"Sailor and the Grand Old Flag"

I wrote the genesis of this story some time in the late 80s. Fished it out of my written junk while looking for stuff to post on orinthio tumblr II. I was only going to type it up and post it here but kind of got caught up in it and decided to flesh it out a little bit.

"Sailor and the Grand Old Flag" 


Deborah lay in her hospital bed, breathing in, absorbing the air that reeked of disinfectant. Her eyes, still a bit heavy from that last dose of Melloril, slowly drifted from the window to the door, to the ceiling and back to the window.

Outside, the grand flag of the United States of America blew with each gust of the wind. Deborah had her suspicions as to who had put that flag there and why. She also had come to realize that she was the one who controlled the wind which unfurled it each time she glanced out the window.

...he was a young sailor, on leave, who had run into her on a scorching hot summer day, sweating in the park. The image of his silly sailor's uniform and those awkward military glasses was quite vivid and made her lauugh as she recalled the day.

"I wonder how he knew I would be here," she thought, trying to figure out exactly WHEN he'd placed the flag pole on the roof of the building next to the one she was locked in.The one that hypnotized her so often.

"Sex was probably the only thing on his mind," she resolved, still too lost in the Melloril to allow the memory a chance to take hold.

It was too obvious. He'd put the flag there to remind her of the weekend she gave herself to him. As it turned out, he'd had more on his mind than fucking.  She was the one who didn't want a relationship.

So goodbye, awkward sailor. With your hope of resurrection dragged down. You probably still tell her "good night", every single night, as if she were still lying next to you in whatever you call a bed. The last words you ever heard from her were "good night" and off to dream in her arms. How many times have wished you had never woken up the next morning?

Deborah's daydream was interrupted by a charge nurse who stepped in to take her vital signs. The procedure had become routine and mundane, but she was uncomfortable nevertheless. The Melloril had made her mouth so dry that it was a monumental tak to keep the thermometer underneath her tongue.  

As the nurse waited for the electronic "bzzzz" that signaled a temperature reading, Deborah stared at the procession of hospital personell and uncomfortable visitors that passed by her room...

...striding down the hallway two men in business suits conversed - one smiling mischievously, the other apparently on the verge of tears. The Nurse's Station was visible from her bed and she was comforted by the sight of the busy gaggle of caregivers. She had become familiar with them all and recognized each one by name. An elderly lady passed by, searching for family members who had long ago passed away. She peeked inside her room. Satisfied that Deborah was not relatede to her, she walked on.

Bzzzzzzz.

Without a word the nurse took the thermometer and walked briskly out, closing the door behind her, leaving Deborah alone in the tiny world she never asked to live in.

Too tired to move, she looked to the sky. Where were the clouds? Where had the sun gone?

Just WHITE. A hard WHITE surface to replace the infinite horizon of the  sky she missed so much. Only a glass orb of light, disarming in it's brightness, even more unnerving it's  sudden extinction. Even when she closed her eyes she could see it's hardness. She discovered that if she kept them shut tight and turned over in bed she could see the floor, every bit as hard and WHITE as the ceiling. If she tried hard enough she could forget the feel of the mattress and the sensation was exactly like being suspended in mid-air.

Of all her mental acrobatics, this was the illusion she loved the most. The weightless, giddy sensation of being a cloud. Movement, without direction. How wonderful! No schizophrenic illusion, not this one. She vigorously denied the possibility that this trick was the result of the potent medication the deluded doctors had forced down her throat. But is it was, she thought, perhaps she'd do well to re-evaluate her disdain for psychiatrists and psychotropic medications.

Sometimes she gets so caught up in the fantasy that she forgets every sailor she's ever had the pleasure to pleasure. She doesn't remember any names, any faces, any phallic objects that would occupy her mind at most any other time.

Then, just as soon as she reaches this state of forgotten Nirvana she turns her head to the right and looks out the window, hoping to see the beautiful world she will surely be welcomed back into. She aches to see the framed paintings, the bric-a-brac, the bookshelves, the clock radio, her carefully crafted expression of her creative personality, not this sterile womb, the hard hospital bed only slightly softer than the floor. She wants so badly to see other people dressed in colorful clothes moving about freely with somewhere to go instead of orderlies all decked out in white.

Instead, without fail, the wind picks up and Old Glory flies free again. Sailor's on her mind. She says to herself, "At least I can see the sky behind it. It looks real enough."

She concentrates on a point to the flagpole's left...the banner rises from it's limpness, hoisted to the west by a new breeze. She concentrates on a point to it's right...the flag pulls 90 degrees and flaps to the east. She clears her mind, only for a few seconds, and watches it go flacid again, pointing to the ground four stories below.

Afraid to look up at the hard WHITE her gaze follows the flag's southern direction she just stares at the sidewalk below. Hard as the ceiling but at least it's real.

She picks up a heavy chair and aims it at the window. In her mind she takes one last look at Sailor, sleeping soundly in her mind, comforted by her treacherous "goodnight". She hoists the chair up with surprising strength, soul crushed knowing he woke up not in anger but tears. She feels no weakness in her shoulders, she feels no weakness at all...only in her heart for a man she called Sailor, the only man who could have held her back. The only man who could have kept her out of this rathole. She flings the chair at the fortified glass pane, an unmistakeable crash proving the limits of it's inadequate fortification.

"It's nice to get a jolt of reality now and then," she thinks.

"But I prefer falling."