The Lovely Shadow Read Online Free PDF

right
arm curled beneath my body having taken a major portion of the
impact.
    The cry I had been uttering as I fell evolved
into a scream of acute pain when I landed. White light speckled
with big red blotches flashed in my eyes. My arm, fingers and hip
were all forgotten. All that existed was my already damaged right
ear, burning and throbbing from its impact with the edge of the
stair, it pulsed with infinite pain and I had a sneaking suspicion
that I might actually have sliced it in half.
    As I continued to scream, (a long single note
fairly reminiscent of my Mother’s banshee like screech) the thought
passed quickly through my head that I had finally done what my
Mother couldn’t, I’d completely destroyed my ear.
    ‘Well, this oughtta make the old Bitty
happy.’ I thought. ‘What she couldn’t knock off my head, I’ve
managed to sever on the friggin’ stair.’
    My lungs ran out of air fairly quickly and my
scream faded into the padded silence that the basement created.
    I lay there for a bit trying to catch my
breath, trying to think coherent thoughts, but unable to because
the all consuming pain that enveloped my body (especially my ear)
felt like the walls of an over tight womb, and it was crushing my
thoughts as well as my breath out of my body.
    I was completely wracked with pain. My throat
was filled with fragments of the imaginary crystal that my Mother’s
screech had shattered. The fingers of my right hand were bent
unnaturally and were smashed against my chest, throbbing with every
heart beat.
    My right shoulder and forearm felt like they
were smashed against a knife edge that radiated pain in ripples
like the circular ripples on the water when a pebble is dropped
into it. Each individual ripple hit my body like a baseball bat,
thumping against my arm and shoulder and making my whole body
shudder. My hip was likewise in a sea of pain. It felt like someone
had performed surgery on it but left the scalpel wedged in the
socket between the bones to grind and press against them.
    Above all this, however, was my ear. I was
certain that it had been sliced in two. The pain was indescribable.
It burned, it pulsed, it throbbed, it ached. There aren’t enough
words in the English language to adequately describe it.
    With every pulse of pain, stars danced before
my eyes. Flashes of red, tinged with white auras floated randomly
before me in the dark. I lay there for a second considering how
nice it would be to go visit Joe right about now and then I passed
out.
    I don’t think I was out very long. When I
woke up I was still lying in the same position. I lifted my head
off the stair slowly, wincing not only at the pain in my ear, but
now also in my neck. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to find
that my head was not stuck to the stair in some puddle of gory
fluid that had leaked out while I slept.
    I rolled stiffly over onto my back side and
sat up on the stair that had been crushing my hip. I reached across
my body with my left arm to examine my right ear, (my right arm was
hurting and I just wasn’t ready to explore that injury yet).
    I put my fingertips gently against my head
just above the ear and dragged them down very slowly until I felt
the top of my ear. It hurt like the dickens to touch it but I went
ahead and traced the outline of my ear anyway, swallowing the pain
as I went. When I had traced the whole outline of my ear and
decided that it was all there, not turned to hamburger, and not
even bleeding, I nearly wept with joy. I had been so certain that I
had lost the ear that I could barely believe that it was all
intact.
    After inspecting the ear, it was time to
check my right arm which I had thus far kept tucked against my
chest. I pulled it away from my chest fully expecting to find it
broken in several places. I visualized white fragments of bone
poking through the bleeding flesh while the arm hung limp, bending
at unnatural angles.
    Using the fingers of my left hand I felt
along my arm. It had a