Excisions

(A continuation to Hockey Masks.

Also,

Excision. Noun.

A medical term pertaining to the removal of spinal material by cutting.

-Geist)

It was dark and then it was burning bright; the beat of life started up again and it was black and white at first but then the color hit him so he just laid there, closing and opening his dried and scabby eyes, letting the sunset in, pushing it out.

The bandit tried to breathe and his lungs heaved blood and water; he tried to move and his nerves exploded in machine-gun spurts in pain.

Closing and opening.

Closing and opening.

He tried to conceive shapes, but they twisted away into something else everytime he thought he had it pinned down- a car became a dog became a sign became a smell. His hearing was nothing but a high-pitched ring that resounded infinitely between each side of his empty head. His eyes rolled back and forth uselessly behind their lids, following the screeching wavelengths behind them.

Closing and opening.

Then, a break, a snap, reality oozed back into place and began to set in.

There was nothing above him, only the grey clouds tinted an angry orange from the angled sun.

Rising? Setting? Time. He needed the time.

With reality came instincts.

Survive. Get up. Move. His legs refused to and his left shoulderblade began to slide out of place. There was a squelch and a pop and the bandit could hear his tendons shearing from the bone as he fell face-first into the asphalt again. When he screamed into the highway it was less out of pain and more out of frustration.

With instincts came feelings.

Hunger. He was hungry. His stomach gurgled even as the body that housed it fell apart, piece by piece. Thirsty, too. A desperate thirst. He felt the little river of blood from his cracked lip pooling at the cusp of his chin and his blown out knee and his shoulderblade was pushing too hard on his skin. He heard a sound like frail paper being ripped in two, and then a wave of heat as the blood fanned out over his back.

With feelings, odd enough, came apathy.

He took his right arm and began to pull.

He knew his rawhide shirt porbably wouldn't protect his stomach from the grind of the pavement for long and he didn't care.

He knew he probably didn't have the energy to get more than a few hundred feet and he didn't care.

He knew he was dying and he didn't care.

About half a kilometer away there was a dog padding around the broken cars and shattered road. The owner didn't care where it went during the day, but just as long as it came back to the highway overpass at night he kept it fed and watered. The pair had food from a single pear tree the man kept alive from a stream that had formed in the gutters beneath the road. The dog was tired of fruit, though. It desired something more primal. It felt the need to be a carnivore.

So when it found a dead body a few hundred feet away from the stream and warm from the setting sun, it feasted to its heart's content.