To celebrate Halloween and offer some support to all of you doing NaNoWriMo out there, here's a creepy bit from my attempt last year. tw: blood, body horror, hospitals
In her dreams she was washed in light and fear. Her very first dream in the hospital, which she would come to name “The Incorruptible”, was awash in blood. It wasn’t the fake, pouring blood of a horror film, instead, the dream took place at the clinic where she had seen Joyce just this morning. She was in the room where they stored all of the donor blood, poured unnaturally into bags which Sophia only tolerated because they saved lives. To her it seemed a gross perversion of the natural order that this was allowed to happen, that this intrinsic part of one’s life force could be stored in plastic.
She slit the bags one by one and poured them into herself, channeling it through her wrists. She was almost full, almost complete, and she felt certain that if she could only get enough of this heavenly life force she would cease to be afraid, cease to be lonely, and become full of power and beauty. Then the tubes disconnected and the blood began to spill over her wrists and arms, running down her arms like juice from a popsicle. Sophia whimpered like an uncomfortable young child, for she couldn’t bear to see this essence of power wasted, spilling onto the floor. Taking care to orient her wrists so that she wouldn’t lose her own liquid light, she taped the bag that she had emptied halfway shut and set it down. Soon, her back began to feel damp and her hair felt heavy. Contorting her head, Sophia was horrified to discover that her hair was leaking blood. It seemed that some divine being had deemed her inadequate as a vessel of that holy blood, freely given by one denizen of the universe to an unknown other. She was sad to see the immense power go, but she comforted herself with the idea that at least one cell that had come from another would remain in her veins, enabling her to leave some fleeting permanence in this world. But her hair became heavier still, and the cells fell to the floor in brilliant drops. Sophia felt betrayed, for she regarded blood as the most majestic group of cells and atoms in the entire body; blood to her was loyal and pure. Yet it left her, pooling on the floor as it did. Feeling unbearably light, Sophia sensed that she was flimsy and dry, like a corn husk that nobody had bothered to make into a doll.
At this point, “the Incorruptible” opened itself up to variation. That first night, doped up on tranquilizers and tied to a hospital bed, the lightness that Sophia felt allowed her to float up into the sky, moved by the wind. She finally stopped feeling cold, and she saw the campus, lit from below her. It looked exactly how she would have imagined the university would appear from the sky if someone had asked her to describe it with a bird’s-eye view the day before, and it seemed so unfair that everything would continue on exactly the way it had before she left; it completely disillusioned her from the vanity of importance, purpose, and meaning. And yet, on the smallest, most insignificant scale, she knew that somewhere among the myriad yellow lit squares there was one that was dark, some place that felt her absence and was changed because of it. But in the eyes of God or whatever omnipresent entity that witnessed this world, Sophia realized, she was nothing. Her story, the one that everyone loved to write, was a tiny dot on the vastness of conciousness, and furthermore, so were the lives of the greatest members of mankind: Socrates, Darwin, Angela Davis, all of them would one day be lost, be it to the peculiarities of history or the intrinsic heat of the universe. Her mind pulsated with this knowledge, expanding and contracting to include unbearably large and small quantities of information. She bounced back and forth between knowing everything and nothing, and was almost sure that nothing was far preferable, nothing was frightening, but manageable. Everything, in contrast, was painful, when she had everything her ears roared and infinite thoughts whizzed through her head, piercing her like bullets.
Jolting awake, Sophia began once again to scream. It was debasing, and in a tiny corner of her mind she was embarrassed, but she couldn’t find another way to find solace from the growing tide of knowledge. The sound drowned out many of her thoughts and drew the attention of the hospital staff, and once again someone was there with a needle to pierce her veins and calm her blood. She grew quieter and quieter and returned to the painless, dreamless sleep that had previously engulfed her, thanking God and Science for the miracles of modern medicine.
No comments:
Post a Comment