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I was paralyzed, I think, helpless to do anything but watch as the
ball fell to the floor. I heard a huge noise: an explosion of some sort,
like a shotgun. I thought of the ice that had ricocheted off the roof
when my mother drove away. Death sound. The thud of what cannot be
stopped. For a second I thought, It's the end of the world. My
world, I meant. In a way this was true. In a matter of seconds,
everything changed. If I had turned left instead of right, perhaps it
wouldn't have happened; if the fly I'd swatted had never come in through
a hole in the screen, if I'd never left New Jersey, if a butterfly in
South America had never unfurled its wings and with a single beat
altered everything, now and forevermore.
When I awoke in the hospital I knew at least part of my wish had come
true. I could taste it, the burning flavor of death. The wish I'd made
in the car traveling down to Florida had accomplished half of its
mission, but I was still half alive. I couldn't move my left side. Arms,
legs, trunk, had all been affected. There hadn't been a multi-organ
disruptionno kidney or lung effects. But my heart had been affected and
there had been neurological damage, the two most frequent causes of
mortalities in lightning-strike victims. All the same, I was informed
that I was lucky to be in Orlon, where there were more lightning strikes
than anywhere else in Floridaglorious Florida, the top state for deaths
and injuries caused by lightning. Because of this, the medical care in
our county was expert. I was supposed to be grateful for that. I would
need physical therapy and a serious relationship with a cardiologist,
since my heart now skipped a beat. I could feel it fluttering inside
metorn posterior pericardium, they said. It was as though a bird were
trapped inside me, one that belonged in a place outside the cage of my
aching ribs.
While I was being told about my condition, with my brother and Nina
looking on, the only thing I could concentrate on was the clicking
inside my head. That wasn't unusual in cases such as mine, the doctor
assured me when he heard my complaint. Neither was my nausea or the pain
in my neck or the swelling in my face or the fact that my fingers were
numb. But look at all I'd escaped! Pulmonary edema, tympanic membrane
rupturedeafness brought on by sound and shockthermal burns from
ignited clothing, serious vascular effects, heart attack, cataracts,
lesions on the brain, the eye, the skin.
I had been unconscious for thirty-two hours, hence the IV in my arm.
Naturally things were fuzzy. Of course, my brother and Nina looked
concerned. And so I didn't mention anything when the nurse came in with
a dinner tray. I didn't say a word when I noticed that the Jell-O I was
being offered was the color of stones. The nurse herself, not more than
twenty-five, appeared to have long white hair. The flowers my brother
and his wife had brought me seemed dusted with snow. I understood then.
I had completely lost the color red. Whatever had once been red was now
cloudy and pale. All I saw was ice; all I felt was the cold of my own
ruined self. Perhaps I had an ocular reaction to the heat of the
strikevitreous hemorrhage was one of the many potential effects on the
eye, along with corneal scratches and cataracts. Why the absence of a
color would affect me so deeply, I had no idea, but I suddenly felt
completely bereft. I had lost something before I'd known its worth, and
now it was too late.
From The Ice Queen, pages 3-31 of the hardcover edition. Copyright © 2005 by Alice Hoffman. Reproduced with the permission of Little, Brown & Co.
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