Hazel remembered the dream from her blackout as being a little like that commercial, except instead of passing by junk food, she’d found herself passing by supersize images of Byron’s face. Then the ride had turned into a terrible funhouse, and Byron’s head had swelled even larger and his mouth opened wide as she’d tumbled down his throat.
Then she’d smelled spaghetti. Byron had a tincture of this artificial odor on his desk, for sniffing when he ate his meals, which were flavorless nutritional shakes (the shakes were weird enough, but Hazel also couldn’t understand how the only food smell he used was spaghetti. “Don’t you want to smell something else, for variety?” she used to ask him. “A cinnamon roll? A bucket of chicken?” He’d blink once, twice, then shake his head no.). Aside from these shakes he really didn’t eat, preferring to get weekly transdermal supplements via pneumatic injection guns. Eating grossed him out; he felt it was antiquated and menial. He’d wanted to get a port implanted in his abdomen where he could deliver daily sustenance to his stomach via a gel or blended material, some texture just bulky enough that his digestive organs wouldn’t atrophy, but he’d decided against it since eating is such a metaphorical act across all cultures. Byron worried that it might affect his business dealings if others, particularly foreign partners from European countries that didn’t romanticize efficiency, found out he did not participate in calorie swallowing and traditional digestion.
Maybe she’d had an allergic reaction to some chemical compound in the rubber of Diane’s throat?
Her arm hurt badly and her brain was acting strange. Hazel pried open the cupboard beneath the bathroom sink with her foot, hoping to have the good fortune of finding a decades-old bottle of aspirin. Her father had never been big on pills. Whenever she felt ill growing up, no matter what the symptoms, his solution was always to go lie down in bed with a wet washcloth over one’s eyes. It won’t make you any worse, he’d say.
Instead she found the full inventory of a small pharmacy. The stockpile seemed to have been assembled based on an opiate addict’s Make-A-Wish fever dream. Hazel curled her foot into a shovel shape and started moving the prescription containers out of the cupboard and onto the watery floor, where they spun and bobbed and eventually floated over to her. “Look!” she said aloud to Diane. “A message in a bottle!”
The first one that landed in Hazel’s hand was Percocet. She took a mouthful, scooped up some water from the floor to wash them down with, then sat back against the outside of the bathtub and panted. “I’d share,” she eye-roll-joked to Diane, “but your mouth is already full.”
When Hazel woke up again, it was to her father’s terry-cloth slipper standing next to her face. His slipper was absorbing a lot of water. Hazel was grateful for the rubberized four-prong antiskid bottom of her father’s cane.
“Let me guess,” he said, his voice thundering down and echoing within the bathroom. From her angle on the ground, with his gray beard and wrathful eyes and bathrobe and cane, her father looked like an angry Moses holding an orthopedic staff. The sea had parted and she’d somehow survived the flood, but now he was going to scold her to death.
“You found my stash of drugs, got loopy and wanted someone to talk to, went to find a sympathetic ear in Diane then got the spins and puked on her. So you tried to bring her in here and wash her off but you were so high things got out of hand. Am I in the ballpark? Why your arm is stuck between her lips I do not know. That’s where you’ve stumped the detective. My working theory is that whatever you took began to kick in after the water started running, and maybe you thought Diane’s open mouth was a flotation ring you needed to shove your wrist inside. But I’m open to correction. Enlighten me, please, Hazel. Give me something to focus on besides my obvious failures as a parent.”
“My arm’s dislocated,” Hazel yelled. She wasn’t saying this to her father, specifically; she didn’t expect him to care or help, but felt it possible to get the attention of a neighbor who’d hear her cries and phone for a medic. Given the frequency of ambulances visiting the Shady Place retirement mobile home community, it didn’t seem too far-fetched that one might coincidentally be on its way. Or if a Byron-cam was in the house, she was covered. For once she missed the meddling assistance of her engagement ring. “My arm!” Hazel repeated.
“How strange that my upstanding daughter should have an issue with her angel wing. Yes, I noticed that, believe it or not. Age has dulled my perception, but an arm extended out an extra foot or so will still raise my eyebrows. Tony’s on his way. Leon’s kid, a chiropractor. Leon owes me a solid. I filled a badger that moved in beneath his ornamental lawn windmill full of buckshot. However, also at my request, Tony won’t be here for a few hours, for two reasons. The first is that I want you to feel more pain. The second is that I’d like you to clean the throw-up off yourself and remove your hand from my pretend old lady’s throat before we have guests. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“It’s stuck.”
“Not for long.” He reached into his bathrobe pocket and took out a spray can of WD-40, then used the bottom of his cane to move the globby wig up and back from Diane’s face. “Good night for now, sweet girl,” he said to Diane. Then he popped her faceplate off, slid it forward on Hazel’s arm like an oversize bangle, and went to work trying to free Hazel’s arm. Diane’s internal back-of-mouth sleeve had the product name, size, and copyright info tattooed on its bottom in stretched lettering: THROATGINA? extra small. Had her father opted for the Throatgina medium or even a regular small, Hazel thought, perhaps they wouldn’t be in this predicament, but she kept her viewpoint of shared blame quiet.
Luckily the Throatgina’s end pouch zipped open. Her father squirted a liberal amount of industrial lubricant inside and attempted to pull downward, but that just yanked Hazel’s arm.
“It’s not budging,” he said. When he slid the bottom up like a sleeve to reveal Hazel’s fingers, he coughed—Hazel looked down to see they had grown purple with asphyxiation. “Hell,” he said. “We’ll have to cut it off. Her throat, not your hand. You’re fully reimbursing my replacement purchase.”