Twelve
Although there had seemed to be nothing the matter with Willie’s legs up to that point, he was nonetheless rendered unable to walk by a sweeping, all-inclusive blow of hospital bureaucracy. It came in the form of an enormous, wheel-chair wielding nurse. She had discharged him into the chair with the mute authority of her size, and had taken him through a series of swinging doors. Her thick, brown arms were very firm on the grips, and her thighs, with an enormity that was only suggested at by the great sweep of white uniform, made a relentless chafing sound as she powered him forward. She turned corners so quickly that Willie’s shoulders slid from one side of the chair to the other. She rolled him down a peach-colored corridor, then a pale purple corridor, at the end of which a seated man in white shirt and pants rose and gave them entry through a locked door. It was a heavy, metal door, with a small window, big enough for a fist and little more. The door had swung slowly open, and then they entered a light-green corridor that had strange, variegated crosses hung along both walls. The black nurse made one more right turn, then a sharp left, and entered a room with a solitary bed in it.
Willie had then been restored his ability to walk as suddenly as it had been taken away, with a stout poke to the shoulder, and a gruff ” …go on to bed now…”. He made his way trustingly to the white, enameled bed, where in a short while he would be asleep. And though when the sleep did come there was no portent of horror, when his eyelids fell unconcerned and let loosen their grip on that alien but firm hospital reality, the abdication of consciousness was an immediate forfeit of all power. The dream would have its way with him then. He would be powerless to prevent the great downward sinking, or the white bed’s unpardonable surprise betrayal of location. When he had fallen asleep, the bed did its malice to him and took him far away to a place where dark-skinned men did unspeakable things in a bright circle of fire. And he had watched them quietly for a long while in the night, until one of them smelled him out in the tall grass and became a yellow-toothed goblin that wanted nothing more than to taste his flesh.