As I laid quietly on this molding and rusty gurney, I could hear the nurses babbling on the other side of the oak doors that divided me from the real world. I wasn't even in the same macrocosm as them as I screamed for help and none of their silhouettes turned to come inside the room surrounded in a dark evil. The only source of light was from a small, dying head lamp right above my face.
"Hello? Anyone?" I called once I heard a lowly chuckle rotate around my entire body. Footsteps ran away from me behind my head and a small rustle of clothes materialized around my feet. Breathing heavily, I twisted my head side to side quickly and wriggled my body. I was trying desperately to pry myself out of the buckled claws holding me close to the gurney.
I gasped as I watched a man emerge from under my feet with a suture in hand, the eye of it already threaded. I watched mutely as the string passed over my body and back over the edge of the gurney. Two nurses pulled a small cart of surgical tools into the light with their backs towards me. Once they turned around, sweat started to trickle down my face as I looked at their faces, for...they had none. It was as if their heads were just skulls covered with a thin layer of skin. They had no nose or nostrils, no eyes of corneas, no mouth or teeth, no ears or earrings...just small dents and outlines for where the features of the face were supposed to be.
The doctor looked down at me as I looked up at him. He laughed as he slowly moved his suture up above my lips. Quickly, my eyes flashed around the room as I noticed one of the nurses, completely mesmerized by the idiosyncratic way the medic held his tool. Only little bursts of images kept me close to reality as the suture moved closer to my lips, stabbing through my bottom lip and continuing through my upper lip. I tried to scream but the pain of moving my lips was unbearable as he sewed my lips fully shut.
One of the nurses climbed onto my stomach and sat down, grabbing a scalpel and stabbing it down onto my wrist. Blood pooled over like a fountain and crawled down the side of the gurney like a daddy long leg, silently stalking its prey. She cut a straight line from my wrist to my shoulder and continued to advance to my right arm, doing the same thing. I grunted and shook as they pried back the skin to drop small, black beetles into my arm and they resewed my arms once again. I could feel them crawling, up and up and up until...
That's when I woke up to my younger brother sitting on my stomach, tapping his fingers up and down my arms that gave me the feel of bugs dancing their way up into my brain. Smiling, I pulled the duct tape off of my lips that he must have put there and pulled him down into a hug. My escape from reality was the last trip I took before my small shimmer of happiness died in a car crash later that day.
