Injury
I’m a janitor at the Y, and there are injuries and sometimes blood and once a lot of blood under one of the basketball hoops. All the other players made a circle around the man on the floor, a panting circle of breathless questions and declarations. ‘What happened? Is he out? I didn’t see. Holy shit. We were both just going for the ball.’ The paramedics whisked him away, and the gym was cleared and closed.
But a week later he was back, with a broad patch of gauze taped to his forehead. He didn’t play, just sat in the bleachers and watched his pals. I caught him glancing now and then at the spot under the hoop where he fell. After the game ended, he went to over to his buddies and they slapped his ass. Someone proclaimed, ‘When you’re all healed up, brother, your ass is back on this court.’
I wished, suddenly, I had something to give him. A card or a little religious medal or a Bible or a Koran, some holy book in which I could write his name and a blessing. Or even a relic, like a vial on a chain with a few drops of a saint’s blood in it. Just as a reminder.
But I felt ashamed. Because, when I was cleaning up after it happened, I had a very strange thought. Almost like a vision. In it, I was pouring bleach straight into the man’s ear. I felt like I was sterilizing his entire essence. When I finally put away my cleaning supplies and peeled off my gloves, I was sure he was dead. I spent the rest of my shift on the roof, in the shadow of the giant HVAC unit, smoking cigarettes and weeping my heart out.
Paul Luikart is the author of the short story collections Animal Heart (Hyperborea Publishing, 2016), Brief Instructions (Ghostbird Press, 2017), Metropolia (Ghostbird Press, 2021), The Museum of Heartache (Pski’s Porch Publishing, 2021), The Realm of the Dog (J. New Books, 2024), Cult Life (Tenpenny Books, 2024), and Mercy (Walnut Street Publishing, 2025.) He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia. He and his family live in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
