Half-measures
By Sai Pradhan
I wondered what was on the menu tonight.
I didn’t mean the sardines, crackers, and grapes that I had swallowed in some pretense of a picnic earlier that day. A fête champêtre, I had told myself, with my clothing catching the perfect rays of mellow sunshine streamed through a canopy of trees as I lay idly, begowned and beribboned like a lady of leisure in an Antoine Watteau painting. Anything to take my mind off my broken self, stuck at home in crumpled pajamas, dragging myself painfully around my box of an apartment like a mangled cat in search of scraps.
I meant in my sleep, which was slowly starting to resemble a circus of horror.
Zinging pain from my severed nerves was a given, said the orthopedic surgeon who sliced my foot open to nail my smashed ankle together after my accident. Was it? Couldn’t they try to avoid clipping my cables?
Healing was a distant shore, one I could not see through my nightly gasps of pain and tears, transmission certainly disrupted. I wanted to fall asleep more than anything in the world, to wake up and find my foot shrunk down to normal proportions from its distended post-surgical form, and to exist without pain; at the least, perhaps, to numb it out for a few hours at night so that I could face the next day.
I swallowed the medicine prescribed to me; let’s pretend it’s called Rhapsodie d’Angoisse to avoid potential lawsuits!
This Rhapsodie was playing tricks on my mind.
Every night, a new nightmare would unfold, forcing me into a dismal theater that I could not escape. I would have to watch it for hours with a deep sense of helplessness, before I woke up sweating and crying from pain. Complex, coruscating, replete with kitschy horror, there would be a Mezzetin-like figure in these hallucinatory dreams, though perhaps not as melancholy or passably charming as the pistachio and salmon striped one Antoine Watteau painted. A half-measure, the poor, incomplete caricature! The one my brain was conjuring up seemed intent on being a ghoul, a clown, a troll, a frightful mask.
I recovered eventually.
Rather, I think I did.
I now wear a pond green all the time like Venus in that Watteau painting. I appear at will between a soporific haze of trees, turned away like she does, spurning clowns who sing melodies; they do not entrance or lull, they screech like Baudelairean bats, I declare, my voice as silky as the lightest breeze through the verdure.
I walk out of performances when I cease to find them entertaining. I shall not be tricked, I think, obnoxious within my new statuesque self. Nobody shall see how I feel, because my nerves are damaged and I do not feel at all!
Now that I inhabit this misty, watery landscape, what need might I have for ankles at all? What need for sardines to feast on? I will be like a leaf, light and dangling, carefree even if I fall like I did on that trampoline (oh the absurdity!), even if I decay.
What I do still need is sunshine to show off my silken contours. I will float, in my dream, green and light and mystical, lush and thriving in the warm light. Why stop at half-measures like my absurdist dream-sequence troll in pastel trousers? I will be a full measure, an unbreakable, total peg.
There are no serious side effects to this prescription, I recall the hospital saying.
Sai Pradhan is an Indian American writer and artist who lives in Hong Kong. Her writing has been published in The Iowa Review, Anomalous Press, Ligeia, Litro (UK & US), Sleepingfish (Calamari Archives), South China Morning Post’s Style, Hong Kong Free Press, and NB. She has publications forthcoming in Prairie Schooner and Vagabond City Literary Journal. Her art has been featured in Sublunary Review, Pithead Chapel, Door=Jar, and Last Leaves and is forthcoming in Vagabond City. She exhibits with galleries from time to time. Find her on Twitter/X: @saisays, Instagram: sai_pradhan_art, and her website: www.saipradhanart.com