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Description
I was sitting in the kitchen in one of the green chairs inherited from my grandmother. Towel wrapped around my neck, my dad was cutting my hair into the same flip-top combover that he sported. The tiny kitchen was crowded with dead wives and relatives, laughing and joking. I awoke when Dad accidentally lopped off an earlobe, into the clinical white of the ICU. Sterile and white, yes, but with drops of crimson falling at my shoulder. My head felt like a herd of elephants had trampled through it, my back as though surgery had been performed with a dull kitchen knife. Behind one eye I saw that the hair-cutting party had turned out badly, leaving bloodied corpses beneath the single swinging yellow bulb. I buzzed for the nurse, who turned up my morphine drip. The lights dimmed. When they came back up, they were the lights of an old porch, with kids playing in the semi-darkness. So that’s where all my old friends went. Country music drifted out from inside the house; not the modern hybrid country, but the old high lonesome. Fiddles and banjos and whiny vocals. Vinyl. I could hear the scratchiness. Scratchiness that became a thin, army-green blanket in a backyard tent. A tent that was somehow large enough to hold an OR full of surgeons and nurses, joking around with each other as I lay dying. At least there was no canned laughter as I made my way upwards into the bright circle of light. Swimming to the moon in my new flip-top haircut. Goodnight, Red Skelton, Tuesdays are yours forever.

Description
I was sitting in the kitchen in one of the green chairs inherited from my grandmother. Towel wrapped around my neck, my dad was cutting my hair into the same flip-top combover that he sported. The tiny kitchen was crowded with dead wives and relatives, laughing and joking. I awoke when Dad accidentally lopped off an earlobe, into the clinical white of the ICU. Sterile and white, yes, but with drops of crimson falling at my shoulder. My head felt like a herd of elephants had trampled through it, my back as though surgery had been performed with a dull kitchen knife. Behind one eye I saw that the hair-cutting party had turned out badly, leaving bloodied corpses beneath the single swinging yellow bulb. I buzzed for the nurse, who turned up my morphine drip. The lights dimmed. When they came back up, they were the lights of an old porch, with kids playing in the semi-darkness. So that’s where all my old friends went. Country music drifted out from inside the house; not the modern hybrid country, but the old high lonesome. Fiddles and banjos and whiny vocals. Vinyl. I could hear the scratchiness. Scratchiness that became a thin, army-green blanket in a backyard tent. A tent that was somehow large enough to hold an OR full of surgeons and nurses, joking around with each other as I lay dying. At least there was no canned laughter as I made my way upwards into the bright circle of light. Swimming to the moon in my new flip-top haircut. Goodnight, Red Skelton, Tuesdays are yours forever.