Better than fruit salad

Since my headlining effort as this virtual address is a kind of cohesion, I will, on occasion, post these divergences from the “normal” voice, or tone, that while seem very familiar to me may not seem entirely familiar to you. These posts will have the label “Platox,” which is a nod to an adolescent blog and penname of mine, which was the Platinum Ox. Sometimes these posts will have two speakers speaking to each other. One is named “Rutabaga” and the other is named either “Kumquat” or “Cheesecake,” depending on the mood, which is weird and kind of distracting and that’s primarily why I’m giving this disclaimer — not so much to apologize for something different then loosely strung together bits of not-narrative, but because those names seem very weird to me, and therefore, surely you.

And this is kind of where it started, all those years ago:

She stopped talking well after I stopped listening. No doubt she was continuing to inform me further about things I didn’t know, shouldn’t know, yet had to know because of curiosity. Time had no value, and though it seemed like hours between breaths, it couldn’t have been more then four seconds between audible sound and the bullets penetrating the leather and polyester of my chair and embedding themselves into my back, burning the skin and sinking deeper and deeper, grazing my spine and bursting through my rib cage and skittering off into somewhere distant in front of me.

Glass teacups ruptured in front of me, bursting as though they had been under extreme pressure, a third bullet severed my spinal cord, electric shocks of pain shot up my nerve endings in the back of my head. Tea and blood spilled over the edge of the table, pooling in the cracks in the wood floor.

I felt my internal organs deflate, leaking fluid from numerous puncture wounds, countless tears of flesh where glass had embedded itself into my chest and shoulders, sticking out like disheveled feathers, long thin shards. My ribs began to show, shiny and untainted, eerily gleaming in the florescent light.

I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out, no sound could come out, something had disconnected my esophagus. Something was wrong. Everything was wrong. Unable to support my own weight, I began to collapse onto myself in the bloodstained chair. It was a deep purple red. It was everywhere. I was saturated in my own blood. They were yelling something. It wasn’t blood. It was something else. Mixed with blood. Some caustic liquid that was eating at my flesh. I heard it sizzle and saw the steam, the boiling, the burning, and then the stench. Where had this chemical come from?

But the sizzling was an egg. Not my skin.

But there were no eggs. There were no toxins, nothing mixing with my blood, nothing getting shoved into my eyes as I was laying helplessly heaped in my own lap. I hadn’t collapsed. I was sitting upright. There was no blood in my eyes. Matted in my hair or caked on the floor. There was no blood. There were no tea cups. The second hand moved.

She never stopped talking.