The Priory Lit. Mag

The man had checked into the hospital with a stomachache. He had stumbled in, barely making it to the receptionist’s counter before kneeling over and vomiting a torrent of green bile, leaving strings of saliva and semi-digested food. He looked up, his eyes pounding and bloodshot, and the receptionist popped her gum and pointed loosely with a lolling wrist to a sign that read EMERGENCIES: ROOM 13. The man had to walk down the long hallway without assistance, sliding his palm against the smooth paint of the wall for support, his knee’s wobbling, his stomach a full soda can that had been left out in the sun too long and then opened. He made it to his room and collapsed on the bed. Ages later he awoke to find figures with sanitary masks standing over him, heads and surgical caps illuminated by bright lights, giving them a blinding halo. They were wielding scalpels as they bent over him and said in unison, “This won’t hurt a bit.” They dug in like children in a sand box, wielding plastic shovels and fingers with sand underneath the nails, raw and searching. The man could feel them sawing away at skin, muscle, tendons, veins, capillaries, and finally hitting bone. But he felt no pain. The man’s vision was engulfed by light.

Later, the man woke up naked on a hospital bed. He felt deflated, like a balloon after an all-nighter. The blinds in his room were closed, as was the door. A single cone of light held a doctor, still in his bloodstained scrubs, sitting in the bedside chair. The smoke rising from his cigarette lifted upward with the light, then crossed over to the other side. The doctor shook his head and exhaled a cloud of smoke,

“We’re all in a state of decay, all just pieces of dirt, you know? It’s our job to make sure you stay together as long as you can. We fight Big Brother Death. We are the grease that makes the gears and cogs of this little ticking time bomb that we live on work. Can you grok that, man?”

The man looked down at his body. He saw a pale patchwork quilt, flabby and Frankenstein-esque. Cross-haired stitches ran along like trails of ants, raw and red like the broken skin of a grape fruit. The man couldn’t move anything. He felt flat as a rug.

The doctor’s cigarette burned brightly for a moment as he inhaled. He spoke as the smoke leaked out of his nostrils and the corner of his mouth

“We took it all out, you know? Everything. Muscle, sinew, bones, stomach, liver, kidney, lungs. When we got to the circulatory system, we had some problems. We did everything we could, but it just kept thumping, like the tail of an old dog against the carpet. Right atrium to left atrium, right ventricle to left ventricle. We couldn’t remove it. I’m sorry, but we did everything we could.”

The doctor put out his cigarette and the light went out.