The Killing Hour

He drifts in and out of sleep and the green numbers on the clock radio tick over quicker than they should. He’s sweating, and the room spins, and he wonders if this is the most relaxed he will ever feel. He needs to do something about his wound before it becomes infected, though of course it probably already is. He can feel the badness from the cut slowly seeping through him. Infecting him. Changing the way he acts and feels and thinks.

He throws back the sheets. They’re damp and he contemplates whether he should write a note to remind himself to wash them, but he forgets about the note even as he forgets about the sheets. He heads into the bathroom and draws himself a bath. He doesn’t know if lying in hot water is going to be a good thing because it would soon become hot water full of the dirt and bacteria from his body, so he pulls out the plug and decides to have a shower instead. He stands beneath it for twenty minutes, letting the water soak into the tape. He gently teases the edges as it does so. It’s a battle but one he wins. In the end the tape comes away, and blood, about a quarter of a glass of dark blood, falls onto the floor in one large splash. The bleeding slows to a trickle but doesn’t stop. He uses a flannel to wipe away the flakes of dirt and a few tiny leaves along with the gunk left by the tape.

He can’t see how dark blood can be good. It makes him think that something inside his stomach has been damaged. Isn’t there a kidney there somewhere? Or a liver? What about his actual stomach? He realises he’s eaten very little over the last few days, and when he does his stomach burns. Why is that? He studies the skin with his fingers, pulling and poking. It is black in areas, white in others, hard all over, and he isn’t sure which colour represents the infection. He lets the hot water wash over it.

He gets out of the shower and sits on the bathroom floor with his back against the bathtub and his towel beneath him. He places some medical gauze over the wound, some padding over the gauze, and wraps duct tape around his torso to hold everything in place. When he gets up he doesn’t feel like the new man he was hoping for, but it’s better than seeing dark blood fall out of him.

The house is still closed up because any light will throw his mind back into spasms of pain. He moves to his bedroom, carrying his bloody towel and bloody flannel with him, and sits on the edge of the bed. He runs his hands over the dressing on his stomach. The wound is clean and patched and the pain seems to be just a shadow of what it was earlier. A packet of aspirin sits on the nightstand along with a packet of sleeping pills. Both are nearly empty. He takes two of each and sets his alarm clock. He rolls the flannel into the towel and tucks them into a plastic bag. He will have to either get rid of them or make an excuse to his wife. He climbs back into bed. The sheets are damp and he thinks about making a note to wash them, but before he can make one and after he forgets what the note would be for anyway, he falls asleep.





43


The temperature is rising and I have the air-conditioning turned to full. In this heat it’s easy to forget I nearly froze to death two nights ago, but easy to remember that hell is waiting around the corner.