Dancing in Dreamtime by Scott Russell Sanders

to her white coat, already hear the southern drawl in her voice.
    â€œEnjoy that beard while you can,” she says cheerfully. “They’ll shave it off first thing.”
    I lift a hand to my chin and pinch a tuft of whiskers. My smile feels as if it has been drawn on my lips from outside.
    At her instruction, I pull off my boot and peel away the sock. She has me lie down on the examining table and positions the snout of the X-ray tube over my bare foot. “Now hold quite still,” she says, before disappearing behind a screen. A moment later I hear a brief hiss. She returns, repositions the foot, takes a second X-ray, and then repeats the cycle a third time. Then she escorts me to another room, where a doctor is studying the images of my ankle on a screen.
    He turns when I enter, asks me to sit on the paper-covered table with my leg extended. There is a whiff of peppermint on his breath. With gloved hands, he manipulates my foot, rotating it left and right, up and down, testing the range of motion.
    â€œHow does it feel?” he asks.
    Thinking of Sharon, I am tempted to give the painter’s refrain—“Hurts like hell!”—but I feel compelled to answer, “Numb.”
    â€œNo pain at all?”
    I shake my head—or rather, it shakes of its own accord. I see myself as if from the outside, sitting on the table, my naked foot cradled in the doctor’s hands. It is as though I am watching a film of myself, every word and gesture already scripted.
    He lets go of my foot and turns back to the ghostly X-rays on the screen. “It’s an elegant piece of surgery. This ankle should hold up better than your natural one. Nothing here to bar you from service.”

    Leaving the hospital, I walk back toward the main gate. The last light is fading from the sky. I hear the sizzle of pipes overhead, the steam cooling as it circulates from building to building. At the guard shack I pause to show my papers once more, and once more I am waved through.
    Near the rusting fighter jets, their engine cowlings clogged with snow, I wait for a ride. As cars and trucks pass, their headlights pick me out of the obscurity for a moment before sliding by. My thumb grows stiff as I wait for the Chevy pickup that finally stops, as I know it will. Likewise, I know beforehand that baby shoes will dangle from the rearview mirror, that the driver, a woman in her fifties, will tell me I remind her of her son, who was killed by a sniper in the Congo, and I know before I speak what I must answer. Hurtling down the tunnel bored through the darkness by the headlights, we exchange our lines, for the film will not stop.
    On the bus I am granted a few minutes of freedom. These periods of lucidity occur less and less often, as the spells of foreknowledge lengthen. The view through the window might be ofan alien planet, everything in shades of gray, silent and bleak and cold. The focus of my gaze shifts and I see my dim reflection in the glass—empty sockets where my eyes should be, my mouth a dark slash.
    At the final stop before my own, an old woman boards the bus. As she teeters along the aisle, her bag of groceries lurching side to side, I know she will ask to share my seat, I will nod
yes
, and she will settle beside me with a wheeze. As I expected, her bag smells of cinnamon and garlic, and so does her black wool coat.
    â€œNo night to be alone on a bus,” she says.
    â€œI’m almost home,” I reply. “My wife’s waiting.”
    â€œCount your blessings. My husband died when he was about your age.” She fishes a snapshot from her purse and holds it out for me.
    Reluctantly I peer at the photograph in the dim light. It shows a man in white Navy dress uniform, with a woman in a wedding gown clinging to his arm. I feel certain I have seen this image many times.
    â€œBelieve it or not, that’s me,” the old woman says, pointing to the bride.
    I am startled to feel tears