One Hundred Stitches

By Sarah

I looked down the steep, rugged horizon as heat waves rose off the road from the humidity. I tightly gripped the black rubber handlebars with my sweaty, clammy hands. I began to get a nervous cramp in my stomach from the intimidating steep road below. Despite my intuition, I gave five hard pedals and went soaring down the road. The wind from my speed cooled my face and swept through my hair.

About a quarter of the way down the bike became unsteady as the front wheels began to shake and the back wheels began to wobble. Then I lost control as the bike quickly began to go faster and faster. The bike began to swerve across the road as the handlebars began to vibrate. The plastic foot pedals began to spin so fast that they forced my feet to detach from them and flail around in the hot, sticky air.

Realizing that I had no control over what direction the bike might suddenly veer towards, I decided to gently clutch the handbrakes. Since I did not seem to be slowing down I put more force into the brakes. Near the middle of the hill I still had no results of slowing down. So, without thinking I slammed on the brakes with all of my power.

The bike stopped dead in its tracks, then my body flew over the handlebars, my leg became caught on the bike and we began to roll down the road. While doing cartwheel after cartwheel, my chin, elbows, knees and hands were being sandpapered by the gravel. For fifteen seconds the bike dragged me on my stomach by my leg. The rough gravel on the road was painfully tearing the skin underneath my jawbone. I began to get a metal taste in my mouth as everything started to slow down around me. Finally, my numb leg unhooked from the bike. I laid motionless on my back in a pool of my blood, listening to the echoes of the shrill screams the people made as they circled my now unconscious body.

I awoke in a hospital's emergency room to a doctor cleaning my wounds with an oversized q-tip. Everything around me looked foggy and unrealistic. The doctor was a plastic surgeon who was kind enough to clean my wounds and stitch me up. He had blond hair that was neatly combed to the left side and light blue eyes that sunk into his golden toned skin.

"I am going to have to give you about one hundred stitches, Sarah. That was a pretty nasty fall that you had," the doctor said with a sorrowful smile.

"Will it hurt?" I questioned as a tear rolled down my check and hit the blue hospital gown that I was wearing.

"It shouldn't. I gave you some shots to numb the pain," he replied with a certain assertiveness.

I closed my eyes as he completed cleaning the gravel away from the exposed flesh underneath my chin. I dozed off and opened my eyes to the slight tugging of my skin. I saw the doctor's hand gently pulling a thin metallic wire-like thread in and out of the skin underneath my jaw.

I think back about that day I was traumatized in such a way that now just seeing a bike laying down in a front yard on the sweet green grass sends chills down my spine, until my mouth begins to water and I close my eyes to stop the memories of how I felt looking up into a huddle of people surrounding my completely bloody, bruised and hurt body with sorrowed yet disgusted looks on their faces, with the knowledge that from that moment on my life would never be the same.