Look Behind You

by Sibel Hodge

nausea crashing through me. Engulfing darkness. I can’t tell where the blackness ends and I begin. Why is it so, so dark? I try again. Close my eyelids. Open. Close. Open. Nothingness still smothers me. I can’t see a thing. Where am I? Am I dead? Slowly, my senses

through my nostrils. And something else now. Drip. Drip. Drip. I can feel and hear, so I can’t be dead. But what’s happened to me? Have I been in an accident? That’s it. An accident. I’m in hospital. I’m lying on an operating table, and the anaesthetic

a shallow breath. It doesn’t smell like a hospital. There’s none of the usual disinfectant and antiseptic odour. And what am I lying on? A trolley? A bed? I move my right hand away from my stomach to touch what’s underneath me, and my left hand moves, too. How can that

I pull my hands apart. No, they won’t budge. Why am I restrained? What have I done? A fragment of memory hovers on the edge of my consciousness. Something about . . . being held down in a bed. Tied to a bed. Screaming. No . . . it’s gone. So, again, think.