by S. Gates
Bodies Are Disgusting
Copyright 2013 S. Gates
Published by S. Gates at Smashwords
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Bodies Are Disgusting
About S. Gates
Connect with S. Gates
Acknowledgements
This work would not have been possible without the love and support of a lot of people. As with most labors of love, thanks go to my spouse, Lander, my bromantic life partner, Eri, and all of my friends who gave me feedback and encouragement while I tried to get this done. Special thanks goes to Damien Williams, whose feedback was invaluable.
Bodies Are Disgusting
You can't remember your first date with Amanda. You aren't sure why this is your first thought as you drift toward consciousness, but all you can do is trace your memories back to the time before Amanda decided you were terrible for each other. This brings her face swimming into focus in your mind's eye: rounded cheeks and soft lips and wide nose and dark ringlets that fall around her dusky face. It makes you feel sick.
That nausea is what provides the final push back toward cognizance. Without opening your eyes, you fumble around until you find the side of the bed you're in and pull your torso over the edge. Your body is wracked by dry heaves that do nothing but make your eyes water and pain explode in your skull, but no amount of deep breathing makes it stop. It takes a while–how long, you can't guess–but your guts eventually realize that there was never anything there for them to evacuate.
With the distraction of retching gone, you finally notice the ambient noises of your surroundings: the patter of rain on a window, white noise from an overworked heating unit, three different flavors of beeping that seem to be keeping time with your heartbeat, muffled human chatter. Combined with the vaguely antiseptic smell that permeates your sinuses, you hazard to guess that you're in a hospital for some reason. Like your first date with Amanda, you can't remember why.
Your arms tremble as you push yourself back to the center of what you now assume to be your hospital bed. For a few moments, all you do is shake and breathe and try not to think about why you can't remember your first date with the girl that you might call your best friend on a good day (or the ruiner of your life on a bad one, even though you think it might not be her fault). When the beeping that corresponds to your heartbeat has slowed, you wipe at your mouth with the corner of the blanket covering the bed.
You can't put off opening your eyes any longer, though you're not sure why you were doing it in the first place. Your eyelids feel crusted in sludge, and you have to reach up and flake some of it away before you can actually get your eyelashes to untangle. Everything is blurry and dark; the only sources of illumination are on opposite sides of you. One of them, you identify as the square of glass set in the door that you assume leads to the rest of your hospital ward. The other, you similarly assume, is the moon filtering in through open blinds. To your left is a complex nest of machinery and wires and tubes, most of them hooked into you somehow. The displays are dark save for a periodic blinking light that has nothing to do with the persistent beeping.
As you blink a few times, it becomes easier to make out some details, though things are still somewhat blurry. Outside, naked tree limbs flail in the wind, and what you had assumed was moonlight is actually a mercury-vapor lamp set somewhere near your window. There's a TV mounted above your bed–dormant–and a call button next to your head. There is a closed door across from you, set in a frame attached to what looks like it could be a closet. Your room is devoid of any other human life.
You feel the sudden need to piss.
From under the closet door, you can see a light flicker. The sounds of water dripping come from behind it, and you revise your assessment from 'maybe-closet' to 'probably-bathroom.' The water's noise does absolutely nothing to help your bladder, but you're hooked up to too many... things to feel comfortable trying to make it anywhere. You aren't even sure if your legs would work or if the probably-bathroom is unlocked.
The dripping stops, the light flickers out, and the door swings wide. Too much distance and shadow lies between you and the figure for you to make out much about the person walking out of the bathroom, but you can tell that they're shorter than anyone you can put a name to. They stand in the doorway for a moment, hands on hips, as if surveying a foreign landscape. The darkness around them looks somehow heavy, somehow alive in a way. If you didn't know any better, you might even think that it was writhing. Looking at it almost makes you feel sick again, so you turn away.
The stranger laughs, voice high like that of a prepubescent child. "Sometimes you surprise me, Douglas. I didn't expect you to be awake for another few hours yet. And here I am without my face." For some reason, this queer statement sets you on edge; you try to say something, but they hold up a hand. "No, hush, don't talk, there's nothing you can say right now that I haven't already heard while you were unconscious. I still don't know why you can't remember your first date with Amanda, but I'd guess it has something to do with the head trauma. Don't worry, it will pass. Perhaps." They chuckle, and your stomach does a lazy roll. There's something about that laugh you can't quite figure out, something that might border on ineffable if you were feeling punchy. You aren't, so you let it go.
Instead of responding, you reach for what you assume is your call button. The stranger laughs again, takes two quick strides (their legs may not be impressively long, even in the dark where you can't exactly focus right, but they seem to stretch) and snatches it out of your reach. "No, not just yet. I'm not ready for the nurses to look at you. They can have you once I've gone, but for this moment, you are mine alone." The words roll of the stranger's tongue like they would a lover's.
You want to say that you really have to take a piss, but your tongue won't work. It might as well be a lead slug in your mouth, and your throat feels scoured with sandpaper.
"The game is about to start," says the stranger. "This will be the last time I see you without my face, and I will miss that. Whatever happens once we've started playing, I have no real investment in the outcome. I play less for the winning and more for the playing, and I hope that you might survive long enough to understand that pleasure." They reach out and ruffle your hair with fingers you can't quite feel. "Which reminds me, I would appreciate it if you told Amanda that I said 'hello.'"
Before you can protest that you have no fucking clue who this person is, your eyes drift closed and you're back to being unconscious.
You still can't remember your first date with Amanda, and now, you realize, you can't remember the last time you saw her either.
* * *
When you wake up again, it's daylight. A squat, dumpy-looking fellow with a receding hairline, brown skin, and wire-frame spectacles stands next to your bed, marking things on what must be your chart. There's no sign that anyone else had ever been in the room with you other than the door to the bathroom being ajar. The TV is on, but you can't focus well enough to see what's playing, and the volume is too low for you to hear.
"Ah, it's good to see you're awake," the short man says, though his voice sounds more disinterested than anything. That's all right, you're not that interested in being awake, other than the fact that you stil
l have to piss.
Evidently, your tongue's working better now than it was last night, because the man just raises an eyebrow. "Well, the restroom is this way. Just mind your IV."
Glancing down at yourself, you see that the only thing attached to you is the IV needle in the back of your left hand. Fuck. No one bothered to ask if you were a southpaw, or you were in no position to say. "I thought I was hooked up to more shit last night," you say.
The man nods. "You were, but you stabilized this morning. It was a little touch-and-go there for a bit. If you need assistance, I can call one of the nurses?" He tilts the end of the word up like a question, and you shake your head. He takes a step back to allow you to swing your legs over the side and slide out of the bed.
You wince when your feet touch the floor. It's that impersonal tile they use in many buildings with large amounts of foot traffic and high probabilities of needing to clean up bodily fluids, and it feels like dry-ice on your skin. You half-expect to lose a couple of layers of your soles to it when you try to shuffle toward the bathroom, IV stand in tow, but it only feels that cold. You finally make it to the bathroom, and there's just enough room for you to park your IV near the sink before you plop down on the toilet. You have never been so glad for being naked except for a hospital gown as you are in this one moment.
In the (not inconsiderable) time it takes to relieve yourself, you notice a few things about the tiny bathroom. The light, set above the mirror and not overhead, flickers ever-so-slightly. It's almost subtle enough that you don't notice it except out of the corner of your eye. The faucet drips erratically, and when you think that you've found some pattern to it, the drip changes. A cramped shower stall takes up one corner, separated from the rest of the bathroom by a dingy old curtain. In most places, the floor has been scrubbed to within an inch of its life, to the point where the enamel on some of the tiles has started to flake away near your toes. You finish your business and go to wash your hands.
On the sink sits a ring. It's relatively plain, just a plain band of silvery metal accented with some form of engraving. You pick it up to take a closer look since your eyes still aren't ready to focus on much, but you can't quite make out what the engraving is supposed to be. For such a small ring, it feels weighty in your palm, as if it were made of some incredibly dense metal, and it is almost warm to the touch. You set it back where you found it, wash and dry your hands, then pick it back up again.
Your first impulse is to pocket the thing and show it to the dumpy man outside, but hospital gowns were not created for the purpose of pocketing anything, let alone pieces of jewelry. Instead, you slide the ring onto your right index finger. It catches briefly on your second knuckle before fitting snugly at the base with just enough wiggle room that you can spin it around if you so choose.
The trip back to your hospital bed takes considerably less effort than the trip to the restroom did, due partly, you think, to the fact that your bladder is no longer filled with what felt like two gallons of liquid. The dumpy doctor is gone, replaced by Amanda. She looks awful and drawn, her face a mess of dark circles, worry-lines, and tear-tracks. She's probably the most beautiful individual you've ever seen, even now.
"Oh my god, Doug," she breathes. Her mouth always does weird things to your name, makes it sound like something that might've been sacred once, before she got ahold of it. But there's no way to avoid the fact that hearing her voice makes you feel a little better. "You look like shit."
You didn't inspect yourself in the bathroom mirror, but you don't have to see yourself to know it's true. You woke up in a hospital with no memory of how you got there or why; it stands to reason that you look like shit. "Jesus, Manda, why not punch me while I'm down." Your voice feels rougher coming out of your throat now than it did when you were talking to the doctor.
She closes the distance between you and pulls you into her arms. It's nowhere near comfortable enough or close enough to be classified a hug, but you know that a real embrace is totally out of the question by the way that your ribs creak in your chest. You half-heartedly bring your arms up to loop around her waist while you rest your head on her shoulder. It's familiar and warm.
You notice that you don't feel the nose-pads of your glasses digging into your face. At least that explains why things are so blurry. "Fuck, where are my specs?" you ask, pulling away and squinting so you can see Amanda's face better.
She scowls (you've always hated it when she does that because it makes her face bunched up and less attractive). "They got trashed in the wreck, Doug." It sounds like she's explained this before. Several times. "You don't remember, do you?" Her words are heavy in your ears.
Thinking the question over, you realize that you don't remember a lot of things: your parents' anniversary, today's date, the tenth digit of pi, the German word for "revenge," what happened yesterday. There are other, infinitely more disquieting holes, too, but you can't quite bring yourself to name them. Not in front of Amanda, anyway.
"I don't remember shit." It isn't exact, but it might as well be the truth. "Just some weird dreams about some kid who told me to tell you they said hey."
Amanda's expression goes from that bunched up scowl to looking like she just sucked on a giant lemon wedge. "You were in a wreck three days ago. Some drunk asshole ran a red light and t-boned you on your side. You lost a little blood, and they were worried there might've been some swelling in your brain or something like that. We weren't sure you were going to pull through." 'We,' not 'they.' Interesting. You file that bit of information away for when you're feeling more cogent. She continues, "You didn't break anything, thank God. Just bruised a bunch of ribs, but they're watching your lungs for blood clots from the seatbelt."
On a whim, you ask, "What about the other guy? He gonna pull through?" You don't actually care about the other driver one way or another, but it seems like the right thing to say.
"Died on impact," Amanda responds, sour expression only getting worse. "I didn't see it, but I heard from the paramedics that it wasn't pretty. They don't think he was wearing a seatbelt, and the airbag didn't deploy."
You nod as if that means anything to you. Listening to Amanda explain your situation has drained all your energy, leaving you feeling withered and exhausted. You sort of collapse on the hospital bed, not even really caring that your ass hangs out of the hospital gown. It isn't like Amanda hasn't seen it before. Or worse.
"You okay?" Amanda asks.
"Tired," you respond, and it's the last thing you can remember aside from the warmth of the metal loop around your finger.
* * *
When you dream, you remember things. You can remember that the tenth digit of e is 4, that it snowed on the day your parents got married, that Weihnachten is German for "Christmas," that your spare pair of glasses is in your sock drawer at home, and that your second date with Amanda was a disastrous affair at a hole-in-the-wall pizza joint. That particular memory makes you smile, because even though it hadn't been particularly funny when it happened, it is hilarious in hindsight. You're both permanently banned from the establishment, which is no great loss considering the atrocious quality of the slop they tried to call food.
* * *
It's night again. You can hear the whir of the A/C unit, can see the glow of the vapor lamps through the slats of the blinds. The rain is back, harder this time. So is the stranger.
He (you're fairly certain, now that you can see definite features, that this short individual is male) perches on the foot of your bed, posed for all the world like a gargoyle. With him this close, you can make out a few details about him: his jaw-line is delicate, his chin is pointed, his eyes are almost too wide for his face, his hair is chin-length and unkempt, his shoulders are slender, and he wears some sort of square-necked tunic with a pair of soft-looking trousers.
He blinks once at you before his face is split by a wide, toothy grin. "You're awake! Finally!" He lunges forward, supporting himself on his hands so that he does not touch your tender ribs. "
Oh, I'm so glad that you're finally conscious, Douglas. I have so much to tell you."
With his face looming mere inches from yours, you can see that his teeth are decidedly pointed and his eyes are almost completely black. It gives you the impression of staring into the face of a shark-like boy (or, perhaps more accurately, a boyish shark). Strangely, it doesn't particularly faze you. It's as if some part of your brain knows that this–whoever or whatever this is–is hardly the worst possibility out of many things you might see on your bed late at night.
You bring your left hand up to his face to shove him away, but he leans into your touch like a needful cat. He rubs his cheek against your palm before dragging his tongue up the underside of your thumb; it's rough, making you revise your assessment to 'boyish felinoid shark.' You jerk your hand away, glaring. "What the fuck?"
"Did you like my present?" he asks as if you'd not said anything. His expression is wide and eager, and it makes you feel uneasy. He practically vibrates with his enthusiasm.
"I don't know what the hell you're talking about," you reply. Your voice doesn't quaver like you expect it to. You thank whatever merciful deity that has taken pity on you for small favors. "Who the fuck are you? What're you doing here?"
The weird little cat-shark-boy laughs. "You can call me Ori, dearest Douglas. I gave you that ring. Do you like it? You're wearing it. I assume that you would not wear a gift you do not enjoy, at least marginally." His grin stays firmly on his face, and he tilts his neck so that he can rub the top of his head against your chin.
His hair is surprisingly soft and smells a little like that time you went with your friends to Cape Hatteras for spring break in high school. You're awash with the memories: four hormonal teenagers piling into an old minivan loaded with snacks, driving for ten hours to reach your destination, ogling the attractive individuals also vacationing at the beach while lamenting your blemished skin and un-toned abs. You remember finally working up the nerve to put on your bathing suit (it was a plain black one-piece that covered everything important to you at the time) and jumping into the cool Atlantic water. You'd seen a little shark, tiny and gray, swimming in the shallows, and it reminds you of Ori.
