There's something captivating, even disturbing about documenting a person's life. Questions come up, one more obvious than the other: Where do you start? What events do you describe? Do you want to spill your guts in a proverbial "tell all"? Or do you save the juicy parts for a later sequel? Do you spend time on those tiny snippets of information, insignificant yet enticing morsels to attract and maintain one's interest? Or do you hope against hope that people won't misunderstand your intentions by plowing ahead regardless, oblivious to the consequences and to people's feelings?
Are you seeking retribution for past slights or absolution for your sins? Whatever the reasons, fiction is fiction. There are some incidents from a person's past that can be embellished, situations that can always be interpolated from the so-called facts. The hard part, as far as the author is concerned, is to distinguish fact from fantasy, and truth from fiction.
In fiction, you are free to go wherever your imagination leads you. With facts, however, you are hemmed in by reality. Sure, you can stretch the facts to some degree, but you can never invent them. Fishing for facts or proof for a given set of circumstances is the preferred method for justifying your case. But with fiction, you can embroider the story to your heart's content. Within reason, of course.
Whatever leads you to that ultimate realization is what counts: that one's life can never follow a predetermined path. As the author, you strive for understanding. For meaning, for purpose, and ultimately for clarity.
My aim, in this work of fiction, is to reach that level of understanding whereby past events, whether real or imagined, can be revisited, reviewed, and reassessed in a new light. By uncovering their meaning, by shedding light on their purpose, clarity, so to speak, can be achieved.
Help me, dear reader, to achieve that clarity.
"Are you alright?" the surgeons cried out in unison. They poked and prodded little Sonny's abdomen, trying in vain to locate the source of his pain.
But all little Sonny wanted to do was cry. And cry. And cry. And cry. And scream, and shout. But no amount of crying or screaming or shouting could make the hole disappear. There it was: a gaping break in his lower abdomen, a nasty, bloody slash; a chasm wide enough for a man's fist to poke through. Just below his beltline and to the right of his stomach. Above the groin area.
"Oh, Lord! Now I see it!" A big, red gash, an open sore to the touch. To little Sonny's mind, it resembled the Grand Canyon. It could have looked a lot bigger, were it not for the half-dozen layers of gauze the nurses had placed on it.
Tears welled up in little Sonny's eyes. My God, he could see his entrails! The redness of that gash allowed him a painful look inside his innards. Little Sonny did not want to look, but he had no choice. There it was, right in front of him. The flesh, the puss, the redness, the blood. Now he knew how a gutted chicken felt as it was about to be baked in Mami's oven.
Not a good sign.
Sonny's eyes opened with a start. It took some time for him to recover his bearings. Was he in bed? Was he alright? He looked around in the dark. It certainly appeared that all was well. Was he alone, by himself? His only brother, Juanito, was in the single bed beside his. Whew, what a relief! But were the bedcovers on or off? They were on. Good. What about his breathing, was it rapid? Were there beads of sweat forming along his forehead? No, nothing like that. All was calm. All was quiet.
These were good signs.
"What a fucking nightmare," Sonny whispered to himself. The last time he awoke, by himself, in the middle of the night he was covered in sweat. Ten towels were hardly enough for all the droplets he mopped off his brow. With a 102-degree fever! This time it was different. There wasn't any fever. There were no chills, no migraine headaches, no bedcovers out of place. He was - how did Juanito put it? - "high and dry."
Well, maybe not so high. But plenty dry. His mouth tasted of raw cardboard. He half expected to cough up a cereal box, it was so scorched.
"What gives with that?" Sonny thought. Radiator heat, that's the culprit! When those radiators start to bang and clang... "Man, there's no stopping them." They sucked whatever moisture was left in the air - and that included his bedroom. To escape the dryness on cold, wintry nights, Mami would place empty Campbell's soup cans filled with tap water on top of those radiators. By morning, the cans would be bone dry. You'd need a full-time water bearer, a Gunga Din, to keep those cans full. As for those soup cans, Andy Warhol couldn't keep up with the demand.
"Damn, what a shitty place," Sonny mumbled, half to himself and half to Juanito who was still sound asleep. "Freaking Projects," Sonny repeated. "God damn, freaking Projects."
He rolled over to his side and tried to go back to sleep.
It didn't take him long.
(To be continued...)
Copyright © 2022 by Josmar F. Lopes
