One of 8 (billion) stories

Everything is just fine

Though buoyed by the wave of enthusiasm washing over certain political shores right now, a few days ago I really needed a shot in the arm. And boy, did I ever get one. It was something, let me tell you. 

I’m beginning at the end, and I promise it will make sense by the time we get where we’re going. Before you set off, here’s a memento to tuck into your pocket: There are nearly eight billion people on the planet, and every single one comes with a story of their own.  

Part 8

Bag loaded, engine running, a young family wheels their cart into the margins of my parking space. I’m hungry and ready to get rolling, but he’s wrangling something out of the backseat before I can make the first move. I lower my window and suggest that I’ll just pull out quickly so they can have more room. Then, I lock eyes with their pea-tendriled baby.

“She’s adorable!” I rave, and he thanks me with such enthusiasm it’s as though that was the last thing he ever expected me to say.

Photo by Lucas Hobbs on Unsplash

Part 7

I need something fast and cheap. I pluck a few items from the shelves, enough to make a meal of the eggs already in the refrigerator at home, and mom-sprint to the check-out. I pass a guy whose eyes scan splashy bouquets of flowers like a dot matrix printer, though he’s likely too young to know what that is. 

“She’s gonna love them,” I blurt, which is presumptuous as hell, but he laughs, so I forge ahead, asking what they’re celebrating.

“She just likes flowers,” he shrugs. “I like to bring them when I can.” 

Before parting, we joke about how the gift won’t really exist until she puts a picture of it on Instagram. 

Part 6

I find my way to the closest urgent care, a facility I’ve never visited before. It’s been years since I had reason to go. I give my insurance card and I.D. to a technician whose cloth face covering hovers just above her upper lip. Not long ago, I would have given her the stink-eye for that. I lift a flimsy, disposable version from a communal basket and work it into position, pinching the wired top edge across the bridge of my nose, as if air isn’t an octopus escaping into and out of improbable places. 

No one else in the waiting room is masked. As I take a seat near the door, a young woman and child just down the row greet me with their eyes. The boy’s face tells me he wishes he could be done now, but he doesn’t whine or squirm. 

“Are you here for him?” I ask the lady.

“My mother,” she replies. 

Part 5

A fresh arrival pushes through the glass entrance. She’s holding a blood-tinged towel on her left thumb and is in good spirits, considering. Her words fly freely across the open room. Dinner prep with a new knife. No idea how bad it is. If she looks she’ll pass out. She flashes a grinning grimace in my direction. I offer words of empathy and tell her my husband did something similar a few years ago, leaving out how he opted to patch his together on his own afterwards.

She is taken to an exam room right away, her high-pitched yelps attracting more staff and the ears of everyone still waiting to be seen. When she reappears with a different dressing on her thumb, she’s still smiling.

“Well,” she notes, “At least I didn’t take the end off.” 

Part 4

There are now five of us waiting. Someone switches the sign out front to one that reads: We’ve reached maximum capacity for all walk-in patients today. I think about the older doc-in-a-box facilities across town that are already closed and wonder if there are any other options for the unfortunate latecomer who will undoubtedly turn up soon.

Part 3

Saggy Mask calls my name from a doorway across the floor, steers me into the small space, points to a chair, checks and records basic information. A practitioner with a syringe knocks and enters synchronistically. I make a wisecrack about her pokey thing and she asks which arm I prefer.

”I don’t care. Left, I guess,” I say, thinking any residual discomfort won’t be as bothersome there.

“Are you left handed?” she questions.

When I tell her no, she suggests it might hurt less afterwards if I take the shot in my dominant arm, the one I move the most, so I present my right side instead and wonder why this conversation just went the way it did.

In under an hour, I’m headed to my car. I can pick up some groceries and get home in time to make a simple supper.

Part 2

We head to the community garden together. He’s coming along to help set thin pieces of wood beneath melons that are just beginning to form. We never got around to the trellis we talked of installing and hope this will make it a little harder for wee beasties to gnaw into tender flesh. Probably about as effective as a paper face mask.

Melons managed, we take to watering together. I’m looking after other gardener’s spaces while they’re on vacation and am grateful for the extra set of hands. He’s out of earshot, so he doesn’t hear the string of expletives.

“Ow, ow, shit, ow!! What the—?! Aaaggh!

I fling off a prehistoric Croc, one of a pair I’ve worn to the point of looking like the bottom of a drought-stricken stream bed, and see that a wire ground staple has punctured the shoe, the sock, and the bottom of my right foot. Judging from the pointy bit rising into the air like a petrified parasite, I gather I’ve been impaled by at least half an inch of rusty metal. 

To be heard from this distance would require shrieking, and I don’t want to startle the neighbors, so I hobble across the garden and show him the skewered shoe.

“Didn’t have getting a tetanus shot on the list of things to do today,” I grumble.

Part 1

The day is unencumbered. We enjoy tea, fresh peaches, each other. Neighbors—two different sets—stop by on purpose-driven errands that unfurl into billowing flags of conversation with an occasional snap, like friends do. I need to vacuum and figure out what we’ll eat for dinner, but all of that can wait until later.

Everything is fine. Everything is just fine.

~Elizabeth