“Mr. Gibson, can you hear me?”
Josh Gibson heard the young nurse speaking at him, recognized nervousness in her voice and wondered if he looked that bad, or if she were merely star struck to be taking care of the “black Babe Ruth”?
“God it’s dark inside my head. I sho wish I could open my eyes,” he thought, feeling his lips move but knowing he wasn’t making no sound. Last he remembered it was 1943 and he was on his way to being the best baseball player in history…in any league. “I’ve done performed some exceptional deeds in these years of mine,” Gibson decided before fading into this continued state of dream inside a dream.
He faintly recalled sitting in some group session in the mental institution listening to the counselor tell them about St. Dymphna, the patron saint of their mental conditions and him snidely shaking his head. “You can pray to her if you like, she has been known to bring miracles of the mind,” the prim older lady told them. Somehow he couldn’t find it in his heart to pray to some vaulted Irish girl, what could some little, ghost of a white girl do for him now.
He felt the seizing of his brain; the lights fractured and sounds slowly fell under the current until there was nothing. He wasn’t sure what happened really. No one told him anything. He didn’t even know what day it was.
“Mr. Gibson, you alright in there?”
Aleathia Drehmer 2010
Published by Doorknobs & Bodypaint, Doorknobs section, Issue 60
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