Concussion Protocol
Copyright© 2021 by Kim Cancer
Mia’s Room
Mia and Lisa are rearranging the furniture.
“I am not sleeping where THAT happened,” proclaims Mia, shaking her head. “I’m putting this picture on the wall. I’m hanging it right where she slept. I think she’d approve. She was religious, wasn’t she? Didn’t you say?” Mia asks, pins a picture of her favorite Saint to the wall, and walks around to the edge of the bed.
“She was,” replies Lisa, grunting after the pair counts to three and carries the bed backwards, toward the opposite side of the room.
They angle the narrow, single bed to line up with the wall, and Mia catches her breath, wipes a drip of salty sweat from her thick brows and tilts her head, speaks in a somber tone, “Like, I’m really glad you’re my friend, and you told me about this. I wouldn’t want to sleep exactly where she was...”
Mia can’t say it. She can’t enunciate it. But the fear and chill are there. They’re a lump in her throat.
Lisa ambles back to the other side of the room, stands over the spot where the bed had been, casts a short shadow over its emptiness. Then she squats down, sitting on her haunches, examines the wall carefully.
Mia, noting how Lisa’s tight blue jeans accentuate her sleek curves and heart-shaped butt, experiences a touch of discomforting jealousy, as she often does, when she finds her eyes grazing Lisa’s flawless figure...
“They did an incredible job covering it up. But I bet if you peeled the paint, you could see the bloodstain,” Lisa says, poking her long narrow inquisitive nose toward the wall. Then she sniffs at it in rapid bursting little snorts, like a drug dog.
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