by Silas Grey 

She's trying to kill me, Elaine is.

No. Let's get it straight; I owe myself that much. The rest of 'em can squat and swear it ain't their crap stinks, but sometimes there's hours pass and I can't help but know mine does.

She wants to kill me, but can't figure out a way to do it — leastways, not without spending half a lifetime behind bars, which sort of defeats the object.

I know there's another bloke. No idea if it's serious mind, or even if it's the same one she's had all along. Does she cheat on him too? Is infidelity something you can't change, like a lop-sided smile you can never straighten no matter how much you pull faces at yourself in the mirror? Or does it only apply to husbands … whoa, let's keep it clean, fella … spouses?

Facing the door, I am, and I give myself 2-1 she won't look. I lose. Door's almost closed behind her and she glances back through the gap. But hell, a bloke's gotta win sometimes, else where's the point, so I do a couple of action replays, and figure maybe it was more a general look into the room rather than at me. But I'm not sure and I don't wanna cheat, so I declare the bet null and void and get my stake back. I reckon I'm only a couple of thou down in the best part of five years, which ain't so bad seeing as how it's pot luck as to whether I'm facing the door, so there's no real way of calculating the odds.

Molly moves into view, a hand down the top of her uniform scratching her left breast. She's a long way past fifty, is Molly, what you might call waiting on retirement, and if there's an easy way she'll find it. Like if there's no one else around the twice-daily massage and muscle therapy tend to get skimped, or on occasion completely forgotten if she's wrapped up in her knitting. Doesn't bother me. We're all a long way past hopes of recovery being anything more than going through the motions.

She's really getting it on with scratching that left dug. Something pretty close to ecstasy in those rheumy gray eyes. Probably at least a century since someone else had a hand down her blouse. A last vicious dig and she tucks everything back into place. She looks at me … well, not at me, not seeing me. No more than a check, a head-count like, to make sure the Red Sea hasn't parted and I haven't gone missing, wandered off looking for the land of milk and honey. A glance at her watch, and she moves around the room, in and out of view, back and forwards, collecting the paraphernalia of knitting, crossword books and romance magazines she's scattered at random during her shift.

A shift change. One of the highlights of my life — though not necessarily something to look forward to. Was a time I knew who followed who, but since Doreen started some course or other to gain more qualifications, the rota's all to cock. But I always hope it won't be Doreen. Super-efficient, she is, but it's all on the surface, no more than skin-deep. Like a cut'n'shut motor … immaculate paint job, a real bargain; but nudge anything bigger than a pushbike and the whole thing comes apart at the seams. Aye, a cut'n'shut job, that's Doreen. Something goes wrong, like a tube comes adrift and the bed and me need changing, and she cusses worse'n a Cathays Park hooker in the rain of a Tuesday night, all the while giving me a bit of a slapping. Both hands, taking it in turns on right and left cheeks. Gets me sort of riled, that does. Not that it hurts — well, it couldn't, don't feel a thing — but at the end of the day it's my money paying her wages. Reckon she could show me a bit more respect.

Wonder if any of them know — realize — what Elaine's planning? Hoping … trying to plan. If she ever gets around to figuring out a way, they'll all be out of a job. Still, daresay there's no shortage of living corpses, all queuing up waiting patiently to be tended. Yeah … but not that many with my brass!

I don't blame Elaine for wanting rid, mind. She's got a right to have her life back. No way in sickness and in health should mean this. And I reckon deep down she still cares — well … as much you can care for a six foot … what? What the fuck am I? The medics reckon vegetable just about does it. But hell, the one thing a vegetable don't do is vegetate! It's either growing, getting eaten, or rotting back into the soil it came from. Me? I'm just a shit-machine … food in-shit out. Or howzabout organic matter transformer? No. Molecule manipulator … Miles'd like that one, I reckon. And let's just say, deep down Elaine still cares for the memories.

It is Miles. Miles with his soft smile and white high-neck, double-fronted nurse's jacket that reminds me of the Kildare era. I breathe a sigh of relief … metaphorically, because a sigh isn't in my repertoire. No Doreen. Miles. My friend, Miles.

Once Molly's gone, he wastes no time. Leans me gently forward, holding me in the crook of his arm while he plumps up the battery of pillows. Then he carefully lays me back and angles my head so I'm facing the window. Does he know what it means to me? Can he? How can he …?

The questions drift off to join the millions of other imponderables that have fleetingly prevented my life becoming a wasteland of nothingness. High up on the opposite side of the valley, in a clearing on the edge of the pine woods, I see the broad swathe of colour marching triumphantly across the green backdrop. Bluebells. My bluebells. I've watched them from the very beginning, when they were tiny random flecks shaken from the artist's brush, slowly seeping into blotting-paper grass. Daily they swelled, isolated patches merging, polarizing in sudden rushes, swallowing up the green in great gulps, until one morning a huge kidney-shaped carpet of color is spread across the hillside.

Five times I have lain here and watched the carpet of bluebells unroll. Four times I have seen the color slowly leach back into the ground. Is it my imagination, or is there already the first trace of dilution, a hint of smoke-gray toning the brilliance?

I can't track my eyes, but at this distance my vision takes in the two horses in the field alongside the bluebells. A chestnut and a gray. I can't make out the details, just two blobs of color slowly munching their way across the field. I know them both well. Use to regularly say howdy and pass the time of day with them, pausing to regain my breath after a scramble up the hill, and with a snicker they would nuzzle my hand in greedy anticipation of the Polos I had ready. Do they miss me? Do they ever wonder why there are no more mints from that sweating, red-faced walker?

Miles is talking. Miles is always talking. That's the difference between Miles and the others … he cares. They all talk around me … above me … about me. Miles talks to me. For them, I'm there, but of no consequence. The family pet asleep on the hearthrug … only I don't have the capacity to occasionally amuse or attract attention by thumping my tail on the carpet. If she has to talk about my condition, Elaine describes me as recovering from a coma, the same as she used to when the words were a gateway to hope, only now she uses them because to do otherwise would be tantamount to disloyalty. Molly makes no bones about it, and is clinically detached with PVS. Doreen is equally blunt, but delivers brain dead with something akin to religious fervor. Only Miles - who is not unsympathetic to a New Age approach to medicine - genuinely refuses to accept the absolute negativity of persistent vegetative state.

Right from the very beginning, when Elaine took the decision to have me nursed at home, Miles talked about what was happening. He told me everything. I know the other names, of apallic syndrome and wachkoma; of the dissension within the medical community of definition, diagnosis and treatment. Could I but talk, I am capable of delivering a lecture to medical students on the history of treatment — cortex stimulation using stereotaxically implanted electrodes in the centrum medianum-parafascicularis complex; the drugs from the cholinergic agonists and catecholaminergic agonists categories; the combined carbidopa/levodopa therapies; the structured sensory stimulation — and the sporadic successes, though inconclusive results, of all such treatment.

But Miles talks of much else too. There is, I suspect, little I don't know about him. Looks like butter wouldn't melt, but he can handle himself. Can't be easy for any normal kid growing up in the hell of the battlefield of Moss Side, let alone one landed with a handle like Miles and an ambition to be a nurse. Done alright though, he has. Got himself a little semi down in the village … and four year old Rosie. Never set eyes on her, but I've known Rosie all her life. The birth, the first tooth, the crawling — reverse gear only, never did find forward — the first words, the first steps, the first day at nursery. So many firsts, and he shares them all with me. Doesn't mention Beth much nowadays. Has motherhood tarnished the Venus he used to worship? Have the dirty nappies and the drudge of housework trampled all over the romance? Or is it something more serious? He doesn't say. Wish he would — isn't that's what friends are for?

Now that's a new one, for sure. Only ever seen it as a one-way street. Miles is my friend — my only friend. But am I his? Does he tell me so much because he has no one else to tell? Nah! That would make him sad, pathetic … and that just ain't Miles. He's one of life's carers; a giver, a sharer. And with all his interests and hobbies, and the different clubs he belongs to, no way does he need a veggie to talk to. And anyhow, what's it matter? My life would be a big fat zero without him.

A passionate amateur cosmologist, is Miles, and I'm as knowledgeable on Black Hole computer binary modeling, hybrid fusion/fission reaction engines, and Saturn's translucent C ring as I am about PVS. His current enthusiasm is for Gravity Probe B, today five weeks into its mission to test Einstein's theory that space and time are distorted by the presence of massive objects. There have been problems with reducing flux and subsequent thruster instability, but apparently both mission and orbit are back on track, and soon GP-B will use the four ultra-precise gyroscopes to micro-measure how space and time are warped by the presence of the Earth, and how the Earth's rotation drags space-time around with it.

They can do all that, yet they are incapable of measuring activity within my brain. They insist I am in a wakeful unconscious state. Yet I can hear, I can smell, I can see, I can reason, I can comprehend. What I can't do is communicate, let them know I can do all these things.

Is the failing — theirs — one of preconception? They see no signs of awareness — the eye tracking, granted; though how can they miss my fixation of vision? — therefore there is no awareness? Or perception, perhaps? From here, the gray horse is white … no two ways about it. White. And the bluebells are not blue — more … what? … not purple … but some shade of lilac, perhaps. Do they stand too far away from me … or too close?

Miles is deep into the news roundup for me. He cherry-picks, omits the moronic, the celebrity crap and most of the politics. Doesn't read it, does it all from memory. He does this for me every shift, thinking — knowing — that I can't hear, can't understand. Just on the off-chance. For me. God, I love this guy.

He has a natural gift for comedy, and nothing is sacred. It's better if he sits right in front of me, so I can see his face. But even now, as I watch the bluebells and the horses way up on the hill, I crease up as he ad-libs, improvises and embellishes the telling of an accidental discharge between heats by a member of the Charleston team at the World SWAT Challenge, with range wardens diving for cover and spectators yelling for body armor. He doesn't know I'm falling about with laughter, because nothing moves, nothing shows. It all happens inside.

Aaah. My nose tells me something has moved. It's all that baby food brown mush they feed me. Stinks at the best of times, but this one's in a class all on its own, so ripe I give myself generous odds of 11-4 Miles doesn't notice it before he finishes the SWAT story. I win. Cock-a-hoop because so far I'm up on the day, but guilty because poor old Miles has got a right mess to clear up.

I grieve that I cannot tell Miles how much his friendship means to me. He deserves to know. I have tried. When he looks directly into my face I concentrate all my energies into my eyes, imagine a beam of light arcing between us. But it is useless. For all his caring, for all his understanding, he is beyond my reach. Oh my friend, if only …

Soon, the bluebells will fade and disappear. Once the process begins it will be relatively swift. I wish ….

The bluebells will return next year. I pray Elaine will have found a solution to our problem by then. I do not wish to be here to watch the carpet unroll.

Silas Grey, nearing the end of a checkered career, has only recently turned his lifelong love affair with words toward writing short stories. He finds inspiration on daily rambles in the hills, forests and moorlands of Wales in the UK. This is his first story to be accepted for publication.