down in the dirt
welcome to volume 21 (May 2005) of
internet issn 1554-9666
(for the print issn 1554-9623)
Alexandira Rand, Editor
http://scars.us.com - click on down in the dirt
down in the dirt
welcome to volume 21 (May 2005) of
internet issn 1554-9666
(for the print issn 1554-9623)
Alexandira Rand, Editor
http://scars.us.com - click on down in the dirt
“It’s a story as common as a penny, son--
I don’t think it’s worth anything to anyone.”
Ani di franco
At 78 rapes per hour i’d say as a country we’re coming
Along nicely If you’d like to cut
Up the women that’s 1.3 a minute I’m a cut up woman
Undone and unstitched the man (men later on
) was so unsorry i was 31 per cent of the women who suffered
Rr-ptsd (rape related-post traumatic stress disorder) the first man
I’d say after i was pretty stressed but after the second year it was rather
Routine the second man i was just delirious i think i was seeing things
Definitely i saw a
Gun
I was twice
One
Of 1/3 of women who will be assaulted in her life as a country
We’re doing quite nicely we’re well acquainted with our rapists 78 per
Cent of us know us our attackers that’s nice for us at least we can say hi
3.24.2005
Statistics taken from the help line, usa inc.
Danny Spokes started up his Rodeo, and backed out of his parking spot in front of the Vitamin Cottage. Pammy is going to get a kick out of this, he thought, remembering the strange incident that had just occurred at the counter, while he was buying a new bottle of vitamin C.
At home, he called out, and Pammy answered from the bathroom. Kitchen smells good, he thought, she must have made supper again. They had been seeing each other for six months now, and living together for two weeks. They were kinda like newly weds-- ‘He brought home the bacon, she fried it up in a pan, and never-ever let him forget he was a man’....He smiled, remembering that cheesy jingle from the 70’s.
Pamela B. Rhimes, Pammy for short, was in the bathroom when she heard Danny come in. “In here”, she answered, when he called her name. “I can’t believe we’ve been living together for going on three weeks now, it’s so cool, like we’re married or something”. She checked her makeup in the mirror a final time, and grinned, the stew in the crock pot was fine, just enough time for a quickie before supper. Under her bathrobe she had on her very sexy, but very uncomfortable underwear. But that was ok, she thought, she wouldn’t have to wear them for long.
Danny looked up from studying the label on the new vitamin bottle when he heard Pammy come out of the bathroom. “Hey good lookin’ what you got cookin’, smells good, what ever it is”. She gave him a big, a mischievous smile and said, “Supper will keep, we’re having dessert first tonight”. Man, Danny thought, I’ve got to be the luckiest dude alive, and chased her back to the bedroom.
Afterwards, as they lay side by side in bed, Pammy was feeling a little concerned. “Honey, do you feel alright?” she asked.
“I feel great, why?”
She rolled to her side, facing him, and placed a palm on his forehead. “Well, you feel really hot, like you got a fever or something. Sure you feel ok?” Danny turned his head towards her and smiled.
“Yeah, I feel totally fine. Hey, that reminds me, I forgot to tell you about this freaky thing that happened at the vitamin store”. Pammy propped herself up on her elbow to listen.”Well,” Danny began, “I was in line behind this fat, old hag waiting to check out, but she was bitching at the girl behind the counter about prices or something. I mean, she just wouldn’t let it go. The girl was totally freaking out, and this crazy hag wouldn’t shut up. Finally, I was like screw this, and told the bitch to pay up or get out of line. Then, and here’s the freaky part, she whipped around on me fast, like a wrinkled up ninja, and then get this, she covered an eye with one of her hands, and pointed at me with the other and said something like, ‘Deeincendo corpis human’ something or other, and stormed out the door. She was weird looking too, dusty black dress, about six miles of grey hair piled on her head, and her teeth looked like old wood....oh yeah, and I shit you not, both her canine teeth were gold.
When Pammy stopped laughing, she said, “Jesus, Danny, something like that could only happen to you. What do you think it was she said? Sounds like those kind of words doctors use for bones and diseases and stuff, Greek, I think”. Danny thought about it for a second.
“Well, she did have a funny accent, like that old, black-and-white Dracula... Hey, let’s go eat, I’m starving”.
While Danny ate, Pammy found a pen and paper, and a digital thermometer, and then sat down at the dinner table across from him. “Tell me what that lady said again, I’m going to try and look it up on line. And, here, stop eating for a sec, let’s see what your temperature is, it still totally feels like you’re burning up”. He took the thermometer, put it in his mouth, and waited for it to beep.
“It’s broken”, he said, and handed the thermometer back.
“Well that’s weird”, Pammy said, “I tried it out on myself, before I gave it to you.” The little screen was blank, so she reset it and stuck it under her tongue. When it beeped she said, “Look, 98.4, it’s not broke, try again”. He did, and got the same result as the first time.
“Weird!, But, whatever, it doesn’t matter. I still feel fine”. Pammy, however, remained concerned.
“Well, if you’re like this tomorrow morning, you’ll go to the doctors, right? Promise me, Danny, ok?” Danny put his hand on her shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze.
“Ok, ok, I promise”.
But in the morning, he felt too good to go to the doctor. In fact, he felt awesome. Shaving, Danny noticed he looked a bit red in the face. That’s just a little sun and the rosy glow of youth, he told his reflection. Man! Do I feel great.
He arrived at the office early, but instead of the usual coffee, he filled his mug with water, drank it down, and filled it again. A tad parched, he thought, as he whistled his way down the hall to his cubicle, or coffin-cube, as his work buddy Larry called them. As usual, Larry was waiting on him when he got there.
“Hey, Dan-o, how’s it go....dude, what the fuck’s up with your face?” Danny put a hand to his cheek.
“What do you mean? What’s wrong with my face?” Larry was wearing a strange, lopsided grin as he stared at his friend.
“Did you stick your head in a paint bucket? You look like an idiot. I mean, your face is redder than a dog’s dick. Go to the bathroom and look at yourself, man!”
But Danny wasn’t listening, he was staring into his coffee mug. The water seemed to be boiling. He dropped the mug, and looked up in a daze, “What? What did you say?”
“I said, go take a look at yourself, klutz! Jesus, man, get a grip, you’re falling the fuck apart!” And then the phone rang, snapping Danny out of his stupor.
“Danny, is that you?” It was Pammy on the line and she sounded excited. “You didn’t go to the doctors did you? Don’t answer, I know you didn’t”.
“Sorry”, he said weakly, “what’s up?”
“Listen to this,” she began, “I looked up those words that lady said to you yesterday, took me like forever. Anyways, they’re Latin, not Greek like I thought.” “Oh yeah,” Danny said, “well, what do they mean?” From behind him, he thought he heard Larry shout, “Dude, your fucking sport coat is starting to smoke!,” But all his attention was on Pammy.
“Tell me if this is exactly what she said”, and then she read, “De Incondis Corporis Humani Spontanis,...well? Is that what she said?”
“Yes,” Danny muttered quietly, “that’s exactly what she said...what does it mean?”
“It means, spontaneous human combust”.....but the phone went dead. Danny stared at the receiver in his hand, and saw it had melted.
“But I feel fine,” he whispered.....
Ten hours later, after the fire trucks and ambulances had left and all but one police cruiser remained at the scene of the fire, two men stood on the sidewalk in front of the burnt out husk that was all that remained of Danny’s office building. One was Officer Whilham and the other was Danny’s friend, Larry Fine.
“Sir, please state your name.”
“Larry Fine.”
“Your full name, sir.”
“Larry Joeseff Fine.”
“Mr. Fine, you say you witnessed everything that happened here today?”
“Yes, most of it.”
“And, you are a work associate of Mr. Spokes?”
“Yeah, we’re friends.”
“Ok, Mr. Fine, in your own words, describe to me what you saw today.”
Who else’s words would I use, dick-brain, “Ok, your honor, this is what went down, believe me or not.
“I got to work when I usually do, around quarter to eight. Danny showed up about five minuets later like normal, except his face was all red. I mean really red, like a tomato.”
“And this wasn’t usual?,” asked the officer.
“Fuck no, this wasn’t usual! Didn’t you hear me!? I mean his face was like super duper fucking red, unnatural, freaky-fruitcake red, Jesus!”
“Ok, calm down, Mr. Fine. Please continue, but without the swear words, please.”
“Sweet, fatass mother of Buda, give a guy a break! My best friend’s head flamed up like a Bic lighter, and you want me talk like a sticky-crack little girl scout? What the fuck, man?”
Officer Whilham considered this for a moment. “Ok, you’ve made your point, sir. Now just calm down and finish with your story, please, so we can both go home.
“Yeah, whatever,” Mother Teresa. “I’ll wrap it up quick. So, his face was RED, like I said. And then it kept getting darker and redder, darker and redder, until it was almost black. And then...his cloths started smoking.
“Mmmmmmmmm, I seeeeeeeeeeee. And then what happened Mr. Fine?”
Larry pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes shut, and shook his head. “Giant, red monkeys flew out of his ass. And I was there, and you were there, toto and the fucking tin-man were there!...You know what happened next!”
“Well, why don’t you just tell me again, Mr. Fine, to make sure I have it right.”
“Why yes, your honor, I’d be glad to enlighten you further....And then, what happened next was my best friend in the whole wide world, went poof! Then Blam! Then shazzam, god damn son of sam, wham bam thank you mam, green eggs and fucking ham!!! He caught on fire, is what he did, and then....he just....walked away....” Larry sagged to his knees, spent, and began weeping softly. “He just walked away, starting the building on fire wherever he stepped, happy as you please, his whole body a torch like that rug-muncher Joan of Fuckn’ Arc.”
The scanner in Officer Wilham’s squad car hissed, and a cackly voice came across the speaker.
“All units to 16th street on the West side, ASAP. The whole quarter is on fire and people are starting to riot.” Larry slowly looked up after the call finished and a huge grin split his face.
“The last thing that crazy mother fucker said to me after he blazed up was, ‘Larry my boy, tonight I’m gonna paint the town RED!’”
i’d like to think it a dance
of intricate proportions
advance forth
two three
cower back
two three
fist grips hair, pulling quickly
head bobs down
two three
slapping in rhythm
to some inaudible tune
spit blood
two three
choke back vomit
two three
eyes swell against the pain
ribs sore and raw
taunting
two three
nothing quite like the abuse tango
“Boy, say grace!” Charles demanded.
“Dad, you crazy,” Deshawn protested.
“I’ll knock you upside the head again,” Charles threatened.
“Say grace!” Dolores hissed at her son.
“Yah, Deshawn,” LaTonya agreed, “don’t be slowin’ dad down.”
“Alright, alright,” Deshawn consented. He shook his head and said guiltily, “Lord, thank you for the food we are about to receive. Please watch over us and protect us and keep us...in the name of our Lord...” He broke off his prayer and cursed under his breath. “I can’t say it, dad.”
“You better say it, boy!”
“Dad, I ain’t lying. I can’t!”
Charles grunted and finished his son’s sentence, “...in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, amen.”
The family winced at the words. But it wasn’t long before they were smacking their lips at their dinner spread: a syringe, an animal corpse blood-drain funnel connected to a clear plastic medical bag, connected to tubes, leading to three cups, one before each family member, except Charles.
Charles had a cleaver, a modified long-handled tool of his trade as a butcher, with a sharpened shaft end. He stood up and held it high, just below the blade, then arched it down through the air. It stuck with an echo in the center of the table.
“If I wake up as one a you, you gonna spend eternity as pieces. Understand?”
Charles looked at each member of his family, waiting for consent. Yes, they nodded, one by one. He began.
Charles jimmied the syringe to the blood drainer. With all else connected and ready to go, Charles jammed the syringe into his arm. Blood leapt into the bag and, with the squeeze of the bag with his free hand, oozed into the tubes. His family watched each others’ tubes like balls in a tennis game, bouncing back and forth between the lines to see which of them would score first. They couldn’t help but bare their fangs. They couldn’t help but lose their civility once that first drop of blood hit Deshawn’s porcelain. The plan had been to wait for the cups to fill. But LaTonya grabbed at her tube and punched it through the circle of her lips. Deshawn let the drop in his cup wait for later and grabbed for his tube as well. Even Dolores, unwilling to waste time chastising her children, went for her share. The bag was quickly emptied. The family was soon sucking the life directly out of its father.
“Ain’t gonna be like you,” Charles cursed.
Although dizzy, he moved as quickly as them to pull the syringe out of his arm, ripping flesh and spraying blood across the table. When family eyes widened at the spray, Charles tucked his spurting arm into his body and squeezed it with all his remaining strength...which started to ebb...as his dizziness grew...from the blood drained from his body.
It took all he had left to pull the shirt from his body and tie it into a tourniquet over the wound. He sagged from the effort, too tired to lift himself, then squinted, too tired to even lift his eyes. The little he could see began to shimmer, especially the metal of that cleaver, stuck in the table between Charles and his approaching family.
They were licking the table, finding every bit of blood in a trail that led to him. he could feel his head falling forward towards them and the tabletop as he began to lose consciousness...
Charles was covered in blood as he often is. Trafficking in meat at Chuck’s Chop Shop is messy business. But prideful. Charles created the business in 1985. It was the culmination of over a decade of toil that included jobs at K-Mart, Get Your Liquor, the Sunrise Sanitation Company, and countless years at the Slab, a backbreaking slaughterhouse that injured as many workers as cows. Charles was no fool. He’d been suffering those years to save up for something of his own, something he’d enjoy, something he’d be good at. Charles could chop meat.
The evidence was hidden behind pink and yellow window signs touting: “Fresh Beef 30 cents/pound,” “Whole Chickens,” “Full Deli,” and more; on top of blue reflective film that kept out the sun and invited customers in from it. Those that ventured inside would see huge sections of meat hung like art over refrigerator displays of cold cuts surrounding shelves of marinades, sauces and seasonings.
But on this day, Charles had decided to take a break from the cool humid stench of his butcher shop and step outside into the day’s searing heat. That’s when he saw her. The second Charles saw Dolores, he knew she was too good for him. She was a striking six-foot-tall woman made taller with a head wrap and made, well...more striking with hip hugging booty-framing jeans and a tight, umm...uplifting green blouse; green on black sun-shining skin: Damn, you fine, Charles thought, I mean fuh-ine!
But what he said was, “Good afternoon, ma’am.”
She smiled and kept on.
But Charles kept on too, watching as she made her way down the street, past brothas who had a lot more to say than him, down to a beauty salon where she worked helping other women be like her.
So the next day, around the same time, Charles found himself out in the sun again.
“Baby, you lookin’ good today,” he tried.
She smiled.
And the next day, “My name is Charles.”
Another smile.
And the next day, “I own this place.”
Another smile. But this time, he didn’t let it go at that. “You like ribs, right?, he added, “Let me get your family some ribs? Okay? Come on, what do you say? Can I?”
She paused and tossed back her head in coy surprise, smiling wider before turning it into a sly smirk. She looked down the street at the other men watching them both. The wide smile came again. Then she looked back at Charles and said, “Yes.” She said yes! She...she actually said yes! Charles was happy she said yes. He was so happy she said yes that he didn’t question it. On another day, when he asked her out on a date and she said yes, he didn’t question it, even though she had claimed to be busy three times before. On another day, when she let him kiss her after turning her cheek four times, he didn’t question it. When she let him make love to her, after saying she wasn’t attracted to him, he didn’t question it. When she said she would marry him, but cried afterwards, he didn’t question it. He was so happy. Because from the day he met Dolores, he knew she was too good for him.
And as evidence, she spared him reminders. She dutifully brushed off the attentions of the men along his street. She gave Charles three healthy children: Deshawn, LaTonya and baby Precious. She quit her job at the salon to raise those children so that Charles could concentrate on his Chop Shop. She settled for sweatpants over summer dresses and traded in mortgage dreams for rental realities. And she had food ready for him when he came home from work; and energy to put the kids down for bed and ready the next day’s school lunches while Charles complained of tiredness, soaked his feet, and played with the remote.
So when Dolores asked to spend a few hours out Thursday night having drinks with a friend, he didn’t question it; even though he didn’t know who the friend was. The request was strange, but she deserved so much more than a night free of lunches and bottle feedings. For she had given him so man yeses, how could he not return the favor?
The time alone felt awkward, but he felt better about his decision when she returned home soon enough to rub his back before bed, tuck him in, and make love to him. And despite the smell of alcohol, she still smelled good.
But when she asked again the following Thursday, he felt himself tested. He thought to ask, “with who?” And he considered other accusative questions like, “You ain’t gonna be doin’ this every week, are you?” And he must have worn those questions of his face. Because Dolores held his cheeks in her hands and said, “Baby, it’s just with Lena, an old friend from the salon.” And she smiled. And Charles felt a fool.
But Charles wasn’t a fool. Or so he repeated to himself as he lay up in bed that night waiting for her to return. And said again when he awoke alone in bed the next morning, her side unused. “I ain’t no fool,” he said to Dolores, when he found her in the kitchen, cooking breakfast.
“Baby, I’m sorry,” Dolores began right away. “I was feelin’ sick last night and went to sleep on the couch. I didn’t want you to catch what I got,” she explained. It was hard not to take her seriously. She looked pale, like white on black, except in the circles around her eyes. Her smile was a painful frown that looked like nausea. And her eyes were raw-hamburger red.
“Baby, you okay?” Charles asked, genuinely concerned.
“I don’t know, sugar. But I plan on takin’ it easy.”
“No more going out?” Charles checked.
“I might even call you to get the groceries,” she added.
“Whatever you need, baby,” Charles assured her, moving close for a hug.
She shook her head, no.
Charles took her “no” graciously, but noted it, and still felt it long after he had left the house for work.
Dolores didn’t call. But Charles still came home late from work with groceries.
An upset LaTonya opened the door. “There you are!” she complained.
“What? Is mom okay?”
“I came home to the baby cryin’ and all the windows drawn and mom back in her room, lookin’ like she ain’t moved all day.”
“Is she alright?” Charles asked.
“I’m alright,” Dolores answered as she stepped into the room. She actually looked much better. Although still in her nightgown, hair clipped, without make-up, her eyes were clear and her frown was gone.
“Has the sickness gone away?”
“Seems to.”
“You still look a little pale.”
“That’s nothing.”
“What’s LaTonya complainin’ for?”
“I don’t know,” Dolores answered.
“Whatever,” LaTonya huffed.
“Where’s Deshawn?” Charles asked.
“He ain’t been here,” LaTonya argued. “He don’t know. He just got in.”
“Alright.” Charles looked between his daughter and wife as if judging a contest between them. “Everything’s cool,” Charles stated.
Dolores nodded. She gave a weak smile.
The following day, it was still daylight when Charles arrived home.
Again, LaTonya met Charles at the door, this time with a self-righteous smile of her own.
Charles guessed at its origin. “Where’s mom?” he asked.
“Back in her room,” she said smugly.
Charles stepped in and turned right for it. The baby cried in the background. Charles wondered if LaTonya had left Precious crying for his benefit. At the door, Charles turned the knob and broke in on darkness.
“Told you,” LaTonya called behind him.
“What’s going on?!” Charles called at blackness. “Uggh,” he heard a groan of complaint. He stepped in and started pulling shades anyway.
“No, no, no, NO!” Dolores protested with such vehemence that he stopped after the first window. He was further stopped when he turned to look at his wife.
She lay half-covered in the sheets on her bed, cowering from the daylight. In her same nightgown, she now looked sick as ever.
“What have you been doin’ all day?!” Charles asked, incredulous.
“I need sleep,” Dolores complained. “Close that shade. CLOSE IT!”
Charles closed it.
“You need to get to a hospital! That’s what you need.”
“No, Charles. Please. Just let me sleep. Please.”
“The baby’s crying.”
“Take care of her for me, will you, honey?” she pleaded.
“Dolores, this ain’t right.”
“Honey, PLEASE?!”
A wail from the baby led Charles out of the room. He corralled LaTonya ahead of him, pushing her into the room she shared with Precious.
“I ain’t takin’ care of that baby,” LaTonya argued. “I don’t care it it’s in my room. I ain’t its momma.”
“Shut up, girl! I’ll do it!”
Despite sun-yellow walls and forest-green trim, the room stank of feces. The baby’s cries were intercut with whimpers. Charles was afraid until he saw the baby’s flush red cheeks and felt its solid grip on his comforting hand.
“Get some formula,” Charles told LaTonya.
“I ain’t no...”
“I said get some formula!” Charles commanded.
LaTonya left.
Charles undid the baby’s diaper. It was filed with a day’s worth of feces. The baby’s butt was raw red.
“You tryin’ to get C.P.S. in here!?” he called back to Dolores.
LaTonya returned with the formula while Charles wiped Precious clean and gently pulled a new diaper tight around the baby. Charles sat on LaTonya’s bed and muttered complaints to himself while feeding Precious. LaTonya stood over him, hands on hips, tapping her feet.
“You’re stayin’ home with momma tomorrow,” Charles informed her.
“Oh, hell no. That’s your kid.” She pointed at Precious.
“And your my kid. And I say you’re stayin’ home!”
“They won’t let me miss school.”
“I’ll write you a note.”
“I can’t miss another day.”
“You’re gonna.”
LaTonya stormed off, leaving Charles alone with Precious. Already done with half the bottle, the baby had been famished. Charles tucked his girl closer in against his torso and met her thankful little eyes with his own while the sun set around them.
When he finally left the room again, he was met by a refreshed Dolores, free of all sickness except for her paleness.
“I feel better now, energetic,” she assured him throughout the night until he fell asleep alone, less energetic than her after a harder day than he was used to.
He woke up with her next to him, fully asleep. He tried to elbow her awake, but she might as well have been dead. There was no waking her. He didn’t have time to keep trying. He had to get to work. Which made it particularly irritating to find Deshawn in the bathroom.
“Get outta there, boy! I’ve got to get ready for work.” “Just a sec, dad,” Charles heard through the door. “I’m feelin’ sick.”
“You been stayin’ out all night again? I told you if I hear something bad from the school, I’m gonna have to put you in check.”
“Nah, dad. It ain’t like that. I’m sick, that’s all.”
After a short wait, the door opened revealing a Deshawn as haggard as Dolores.
“You got what mom got?”
“I don’t know, dad. I just feel real bad.”
“Stay home if you need.”
“Alright.”
Charles couldn’t do much more for anybody. Except to warn LaTonya, “Don’t catch what they got.” He left for work and returned afterwards to the same: Dolores and Deshawn bedridden and LaTonya complaining.
“I ain’t watchin’ them tomorrow,” LaTonya declared.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take ‘em,” Charles volunteered. “Take ‘em to a damn hospital.”
LaTonya was happy to close the door on her family, even if she had to take Precious with her.
Charles wasn’t happy. Even after Dolores and Deshawn appeared professing their health, Charles scowled, unconvinced. Instead, he flipped his channels with conviction, frustrated by their glib recoveries and irritated at the prospect of missing the next day’s work regardless. Once he put himself to bed, restless sleep came easily. It became particularly restless when Charles was torn awake by a scream in the middle of the night. Charles leapt out of bed and to the door so fast, he barely kept his legs under him. “GET OFFA ME!” he heard LaTonya’s voice. Charles stumbled through the dark into the shadows of LaTonya’s room where a fight was going on.
Someone laid atop LaTonya, pinning her under the covers while struggling with her. But LaTonya fought back, slapping at his face, knocking back his hands and screaming as if she was losing.
Charles didn’t give her the chance. He grabbed two fists full of the attacker’s collar at the back of the neck and wrenched him free from LaTonya. With a twist of his hips, Charles directed the attacker’s momentum, with a thud, into the wall. The attacker slumped in Charles’ arms. Charles let him drop. The attacker covered his face with his arms. Charles mistook shame for defense.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” the attacker cried.
“Deshawn?”
“Dad, I’m sorry.”
Charles slapped his son atop the head. “Boy, what are you doing!?”
“He tried to bite me!” LaTonya screamed hysterically. “Look at his teeth!”
“Deshawn?” Charles threatened.
“I’m sorry, dad,” Deshawn whined.
“Show me your teeth.”
“Dad...”
“I’ll knock you stupid.”
Deshawn guiltily bared his fangs.
Charles slapped him hard. “Get to your room,” he demanded. “You’re in trouble.”
Deshawn scrambled through the door on all fours.
“You all right, LaTonya?” Charles checked.
“The baby woke me,” LaTonya explained, “right before Deshawn came in. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have seen him. He tried to bit my neck. He’s crazy.”
“He’s sick. I’m a handle this,” Charles promised.
LaTonya checked the baby then followed her father to Deshawn’s room. Charles left her behind the closed door. But LaTonya could hear the happenings inside. Charles was screaming angry. Yells were punctuated with slaps and thuds and breaking things. LaTonya whispered, “Damn,” ‘cause she’d heard dad go off on Deshawn many times, yell, hit, and throw things, but never like this. She might have worried about Deshawn if she wasn’t so scared by him and pissed at him. Shit, she should be beating him, she told herself. But then things got silent. And then she heard the belt. Smack, smack, smack. She could never do that.
When dad came out, he was sweating, exhausted from beating his son.
“He ain’t gonna hurt you no more,” he proclaimed. Satisfied, he staggered to his bedroom and closed the door. In less than a minute, he opened it again.
“Where’s mom?” Charles asked.
“I don’t know,” LaTonya answered.
She wasn’t in bed. She wasn’t home. Charles felt his exhausted body fuel with anger again. He put a hand to his belt buckle, then made it into a fist. So she’s out there, he told himself, like when she was drinking. Only she didn’t ask this time. It’s like that now. He started for the door, resolved to search the city for her and drag her home; but then stopped, knowing home was his best chance to find her. He cursed her and pleaded with her all at once in his head. And it exhausted him again. So he settled down on the couch.
“Just go to your room and watch the baby,” he told LaTonya.
And he waited.
Dolores got home at 5:18 and 23 seconds in the morning. She turned the key and tumbled the lock slowly, just like a criminal. It gave Charles time for his eyes to moisten and his jaw to clench tight, as he pre-played the words.
“Where have you been?”
Dolores slid in just as the words hit her, caught in a motion she would reverse if she could. She hung her head as if a spotlight was upon her. Had one been, it would have illuminated a black evening dress, high-heel shoes, and make-up. Charles hadn’t seen her dressed like that in years.
“Where have you been!?”
“Out,” she whispered.
“Out!? Out where?!”
She turned her head away from his at first, then decisively brought it back and lifted it to face his spotlight. Charles searched her face for defiance or remorse, but found nothing there. Meanwhile, he huffed and grimaced, giving her plenty to react to. She might as well have been blind.
“Who you been with?!” Charles demanded. He stepped forward and clamped her arm, trying to grab her attention along with it.
“I can smell him on you,” he said with disgust, throwing her arm down to her side. “Who is it? Tell me!? Who got you sick!?”
She solemnly replied, “I don’t feel sick.”
Then she looked at him. She let her top fangs peek below her upper lip. “I feel alive!” she yelled, then turned and stomped towards their bedroom.
Charles rushed to meet her at the door. He held an arm in the way and the other at his belt buckle. What was he going to do? Beat her like he beat Deshawn? Would that make her stay home?
“Get out of my way!” Dolores demanded. The sun was coming out soon.
“Mom? Dad?” LaTonya asked from her doorway.
“Get in your room and mind your own business!” Dolores commanded.
“I don’t want you going out anymore,” Charles demanded Dolores in turn.
Dolores cocked her arm back near her waist, as if there was a belt there.
“You let me in there!” she screamed.
“No.”
She looked at the windows, then at Charles, then LaTonya, then back into the house. She sprinted for Deshawn’s room and tossed open the door to darkness.
But she didn’t enter. She stood there then jerked around.
“How dare you,” she called with an angry chill in her voice.
Behind her, Deshawn lay beaten and tied to the bed with sheets.
Dolores screamed back to Charles and LaTonya, “You expect me to stay locked up in here all day and night. At least you’ve got a job or school to get you outta here. I’ve got a baby for company all day. You feel me? And now that I’m gettin’ mine, you both cryin’ ’bout the same thing. Well, you can spend some time makin’ up for the time I’ve served in this house...in this prison!
She leapt into the room and worked at the bed. “Go son!” she declared. “Get some quick!”
Deshawn broke through the window of his room out into the diminishing night.
Dolores stomped out of the room triumphantly and pushed past her husband into her own bedroom and slammed the door. What could he have done? Beat her like Deshawn? Would that have made her stay home? Charles ran out of gas, exhausted again, before the answers came. When Deshawn jumped back into his room, covered in blood and eyes wide with delight. Charles let him slam his own door without protest. He let LaTonya slink back into her bedroom without comment.
Charles fell back onto the couch. He sat there kneading his brow, trying to massage the tissue past his skull, which was equally exhausted by the thoughts that flipped through his mind as he struggled with the change, the loss of stability in his relationship with Dolores. He went through all the phases of grief. DENIAL: “This can’t be happening,” he told himself. “Vampires aren’t real. But losing Dolores is. Vampire or not, she’s changing, leavin’ him, choosin’ someone else.” ANGER: He was so mad at her condition. He rose from the couch with the sun.
He opened the door on a dark bedroom, drapes drawn. First, he drew back her covers. She slept coffin-style, arms and legs stiff straight. Then the drapes. Light flashed onto her, igniting her skin, which popped and steamed like chicken breast in a microwave. Dolores woke to it, screaming and hissing in pain. “Feel like I feel,” Charles thought to himself. “Burn.”
“Charles!” she pleaded, “you’re killing me!”
“What am I doing? I am killing her,” he agreed. He snapped the drapes shut and stepped away from the window like a soldier dropping his gun. He followed the rising steam to her blistered body. Dolores moaned and writhed in agony. GUILT: “What have I done? What have I been doing? Why are we here? Maybe it’s me. If I could have been home more... If I talked to Dolores to make sure she was happy... Maybe she wouldn’t be a burning vampire. Damn!” Charles cursed. “It don’t matter why we’re here!” Charles reached out to Dolores, but didn’t touch her. He grabbed the covers and pulled them over her. “I gotta fix this! But I can’t fix this.” DESPAIR: “This is bigger than me, much bigger than me.” Charles went to his dresser and opened the bottom drawer. Even in the darkness, he could make out the shapes of its contents: the Bible and crucifix his mom had given him for his wedding day. He pulled out the crucifix and spoke aloud to the man nailed to it. “Jesus, what am I gonna do? Ain’t no amount of cheek turnin’ gonna solve this one. Damn, they’d bite my cheek if I turned it at ’em.” He looked at the wooden figurine as if it might reply. Getting none, he tossed it back into the drawer and kicked it shut.
ACCEPTANCE: Charles walked over to the bed and slipped into the covers. He touched Dolores’ cold skin at the waist and caressed it like he would to signal he wanted to make love to her. There was no response. He brought his hand up to her neck and found two healing puncture wounds. He followed the contour of her pale blistered arm down to her wrist and felt for a pulse. She was dead to him.
LaTonya woke Charles a few hours later. “I fed the baby. I’m going to school,” she informed.
Charles moaned in response and tossed himself back to sleep. He would sleep in with the rest of the family, confident their sleep will be at least as deep as his. He failed to take into account the baby, who woke him with her cries before 10am. Charles changed her diaper then slept a little longer on LaTonya’s bed. Precious woke him again for food an hour later. He was stuck away then, with nothing to do but check on Precious until LaTonya returned after school. He didn’t mind. He was even thankful. If not for Precious, his only company would be the dead.
When LaTonya stepped through the door, both she and Charles greeted each other with, “We’ve gotta talk.”
But Charles did most of the talking. “They sick. Someone got your mother sick and she passed it to Deshawn. And if we don’t keep an eye on them, they gonna pass it onto someone else or even us.”
“What are we gonna do?” LaTonya asked.
“I don’t know but we gotta be together on this. I need you. You might complain a lot and all but I could always count on your more than Deshawn. I ain’t never needed you more than now, ain’t ever needed anyone as much as this.”
“Alright, dad.”
Charles hugged LaTonya. “Thank you.
“Here’s the plan. I need to talk to Deshawn. I need you to watch mom.”
“I ain’t going in there.”
“Watch her from the door.”
“Okay.”
So Charles stepped into Deshawn’s room and waited for the sun to set so his son would rise. The smell in there was different from his bedroom’s. Sweat mixed with bad breath. Maybe there was some humanity left in Deshawn. Maybe it was the absence of the smell of burnt flesh.
“Dad?”
“Son.”
“I need blood, dad.”
Charles sat next to his son at the edge of the bed. He held his hands together as if in prayer and spoke softly. “I know...but I need you to...I can’t let you get it. You’re gonna hurt somebody to get it. I can’t have any son of mine hurting anybody. There’s too many kids wrapped up in gang life and bad things. I didn’t make it this far by stepping on anyone’s toes. I made mine by doing good. And you’re supposed to take over for me, not end up in some jail somewhere wasting a life.”
“Dad, it hurts. This is different.”
“No, son. It’s not.”
“I need it dad.”
“No, boy.”
“I’m getting stronger than you, dad,” Deshawn said plainly.
Charles stopped the conversation and gave his son the look he’d given him the night before. Deshawn returned the defiant look he learned from his mother.
Charles got up and left the room.
Deshawn hopped from his bed, nodding to himself in congratulations, until his father burst back into the room.
“Get your ass back on that bed!” Charles ordered.
“You gonna make me?” Deshawn challenged his father. Charles remembered the defining moment in his life, when he stood up to his father’s whoopin’s, turned back his father’s hand and threatened him with his own. Ever since Charles bean beating Deshawn, he knew the day would come when Deshawn would do the same, when Deshawn would prove himself a man ready to live by his own rules. Today wasn’t that day.
“I don’t have to,” Charles answered. “I brought someone else with me, gonna kick your ass just fine.”
“I don’t see your army,” Deshawn mocked.
“When a man got Jesus,” Charles announced, pulling his crucifix from behind him, “he don’t need no army.”
Deshawn recoiled from the cross.
Charles stepped to him, and slapped aside Deshawn’s arms with the object. “Gonna knock you upside the head with Jesus,” Charles announced. He brought the flat back of the cross down hard against Deshawn’s skull. Deshawn hissed. “Jesus just bopped you upside the head.” The next blow landed with a sharper edge. “Oh, there he goes again!” Deshawn screamed. “Go Jesus!” Charles was relentless now, landing blow after blow, adding a fist, then a kick, until Deshawn lay atop his bed moaning surrender. “What’s it like to get yo’ ass whooped by Jesus, huh?” Charles asked. “I said HUH!?”
“Ohhhh,” Deshawn responded.
“You gonna get some blood?” Charles asked.
“No,” Deshawn grumbled.
“I said, you gonna leave this room!?”
“No,” Deshawn relented.
“Damn right.”
Charles didn’t take the chance. He tied his son up again, as he had the night before. Delores ain’t letting him free this time, he told himself. Time to take charge of this family.
When he returned to the living room, Dolores stood in its open doorway to the outside. Charles stood startled.
“Hey darling?” Dolores greeted him with a flash of her fangs. “Who you got on your side now?”
She closed the door behind her, faster than Charles could react. She was gone. But she had left the bedroom door open. “LaTonya?” Charles called. There was no response. Charles stepped towards it with cautious trepidation. In the dark room, laid in Dolores’ place on the bed was LaTonya, stiff and pale, ripped open at the throat, bloodless.
“NOOOOO!” Charles’ scream ripped through the night. “NO! NO! NO! NO!” he continued, refusing to relinquish his denials. There would be no acceptance of this grief, whatever the cost. “Deshawawawn!” Charles invoked in a long drawn-out call-to-arms as he dashed to Deshawn’s room.
Charles threw open the door and stood in quaking silhouette. “I’ve got a deal for you son, a deal you better take quick because I don’t like giving it to you...”
Deshawn returned hours later, splattered with patches of blood. He was a messy eater. He smiled at his father, revived and thankful, and eager to show it. “I found her, dad. I found her.”
“Where, son?”
“The Apple’s Worm. It’s a bar.”
“I know it.”
“Um, dad? You ain’t gonna like what you see there.”
“I know.”
The Apple’s Worm hid at the end of an alley burrowed into the core of the city’s center. The narrowness of the alley prepared Charles for the sight past the dark wood and clear-and-stained-glass-paned doors into the Worm. The view down the length of the bar backed by a tight walkway showed little room for the stools between. Dolores filled the view, sitting a few seats in from the door, laughing preoccupied by whoever sat on her other side, blocked from view. Charles fought the furious urge to bust in through the door and engage whoever that might be until restraint reminded him that “whoever” could be two people, three, four, or more. And a fight in the bar would add to the police to the mix too.
So he seethed patiently until Dolores finally rose to leave, taking the arm of her barmate and moving towards Charles. Her disease-spreading, bar-hopping, home-wrecking, partner was a beanstalk-tall, skeleton-skinny, black-leather-wearing, beak-nosed, dorky-lookin’ white dude.
“Oh haaaaayl naw!” Charles cursed. Charles would have beat him right then if he hadn’t imagined doing worse.
So he exited the alley and stuck to the shadows to follow the couple to a warehouse just down the road. They entered. He left them there for later.
The Chop Shop glowed florescent refrigerator-light blue around its pink and green posters. Charles saw the stark light set against its dead neighbors as the store’s protest at having been kept closed. I’m comin’ to open you now, baby, Charles thought as he parked in front of its door. Once inside, he made an apologetic frown as he passed all the work he had to do and went for the ax on the wall behind the counter. He took it to the back room where he found its twin outside the meat locker. Then, with cleavers, a hammer, rope and nails, he went to work atop the cop block table in the center of the room. He soon had a floor covered in chiseled wood shavings and two axes with cleaver blades attached to the other sides of their shafts. Charles lifted both high. He smiled at the ax handles sticking out below each hand, whittled into the sharp points of wooden stakes. And Charles howled, “Whoooo-hraaah!,” a visceral savage warrior’s tribute to the blood about to be spilt.
Charles strode into the warehouse as if it was his own. He greeted the perturbed heavy-metal-rockstar-lookin’ man at the door with an indignant swipe of his cleaver ax, which separated his left from his right sides at the shoulder. The accompanying shriek sounded alarm to the other in the building, who began to pour into the corridor before Charles. A school marm, an old man, a 10-year-old boy, an Asian woman, all vampires, but not one of them the same. All came to meet Cleft and Twain, Charles’ newly named twin bringers of pain. Those that stayed intact enough to keep fighting were soon stung by an ax handle stake to the heart and permanently dispatched. Any other man might have tired after the fifth, sixth, or seventh vampire. But Charles’ arms rippled with the muscles of a meat-chopping master. “Charles the Butcher:” sounded like an infamous title. Naw, just a job, and a handy one for a vampire killer. Charles was soon awash in red with a cannibal’s feast in a trail behind him. At thirteen vampires dead, he sliced past the corridor into the ghastly chamber beyond.
The chamber might as well have been Charles’ Chop Shop. For it was lined with freshly hung meat, in this case, bodies, strung up on hooks at the end of long chains hung from the ceiling. Below each body sat a tub with ladles and red plastic beer cups. This was a vampire party. Charles had crashed it.
But now, atop the rafters, boxes, and walkways that lined the side walls, perched vampires prepared to crash down on Charles. They awaited orders from the familiar vampire that sat atop a poorman’s throne made from a recliner draped with red velour at the far side of the chamber. It was that skeleton-skinny, home-wreckin’ mother fucker that Charles was lookin’ for! Dolores sat atop his lap with an arm draped over his shoulder.
“Charles!” Dolores shrieked.
“So this is Charles,” the vampire spoke. “No eternal life for you, Charles.”
“Give me my eternal wife, bitch!” Charles demanded.
“Come and get her,” the vampire beckoned with an inviting finger.
As soon as Charles stepped forward, the other vampires were upon him, throwing themselves towards his whirring blades. He tossed their pale thin bodies, or pieces of their pale thin bodies, about him with explosions of gore, dispatching all comers in a cuisinart frenzy.
When he had finished them, he faced Dolores. She had one hand on her hip, the other pointing a claw-like finger. “STOP IT!” she demanded. “You leave him alone! Put down those things and leave us! I’m through with you! We’re over! Done!”
Charles pushed her aside and lifted Cleft high in the air above the now terrified vampire. The vampire’s skinny white arms did little to slow the sharp end of Cleft from driving deep into his diseased heart. The vampire gasped and clutched at the shaft. He died quick. Charles left Cleft there.
Charles turned to Dolores with rouge-rimmed eyes. “We’re not done. We’ve only just begun,” he promised.
Charles whipped Dolores around him to throw her into the house. “He’s dead now. This is all you got.”
They entered the house to a screaming baby, LaTonya and Deshawn.
“Aw, shit,” Charles swore. “Sun risin’ soon,” he called back to Dolores. “You better get yo’self to bed.”
“You takin’ care of the kids?” Dolores asked as if she cared.
“Count on it.”
Charles had left LaTonya and Deshawn tied to their beds. They were screaming in bloodlust. Precious’ screams were all that mattered, as far as Charles was concerned. But as soon as he finished feeding and changing her, he realized he’d have to give them blood to keep them.
So once the sun rose, he returned to the Chop Shop, not to open it, for Precious would be needing his attention. It took him about an hour to squeeze the good meat enough to get a bucketful of animal’s blood and head back for home.
When Deshawn woke after sunset, Charles was there.
“Your mother and me have decided to try to work things out. You know, with everyone being sick and all.”
“LaTonya sick too?” Deshawn asked.
“Yah. But we’ll work it out. You down?”
“Yah,” Deshawn agreed.
“Got blood for ya,” Charles said cheerfully with a clap of his hands.
“Blood!” Deshawn exclaimed. “Yup! Yup!” Only then did he realize that his constraints were gone. He leapt out of bed.
At Charles instructions, Deshawn waited excitedly at the dining table while Charles freed LaTonya and Dolores. When they were all together, LaTonya looking distressed, Dolores skeptical, Charles announced, “I know, to keep us together as a family, I’m gonna have to provide for you in a way I ain’t never done before. I want you to trust that I’m gonna. And that starts tonight, right now!” Charles went to the kitchen and returned with three cups and his bucket of blood. LaTonya was instantly at ease. Dolores’ skepticism was gone.
“Awww, baby...” Dolores praised.
“Thanks, dad,” Deshawn added.
“It hurts, dad,” LaTonya informed.
“Not for long, baby,” Dolores assured her.
Charles placed the bucket in the center of the table and dipped the three cups, passing each in turn. Each was immediately emptied. By the time Charles reached to refill the first cup, the three family members were standing on either side of the table, reaching past him for the bucket. Charles stepped away, allowing them to take over. Dolores had to grab a fistful of Deshawn’s afro to keep him from sticing his head into the bucket. LaTonya grabbed between them and lost her cup in the blood. She brought wet hands to her mouth while whimpering for more. Dolores eventually settled them down enough to recover the lost cup and get them trading turns scooping cupfuls.
They had made it three-quarters of the way through the bucket before Deshawn vomited. He spurted all over the table, part of it spraying into the remaining blood. Dolores and LaTonya recoiled from the bucket, but not just because it was now tainted. They too felt the stomach pains and nausea that preceded Deshawn’s retching. Soon, they too were vomiting throughout the room, grabbing at their bellies and condemning Charles.
“What is it?!”
“It’s bad blood!”,
“I’m sick, dad.”
“Damn it, Charles!”
Charles backed away from the fetid room, his own sympathetic nausea encouraging his retreat, as did his disappointment and dread.
“Dad...” LaTonya called after him, before vomiting again.
“Dad...” Deshawn took her place.
“Charles,” Dolores added between coughs. “We need you.”
They were right, Charles thought. And he’d failed them. Perhaps even killed them in the process. He had to make right, no matter what the cost. The loss of everything he had ever worked for and cared for assailed his eyes and nostrils.
“Go ahead, boy,” Charles called into the dining room. “Go and get some, and bring some back for your mother and sister.”
Charles held open the door for Deshawn, who staggered into the night.
When Deshawn returned with the limp body of a young attractive girl in his arms, and laid her on the table, and LaTonya and Dolores leapt at either side of her neck and drained what remained of her, it was Charles turn to vomit, spewing the contents of his stomach into a corner of the room furthest away from the horrific scene.
That night, Dolores, LaTonya, and Deshawn lounged about the house as they used to. They watched television and talked happily. Seeing them that way, having them back together as a family, almost made the events of Charles night worthwhile.
For Charles’ night was far from usual. After moving the dead girl’s body into the bathroom, Charles spent hours bleaching the dining room clean of vomit and blood. He spent more hours sawing the girl into pieces so that he could wrap her and Hefty bag her so he could inconspicuously carry her back to the Chop Shop at daybreak and hide her body in his backroom meat locker. Then he had to clean up her mess in the bathroom. And then, he spent the remainder of the night, using wood scraps from the garage to seal the windows of his bedroom and move LaTonya’s and Deshawn’s beds in next to Dolores’ to create a kind of family crypt, darkest room in the house, with a crossbar lock over its door, so that Charles could sleep peacefully on the couch during the day without fear that he might oversleep into the night. And all the while he, and ONLY HE, was in charge of tending to Precious, keeping her fed and fresh and away from the rest of the family.
The next night, Dolores plainly stated, “We need blood.” And so Deshawn was off again, luring a young woman into his arms so that he could feed off her and bring left-overs home for the family. Charles spent most of the night in LaTonya’s bedroom with Precious and Jesus, resting the cross in his lap and asking for forgiveness. Until LaTonya knocked on the door.
“Dad?”
“Come in,” Charles called as he hid the cross under the covers.
LaTonya entered and stood in front of the bed and her father.
“What’s on your mind?” Charles asked.
“How come Deshawn always gets to go out and I can’t?”
“What’s the problem?”
“He’s always gettin’ some and I want some ‘a my own.”
“No, LaTonya. I ain’t gonna have no girl ‘a mine runnin’ about in the night doin’ what Deshawn is doin’. It’s bad enough you and mom doin’ what you’ve already done.”
“Mom says that by the time we get it, the best is gone. Mom says I can handle myself and get my own. She says I’m old enough.”
“Girl, you get outta here before I give you somethin’ else Deshawn gets that you don’t.”
LaTonya grunted in defiance, but left quickly.
Charles went right back to praying.
But it didn’t help. The next night, all three of them stood at the front door dressed in street clothes when Dolores announced, “We need blood.” Dolores had an arm around Deshawn. LaTonya, wearing make-up and a skirt that ended halfway to the knee, held onto Dolores’ jacket.
Charles stewed at the defiance. He wished he had Jesus with him.
Dolores preempted his outburst. “You want us to come back?”
Charles exhaled. “Yes.”
“Then we’ll come back,” Dolores agreed as she led her children out the door.
On condition I let you leave, Charles thought to himself.
“It ain’t right,” Charles told Jesus and Precious. What’s a man willing to put up with to keep his family together? It was the first of many evenings that Charles spent alone with Jesus and Precious, talking to himself. He spent his early morning chopping corpses. At least he had convinced them to bring him back the corpses, so he could hide them in his shop. And he spent his early parts of the day visiting the Chop Shop, cleaning out the spoiled meat, dumping off the bodies parts and making a pile of the bills he found slipped through the mail-slot onto a pile inside his store’s door.
Between all that and caring for Precious, Charles wasn’t getting much sleep.
“I can’t keep this up,” he told Jesus, who he’d carried along with him into the bathroom, and set on the counter as he considered how best to start sawing the thirteen-year-old boy LaTonya had brought back with her. Charles lifted the saw in his shaking hand and put it against the boy’s broken neck, right below his fear-twisted face. He was the same age at LaTonya. He had a family too, and a father that’s lost him. How many families was Charles gonna allowed wrecked to try to save his own? It’s wrong, Jesus told him. The meat locker was almost full. I’ve become like them, he told himself.
Charles put his free hand against the boy’s sternum and began sawing. The saw slipped and ran between his thumb and forefinger. Charles pulled his hand into his mouth. Blood filled it. He clamped his teeth down to slow the blood. He shouldn’t stop it, he considered. He should let it all flow, let himself die, rather than keep up this ghastly work. He wasn’t who he was supposed to be. And this new him and his new family, wasn’t worth saving.
Charles stopped, and with his hand still in his mouth, got Twain from the trunk of the car. He’d left it there since that night he’d killed all those vampires. He took it into the family tomb and found Dolores’ bed. They’d just recently gone to sleep. He brushed the hair away from Dolores neck and lips. She used to be better than him. Now she was worse, much worse. And Deshawn too. And LaTonya. He held Twain in his right hand so that the stake hung with enough room to spare. He put a hand at the top of Dolores’ sternum and lifted Twain into the air. Tears began to well in his eyes. His hand slid down over Dolores’ dead heart. He sat down next to her and laid Twain in his lap.
“When we was a famly,” Charles said to them all, “every day was so perfect. I coulda been doin’ anythin’ with my life, and it would have been heaven as long as I had alla you. But you had to go and cheat on me, Dolores! And you done dragged everyone into it all, Deshawn with runnin’ around and LaTonya tryin’ to be like him. You can say all you want about what I did wrong and how I coulda been better. But there ain’t nothin’ I did to deserve alla this! We had good times, and a good life! You’re the one, you’re all the ones not tryin’ anymore to keep things together, doin’ bad and makin’ me a part of it in the name ‘a good. Well, I ain’t havin’ it anymore. There’s only so much that a man can stand. There’s only so much that a man can give!” Charles began to sob. “I need you all. I never imagined life without you. I can’t stand the thought of life without you. What more can a man give...?”
When Charles woke at the dinner table, shivering without his shirt, which he’d tied around his bleeding arm, the ax-cleaver Twain stuck into the tabletop reminded him of what he’d done the previous night, how he’d tapped his own blood to try and feed his family, to try and keep them from killing any more people, to try and keep them at home. He had failed. The room was empty and the door to the tomb was open. They couldn’t be in there. And with the sun almost completely risen, if they weren’t in there now, they weren’t going to make it in time. They were gone. He’d lost them.
Charles tried to stand, but sank back into his chair, weak and in pain. He felt sick. Heartsick, he told himself, at being alone. Why get up? he asked himself. Why ever get up again? He had nothing left.
A glorious cry from Precious gave him the strength to riseqzd. He stumbled and then hurried into LaTonya’s room, fearful of the reason for the baby’s cries. He found Precious in the crib, skinny and pale, shaking. He gasped at her condition and lifted her into his arms, to check her. Her neck was unhurt. She must be cold and hungry. She would be fine. Charles would make sure of that. He’d spend all the time it took, Chop Shop be damned, to make sure he did right by Precious, so she’d stay around, and they’d have be a family. Charles held her close to his chest. He could feel her warmth against him. For all the time he’d spent caring for her, in the days past, he hadn’t hugged her. He brought her up near his face and held her against his shoulder, so that her neck was near his mouth. He felt sick inside. He told himself it didn’t mean anything. And even if it did, it wouldn’t make a difference.
I burn your legs,
Bite your head
Suck your soul
And inhale straight.
I crush you beneath
My dirty feet,
Throw you lonely
To your merciless fate.
Been no friend, for so long
Living in my blood, in my lungs
I hate living, you help me die
I puff you out into the sky
Still you call me as a friend
And I rush, to get your smell.
You are the only true friend of mine
In my lonely and ugly times
None had been so close, so dear
To my heart and to my lungs,
Love in my heart, still lies for you
And I don’t care about your bitter truth.
The Swan
Extreme Makeover
Is making you beautiful
Screw inner beauty
What is on the outside counts
Any imperfection is a crime
The world needs/wants
MORE
Perfectly manicure People
Like perfectly mowed lawns/gardens
Along an upper high class suburb
Perfect white gleaming straight teeth
Let’s make that face 10 years younger
Suck out all of that fat!
No...the tits need to be bigger!
Making you beautiful
Takes a lot of work!
Kind of painful too
But so what!
Inner beauty doesn’t count
Any imperfection is a sin
We want to make you beautiful!
For years you have carried her,
Snug against your chest,
Cradled in the bend of your arm.
From time to time you have lost her plastic bottle
Or crewed on it.
You have changed her diapers
And sighed over invisible accidents.
You have spanked her bottom
And cried out when the feel of hard plastic
Stung you open palm.
And last night I watched you place her in your bed
Beside her, swathing her tiny body
With the blankets,
Guarding against night’s sudden chill.
You brushed a strand of dark hair from her face
And sang “Puff the Magic Dragon”
Before curling up next to her.
From the doorway, I watched you
Slip your thumb into your mouth
And close your eyes.
For just a moment, I thought of saying,
“You’re too old to suck you thumb.”
But as moonlight spilled onto the bed,
Sketching lines and shadows on the blankets,
I simply held my breath
As sleep visited the stillness.
Give me a break!
That’s what I was thinking when she broke
Up with him.
I didn’t mean it that way.
I just meant I needed some cotton
Not to hear his squawking about his broken
Heart.
Which had broken into thirty-six pieces,
One for each of his three
Dozen hurts.
I told him to see a psychiatrist
But he kept on insisting that I could help.
I had a lot of experience
In hurt.
Most of it self-inflicted.
So I listened,
Not volunteering any wrongful advice.
Jesus, what could I say?
I was a boxing coach who had dented
His own head in so many directions.
From so much promise I was carrying around
Bagfuls of disappointment
Like a homeless man
Pushing a shopping cart of soda bottles, jockeying
For the refunds.
Juxtaposed between the Mississippi and the swamp
is the beaded ulcer of the South’s stomach.
Where boys smear crimson gloss on their lips and
the girls slide past their teeth;
Where I owned the cobblestone and sludge in the gutters;
Where the river spills life from its sodden womb;
Where I ran through alleys and tasted the bitterness of adoration;
Where I saw the world through a virgin’s eyes and
wept at the beauty of the rusty, dusk dry sky.
Nestled inside New Orleans, a pomegranate tree whose fruit is
decaying on the branch, spilling nectar from corroded skin.
Where incense is burned from doorways
and velvet is draped from balconies;
Where I put my hands in gloves to keep them warm;
Where the blood that’s spilt is washed away by dawn;
Where names written in cement and bathroom wall graffiti
are more precious than literature found on shelves.
Vieux Carre - a desolate wasteland of angels and masks, of
morbid splendor, left in my mouth the taste of rotten wine
and empty bottles for my eyes.
Near Arusha, Tanzania.Anemia
Bruce Kilstein
After the screaming stopped, the villagers waited a few hours before pulling Dr. Nathan Harper from the hut. Just to be safe.
It would be several days before he would regain consciousness. Arms expertly bandaged by the team from Doctors Without Borders that had finally found him. Strange that no one from the village had contacted the mission.
The mission. Nathan had traveled to Africa in search of something. What he was searching for hadn’t been quite clear although there was no doubt that something was missing. After six years of surgical residency and a year as attending trauma surgeon at Camden University Hospital, it was clear that there was a void in his life. On the surface things seemed to be going well. He had finished his training, had a promising new career, and a new girlfriend. Maybe it was all the hours spent in the artificial glow of the OR lights of the urban trauma center that made him crave some time outdoors. Seven years of just about living in the hospital was enough time to make anyone sick. You began to think the whole world consisted of a relentless flow of gunshot wounds, car accidents, surgery and transfusions.
The blood was everywhere. The pressure was enormous. This was an anemia of the soul.
He hated to leave Carolyn just when the relationship was getting hot but he was burning out. The medical mission seemed an obvious escape. He wasn’t all that religious. Hadn’t had all that much time to think about it lately but he supposed medicine had become his religion. He would leave the preaching to the true missionaries while camping out, providing some healthcare to people who really needed it and perhaps spend some introspective time out with the giraffes.
It had worked. The job was interesting. He was learning more about diseases he had only read about before. He was learning about a people who surprised him with their genuine capacity for warmth. Westerners thought of them as poor. Economically there could be no doubt. In terms of tradition and spirituality they lacked for nothing. Away from pagers and phones, he began to relax. He kept a journal of letters to Carolyn that he hoped would help her appreciate his reasons for leaving.
The last call came near dusk. The messenger from the outlying village had made it seem urgent. You didn’t have to speak Swahili to see that, but Nathan’s guide seemed reluctant to want to go. Freddie mumbled some explanation about tribal superstitious nonsense and how it wouldn’t be safe to travel at night. Nathan looked at the villager and then at Freddie and realized that under Freddie’s indifferent exterior there was fear.
After some brief words Harper gathered his medical sack and headed off for the Land Rover with the villager. Freddie had little choice but to grab a rifle and follow. They drove west as a huge sun started to dip below the horizon, the day rippling away in waves of dying heat. The air became still and the night animals began to stir, dim silhouettes skirting the edge of the bush. They rattled over a track that suggested a road as clouds of insects rose before them in search of the night’s first blood meal.
Over the noise Freddie translated the patient’s symptoms to the doctor. Fever, bleeding from the nose and eyes, delirium. Not a rapid nosebleed but a slow, steady drip that would not stop. Now Harper began to worry. What if this was Marburg or worse Ebola? Deadly viruses that killed just about everyone that came into contact with them. If that was the case he should have listened to Freddie and not rushed off with such zeal. This would be a job for a better-equipped organization like the WHO or CDC. Well, he would be careful and investigate. If this were one of the filoviruses then acting quickly and setting up quarantine would save hundreds of lives.
They came to a dusty stop about an hour later at the outside of a ring of mud and thatch huts. The air was still warm but a group of men sat by a fire, faces staring orange fixed on the sheltering flames as the darkness shrunk their world. Even in this wild place there was protocol. Nathan politely waited by the Rover while Freddie approached the elders to ask permission to enter. Harper took his bag and a flashlight from the vehicle. Something was wrong with this place. In his few months he had been to enough villages to know that there was always some noise, some bustle at the end of the day. Children and dogs would run to herd chickens or livestock. There would be smells of cooking and rough tobacco. Laughter. Here nothing moved. The stillness seemed unnatural. From far off the low trumpet of an elephant sounded. He played the light around the perimeter. There were no children. No dogs. No livestock. No one laughed.
Freddie motioned Harper to come forward. They were directed to a hut at the edge of the circle. None of the men around the fire followed. A talisman hung on the doorframe. Feathers and shells. When he came to Africa, Nathan would have said that tribal medicine was just superstition. A few months observing the shaman that operated in the area quickly changed his mind. There was no doubt that they often had the ability to heal. Maybe the herbal medicines that they brewed were potent drugs. Maybe their incantations had real magical power. Maybe both, but the key ingredient seemed to be that they believed in themselves and the patients believed in them. Nathan had learned long ago that a patient’s outcome had just as much to do with their wanting to recover and trusting in the treatment as the treatment itself. The fact that they had called him meant that this was something unusual.
Trust.
Hearing no sound they ducked and entered the low room following their narrow beam. The fading light hid most of the blood on the walls. The woman was clearly dead. She lay on a mat in the middle of the floor. Not breathing. Staring blankly at the ceiling.
Nathan approached her but Freddie stayed by the door. He glanced back quickly over his shoulder. “C’mon Freddie, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Freddie didn’t move. “Trust me.” He inched forward.
Harper knelt by the body. Strange. A thin trickle of blood still seeped from the corner of her eye. It ran down her cheek over tribal scars, through her beaded necklace and made a tiny pool on the ground. There should have been flies. He fumbled in his bag for a pair of rubber gloves and then reached out tentatively for her neck. No pulse. He grasped her wrist and moved her arm. It was limp and pliable. No sign of rigor yet, but if she had just died why was she so cold? Why hadn’t the blood clotted?
He found a culture tube and removed the swab. He touched the swab to the corner of her eye to get a sample and flinched when the eye moved. He jerked back in response.
“What is it Dr. Harper?” Freddie called moving closer and shining his light in Nathan’s eyes.
“Nothing Freddie. I just got spooked.” He uttered a little laugh. Of course the eye didn’t move. It had just appeared to change position when he tugged at the lid. Silly. Best to get a larger sample if this was something unusual. He removed a syringe and two glass tubes from his bag. “Freddie, I really could use your help. I can’t hold my light and draw blood at the same time.”
Freddie moved a few steps closer and aimed his beam on the woman’s arm. The sun had nearly set and the harsh artificial light made her arm seem pale, in spite of her dark skin. Thin veins snaked blue toward her hand. With practiced ease Harper pierced her vein and thick fluid filled the syringe. As he withdrew the needle, a spray of blood jetted from the small wound. He flinched as it hit him on the cheek. Freddie dropped the flashlight.
“Damn!” Harper yelled. He wiped his face with his sleeve. He was astonished. There couldn’t be that much blood pressure in a dead woman’s arm. He felt his skin burning where the blood had landed. He tore open an alcohol gauze pad and wiped hard at the area. The vapor made his eyes tear.
The movement was almost imperceptibly swift. As he turned his head to see where Freddie had gone, the woman was at his exposed throat. As he fell back the needle drove through his wrist. He dimly would remember screaming before the world went black.
Camden, New Jersey.
Six months later Dr. Harper stood on the roof of CUH with his trauma team awaiting the helicopter that banked low over the river from Philadelphia. The sunlight bothered his eyes. Too much time indoors, he thought. He turned his back in shade and let the nurse assist him in gowning. She tried not to be obvious but it was clear that she noticed the scars. They had healed well. The doctors who had saved him had done well but in close quarters it was easy to see the jagged line on his neck, the marks on his cheek like frozen tears and wound on his wrist as she slipped the glove over his outstretched hand.
He hadn’t minded coming back to work after his recovery. He had been getting bored. He had hated to leave Africa so soon but it was clear that he could no longer stay. He needed a more sophisticated medical facility. His lack of a clear explanation as to what had happened to Freddie and the Land Rover did little to reassure the folks at the mission and, besides, no other guide would agree to work with him.
He did feel tired though as he pulled his mask over his face and slid the plastic protective eyewear into place. Once the novelty of returning to surgery had worn off, the pace of the hospital had caught up with him. He would get some blood work and see Cripps for an exam. The helicopter landed in a spray of dust and grit.
Paramedics unloaded the patient. Each member of the trauma team had a specific job. They worked as a unit with Harper at the head directing the show.
“Gunshot to the left chest,” the paramedic yelled over the noise of the blades.
They moved quickly, wheeling the victim away from the helicopter. A technician cut the man’s shirt off exposing the wound. His skin a blue pale shade that told them he was hypoxic. The bullet had punctured the lung and blood was filling the chest. Harper couldn’t be sure that it hadn’t hit the heart as well.
The scene would look chaotic to an outsider but they remained calm. Harper calmly gave orders. The ABC’s came first. Airway. Breathing. Circulation. If you had no airway, you had no patient. “Let’s intubate, get a central line in his neck, same side as the wound. I need a chest tube.” The helicopter powered down and Harper placed a stethoscope on the patient’s chest. No breath sounds on the side of the injury. Weak pulse. An anesthetist grabbed her blade, inserted it into the man’s mouth and slid the endotracheal tube between the vocal cords. She attached the tube to oxygen and assisted breathing with a bag. Through a tattoo on the neck that identified the man as a gang member, a resident plunged a large needle into the jugular vein. He inserted a catheter and attached tubing to a bag of fluid. He squeezed on the bag to try to replace the fluids as rapidly as possible. A nurse poured antiseptic solution over the patient’s chest and everyone’s hands that were working nearby. Harper took a scalpel and made a transverse cut between the ribs. He spread the muscles of the chest wall with a clamp and then inserted his finger into the chest cavity. Warm blood flowed over the opening and down his arm and over his feet. He felt the blood through his sock oozing between his toes. With his other hand he took a plastic tube and, using the finger in the chest as a guide, slide the tube over his own hand into the chest. The blood took this detour through the tube and away from Nathan’s socks. The nurse handed him a suture and he sewed the tube in place. This would allow the lung to expand and give them time to get the patient to the ER where he would receive a transfusion and x-rays.
Nathan tore off his bloody gown and gloves and saw that the blood had soaked through his scrubs. He left the younger doctors to care for the stabilized patient and headed to the locker room to change. As he undressed, the room began to revolve. He didn’t feel well. He staggered into the shower. He kept the lights off and felt a bit refreshed as the blood washed down his legs in the dark. He would have to see Scripps later. When had he eaten last? He didn’t remember. He wasn’t hungry though. He needed a nap.
Dream.
He was in a small hospital in Africa. Small room, plaster peeling the walls. Intense sun through a broken window blew cold air. Wrists hidebound to the icy bedrails. The woman from the hut enters, dressed as a nurse, carrying a tray. Eyes bloody she smiles and removes the cloth covering the tray revealing the needles, the tubing, the glass, and the flowers. She makes him sip the river water the dead drink to forget life. Before he can speak, to warn her of the contamination, she crams his mouth with flowers. She smiles, wiping the blood from her eyes so that she can better see him struggle He drowns in the sweet aroma of the flowers and her rotting skin. He strains at the bonds that now hold him, trying to free himself from this dark hospital, this nightmare, this rough beast.
She whispers in his ear and he is calm, understanding words she breathes in some dead language- the words fill him. It made strange sense to surrender- he now knew what he needed to become fulfilled and he moaned as she kisses him and plunges the needle into his heart.
Carolyn.
From the journal of Nathan Harper, M.D:
| April 2, 2005Near Arusha, TanzaniaDear Carolyn,
|
At first, Carolyn Blanchard had not understood. Nathan had flirted with her for a whole year before finally asking her out. Soon after she agreed he left. As a social worker at the hospital, they often crossed paths to discuss helping patients make arrangements for care after discharge. She knew she wasn’t the prettiest woman in the hospital but she was by no means ugly. Her personality quickly charmed most of the young doctors, Nathan included, and offers for dates were never in short supply. She was attracted to Nathan immediately. He was cute, confident and always seemed to have time to talk to his patients. The problem with working so many hours, they had mutually lamented on their first date, was that they never had the opportunity of meeting people their own age out in the “real world.” Carolyn was wary of dating the residents because she knew that CUH was only an arduous way station on the long academic road. Most would be leaving when they finished their training. She was attracted to how confident he could be at work and how shy, vulnerable, and introspective he was outside the hospital. She had only accepted Nathan’s offer because he had decided to stay on and accept an appointment to the medical staff. She was then ready to take a serious interest.
Then he left. There was no way to get in touch with him. She brooded. She was unsure of what to do, but when she heard of his (what did you call it? accident?) injury, she had found herself worried and scared. The feeling had surprised her. She cared more for him than she had expected. When he returned he did seem different. Changed by his experience.
The journal had arrived a month before Nathan’s return. Battered, stained, but mostly legible, Carolyn read with tears Nathan’s narrative, all addressed to her. He described his life, experiences, fears, and feelings for her. He wrote twice a week for ten weeks, and then nothing. A final letter was written on separate stationery and taped inside the back cover of the journal.
She watched him sleeping on her sofa. He looked pale. Always tired at the end of the day but after his naps, he seemed much better by late evening. She let him sleep, poured a glass of merlot, and reread the final letter written in a female hand.
| Hospital du VirgineSysteme du Sante MisericordiaLourdes, France
|
Carolyn looked up from the letter, startled to find Nathan awake and staring at her. She dropped the glass. It shattered on the edge of the coffee table, staining her legs red. Nathan just stared.
“I didn’t know you were awake,” she said, kneeling to sop up the mess on the hardwood floor. She cut her hand picking up one of the shards. She wrapped her hand in a towel, a spreading purple stain soaking through. “Damn,” she said.
“I could hear your reading,” Nathan said, “It woke me.”
“I think I may need stitches.”
“Let me see,” he said, not moving from the sofa. He edged back into the cushions so that she could sit by him. He unwrapped the towel and held her hand in his. “Amazing,” he said, tilting her hand so that a trickle of blood ran down the scar on his wrist. “So much we can learn from a little fluid.”
“Are you sure you’re really awake?” she asked, attempting to pull away. He wouldn’t let her.
She began to feel dizzy at the sight of her own blood. The wine had probably contributed but when he brought her hand to his lips she found the sensation erotic. He pulled her to him and heard, as if from afar, a low moan that seemed to come from somewhere within her. He sucked on her hand and moved slowly up her arm to her collarbone tracing the sleek curve with his tongue, nibbling with his teeth, pausing at her neck, she felt on fire wanting him to (what?)
“Fill me,” he finished the thought in her ear. It was the last thing she would remember for three days.
From the medical record of Nathan Harper.
| Lucien Cripps, M.D.Camden County Internal Medicine and Hematology
|
Nathan.
The realization was slow. Harper let the soapy water ooze down his arms at the scrub sink. In the time he usually reserved for thinking about the surgery he was about to perform, he reflected on the last few days.
His visit with Cripps had been enlightening. The blood test had been a surprise. He knew he was tired but just how anemic he was had been startling to both Nathan and his doctor. He told Cripps everything, well almost everything, that had happened and how he had been feeling. The explanation had made some sense. The lady who had attacked him in Africa certainly did manifest many of the symptoms of hemorrhagic fever. All except the part where she didn’t have a fever or a pulse but he didn’t think Cripps needed to know that part. He already seemed to think that Nathan was crazy, or at least “mentally affected by his traumatic experiences,” as Cripps put it. He had told him about the dreams. He didn’t blame Cripps for cooking up a diagnosis. Sometimes you had to ram a square peg down a round throat. So what if all the information didn’t add up to exposure to hemorrhagic fever? What he had did seem oddly viral. Boodborne. The alternate explanation that Nathan was kicking around privately would have sounded clinically absurd in the white light of the exam room. He gazed up at his refection in the window to the OR.
In the blacklight of the bedroom things made sense in the way segments of dreams connect. He had been longing for something when he went to Africa and maybe he had gotten it. The chance to know a hunger deeper than any he could have previously imagined and with it, the deeper fulfillment satisfying that desire. He had staggered around for days slipping in and out of dreams, odd sensory hallucinations. The anemia, the lack of blood, made sense in explaining how tired he was and, with that fatigue, perceptions altered. What Cripps couldn’t say, and would not be able to no matter how many tests he ran, was where half of Nathan’s blood volume had gone. Nathan smiled beneath his surgical mask. He couldn’t really say either, other than to suppose that what was lost in Africa was lost for good. When the blood left his body in a certain way (he hadn’t been able to name it even to himself yet) it had to be replaced in the manner in which it had been removed. He wasn’t even sure how he knew this. Instinct probably. The way a spider knows how to make a web.
He finished his scrub and backed in through the OR door, hands held away from his body to avoid contamination. He put on his gown and gloves. The nurse handed him the scalpel. He traced a red line with cold steel though warm skin and thought about his long weekend with Carolyn. How she had filled him so warmly, tasting her again and again. How it left him with more and more energy, as she grew steadily pale. He had to stop at some point of course. He didn’t want to kill her. She was falling in love with him and he didn’t know if that was a good thing given the circumstances. Maybe being in love made the exchange of body fluids more meaningful. Sacred. It felt good to feel so dominant. He felt guilty that it didn’t bother him.
He shook off the thought. What their little weekend had left him was enlightened. He knew his hemoglobin would be higher now if Cripps drew another blood test. His color was better and he was sleeping very well. At least for the time being. He had no idea how long it would last. How long it would be until he needed to be refilled. He held out his hand and the nurse passed the long scissors with the reassuring wet smack that instruments made on latex. He deftly reflected the patient’s intestines, placed retractors for his assistants and exposed the leaking aorta. He stopped the bleeding, wrapping his hand around the throbbing vessel like an old friend.
Carolyn.
The dream
| Of the lady in the beads, hovering over her bed, whispering to Nathan in private consultation. The smell the close constriction of, a sickroom full of flowers |
ended with her alarm clock. She struggled to consciousness, barely able to read the day. Monday. Had she been in bed all weekend? She stared at the ceiling recalling fragments: wine, a shattered glass-
She held up her neatly bandaged hand.
Nathan, kissing her-
She absently touched the spot on her neck, surprised to find it painfully hot.
And the fever.
She rolled toward the nightstand: pitcher of water, bottle of Tylenol and a note:
| Monday-called in sick for you. Don’t dehydrate.Replace your lost fluids. Will check on you later. – N |
She remembered feeling sick, and managed a smile, thinking how caring Nathan must have been. Tending her fever, bandaging (binding?) hand. Had it become infected? Probably too soon for that. She drank some water and was swallowing two pills when the thought closed on her like a lid. Could Nathan have given her whatever he had caught in Africa? Some kind of virus?
She began to sweat. Morning light leaked through the window slats. She found it painful. Maybe if she slept some more. She pulled the bloody quilt over her face only to resume the dream.
Lucien Cripps
found Nathan, after a bit of a search, at the bedside of his trauma patient. Nathan watched the man dying in a lonely room at the end of a long hospital corridor. The room was darkened, low glow of late afternoon and high glow green of the monitor that recorded the last erratic, slow churn of an ebbing pulse.
Cripps leaned into the room. “Nathan. I need to talk to you.” He motioned at the man in the bed, “He conscious?”
“I doubt it,” Nathan said. He joined Cripps in the hall.
“Sad,” was all Cripps could say. They had seen the results of gang violence all too often to be overly affected. He looked down the hall to make sure they could not be heard. “I didn’t want to give you the results on the phone.” He handed Nathan a lab report. It was a positive test for the Marburg virus.
“False positive,” Nathan said. “If that lady in Africa had Marburg, I would be dead by now.” The thought took him by surprise. Something he was missing. He tried to manage a smile for Cripps.
“Maybe. I took the liberty of sending your blood sample to the CDC.”
“The CDC!” Nathan shouted. Nurses from the station down the hall looked up. “The CDC,” Nathan repeated in a harsh whisper. “Shit, Lucien.”
“Look, Nathan. We can’t take chances. If it is Marburg you could be a carrier. I know all of your symptoms, the anemia, don’t make sense but I need some outside help.”
“You know what they’ll do don’t you? They’ll be here with a helicopter full of men in space suits. They’ll stick me in isolation. Probably shut down the whole hospital.”
“Better than killing everyone in the hospital.” Cripps tried to sound reassuring, “Nathan, I think it’s best if we admit you as a patient. Maybe have Lillian Mueller look in on you as well.”
“Sure, the CDC and a psychiatrist. I thought you were my friend.”
“I am also your doctor. It’s what’s best.”
“What’s best is that I get back in there with my patient.”
“He’ll be dead soon. I want to make sure…” he trailed off.
“That I’m not dying,” Nathan finished the sentence.
“Yes.”
Nathan had a sudden clear moment of understanding. Now he had to keep himself from laughing. “If it is Marburg, there is nothing you can do anyway.” He tried to sound appreciative, “Lucien, I know you are trying to do what’s best. I know that I haven’t exactly been myself lately. And, you’re right, the stress of this illness and getting back to work has been tough. I’ll take a few days off and if I’m not better, then I’ll check myself in and you can unleash Lillian and the rest of them on me. Right now I’m going back to my patient.” He didn’t give Cripps the chance to respond. Nathan went back into the room and shut the door behind him.
He sat in the dark watching the sun set behind the skyline. He was hungry again, but remained calm. His conversation with Lucien had confirmed what he had suspected. All the legends, the movies and books had it wrong. It was virally transmitted. Whole villages died (from what? Exposure? Contact? Blood loss?). Didn’t matter. Some survived. The health organizations looked for some mysterious vector, cave bats or monkeys or mice that seemed to vanish with the suddenness of the outbreak. They would never find the host because it was something that they could not accept. The real hosts, the carriers, were invisible to them. (The Church had some idea, but people stopped believing them a thousand years ago.) They could be lying dead and dormant or working as charitable nuns. Thank (whom, God? Maybe not.) for Sister Marcella. He had a lot to learn but was suddenly excited by the possibilities. He knew what he had to do.
He watched the monitor as the patient faded. Eyes already staring at the emptiness that the dead seem to enjoy. Before the nurses could notice on the remote monitor, Nathan rose to the bedside, unbuttoned his shirt and pulled the leads off the man’s chest. He attached them to his own failing heart, an organ that he now knew he had outgrown. He wound a blood pressure cuff around his arm as a tourniquet, opened a new IV catheter with his teeth and inserted it into a vein below the inflated cuff. He checked the blood type on the bag that hung above the bed. Probably didn’t matter if it matched his. He removed the tube from the patient’s arm and inserted into his own IV.
Soon he felt the warm rush fill his veins and spread like a blanket over his whole body, he knew what a drug addict felt like after a fix, his fingers flexed, his head fell back, eyes gone ash as the sun disappeared behind the city.
Harper
spent the next few days with Carolyn. He took just enough blood to keep her semiconscious and keep him adequately fed. She wouldn’t remember anything. While she slept, he spent much time on the phone making arrangements. He checked in with Cripps who told him that the CDC was sending a team at the end of the week. Nathan agreed to be admitted to the hospital.
He considered taking Carolyn with him, but he knew better than to take someone on a journey he knew so little about. There would be time to visit her later. He felt he had centuries of time. He felt sorry that they would probably subject her to thousands of medical tests once they realized the connection to him. They would find nothing. She would recover.
He felt suddenly sad for Lucien, but Nathan could see no other way. If he chose to just leave, disappear, there would always be people looking for him. No matter how cold the trail grew, he would always have to watch his back. Better there was no trail at all. He could at least explain everything to Cripps. Give him the satisfaction of closing the lid on a medical mystery.
Newark International Airport
Two days later.
The two men took a coffee break in a quiet part of the terminal customs area before resuming the tedious loading of the planes. One sipped coffee as the other scanned a copy of The Currier Post:
|
He sat back on a large crate. “Can you believe that?” he said to himself. He put the paper down and checked his manifest against the label on the crate. “Newark to Amsterdam to Paris, Orly. KLM flight 4233. Supplies, Sisters of Mercy, Lourdes, France. Cleared customs routing number 39A322x. Looks good.” The men slid the heavy crate on the forklift. They heard the contents shift unpleasantly.
Nathan felt his weight lift; free of gravity in the blanketing dark, glad that he had remembered a pillow.
A calculation: Breathe
blankly. Blankly
breathe. A story “so terrible
it cannot be told for fear
the reader will disgorge”
So save yourself
some trouble:
take a shoelace & tie it
around your neck. Or
shut up & do something.
Stop it with the amnesia.
Stop black as pitch
from being pitch black.
Leave the fears of the school
yard to the child.
Leave the ossification
to the government.
Leave the desiccation
to the President.
Previously published through Mad Swirl
what is veganism?
A vegan (VEE-gun) is someone who does not consume any animal products. While vegetarians avoid flesh foods, vegans don't consume dairy or egg products, as well as animal products in clothing and other sources.
why veganism?
This cruelty-free lifestyle provides many benefits, to animals, the environment and to ourselves. The meat and dairy industry abuses billions of animals. Animal agriculture takes an enormous toll on the land. Consumtion of animal products has been linked to heart disease, colon and breast cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes and a host of other conditions.
so what is vegan action?
We can succeed in shifting agriculture away from factory farming, saving millions, or even billions of chickens, cows, pigs, sheep turkeys and other animals from cruelty.
We can free up land to restore to wilderness, pollute less water and air, reduce topsoil reosion, and prevent desertification.
We can improve the health and happiness of millions by preventing numerous occurrences od breast and prostate cancer, osteoporosis, and heart attacks, among other major health problems.
A vegan, cruelty-free lifestyle may be the most important step a person can take towards creatin a more just and compassionate society. Contact us for membership information, t-shirt sales or donations.
vegan action
po box 4353, berkeley, ca 94707-0353
510/704-4444
MIT Vegetarian Support Group (VSG)
functions:
* To show the MIT Food Service that there is a large community of vegetarians at MIT (and other health-conscious people) whom they are alienating with current menus, and to give positive suggestions for change.
* To exchange recipes and names of Boston area veg restaurants
* To provide a resource to people seeking communal vegetarian cooking
* To provide an option for vegetarian freshmen
We also have a discussion group for all issues related to vegetarianism, which currently has about 150 members, many of whom are outside the Boston area. The group is focusing more toward outreach and evolving from what it has been in years past. We welcome new members, as well as the opportunity to inform people about the benefits of vegetarianism, to our health, the environment, animal welfare, and a variety of other issues.
The Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology
The Solar Energy Research & Education Foundation (SEREF), a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., established on Earth Day 1993 the Center for Renewable Energy and Sustainable Technology (CREST) as its central project. CREST's three principal projects are to provide:
* on-site training and education workshops on the sustainable development interconnections of energy, economics and environment;
* on-line distance learning/training resources on CREST's SOLSTICE computer, available from 144 countries through email and the Internet;
* on-disc training and educational resources through the use of interactive multimedia applications on CD-ROM computer discs - showcasing current achievements and future opportunities in sustainable energy development.
The CREST staff also does "on the road" presentations, demonstrations, and workshops showcasing its activities and available resources.
For More Information Please Contact: Deborah Anderson
dja@crest.org or (202) 289-0061
