Just returned from a nice brisk walk. Everyone should return from a nice brisk walk every now and again. Feels great to get out there and walk as fast as you can as far as you can until you puke. Get the heart thumping and those legs burning. Sometimes I get all the way to Belleville. So tonight I went out to return two DVD’s at my “local” video store. “Local” meaning all the way to Ridley. That’s almost Avenue Road. That’s like a brisk 10-minute walk. Like shinsplint-inducing brisk. Leisurely, it’s a 16-minute walk. I chose brisk. So there I am walking under the 401 bridge and then along the grass on the north side of Wilson Avenue, few cars, no pedestrians, just me. Walking briskly. I prefer to walk on grass rather than concrete. Softer surface, less impact stress on my back for each step my 215-lb frame takes. So I’m walking along the mostly deserted street, coming closer to the lights at Ridley, and on the other side of the intersection, the northeast corner, on the sidewalk there, beside the bus stop, I see something. At first I can’t make out what it is. It looks like two people on a bench. But I don’t remember a bench being there. Finally I’m close enough to see. A person in a wheelchair. Not moving. It kind of creeps me out. A person in a wheelchair on the sidewalk, all alone, no other people around, just sitting there as though waiting for the light to change. But the light changes and the wheelchair person doesn’t move. Just sits there all alone at midnight on the side of the road. I come to the intersection and begin crossing Ridley. Presently I notice that the person in the wheelchair is a woman, old and large. Reminds me a bit of Gramma from Stephen King’s story by that name. Big bespectacled lumpy face that looks like it’s starting to slide off her head, toothless sunken mouth, eyes big and venous behind cokebottle specs. She’s staring out from her oversized wheelchair across the intersection toward the southwest corner. The wheelchair looks part-ATV, with gearshifts and big fat mag wheels. Good low centre of gravity. She doesn’t look my way, which suits me fine. Then I start to wonder if I should ask if she’s okay. I mean she’s in a wheelchair, all alone, not moving, on the side of the road in the middle of the night, looking out across the street. Surely at least some of these signs point to her needing help. Like a sinister version of the old lady needing a hand crossing the street. But I’m creeped out enough that I don’t want to even acknowledge this creature, lest she (if indeed it’s a she, this wheelchair goblin) turn her placid gaze on me and smile and open her mouth in a grotesque continuation of that smile to an insane, impossible, face-consuming degree of openness, and out of that over-open mouth slither tongues, many of them, along with a slow-building banshee wail, not tongues but hands, hands of ectoplasm growing and stretching, reaching for me and wrapping their oozing ectoplasmic digits round my pale gulping throat . . . Wouldn’t want that, no sir. Dodging a car and making it across the intersection, I pass the wheelchair woman on my right, passing sort of behind her, in her peripheral vision. Her hair is that of a fitful sleeper who’s just risen. I pull the DVD’s out of my shorts pocket. As I’m pushing them through the storefront door’s mail slot I tell myself to get over my creeps and just ask the woman if she’s okay, if she needs any kind of help. But then what if she’s offended by my assumption that she needs help? Hmm. I turn and retrace my steps. There she is, in my sights, sitting in the same position, unmoved, her back to me. At the last possible second I instruct myself on what to do. Beside her I stop and say Hi there!
Ahh! she cries and jumps halfway out of her wheelchair and thumps back down again.
Her reaction makes me almost shit my pants. For a nanosecond there I thought I might see hands reaching from her open mouth, sinister digits oozing and stretching toward me. I grab my chest and try to calm my breathing.
Jeez, she says in a smoker’s gritty voice, you scared me half to death there, eh?
Yeah me too, I say. I’m sorry about that, really. I didn’t mean to scare you. Actually I was just going to ask, are you okay out here?
Yeah sure, she says, smiling a toothless leer. I’m just waitin’ for my sister to come home on the bus.
You sure?
Yep. Still smiling.
All right then, cheers, I say, smiling back at her. And I turn and head on my way, still smiling. Mainly at our exchange of surprise, two strangers sharing the jarring shock of interface, but also because that jarring shock of interface was for me the release of accrued tension, that creeped out feeling I’d had in approaching the wheelchair goblin. And thus the monster became human, right before my eyes.
No comments:
Post a Comment