Ice Cream, a flash fiction piece

Your eyes water as the needle slides into your skin, but not because the burn of the medicine entering your blood is unbearable. You are still here and you will be here for god-knows how long. The drug intoxicates you, as it should, and you slip into faraway memories as your eyes flutter shut.

***

The hand of the smiling man strokes your hair. You close your eyes, lean against it, take comfort in your father.

“It’s almost time to leave, sweetie. Mommy is talking to the doctors,” you hear your father say as he slips his arm over your shoulders and squeezes. “You want some ice cream?”

An hour later you sit on your father’s hip, slumped over, nearly asleep on his shoulder. The ice cream taunts you. When you taste the sweet, cold sugar you smile up at him for the first time since before they cut you open. You don’t know it, but in a week he will disappear. You will not smile again for years.

***

You are twenty-five now. You wake up and are told you can go home, but you realize you are alone. No mother to talk to the doctors, and no father to take you for ice cream.

“Are you alright, Miss?” Your nurse looks concerned.

“There’s no one to take me home.”

The young nurse’s smile spreads into his bright blue eyes. “Let me, I am clocking out anyways.”

Feebly, you agree. He chatters on, helping you get discharged.

Half an hour later, the nurse’s arm is around your waist, holding you up, and you are waiting in line for the cold, sweet taste of ice cream once again.

Thinking of your father, you smile for the first time in years.

@ 2014 by Katrina Galvez, originally published in Subplots Spring 2014 Healing Chapbook