• Fever Dreams

    They stand around my bed in silence, their faces obscured by paper masks. A precaution they said, until the worst of it passes. The room seems empty of movement. Even as the doctors whip about, their moving seems false. It is like at the cinema: just still pictures passing at a speed that simulates motion. I hear the door open, swoosh, but nobody enters. I hear clicking steps, like a dog sneaking along the kitchen floor. Then I see them, first their tiny black hands grasping at the ends of the blanket for a hold. They have scaled the bed. The first to reach the top swings its black scaly leg over the top and rolls unto the blanket by my feet. I try to scream, but it sounds muffled, as if I am under water. I am drowning. The imp stands only a few inches tall, but its mouth is full of teeth and its claws glisten in the incandescent light of the ER. I see another claw grasp out from over the edge of the mattress, then two, then ten. Scores of demons climb up onto my legs and lap. They look at me with red eyes and black flesh. One walks up unto my chest, and with a wicked and toothy grin, slashes at my face with its claws. Sharpened talons scrape trenches through my face. Its scaled feet were cold as steel on my collarbone.
    My attention is diverted as I feel a tinge of burning on my chest. Swatting one away to get a better look, I see two black imps holding a lit match to the flesh of my ribcage. The thin hospital gown has already burned away, the edges black and flashing with embers, and the bare skin beneath glows sun red. As I watch, the skin melts away like candle wax, leaving a gaping hole in my chest. As I thrash in horror, the imps begin, one by one, to dive into my torso. I can feel their clicking feet tear gashes into the walls of my lungs, which deflate like punctured balloons as they fill with the demons. One grabs hold of my intestines and begins to feed them out like a fire hose to one of the creatures still standing on the bed and he in turn tosses them off the edge of the bed where they hit the floor with a slurp and coil like a snake there on the ground. Another races down into my bowels and drills holes through my legs and scrotum, Red nectar interspersed with semen blossoms out and spoils the pristine white of the sheets. I feel the wicked movement of one demon up my chest and into my throat. As it climbs, my tongue is pulled backwards and slithers downwards into my chest. Reaching my mouth, the demon tugs at yellow teeth and uproots them one by one and these too fall down the ruined chute of my esophagus and down into my chest, clicking against each other like piano keys, while pushing through the roof of my mouth, it thrusts into my skull with a frenzy of slashing and biting until it cracks through the upper jaw bone and wades through the rotting brain juices and up through the top of the head, exposing my grey skull. Picking up a scalpel, one demon makes a cut along the skin at my waist. Two more grab fold and in one swift motion, pull of the silk skin of my legs like stockings, revealing pulsating red muscle underneath. The same is done with the shirt of skin on my torso, and I am left a naked chunk of rotting meat and shattered bone dripping blood and puss like a leaky faucet. There I lay, a skinless corpse. Without the protection of my pale blue skin, the sunlight through the small square window on the eastern-facing wall begins to melt my flesh and cell walls begin to break down mitochondria erupt spilling poison into my blood killing muscle tissue as I atrophy like a neglected limb and dissolve into a blackened puddle of sticky flesh pustules that flow spiraling towards the center of the room.