Mr. Horse

Chapter Two

I'm sitting on a metal slab and there's blood all over my shirt and face. I've been screaming for so long my throat's raw. Martha, my new mother, leaps out from behind the door and shouts, "Ha!"

You know those sticks the doctors gag you with when they're looking down your throat? Tongue depressors. Martha took two and slid them under her upper lip. In a silly voice she say, "I'm Wally the Walrus! Tusk, tusk!" One of the tongue depressors falls out. "Oops.." She says, "Make that one tusk." She bends over to retrieve the stick off the floor.

Through my blur of tears, I see something on her butt. I hiccup and point.

"What?" Martha asks and bolts upright. She reaches back. "Oh, hey! I wondered where that went!" She peels a gummy worm off her jeans and slurps it into her mouth. I giggle a little..which was very painful.

Martha clutches her throat, staggering backwards, like she's been poisoned. She knocks a box of latex gloves off the counter and curses. I can't see her as she's picking up the box, but I hear blowing sounds. Cautiously I peer over the edge of the table.

Martha shoots up and I yelp. She filled the glove with air and tied it at the wrist, she's holding it at the middle of her head. She's bobbing and strutting around the room going, "Cock-a-doodle-doo. Cock-a-doodle"—reaching out a claw to grasp me. She pecks me. Her eyes are evil and she's going to get me. Just as I shriek, the doctor bursts in. He looks from me to Martha.

"Who needs help here?" He asks.
Martha and I point at each other and we both crack up.

For a moment I forgot I was in the emergency room getting stitches for the gash on my chin and eyebrow. I forgot I've been howling, wailing, and clutching my jaw ever since I fell and hit I to the sharp edge of the coffee table, and Martha had to scoop me up, wrap me in a towel and rich me to the hospital from the foster home while Dante, my new father, filled the rest of the papers. In her lap with my face buried in her chest while my face and eyes throbbed. I cried, bled, and screamed bloody murder. I imagined I was dying and my life was being sucked out of me like a kid drinking a soda.

We're laughing now; we're laughing so hard I forgot how much it hurt and how scared I was.

*
Weird. That was my first memory with my new family. My first memory outside of that hell hole of a foster home. I was four years old when I was adopted.