"Not By Half"

He walks through the wall, unimpeded. A huge blocky slab of ice forms in an instant and he is gone.

The near-dark he leaves you in is fogging up from the ice melting and the hospital’s industrialized environmental heat control kicks on and ramps up.
Hell for you begins in the here and now, in your sickbed. You don’t need some snarky visiting Dark Deity to clue you in on this golden nugget. You know how you got here, that’s for sure.
It is here you started planting your sins. It is right in this spot where you have watched with joy, in the bits of clarity, their budding fruits. You looking down and smiling as they piled high. The silent cries and screams and pleading troubled you not. You enthralled at restraint, too weak to fight back, aware of how wrong it was. She could not understand why you were doing that to her.
Now the dharmic spill has covered you, laying still and unmoving yourself. Chemical restraints they call it, keeping you drifting in and out of consciousness, fleeting as a swirling passing breeze, then back down to the deep dark warm nothingness.
Because you cannot be baby-sat 24/7, strong leathers make sure you stay put, if you accidentally throw off the chemical shackles. If you ever try to heave yourself over the safety rails and truck right on out of this place. No way, Jorge, just forget about it; ain’t happening. You are here, my friend, for the duration. The Big Man says so.
This is why you are wrapped in your sick bed, dying slow, perfectly still, alert in this moment. Not surprisingly, you seek your only form of comfort. You search for the dark cloth to pull over this pesky alertness, but then you feel something under the covers with you.
Through the foggy dim light, cold drizzle falling soft on your bits of exposed skin, you see her.
The hand grasps up your leg, dark blue and crawling. The night-light glow, showing through the growing fog of melting ice, illuminated the bone-thin and veiny dead hand. Her old face comes into view. Her mouth is screaming silent. Her eyes are red and leaking, reeling you in, you stare hard at her as she grabs your crotch with her other hand. She tugs and pulls her way up, the tired green covers slipping past her wigless, spotted scalp, blue with death, hands icy on your bare stomach. You screaming noiselessly, the breathing tube keeping you alive placed through useless vocal cords. She uses the hair and loose skin on your withered chest for purchase. Your head is rigid and your neck too drugged and heavy to move. Her horrid breath is leaking out of the great black hole of her dead mouth as she reaches your face. She grabs hold of your life support connection and pulls the circuit from your breathing tube. She drags her dead, decaying self, one more tug and she clamps her hole of a mouth onto your breathing tube. She begins to suck on it, aspirating the life right out of your lungs.
The breathing machine alarms shrilly, but no one comes. You crash inside, darkening your peripheral vision, narrowing, closing down. Your heart thuds crazily in your chest. You lose your hold on consciousness and you lose, are lost.
Finally, as the only thing left of This is the faraway alarm of a cardiac arrest and the only thing so far of That is the scent of sulfur and sugar, the code team arrives.
They come wading in and save your sorry ass, again. They pull you away from That and back into Hell’s waiting room. Back to your bed, back to being resuscitated by a whole f***ing squadron of scrub-clad heroes. Fifty bills an hour times twenty of these motherf***ers and you ain’t worth the scratch, brother, not by half.
The heroes bring you back, successful, slowing down. Just now noticing the cold water puddling their clever-stupid multi-colored crocs on their sore wet feet, wondering from whence this shit came.
F*** f***, dumb-ass donkey f***, you think. I’m still here. Show some mercy and gives us some morphine, you f***ers, you yell in your mind. You need to go under, rest. Because you know they’ll be back. And so must she.

)0(

Westphal pulled into the parking lot of Harborside District Hospital. He selected a spot near the exit and killed the motor. He sat a moment, using the corner of his driver’s license to snorkel up a bump of the white lady, and yet again. He put the cola away and sat, reflecting on his chances. Really of how he didn’t have any more, how he’d let them all run out. Too many missed shifts, too many doctored piss tests, too many pleading visits to the licensing board. Too many iced vodkas and baseball chalk lines of MDMA and cocaine to go high and wide. Too many muscle relaxers and sedatives, more vodka to come down, just too many.
Westphal’s eyes hurt as bad as his head. His shift began at 7pm and ran unrelenting until 7am. Working graves at the end of his career in a Skilled Nursing Facility. It was pretty f***ing pathetic. Westphal can’t even see forty yet, but instinctively knew the score. Th

Steven Rage