“We’ll have to figure out a way I can help you,” my husband says as I sit on the couch at home, my cast on a pile of pillows.
It’s not the short wrist I imagined. Rather, it starts at the shoulder, hinges at the elbow, tightens at the wrist, and weighs several pounds. Beneath that, the pain beats in time with my heart. But I don’t take the pills. The ones my mother took to die, the ones who took her from me, made her mean, changed her brain. The ones my husband’s mother took every day, an addiction she couldn’t shake, with all the same consequences. Meanness, disconnection, death. I’d rather feel the pain, the desire for it to stop.
Days pass, the pain subsides and the cast takes on a personality. A devious agent of change. My husband brings me food, and where at first I hate the fact that I can’t prepare it myself, counting every calorie that hits the plate, I can do nothing but accept my frustration and eat.
He buys stencils and stickers, and we dazzle my plaster arm until it shimmers gold. He wraps me in a rubber cover before every shower. He’s behind me in the mirror and I talk him through the basic anatomy of a ponytail, how to braid my hair, how to secure it with a plastic band. He brings me stacks of yellow notepads. Within a week I’ll be sitting at my desk, in a sling, thankful that the fall caught my left wrist instead of my right. Small graces.
Writing by hand is slow work. But the time it takes to make a sentence produces a certain lyricism, and the plot I once resisted becomes the plot I embrace. I’m still writing, still in a cast, as the world locks down.
Helplessness, uncertainty, fear. A season of loss and letting go. Calorie counting decreases, then increases, then decreases. The virus does the same. When the cast finally comes off, my arm looks like a newborn baby, soft and not yet of this world. Fingers free, I transcribe the novel I’ve handwritten to my computer. I review, review again, choose words, punctuation, images with care. Here’s a question mark. Here, a heart. Here, a new world for my character to walk through.
Episode is a column about a moment in the life of a writer. Allie Rowbottom is the author of the novel Aesthetica and the family memoir Jell-O Girls.