TURTLE SPEED

Mom was waiting in the emergency room when we got to the hospital. She stood between two doctors, speaking to them, her back turned to us. I saw a hospital card in her hand and knew—the way you know you had stepped on a nail barefooted—that she had gotten the card for me as if I was a baby that couldn't do it himself. 

'Mom,' Jasper called, and she turned.

She walked to us, and I could see her face crowded with worry. She stopped two steps away, her eyes searching my face. I don't know what she saw—maybe the anger and the frustrations—but she came no further. 

The doctors she was speaking with walked past her and came to me. One of them, a man in his late fifties or early sixties, held my and lifted it up. 

'Your mom told us what happened,' he said, peering at my hand. 'Come with me,' and he pulled my arm to follow him the way a teacher would pull a naughty student to the principal's office. 'Let me take a look,' he added. 

 The second doctor, obviously a junior to the first, followed us. We reached a table, and the smell of hospital's antiseptics was stronger here. I rubbed my nose with my left hand. 

'Why didn't you go to the hospital in Lagos?' the older doctor asked. 'Do you want to die?'

He shifted my hand from one angle to the other, his brown eyes peering at it closely. 'You cut the finger yourself?' he asked. But he did not wait for me to answer. 'That was brave but stupid; you could have bled to death.'

I stared at his bald head. 

'Did you have a look at it?' he asked, still peering at the hand.

'Yes,' I said. 'It was a viper.'

'How did you know? Did you kill it?'

'No; someone else did. He said it was a viper.' 

'Is he going to be all right?' mom asked from the back of the room. 'Please, help him.'

The doctor ignored her and went on searching for God knows what in the hand, and when he was done, the younger doctor inserted a needle in my hand and attached a drip set to it. He pulled a drug out of a vial and added it to the infusion. Two attendants came out of nowhere with a trolley. 

'Lie on it,' one of the attendants said and she removed the infusion set from the hung it was attached to and hook it to the long pole on the trolley. I lay down and they wheeled me to the men's ward. All the beds were occupied, and we reached the end of the ward and found an empty bed there. They turned the trolley to align with the bed; I came down from the trolley and lay on the bed while they transferred the infusion set to my bed. 

Jasper, mom and Mr. Kingsley stood beside my bed looking down at me.

I looked at Mr. Kingsley. 'Thank you, sir.' 

'You are welcome,' he said. 'Just get well as soon as possible.'

I turned my face to the wall and closed my eyes. 

'Do you want me to get something for you?' Jasper asked.

'No,' I said.

'Are you alright, Paul?' Mom asked. 

'Yes.'

I closed my eyes and the tears crawled from my face and fell on the hospital sheet. I lay this way for a long time, the noise in the ward hushed and distant, and eventually the fatigue of the previous days caught up with me and I drifted into a deep sleep. In my dream, three fast moving snakes chased after me and I ran with the speed of a turtle.