“The results are good,” he announced. “Quite good, indeed.”
Please let that be the end of it, Richard thought. Please let them be done.
The Doctor wrung his hands together, a concerned look spreading across his face.
“There is one more test I’d like to run,” he said.
Richard grimaced. Wasn’t this ever going to end?
“Will you leave me alone, then?” he asked. “Once you’ve done that, will go away and leave me be?”
The Doctor grinned, his candy corn teeth gleaming.
“Nurse, I’d like to perform a colonoscopy, if you’d be so kind.”
Richard’s eyes bulged.
“Huh? What . . . wait . . .”
The nurse scrounged through the shopping cart noisily, as The Doctor pulled on a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves.
“Listen, you don’t have to do this,” David said.
The old witch pulled a green garden hose out of the cart, odd pieces of junk clattering loudly. She looked at Richard and winked.
“No. No. No,” Richard pled.
“Just relax,” The Doctor said. “This is a very common procedure.”
He took hold of the waistband of Richard’s boxers and gave a yank. The flimsy silk gave way with a quick rip. Richard’s face flushed as his genitals were exposed. He twisted his hips back and forth in a futile attempt to hide his nakedness.
“Why are you doing this to me? What did I do to deserve this?”
At the foot of the bed, the hag was busy unraveling the hose. Her nose made a labored whistling noise as she breathed. The Doctor had reopened his trusty jar of petroleum jelly, and was applying a thick coating to one end of the rubber hose.
“Oh no,” Richard moaned. “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this.”
The Doctor inserted a jelly-covered finger between Richard’s buttocks and slathered a dollop of the stuff onto his anus.
“This will be over before you know it,” The Doctor smiled. He took hold of the hose like a deranged firefighter.
Richard shrieked.
The nurse mimicked his anguished cries. It was a cruel, taunting gesture, and if Richard hadn’t been tied to the bed, he would have killed her, no second thoughts. He would’ve wrapped his hands around her scrawny throat and squeezed until her trachea popped. He would have watched the light go out of her eyes, and cherished every second of it. But he was tied to the bed. They had the control, not him. So he did the only thing he could. He screamed for help. He screamed as loud as he could.
“Nurse!” The Doctor called. “Gag the patient.”
The hag hiked up her dirty white skirt and pulled down her panties. Richard caught a brief, awful glimpse of her briar patch of pubic hair. The underwear fell to her ankles. She stepped out of them, picked them up, and twisted them into a tight ball. She came at Richard, and stuffed them into his shrieking mouth. He gagged as the fabric pressed against his tongue and the roof of his mouth. She wedged it in further with the flat of her hand. Richard tried forcing it out with his tongue, but it wouldn’t budge. The old bitch cackled, then bent down and licked his cheek. His eyelids fluttered, and he fought the urge to vomit.
“Much better,” The Doctor complimented. “Now, let’s get down to work.” He bent forward and pressed the end of the hose against Richard’s rectum.
Richard bucked his hips furiously, trying to fight off the assault. He clenched his sphincter as tightly as he could. It did no good, as Richard felt the copper threads being forced into the sensitive orifice, tissue tearing. He screamed against the wadded panties in his mouth. It was a muffled, choked sound. He felt a white-hot flash of pain as hose worked in deeper — a fire in his guts like nothing he had felt before.
Hadn’t anyone heard his screams? His shouts for help? It was late, but surely, someone on his floor was still awake. Wouldn’t somebody have been stirred by the commotion? Why wasn’t anybody coming to check on him? Why hadn’t the police been called? What the fuck was wrong with people?
With every moment of pain, Richard thought things were as bad as it could get, and every passing second proved him wrong. Each torturous instant was replaced by one more intense than the other, as the hose snaked impossibly further into his body. He didn’t even fight it. He lay there, eyes full of tears, as the indignity went on and on through the night.
The rich, pink light of dawn peeked through the curtains in Richard’s bedroom. The sound of the city waking and going to work drifted up from the streets below.
It was over. For how long, Richard wasn’t sure. Thirty minutes, thirty seconds — time wasn’t the same now. It passed differently. How could five seconds of time spent driving on the freeway or eating lunch compare to five seconds of what he had gone through during the night? How could those five seconds be equal?
He was lying in a fetal position on the bed. Tracks of blood-streaked sludge marked the mattress where The Doctor had withdrawn the hose. Tangles of sweaty hair stuck to his forehead. He had been cut free from his binds, his wrists and ankles bloody and raw.
The hag appeared busy, loading The Doctor’s “instruments” back into the cart. She hummed a tune that might have been Camptown Races. Or maybe not. The Doctor himself, stepped out of the bathroom, his hands freshly scrubbed, but the rest of him as scummy as ever.
“Ah, there’s the happy patient,” he crooned. “See now, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”
Richard buried his face in his pillow. The Doctor strode over to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. Richard didn’t look up as the lunatic patted his shoulder.
“I’m happy to report that all your tests came up negative. You seem to be in tip-top shape. Although, there is a growth that I’d like to take a look at on a later date.” He let his hand glide down Richard’s body, to his groin, and fondled his genitals. Richard whimpered, but didn’t have the strength to move.
“This may have to be removed eventually,” he warned. There was an ominous tone to his voice. “I’ll have my nurse book a follow-up appointment for you in three months.
“And please don’t miss the appointment. It would be much more dangerous in the long run if you did. Do we understand one another?” As if to punctuate, he squeezed Richard’s testicles. Richard grimaced and nodded.
He stood up and the old hag joined him at his side. She handed him his clipboard. He took a gnawed pencil out of his breast pocket and scribbled something down. When he finished, he laid a McDonalds napkin on the night stand. It was a crudely drawn sketch of a pair of female breasts.
“If you should experience any itching or burning, I want you to have this filled by your local druggist.”
The hag pushed the cart out of the bedroom and into the hall, contents rattling gently as it rolled across the carpet. The Doctor followed her as far as the door, but stopped and turned around to face Richard.
“There is one more thing I should take care of,” he said. Richard’s muscles tightened. Another test? Would the horrors never end?
“I’m speaking of the bill, of course. I’ll have my nurse send a copy to your insurance provider. They’ll cover a large portion. However, you will be responsible for the deductible. It would be most appreciated if you made that check payable to me, and sent to my office in a timely manner.”
He paused, as if wanting to say something else. Instead, he turned, and without saying a word, exited the room. After a moment, his apartment door slammed shut. For a moment, he could hear the shopping cart moving down the outside hall, wheels squeaking. They were gone.
The last thing he wanted to do was move. His insides ached. The throbbing had returned in his head. He was almost sure the blow from the mallet had caused a concussion. He touched the lump on his forehead with his fingertips and winced. He looked at the digits and saw sticky, half-congealed blood on them. There was a heavy dampness in his groin and on the sheet.
He sat up, yelping, as freshly torn tissue stretched and burned. Despite the pain, he managed to inch his way to the
edge of the bed. He sat with legs dangling over the side, and picked up the phone from the night stand. His wallet, watch, and car keys hadn’t been touched. He took a deep breath and dialed. It rang twice before a lady with a sweet voice said, “Nine-one-one, how can we be of service?”
Richard clenched the phone so tightly in his sweaty hand, he was afraid it might break. He loosened his grip and started to speak.
“Um, this is, um . . .” He paused, not sure what to say.
“Sir?” the lady asked. “Sir, are you still there?”
“Hmm? Oh . . . yeah. Um . . .”
“Sir, if you’re unable to speak, just stay on the line. We’re tracing your call now.”
“Never mind. I’m sorry.” Richard gently laid the phone back in the receiver.
No, he thought. He couldn’t.
He grimaced as he stood. He slowly made his way to the bathroom. He found that if he half-waddled, half-shuffled, it didn’t hurt so badly.
He stopped at the sink and splashed some cold water on his face. He cupped the liquid in his hands and drank from them. The water was cool and soothing on his raw throat. He felt a pressure in his bowels, but didn’t relieve himself. He was afraid of what he might find swirling about in the toilet water when he was done.
He looked at himself in the mirror above the sink and was shocked at what he saw. There was a pale, haggard ghost staring back at him. That wasn’t the same face that had been in the mirror the night before, when he had brushed his teeth before going to bed. That face had belonged to a man. This haunted visage was barely human.
Tears began rolling gently down the face. It twisted into an ugly mask of grief and shock. And something else. What was it? Shame? Yes, that was it. Shame.
The face sobbed and shook uncontrollably as if a dark storm raged just underneath its skin.
As the face wept, Richard wanted desperately to reach out to it — to gently touch its cheek and tell it everything would be all right. But everything wouldn’t be all right, would it? Life would never be all right again.
Richard and the face in the mirror cried together for the things they had lost.
She Called Him Sky
by Mercedes M. Yardley
Mercedes M. Yardley wears red lipstick and poisonous flowers in her hair. She is the author of BEAUTIFUL SORROWS, APOCALYPTIC MONTESSA AND NUCLEAR LULU: A TALE OF ATOMIC LOVE, and the BONE ANGEL TRILOGY.
There was a boy. And there was a girl. Many stories begin this way.
The boy was a sad, beautiful boy. He carried something small and bruised in his hands. The boy stumbled through the forest, tripping in the ivy and knocking his head against the trees. He staggered through the desert, falling down and walking on his knees. He crawled through the arctic cold, blowing on the slight, battered thing in his hands.
One day the boy met the girl.
She was passing through the cornfields when she saw something pale amidst the green. She stepped closer, and realized it was a white hand, palm upward. The hand belonged to an arm, and the arm attached to a very-much-asleep boy. His other hand was fisted tightly.
“Boy,” she said, and pulled on his outstretched hand until his eyes flew open. They were black as night with no white at all and shone as though he were crying. His oil slick eyes roamed around a bit wildly until they landed on the tan face of the girl.
“Hello,” she said, and studied him seriously. Then she smiled. “I think you could use some help.”
She took the boy home, gave him a bath, and gave him a name. She called him Sky because he always looked so sad, like the stars look sad. She thought of how the moon was always alone, never invited to tea, an eerily beautiful voyeur. Sky was just the right name.
The girl didn’t have a name herself, and it didn’t matter because the boy couldn’t speak. He just held whatever it was tightly in his hand, careful never to drop it.
“May I see what it is?” she asked him, and after thinking it over, he slowly opened his fingers.
It was a heart made out of red crystal, only now it was fissured and tender to the touch. The fire inside the heart had almost gone out, and even as the girl watched, a small bit of it crumbled to dust and fell away.
“Oh,” said the girl. She looked at the boy. “Sky,” she said, “I might be able to fix this. It could take me a while. May I try?”
He watched her with his strange eyes and then he nodded. The girl gingerly took the heart into her warm hands.
“I will take it into my shop where it will be safe. I will bring it back to you when the moon is the same shape it is now. All right?”
Again the boy nodded. The girl held the heart close to her chest and ran back to her shop. She carefully set the heart on a scrap of blue fabric, and surveyed her many tools. Then she got to work.
Every evening she worked on repairing the red crystal heart, and every day she spent time with the boy. He pointed at the birds and she told him their names. He pointed at the water and she showed him how to wash. He pointed at the honey-haired girl who lived down the lane, and the girl’s eyes stung a bit.
“Yes, she is very pretty. And very, very kind. Her name is Asphodel, which is a type of lily. Me? I am not called anything.” She smiled at the boy. “The sun is going down. I shall leave now to work on your heart.”
She worked so hard that she didn’t see the sun for days, but the time had come. The moon was fat and heavy in the sky. The boy’s eyes pulled away from Asphodel’s home long enough to see that the girl was walking toward him, something carefully cupped in her hands.
The heart was beautiful, shiny and full of burning life. The fissures had mended, the broken edges had been smoothed and polished. He held his hands out for it, and the girl let her fingers linger on his for a second when she passed it to him. Then she pulled them away.
“It is good, Sky. It is strong and able to withstand much, I think.” She watched his liquid eyes drift toward Asphodel, a compass to True North. Her lips turned upward. “I believe it is strong enough to survive if you give it to Asphodel. I think that you should try.”
He looked at her then, gave her a brotherly kiss and sprang to his feet. His footsteps were whispers.
The girl picked her way through the flowers on the way back to the shop, but she never made it. She fell, silently, and her hand found its way inside her shirt to the hole where her plump, healthy heart had been. The boy’s small ragged heart was still wrapped in fabric on her table, resistant to filler, resistant to files. Buffing didn’t warm it, fires didn’t fuse it. Sometimes, something so broken can only be replaced.
The flowers were soft. There was no sound.
In the Bones
by Bracken MacLeod
Bracken MacLeod lives in New England and has worked as a martial arts teacher, a university philosophy instructor, for a children's non-profit, and as a criminal and civil trial attorney. While he tries to avoid using the law education, he occasionally finds uses for the martial arts and philosophy training. His stories have appeared in several online magazines and print anthologies including Sex and Murder Magazine, Shotgun Honey, Femme Fatale: Erotic Tales of Dangerous Women, Reloaded: Both Barrels Vol. 2, Anthology Year One and Year Two: Inner Demons Out, and most recently Ominous Realities from Gray Matter Press and LampLight Magazine.
His debut novel, MOUNTAIN HOME, is available from Books of the Dead Press.
Carol was stable, but still unconscious. She had tubes going into her arms and mouth, bandages around her head covering the portion they'd shaved in order to operate, and a large contraption that looked like an Inquisitor’s device holding together what was left of her leg. Large metal circles with wires leading to screws and pins invaded pink and red inflamed flesh, torn and cut and loosely stapled back together. All for the sake of holding together a single bone which had been made several.
Although it wasn't permitted, the night staff bent the rules and moved one of the fold-out chairs from Maternity into Carol’s room for her husband, Paul Goddard, to sleep
on. It was uncomfortable, but after two nights in the hard visitor's chair leaning over to rest with his head propped at the end of the bed, it felt like a feather mattress. The doctor who came in the following morning to check on Carol seemed to tut-tut softly when he saw what they'd done, but had nothing else to say about it. Paul doubted that the doctor kept quiet purely out of sympathy for his plight. It was likely just a matter below his pay grade. Come in. Check the patient's condition. Move on to the next one.
He looked at his wife's butchered thigh and thought about the things coating the floors and floating through the air in any hospital that might take up residence in her. Tiny invisible things cast off from one person, infecting another, passed from mouth to hand to wound. Everyone directly caring for Carol washed their hands compulsively. For the other staff and lighter contact visits, there were alcohol hand sanitizer dispensers hanging on the walls in every single doorway and hallway in the place. Hospital protocols bred obsession. A dose on the way in and a dose on the way out. The drip leading into Carol's arm fed her an antibiotic to keep infection at bay.
Still. You had to be vigilant.
Paul had read about MRSA, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. It was natural selection at work—a strain of bacteria resistant to antibiotics that, while not any more virulent than normal staph, was much more difficult to treat once infection set in, thus making it deadly in certain cases. Cases like hers.
Paul sat up in the chair to look out the window at the Charles River. The water sparkled under the light of the rising sun. On the surface of the calm water, a young man pulled on long thin oars, his narrow boat lacing delicately across the surface leaving a pattern like the water-skippers he used to stare at as a child when his parents took him to the woods.
Beyond the river, the city skyline rose up like distant, jagged spires stabbing at the white and blue sky. The Hancock Tower, 111 Huntington, the Pru. The city was once a peninsula connected to the mainland by only a slender isthmus until they built up the Back Bay and other parts of the city using landfill. They displaced the bay with the shattered fragments of earth and forest, old docks and tons and tons of gravel transported there by truck, arriving every forty-five minutes, day and night, for fifty years. It was all buried to build a bigger city, a stronger city. But it was never strong enough. The fill is weak. The gleaming towers that rise above the Back Bay are built with supports that pierce down through it, right down to the bedrock. Man’s reach for the sky rooted to the bones of the earth.
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