The bed
had a ramp, a 'sit up and take notice of you' bed with a plastic undersheet
to catch any slip ups. The sheets were creased, with brownish streaks, dried
blood...they weren't for changing. The bed leaked fluids that it didn't have.
In the middle of the night I sat up bolt upright and naked "Are there
mosquitoes here?" I inquired.
"What do you think you're at the seaside?" the nurse retorted.
The itching
went on all night and then at six oþclock everyone woke up and I conked out.
My bed floated in the sea, the pain was on the end of a telephone line and
I could hear it faintly in the distance. My bed blew up into a lilo and I
floated into the Mediterranean - middle earth between the ephemeral and the
divine - and I dived under water exploring corals among angel fish and jade
sea horses. The seaweed garlanded my arms and tangled with the telephone wires.
I wasn't completely cut off. I floated out of my body and looked down from
the sea clouds on the husk with its dented metal casing and crumpled mesh.
Sparklers were shooting out, fizzing and crackling and I heard inchoate shouting
far away. After "Give me five, live" I rejoined the lilo that blew
up into an airship and I was tripping on the bed in an airbubble. At first
it hit me as a vacuum - the sticky electricity stopped crackling in my head
and my blood tamed and then I felt heat, real heat, heat that claws black
to ash, cools lava to pumice stone, lolling froth and burning and I knew there
must be air though there was nothing to breathe but hot froth, stained sheets
with frothing magma surging up, wretching up from the earth's bowels, where
mud and soot settle and charcoal sediments. It left fossils in the mould like
crows feet in bark and whitened bone of empty sockets.
Jude
Rosen
