Frostwriting
>I sputtered out of the depths
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| Roger White @ At Length |
Chris Wiewiora reflects on his life in pools at Frostwriting.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I know all the pools I’ve ever been to. The first one I remember is West Virginia Wesleyan College in the mountains of my hometown, Buckhannon. The private Methodist school had an Olympic-size pool that the public could swim in for a small admission fee. I learned how to swim there with my father.
Dad splashed in, lowering himself further down, then strummed chords on an invisible acoustic guitar and sung the folk song I’m being swallowed by a boa constrictor…. The snake ate him throughout the verses: “Oh no, oh no. He’s swallowed my toe / Oh gee, he’s up to my knee / Oh my, he’s up to my thigh / Uh-oh, uh-oh. He’s at my torso.” Deeper and deeper the water climbed up. Then “Oh heck, he’s up to his neck—Gulp!” Dad went under and the water ate him whole.
After surfacing, Dad coaxed me into the pool: Jump in, I’ll catch you. He held onto me with one hand on my stomach and let me practice the front crawl: Stroke, breathe, stroke. Dad let me go: Just keep your head up. I dog paddled in place, slapping the water frantically. I started to sink, gulping more water than air. Dad caught me right before I went under: Good try.
All at once came my moment of success: I paddled in the shallow end without needing Dad to save me and swam into the deep end where I couldn’t put my feet down on the pool’s floor. After Dad taught me to swim, my mother wanted to teach me to float. Mom and her younger sister, my aunt, would lie on their backs and skim half in, half out of a pool for hours in perfect symmetry. I expected them to puff out a snort like whales.
>Seventh Hospital of Kazakhstan
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| Judah Maha |
David Whitsett @ Frostwriting on the pleasures of something gone horribly wrong.
My hospital room is a sad affair, a blank cell of alabaster walls and rusted metal beds. I share it with an old, dying man named Sergei, who has a huge kidney stone lodged inside of him. He occasionally brings out his ultrasound pictures to show me, as if to make sure I’m duly impressed by it. “Biggest one here,” he often reminds me, as if that’s what it would naturally take to send him to the hospital.
I am lucky to be here, I remind myself, in the seventh largest urology ward in Kazakhstan. I had to hitchhike here while my body tried but failed to pass a slow-moving kidney stone. The worse pain I have ever felt no doubt, but it in some ways it came as a relief, a welcome interruption of the mind-numbing repetition of life in a village. For some reason, I feel guilty about it, that such an obviously bad thing could leave me with such a good feeling.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Each morning I get woken up by a nurse who shoves a shot the size of a howitzer into my ass. “It’s for the pain,” she says. I nod thankfully at her, making a mental note not to sit down for the rest of the day. The nurse moves so briskly, I can never get her name, but I can guess the reason for this. There are about a hundred people on the ward, all of them contending with the pain of having small rocks move down a tube the width of a sewing thread inside them. This means a hundred sad, bed-worn asses that require her indelicate brand of care each morning. “She probably knows our asses better than our faces,” Sergei likes to joke, often.
altimoniere 