Awoken from Her Afternoon Nap (A Short Story)

The knocking jolts the Thai nurse from her nap. She pushed aside the Thai comic book she had been reading on her couch before she drifted into her afternoon siesta. This was her day off, and all she wanted to do was relax at home. Who would come knocking at her door?

“Hello, I need your help!” The voice called from the other side. 

At first, she tried ignoring it, but the man on the other end wouldn’t go away. She was off the clock: this was her day to not help anyone. Eventually, though, she walked over to the door to figure out how to politely send him away. 

“Hello?” she answered. 

“Please help me!” 

“Help you with what?”

“My foot! My foot hurts,” the man cried. 

She looked through the peephole and saw it was her neighbor. She barely saw him, but he lived across the hallway in their apartment complex. 

“I need someone to check it out,” he implored. 

She is hesitant, but she decides the easiest way to send him away would be to look at it real quickly. 

“Ok,” she replied, opening the door. “Let me see.”

He limped her over to his apartment, where he reclined on his couch, his right foot sticking up towards her. 

“It’s the sole. The sole really hurts!” is all he could say. 

“Ok,” she conducted a brief examination. She started poking the soul along key pressure points to see whether anything was the matter and then moved up along the ankle.

“You should be fine,” she explained. “You just have some swelling along the ankle that is pinching your nerves and causing pain in your sole. You should be fine. Rest for today, but tomorrow, go see the doctor. There’s a small chance it might constrict your blood flow and cause a blood clot. Those can be life threatening.”

“Ok,” he stated, relieved. 

“You are going to be okay. I’m going to go back home, but if you have any more pain or soreness take some aspirin.” 

With that, she left. She didn’t want to say anything because she didn’t want to stay long, but something was off. His foot was cold, and she couldn’t feel a pulse. He also didn’t respond to the normal nerve pinches or tickling that would usually cause any foot to flinch. If that was not attached to her moving, screaming neighbor, she’d have assumed it was a dead foot. 

She walked back to her apartment. Had she done the right thing in not investigating the anomaly further? She couldn’t help but feel like she had seen a case like this before, but she couldn’t remember any details. As a matter of fact, all of this felt vaguely familiar. 

She entered her apartment. Her cat was staring at the screen door of her balcony, gazing outside. She walked over to her balcony too. It was a sunny afternoon, and its warm glow seemed to beckon her. She couldn’t help but see a part of herself in her cat, the part of her that longed to head out and have an adventure. 

She opened the screen door to take in the sun, but her cat immediately took this as an opportunity to try to bolt outside. She caught him just in time. 

“No, no, no,” she cooed. “You can’t climb out there. You might fall off the ledge and get hurt.” 

She carried him back to her couch, but when she sat down, he immediately jumped out of her lap and perched right back up on the windowsill to plan another opportunity to escape. 

She checked the status of her nursing certification application for New York. Everyday, she was waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. She felt like her life has been stuck in limbo. 

She put that aside and picked up her Thai comic book. It satirized the latest developments in Thai politics, how the current military-backed government had bamboozled democracy to maintain their iron grip like always. She also felt like this was the same old song and dance. Like she had been reading about this same story happening again and again. 

This all struck her as odd. Like her world was on repeat. All this intense thought made her sleepy, though, and she slowly drifted off to sleep. 

She jolted awake suddenly to someone pounding on her door crying that he needed help. 

(If you would like to read more short stories, you can browse them here.)