make a good writer. Most writers are snobs and failures. My cousin the writer is a snob and a failure. No one in my family hears of her books or reads them. She calls them goons, and swings her cape over her shoulder. She tilts her head even higher. She looks at the ceiling and walks into the wall. Even I hate her.

  Most wheelers have high self-esteem. They can’t help it because they’re buried in shit. You’re just so heroic, soldierly, unique. You have to mentally get out of your wheelchair and look down from the chandelier at you and your wheelchair covered in shit. Then you’ll understand you aren’t brave and so great because your legs don’t work and you’re pasted to a stupid chair. You’re just a dumb metallic kid and your family steps into you like a mine car and rides you down to hell. They get to die then but you sit there in fire and suffer.

  I’m a twelve-year-old kid.

  Shit.

  The Constipated Broccoli Kid

  The old man gave me some cheese from his pocket. I don’t generally eat cheese because it makes me constipated. Usually once a month I have a bowel crisis and my parents take me to St. James. This one time when he saw me coming, the fat orderly, he rolled his eyes and turned to the nurses and said: “Oh great, it’s the constipated broccoli kid.” Then the nurses all laughed. I could’ve died right there, so easily.

  The cheese was covered in both mould and pocket fuzz. I ate it anyway. I was starving to death.

  Caitlyn

  It’s beautiful out, today. It’s crisp but it’s sunny. I’m still wondering about that skeleton. I couldn’t tell because the old man didn’t stop but it looked like a femur and a ribcage.

  A girl from town went missing. Caitlyn something. People formed search parties and looked for days but never found her. I always wondered what happened to her. It haunted me because she was my age.

  Coyote or fox bones, probably.

  The old man is curled up on the grass now, napping. He twitches a lot in his sleep. My aunt had a cat that slept in a vase and meowed to get out. Cats are perfect creatures, she’d say, as she shook it out of the vase like ketchup.

  God, I feel so agitated.

  Rachel

  We used to have a maid, Rachel. I wasn’t sure why I initially hated her, but I think it’s because a maid is someone you pay to do the things you really should be doing yourself, and it makes you feel bad about yourself, so you treat them badly. I couldn’t really treat her badly, but my parents treated her like shit. She looked forward to cleaning my room, I think, because I was usually in it, and my parents acted differently when I was around. Like if they raised their voices a thunderbolt might split me in half, and then they’d have two wheelchair daughters.

  All I ever really wanted was for them to treat me like a real kid. To yell at me, punish me. When I looked at my dad with eyes that said: “Dad,” he looked back with eyes that said: “May I help you to your room?” Or: “Can I be of any assistance?” Like I was a visiting aunt from Montana.

  Rachel teased me and scolded me. I didn’t like it at the time, I wasn’t used to it, but thinking back . . .

  She read to me a few times. I’m a great reader, but some books are a challenge to hold open. Once I was reading, she was dusting something, I was really struggling with the binding, and she just snatched the book out of my hands and finished the chapter out loud. I was preparing to have a fit, but then surprisingly I liked listening. I missed it. She read to me a few more times, after that. Reading is
a kind of love your parents give you and when they stop giving it there’s just not as much love. It’s like that with a lot of things, I guess. People really hug their small kids a lot. There’s a little less love every day.

  Dad fired Rachel last year. Not because of anything she did or said, even though whenever anything went missing he blamed her, then didn’t apologize when it turned up under the couch, or behind the potted plant. It was just the recession and everything.

  I miss Rachel, I guess. It’s not like she was my Pegotty or anything. But when I read David Copperfield now, I read it in her voice, it’s her voice in my brain telling me the story.

  She was probably my only friend.

  Whales

  Whales could write great novels if they only had hands.

  The Sea-Wave VI

  Then I dreamed of a garden and woke in a garden. For I could hear the wind, still. In the green, grass. The stone changing, on which I lay, the cool stone . . . to my lonesome bed. Believing . . . I was still in that green place. For such a moment, only.

  The moving grass. It could only be him. The dark man. Brother Ulgoth.

  I listened. But heard nothing. And then something. So very, faintly. The tone, so familiar.

  I rose. I approached the door. Observing the grille. There was no man there.

  I stepped closer. Laying my hands on the bars, of the grille. Peering into the hall.

  I saw only . . . a shadow. And a deeper, shadow. The dark of the hall — there was a lone candle — and a greater shadow. The robe . . . of this brother. The black robe. The back of it. He seemed . . . to be speaking. Stirring, the black fabric of his hood. Surely, speaking. To the man in the cell, opposite.

  I held, now, my ear, to the grille. And listened. As one might . . . a tragic man, to a dark bird.

  So gently speaking. So quiet, the hall, I could hear. I could hear, each word:

  “The sea-wave comes and goes forever. It rushes against everything forever. Nothing, not iron, survives it. For the sea-wave flows forever. It takes away everything, forever. All crumbs, and the phantoms of all things. Until they’re nothing. Everything, we have. The good things of earth. The miserable things. All suffering. All, is salt. Your bones. They will wash away. It will take them, the wave, away. The Earth itself, is salt, and will wash away. In the wave. For it comes and goes, forever.”

  Sliding my hand, down the wall. As a wave, against the wall. Falling.

  An Ideal Secretary

  You know, I don’t hate the old man. He stole me, I am scared to death, I don’t hate him. I don’t know him or understand him. When a branch scratched me, he took a crust of bread out of his pocket and rubbed it on the scratch. At first I was appalled but . . . Maybe he thought the mould was penicillin.

  I’m not sure if what he’s telling me is real-life stuff. It doesn’t sound like anything I ever heard of happening to anyone.

  I don’t really know anyone.

  Maybe he’s illiterate and picked me as an ideal secretary who’s quiet and works for bread crusts. His stories . . . They could be life stories or a novel.

  I don’t know.

  I’m writing it all down.

  But I don’t know.

  The Fifth Dimension

  When I wake up and I’m not in my room, I’m in the middle of nowhere, I’m cold and I’m in pain . . .

  It’s like a dream.

  One time . . .

  Mom was at Thee Lingerie. I was waiting outside, reading David Copperfield.

  A woman came up to me. A smiling woman. She crouched down. She rubbed my shoulder. She whispered in my ear:

  “It won’t be like this in the Fifth Dimension.”

  She smiled even harder and squeezed my hand.

  “In the Fifth Dimension, there is no disease. No pain. There is no suffering.”

  I looked down the aisles. I couldn’t see my mom.

  “Our spiritual bodies will be strong. We will flourish, all of us — and shine with the light of pure life.”

  I looked at her eyes. I hoped . . . But she was. She was serious.

  Sincerity is terrifying.

  I felt like screaming.

  The woman put something in my hand. A pamphlet. She kissed my cheek. Then she walked off, smiling.

  When Mom came out of the store, I stuck the pamphlet in the front of David Copperfield. I pulled it out later, in my room.

  Humankind will soon enter the Fifth Dimension, a dominion of Bliss and Serenity.

  World peace, social harmony, copious joy. The Fifth Dimension sounded perfect.

  Nothing perfect is real.

  I ripped the pamphlet in half.

  At the mall, I kept an eye out for the smiling lady. But I never saw her again. She probably got hospitalized or arrested. Or she took a strange turn and made it to the Fifth Dimension after all.

  I took a strange turn, too.

  If I saw her out here, the smiling woman . . .

  It wouldn’t even surprise me.

  The Minimalist

  My grandpa’s a minimalist. He takes medication. He just said: “I’m a minimalist” and got rid of his furniture. He sold his bed and sleeps on the couch. When we go there there’s nowhere for anyone to sit but me. There’s two empty rooms, a bathroom, and a mini fridge full of yogurt. My parents gave him a table but he threw it away. They sit with him on the floor and eat yogurt. My dad opened a cupboard once and a million silver yogurt lids tumbled out.

  Mental illness is pretty common in my family.

  Wilkins

  My parents thought a pet would be good for me, so they bought me an insane cat I named Wilkins. The night before we picked him up at the humane society I pictured him hopping on my lap and being like a small friend.

  There were a lot of cats at the humane society. I chose Wilkins because when I wheeled past he meowed instead of backing away. Plus his eyes were two different colours and sizes.

  I loved Wilkins but every time he came up to me he’d scratch my legs like a scratching post. Then he’d look lovingly up at me with his crazed eyes while I sat there bleeding.

  When my dad saw the marks on my legs he was horrified. My mom must’ve seen them when she was bathing me but she never said anything. Then I seemed to be allergic too, and for a while I needed an inhaler. So my parents took Wilkins back to the humane society. They said it might be just temporary. That was a couple years ago.

  I miss Wilkins. He hurt me sometimes, but so did life. You can’t take your life back to the humane society. Or I’d’ve tried that a long time ago.

  Something

  “See them?”

  The old man stopped. He pointed at a tree.

  I couldn’t see anything.

  “See them?” he said again, really looking at me. Really talking to me.

  “See? You see?”

  I shook my head.

  He made a sound like a small dog and then pointed again but didn’t say anything. Then he made a sound like a bigger dog. He crouched and walked around my chair. He was breathing, I could hear him making sounds at about my head level. His feet, or probably his knees, were scratching on the ground. Every minute or so my handlebars creaked, his breathing sounds moved from behind my back to just behind my left ear, it was like he was breathing in my ear. Then they move quickly back behind my chair and became whimper-y.

  There was really nothing that I could see in the tree. There could’ve been a bird or a squirrel. Though I don’t remember seeing one. It was just a big, I’d say, oak tree.

  This went on for maybe an hour. Sometimes he was so quiet I wondered if he was falling asleep. I was getting sleepy. I almost fell asleep, or did fall asleep. But then he just sprang up and wheeled me on past the tree faster than I think I’ve ever been pushed. If I’d fallen out he probably would’ve crushed me to death. And kept going.

  The Half-Kid


  Once upon a time, I split in half. I tipped over and split in half. Then my mom picked up the half of me she didn’t like and threw it down the well. The other half-kid’s still up there looking down at me sometimes. Sometimes she goes away. I’m scared she might not ever come back. I’m lonely and I’m scared down here. When I see her for even a bit I’m so relieved. I stop having panic attacks. She looks at me sadly and I’m almost happy. But I want to scream be careful. And stay the fuck away from the edge.

  Mrs. Ramshaw