NO REGRETS

NO REGRETS
by Joe Manion

What first got my wife Elsa upset is when I peed in my khakis without knowing it. I’d been losing it marble-by-marble for months. Poor Elsa—her game shows interrupted by neighbors returning me home from walking the dog we no longer had. But the appearance of my dark crotch really threw her over.

“I ain’t changing no diapers,” her cigarette bouncing between her tight lips like flipping me the bird. “You got more issues than a magazine stand, Carl, and I didn’t sign up for this.”

So she took me to the Think Again franchise on Flamingo for a ResynapstivaÒ patch and daily pills—you seen the commercials. Last year’s Wonder Cure for dementia.

Before the sickness, we’d had it made. Carefree living in our trailer park outside Vegas: no lawn to mow, fifteen-minutes to casino buffets. We’d ice beer, grill red hots, and dine over gravel at the picnic table, then burn through a pack under fiery, desert sunsets. You could keep heaven all I cared. Once I grilled a rattler Elsa decapitated with the shovel—delicious. In the desert, it’s kill or be killed. Both Elsa and me understood what that meant. No regrets.

But after weeks on ResynapstivaÒ, it was no dice. That was when—and I didn’t know how—a train broadsided my truck, landing me in a wheelchair. Doc said, “’course you don’t remember, Carl. The shock locks away the event in your brain.”

I got good with the chair, and the day of my homecoming Elsa said tenderly, “Let’s go to The Hard Way,” where we take coffee and donuts on special occasions. It sits just across the pencil-straight highway that skims past the trailer park, an easy run in my chair as long as semis aren’t blasting by on the desert floor.

It was there at The Hard Way the daily doses of ResynapstivaÒ finally kicked in—in a fierce way. All the sights and sounds my brain had recorded were connecting back up to my mental grid. Here’s what bubbled up: My child-like, forgetful eyes watching Elsa stop the truck on the tracks and shut off the engine. “Don’t you move a nose hair, Carl. I’m gonna go get us some Cokes.” Soon white light flooded the cabin, metal squealed, a horn blasted. The train that tore my spine.

I chewed my Boston Crème, blanking my face, heart pounding. Elsa watched me close and cool as silk undies.

“You’re tired,” she said. “I’ll push you home.”

At the crosswalk, she kept us. The noise of an approaching eighteen-wheeler made words impossible. I secretly dug the left brake into the rubber of the wheel just as she pushed hard against the chair, spinning it around the frozen wheel. She stumbled forward, and I kept the chair going around until the leg braces knocked her under the last eight tires of the semi.

Kill or be killed, you keep one eye open in the desert. I’m happy it was quick. Elsa would understand.

Fiction © Copyright Joe Manion
Image by Vladyslav Topyekha from Pixabay