Shape of the Spasm

So, as the spasms rip through your toes and your feet, your balance is affected, and, at the very least, you can’t help gasping aloud as the muscles contract and pain shoots up through your toes, through your feet to… well as the song goes,

“the toe bones connected to the… foot bone. The foot bones connected to the…. ankle bone… The ankle bones connected to the…”*

(okay they’re talking about bones not muscles, but, you get the general idea)

The gasping was the unfortunate part. Sure the cramp hurt, but the gasping caused my father to hear me, which resulted in me hearing him. I heard him getting up from his chair and opening the door to the lounge, the one step across the hall to swing open the door to the bathroom. I tried to stand up straight to show I hadn’t moved, but with no front balance due to the cramp in my feet, I writhed more than I stood.

He looked at me. Actually he glared. “Stand up straight’ I did. It hurt I also felt my leg shaking fairly uncontrollably as the muscle cramp leapt to my calf muscle. I lifted my foot from the floor immediately. “Put your foot down!” He demanded. I did. Well I slammed it down, but due to the cramp, my aim was off and my direction (due to the balance), and as I slammed it into the floor. I was sure I heard the toes crack as the end of them connected with the floor. ‘”Himmm!~” I gave a somewhat strangled cry as a different feeling of pain took over. “Stand there. Be Quiet. And don’t move.” My father left the bathroom door open and went back to the lounge room. This time he left that open as well. I could just see his the back of the left side of his head as he sat back into his chair. Then I remembered seeing my mother, and one of my sisters on various occasions, coming hobbling into the bathroom with a toe cramp and pushing their foot as flat as possible onto the cold linoleum the flattened out the foot as much as possible to ‘uncramp’ the foot. I thought I would try that. I flattened the foot. It hurt even more. I stopped it. Then the cramp kicked in again and that hurt even more. So I pushed down really hard.

That pain then over-rode the pain of the cramp. But it was a satisfying pain. It felt better than the cramp pain. But it still hurt, but it was a different hurt. Oh, NO! I was becoming a weirdo. I was standing on a cold linoleum floor, hurting myself, to get rid of another hurt? I preferred one pain, over another. I had read about that type of mental illness in Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”. The preference for the type of pain as the subject victim was tortured. Did I have it! Was I a… deviant?

(Continued tomorrow)

Dem Bones, Dry Bones or Dem Dry Bones is a well-known traditional spiritual song. The melody was written by African-American author and songwriter James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938).