[Rance]

This is a spur-of-the-moment story, a bit of brain-prattle that I spilled out on paper right quick before a show that I watch comes on! I'll likely continue tonight and post a bit more. Editing and revising other work of mine has caused a little bit of a creative hole to open up in my heart, and it's been looking for a short-story to fill it. Hopefully you'll enjoy the direction in which the story is going, but for now, this is what you get!

Harold and Ida - Part One

I remember when I first discovered I was sick.

Remember is an awfully strong word, though. Memories are usually accompanied by ideas of time or place, feelings of intense emotion, stimulants to senses particularly affected. This memory doesn’t have any of those things; it was wrung free of them like a sopping-wet towel, leaving only a bare dampness of fact and occurrence. I remember it not because of what happened, but because it was the beginning to everything that happened afterwards. I remember it the way someone looks up towards the sky whenever it rains. You know where the rain comes from, but be damned if you don’t always look just to be sure that nothing’s changed since the last time.

I was working. It was a tiny summer job while I was home from college, something I managed to get through the local temp agency. Temporary employment agencies work wonders when you’re only home from university for two-and-a-half months. I can’t recall too much about that day, but I can remember that I had eaten scrambled eggs with ketchup that morning and that I’d worn my favorite pair of socks. I remember how my boss kept asking what was wrong and kept saying my name over and over.

“Ida, Ida,” she said, making her sound like she was stuttering over the beginning a sentence rather than repeating my name. “Ida, sit down, sit down, else you’re going to hurt yourself!”

But I couldn’t sit down. When the fit struck me, I can’t recall what I was doing. I remember launching myself from my desk and sprinting without direction towards what I thought might have been the lady’s room. The world suddenly went from being wide and sensational to being like a small, multi-colored pinprick through which only slight sounds and colors managed to leak through. I was lucky I didn’t wear high-heels. I would have fallen a lot sooner than I did.

I almost managed to make it to the toilet. I threw open the door (with enough force, I later discovered, to break two of my fingers at the second knuckle) and collapsed on the powder-blue tile. My throat tightened. I vomited. I kept vomiting. Usually, if I have to be sick, I get scared of doing so, but nothing during this diluted frame-of-mind seemed to really have any substance to it. You would think a life-changing event like that would have filled itself in inside of my mind between when it happened and the present, but it hasn’t. The only thing that comes back is a permanent tattoo of coolness on my cheek from the floor-tiles that I sometimes feel in the middle of the night if I wake up in a feverish sweat.

Besides that, I woke up out of it all under the hot, fluorescent halo of a hospital’s exam-lamp. There were three faces above me – my mother, my father – and then a third, with a hawk nose and thick-rimmed glasses. He seemed more interested in his clipboard than he did in me, though. The words were something from an Oscar-winning movie – the script, it seemed, of a tear-jerking climax, but I had forgotten my tear-ducts on that particular day.

“There’s a lump in her brain. A growth, a tumor, tucked just between two of the lobes, here—“ said the unfamiliar face, turning to poke at a black-and-white photo stuck on the wall, “—and it’s something that, with a bit of attention, we might be able to slow. Has there ever been any history of brain trauma?”

No, my parents both said, or maybe I said it, or maybe nobody said it.

“Was she ever dropped as a baby?”

No.

“Did she ever take place in any sports where she received blunt force to the skull?”

No.

“Has there been a history of seizures in her past?”

No.

“Black-outs?”

No.

“Forgetfulness? Confusion of senses? Sensory stimulation with no origin?”

No, no, no. What does this mean, what does this mean, they said, or maybe I said, but the memory wasn't enough to merit a voice.

“I’m afraid that this situation,” the doctor said, monotone and matter-of-fact – the kind of guy who had gotten his doctorate, but had taken Tennis courses instead of Drama 101—, “is considerably disturbing. Mr. and Mrs. Rousseau,” said the doctor, tucking his clipboard under his arm, “it looks, though not all the tests have been completed, like your daughter Ida may very well be suffering from a malignant tumor.”

And that, my friends, is precisely how I remember it – one minute, I was working, typing, pounding out letters from my boss and waiting for lunch, and the next, I was in a hospital, and my brain was on display in monochrome. From the middle of it, there was a thick and black oil seemingly frozen in place, something that brains shouldn’t naturally have, and my parents kept staring at it. My father was holding my mother. One of them was crying. To this day, I still can’t remember which.

My name is Ida Rousseau. I have a brain tumor, and in six months, I’m going to die.