Chapter 10: Floating
Martin had felt like he was floating just above the scene where he was watching Louisa and directing her to prepare the wound and tie off the artery. It was only the pain from the operation that kept him paying attention to what needed to be done. Once she finished the job and left to get help he found himself drifting higher and then higher. The pulse that had been pounding in his ears faded, he couldn't feel it at all now. There was a dull ache in his arm but it seemed so far away, so very far away, it didn't bother him any more.
It wasn't so much a flashing of his life before his eyes as a new way of seeing the familiar farm from an unfamiliar vantage, from a great height. The lumbering cows were gone, the field was home to grazing sheep. In the distance was the old chicken coop, with a familiar figure tending to it, but instead of being white haired and stooped with age she looked in her prime, and helping her was a man who was showing early signs of motor neurone disease, and with them was a young boy with white blond hair and pale blue-grey eyes. He strained to recall their names but nothing came to him. They didn't see him and he drifted with the breeze toward the village, over the slate roof of a familiar cottage on the hill, where there was some sort of commotion happening in the narrow road in front, someone was standing atop a van. He thought he could hear someone shouting his name but, uninterested, he moved on.
He drifted down the hill to where there was a celebration going on beside the harbour. A boy with white blond hair and pale blue-grey eyes was sitting on a hay bale and sulking as a grey haired older woman and a younger woman wearing bright colours tried to cheer him up with an ice cream. It was, he strained to recall, and it came to him, yes, it was James Henry. And there was little Mary Elizabeth in her buggy, taking in all the sights and sounds of the world with clear baby blue eyes. She stared up at the clouds and made eye contact with him, and smiled as he floated high overhead. Here he felt a momentary regret, but now the insistent breeze was pushing him slowly over the harbour and out over the glittering, pulsing sea that stretched to the far horizon and the endless beyond…
To be continued…
