Hospitalised

And I wish it could be more sentimental.

I wish I could, you know, say I clung to that hope. Or that the hours ticked by and I sat there, believing.

But really the feeling was a wet match that died as soon as I thought it, and I returned to contemplating the incessant vomit that I’m sure is just as agonizing to hear as it is to recount. This spume I churn goes on for days... and days and days and days...

Sorry, how much is the Church looking to catalogue?

Well, okay, okay then, ahhm—I was thinking about maybe killing the farmer, when he got back, because of... uh, whatever, o-o-or, no, it wasn’t to cover up the blood or anything, if that’s what you’re... or, nevermind, I guess it was, basically. So... that was there.

And then I considered how the screamers had quieted somewhat, as though their chorus had gone to preach their sufferings far out in the wheat field. I figured then how it worked—b-basically, if the hunger can hijack me by my lack of presence, the screamers can contrarily strangle me by my regard to their voice. So for shushing them, it’s really a matter, of just, not attending...

Or, well, something like that. It’s... they’re... I guess, by decoding the mechanism, I sort of traded volume for constancy. So, you know... ever since then it’s been some wicked tinnitus. Haha.

I-it’s, sorry, it’s not really... funny...

A-anyway, so I had grasped more of my situation, somewhat, and accordingly expanded my bounds for theorizing actionable countermeasures to myself and a more solid sense of consequence and priority to what I was not-doing. The blood across the room distracted me from much meditation, though, both for how it inflamed my ashamed ruminations, and for the hunger’s recurrent tug to reclaim my shed viscera.

Wagon wheels squeaked outside. I snapped awake, straightened in the chair, and wiped the saliva from my chin. I had been staring at the bloody side of the room, though upon recognizing so my gaze flicked to the front door, which the farmer’s hasty exit had left ajar this whole time, and which, by the wind’s coaxing, now gaped vacantly open.

Into that cavity there materialized my hallucination of the farmer. He flinched at a glimpse of blood in the room, froze outside the door, then glanced to and fro like a hare. My gaze stuck now to the table. I could do nothing to ameliorate that reaction, should he have it, as I predicted he should.

I then observed a banal fact that in retrospect changed me profusely. There were three people outside. What cued me to this information wasn’t their footfalls or voices, but the magnetic tingle their presence inflicted on my skin. Though not an unexpected phenomenon by now, I realised then that ‘the gradient’ was not only a force but a sense, as integral as a dog’s nose or bat’s echoes to my perception of... really, everything around me.

I guess I was in denial of information I already knew. Without shifting my gaze, as though I were eavesdropping, I watched a silhouette enter the doorway—of course, it wasn’t the farmer.

It was a local palatine, in his white acolyte’s tabard, old enough to be bald but still only once-anointed. When his eyes beneath his furrowed brow fixated on the scene, his hand flashed to his hip for his sabre.

A smirk cracked over my face as I scooched myself off the chair. Blood squelched between my toes.

The palatine raised his palm. “Hold.”

I touched my neck, holding.

Though his gaze stayed on me, his attention shifted aside to the farmer and the third man (who I figured to be another palatine), someways off.

“It’s mine,” I supplied.

Still, he called to ask the farmer who else had been in the house.

I ran my thumb up and down my pointer finger. My shoulders slumped. “It’s mine.”

The second palatine approached the doorway also, with his palm outstretched to keep the farmer well distanced. While the farmer called to confirm the house held no pets or kin, fretful over whatever scene inside had worried the palatines, the first, elder palatine did opt to draw his sabre.

I mean, I had the leeway to judge that blade in my face as a pretty unnecessary escalation.

“This is yours?” the elder palatine jutted the point of his sabre as though scooping the air.

I nodded, but not with enough enthusiasm to reassure the palatine. He’d frozen outside the doorway, as though conscious of the enclosed ground as a seal upon me, and aware that releasing me from the house would mean unbinding me from all restrictions. This wasn’t actually true, as the only force compelling me to linger was etiquette, and I could very well direct myself to ruin this man if I felt so. He just wasn’t confident that he could order me, and I’d listen.

“I died,” I said, unsure what I was even explaining, “last night. U-uh, i-in Vamu, and it...”

The palatine dipped his head for me to continue.

My jaw chattered.

Like it had with the farmer, the Hunger circled these two palatines, and though neither invigorated it as profoundly as did the end of the gradient, something about their proximity did spark my blood aflame. Inexplicably, the Hunger paused its loping to tilt its head and judge me for this. ‘These? Really? Well I guess... if you say so? Mmn...’. Then I envisioned it chomping half-heartedly at the guy’s leg anyway.

Right, excuse me, point of objection, where are these reactions coming from in the first place? Hm? ...Whatever.

I sighed, pushed aside the noticeable thrum of my heartbeat, and palmed my shoulder. Where was I. “...I-I’m not sure, what’s really, going on, still, yet.” Well, that was more-or-less true.

With his lips pursed, the palatine nodded to the walls. “What is this?”

“Ahm, s-something, inside, is trying to kill me.” Wow where did that come from! Okay? “It’s inside here, trying to...” I made a diamond with my fingers and framed it over my chest. Okay!!

But apparently that was what the palatine wanted to hear. He rolled back his shoulders and sheathed his sabre, then ordered me forth with a wag of the hand. Every step over the bloodstained floor whetted the back of my throat with nausea, that equally each footfall cast a swell in the screamers’ din. Too, though, for every inch nearer I drew to these men, more and more caustic fizzed the bubbles in my bloodstream, which demanded that I reap from these two meatsacks whatever pittance of glee that I could. My dismissal of the palatine’s caution had maybe been cavalier.

My skin well enough cloaked the burn, though, that I doubted the palatine noticed it. He nodded, stopped me again, and imposed a final test.

It was, “recite from the paeans.”

He frolics like a jackal in the boneyard. I hadn’t thought about the paeans since college.

Given recent events, though...

“Watered on Your love, a soul / stands at Heaven’s gates, invited / through the adversity of the long night, / at Your door my heart is laid.” Head bowed in proper form, my absent sarcasm and capitalized ‘y’s had felt achievement enough. That my voice also cracked, and palms rose halfway to meeting, then razed my ego near to crying as if stripping the mud that was me off of gold-leaf.

I wrung my wrist, looked aside, and swallowed. Epileptic shivers ran over my skin.

The palatine liked it. He withdrew from the doorway as I scooped up my damp shoes, reeling mentally from the recitation, bodily from the redoubled ferocity of the hunger shredding through my muscles. It rammed against the underside of my skin as though beating at prison bars, desperate to move my fingers like knives through the palatine’s neck. Beads of salty sweat iced his moist flesh held the viscous fat spurts of his blood, the ghost of which congealed as treacle on the back of my tongue. The concentrated toulene in my veins combusted, raging and whirling, as a wildfire. Glory take it, take it, take it, glory, so the mantra reignited, with the hunger so insistent and...

...Sorry. Is saying that I just, didn’t do anything, on these urges, kind of an anticlimax. I mean. So, I followed outside, to the front garden...

“Ugh,” I muttered, hooked by the gradient’s current. I stumbled some steps along it, as though battered by wind, before shielding my face and planting my footing.

“What acts here? Look,” the younger palatine called, touching the chain on his belt.

“Come this way,” called the other, waving his hand. On the road behind them, positioned opposite the gradient, was a simple open carriage, drawn by a large camel bannered in red and white linens.

I flinched. My foot naturally fell another step backwards.

“This is devilry?” The younger palatine asked while unclipping the chain, twisting its length taut in his fists.

“This way. Come to here,” the elder repeated, jabbing his finger to the ground where he stood.

“I-i-i-i-it,” I cradled my arm and tipped up my chin, wanting to slice off my head. “C-could you...?” Bring the carriage around this way? Oh but why? So it could go back to the road and I could slide off the back? Great idea.

Jitters swelled across me from the screamers.

Making something so simple into such a cumbersome nuisance. I would probably have to explain my circumstances, and what I’d been doing before the palatines arrived, in some marginally detailed capacity. And make it into some whole, massive thing...

“Come,” the palatine now barked as if lashing a whip. “By commandment of Czjeir.”

Hey hey hey hey now okay. Who made you the king? Some backwater chapel stamps tapwater on your forehead and now you’re an envoy with an illumed throat? I’m not some, toy arbitrarily deciding to make things for you difficult, maybe there’s a possibility I can’t actually do what you want? And maybe the point of you being here was that you’d present some actual solutions. If you’re unable to do that then how about shove off and maybe stop messing around so I can stop being beholden to the utter abject total incompetence of a worthless...

I smoothed my hand down my arm and let it drop to my hip. My screed of malevolent bitching disappeared into some chasm as I straightened myself, to consider my options.

In doing I realised the gradient’s pull had melted, and the Hunger’s screechings gone mute.

The calm that overtook me as I tested a step forward, met no resistance, and confirmed my ability to in fact do what the palatine wanted, was atrociously laughable.

I offered my hands to the younger palatine for shackling. I hadn’t felt the gradient when following the farmer to his house, either. Perhaps circumventing the force was achievable by binding myself to some alternative...

The elder palatine shook his head at the younger, who hesitated, but returned the chain to his belt. Dancing wheat stalks rustled in the breeze.

“Thank you,” I said.

The younger palatine pointed me onward.

As I heaved into the carriage, considerations floated through me for the palatines’ names and family compositions. The camel reared its neck and tossed its head. It snorted when a beeping finch darted by in the warm, citrus-soaked air.

“Hi there,” I said. Its musk stank quite badly, though the outdoors diluted it.

The creature swayed its attention to the dusty road ahead, lined with mounds of gurdhi. Usually camels resented standing in one spot for so long, and would start wandering to graze or at least sit, as was a frequent sight in Amsherrat’s markets. I suppose its discipline was the benefit of training in the Church.

“They’ll take a bit. Tcha?” I smoothed my fingers in my lap and glanced away from its pelt to the palatines, who had crowded to explain something to the farmer.

If I could be a fossil, and the excruciations of time pressed my image down thicker, instead of an organic mass that rotted by the seconds, perhaps that would lighten me with some kind of solace.

The palatines finished their business. A bounce kicked through the carriage with the weight of their boarding, and their backs planted themselves upon the drivers’ platform before me. I couldn’t decide if that attitude was brazen, careless, reasonable, or what, but I resolved to depart the palatines if the gradient did drag me off the cart.

All that waiting for some prospect of aid, only to give it up over this. My commitments are as firm as a cobweb.

Plus, once I followed the gradient enough to abandon the wagon to the plains, I would realise myself again trapped, then again leave myself to happenstance’s roulette of offerings. I know my own logic, I know it’s contemptible. Crowning the murder resultant would be the motive, ‘the way the authorities sat down offended me’.

Was I a joke?

The elder palatine turned over his shoulder. “Stay there.”

My palm shifted from my knee to the wooden bench where I sat. I nodded, and the pleasant fantasy of forcing the gradient upon myself faded.

With the returned visage of the palatine’s back, the wagon began to roll. For once I felt myself with nothing I cared to consider, be that of the palatines, their plans, or their destination.

Into the cavity flowed hunger. Right there under that tabard was a lovely slab of trapezius for my thumbs to shear and GOD, dear GOD, please let me, let me dive for their backs, surge up their throats, let their chins pop from their necks let me catch their skulls bash them on the wood let me rake let me bathe let me out let me OUT let me eat eat eat eateateateateateateat

Tired of this sequence, I ordered, sit.

My ears pinned back and hackles raised. A tectonic plate rumbled in the pit of my throat. I jolted to intervene before the palatines noticed, but—HOW COME I’M NOT ALLOWED TO EVER HAVE ANYTHING FUN? The heat of my own temper blindsided me like a wall of pyroclast, so crushing in its weight and volcanic in its fervour that I immediately evicted myself to dodge it. This move was an error. My body, afire, shot forward.

I clicked in to abort the launch with my nails suspended barely a knuckle’s length from the back of the elder palatine’s head.

My throat strangled my sigh into silence as I recoiled myself to the bench. Drawn over my chest were my hands. I glanced from my crossed wrists to the palatines.

“...to spend little time,” said the elder.

“They abided reports for many months. I cannot imagine what bargain...”

“Do not judge the beguiled, Heshidah.”

“So in patience I walk. I only question, to my enlightenment, by what lapse of virtue would that cottage not burn?”

This conversation voided me from their notice. My shoulders touched the backrest but the spread of their napes to their tabards still pulled daggers from my stomach to the underside of my skin.

I locked my throat and twisted my hands. I probably needed to warn them.

“The answers dawn with the inquisition of the Abbot—these questions stretch higher than us,” replied the elder.

Heshidah fell quiet.

Though I jumped on the lull, not even the first syllable of ‘excuse me’ managed to squirm from my throat. I had my mouth open, and breath had congealed, just no permission to speak. Without that last component, it’s... well, it’s not the palatines who’re draconian enough to rule these sanctions.

My pulse muted smoothly and my raised hand returned to my side. I recognized now that the attempt had been stupid, and to keep silent was right. The only thing that could determine whether these palatines would come to danger or not was me.

To interrupt meant to imply they adhere to my unconceived and hence pointless contingencies, when I could permit a fair course by self-control.

Truth is so simple.

I laid my head on the corner of the wagon that faced the gradient. Amid the easterly plain of sickly grass there rose shrubs and lone sycamores, which stood upon their islands of shaded dirt. One, two, three, four, and far more to the distant humps of the mountains... I considered the dormice and the chukar that must inhabit these plants and those rocks, as though I might reach into their hollows or sit upon their peaks with the same triviality it took to imagine these vantages.

The Hunger shifted its footing, perked to these scenes as if curious. The tingle of the gradient returned to my skin, more as rippling satin than a chain in the hand of a despot. At this modest degree, the combination of static with muffled screamers tickled me somewhat pleasantly.

My eyes half-lidded. The sky streamed with white clouds.

God.

I wished I could eat.