WHEN BAD DOGS DO GOOD THINGS

Moonlighting as a Corpse

Moonlighting as a Corpse

The first sensation I encounter is the tightness in my neck. I can feel my chin tugging down towards my chest, the skin flakey, crusted, and scabbed over, like an anchor yanking me into the sea. Before I even can open my eyes, I try to roll my head backwards but I'm met with resistance in my throat, like little wires are linking just below my chin and holding me down. There's a cold, dull ache that meets me in response. It feels like there's a growth living on my skin, a mutated tumor deforming my neck's mobility. I experience pulses of consciousness that are abrupt, but not abrupt enough for me to open my eyes.

The bottom of my throat feels like it has hardened mud inside of it. I try to clear my throat but all that I'm met with is pain, forcing a cough out that hurts even worse and makes my eyes water. The more awake and aware I become, the more the pain becomes my existence. The next pain I'm greeted with is a stinging in my asshole. The tears of the meat. It's like when you accidentally pour shampoo in except it doesn't go away. It hurts, it really fucking hurts.

The third pain, and perhaps the weakest, is a tightness in my right arm, like someone's stuck me with a needle and is pumping me up with some kind of fluid like I'm a helium balloon. The only nice thing is that when I focus on one pain, the others melt away.

Beneath all of the pain across my body and tightness in my neck, there's the smell of BBQ. It's strong. Even though I can tell from the still, dry air that I'm inside, there's the smell of meat cooking. I shift again. There's a cushioned chair against my back. The room I'm in is dry and warm, comfortable even. My neck is itchy, the wired, scratchy feeling irritating. I want to rip it out. I jerk my right arm up to instinctively tug at it, but a tight leather restraint prevents the motion, the bottom of my arm hitting cold wood. I'm strapped to some kind of chair.

It comes back to me then. I had to have been drugged. I fucked Kim. Kim's dead. I was raped, violated and impaled by another man. And then, he took a knife to my throat. Am I still alive? Is this hell?

I'm fully awake now. Everything hurts. I open my eyes: the first thing I notice is the room is orange, like I'm a baby chick under a heat lamp. My arms look discolored and bruised and they're trapped under leather straps that keep me tied to a rustic, wooden chair with cushions under it. Southern comforts. From my right arm comes an IV that links up to two different bags of fluid hanging next to me, one is red, one is completely clear.

Otherwise, it looks like I'm in a bathroom or the rooms from Saw. There's tile beneath me and the chair that's an off white tinted orange from the tin covered lamps hanging from the ceiling. The walls and ceiling are made from the same sort of stuff. To the left of where I'm facing is an iron door with no windows and directly ahead of me is a grimy filth covered mirror. I know even without studying it that the mirror is a mirror on just one side and someone is watching me through the other side.

I can see myself though. I'm wearing a white hospital gown with black dots, my hairy legs piercing through the bottom of it. I can see at the collar of the gown where pinkish-red fluid has stained my skin. The real horror however comes at my neck: right over my Adam's Apple is a sea of criss-crossed black surgical stitches. The stitches look like tiny spider legs all jammed in the wound to keep my mangled neck together. I'm not sure how long I've been unconscious but I can see where the blood has dried up and created an ugly mound of healing flesh over the tops of the stitches. It's going to hurt like a bitch when they get pulled out. How am I still alive?

My skin is paler than it was. How long have I been here? It's a medical miracle that my throat is still together. Who patched me up? Ben? Is this what Kim expected? Is that why she told Ben to "do it?" Did she want him to torture him