Pain is not Gneiss

He sped up, pushing and pushing, wobbling as the two-wheeled machine intermittently became a three-wheeled machine, tottering between the bent training wheels. She chased after him, in the fastest way she possibly could. Her gait was more like that of the “zombies” in those silly English language movies that she avoided. There were no scenes of romance or drama in those types of movies, but she knew that her grandsons liked them, so she would occasionally rent them from the Blockbuster on the corner (it was only a 6 minute walk from her house).

Her feet were an outcropping hanging over the side of her chanclas like a West Texas igneous rock formation, craggy and dry. She could barely reach her own toes anymore, no matter how she attempted to contort her body, to try to make any effort at keeping them tidy. And the $40 that she would have to pay some Oriental lady at one of those shops was just not part of her monthly budget. Her disability check only came once a month, and there were so many other things that she had to do with it. So, she stuck with her weekly pedicure from her granddaughter who liked to paint her toes various shades of pink and red, but who could do absolutely nothing about the growth next to her big toe that only kept getting bigger.

She had so much more in common with those igneous rocks than just their resemblance to her feet. She, too, had gone through the tumults and processes in her life that made her blood boil, for both the good and the bad. She, too, had undergone outbursts, explosions, transformations. And now, it seemed, all of those things were gone. She had cooled to a point that life no longer flowed in her, out of her, or around her.

Don’t misunderstand. Those grandchildren of hers were everything in her world. She would do absolutely anything for them, but their lives weren’t hers. Their lives were just beginning. They were still full of the fire and passion and warmth that she longed to have inside her. But she had cooled. And she was a rock. She was their rock.

As she tried to quicken her pace, her robe came open a little, so that she could feel the heat of the passing bus float to the tops of her legs. She was just noticing this sensation when the horrible message travelled from her eyes to her (cerebellum). She saw it all happen right in front of her and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get there quickly enough to stop it. She watched as the cheap piece of aluminum attached to his bike bent, then buckled, because it just couldn’t hang on anymore. She watched as he tumbled, his body rolling onto the street and heard the horns from the cars begin to wail. She heard her own noises, mournful, shrieking, coming from her body in a way that she couldn’t control.

Her body took on a new life then. It remembered its old ways. What it was like to have fire, to have something ignite within. She changed then from a zombie to a superhero, pushing her body beyond any capacity it actually had as she swooped in to spirit him away before that car with the squealing breaks could touch him. She rolled onto the sidewalk with him in her arms, his face and hands scratched, but no broken bones, no split skulls, no pieces of him remaining behind. She held him and she rocked. And she rocked. And she rocked.

She looked down at herself through the muddy tears that had filled her eyes and she saw that she was bleeding. She had lost one of her flip flops in her heroic endeavor, and her sole had split open and bled, completely exposed. She couldn’t feel anything, though. Maybe the cut was just too deep and the location too old. Or maybe it was just because superheroes don’t feel pain.