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A Child's Garden of Verses
by Pun
Notes: Begun as a part of the Two Minute Warning fiction
challenge. Thanks go to Lenore for beta.
House's mother was obsessed with poetry. A constant stream of
verse
fell from her lips punctuating the moments of her day. She recited Poe
when she cooked, knife chopping to the rhythmic rhymes, and Cummings
when she drove, unexpected turns and stops following to his broken-off
verses with little regard to practicality. House hated how often this
eccentric method of navigation made him late, and when he told his
seventh grade homeroom teacher to blame Cummings for his tardiness he
got detention for being wise. (To be fair, House got detention for
being wise at least once a week with or without the help of infraverbal
poets.)
When the leg happens and House suddenly has to cut
down on his pacing (and jogging and golf and racquet ball) he's shocked
to realize he still remembers his mother's poems. Shelley, Donne,
Shakespeare, Catullus and many more whose names he can't remember now
(but he remembers their damn verses) all force themselves upon him like
a virus that had been hiding dormant in his marrow all this time. The
words carry with them memories of giftless birthdays and lonely
microwave dinners and worst of all they are further confirmation of his
horrible suspicion that he has turned into her.
House may
resent the poems, but he gets them now--not their meaning but their
purpose. He understands that the recitation for her was the same as
physical activity used to be for him. Something to get his mind to stop
racing for a blessed half hour, extra applications to slow the
processor down, make it stop whirring, buzzing, screaming at him. But
House resists. He reaches for the gameboy, the soaps, the booze, the
pills--especially the pills--because he doesn't want to hide behind
corpses and their words.
And yet, sometimes, when his leg is
killing him, and he's beaten every video game (twice), when it's after
three a.m., and there's nothing but infomercials on, and he's already
had way too many pills, he lies awake, alone, staring at the ceiling
and begins, "There once was man from Nantucket . . ."
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