Just a small excerpt from some of the writing I managed to get accomplished last week. This is first attempt hasn’t been edited, so please excuse the burrs and blemishes.
To set it up (page 49): Donnie the walking suicide has escaped the clinic. Hal arrives too late to stop him, but manages to rescue Abbey from an unwarranted medical experiment. Stealing a car they put the clinic and it’s goon squad orderlies in their rear view mirror and disappear into the night.
Meanwhile, the storm of the century is fast making landfall, and it has their town in its sights.
Enjoy?
Abbey dropped out of college the same month her mother died of cancer. What she had wasn’t the kind of cancer where chemotherapy makes your hair fall out in thick clumps, you’re gifted with an exclusive insight into the secret meaning of life, and your very being exudes a peculiar aura as you calmly tell concerned friends and family that, “No matter what happens, it’ll be alright,” and that, “I’m fine with this,” and, “Do I look silly in this hat?”
No, her mother didn’t come down with that type of friendly cancer at all.
Abbey’s mother had what doctors called Paget’s Disease, which sunk itself deep into her pelvic and femur bones, causing them to grow abnormally large, cavernously porous, and alarmingly weak. The joints in her hip became so enlarged that any movement made her bones creak like snow being compressed underfoot. Walking became painfully impossible.
One morning she feebly tried to slide herself out of bed and into an awaiting wheelchair but, slipping on the covers, missed and fell flailing to the shag carpet where her pelvis shattered into several jagged pieces. It was at the hospital they discovered that she had developed a rare and painful type of bone cancer. It was some horribly convoluted Latin name that Abbey never bothered to memorize. “I’m sorry,” the doctor said to her, not taking his eyes off the charts he held in his hands, “but your mother is suffering from a stage four variant of the disease. We’ll make her as comfortable as possible.”
By “comfortable” they meant “heavily stoned on a continuous morphine drip”. And even through that delirious drug haze, during those final days when death refused to grant her release, Abbey’s mother squirmed and writhed in terrible agony that no amount of medicine could touch.
Her eyes, withdrawn and sunken into dark pits, never gained that calm ethereal peace that people who come to accept death as a natural part of life always seem to attain. The cancer had whittled her down until just 78 pounds of flesh hung off her ravaged bones. Lips that always smiled were now drawn tight against her teeth so that only a paper slit appeared where her mouth used to be.
On that last day, as Abbey tried to give her mother’s foot a comforting squeeze, she felt the bones in her toes crack under the reassuring pressure of her fingers. Abbey let go and collapsed into a dark corner of the room, lowered her head into her hands, and finally gave up trying to be brave. And as she cried her mother seizured. Gripped in the tightening throes of spasm the fracturing bones in her ribcage sounded like distant pops of heavy rain on a closed window.
The machines attached to her mother began screeching and wailing in increasing urgency as the skeleton that used to be her mother thrashed savagely under a thin layer of crisp, bleached hospital sheets. Abbey continued to cry, never looking up, never letting up until the hysterical baying of the machines were silenced, the doctors called the time of death, the body serenely covered up, and Abbey was once again alone in the room with a corpse and a pool of tears that shimmered on the polished Formica floor between her legs.
