The Toe Tag Quintet

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‘I loved that shirt, Reginald.’

I was gazing out of the window, beyond the tangle of clear tubes, at the flowerless jacaranda tree outside.

‘And which shirt might that have been?’ asked Reginald, not very enthusiastically — not in an interested way, but as if to say if it pacified me to send out some noise with his exhalation, he’d send out some noise.

Reginald was my nurse, and there was an aura about Reginald that said his job of dressing bullet wounds and other sundry abrasions that came into his care was a temporary step to grander things. It was so complete about Reginald, this aura, that I sensed his entire life was a stepping stone to some nirvana. If Reginald’s flat life had a scent, it would be the human breath contained in a week-old balloon. Somebody else’s breath, at that.

‘The Hawaiian,’ I said, to the tree.

I shouldn’t be here. In a hospital bed. With a bullet in my thigh. And a hole punched clean through my side. It had taken the surgeons hours just to pick out the fibres of my new retirement shirt from the wound. All those threads that used to be pretty coconut trees and hibiscus and a little grass hut. I loved that shirt.

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