neelwrites/fiction/shortstory/SPF/200words/28/02/2017

OF HOSPITALS, MOTHER-IN-LAWS, AND METALLIC PLATES  (200 words)

By Neel Anil Panicker

Hospitals are like certain pesky mother-in-laws. I hate the sight of one.

‘We need to examine you in detail. You’ll be admitted’, the woman in white says as she shoves a piece of paper. I peer into some pre-Christian era lithographic inscriptions that clearly my University forgot to teach; for sure, it’s not a love letter; instead are  drawings of my broken left arm in different angles of disuse.

I am wheeled into a depressingly green hospital bed where my metamorphosis from an honorable eighty kilos to a deplorable seventy happens in a jiffy.

For the next 24 hours my body becomes the happy playground of fat bodied nurses who poke, stoke and provoke suspicious looking coloured concoctions into nonexistent veins.

I open my eyes to find myself stretched out like a hapless frog as six pairs of eyes, knives in hand, glare at me.

They swoop down to swear and scream, cut and then shove a metallic plate the size of a geometric ruler deep into my elbow.

Much later, I wake up to an empty room.

I sight a glass on the table.

‘Half full, half empty. Water, no water, poison, elixir. Fuck you, I am beyond caring.’

©neelanilpanicker2017  #fiction #shortstory #200words

Written for SUNDAY PHOTO FICTION CHALLENGE HOSTED BY

https://sundayphotofictioner.wordpress.com/2017/02/26/sunday-photo-fiction-february-26th-2017/