the knot

As he becomes more alert, David can feel the jackhammer in his head, drilling its way to the core of his being. He moves his hand slowly towards his left temple. Just above it, he can feel a hard, raised bump jutting out, one that hurts when he presses against it. ‘How many beers did I have last night?’ he asks himself. He feels as though his left leg has gone numb and tries to shake it awake. A searing pain, one far greater than the one in his head, emanates from his leg, going through his body like lightning. He yells out in pain.

He hears his voice drifting for miles and realises then that he isn’t on his one thousand thread count, soft white sheets. Alarm bells ring when he feels his hands are wet and gooey. ‘What the fuck?’ he says out loud, moving his fingers to his nose. He can smell an earthy tone, one that tells him, ‘Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore!’. He slowly opens his eyes, but everything is black. He puts his muddy hand to his face, feeling a cloth tied to it. He rips it off, and alarm bells ring like those in a church at 6pm. He’s in some kind of forest. He’s surrounded by aged trees, their overgrown roots jutting out of the forest floor, their trunks reaching the sky to the high canopy of leaves above.

Opening his eyes wide, he tries to sit up, but when he moves the pain, coming from his ankle, overcomes him. He looks down to see a bear trap. It looks like a massive metal jaw, clenched firmly on his leg. Its teeth disappearing through his trousers, and clamping into the flesh beneath. His foot seems like it’s not attached to his body anymore. It’s jutting out of the bear trap at a right angle. He notices bone protruding out of the bottom of his trousers. He lets out a scream that is so loud, he can hear the flapping of birds' wings hitting each other as they fly away. When he has no more extra air to expel, he says to himself, ‘I knew having those bastards as my groom's men, taking me out for my bachelor party the night before the wedding was a bad idea!’ As he is entrapped, he begins to look around to see if he can recognise any of his surroundings. He is in a dip in the ground, one he must must have fallen into. He was blindfolded, and inebriated, and could have easily stumbled and rolled into the place where he is now held captive.

He pat’s his pockets to see if he has his phone. Thankfully, he does. He looks at it and is alarmed by the fact that it is 10am. He is supposed to walk down the aisle at 4pm. He moves the phone left and right, up and down, to see if he can get a signal. The thick canopy above prevents that. He tries to get comfortable by positioning himself against the massive oak tree he woke against, shivering in shock, from the jaws that have confined him. He feels lightheaded and vomits onto the muddy ground.

He tries to close his eyes and listen to the melodious sound of his surroundings. The leaves of the trees hang down as the droplets from a summer shower escape the massive canopy above. He hears the droplets hit off each other, each and every one making a sound he can only describe as a windchime, a different tone coming off each leaf. He tries to focus on the sound, pretending he is in his grandmother's kitchen. She has all different types of noises coming from contraptions she has made on her back porch. He wipes his eyes with the end of his shirt and screams out of nothing more than frustration. He watches a lone leaf billow to the ground. it resonates as to how he is feeling. He has to remind himself that unlike a game of chess, life doesn’t stop at checkmate!

He reaches for his phone again. There is still no signal. ‘I’m going to kill those idiots when I see them!’ He explodes like a bomb. ‘They know the wedding is at 4pm, so where the fuck are they?’ he asks himself. ‘How am I going to get out of here?’ His watch pings. He quickly glances at it, having to remove a layer of caked on dirt first. It reminds him that he has to pick up his suit. ‘Fuck all good that is to me now!’

He’s beginning to panic! ‘What if Jessica thinks I’m standing her up?’ He knew his so called ‘friends’, don’t like her. They think she is out for his money! She warned him before he left last night that they were going to do something ‘epic’! ‘Yea, like leaving me in a hole in the ground on my wedding day, in a bear trap, isn’t ‘epic’!’ He lets out another scream, ‘aaaahhhhhh!’ then asks himself ‘why didn’t I do the sensible thing like Jessica, and have my bachelor party a week before the wedding?’ He thinks back. ‘My so called ‘best man’, Eoin, was the one to insist it be last night! He’s also the one who hates Jessica the most. Yes, it's quick getting married after six months, but she insisted on the prenup, and I was the one who said no! That eejit doesn’t want me to marry her and this is his way of making sure I don’t go through with it!’

David quickly thinks back to the very first night he met his beloved, Jessica. When she walked in the door of the pub, a whiskey in his hand, it was as though her body lit up! He heard the sound of angels singing as she made her way to the bar. He couldn’t but ask her if he could buy her a drink. He remembered the way her face flushed at the question. They shook hands after introducing themselves. David felt electricity come off her skin, but in a good way! As the bar got busier, the decibels at an all-time high, he leaned in to whisper in her ear if she wanted another. When he smelt her perfume, he instantly recognised it as Dolce and Gabbana, Light Blue! He knew it as it was his sister's favourite as well. Since then, he went out and bought his own bottle to spritz on the pillow next to him on the nights she didn’t stay over!

He knew his ‘friends’ thought him crazy to propose after just six weeks, but he would have done it there and then at the bar, had he a ring! They don’t see the true person she is, but that is their fault, not his! He has given them more than an ample opportunity to get to know her better, but they weren’t interested. They think her to be a gold digger! Yes, he is considered a multi-millionaire after his online t-shirt company was bought by Nike. Six months is a short time to know someone before you marry them in their eyes, but he is thirty-eight years old. He thought he was in love before…until he met Jessica! This is a match made in heaven! She is undoubtably his soul mate!

He tries to focus on Jessica, as white spots are entering his vision. He knows he won’t be able to stand the pain much longer. He is dehydrated from the alcohol he consumed the night before, and can see himself blacking out in the very near future! He closes his eyes, the white spots following him. He thinks of her long, flowing, semi curly brown hair, and how good it feels to brush after they have shared a shower. He can picture her big, brown eyes, and focuses on the way her iris darkens as it moves farther from her pupil. He sees her body, one which she isn’t too keen on as she’s only five feet tall, but to him she’s perfect! She just slots into his arms, her curvy body giving him something to hold on to.

As he is thinking about her, the rain on the canopy above gets heavier. The sound mesmerising! He hears a loud clap of thunder, grateful that the trees in the forest are so high, meaning he hardly gets wet. The air the day before was very muggy and he was afraid of sweating through his suit, ‘I guess I don’t have to worry about that anymore!’

Frantic not to leave her at the altar, alone, with no explanation, he tries to bring his entangled foot towards him to see if he can release it. The pain is so intense that he gives up, gives in to his fate of being left there to die.

With his morale at an all-time low, he thinks he hears his name. ‘I must be delusional!’ he says to himself. As he hears it get louder and louder, he calls out, ‘I’m in here!’ and grabs the nearest stick to hit the tree that is supporting him. ‘He’s over here!’ He hears his best friend, Eoin’s, voice first. Then he hears cheers and celebration, until his ‘friends’ slide down into the crevasse he has been sitting in for God only knows how long. ‘Oh, thank god,’ he hears Eoin say as he moves closer, ‘I thought we lost you!’ David is so angry that he throws the stick in Eoin’s direction. As Eoin creeps closer, careful not to trip over an oversized root, he says, ‘c’mon man, it’s your wedding day!’ David just points to his ankle. Eoin’s eyes grow wider, his hand moving towards his mouth in shock. He takes one more step before he sees the jutting bone and backtracks to vomit against the beautiful bark of the nearest tree.

When the other four see his predicament, Sean climbs back up the muddy hill, shouting back, ‘I’m going to get signal for an ambulance!’ David is shivering in shock now, and, once the guys cover his foot with one of their coats, they begin to apologise. The consensus was, ‘it seemed like a good idea at the time!’

Before long, help arrived in the form of paramedics and firemen. At first, he didn’t understand why fireman, but they are the ones to free his leg from the trap. As they did so, a canula was put in his arm and he receives some morphine for the pain. He had never dabbled in drugs before and asks himself, ‘why didn’t I if this was what I was missing?’ Then he shook his head and refocused his sight's on Jessica. ‘She’s going to kill you guys!’ he said as his foot was released and he blacked out at the view of his shoe dangling from the hem of his pants like a puppet on a string!

He drifts in and out of consciousness on the way to the hospital. When he gets there, he is rushed into surgery, the last word he hears being ‘amputate’!

David woke to the sweet smell of Dolce and Gabbana, Light Blue. ‘Jessica?’, he croaks, slowly opening his eyes. ‘Yes baby?’ she replies, dabbing his lips with a wet face cloth. ‘Do I still have my leg?’ She squeezes his hand tightly, David waiting for her to say ‘no’, but instead, she says, ‘yes baby, you still have your leg!’ David smiles and drifts in and out of sleep, the morphine keeping him comfortable.

Jessica looks down on Davids's foot, cringing at the sight of the metal frame holding it together…barely. She was the one who told the doctor to save it at all cost. She was the one who knew David would prefer to have some mobility than none at all. The doctor told her that he will, from that day onwards, have a limp…and a cane! She wasn’t sure what David would have done, had he been conscious, but she knew what she would want him to say!

When the doctor enters not long afterwards, he talks to Jessica as though they are already married. She didn’t know that he had already named her his emergency contact. ‘Words’ were exchanged with Eoin for what he did to her man! It just so happens that you can break a man’s penis if you clench it and twist it a certain way, but Eoin isn’t pressing charges. He likes the way Jessica would do anything for David, even if a broken penis is what had to convince him!

David went through grueling and intensive physiotherapy after that wretched night. It took a full year for him to become mobile with just a cane. Jessica’s nieces had bedazzled it for the occasion. This time he had no bachelor party whatsoever. Instead, both his, and Jessica’s, best friends and family came over for a few drinks and played some party games. It was the first time he had seen beer pong in the flesh, but Jessica convinced David how much fun it is. It turns out that he is good at it to boot! He gets Eoin so drunk that he staggers around, being obnoxious to all of Jessica’s friends. Big Jim, Jessica’s father, blindfolded Eoin, carried him out to the back garden, and tied him to the biggest tree he could find on their two-acre plot! It was in case he harbored a plan to reenact last year’s fiasco. ‘Just in case he gets any notions!’ was Big Jims explanation as he threw him over his shoulder and carried him to the perfect tree. They left him there all night!

Just before David starts to get dressed, he goes out to retrieve his friend from the tiny forest around him. He was sick of hearing him cry out for help out the second story window. He approaches Eoin with a sharp kitchen knife to untangle him. Big Jim was in the navy and knew his knot's, so, in David’s eyes, he just had to cut Eoin free. He could see Eoin squirm when he notice's the knife coming in his direction, and David couldn’t help but laugh when a wet patch spread over Eoin’s groin region.

The two of them walk back to the house. David limping because of the bear trap and the multiple surgeries he went through to get him to this point in time, Eoin, because David had hit him on the leg with his bedazzled cane…just to give him a taste of the full experience!

When the music starts, everyone on their feet looking at the blushing bride, David notices she has that very same glow he first saw all that time ago in the bar! He watches her glide up the aisle, Big Jim by her side, and can’t believe how beautiful she looks. She finally joins him at the altar. They finally tie the knot, but this time neither wants their freedom!