wip wednesday | chews me up, spits me out
Kiara Alfaro, 1 hour. Grey Honda Civic in the PTMC parking lot, 11 P.M.
It all catches up to her then, as it sometimes does. She lets it. She’d feel pretty hypocritical if she never took her own advice.
Kiara never leaves the hospital covered in blood. That privilege was reserved for the doctors and nurses, when they couldn’t cover up their scrubs in time after they unwrapped a soaked bandage, hit an artery. Or today, when there was just so much of it. Seeped into every pore and crack on their bodies and brains, clinging to the grout and the fluorescents. The back of her teeth, in a way.
She never leaves the hospital covered in blood or vomit or piss or feces. She has an office. A small, perpetually dusty broom closet, but somewhere she can stash extra cardigans and ibuprofen when the overhead lighting inevitably produces a stabbing in the back of her skull. She’s even got a few picture books and board games stacked in the first drawer of her desk, for the kids in the viewing room. Not all of them want to draw, she’s discovered, and she can provide a few options this way.
Sure, she bought them. Not the hospital. It’s ok. Resource allocation, and all of that.
She never leaves the hospital covered in blood but she wants to, at least once. So that when she goes home and doesn’t meet Molly’s concerned eyes and drops her nice leather work bag by the garage door and heads to the ensuite and strips her business casual and puts her hair up and tries to bite at her epidermis with blunt nails and a burn in her chest until it’s raw and her own blood rises to the surface, she could be scrubbing off the gore and sweet copper out of her pores and lines and not nothing, never anything at all. So when she tries to break the skin down and expose the bone and musculature, something tangible and visible and material could actually leave her body. The red could circle the drain and it could leave her. And Kiara could go into her daughter’s room and read her a bedtime story with her wife and not worry that when she brushed through Ava’s curls she’d be coating them in invisible filth from the shit that’s she seen and heard and said and had to swallow until her stomach hurt.
And she would be clean. Finally.
Six bodies in pedes. When Kiara walked in with Lupe she held her breath, unwittingly. Some old saying about plugging your nose when you drive past a graveyard. Some old saying her dad would recount, in the car, in the backyard, in that dingy diner he took her and her younger brother Caleb to, after school let out, when he didn’t have to work. Then shake his head as if he didn’t actually believe it, but thought they should know anyways. But he did, and he does.
She turns the key over and the ignition sputters to life. No overlapping siren wails for the moment. She can get home relatively quickly, she thinks, and still kiss her daughter goodnight.
Halfway home, there’s a cemetery on her right, on a narrow, dimly lit road. Small, with simple headstones and a handful of scattered statues, gleaming white in the low streetlight. She inhales, deep, and exhales. Grips the steering wheel and checks the rearview. Thinks about those six bodies and the zoomed-in pictures of body parts and piercings and tattoos. Extremities beyond extremis. When she walked in, she held her breath. When she walked out, she swallowed around a gasp. Maybe in that moment she let six beating hearts into her lungs and bloodstream. Not to haunt. To live, a little longer. If you believe in that sort of thing.
