Free Me & Death by Richard Scrimger

ghost took this opportunity to thumb him hard in the eye.
    “Hellfire!”
    Morgan let go. Bill swabbed my throat with alcohol and cut deep with the X-Acto knife he’d taken from the sterile package. A thin stream of air reached my lungs. Morgan swore again. Bill was still working, feeding a length of narrow tubing into my throat. Another breath, easier this time. And another.
    Morgan floated near me, scowling deeply, tearing from one eye. My ghost had disappeared. I was going to live.
    I smiled and closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was in a hospital bed with a headache the size of Lake Erie.

ME DOING A LITTLE BETTER

CHAPTER 18
    I tried to speak. Couldn’t. My throat felt like sandpaper. I tried to say, Where am I? and it came out like,
Wahmmaaaam
. No one answered.
    The light in my eyes made my headache worse. I tried to say, Put out the light, and it came out like,
Pahlaaaaa
. No one did anything.
    I turned away. No I didn’t. Red hot spikes in the back of my head stopped me from moving.
    I fell asleep.
    Next time I woke up things started coming into focus. I was in a hospital bed, surrounded by bloops and gurgles and whooshing noises. A nurse stood by my bed. “Good morning, Jim,” she said loudly.
    Light in my eyes again. My nurse moved it around. I followed it with my eyes. “Very good,” she said.
    My hands were tied to my sides. I started to wonder why and then fell asleep.
    Next time I woke up, an old lady was sitting next to me, squeezing my tied hand.
    “Jim,” she said. “Oh, Jim.”
    “Ma,” I said. My lips felt like balloons. My throat burned.
    My tied left hand hurt when she squeezed it.
    “Ouch. Let go,” I said.
    “Oh, Jim,” she said again. She couldn’t understand me. It was her, all right. Smoke-gruff voice, face like a crumpled fender. Ma. I was happy to see her.
    “What happened?” I asked. “How’d I get here?”
    “Oh, Jim,” she said.
    I went back to sleep.
    A doctor shook me awake and asked me questions. Name, address, how many fingers. I told her.
    “Good,” she said.
    Her name was Dr. Driver. She untied me.
    My throat still hurt. I reached up, but the doc grabbed my arm in midair.
    “No, Jim,” she said. “Let your throat alone. You had a tube sticking out of there, but it’s gone. Now you have to let the wound heal.”
    She asked me to make a fist, touch my fingers together. I did them easy enough, except that there was a needle and a tube coming out of my right wrist and they got in the way.
    “Good,” she said again.
    There was another bag below the bed, with a tube attached to my dick. Pretty gross.
    The doc was real old, maybe like fifty. She had a white coat, glasses, and her gray hair in a ponytail. Her lips were a thin line. She took a microphone from her pocket and started asking me about the last thing I remembered before waking up in the hospital.
    “What about the accident?” she asked. “Do you remember that?”
    “I remember a car,” I said.
    “Go on.”
    “Big white car. A Lincoln.”
    “I don’t know about the car that hit you.”
    “Raf was with me. It was dark.”
    She frowned. I shut up. Just in time I remembered that we were inside the Lincoln, boosting it. I wasn’t going to talk into a microphone about that.
    “What do you remember after the Lincoln?”
    “I went home.” The doc nodded encouragement. “I was wearing a new shirt.”
    “New shirt. Good. Go on, Jim.”
    But I couldn’t. I tried, but my memory was a pocket with a hole in it. There was nothing there after the Lincoln.
    I caught myself trying to touch my throat. “Did I really have a tube sticking out here?” I asked. You know, that would look kind of cool, walking down the street with a tube out your throat. Hold a cigarette up to it, take a drag, let the smoke out.
    All right, maybe not too cool. But interesting.
    “You started to choke in the ambulance, and the paramedic stuck a tube in so you could breathe,” said Dr. Driver. “Do you remember that?”
    It