terrified
of this
here's a list:
- three red balloons for sale, icy landscape
- sandwich shop windows are fogged
- women with no traction
- a dog laps an icicle
- bookstore coughs dust, vomit in the gutter
- FOR RENT FOR RENT FOR RENT FOR RENT
- COMING SOON banner dances with passing gusts
- crawdad erupting from brick and metalwork
- McDonald's litter
- cars scoot along and I cannot catch them.
- it is 12 degrees. it is thursday, i think.
here's a flash i should have turned in this morning
Parasite
There was a glow where a glow should not be, beneath the pallid tissue of her flank, light love-handles, the outline of a familiar fruit.
She poked it. Two fingers together massaging the glow how the chart in her bathroom showed her to screen for lumps and cancerous things.
At night, sometimes, at random hours (she kept a log on the empty orange stripe of a Wheaties box: 3:15 a.m., 4:18 a.m., 12:53 a.m…twenty total instances recorded) vibrations rang her cells like the rattle of a distant L-train.
Last night, she heard a muffled beep beep beep followed by three or five seconds of toneless waves riding, tickling her freckled flesh.
By the end of the week the phenomena had traveled, broadcasting now from an inch northwest of her navel. The glow pulsing in a more defined shape. The notes louder. The vibration tighter.
The waiting room was for people without a whole lot of money and it smelled like babies and wafting fungus. She breathed through her mouth, which was only open to a slit, and forced her mind into a year-old tabloid magazine: a gay pop musician and his husband coddled a child, a very, very small child. Adoption. Diapers. She imagined that baby ripping out of her; steel stirrups and coarse sheets. She would prefer birth in an inflatable pool filled with warm water, the newborn like a torpedo, leaving one pool for another. She thought about elasticity and condensed physics and integrals. She snapped a rubber band against her wrist until it painted splotches of red.
“*garbled*, Jordan,” the nurse entered stage left and announced. “Dr. Hausmat will see you now.”
She orphaned the gay men to a rickety end table.
Dr. Hausmat had enormous hands. With his mighty gloves he folded the gossamer dough with a gentle, Eastern ease. She bit her lip. Rolling and pushing, uncomfortable with her shirt pulled up just below her bra. She settled for staring and attempted to astral project her next boyfriend on the lunar surface of a particular ceiling tile.
The walls were thin that even the click of pen penetrated into examination room 4. Hausmat paused for a second, left ear twitching like an insect’s antennae. A nurse gossiped, then, as if sensing an eavesdropper, she faded.
After he stopped rubbing, he snapped his own pen and scribbled runes on a prescription pad and said, “I give you this. This make you better. Drug react within one hour.”
She readjusted her crinkled cotton scooting to the edge of the table. She asked, “I can’t read this. What is this? Pseu-donox-io-den-phillus?” She looked down again. “What is…pseu-donox-io-den-phillus?”
“It is…” he started and went off into a dated Slavic derivative and left in awkward stride. She thought he had said (in quick English): it eliminates the core.
Three forty-seven p.m. the next day, after the pharmacist deciphered the note's slashes, she swallowed the two pills in the orange bottle. Thirty minutes pushed her porcelain.
She sat wondering what would appear.
Her anus felt ergonomic, excessive and then way too popular.
She wiped and surveyed the iPhone submerged in the toilet’s blue water.
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