You Can Never Leave
By Marie Myers
Somewhere in the distance I swore I could hear something like a leaky faucet accompanied with a smell like mold or rot. It struck me as strange that I hadn’t seen a single staff member yet. I was more than a little creeped out when I rounded the corner and entered what looked like a small lobby much like the one I had sat in when this first started. The lights buzzed and flickered from above. Across from me was a woman in a hospital gown. It took my mind a moment to take it in. She was just standing there, long black hair down to the middle of her back covering her exposed bottom end, blood dripping onto the floor beneath her. A puddle so dark it almost looked black. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I just stood there staring. Until my common sense finally kicked in and I realized that she was probably in trouble.
“Ma’am?” I stammered. “Are you…OK?”
She let out a low sob that bounced off of the walls of the room. There was a sound like someone scratching at dry skin or peeling something away that was sticky. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next.
She was standing there holding the flaps of her chest, which had obviously been cut open. I could see the fatty tissue surrounding her chest cavity, strands of it hung down on her hospital gown obviously cut with a scalpel, staining it with her own internal juices and blood. Spots of pinkish yellow and dark red. Her heart was bleeding. She seemed to feel for it blindly. Blank eyes stared at me, eyes that lacked life, that were fogged over, oblivious to the blood that was splattered all over the front of her, and the tendrils of fatty tissue as well as muscle that dangled from her opened body.
“They cut me open.” She sobbed much louder this time. Her words transitioning into a screech as she repeated herself again and again and again.