in a room and a man punched me in the eye. He said something like, Tell us, tell us, and this will all stop. I had no idea what he was talking about. The inside of my mouth was tender. I remember saying, I don’t care if you do this to me. He stopped, shook his head. I threw myself at him. Hit me, I said. Hit me. I don’t fucking care. Do it. He was much bigger than me. I was slapping him and screaming. I could tell I was scaring the shit out of him. Do it, I said. My voice suddenly quiet, calm like I was answering a question in a classroom.
Last night, or a week ago, I was sitting in a room filled with animals. They were all speaking in human voices. They were talking about celebrity gossip. A celebrity was caught cheating with the maid. Two of her kids were his. One of the animals was Bigfoot. His teeth were yellow. Leaves were caught in his face fur. You look much more authentic, I told him. There were different raccoons. A bat. I wondered if they were all robots I had seen before. My nose was bleeding. It stained my shirt. You’ve gotta take care of yourself, one of the raccoons said to me. I laughed. The blood ran down my nose and chin, but I stayed and listened to them talk.
Then today, I woke up in my bed. Looked at my phone and was surprised by what day it was. It was Saturday, September 5th. I had lost weeks in August and the beginning of this month. It was late in the day, 6 p.m. I went to the bathroom, undressed to take a shower. There was a scar near my breast, close to where my heart lives. I took a breath. Thought about how I was seeing, breathing, hearing. Took my heartbeat. I felt like me again. There was a small, healing bruise beneath my eye.
I showered, dressed. Wrote the beginning of this for both of us. As I wrote, I tried as hard as possible to feel nothing. I needed to be objective. I needed to be as clear-headed as I possibly could.
First, I went to the closest emergency room. I wanted a doctor to look at my scar. Maybe they could tell me what had happened.
The ER was packed. There was a child with a cloth pressed against her head. She kept trying to take the cloth off, wanted to touch whatever was beneath. A man was lying on the floor, while two other men tried to coax him up. I can hear everything, he said. I can hear your blood moving through your veins. I can, I can. A woman whose skin was tinged yellow, so that her hair and flesh were almost a matched set. Multiple people saying they could see a black sludge following them. It was seeping beneath the door. It was glistening on the walls. Couldn’t you see? It sounded exactly like what I had seen, and I looked around, but all I saw was white walls and scared people and cheap televisions in the corners.
I think I really hurt my eye somehow. A teenage girl said, I keep seeing these neon diamonds. She had a paisley print scarf wrapped around her eyes. Her mom was holding her hand.
Some teenagers smelled familiar. Sweet, like cotton candy, fire, and, maybe, vitamins. One of them had a long cut on his palm. His blood looked closer to blue than red. A man with a nail sticking out of his foot. He was saying, It doesn’t hurt. I could live like this forever. Let’s go get a milkshake.
Despite the cold, I was sweating. A mother walked in holding a baby. Its skin was bright red. The baby had a scream that sounded like it could melt glass.
The news broke in with a special report. The anchor said we weren’t supposed to drink the water in Lakewood and the surrounding areas. He listed off the small towns nearby. There was widespread contamination, and not boiling, at this time, would help. None of the people waiting seemed to notice. A nurse came out and taped a garbage bag over the drinking fountain. On the intake station, she put out a line of water bottles. It’s going to be a three-hour wait for anything not life-threatening, someone yelled.
I left and drove the two hours home. When I opened the door, my mom