Live and Let Live

Pain. Blood suckling through an open wound. An old familiar ache. He opened his eyes and as consciousness dripped back into him from an IV drip he heard the age old amalgamation of noises associated with a place of healing. Beeping of life support, soft farts of oxygen tanks, screaming against the heavens as death took it’s toll, joyous tears as someone ducks the scythe. Johnny didn’t move, he’d been shot before plenty of times, and he knew at this point one should just lay still and let the doctors heal you. Not that they would have much to go on this point, because from Johnny’s perspective he was essentially an old gun that no one made the replacement parts for anymore. The only thing keeping him alive now was gristle, stubbornness, and more gristle. The stink of antiseptic and myriad other cleaning fluids burned in his nostrils. His gaze cast about as a lighthouse, until it settled onto a calender. Upon seeing the date his eyes widened. It was in this way that the old man in the Crosslen Wing of the Mael Hosptital came out of his 2 week coma with the first words being “Shit!” This noise startled the young medical intern, causing the seven foot man in scrubs with prodigious muscles to scream like a mix between a small mouse and a teapot that was done. The flower pot he had been idly playing with shattered to the floor. “Oh god! Wow! You’re awake!” The intern began babbling, nothing had prepared him for a man who had been shot and in a coma to come out of it yelling. “Three weeks! It’s been three weeks! Dammit it’s nearly Christmas! My gas station!” Ol’ Johnny was not really yelling of course, he had just come out of a three week coma, so the normal deep baritone was instead a very peeved svelte trumpet. After this other doctors came in, asking inane question and saying inane things, blah blah blahing about bed rest and oh good you’ve made a recovery, and what happened and so forth. This situation continued to develop for the next week, as Johnny got his legs back under him and stocked up on a large number of painkillers. Though they wanted him to stay, he knew he couldn’t. Instead, a fire had been burning inside him. He silently raged at himself for getting injured, losing another few inches off his quite definitely shorter life. He gathered his belongings, the whole week swirled around him. Who had that woman been? Why? He was confused, but the moment he stumped back into his station, back into a constant, he let it slide. Times were too hard. He didn’t want to think about what had driven her to doing what she had done. He wasn’t disappointed either, as without him locking up it had been lightly broken into, only some food and drink were taken. This puzzled him, as he had thought that perhaps it would or should have been bare. Still, opening some extremely illegal absinthe and taking a swig made that go away. Thing’s were back to normal, gun check, key’s check, questioning self’s own mortality. Johnny himself. Still there. So he put up Christmas lights, raised the gas prices to Christmas levels, and put on the radio. The last thing he heard as he sank into sleep was the one of his favorite songs ever, “It’s the mooooost wonderful tiiiime of the year......”.