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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v099) (the October 2011 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:						This writing also appears in this 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback “Symbols Manifest” Order this 6" x 9" ISBN# book:

Order this writing in the book Bleeding Heart Cadaver (a Down in the Dirt collection book)		get the 320 page September-December 2011 Down in the Dirt magazine issue collection 6" x 9" ISBN# paperback book:

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You Find Yourself at a Loss

Tim Moraca

    On hands and knees and panting on the floor, a broken mirror reflects a fractured face you can’t recognize. Rivers of sweat drenching sickly green skin, bottom lip puffy like yesteryear’s cotton candy, but the eyes—hazy weights sunk deep—those are yours. Fragile and furry as white lab mice, the two orbs ransack the mirror’s crooked maze. But there’s no cheese, no start, no finish; no wanton scientist looms above, and the mice tails writhe through your brain and into your throat like tiny pink snakes and it makes you want to scream.
    The face in the broken mirror disappears.
    Under rows of blinding fluorescents, two walls and a scuffed marble floor fall away to a single point, the apex of an empty pyramid. The lines of intersection waver, curved rows of ants hypnotized, sucked out through the corner of the room. To escape! there, through the cold walls. If only the ants would pick you up and slip you out.
    Looking left and right, you grasp for a true exit. A young nurse sleeps in a sprinter’s stance by the water fountain. His scrubs are purple with cartoon squirrels and speech bubbles ordering, “Go nuts!” He’s a pretty boy, pompous, grades paid for by daddy, probably has a girlfriend, too.
    The squirrels prancing down his right side are soaked and dark, and a crimson puddle grows on the stone tiles below him.
    You shuffle and squeak across the floor and topple his slumped body, revealing his pale face. He shares your son’s arching forehead and wavy hair. Dread holds its blade to your heart; you don’t want your son to grow up like this nurse, murdered in his late twenties at work by some crazy. A shame, really. Unfortunate collateral of the recent chaos.
    Ammonia and lilies clash in the psych ward lobby. Opposite the nurse, the head security guard sits peacefully next to an old green couch. His belly fills his tan uniform and spills over his belt, and his hat barely hangs on to his tussled hair. Stretched wide in a V, his legs look relaxed, inviting as your parents’ when you were young. A thin, careful line treks across his jugular. Fresh blood trickles down his neck, a lively mountain stream over smooth pebbles. The serenity of outside beckons, but the victims are heavy shackles, pleading for a eulogy.
    A young woman in white, now red, is slung over the receptionist’s window. Her left arm drapes gracefully, reaching toward the ground, her slender hand curled as if to scoop vile smears off the floor’s natural brilliance. A stabbing sensation hits your gut and your brain as you rise to one foot, the other, then all limbs outstretched for balance. You stumble toward her in cumbersome boots. Her blond-streaked hair flutters angelic around her ear; a diamond stud earring catches the artificial light and radiates rainbows. She is so beautiful. She always was.
    The buzz of the lights and electronics grows and saturates the room, and you wince and turn away from her.
    Lying face-down, the fourth body is splayed as if his appendages are tied by rope to bed posts. You remember him from the papers, the madman who raped and murdered a handful of homeless women last autumn. He was the target, yes. The others were not, but it doesn’t matter now. The rest of the building’s occupants evacuated, lucky for them.
    You roll the patient over and grimace. His garments and skin are sliced from throat to waist, and his eyes are open, wide with shock, sparkling teal, and cutting through to your insides, to a place where night reigns under physical layers. His lip is raw and bulging. You brush the tender wound on your face. Too much like your own. But you are not him; you cannot be insane, not like him. You are the innocents, those pure and tragic martyrs.
    Sirens encroach upon the room’s white noise.
    You sigh and shut the patient’s eyelids.
    Of course you are him. He has eyes and skin and blood, too. The four bodies rest in your hesitant presence, awaiting judgment already received. Their deaths plead for closure, for acceptance, for sympathy. You are all of them, and you want to drag them together in a pile and hug them tightly and tell them you’re sorry they’re dead. It’s not your fault. It might be your fault. You are good and evil, both at once, forever until death when you are neither: just an old vessel tattered and discarded, buried or burned. You want to die now, if only to escape the loneliness.
    A megaphone booms, seeping through doors and windows. “We’re coming in.”
    “For who,” you think. “For me? None of us is any better or worse, not the handsome nurse or the brave guard or the pretty girl or the evil criminal, or me.”
    You panic and drop to the floor, imitating the dead. You did this. No, you couldn’t have done this. They are not strangers, but neighbors, friends, family, love. You must help them, even as the ants ignored your plea for escape. You must become their flawed hero, recomposed of the scraps of their corpses. Oh, to break free and wash away existence, but, so much stronger, entranced by the need to stay stuck here, never forgetting, images branded into your squishy, throbbing brain, melancholic and marinating in human accord.
    A commotion down the hall, and, “You! Who are you? Put your hands where we can see them!”
    You did this. No, you couldn’t have done this. You hate them all; you love them, too. What were you thinking? Who do you think you are?
    In the broken mirror, everything else disappears. These leaden boots, these ruby-stained fingers and submerged eyes, this whimsical burden of life, these are you.

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