“Scalpel.”
The instrument glinted in the surgical light as the surgeon took it.
“Making incision above posterior iliac crest.”
Emmett didn’t feel it or what their fingers were doing inside the opening, only heard it: the scream of the power drill, the gnashing of metal on bone.
A large needle and syringe passed over him. “Beginning extraction.”
This Emmett felt: a sharp sting of pressure penetrating deep into his hip bone. A probing, scraping, sucking violation. He’d read about this. They had to collect stem cells from his marrow to create the vector. The extracted material, bloody and thick, dribbled into a plastic bag.
Fading in and out, Emmett couldn’t keep hold of time. It passed, maybe minutes or hours or days. Then someone was applying gauze, another hooking the bag on an IV pole.
It swung, puckered and gelatinous, like a sack of raspberry jam. Two tubes trailed from it, one smaller, one thick.
“Virus.”
A fresh syringe passed over Emmett’s head, a little one filled with clear blue liquid. The surgeon fitted the tip into the end of the smaller tube and smashed the plunger.
The blue liquid blackened as it infused the bloody soup of stem cells. Emmett panicked, moaned in fear, or tried to. For a second he believed they’d heard him. They were removing his mask to hear him better.
The nurse squeezed his cheeks together like an adoring auntie, then shoved something roughly into his mouth. It was bendy, sterile tasting. A ribbed plastic tube. Emmett gagged as she thrust it deeper. It scraped down his throat.
He retched, unable to breathe. His eyes streamed, his vision bleary and starred.
Emmett always knew he’d die young, but not here. Not like this.
“Administering nutritive formula.”
The nurse turned the lever on a tank of brownish-green sludge. It began to gurgle and empty. The noxious smoothie chugged through the plastic tube, wending toward him like a headless snake.
Then the snake was shoving itself down his throat. Its heaviness filled him like concrete: a sensation his body remembered with a spasm of inner violence, a reflexive response stifled by the deadening effect of the sedative. A voice cut through the mire of black gelatin surrounding his mind:Got room for a little more, sport?
His body twitched inertly on the table. He couldn’t scream or even cry for help. A needle glinted thickly like a six-inch metal straw. The nurse inserted it into the bag’s larger tube, sucking the syringe full of tar-like vector.
Still choking back formula, Emmett blinked up at the surgeon above. His head blocked the surgical light, reflecting Emmett’s pathetic face in his goggles. He held out a hand for the syringe. “Prepare the injection site.”
Hands rolled Emmett onto his back with a stab of pain in his wound. They cut a hole in his hospital gown and tore it open from the middle, exposing the downy, stretch-marked belly beneath.
The surgeon laced his gloved hands around the syringe, his thumb poised on the plunger. Black fluid pooled at the beveled tip. A drop unlatched and splashed against Emmett’s skin.
The surgeon’s fists jerked upward, then slammed the needle down, burying it up to the hub with a pinprick of excruciating pain. Emmett’s back arched, hands clawing the table, throat contracting into the shape of a scream. The vector spread through him, ravenous as lava, rewriting his DNA with a pen of fire.
His old mantra returned to him unbidden:Feel the burn.
Then the darkness opened its mouth and swallowed him whole.
Appendix F—Blog Post
My Stepdad and Other Monsters: Part 1
By: Emmett Truesdale
Published: June 17, 2018
As a compulsive overeater, one of the questions I often find myself asking is:How did I get this way? Where did my food addiction really start?I guess the idea is that if I can figure out how it began, I can figure out how to end it, or at least not be so controlled by it.
In my post last month I wrote about my mom and her “food is love” approach to parenting. I definitely think that’s part of the reason why I find myself reaching for snacks and sweets when I’m stressed or sad. But deep down I know that’s not the whole story. Just the tip of the ice (cream) berg, you might even say!
