As I Lay

Septicemia happens quickly. The doctors said the wound was healing just fine and it was O.K. to go out of town for a few days. The next thing I know I'm flat on my back dying in the front room of my lake cottage.

Sepsis is no fun; there's the fever, convulsions, chills, weakness, tremor and loss of appetite coupled with a fair amount of delirium and some interesting hallucinations.

"As I lay dying, the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as I descended into hell." Agamemnon to Odysseus.

Laid out on the green leather couch I was one of the Civil War wounded; survivor of the horror of battle, broken by a Minie' ball, cut through the bone with blade and saw and now dying of the bugs. Bacterium swarms the crude wound, eats flesh and bone and percolates within the blood stream, cooking the vitals. Without the life force the ragged room of shattered men rests uneasily amid blood mess, stench and within sight of the pile of parted discards. Some so weak they cannot raise up to receive water or die flat out in their own puke. Better that the grimy surgeon opened our veins to a quick exit or the enemy provided a kindly coup de grace. The finishing stroke is somewhere in the night, wrapped in the shivers, without elegance as the heart races from the room away from life and light.

I take myself up in a dream and somehow find the way to the future. Now undead I wander a place of penance and await the expiation.