Free Almost Home by Damien Echols

bringing my grandmother out on a stretcher.
    It seemed surreal because it was late enough that the sun was down, but it wasn’t completely dark yet. The sky was a beautiful mix of dark blue and purple that made my heart ache. There was a special, magickal feel in the air that I’ve only felt a few times in my life. It touches something in you and it’s so damn beautiful that you think you’ll die because it’s too much to take. A time like that isn’t part of any season. It’s not spring, summer, winter, or fall. It’s a day that stands alone, like a world unto itself.
    I’ve only experienced it five or six times in my entire life, but I pray to be blessed with more. It’s like a drug. If everyday were like that, no one would grow old or die and war would not exist. There are no words that can convey the magick in those evenings. They’re dark in essence, but look over you benevolently.
    There was something about the way the red ambulance lights flashed through the entire world without making a sound that hurt my mind. No loud siren, just that red light flashing. I knew my grandmother would be okay. Everyone is okay on an evening like that.
    My mother jumped from the truck and explained who she was. They let her into the ambulance to ride with my grandmother, who was barely conscious. We Damien Echols
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    followed behind. At the hospital she was quickly rushed to surgery, where her heart doctor was already waiting.
    We sat in the waiting room flipping through magazines without seeing what was on the pages, pacing the halls, and staring blankly at the television screen that perched high in the corner. When the doctor finally came out, after what seemed an eternity, he pulled my mother to the side and explained that he did what he could, but that my grandmother wasn’t expected to live through the night. We slept in the waiting room, expecting to hear the worst every time a doctor passed through. The news didn’t come that night, or the next day either.
    That afternoon the doctor came to talk to my mother again. He said my grandmother was still alive, though in critical condition. The new problem was that she had developed blood clots in her leg, and it was going to have to be amputated. He had doubts about her making it through the surgery, but she would surely die without it.
    We all lived in that hospital waiting room for nearly two weeks. I didn’t mind, it was more comfortable than anything at home. The air was nice and cool, everything was spotlessly clean, and there was even cable television. Jack brought sandwiches from home to eat, or when he scraped up enough money, there were hamburgers from a fast food place. We only ate in the cafeteria once, because the food was so expensive, but I found it to be quite tasty. Every so often I snuck down to grab a few handfuls of crackers or breadsticks from the salad bar when no one was watching. I loved hospital food. I thought it was delicious.
    When I was allowed to go in and see my grandmother she was so high on morphine that she didn’t know what was going on around her. She weakly raised one hand to point at a mirror on the wall and asked me to change the channel.
    She called me a “little shit” and told a story about how we would become vampire hunters, because you could get a huge reward for bringing in a vampire egg. She only started coming back to reality once the doctor gradually decreased the morphine dosage. She was going to survive after all, though now she only had one leg.
    A sixty-five-year-old amputee with two heart attacks under her belt, she was in no condition to take care of herself. She couldn’t be expected to move into our filthy and squalor-ridden palace, so we had to move into her trailer in Lakeshore.

    I couldn’t pack my few belongings quickly enough, knowing that this was my last time in the shack. It seemed too good to be true; I was escaping hell. I’d never have to see this place again. I didn’t waste time taking a last look