Storella: "Apples and Oranges" (standard:drama, 462 words)
Author: Jerry Vilhotti	Added: Apr 26 2001	Views/Reads: 3677/1	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Viewing reality from a little boy's world.

The day after Johnny's operation, the doctor's scalpel left a long
railroad track of scar over the area where he subtracted the stream of 
water trickling inside and after the doctor told the boy's mother that 
he had also taken from the leg a cancerous substance and so charged her 
double for the operation never realizing himself that he had mistakenly 
taken growth cells which would manifest five years later when Johnny's 
leg would bow from the weakness within, inside the memory of the dream 
he had while on the operating table of the sun twanging from a frown to 
a smile - he placed the faces of the nun and nurse inside the smiles.  
They had befriended him hours before he went up to the room with the 
giant overhead light. Johnny defecated in his bed the night after his 
leg had grown bandages.  He had stood in the blood drenched bed trying 
to see himself in the deep darkness surrounding him and when the nurse 
and nun finally came through the semi-darkness, the first words they 
said were: "Shame on you Johnny.  An eight year old boy doing that." 
The whispers were said in a kindly way so he did not feel any shame.  
He had given something of himself in the horrifying darkness that had 
red blotches of growing blackness smothering his leg.  The nun and 
nurse had further lessened his fears moments before his going upstairs 
by telling him he was a brave boy and they promised they would be with 
him in the operating room and they had kept their promises. The boy in 
the very next bed, burned by friends who decided to "Burywater" him 
because he was a "kike" and didn't want one of them in their school 
where unknowingly they being of the poorer classes were being educated 
by teachers who looked down on all disgusting foreigners not realizing 
that they were or had been like them as they begrudgingly taught them 
skills that would enable them to do factory tasks and at the same time 
attempted to assimilate them into the American culture where they could 
be shown the way by the elite who were really educated in the elite 
schools, full of bandages from head to feet, and he exchanged some 
words, many silences and a few comic books.  Johnny talked to the slits 
that showed the boy's eyes; eyes that were wisps of black smoke. Within 
a week the boy full of bandages died and Johnny was told by a nurse - 
who would tease her elderly patients by eating an apple and telling 
them it was an onion, that little Arnold had gone to a better place.  
When Johnny said he wanted to go there too, she said: "He died."


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