Magpie Tales 3 (A kilo weight being the picture prompt)

Her big eyes stared out from her pinched white face and pain showed in the creases of her brow. The sheets were taut against her chest and the green coverlet that matched the five others in the ward had slipped to one side.


‘Don’t touch my leg,’ she groaned. I looked at her leg with the large evil looking apparatus attached to it, stretched out from under the half cover, and swallowed when I saw the pulleys and weights that hung off the wire attachments.

‘My broken fibula was out of place so it needs to be stretched back into position,’ she said.

I felt sick just looking at it and sat down in the chair beside the bed.

‘So you didn’t get to France, I think your hubby said you were on the local dry practice run, preparing for your skiing holiday?’ I replied.

Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes as she sobbed. ‘Oh no I didn’t do this on the slopes, I fell over that bloody thing I bought on Saturday as a doorstop and went flying, without skis I might add, down the back steps into our kitchen.‘

We looked at each other and without another word being said, her sobs turned to laughter and before I knew it I had joined in. Then her laughter turned to moans as her shaking body moved her leg and the weights hanging off the contraption swung. I smiled sympathetically and looked at her face as she winced in pain.

And to think I had been envious of her find in the junk shop, thinking how it would polish up and match the colour of my grey stained floor boards, as obviously Jen had done. ‘What a find,’ she had said, when she had turned towards me showing me the kilo weight, ‘isn’t it great, so, so kitsch?’

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