Ten
The white, enameled head-board was presently a thing of gleaming loveliness to be clung to with every fiber of one’s strength, with ten fingers wrapped tightly round the smooth riser bars, and held to one’s breast with life’s last gasp. The entire metal hospital bed was a magnificent white peak, projecting through a gray storm-head of inscrutable hospital paraphernalia. It was a miracle of self-description. A bed is a bed is a bed. And although it had betrayed you by sinking suddenly, and without warning, through the tiled floor, down through as many levels of building as there were between you and the street, then lower past the steaming, fetid sewers, lower still into a hot, gassy bowel of another place layered with dry dirt, and grass, and twisted trees, where horror and death reside; although it brought you down to the place where now the yellow-toothed goblin wants to smear madness on you, you loved the bed because it was the way home. So you clung with tenacity, and with the one remaining faith in you not yet shaken and shattered to bits. You waited for a reorganization of up and down, an unskewing of inside and outside. You kept your eyes shut tight, because even from its sheathed place, down below the horizon, the sun was roaring like a blast furnace, evaporating the other face of the earth. This you could almost see. Even though the night is a lifetime of loss with myriad opportunities for dismemberment at the hands of goblins, you knew that the sun was barreling around again, coming for you specifically, the great determinant of forever; and, if the sun should find you out of your hospital bed, wandering in the tall grass, it wouldn’t care that a goblin had wanted to taste your meat, or that you were just a kid who lives in Corona, or that this was just a nightmare, it would singe you into that place, make you a patch of ash on a small stone, make you a permanence in Africa. So you clung to the hospital bed with all of your might, and with eyes shut tight against the horrors of the night, you waited for the day to come. And finally it did.