Alone: A Modern Fictional Haibun
Sabella took her art bag and a cushion and walked into the thicket to the east of Dark Lake. There was a picnic area a little over a mile away. She felt guilty for being relieved that the grounds would, more likely than not, be empty. Thanks to the Trump Virus, tourism was next to non-existent this year.
The thicket was shadowy and smelled of pine and loam. The gloom embraced Sabella like a pair of comforting arms, and she let her darkest thoughts surface. At sixty years old and in less than perfect health, she might not have a lot of time left. She was fat, she was diabetic, she was on medication for high blood pressure, and she had a mitral valve prolapse. She refused to have the valve replaced because she didn’t want to be on blood thinners for the rest of her life.
Sabella knew that she was everything that the youth-oriented culture created by advertising disdained. When her hair started going gray at thirty, she had let it go its way. When the first thing out of a doctor’s mouth was “we need to do something about your weight,” she was quick to fire back that she realized that her size made her a pariah in a culture that embraced nearly skeletal thinness, so the doctor was welcome to think that she was ugly as she had no control over other people’s thoughts, but she wasn’t here for yet another starvation diet.
“Let’s get the labs and see how well my thyroid medication isn’t working because it never really does,” Sabella would tell the doctor. “Let’s see if I behaved myself well enough during the last three months that my A1C is in the single digits. Let’s see if the blood pressure medication is working the way it ought to, which it usually does. Thankfully, the nurse took the reading before you had a chance to piss me off. You’ll find that the EKG looks about the same as it ever does. I’m here about diabetes, hypertension, hypothyroidism, and my mitral valve prolapse, Doc. I couldn’t give a gnat’s fart in a category five hurricane about trying to lose enough weight to squeeze myself into skinny jeans. I prefer to wear my fat pants and be comfortable, thank you very much.”
Sabella hoped that the doctor in Newport would be savvy enough to realize that this tough old bird wasn’t going to change and would prefer to address her conditions rather than her size. She’d run out of patience long ago with the sort of physician who wanted a perfect patient and believed that shame was an appropriate approach for anyone who didn’t measure up to his or her standards.
Sabella emerged into a clearing of lush summer grass and was pleasantly surprised to see that park services still trimmed the area around the picnic table. She sat down with the sun to her back, sending out a wish that she would be allowed to remain alone while she wrote or drew. She didn’t want to feel the touch of anything but the breeze. She wanted to forget her awful argument with Alex, but, as always, the memory of their heated words pushed its way to the forefront of her mind.
A tear flowed down Sabella’s cheek, and she brushed it away angrily. A brusque bite in a blustery draft burst through the soft, summer zephyr, and Sabella noticed dark clouds on the horizon.
“Fine, I’ll make it quick,” she sighed. “Here I am, rushed as always. I thought I moved here to relax, Uriel. Are you ever going to get around to telling me why you wanted me to move here?”
Not hearing a discernible reply from the angel, a directionless Sabella put pen to paper. Her messy cursive painted a heartfelt Senryu for her younger sibling.
you are my brother
Acknowledgments
This fictional Haibun was created using the words cursive, touch, and forget as directed by the Tuesday Writing Prompt Challenge from Go Dog Go Café https://godoggocafe.com/2020/07/28/16154/ and the Baransu challenge from Carpe Diem Haiku. https://chevrefeuillescarpediem.blogspot.com/2020/07/carpe-diem-exploring-beauty-of-haiku_20.html
The image is copyright gayleenfroese2 on Pixabay. https://pixabay.com/photos/crow-picnic-table-mountains-park-5405099/
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