Constance' Coma and the Foreboding Footnote

(continued from Candy's Christmas Kick, Dec. 28/2011 &
Aunt Carol's Pubic Display of Affection, Jan. 2/2012)


It was five days after Candy dropkicked her mother’s Christmas tree. New Year’s Eve. Her mother, Constance, lay prostrate in a hospital bed having falling into an “unconventional” coma. Unconventional was the word chosen by the attending physician, one Dr. Sing-sing—a short man with porcelain teeth and dense, thick hair that seemed to sprout from his head in clumps like a spider plant.

Candy’s father, Fritz, stood over his wife’s hospital bed in his penny loafers and thin shoulders. He managed a look of calm composure on his pleasant enough face, but tapped one foot competitively against the hospital’s linoleum floor to compensate. He was exhausted.

To the unexplained nature of the coma, Dr. Sing-sing described such that,

“By all accounts,

 Constance should be awake.

 Her body reacts to outside stimuli

 as though she has been temporarily¹ paralysed.”

                “Do you have any exotic pets in the house?”
                                “No.”
                “Have you eaten anything out of the ordinary lately, wild mushrooms, shellfish?”
                                “No.”
                “Does your wife have any history of epilepsy?
                                “No.”
                “Any known medication or drugs she’s taking?”
                                “No.”

The only out of the ordinary thing they could detect was the dried blood on Constance’s hand, and the tiny sliver of Christmas glass lodged in her palm. “I found her lying below the Ikea dining table,” Fritz explained upon bringing her in.

But elsewhere in the sepia-painted hospital room, in a place somewhere between here and there...

...Constance was in her home, lying under the Ikea dining table. She was completely surrounding by broken bits of Christmas ball scattered and glinting all around her on the floor.  She tried to get up but couldn't without putting her hands on the broken glass. She was paralysed.

Even her cheek was pressed into the floor with glass shards lying in wait beneath it. The Christmas glass was red, green and blue – it might have been pretty in another situation.

The Christmas glass began to shiver all around her, it stirred. Soon the glass began to slide along the ground away from her, towards the front window where the Christmas tree would normally be.

Some of the glass bits began to reconnect with each other, one of the green Christmas balls had begun to form like a 3-D puzzle. The Christmas tree laying on its side began to quiver—it started to stand up, right itself again, glass balls had begun to reform. Some of the Christmas balls seemed to levitate through the open air and find their place on the tree branches.


And there was something else different about the room. Someone was in the room with Constance, someone who shouldn't be there. Constance tried to manoeuvre her eyes to see who it was—she couldn't adjust her position without cutting her face open on the Christmas glass. The looming shape of him was just beyond her sight.
            
                He was a bad man.

[1 Sing-sing shucked the air in an unfortunately clichéd karate chop motion to emphasize temporarily—as if focusing on the word temporary and ignoring the word coma would lessen the severity of the situation.]