An Evening Admission

There was a man much too tall for his bed in the emergency department, who lay with his feet jammed up against the footboard, his jeans torn at the knee and his knuckles scuffed and a snake wrapped around his biceps, who showed me photos of his black Harley licked with fire. He was the kind of man who chain-smoked since childhood and spent the last fifty years of his life racing his bike down steep mountain slopes fraught with treacherous curves...