fact or fiction?

 

This is a piece I wrote several years ago about a busy night in the emergency room:

 

"Just after midnight, they brought Jeremy Crane in, lifeless, on a gurney. He'd wrapped his car around a telephone pole doing eighty miles an hour. Without a seatbelt. After having enjoyed a few underage drinks with his friends.

 

Not six months earlier he'd been in my office to have his learner's permit signed. I'd made him look me straight in the eye and promise me that he would wear his seatbelt every time he drove. That he would wait until all of his friends had fastened theirs before he would start the engine. That he would never drink and then drive, and if he did drink, he would call someone to drive him home. I made him promise me he wouldn't fiddle with the radio, or neck with his date while he was driving. And he did. He looked me in the eye and solemnly promised. He lied right to my face, and then he signed his name to it.

"The difference between

fiction and nonfiction is that

fiction must be absolutely believable."

~Mark Twain~

 

And look what happened to him. They wheeled him in with IVs running in both arms. He was sucking air in through his shattered ribcage with a tube down his throat so the medic could pump a little oxygen into his lungs. A stiff brace held his neck straight. Blood seeped out of the gash above his right eye, and the one behind his right ear, and the one on his left arm. His face was bruised and his eyelids swollen. His left shoulder was out of joint, his abdomen distended, his left foot missing, his pupils fixed and dilated. He was dead. At two o'clock in the morning, I was on the phone to his father."

 

Now that you've read the scene, can you tell if it's part of my memoir (nonfiction)? Or is it a scene from a novel (fiction)? Can you tell?

  

"Fiction reveals truth

that reality obscures."

~Ralph Waldo Emerson~

  

One of the goals in narrative medicine is to apply storytelling techniques to the process of obtaining the patient's medical history...his story. This exercise reflects the fact that reality shapes good fiction, while good fiction accurately reflects the truth. 



 jan

PS: This is a fictional scene from my (unpublished) novel, The Bandaged Place.