Wisps
Jerry Vilhotti
The day after Johnny’s operation, the doctor’s scalpel left a long railroad track of scar over the area where he subtracted the stream of water trickling inside and after the doctor told the boy’s mother that he had also taken from the leg a cancerous substance and so charged her double for the operation never realizing himself that he had mistakenly taken growth cells which would manifest five years later when Johnny’s leg would bow from the weakness within, inside the memory of the dream he had while on the operating table of the sun twanging from a frown to a smile - he placed the faces of the nun and nurse inside the smiles. They had befriended him hours before he went up to the room with the giant overhead light.
Johnny defecated in his bed the night after his leg had grown bandages. He had stood in the blood drenched bed trying to see himself in the deep darkness surrounding him and when the nurse and nun finally came through the semi-darkness, the first words they said were: “Shame on you Johnny. An eight year old good looking boy like you doing that.”
The whispers were said in a kindly way so he did not feel any shame. He had given something of himself in the horrifying darkness that had red blotches of growing blackness smothering his leg. The nun and nurse had further lessened his fears moments before his going upstairs by telling him he was a brave boy and they promised they would be with him in the operating room and they had kept their promises.
The boy in the very next bed, burned by friends who decided to “Burywater” him because he was a “kike” and didn’t want one of them in their school where unknowingly they being of the poorer classes were being educated by teachers who looked down on all disgusting foreigners not realizing that they were or had been like them as they begrudgingly taught them skills that would enable them to do factory tasks and at the same time attempted to assimilate them into the American culture where they could be shown the way by the elite who were really educated in the elite schools, full of bandages from head to feet, and he exchanged some words, many silences and a few comic books. Johnny talked to the slits that showed the boy’s eyes; eyes that were wisps of black smoke.
Within a week the boy full of bandages died and Johnny was told by a nurse - who would tease her elderly patients by eating an apple and telling them it was an onion, that little Arnold had gone to a better place. When Johnny said he wanted to go there too, she said: “He died.”
