OPEN-BRAIN SURGERY

malcom is brave

malcolm i forget his last name is born

(the fifth mistake of his mother's womb) during

the middle of the witching hour on a sunday night; the sun

swallows a bottle of melatonin pills and

slips deep into the clouds to hide, for the time being

plump-bodied nurses (half-occupied with

sucking in

sterilized air to

fold their plush stomachs back into themselves) work in the darkness,

shoving sweat-slicked

gloves over spindly ringless fingers, reaching in and pulling out and pricking further and cursing louder and

eventually

plucking him out from the cavernous hole he came from, by the tops of his ears

and not his head

because you never touch a bad thing

where it can think

can't open yourself up to the risk

he is thrown onto a

cold silver table using a rusty spatula and experiences his first (exorcism) doctor's appointment with his miniature baby brains rolling around like

lima beans in a jar, waiting for the spirit to release him, until the Head Doctor Whiteman, whose name probably wasn't always Whiteman but

had lived his life thus far so as to

bear it proudly

promised his mother that the worms slithering out of his nose and collecting in a slimy pool in his tiny, tiny hands were

"only temporary", that

he'd shed his weirdo psuedo-skin Soon Enough

and he'd be the bouncingkindofstrange baby boy everyone knew/wanted him to be in No Time

it has been sixteen years.

I. the first birthday is spent with the spiders blowing life into cobwebs only to have them breath out death under the wooden beams holding up his mother's newest deathbed. this is an older man's house: there are bodies of women with gaping bites taken out of the slights of their hips mounted on the wall (gravesites, or "lover portraits") head down legs broken lips parted, and whips in the shape of beer bottles used to keep the restless, immortal ones in check; one hundred tassels to hang the prettier ones by their pretty, translucent necks.

malcom i forget his last name intertwines his hands with the purples and drapes blues over his eyes. he eats every last morsel of the bug-cake the spiders feed him, clicking their pinchers and pinching his tongue, filling his cheeks and jumping down his throat in single file. he washes them all down with a special kind of blood called merlot that made him confused about how his hands became his hands, or how his nails stayed on his fingers. the rest are similar to these.