The GP Asks About Pins and Needles by Kailum Graves
My father says there is water
moving inside his left leg.
The GP asks whether he means pins and needles.
No, he says. Water.
She checks his circulation,
presses two fingers against his ankle,
asks if the sensation changes at night.
That’s when it starts, he says.
After the television goes quiet.
I am there because he forgot
which tablets he takes in the morning.
He has brought them all in a biscuit tin,
including one prescription that expired in 2019
and a button.
The GP asks about previous injuries.
He tells her about Roads and Drainage.
Not the whole job.
A section behind the squash courts,
thirty-odd years ago,
when they were told to fill the channel
before the new car park went in.
There was a fridge in it. No door.
He says this twice,
as though the missing door
changes what they did.
At lunch, Frank ate pickled onions
straight from the jar
and put the lid back with his dirty hand.
Dad refused them after that.
He still does.
Frank is dead now.
The GP says, I’m sorry.
Dad says, What for?
On the drive home
he tells me she wasn’t listening.
I say she listened for forty minutes.
He says it was thirty-seven.
He had been watching the clock.
A week later he asks me to print
an old council map.
The creek is a pale blue line
under three streets and our back fence,
though he says the scale is wrong.
He starts digging beside the shed.
Not a creek, he tells the neighbour.
Just somewhere for the rain to go.
The rain already goes somewhere,
I say.
He keeps digging.
He cuts the internet cable on Tuesday
and blames the installer.
For two days I work from the library
beside a man watching horse races
without headphones.
Dad leaves the trench open.
A magpie drops half a bread roll into it.
By morning the bread is furred with ants.
By January the sides have fallen in.
The shovel is rusting where he left it.
He says he will finish after his knee settles.
I want him to fill it back up.
We argue about this
while bringing in the washing.
He calls me dramatic.
I tell him he is making another mess.
He folds a towel badly,
then folds it again.
That night he waters the lemon tree
and lets the hose run
into the unfinished trench.
In the morning
the water is gone.
He says the soil took it.
I wind the hose back badly
and leave the last loop across the path.
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