Free Prelude to a Scream by Jim Nisbet

upended in an umbrella stand behind a door. The pains he’d been experiencing when awake under the cypress tree were still with him but seemed manageable, buffered as they were by morphine, or perhaps Demerol, the effects of which he recognized. The pain existed at a distance; his nerves flashed him irregular word of it, like a sharp bit of light caught by a rooftop mirror a couple of blocks away.
    The door to the hallway opened and admitted a nurse in a crisp uniform. The little white hat atop the heap of her brunette hair looked to Stanley like a distant sail on a moonlit Indian Ocean. She had violet eyes, open and frank behind the Spanish combs of their lashes, and a pale, hothouse skin without visible blemish. The blue nameplate pinned to her breast reminded Stanley of a sign he had once seen above tree line on the pristine slope of an eastern approach to the Sierra Madre, nearly buried in a winter’s good snowpack, which read, “Road Closed, September 15 to May 15.” He couldn’t see them, but he just knew it: little, white, practical shoes. Why did that remind him of something?
    â€œHi,” he said joyfully.
    She had been about to hand a large envelope to the guy with the clipboard, and he had been about to take it from her. They paused over this exchange to look at him.
    â€œYou’re back,” she said, with a smile that looked like she cared. The movement of her eyes reduced the rest of the world to chador.
    â€œYes,” said Stanley, with reckless enthusiasm. “I’m back, and I’m glad. Before I leave again,” he extended his hand, “Stanley’s the name. I didn’t catch yours?” Next to the bed a wheeled stainless steel rack bearing plastic inverted sacks of translucent fluids clattered and followed his eager gesture.
    The man in white watched Stanley over the rims of his spectacles a moment, then removed the slim gold pen from the pocket of his frock and made it click.
    â€œGeneral feeling of well-being despite mitigating traumas indicates untoward affinity for morphine,” he darkly muttered, re-clicking the pen to make a note on his clipboard. He silently reread what he’d written as he stabbed the pen down the front of his coat, a blue line following its tip.
    Though his own glad-handing gestures surprised him as much as anyone else in the room, this remark about mitigating traumas puzzled Stanley. Where had he heard that before?
    The beauty next to the bed laughed and said, “Iris. This is your surgeon, Doctor Sims.” Her laugh reminded Stanley of the bells of a herd of sheep following their Basque shepherd home through a mesquite grove in August, high in the Ruby Mountains of eastern Nevada, just before twilight: precisely.
    She handed the large envelope to Doctor Sims and sat on the edge of the bed, gently taking Stanley’s hand into hers.
    â€œI feel better already. Can I go home now?”
    She laughed.
    â€œWhere am I? Why am I where am I?”
    â€œOh.” Her expression changed to one of concern. “You don’t know?”
    â€œNo. Should I?”
    A mere few thin layers of cotton cloth separated his hip from hers. She nestled his palm on her knee and covered it with one of her hands while she stroked the back of his wrist with the other. Thoroughly enchanted by her consternation, Stanley almost didn’t care what was wrong with him.
    Dr. Sims pulled a sheaf of X-rays out of the large envelope.
    â€œHow does it feel?” nurse Iris asked softly, stroking Stanley’s hand.
    â€œLike my first date,” Stanley said.
    Her blush looked like alpenglow on a west-facing slope.
    â€œI mean your lower back,” she said. “How does your lower back feel?”
    Stanley smiled and repeated stupidly, “My lower back? What about my lower back?”
    Iris glanced beseechingly over her shoulder toward her superior. But this individual’s back was turned. One by one, he studiously held