Now on twitter
There was something wrong with their eyes.
There was something wrong with their eyes. It wasn’t there at the beginning. It had to have changed at some point, but so slowly that I didn’t spot it until it was too late. We were sitting at the rubber coated picnic table at the front of the warehouse. The checkout lines behind us were humming along as people bought their five gallon drums of detergent and thirty-six packs of printer cartridges, handing the cashier their ID to prove that they had a right to the things they bought.
And as we sat, not talking, I started staring at the massive ceiling. And I saw something up there, farther away than it should have been, almost as if the entire building had been slowly expanding ever since we walked into it. The place had somehow expanded in volume to something like that of a football stadium. I stared up, and far off in the distance, there were now catwalks in the ceiling. Rows of men dressed in identical black business suits were walking up and down, surveying the area below.
I looked back down at the round table we were sitting at. The vast warehouse of shopping had become deserted. We were the only ones there now. Our little table sat alone in that ocean of concrete. A few powerful overhead lights created small pools where we could see. I looked behind me and saw a man peek out from behind a wall. A wall that had not been there a few seconds ago. He moved the drywall aside like a curtain. He saw me spot him and he quickly disappeared. I heard a voice behind the wall chastise him, saying, “What are you doing? He’s not supposed to see us!”
I looked back at my family. They were all sitting completely still, their bodies frozen in mannequin poses. Their mouths hadcontorted in ridiculous smiles that stretched from ear to ear. The pupils of their eyes had turned into vertical slits like snakes eyes. And they gazed directly at me.
My breathing quickened and I looked back up at the ceiling to see that there was only one man in a suit there now. I could tell, even across the vast distance between us, that he was staring directly at me. I saw him raise his arm in a wide arc and bring it back down with index finger extended, pointing directly at me.
My heart rate tripled and I looked back over my shoulder to see that the wall had moved to within three feet of me. It was shaking and bulging now. A small squid tentacle briefly appeared from underneath before recoiling back under. I turned my head and balled up into the fetal position on my bench. My family’s heads had turned into giant smiling cobra faces. I buried my nose into my knees as adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream.
The wall was making noises. The voice screamed out from behind it, “REMEMBER! HE CAN’T SEE YOU! NOT NOW! NOT EVER!” A chorus of snake rattles and growls and screams rose up from behind the wall. A wet and sticky tentacle slithered up and around my neck and started pulling back and down.
Back and Down.
(authors note: I don’t know if that is as scary to you as it was to me, but when my wife woke me up from this nightmare, I rolled off the bed and screamed “NOOO!” for a few seconds, so loud that I couldn’t speak the next day. She told me that if I ever did that again she would divorce me.)
When you receive a transplant, you aren’t supposed to know whom it was from. A lot of my patients have a hard time with that. They want to say “Thank you. Thank you for this swell new kidney/lung/liver/whatever.” But there are laws and ethical guidelines that prevent such a thing. I suppose there’s some kind of metaphor there, some kind of statement. A metaphor or simile or whichever the fuck you call it, but it’s beyond me to put it into words. So I won’t even bother. What I can do, and will do, is re-tell this story to the best of my abilities. If I go fuzzy with the details, I hope that you can find it in your heart to forgive me. After all, this story did take place a long time ago. Twenty-six years ago today, to be exact. And if it seems too fantastic or horrific to be true, all I can say is that I, along with the rest of the surgical staff at Sacred Heart Hospital, all of us present that day, will tell you the exact same story.
I was leaning against the nurse’s station on that particular day, the end of my 24 hour double shift as a surgical intern was still four hours away and I was counting down the seconds until I could go home and sleep. From where I leaned, I could see out the large glass doors that served as the main entrance. Sacred Heart had a sizeable front lawn with several dozen large maple and oak trees. And I remember, with incredible clarity, how the leaves falling from the trees were particularly beautiful that year. The wind was swirling them around in little whirls of peaceful color, the whole outside had that smell, that smell of dead leaves and fall. The maintenance guys had raked up several huge piles of leaves, a few of which were placed into those orange garbage bags that look like jack o’ lanterns when they’re full. A few actual jack o’ lanterns were placed on either side of the main entrance doors, typical things, triangle eyes with oval mouths, one tooth on the bottom. The candles inside of these were lit and flickering.
The entire place was decked out in Halloween gear – cobwebs, little paper witches, plastic cauldrons of candy, the general B.S. that comes with the holiday. A few of the staff were wearing some small costumes, a few kitten ears on some nurses or pirate eye-patches on the doctors. There had been a very light workload for the day and everyone was relaxing, even though no-one was sure that the peace would last, everyone was acting like it would. In fact, the hospital had a stillness to it that day. Walking around, I felt this incredible calm and peace permeating the place. You could sense it in the air. No one spoke about it, but you could just see it in the easy way everyone breathed. The place was quiet, and also kind of deserted. We’d discharged a large number of patients the day before and a little more than half of the rooms in the hospital were empty. The whole place was calm, quiet, peaceful and empty, a weird sensation to feel in a hospital, a place that is normally high action all the time. Not that day though.
So there I was, just leaning against that nurse’s station, minding my own business, and soaking up the atmosphere. Outside, the sky was starting to darken and the sun would be set in an hour or two. There was only one nurse by me, doing some paperwork and not paying attention to anything that was going on. The other four or so nurses on duty had scattered around the hospital. I decided to try and strike up a conversation with her.
“Whose chart is that?” I asked.
“Reed Davis.” she replied, polite but disinterested.
“The little red-haired kid right? Room 118?”
“Yep. Red-haired kid, about 14 years old, room 118, bad heart.” This kid had been in and out of the hospital over the past few months with an assortment of cardiovascular related problems. No one had figured out why a kid so young would be facing heart failure. They had figured out that if he didn’t receive a transplant soon, it wouldn’t matter.
“Have they moved him up the waiting list yet?” I asked her.
“That’s what I’m working on right now.” I waited for her to elaborate and she didn’t, giving me the polite brush-off. I gave up on the exchange and turned back to face the front doors, watching the sun slowly sink behind the tree line.
I stared out the doors for a few minutes when something caught my attention to my right. This nurse’s station was also in the middle of a long hallway that ran almost the entire length of the floor. To my right the hallway extended all the way down to a side entrance, a single door that the public could use to enter from the side. Out of the side of my vision I noticed someone walking down the hallway towards me. Only walking isn’t the right word. He was dressed like a bum, a dingy army jacket and soiled jeans, a mesh trucker cap pulled low over his face. I was trying to figure out what it was about the way he was walking that was weird. I had a fair bit of time to try and pin point it because he was moving ridiculously slowly and he had 50 feet or more to cover before he made it the nurse’s station and the main lobby.
“Hey, hey. Look at this guy walking towards us,” I said to the nurse behind me. She didn’t respond. I looked back over my shoulder and she was gone, her paperwork sitting on the desk. I then looked around for anyone at all, only to see that the main lobby and nurse’s station were completely abandoned, just me and that shadow walking down the hall. I turned back around to look at the guy some more and he was inches away from my face, breathing into my mouth and staring into my eyes.
——————————–
I don’t know if any real description can convey the vibe that this, I don’t know, “thing,” gave off. Close up, the state of decay that his clothing was in was unbearable. His jeans and jacket had holes in them, not tears mind you, holes that could have only come from some sort of worm eating through the fabric. His jeans, although at first appearing to be black, were really just so soiled that they became black, and actual clumps of mud were scattered about his body. His face was sunken in to such a degree that it appeared, on first glance, that his head was just a skull. This is not an exaggeration, as the other people who saw him later will testify. The pupils were so dilated and so large that it looked as if he didn’t have eyes at all, only when he shifted his gaze did the whites appear and confirm that there were, in fact, eyes in that skull. His breath reeked of so much dirt that, as he breathed into my mouth, he was literally breathing dust into my face, the smell was unbearable, it smelled of rot and decay and death. His face was covered with the dirtiest, scraggliest beard that was also clumped and matted with dirt. His lips were parched and cracked. We held each other’s gaze for a few seconds before I finally inched backward to give myself some space. He never moved.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
He inhaled deeply before finally, what, speaking? No, speaking’s not the right word. He made sounds that sounded like rocks scraping together. His words came from the lungs and not the mouth, if that makes any sense. His speech was more breath than sound.
“I’m here to see Jerry Allen,” he said in that disturbing non-voice.
I’d seen zombie movies before in my life, in fact I’d watched “Dawn of the Dead at least 30 times. So that’s probably where I got the first notion of what this thing might actually be. But at the same time, this was the real world and not a movie theater. So rather than blindly running or reaching for the phone to call security I decided to just be as professional as I could and see where this went before making an ass out of myself and calling security to tell them that a potential zombie was in the hospital. I studied his body for a second before saying anything.
“Are you okay sir? You look like you’ve suffered some injuries,” I say with all the sense of normalcy I can muster. “Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll get some people to…”
“I… want… to see… Jerry… Allen…” it interrupted me. It was going through great pains to make its intentions clear.
“Just a second,’ I said back, “I’ll look up his room.” I moved away from him and back behind the desk to find where this Jerry Allen was at in the hospital. I had to take my eye off the guy for a few seconds while I rifled through the room assignments, but I could feel his gaze burning a hole through my back the whole while. I finally found the room assignment and I whirled around to tell it to him.
“Mr. Allen is in room 115,” I said with a stutter. The thing was staring at me and he had a weird half-cocked smile on his face. He didn’t say anything or make any noises. He only moved around the outside of the desk, never taking his hollow eyes off of me, never dropping his creepy smile.
At this point, everything in my body was telling me to run away, just run as far as you can as fast as you can. Just bail, get the fuck out of there, NOW! But my professional side was telling me to stay put, be a man, you’re a doctor for Christ’s sake. I stood there, glued to the floor by panic. In my mind I was trying to process all the different directions that this situation could go at any second, and each one scared me. He shambled around the outside of the desk, staring me down silently, smiling. After a few seconds, he made it to the other side and disappeared around the corner, into the hallway that transected ours.
Adrenaline was still dumping into my bloodstream for a few seconds after all of this. My sight locked at the exact spot where the thing had gone around the corner, because I think I expected to see him pop around any second and say “Just kidding, I am going to kill you.” It was then that I felt a hand grab my shoulder.
I’d say I shrieked like a little bitch, but that’d be understating it. I gave the most unmanly scream that’s ever been given by anyone with a set of testicles ever. I spun around, staggered backward and tripped over a chair, knocking my head against the lip of the desk, putting me out cold.
———————————————
When I came to, Doctor Kim was standing over me and examining me to make sure I hadn’t suffered a concussion. Doctor Kim was the chief surgeon and oversaw all of us interns.
“Well you don’t have a concussion,” he said.
I asked him, “How long was I out for?”
“Minute or two, you feel alright? Dizziness? Nausea?”
“No, I’m alright.”
“Think you can stand?” he said while extending his hand to me. I took it and he pulled me up. “There, now what the hell had you so frightened?”
I took a second and debated whether or not I would try to describe the thing to Doctor Kim. I decided to just leave it alone.
I told him, “You just startled me, I guess.”
“Huh. Well… ok. Look, I was actually looking for you. I just got a call from my wife and she’s stuck at work so I have to go pick up the kids from their after-school party. I shouldn’t be more than an hour, hour and a half. There aren’t any procedures scheduled for the rest of the night. So unless we get an emergency you should be fine. Alright?”
“Yeah. Yeah, cool.” I was feeling the lump on the back of my head. It was huge and throbbing. A little bit of blood came onto my fingertips when I pulled my hand around to look.
“You should get a nurse to stitch that up.” Doctor Kim said.
“I will.”
“Alright then, I’ll be back shortly,” he said, “Oh hey, did you hear on the scanner? About the cemetery near here?”
“No. What happened?” I asked,
“Some kids vandalized a grave, dug it up and everything. Tried to make it look like zombies were coming out, sick huh?” he said, arching his eyebrows at me, backing towards the main entrance the whole time.
“Yeah, sick.” I said. I was getting sick to my stomach. I don’t have to say what was going through my mind when I heard this. It’s going through your mind right now as well. Right then I instantly regretted not calling for security when the thing was near me.
“See you in a little while.” Doctor Kim said as walked out the main entrance. I waved at him and kept checking the bleeding in the back of my head.
The nurse who was doing the paperwork before came back around the corner and sat down at the desk. Her hands were shaking and her eyes were kind of misting up. She sat down in her chair and went to grab a pen but instead knocked the entire pen cup over, spilling pens and pencils all over the floor.
“What’s wrong?’ I asked.
“Well for one, I was just checking on little Reed and in comes Doctor Desmond…’ Doctor Desmond was our cardiology specialist, heart doctor, if you will “and he just got the back the latest tests for the kid. Without a transplant that kid isn’t going to make it another week.” She was fully crying then. This nurse, like me, was still new to the medical profession, she had only been nursing for a month and a half, and hadn’t had a chance to build up that callous wall of ‘who gives a shit’ that everyone in our profession has towards tragic things like this. It’s a survival tool.
“And then,” she continues, “I ran into the creepiest son of a bitch that I have ever seen in my life. He really, really scared me.”
At this point, my nerves and everything in my body were ringing and all my senses were shivering and pulsing. “Let me guess,” I said, “dirty as all hell, horrid breath, looks and smells like death?”
“Oh my god,” she said, “you saw him too?” I told her about my entire encounter with the guy.
“I was leaving Reed’s room,” the nurse says, now in a panic “I was leaving Reed’s room when I saw the guy creeping around room 115, right across the hall. So I asked him if I could help, and he didn’t say anything, he stared at me and smiled. I thought about calling security but I didn’t want to be rude to the guy. He said he was just there to visit a friend. So I just left him!”
“I’m calling security right now,” I said. No sooner had I picked up the phone and started to dial the extension, than a flashing light was going off over the desk, indicating that room 115, Jerry Allen’s, the room that the potential zombie was lurking around, had just had a heart monitor flatline. The nurse and I took off in a dead sprint to see what was going on. What we saw when we got there, was so disgusting, that I, a surgeon who deals with blood and guts daily, almost threw up.
———————————————
There, on the bed, was Jerry Allen. He looked almost normal except for one thing, the huge fucking hole where his heart should’ve been. There was something there, in that hole, only it wasn’t a heart. Somebody, and I suspect that you’re thinking the same thing I did at that moment, had ripped open his chest and torn his heart out, and then filled that hole with dirt. It was the dirt that made my stomach churn. It was filled all manner of maggots and worms. The hole moved and convulsed as the little things churned around inside Jerry Allen’s heart cavity. The nurse was the first one to speak.
“Oh my god,” she said. The color had completely drained from her face. “If that’s where the heart used to be, where’s the heart?” she asked. We both looked at each other for a second, trying to decide what the hell we were supposed to do next. She was the one who acted first.
“Reed,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. We both ran across the hall into the little kid’s room. Reed was there, unharmed for the moment, but he was awake now, and his heart monitor was going through the roof. The reason for his excitement, was that the walking dead was standing beside his bed, holding a freshly extracted bloody heart.
———————————————
The nurse and I were completely frozen in place. Reed was sitting up in his bed, his eyes and his mouth both wide open. He was just as unable to move as we were. The zombie was inching towards the little kid, that same crooked smile on his face that had terrified me to no end. Reed finally muttered something I’ll never forget
“Unc… Unc… Uncle Mike… Don’t…” he whispered between shallow breaths.
I can’t speak for the nurse, but my mind was telling me to do something, anything, to stop the guy from eating this poor kid. My body was having none of it though. It was a sheer, blind, immobilizing panic and fear that likes of which I’d never felt before and never hope to feel again.
The zombie was only centimeters away from Reed’s face, breathing dust all over the kid’s cheeks, its mouth wide open and its sharp rotting teeth exposed to bite and tear the flesh from the kids’ skull.
Reed snapped out of his panic and let out a loud piercing scream. At the last second, the zombie snapped its jaw shut with a loud click and slowly backed away. It laid the bloody and dirt clodded heart on Reed’s chest and started shambling towards me and the nurse, who were still locked in place by panic, right in the way of the door. I can’t tell you how long it actually took for the thing to reach us. I can tell you that it felt like eternity, watching it creep towards us; its jaw clicking excitedly, me trying to comprehend how it would feel to be eaten alive.
But when it got to us, it didn’t attack. It just pushed us out of the way and walked out into the hall. The nurse and I stared for some moments at it, dumbfounded by what we’d just seen. What finally snapped us out of our malaise was the sound of Reed’s heart monitor flatlining.
———————————————
The excitement had been too much for the kid and his heart had had to work too hard during that time where he was being literally scared to death. We brought out the crash cart and shocked his heart back into the weakest of beats, enough to keep him alive for a little bit. The security guys showed up at the door right then.
“We heard a scream. Is everything ok?”
“No. Everything is not ok,” The nurse snaps at them. “What the hell took you so long?”
“Well we got here as quick as we could…” the guard trailed off spotting the heart lying on the kids chest. “Jesus,” he said, whispering, “Is that a –a –is oh Jesus is that a fucking heart?”
“YES!” the nurse and I yell in unison, annoyed by the guards’ presence as we were trying to get life support set up on Reed.
“Well what in the world is it doing outside of someone’s body?” the guard asked, his voice rising in pitch toward the end. The other guard beside him was just staring at all of us with his mouth open.
“It’s a long story,” I said. I looked at the heart and then back at the nurse. She was thinking the same thing I was thinking. We didn’t have to say it out loud. She knew what to do.
“What tests do you need me to run?” she asks.
“First of all, wash the dirt off it and put it on ice. We can only hope it hasn’t been out of the body for too long. Then go find Doctor Desmond. He’ll know…”
“What will I know?” Doctor Desmond, the cardiology specialist, the heart doctor, had shown up and pushed his way past the two security guards. “You two do know that the guy across the hall has flatlined and has probably been dead for at least ten to twenty minutes right? I would have gone in there and pronounced him myself, but it just didn’t feel appropriate.”
“Here,” the nurse says, shoving the heart into his hands. “Do whatever you have to do to see if this is a match for Reed.”
He took the heart and immediately got disgusted and outraged. “What the fuck is this? Why is there a human heart covered in dirt in my hands? Huh? Jesus I’m not even wearing gloves. Is this thing still warm? Where did you get this?” he snaps at us.
“JUST SEE IF IT’S A GODDAMNED MATCH!” the nurse screams at him. In a hospital, the doctors may make the money, but the nurses run the show. If you, as a doctor, have a nurse with a grudge against you, your life will be a living hell. This is why Doctor Desmond shut his mouth and immediately ran to do the tests.
We finished setting up life support on the kid. The Nurse leaned over him and pushed his bangs back off his forehead. She was whispering to him, calming things, hoping he could hear them. The rest of us, me and the security guards, were just standing there waiting to hear if this heart was what we thought it was.
Ten or twenty minutes later, Doctor Desmond ran back to the room with a manilla envelope in his hand. We looked at him and he looked back at us.
“Well?” the nurse said. Doctor Desmond took a few seconds to catch his breath before responding.
———————————————
I probably don’t have to tell you what the test results were. The heart, in spite of all probability, in spite of being out of a living body for a good 5 minutes, was a perfect match. The heart of a 37 year old obese male had been a perfect match for a skinny 14 year old kid. We prepped Reed for surgery right there and Doctor Desmond and I performed the transplant. If Doctor Kim had been there he would have assisted but since he was picking up his kids I got to do the honors. Reed made a full recovery and is still alive today. I later asked him about his Uncle mike. Reed, god bless him, told me that they had never been particularly close and that all he really knew about his uncle was that he died in a bar fight twenty years ago with some guy named Jerry.
“The guy broke a beer bottle in half and stabbed him in the heart with it,” Reed told me.
Jerry Allen had no immediate family alive at the time of his death, so even though he never signed an organ donor agreement, the nurse and I forged one for him. His body was given a burial at the cemetery near the hospital, in a small grave that lay right next to the grave of the zombie.
The zombie, Uncle Mike. If it did anything else that day, we don’t know about it. It just sort of disappeared and was never heard of again. The hospital and the police opened an investigation as to how Jerry Allen died and how his heart was removed. We were the main suspects, but we were cleared due to a lack of evidence. We never told anyone about the zombie. So no one ever went to look for it.
When Reed was out of recovery he asked us where his heart had come from. I told him that was something no-one was allowed to know. He had a hard time with that. He wanted to thank them. He wanted to say “Thanks for this swell new heart!” But something tells me that in this case, it is completely for the best.
I was almost a part of history because of how I almost died.
I was almost a part of history because of how I almost died. Or I should say, because of who almost killed me. You see, there was this famous killer that was up and going in the bay area in the late 1960′s. I won’t say much more than that. I’ll let you pick which one you think it is I’m talking about. Although, perhaps my story will inadvertently give it away.
It was late October and it was around three o’clock in the afternoon. I was sitting in a little clearing about a half mile off the main walking trails, in Otanama state park. This place was a little sanctuary for me. I had dragged a picnic table away from a campsite not far from there and I was sitting on it, smoking a joint, drinking some wine, and holding a picture, a picture of my ex-girlfriend.
It was taken three weeks prior at a dance. I was holding her hand and she held mine. She looked radiant in her blue dress and I looked equally dashing in my tuxedo. After the picture was taken I told her I loved her. And I meant it with all my heart. She said it back. And I believed it. She told me she was going to the bathroom. I kissed her on the cheek. She turns and goes. I don’t see her again for another hour. I go to look for her. I find her in the backseat of a car where another guy is fucking her brains out. She’s screaming, “Oh god, I’m gonna cum!” at the top of her lungs.
And so there I was on my little picnic table in a clearing in the forest. Drinking my wine, smoking my joint, and hating this bitch. I had written all over the picture, things like “Whore” and “Slut” and “Cunt.” I was writing on the back of it, planning ways to kidnap her and torture her. I had a very detailed explanation of how I wanted to shove barbed-wire in her snatch and make her gargle her own blood. I was not sane and I was vengeful.
It was at that moment that I first heard the sound of something moving in the woods.
I brushed it off, chalking it up to normal weed paranoia. I kept fixating on my picture, letting my thoughts and wants grow darker and more hateful. The sound came again, closer this time. I turned and looked over my shoulder and there he was.
He was tall, dressed all in black. He had a paper grocery bag around his head, bunched together at the neck with string and spray painted black. He had cut small ovals for eyes. In his right hand he had a small pistol and he held his left hand behind his back.
We stared at each other for a few seconds. He didn’t move and he didn’t speak. After a moment he flicked his gun hand at me, side to side, meaning he wanted me to move off of the table. I got up. He motioned for me to get down on the ground. I did. I heard the leaves crunch under his feet as he walked up to me. He brought his full weight down on my back, putting his knee right on my spine. He grabbed my hands with brutal strength, tied me tight. He turned around and pulled my feet up to my hands, tied them all together. I heard him cock the gun, and he jammed it into my right ear. He leaned over and whispered in my left.
“Mother says ok. There are lots of squirrels around here.”
I had no idea what to make of that, so I didn’t say anything at all. He smashed the butt of the gun into my right ear and the right side of my head lit up in blood and pain. He screamed into my left ear.
“MOTHER SAYS OK! THERE ARE LOTS OF SQUIRRELS AROUND HERE!”
“YES!” I yelled back at him. He got off of my back and stood in front of me. I saw him un-sheath a gigantic hunting knife. He moved the blade right up to my right eye and made several twisty motions with it before getting on my back again, his knee right on my spine, his full weight bore down on me. I waited for the stabbing to begin, praying that it would not be long and painful. But he didn’t do it. After a few seconds he got up and grabbed something off the picnic table. I couldn’t see what it was because he was completely behind me. He walked around to my front and shoved the picture under my nose.
“Who is this?” he asked. I stared down at the picture of my ex-girlfriend, at the vile words I’d written onto her. He flipped it over so I could see the back. I stared at the horrific plans I’d laid and wished upon her. “Who is mother says ok this?” he asked again.
“She’s mine.” I responded. I don’t know why those particular words came out of me. I meant something along the lines of “She’s my ex-girlfriend,” but that’s not what I said. “Oh,” he whispered, backed away with the picture, staring at it, standing silent. For a moment I thought he was going to ask me how he could find her. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d asked for that.
He walked back around me and cut my ties. He placed the picture back under my nose and whispered in my ear. “Enjoy.”
The blood from my ear was trickling into my mouth, tasting of copper and sweat. He told me to keep my head down and not move for five minutes. If I did, he said, He would shoot me from behind the trees. I did as I was told and waited five minutes before getting up and leaving.
When I got back to my house, I cleaned up my ear. I took the picture and burnt it. I took the ashes and buried them. I planted a tree over the burial spot. Over the next couple of days I saw this guys victims become icons in the news. In the years afterwards I saw them become mentioned in text-books and encyclopedias. My name was never brought up. The police never knew about my run-in with him.
I saw my ex-girlfriend frequently over the next years. I ignored her and pretended like she didn’t exist. She acted like that hurt her. If she only knew.
I can say, with some authority, that hell is immobility and constant sameness. I can say this because that is the hell I have endured for a long time. I have been forced to lie here, on my back, facing upward, into never ending darkness for that long. There is never any variation, at all, in what I see or hear or feel. I do not even have the comforting thought of being able to go insane. I will always, now and forever, be forced to deal with this monotony, until the reckoning, eons away, when christ comes to redeem mankind.
I was involved in labor relations in the 70′s. It’s a dirty secret that the mafia is involved in Unions. Always have been. But there was a change going through us back then that we might be able to do away with it. We were sick of the pensions always being ripped off. Word got around to the wrong people what we were trying to do however, and I was murdered. I was leaving the job site one evening when I was kidnapped, grabbed from behind and shoved into a car. I was driven to a remote spot where an overpass was under construction. I was blindfolded, a straw was inserted into my mouth and I was told to lie down. My legs and arms were bound and concrete was poured over me, right up to the point of being level with that straw.
I lingered on for some days, before I finally passed away. The road was finished over top of me and my small breathing hole filled up with so much dirt, over time, that my entire lungs, throat, and mouth are now packed with it.
Since then, I have been in a sense of total sensory deprivation.
I see nothing. I hear nothing. I smell nothing. I taste nothing. I feel nothing.
Over and over again.
Forever.
I don’t know if I went to hell and this is my punishment, or if my hell is being stuck in the moment of death for eternity. I do know that I would welcome any change, at all. I would welcome disembowelment and torture. No pain can ever be worse than the total sameness I’ve endure for only god knows how long.
Holy shit, the flowers are vomiting blood.
Holy shit, the flowers are vomiting blood. The daisies have cartoon eyes that are contorted in agony and blood is literally flowing from their mouths. Out of the corner comes a kitten walking upright, wearing full-on metal knight’s gear. Sword and shield and helmet and everything. He’s chopping all of the flowers down and flower-blood is spraying all over him, soaking his fur and staining his armor. He’s screeching and killing. The daisies keep on puking until he cuts them down. At last, as one single vomiting flower is left alive, The kitten-knight drops his sword and falls to all fours. He gives himself a lick-bath and sheds his armor.
Beneath him and off in the corner, the blood is standing inches deep. The soil beneath this all has formed a great big mouth, sucking and slurping at the carnage, swallowing and loving every stalk, petal and stem. The kitten cleans off the last of his fur and stands on his back legs, grabbing his sword and preparing to sever the last standing flower. The daisy is dry-heaving now, it’s white petals stained totally red. The kitten lifts the sword…
“What do you think?” She asks me, “Isn’t it lovely? I mean when I look at it I can just see that cute little kitten romping through the field and having a good time. It makes me kind of home-sick though. What do you think about it?” she asks me with her big wide blue eyes. Eyes that are incapable of comprehending the pain she’ll endure in less than two hours. The crowd at the little art gallery is shuffling around us, a small crowd has formed around our little painting of a kitten in a field.
“Well I guess I see the same thing as you, I guess.” I shrug my shoulders at her. No way is this bitch gonna know what I’m really thinking.
“Art’s not really you’re thing is it?” she asks. I imagine her face slit up and disfigured.
“No. Art’s not my thing.”
“Oh sweetie, that’s why I like you. You’ve put up with all of my interests even though they bore you. That’s so sweet!” she says while I picture her with empty eye sockets, black holes with nerves dangling where there ought to be eyes. “I tell you what, what do you say we go back to my place?”
“I’d like that.” I say.
“Alright then, let’s go.” I take her arm in arm and we walk out of the gallery. On the way out we pass another couple that is staring at a painting of abtract geometric shapes. the woman asks the man “What do you think?” His response: “I think that that circle is trying to fuck that rectangle.”
“Close,” I think to myself. “Close”
Mr. President, if you insist on acting like a spoiled child, we will treat you like one.
“Mr. President, if you insist on acting like a spoiled child, we’ll treat you like one. If you’re not responsible enough to clean up the messes you make, if you think it’s okay to just leave crap like this for someone else to handle, then you are nothing more than a spoiled brat who deserves a spanking. And with god as my witness, if you really were my child, I’d bend you over my knee and then make you go stand in the corner. I mean really, this is completely ridiculous. Let’s just think about this for a second. Would any other grown man, let alone elected official, be able to get away with what you’ve done? Would any small child get away with it for that matter?”
“N-n-no,” he says with his chin touching his chest, unable to look me in the eye.
“That’s right, no. Would you make your mother clean up the sort of stuff you’ve done in here?”
“N-n-n-no.”
“That’s right, no. So what makes you think it’s okay to make me do it, huh? You think because I’m just a cleaning lady that it’s okay to pee on the carpet and scribble on the wall with crayons?”
“No Ms. Alba-Lucia,” he says as he wipes his sniffles on his suit sleeve.
“Oh, it’s okay sweetie don’t cry. Just try to be more responsible okay? You’re a grown man. Act like it!”
“I will,” he says.
________________________________________________________________
But then of course the day dream ends and he walks in the room for real. He asks me the usual polite questions, I never bother to tell him about how hellish it is to clean up after him. What a pig. On my way out he asks me where his new issue of Mad Magazine is. I tell him it’s under the report on foreign intelligence filed by the joint chiefs. What a simpleton. I can’t believe they posted this job as requiring a four year degree.
Perhaps I will take up those Iranians on their offer to turn spy.
It really is a lovely planet.
It really is a lovely planet. It’s a shame that many of them don’t get to see it from out here. They can’t appreciate how insignificant they are. Indeed, in our dealings, most of them seem to think that they are of some great significance. It is ironic that my people have lost that perspective. We have forgotten what it is like to have a home. To have a sky and a sun and a moon. We have only had vast empty starfields for a long time, and nowhere for our people to rest. We have forgotten what it is like to matter.
So we move, looking for a potential home. This one could work. It feels right. It feels like home. It feels like a fresh start and a second chance.
It feels…
It feels…
It feels scary. If we fuck this one up then that’s it. No-more. We’ve been drifting for 150 years. We’re almost out of supplies. It’s smaller than the old one, with less water. But it’s still got beaches and forests, rivers and deserts and skies and clouds. It’s got oxygen.
We may have given up on god when the old world collapsed. We may have to bring him back to our hearts for this one. We may need him for our last chance.
I’d never met an actual circus announcer before.
I’d never met an actual circus announcer before. I wasn’t sure whether to believe him or not, but when I saw him standing there, with the spotlight falling on him, the cigarette smoke swirling around his tailcoats and the sawdust on the floor, I felt proud for him. I was glad he got to do what he wanted to do with his life. I saw him grab the overhead mic and his voice boomed into it.
“Sammy Joan, The Bearded LADY” he cries out as the opening processional marches around him. He announces the strong man, the acrobats, the elephants and lions. The clowns come by in their little cars and circle him. Everyone laughs as they stumble out of the tiny contraption, falling over each other in huge pratfalls. At last the laughter dies down and he holds the microphone out away from his face.
“Ladies and Gentleman,” he says and then takes a deep breath, “THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH!”
The spotlight dims and he drops his arms. As the light fades out I can see him light up a cigar and walk off into the darkness.
__________
Behind all of this, the doctors have given up on the crash cart and his heart monitor is making that steady loud whine that only means one thing. The attending doctor calls it. Time of death: 11:19 a.m. They slowly walk away from the table. A nurse pulls a sheet up and over his face. A new intern spots me behind the window that looks into the operating room.
“Hey,” he says, “You alright? You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“Every day,” I reply.
He doesn’t know what to make of my reply, whether I’m joking or not. I’m not. One of the older nurses grabs him and leads him away, explaining me to him as they toss their bloodied surgical aprons in the bio-hazard bin.
I’ve tried to explain death to them all before, that when you die you become the thing that you loved most about the world.
A hospital was both the ideal and worst choice for a person of my abilities.
Let’s follow the fireball as it travels through the building shall we? It begins at the roof, in an air vent where I’ve rigged a combination of heavy flammable gasses and hoses to force it in to the vents. I’ve had seven tanks pumping the gas into the system for the past ten minutes. Earlier I shut off the air conditioning. The worker bees have been sweltering for the past half hour and when I turn on the system again they’ll be so happy to have air that they’ll ignore the smell. Not that it matters, there’s so much of the shit waiting to hit the fan that they won’t have time to react.
Okay, he should be arriving back from lunch and sitting at his desk right now. Time to start the show. I dislodge the brick that’s preventing the main ventilation fan from turning and then shut off my hoses that go into the main air intake. I toss a match into the fan and then jump off the side of the building.
Gravity is pulling me down slightly faster than the gas is falling and burning through the building. I get to see the people see me and then get burnt alive. A few seconds later I see him. The moment only last hundredths of a second but my brain slows it all into slow motion.
He sees me. I see him. I flip him off. He burns to death.
I throw open my chute and fall safely down to the street below. Change is imminent now.
When you’re about to die, your life does NOT flash before your eyes. Not your complete life anyway. It’s more of a blooper reel. My low-lights included many things that I regret deeply. There was the time when, as a very young kid, I stayed up real late crying that I wanted to die, and I kept it up until my mom made me come stay in the bed with her. I only did it because I wanted the attention and after that night I never did it again. That’s only one though. There were many, dozens, of moments of physical intimidation where I did nothing to stand up for myself. There were the moments in high school, watching my ex-girlfriend fuck her new boyfriend at the prom after party, watching him squeeze her tits, seeing me and telling me to fuck off. And I just hang my head low and walk away.
At the exact moment when you know it’s coming, your death that is, your brain does this little pre-show where it tells you what to expect. Mine told me that it was gonna review those moments where I tapped out and quit. The times where I hit the bottom of the barrell. I realized that I fucking lived at the bottom of the barrell. The good times never came. And as I saw my ex-girlfriends face, contorted in orgasm and her new boyfriend having the time of his life, I saw the exact moment when I resigned myself to the whims of others, and their approval, forever more mattered more to me than my own. That moment saved my life.
I reached down, way deep down and found the fight inside myself. I kicked out with both legs and shoved the rapist off of me. His knife left a big tear in my throat but did not cut any major arteries. He stumbled backwards with this confused look on his face. I took that opportunity to run. I ran as fast as I could and went straight to the apartment of that ex girlfriend.
I knocked on the door where her new boyfriend was now her old husband. She answered the door and recognized me. She was more shocked at the blood on my throat than at seeing me for the first time in 5 years. I went in and kissed her before she could say anything. She did not pull away. She did not touch.
“You’re bleeding.” she says.
“Yes. And it’s about time you shared.” I say this and then go straight to the hospital.
