Hot water ran into the sink for three or so minutes before I noticed the steam lessening, but the worms in the sink were still prevalent, still squiggling. Clutching a half bar of soap that I’d found in a crevice between one of the other sinks and an inert bloodbag-stand, I dug my fingernails into it and started scrubbing under the waning heat of the water, trying not to touch the puddle at the bottom of the sink with all the little worms in it, squiggling around, left over from a back-up in the hospital pipes.

In the search and subsequent exposure of the infected, lead pencils were sharpened to razorpoints and distributed to available hands. Rubber gloves were administered to all in attendance, though only the nurses themselves would be inspecting for evidence of lice infestation. It was a show, to be sure. The white rubber gloves made for a performance. Grimaces or blank stares were employed. I want you troubled, if not just plain hurt, these stares implied. The nurses, gloved up and pricking their sleek tongues with sharpened pencils, they hovered greedily over the frightened parade, murmuring slight prayers of infection to fulfill legitimate desires of progress and promotion. I sat down in the chair, queasily off balance, but once making eye contact with the nurse I felt both enamored and proprietary … I considered it my chair, and her my nurse. My head screamed, my body shook. Nothing in my life had meant much until today. I stared at the nurse as if she were a provocative scrawl on the side of a traincar presently passing through a populated thoroughfare in front of dozens, or perhaps wholly several dozens. Who knows what scenes she’s attended to, I wondered. What horrors she has witnessed? Just then my old enemy ‘sleep’ wandered in to my life yet again, and I blacked out under the nurse’s pencil. Automaton and regretful enthusiast. I stretched, yawned, though this was pure show, to cover the more serious attributes of my inability to focus on not fainting. It was my great interest that needed to be shielded, and protecting my interests was key. So I threw off the staff and the other gloved but wholly unnecessary staffhands, all with a glare. I grew so stiff with anger that I almost forgot to pay attention to the nurse as the first prick of that sharpened pencil lead bit into my scalp. Maggot to butterfly, I said to myself. Transcend. Molt.

I put this part of the day into a small box and wrapped it with bed linen. Stuffed it into the closet where the extra sheets and blankets are. When you open the closet it doesn’t look like anything but a bunch of soft things. When I sink into the chair by the steel safe in the floor I put all of that part of the day far away in my head and I stare blankly at the fireplace, intrigued by how little I’m able to veer off into a semblance or shade of emotion that one could admire. I raise my hands in the air in front of me and splay my fingers, tip-tapping nothing with the fingers as if to grasp or play at; in the shadow reflections on the wall from the flames below the mantle it looks like I’m playing the piano. But what would I know about playing the piano?

At the foot of her bed, over the long long hours of the day, I forcibly ceased to become surprised by changes in her heart rate or even worried that such things could be of any danger to her at all, so that, with time, as the night drew on, I became self-sufficient and knew that I would be alright enough to fall asleep. When it was evident to me that the nurses would not be coming back in to check on me for a while, I crawled underneath the hospital bed and, spreading my jacket across the small expanse of available floor, hid underneath my love, and I curled up and went to sleep.

No believers.

Misplaced things sometimes get found again. That’s why people drag lakes when someone goes missing.

IRREGULAR SEWING PATTERNS - 105 Portraits By Jaret Ferratusco.

It is not above as it is below the Heavens.

(View full gallery on Corpse On Pumpkin’s page at Facebook.)

You’re so beautiful.

In dreams we were so small that we climbed into the peach trees in the field and on thin branches would construct houses for us to live in together, where we could never be found. We would build as many houses as time and trees allowed, never again to return to the world we came from beyond the peach field. Only then the sound of screaming and fights woke us, shattered the houses, shattered concentration.

The Unachieved Christmas, 6/7.

(Source: corpseonpumpkin.com)