Norah knew better.
She was told that she was going to the “neurology unit.”
But Norah knew better.
She was strapped into an upright stretcher—kind of like a wheelchair. Strapped in tight. A belt at her waist. And two around her chest.
Norah was wearing a sheer silken nightgown—torn and saturated with blood.
Bright red cells by the millions flowed from wide gashes on the back of her calves, thighs and shoulders. Flesh hung loosely from her right palm. She could not feel her ring and pinky fingers.
Norah was terrified. She kept repeating, “This is nuts. This is fucking crazy.”
Of course, she whispered these words silently—to herself. Norah wouldn’t speak to the EMTs. She wouldn’t speak to anyone.
It was the 23rd of February and cold outside. Snow clung to the corners of the city streets–gray, lonely and ignored.
As she was being rolled out the front door, Norah took a quick glance back. Shards of tortured glass lay in pools of her own blood and skin. And while winter winds blew into the apartment and feathered upward in erratic gusts and swirls, an empty dark space opened out into the night where there had been a plate glass window just 43 minutes prior. Norah had shattered the window with her tiny plump body–dashing blindly through it and onto the balcony like a sprinter fresh from the starting line.
The figure in the top hat across the street had signaled her to do this. To make her break through.
For over an hour, the costumed woman...or man...Norah couldn’t tell which–had danced and danced about an 8th floor living room in the building opposite to hers. And like a perky kitten in a window, Norah had watched this strange, tenebrous movement and received the hidden message that this was her 2am opportunity to free herself of all the pain, of all the torture, of all the noise. Her break through. Insight and enlightenment would follow shortly after.
The figure in the top hat had covertly beckoned Norah to run through the window and enter into silence and sweet release. Final quiet. End peace. A direct hit on the mute button in her head.
Norah trusted this message. She trusted the dance. And she understood that it would take courage. She understood that it would take faith. To act.
Norah did not understand everything, however. She did not understand the laws of physics. And she did not understand that she was privy to their consequences.
Norah did not understand that her mad dash through the window would cause her to lie on an emergency room table for seven hours being painfully stitched back together with hundreds of sutures in numerous physiological locales. She did not understand that floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows—when broken—cut human flesh like spanking new serrated knives slice into warm, tender brie. She did not understand that she would be hospitalized and studied like a strange and curious object for weeks by psychiatrists on the fourth floor of a locked unit–pumped full of drugs that mangled and manipulated what was left of her fragile, damaged body–leaving her stiff and twitching like a helpless insect recently gassed with poison.
Norah did not understand any of that. But as the EMTs sarcastically chuckled and commented on her wretched state of affairs, Norah understood one thing. She understood that she was completely alone in the world, and that no one would take care of her.
Except her.
And so she began.
...
Norah Makes Her Man (literary hors d'oevere 3)
Norah Makes Her Man (literary hors d'oevere 2)
Norah Makes Her Man (literary hors d'oevere 1)•••••••••••
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zaadz
August 2008 
Delia
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