Free The Mentor by Pat Connid Page B

she’s
wanting to change the subject, she knows right where to hit.    
    “Funerals
are for the living, so the folks left behind can feel better,” I say then stop,
waiting until she looks at me.  “I don’t want to feel better.”
    The nurse
smiles at me, parts her arms in a theatrical way as if to emote the word surprise and in a sing-song voice says, “Hospital.”  She then adds, dialing the phone:
“The whole ‘feel better’ thing is what keeps the lights on.”
     
    AS I AWOKE,
MY shoulders were killing me, but I realized this only ranked second in the
sensory overload department.  
    The smell.
 Damn, the smell .  That’s what made me wake up, I was sure of
it. 
    I started
gagging, a clot of phlegm had been brewing in my throat, and my eyes began to
water. 
    Spitting it
out, the mucus was gray-black.  
    My eyes
hadn't focused yet.  I was still very, very groggy.  Tired.
    I could hear,
and this was odd, what sounded like… waves.  Or the ocean.  Actually, it
sounded like one long wave. 
    No
breakers, just a roar of one long wave, like maybe the seconds before a tsunami
hits.
    Incredibly,
it just went on and on and on…
    Trying to
shake the thick film from my mind, I sucked in another breath of rotten-egg air
and opened my eyes wider, which stung a little in the hazy sun and… something
in the air.
    That’s when
I snapped fully awake.  I realized what was in the air.
    Me.
    My arms
raised, bloodless hands Velcroed into steering toggles, I was falling from the
sky in a frigging parachute .  The sound was not a tsunami but instead
the Earth’s atmosphere-- the wind-- screaming past my skull.  
    And
speaking of screaming, a moment later, I was doing that, too.
    Blinking,
blinking, and trying to focus on the ground below, but there was still such a thick,
heavy fog in my head.  
    I looked up
to the straps and instinctively tried to pull my hands free.
    This drew
both straps down. 
    My descent
suddenly slowed, and I arched up then nearly fell backward, and—in one of the
longest moments of my entire life—I just hung in the air and watched in horror
as the parachute above me began to wither and collapse, as if deflating at its
edges.
    Quickly,
hands back up.
    For a few
seconds, I felt like the Coyote in those old cartoons-- impossibly suspended in
the air, moments before crashing to the ground in a fat ring of dust. 
    If I'd had
a sign that read Help! , yes, I would have held it up.
    Slowly, the
roar picked back up.  Louder, then louder still. 
    My brain
seemed unclear what to do with the images of my parachute failing above
me, so the moment just played back in a loop for a few seconds.
    But, as my
head began to clear, I realized that I might have only imagined the parachute
crinkling at its edges. 
    Imagined ?  
    No.
 It’d been more colorful, like a hallucination.  
    So-- drugged.
 
    Again, I
was coming out of some sort of drugged state.
    Falling
quickly now, I could feel my heart start beating again, as if some translucent
EMT on butterfly wings had given me a blast with its defibrillator.  
    A tug left,
a tug right and my parachute changed direction each time: left, then right. 
    I thought: My
parachute ? 
    How did
I even..?
    Ah, sure.
 The midnight ninja again.
    This time,
I had no idea what he wanted me to do.  Not that I’d really known last
time.  But, at least, in a van trapped underwater it's clear what's at the
top of your To Do list.
    Trying to
remember what he’d said just before the golf club hit me—and for a fleeting
instant, I wondered why my cheek didn’t hurt more—I was having a hard time with
my recall.
    Sure, I’ve
got near perfect audio retention, but whatever he'd given me had been powerful
stuff and was hard to shake. 
    Once again,
I didn't know where I was.
    Once again,
I'd lost complete control.
    But I think
the thing that scared me the most, the thing that was really messing with my
mind, was looking down past my feet and seeing all that