The Deadman ✔

Prologue

The Deadman

A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name.
-Barbara Kingsolver

When I was six I broke my arm rolling down a hill. I tripped during a game of Tag with my cousins, they got so guilty each one cried for days. It got so shattered at the point of impact that I had to get surgery to fix it.

More specifically, I had to get a bone graph and a marrow transplant so I could heal again.

It did the opposite.

The person who donated to me was sick, very sick, and when he gave that part of himself to me, I got sick too. He's dead now, has been for a while.

Nobody knows what disease I have, how to treat it, if there's any cures.

I'm incurable.

And chances are, I'll die before I'm forty. I'm already twenty two, so when I have problems my idiot cousins- -CJ and EJ Hilton- -like to joke I'm having a mid-age crisis. Having a chronic illness is very, very hard to explain to the average person.

There isn't a feel better or a get well soon card that can help me, or make me feel better. That isn't an option, and there never will be. My symptoms won't get better, or more manageable. They aren't going to disappear like the flu, and they aren't going to stop doctors from knowing my name and trying to be the one to cure me, get the glory.

It won't stop my peers from calling me Hospital Boy because I'm there so much I started to smell like it. 

This isn't going to get any easier to live with, to explain to people, to die from. It's going to make it harder for people to care about me every year they add onto knowing me until they leave. I'm going to stay a burden until I die, and even then this mystery illness will be a pain in the ass.

Hospital Boy won't get better, and I'll die in the place that gave me my name.

All my life I've lost my breath.

It would happen over the simplest things, if I stretched too high to catch a ball, lifted something for too long, if I sneezed, if I talked. Other times I would loose my breath because I had a panic attack, or was yelling or being yelled at, if I was exerting myself on a physical level. 

Having the wind knocked out of me is a familiar feeling.

But I didn't truly know what it felt like to loose the air in my lungs, loose the feeling that has kept my alive my entire life.

I didn't loose it when I fell in love, I didn't loose it when I found out one drunken night with the girl I love would mean a baby, I didn't loose it when I found out that I'd actually be a father.

No, I lost that when she told me that she doesn't love me.

When she spit in my face how much she can't stand me, how I've ruined her life, that she doesn't want me in any aspect. I'm not her 'type' whatever that means, seeing as she quite willingly had sex with me. Her saying this made this ugly, lonely and depressing thought hit my diaphragm. 

Violet Thompson is carrying my child.

And she despises me for it.

The way I came to this conclusion was simple, Nonnie- -that's what I call her, since her middle name's Noel and I wanted something to call her that if I shouted it in the middle of a crowd, only she would turn to and know it's me- -told me that all she wants is someone there. A father for her baby, a physical presence.