+++
author = "Steffen Blake"
title = "Bonsai"
date = "2021-09-10"
+++

The first thing I recalled was the ringing, the loud splitting sensation of a high pitched hum in my ears. It droned on and on in my mind, coaxing my consciousness out from the sea. The next thing I remembered was the aching. Along the small of my back were two piercing sensations, stabbing up into my kidneys. My neck refused to respond to me. I tried to open my eyes, and the glaring lights overhead were like a vice on my skull. Everything was white and a blur, where was I? What was happening?

I tried to speak, but found I could at best let out a dull groan, which my throat responded to with an agonizing sear of lancing pain, which arced its way down to the core of my body. My god, I had never in my life felt more thirsty. My mouth was parched and my tongue swollen and bloated within it. Water. I needed water unlike anything I had ever needed before.

By this point, slowly, my senses began to tune in. The glaring lights above slowly coalesced into smokey white tiles overhead, and the prickling sensations on my back had simplified into the coarse fabric of cotton. Pain. Everything was pain. That initial ringing which had woken me up had faded to a dull roar. I could hear voices now, distant and close, murmurs and footsteps on tile.

I took a sharp breath in through my nose, it was acrid and difficult and left my body as a wheeze. The air was stingy and sharp with that lingering chemical scent.

A hospital. That’s what this was.

More objects began to focus into clarity around me as I blinked away tears. Looming at my side were some pieces of dated medical equipment, the dull greys and yellows that were an assault to the senses. Grimey lights on the equipment quietly blinked away dutifully. I carefully turned my neck, each millimetre agony, to observe further. Sitting at my other side was an IV drip bag, filled with some form of brown fluid. Flexing my right hand slightly as best I could, I confirmed the prickling sensation of the needle in its wrist. Wonderful.

“Awake, are we?” A woman’s voice spoke out from the foot of my bed then, causing me to issue a startled (and painful) gasp. “Can you talk?” she questioned. I heard footsteps as she approached me from the side.

A sharp click preceded an agonizing, blinding light. I felt fingers on my face which pulled my eyelids open. It felt like my brain was being squeezed in someone's fist. I could only groan in response, my tongue refusing to cooperate with my efforts.

“Alright then,” she stated matter of factly, and the light was gone, “Can you understand me? Blink twice for yes” At this point her face came into view, obscured by the tears welling up again in my eyes. Carefully and purposefully I closed and opened my eyes twice, staring deep into her looming shadow of a visage.

“Good. I'm going to tell you a few things now. I need you to listen very carefully, do you understand?” Once again, I blinked my eyes at her twice. Yes.

“You have been in a terrible accident. You were seriously injured, and rushed to this hospital.” I felt a sharp sensation well up in my stomach. Panic? Anxiety? It was cold and twisted, like a knot. “You have been unconscious for over a week, but you appear to be recovering well. You have a very strong will to live, it seems. Does this all make sense so far? Are you following me?”

I took a shaking breath and blinked twice. Yes.

“You still have a lot of recovering to do, and you need to conserve your energy. We are doing everything we can to keep you comfortable, but you need to understand these things can take time.”

Yes. That makes sense. Visions rose in my mind. Twisting metal, shattering glass, the sound of tires screeching on pavement, blood, chaos. Panic.

“There is another thing that we need you to be aware of.” Her voice had gone cold, concerned, yet serious. The knot twisted around in my stomach now, and I felt something rise up inside me. Fear. “The accident was serious, and we did everything we could, however, there were… losses.”

I locked eyes with the woman now. She had a solemn look on her face at this moment, and her eyes kept darting to my side as she spoke. I swallowed once and slowly turned my gaze to follow hers, to my left side. It took a moment to truly register what I saw then. My shoulder was heavily bandaged with gauze, and the grey cotton blanket had been tightly packed over my body. I blinked once. 

My arm. 

Where was my arm?

What was this? Why was my arm so cold? I tried to move my left hand, but nothing responded. I felt a sharp lance of pain in my shoulder as I shifted, to try and see my arm better… but there was nothing there.

The space where my left arm was supposed to occupy was simply… empty. Everything simply ended at the stump of my shoulder and the bundle of gauze. There was no weight, no pressure, no sensation. Simply. Nothing.

“We are so sorry” she simply stated, “There was nothing we could do… You lost so much blood.”

The howl that had been building up in my stomach finally let loose, screaming up my throat and split the tepid air. I couldn’t remember what had happened, I couldn’t remember why. I thrashed in the bed, shaking it all the way down to the floor. The aluminum frame clattered and whined, and I found myself shaking with fury and terror. What had I done to deserve this fate? What had I done?!

I felt hands on my body, pinning it down to the bed. I screamed and cried out, then felt a prick in my arm, eliciting a cold and creeping sensation in my body. Inky blackness swallowed my vision and bathed me into subconsciousness.

When I next awoke, it was to the sound of shuffling and scraping. My eyes snapped open, the memories rushing back. I could feel my left arm aching to twitch, to move, but it refused to respond to my subconscious urges.

It was dark now. The room was solely illuminated by the pale sheen of the night's moonlight, casting through the solitary window high up the wall on my left, behind the equipment’s droning lights and soft whirring. It was stout, several feet up, and barely provided enough luminance to grant clarity to my surroundings. I craned my head to the right, towards the shuffling noises which had awoken me.

The haggered sheen of white canvas blocked any view I could hope to have, for a massive curtain had been drawn across to seperate my bed from whatever was going on behind it. “Who’s there?” I attempted to ask, but all that rose from my mouth was a dry croak, lost to the shuffling and movement.

Straining as hard as I could, I held my breath and listened intently. Sounds of rustling fabric, creaking metal, and a bump against the wall. Haggard breathing perhaps as well. The sound of my own blood pumping was deafening, and my heart thudded in my chest like a drum. I closed my eyes, attempting to slow my pulse just a smidge, enough to lend further fidelity to my eavesdropping.

A soft, mottled moan tore through the silence of the room, causing my eyes to snap open and a sudden chill to creep down my spine. My heart rate skyrocketed as my pulse attempted to tear free. It was a man’s voice, I was sure of it. A cough, wet and virile followed. Someone was in the room with me, a mere two or three feet away on the other side of that curtain.
I don’t recall how long I sat there, staring up at the roof. An hour? Two? Eventually exhaustion took over and I found myself unwillingly drifting off back to sleep.

It did not last long.

My eyes snapped open, this time assaulted by early morning light pouring through that miniscule excuse for a window, coating the hospital room in a greenish sickly hue.

Screaming. Scrambling. I turned immediately to see that the curtain which had blocked my view of my roommate was now pulled back, and I could see them in full. I felt my pulse race wildly out of control as I attempted to come to grips with what I saw. For a moment, my consciousness was simply unable to grapple with this view and gave up, merely accepting it as fact.

But, after another moment of watching a nurse pin the man down to his bed while he wailed and screamed and thrashed, I realised exactly what it was my eyes were focusing on.

His body was wrapped in bandages, most of which looked old and in need of changing. I could see parts of his face through his cocoon of cloth though, and his eyes were wild and stricken. His arms were bound down to his front and sides via straight jacket, and his legs were tightly bound to the end of the bed.

These were not the sights that left my mind reeling, however. Perched atop this man’s head, like sprouting branches of ivory, two pairs of antlers stood proud and tall, white and polished like marble. In stark contrast, however, a flow of crimson red was sprouting out from the end of one tip, blood. It was blood that I saw, I realised then. It appeared the end of one of the antlers had been removed and it was bleeding, a wound even.

One of the nurses reached up to grip near this point and her hand slipped on the crimson soaked bone, streaking red all the way down and staining the ivory bright red. This seemed to evoke great pain in the man, as he let out a shudder and howled, much as if someone had touched an open wound on any other part of the body. I merely lay there watching in mute fascination and horror, still attempting to understand what display I was viewing.

After a few more moments of struggle and some rolled up sleeves, the nurses managed to grip the man by his antlers and hold him still while another nurse bound them to his headboard. Finally, they released and stepped back. Despite his struggles, the man was now completely bound still by the white crown of bone atop his head. He whimpered in fear now, muttering noises through the filthy bandages covering his mouth.

“Now now” a voice dryly uttered from the entrance to the room. I whipped my head up towards this new sound, unfamiliar, “That’s enough of that”. It was a man’s voice, sultry and evocative. I could hear the sounds of thick boots on the tile floor approaching. As he came into view, I finally was able to see the man’s appearance. Raven black hair was slicked back atop his head, oily and with a muted sheen. His ratlike face was pulled tight into a smug grin, and he wore the uniform of the hospital. As he approached, the greased man pulled a pair of rubber gloves tight and adjusted them, then stood at the foot of my co-patient’s bed.

As a small aluminum table was creaked up to his side, the doctor approached the antlered man with a look of keen interest, much like how one may examine a specimen under a microscope. He gripped the man by the chin and ran one finger up his milky crown, inspecting it carefully.

The antlered man let out a soft moan of fear as the doctor extended a hand out behind him, which a nurse soon deposited a device into. Shears. Those were clearly shears, much like the type a gardener would use to clip a tree’s branches in the Autumn. I felt my heart stop and my blood run cold as I watched the doctor raise the shears up to one of the prominent antler’s base.

“You will look lovely in my garden,” the doctor stated sharply, before closing the shears. The sound of the bone material cracking and crushing under the blades snapped through the room, and I felt myself wince back in horror. A single spurt of blood, bright red and crisp, spurted forth and splattered a nearby nurse’s gown. I watched that piece of ivory fall gracefully down and land on a metal sheet pan held in her hands. ‘*Plink*’. It echoed out in the air, the sound of bone on metal.

The man on the bed’s entire body went rigid and I could see his knuckles go white as he strained against his bindings. And then, he howled. It came from deep within him this time, like a creature screaming and crying against the cruelest of worlds. In that moment I felt my heart shatter and I felt tears spring forth from my eyes. I watched the man’s body bend up and strain, then limply collapse back down after a moment, only to repeat. The sound of his bed rattling filled the roam as he continued to howl.

“That's only the first of three!” the doctor proclaimed with bemusement, “We are just getting warmed up!” and he began raising the shears up to another point on the man’s antlers.

At this moment my gaze connected with that of a nurse. She let out a startled, “Oh!” as we locked eyes, then rushed forward and snatched the curtain, dragging it to obscure the view. I could no longer see my roommate’s anguish, but the curtain did nothing to stop the noise.

‘*Crick*’ the sound of bones cracking once again rang out, followed again by that soft ‘Plink’ of the antler being caught in the metal pan. The man’s screaming doubled and I could see the silhouette of his shadow thrashing against the curtain.

Slowly I turned my gaze up to stare at the roof, focusing my eyes on the chalky tiles covered in their thin layer of grime. This was no hospital I realised, as I listened to the third bone snap and be collected.

This was hell.

Soon the nurses filed out of the room and closed the door behind them. The curtain had been left closed, obscuring any view I could hope to have of the aftermath. Probably for the best, I wasn’t too sure I would ever want to see that.

For the next several hours my roommate wailed, moaned, and screamed out. I found myself laying in my own bed simply staring up at the roof, listening to his cries for help, completely incapable of responding myself or aiding in any way. I was just as trapped as he was, my one arm was bound and my other? Well. It was gone. I realised now that the shocking events must have completely dumbed my senses, for now the loss of my own arm had become a simple fact, plausible and accepted.

Compared to those events which I had just witnessed, my missing arm was a mere fact of life now. 

Eventually, sleep I think overtook us both.

I wish I could say those events were a feverish dream, something concocted in the madness of a man unable to comprehend his own loss and damages. I wish I could tell you now, here, in this moment, that was the end of things.

But unfortunately it was not. Not even remotely.

Each morning I would be awoken to the screaming of that man again, the doctor entering our room, the shears coming out. Sometimes though, that was it, no cutting was performed, and the rest of the day would carry on without events. At one point a nurse would follow in after the group with food for me, typically a liquid based diet, as that was all my swollen and damaged jaw could muster, but the food was food and I welcomed it, suddenly finding myself ravenous. 

Though many of the times the sustenance took the form of a pale beige, flavorless shake, rarely I would be treated to a bright red, almost flavorful one. They never told me what these shakes were, and I was still unable to form words to query as to what the food consisted of. I merely silently let them place the straw in my mouth, and once the cup was emptied, the nurse stood up and left with it. That was the closest to human contact I had for several weeks.

However. Some days were more intense. The doctor would measure and appreciate the man's horns, and then the shears would come out. Most times I could only hear it, that bone cracking noise, the soft ‘plink’ of it being caught in the metal tray. Other times they would forget to close the curtain and I would watch in horror and fascination as that ratlike man would precisely snip away at my roommates growing antlers.

I realised, slowly over time, that it wasn’t the workings of randomness. The doctor knew exactly what he was doing. As the weeks rolled by I could see my roommates horns had grown farther and larger, and thicker at the base too! It was a marvelous and yet striking sight to behold.
But an even more terrifyingly interesting event was occurring, for the horns out of the man’s head were not the only ones that made themselves known. Around the third week it was clear more bony protrusions were rising up, some out of the man’s wrists, one out of his thigh, and a final one his chin.

The doctor would examine these intensely each day, tutting and muttering with his tape measure, pondering. Sometimes he would pace back and forth. Other times he would grip the man’s chin and turn it left then right, examining these new protrusions from several angles. My co-patient would simply stare back in mute horror, awaiting his fate.

One day the doctor seemed to make a decision. Just like that, with one quick snip he removed the protrusion from the man’s cheek, all the way at the base. The man screamed in horror, letting out a sharp yelp and then openly weeping. The doctor simply muttered more to himself, taking further measurements while blood openly seeped out of the hollow wound left behind.

At this point I had become largely numbed to this process, and it had become a sort of game to me. Would more bones become snipped today? How many times would the doctor run his hand back through that greasy hair of his? Once? Twice? More?

I felt a bit bad about this. Should I not feel empathy and terror at these events? Long ago my blood had stopped going cold at the sight. It had been weeks since my heart skipped a beat at my roommate's cries of agony.

If anything, I feared I had begun to resent the man. His screams of pain and cries for help were never met, and I found myself longing for the peace and quiet of a silent room and a proper night's rest. How was I to finish recuperating and achieve my own path to wellness when I could not get a wink of sleep?!

Perhaps my wish was heard, for as the next week progressed, the man did indeed slowly mute himself. The curtain was now always drawn and I couldn’t see what had changed, but by the end of that week the snips of the shears had become more common, more frequent, and yet not once did the man utter a noise in response, aside from perhaps the rare contained moan.

Perhaps, I thought to myself, these fools had finally gotten their act together and administered the poor thing some painkillers. I couldn’t fathom why it hadn’t happened sooner, but I was certain they had good reasons. At this point I no longer had need for the small rare doses of morphine the nurses had been giving me, and I largely had feeling restored in my right arm. I was able to feed myself on my own, and even was able to take on partially solid foods!

I focused on my restoration with gusto. Whatever foods and drinks they brought me I wolfed down with the eager delight of any young man on the verge of freedom. I began to pay little heed to my roommate's situation now, his morning rituals I would respond to by turning in my bed to stare up at the window high up on that wall and drift back to sleep.
However, on one particular morning I awoke to something different. I felt particularly refreshed now! I turned my gaze towards my co-patient and saw the curtain had been pulled back to reveal the backs of several nurses leaving the room with his bed. They were wheeling him out of the room!

My eyes settled on his body as it turned the corner, and through the nurses clustered bodies I caught a glimpse of the man now. In that moment I felt everything in my body freeze with terror. What was once a man was now merely a cluster of ivory white. The antlers that had protruded from atop his head were now the most prominent feature, several feet long and twisting back and forth in elegant curls and arcs, splitting and twisting about. Dozens more of such features rose from his body, each featuring delicate and wistful turns and twists. His hands were held up, locked into place by the horns interlocking with one another.

For a moment I locked eyes with him, right before the corner came and they left the room. I saw his eyes move to look at me. Despite being encased in a prison of his own body’s design, the man was still completely alive and unable to move. I bolted upright in my bed and scrambled forward, only for the door to slam shut behind the last nurse. Before I had any chance to act however, my own nurse came back into the room with a heaping plate of food.

I slumped back into my bed quickly so as to avoid suspicion. I quietly ate the offered food, pondering about what I had just seen, running those events over in my mind back and forth. The doctor had mentioned something about a garden weeks ago, that I was sure of. What sort of disease did this man have, and was his state due to a failure on the doctors behalf…?

Or… Perhaps it had been caused by the greased man’s intentful actions? I recalled his smug playful grin, the way he looked at that man like a toy to be manipulated. It made my blood curdle in my veins.

I resolved then, there was only one thing I could do. Night time couldn’t come sooner that day. I sat in my bed and counted every minute that slipped by, patiently awaiting the moment I needed. 

Eventually I nodded off for a few hours, but the adrenaline carried over and I awoke in the middle of the night. The pale moonlight filtered into my room and I knew it was now or never. Getting up out of my bed, I gently placed my feet on the tiles. They were ice cold and a shock on the senses, and I had to hold in a gasp of air.

I collapsed then, I had not used my legs in who knows how long and they were not as up to the task of walking as I had hoped. I half crawled, half drug myself out the door. Out in the hallway I carefully took stock of my surroundings. It was indeed a hospital I resided in, and the soft moonlight gave just enough vision for me to make my way down the hallways as I supported myself on the beam along the inner wall.

It did not take long for me to find my destination. I came across what was clearly a large atrium at the centre of the hospital, and two massive glass doors at its back opened up out into what I presumed to be the garden. I carefully stole myself to the doors and gently slid them open. My legs had begun to work again, so I managed to hobble myself out into the garden and along the cobblestone path towards its center.

The moon had become obscured behind clouds and bathed the garden in thick darkness. I took my time, walking past the trees that lined the path of either side. It appeared there was some form of statue at the center of the garden, for I could see its silhouette looming ahead.

Half stumbling, half hobbling, I approached my goal. Stopped a few feet short of it I found a small concrete slab that felt like some form of bench. Taking a moment to catch my breath I sat upon it. The rock was cold and hard, but better than nothing and gave me a moment to take in my surroundings as best I could.

It was then in that moment a single pillar of light from the moon broke through the clouds above, and I felt my breath catch as it highlighted that statue before me. I knew this figure, I had seen him too many times to be mistaken for any other.

It was none other than my co-patient himself, stood up on a stone podium’s dias, raised several feet off the ground. As my eyes adjusted I could see his face, eyes closed and asleep, the twisting and curving network of bones from his body encircling his frame, keeping him propped up and held in place. The maze of horn and antler from his skin terminated at the base of the stone at his feet, where I could see several large iron stakes had been tamped down through them and into the stone. Thick red stains made it clear that it had been a messy and painful process.

Slowly standing up to stare at the figure, I simply stood motionless, gently swaying in the night's frozen breeze. The moon slipped out from the clouds then, fully illuminating the garden around me. This was when I realised that my companion was not the only living statue in that crossroad.

The stone slab I had been sitting upon was yet another dias, for yet another figure, this one an old man. The blood stains at his feet were more copious, and as I reached a hand down to feel I realised with muted horror I had sat down in the coppering stains of old dried blood, and a fair bit of it had lifted up onto myself.

I let out a yelp and stumbled back, turning and looking around. I counted easily eight, no, perhaps even nine more of these human statues, each one with twisted and turning frames of antlers coming from their bodies and terminating into various stone pillars. Some were posed up into inane shapes, hands and feet lifted up gracefully in the air as if mid leap. One was simply standing stock still at attention, a child who looked to be no more than a dozen years old.

I felt something rise in me. I doubled over and retched, feeling my days' food spill forth and splatter across the stone path at my feet. My brain no longer could contend with these offenses and I found myself collapsing onto the ground as my legs finally gave in, fully exhausted.

My eyes opened. It was morning and I was lying in my bed again. I swallowed for a moment, then turned my gaze to the area beside me. My companion's bed was still gone, and I was still in the hospital room. Relaxing back into my pillow at my neck, I pondered the memory of him on the dias, one hand held up as if reaching out to cup, the antlers spiraling out of his wrist and back behind him.

Perhaps I had conjured it up, and had simply slept through the night. Now in that moment I felt almost silly. The obscenity of that vision now challenged all notions of logic in my mind. I discarded the memories as the ravings of a poor night's sleep.

The door opened and my nurse came into the room with my daily meal. However as I ate, he gave pause and put a hand up to my forehead, then a sly grin slowly slipped over his face. He hopped up and rapidly stole out of the room. Confused and bemused, I continued eating my food.

Soon enough footsteps approached and the door was opened. The doctor had returned. He slowly approached my bed, then put his own hand up to my forehead. It was then that I felt it, and I went stock still. The fork in my hand was dropped and clattered to the plate in my lap.

It was small, barely noticeable, but against the doctor's clammy hand there was no mistaking the sensation of a small bump, a small nodule of bone that protruded ever so slightly out of the center of my forehead.

I slowly turned my gaze to lock it with his, peering deep into his ice blue eyes which sparkled with delight.

I felt my heart skip a beat and my skin break out in a sweat as I heard him whisper those oh so familiar words, his voice haunting and filled with childish joy.

“You will look lovely in my garden.”
