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Learning to Fall: cast away.
Momma sat with me in the emergency room. Dad would've like to come, she told me, but he is out on the road at a convention of children's entertainers in Alabama. She talked real precise like I was hard of hearing as well as gimped out in the arm. Momma looked so sad it made me want to be all smiley-like so she would cheer up.
"N.B.," she said with her hand on my neck, petting me like I was her dog, "everything's going to be just fine."
I smiled at her even though I knew it wasn't true. There was a big lump near my elbow and another one further up my arm near my wrist, and both of them were red at first, but now they were turning blue and kinda' purple. We were waiting for the bone doctor to come and set my arm.
"What's it mean to set an arm?" I asked Momma.
"Oh, N.B." She didn't say more than that and that's when I figured it was gonna' hurt.
Momma called a nurse over to hold my hand up and to keep petting me in on the neck the way she knows I like it while Momma went to have a cigarette. The nurse sat where Momma was sitting and held my hand and rubbed my neck like she was wringing a chicken neck. Her hands felt like a man's hands and she smelled like feet.
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