Hopeless Things and Chutney

The doctor tried a bishopric then a tinctures’ worth of Lithium but the legless man’s mother still couldn’t raise her arms above her head. The doctor mixed beetroot and anise and tamped the syringe down to half-full. He cinched the surgeon’s tubing round the legless man’s mother’s arm then hooked it round his thumb and forefinger. The legless man watched as the doctor punched the needle into his mother’s arm, tatted a vein and pushed down on the plunger. A pennon of blood flagged the chamber, just enough to mix the tincture with red platelet’s. The doctor pushed down on the plunger a second time, releasing a fulminate of red cure into his mother’s arm, a warm ebbing running up his mother’s arm and into the base of her neck. She relaxed her head into the pillow and closed her eyes, the skin around the puncture closing up like a wilting flower.

(She thought of prickly pear and star-anise, wormwood casket-rot, pitted cherries and plum chutney). The legless man sat next to his mother’s bed and watched as she fell into a medicinal stupor, her eyelids fluttering, lips quivering like dill seeds in a summer storm. Sometimes all you can hope for is more hope, nothing more. The legless man hoped that his mother would get better, that the red boils and sores would go away. Then he hoped that his da wouldn’t etherize anymore baby rabbits or bury dead things under the juniper hedge. He hoped that the day would end rainless and the sky would fall gently into night. He hoped for lots of things and things that were hopeless yet worth hoping for. Most of all he hoped he could stop hoping and never have to hope about hopeless things any more.