Flies

The pain was all encompassing: the bright agony of daylight, every smell, both pleasant and not, the horrible tapping of endless pairs of shoes echoing the floor around her. She was under attack. Whatever peace she had known was gone. Her pain had become an entity, a breathing, living thing.

Her old life had been lost in a series of hospitalizations, surgeries, and misdiagnoses. Her new one as she was steadily learning would only be escapable through death.

Tears formed but didn’t fall from her eyes. She twisted her lip, biting it until it bled, hoping that a new feeling might give her some respite from the others.

She licked the warm, redness from her mouth, and for a second pretended that he, someone, anyone was there. Looking at her. Seeing that she was still sensual and alive. Then the walls of her room became focused and clear through the blur of painkillers, desire and want.

She squeezed her nipple and smiled. Something of her past remained. That wonderful tingle of lust was still hers.

I have to do it today before I lose this, too, she thought. I have to find a way to get up from this bed.

She didn’t want to be found there. The sheets were disgusting. They were plastic, meant to save the mattress for future use. But the nurse hadn’t put them on correctly, which meant that nothing lay between her patient and the plastic, or the soup of blood, poison and sweat which puddled its surface. Now bedsores grew and spread resembling a map of the ancient world as country after country is conquered and joined with the whole in an ongoing march of destruction.

After my shot, I’ll have a little more energy. Maybe I’ll be able to get up. This thought almost proved too much as she began convulsing with pain and nausea.

Minutes became hours as the clock stubbornly refused to move according to the commands given it. She was having seizures by the time the nurse came with the needle.

Yes! Give it to me! Do it now! Oh God, I love you! Then the warmth of the medicine as it sped through her veins. So sensitive to every tick of her body she could feel even that. Thank you. Thank you. God bless you.

If I had a knife I could rip the path it’s taking through my arm, she thought smiling, proud of herself for having a special knowledge of such things. I could rip it all the way up to my brain. I wonder what they’d do when they saw me. Probably just think it was suicide. They’d never believe that little old me, who’d learned my medical skill from the wrong side of the bed, was able to do something like that.

Her senses dulled, and she closed her eyes. But the pain was still there, having only been slightly muffled by the medication. The fingers of her left hand trembled, another little gift from the ongoing war of these two enemies. She lay between them helpless, a bystander waiting for one of them to finally win and be done with it.

She tried to bring her head off the pillow, but didn’t have the strength, and fell back on hospital-issue number-whatever-it-was, exhausted and disgusted with herself.

Something jarred her from her despair. A new sensation to be catalogued with the other agonies and defeats which had been the steady diet her body had given her.

Her body arched and fell amid the IV bottles, monitors and bags containing her various bodily fluids. She looked orgasmic, yet horrified.

Gasping and panting as pain and ecstasy intermingled and spiraled themselves around, upon and deeply inside, her lips quivered equally with unutterable terror and indescribable bliss.

From the corner of her eye a shadow roused her. It was black and oozing over her skin. It would have resembled tar, if tar was able to breathe.

But there was something else, a low, continuous drone like the voices of a thousand, miniature Buddhist monks.

She fell asleep and dreamed that she had climbed out of herself and was finally able to see the undulating, black thing that pleasured and pained her.

The strange sound was still there. The monks were proving to be as implacable as her pain, as she flew down to get a closer look at the black mass.

Flies, millions of them, were crawling upon and inside of her, invading every secret place. Her nostrils were so full of them that she was certain her other self would suffocate before the shock of their presence and their feasting bore through the gelatinous pudding of medication and mire that was her brain.

She wanted to scream, but couldn’t, as her mouth, forced open by the great surge, vomited them out as others flew in. No longer a place of words or sighs, the flies had given her mouth a new use, doorway to her throat, esophagus, stomach contents and beyond. This army intended to win.

Flying within inches of her body, the sight of them feasting and laying eggs in her wounds overwhelmed her. She collapsed onto herself disappearing into an unconscious netherworld.

She was worn out. The doctors had all come at once, asking her question after question about what had happened.

“I don’t know,” was all she could say. She had no idea and didn’t care. The pain was gone and so were the sores. Somehow she’d been borne back into her previous self without even a scar.

“Look, I don’t know what you want me to say,” she said scanning the faces of the people before her. “I’m all right now. I’m okay. I made it.”

Then everything went black and she knew it had all been a lie. So she closed her eyes and submitted herself to the pain. It had won and continued to do so, even after the moment when the coroner began to open her chest with his scalpel.