1
When Orlando is happy, he can swallow the moon. He doesn't always, but he can and when he does, the moon shines out from his skin, comes out through the deeper folds, where his thoughts have struggled their way to the surface or laughter left its mark.

2
He thinks he sees a light, then a face, a light, a blink, a light and then darkness. Somewhere in between, they tell him he fell off a rooftop. He believes them, even though he can feel no pain in his legs. The dark takes over when he gives up trying to make out who they are.

3
He's flying. Or is he flying?

He feels too light to know whether his weight has been lifted by wings or if his substance simply stopped existing. Someone's running next to him. Something's going up and something's going down. Lights again. Then darkness.

4
Later on, he reconstructs in his mind's eye the hospital corridors - down which they rushed him on a stretcher to be operated on - and their wavy shape.

Each wave's peak is the door to an operating room, his mother tells him. She knows, she paced those corridors endlessly.

Up and down, up and down. He looks at the mental image of wavy concrete from the height of his wheelchair and sneers at it.

He can't remember what motion is.

5
"It's time for your daily massage."

He would leap into his mother's lap and she would laugh, then rub his back gently for a while before sending him off to sleep. Since their father died, she had different treats for him and Sam. This was his. He knows that, though they'd never thought it at the time, they couldn't tell her love apart from her daily routine.

Sometimes they would hear her cry in the half of her bed that was still occupied.

6
Sometimes, he would have trouble with sleep. Sam told him to count sheep.

"Before you reach 100, you'll be asleep," she promised. He tried to count to 100 and when he reached it, he tried to count to 200 and when he reached it, he thought that maybe sheep were too interesting.

Some of those sheep were white and some black, some were brown and some had sparkling dots. All had faces, except one, who had a face, though it was too blurry to be seen. They all passed him by with the sort of polite nod you'd give a stranger that interrupts your rest.

And now, now they were trembling, shivering and buzzzzzzzzing in his head with pain killerzzzzzzzz.

7
They brought him to a rehabilitation centre, but he couldn't distinguish white from white, one set of doctorial faces from another, building walls, blinding light from the outside where he cannot go.

To be continued...