by Robin Silbergleid
1.
Here are the basic facts: A ceiling fan is a mechanical fan, usually electrically powered, suspended from the ceiling of a room, that uses hub-mounted rotating paddles to circulate air. Ceiling fans generally spin between 80 and 300 revolutions-per-minute (RPMs) with about 220 RPMs as a common high speed and 100 a common low.*
2.
What do I do? What do I do? Her feet shuffle back and forth, her weight bouncing on her knees like a marionette. This is what I can see from one eye from beneath the towel, where I am curled, in the single hallway of our upstairs, before I collapse, holding my face because if I don’t it might fall off. My right hand is shaking, twitching. I don’t know what to do.
I am thinking: blood, bone, brain damage. The children will be orphaned.
She is eight. She was in her bedroom reading. I was in the bedroom with the baby. I had just nursed him, changed his diaper.
In his crib, now, where she put him, the baby is screaming. I hear him. And the whir of the blades.
911, I tell her, now now now.
And then, when they don’t come, neighbor.
Oh jeez, he says, eventually, oh jeez, his big feet on the creaky floor.
3.
There are five blades on the fan above my bed. There were four wounds to my face: two low on the forehead, one on the right side of my nose, one under my left eye, so close to the eyeball that when the doctor stitched up my face I could feel her tickle my eyelashes with the needle. I had two black eyes. My hand twitched from brain trauma.
According to the TV show Mythbusters, it is impossible for a domestic ceiling fan to decapitate a human being or do more than cause “minor” injury.
The upstairs of the house looked, my friend said, like a murder scene. There was so much blood that when I pulled down my pants in the emergency room I was sure I had gotten my period. It was July in Michigan; the fan was spinning fast.
4.
I could say, this is why you don’t clean.
I could say, a different kind of domestic violence.
I could say, this is why you don’t ever stand on a bed. Ever.
I could say, I got lucky.
It’s only a scar.
But I am thinking of my daughter’s small white chair where I sat while my neighbors swapped cell phone numbers on construction paper and crayon. The one whom I know from the bus stop slipped sandals on my ruddy feet. The one who lives next door, who likes to garden, stayed with my children–the baby with a bottle of breastmilk from the freezer, the big girl praised for her bravery– while her husband drove me to the hospital. This is the spin I choose to put on the story, a story of human kindness and people looking out for each other, because the other story, the one where small children watch their mother’s blood pool on the wood floors during the twenty minutes it takes for the ambulance to arrive, is unfathomable.
5.
Every morning my daughter watches while I put make-up on. If your scar was flipped over you would look like Harry Potter. My hand trembles. She turns off the fan. The damage is not minor.
*courtesy of Wikipedia
junk 