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Upstairs  Parents’ Room 77 Arthritis, 1952 It’s like the spell cast on the castle when Beauty goes to sleep. Daddy bedfast. Me three years old. I won’t eat unless Mother brings my meal up to the bedroom with his. I am scared still. My strong, happy daddy can’t walk. He tries to smile at me. “How we doing, Sugar?” he asks. I say, “Fine, Daddy,” but he is the answer to that question and he is not fine. He is terrified, I realize now. Thirty-five years old, a wife and two children, and one day, an electrified spine. Stand up and the pain is beyond beyond, each nerve a sizzling wire. He is going by ambulance to Knoxville but I don’t know this. He is going to have his spine fused. Radiation, bonded with drycleaning chemicals, far down the road will start his cancer dance. But for now it will cage the pain. It will lift him from this bed, wed him to a leather and canvas brace, send him back to Nu-Way. Once Daddy can move, the house will wake, his kingdom shake itself and go on. ...

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