The monster in my head has a –isel.
Yesterday, it –ipped away at my ability to pronounce ‘–’ sounds because I asked a priest to exorcise it. Of course, now I can’t go back to St Mary’s –ur– (dammit!) because a nun called the police.
Today, I’m sitting in a waiting room at the emergency department, hoping they can surgically remove my monster. The triage nurse gives me a mental health form to fill out but there isn’t a –eck box for evil little head beasties.
§
“This is astounding,” the doctor says, holding up my CT scan. “I can’t fathom…” his thoughts dither as he picks up his phone and calls for a second opinion. That doctor calls for a third and the third doctor for a fourth.
Soon, the room is crowded with scientists blathering in unbridled excitement.
“I’m taking away your sexual impulses,” the monster hisses. “That’ll show you.”
A serious-looking neurologist addresses me. “We’ll need to run tests and call in specialists to investigate. This is unprecedented. We can’t operate until we know what kind of organism we’re dealing with.”
“Unprecedented is an understatement,” another doctor scoffs. “There’s a… thing… in his head! This will fundamentally –ange medicine. Hell, I might even believe in aliens now.”
“I doubt it’s alien,” a young resident says. “Looks more demonic.”
“Have you all lost your minds? It’s clearly some kind of parasite,” comes another voice. “Perhaps a mutant kind of Naegleria fowleri?”
My monster howls. “Ha! If I was a brain-eating amoeba, I wouldn’t be slummin’ it in your shitty brain.”
“It’s sentient. We’ve recorded audio of it,” the first doctor says. “It speaks English with perfect diction and—if I might add—has a foul mouth.”
A new debate erupts until the serious neurologist asks, “How long has it been in your head?”
“Two weeks, maybe three?”
“Have you been overseas recently?”
“No.”
“Do you know how you might’ve acquired it?”
I ask the monster internally and it answers with a maniacal –ortle. “I climbed up your urethra at the gym. I tried your nose and ears first but they were filthy. Your earwax is the vilest I’ve ever tasted.”
“What’s a urethra?” I ask aloud.
The cacophony of doctor talk falls uncomfortably silent. A nurse explains, “It’s the tube that runs from your bladder and through your penis to transport urine and semen.”
“He climbed up my what?”
§
I meet dozens of doctors and nurses over the next few days. I lie and tell them that the head monster is making me dizzy. I whimper in false pain, shiver uncontrollably and refuse food. I know they won’t cut it out unless I deteriorate. They want to study me, study it, take shiny scans for their shiny resear– papers.
The monster has –iseled away a decent portion of my –ildhood memories, my sense of smell and some of my gross motor skills. I’ve now seen a thousand images of my one-in– tormentor. Its silhouette has grotesquely exaggerated limbs like a praying mantis or wingless-dragonfly. Its face, however, is humanoid; bulging eyes, hollow –eeks, razor teeth.
My heada–es are real now. I wish my monster would take his –isel to my pain receptors.
§
I’m awake for the surgery.
“Motherfucker!” The monster yells. “You’ll regret this. I’ll put up a fight. As soon as I find your optic nerve, I’m smashing it to pieces, you son of a bit–.”
The drugs make it hard to distinguish if the voices are coming from outside or inside my head. I hear the sound of the cranial drill as it cuts into my skull.
“It’s moving,” my surgeon, Dr. Leung says an hour into the craniotomy, “I can hear it telling me to go—oh my!”
“Oops, there goes your equilibrium.” The monster declares in a sing-song voice.
“I thought it was in the frontal lobe,” remarks another surgeon.
Dr. Leung is contemplative and when she next speaks, her tone is ominous. “I think it’s heading for the brainstem. If it gets there, we’ll be too late.”
After that, the dissonance of voices and ma–ines and perverted giggling is too mu– to process. I can’t physically feel the monster’s –isel but I sense little bits of myself disappear. I think I hear Dr. Leung cursing and a shriek from a nurse. A flash of blue scrubs darts across my blurring vision. A light above me explodes. Blood drips into my eyes.
There’s a cadaverous silence as everyone flees the room.
“I was just making myself comfortable,” my monster whispers as it hacks away at my brainstem. “Now, I have to go find someone else. Do you know what a pain in the ass that is?”
Maddison Scott is a teacher, writer and former film projectionist from Melbourne, Australia. Her short stories have appeared in The Molotov Cocktail, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review and Five on the Fifth, among others. She has work upcoming in Stupefying Stories and in two anthologies for Shacklebound Books. You can find her online at: maddisonscott.wordpress.com
1 comments:
I love this. It's not only challenging, it's incredibly clever too.
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