The meteor shower began Tuesday and ran into August. Isaiah
only noticed them on his morning drive to work, with his left arm propped in
the window, rolled down to enjoy the blow-by breeze. A shooting star cut his
arm quite severely and he needed two band-aids once he got into the office.
Every morning the shooting stars found ways to cut Isaiah. They
sliced his neck and gashed his brain. Soon he couldn’t type because of the
bandage around his right hand. He wound up leaving the band-aids over his eyebrows
because, even if they’d healed, the sting of removing tape from the fine hairs
was too much for him.
Soon. Soon his office mates mocked his plethora of band-aids
and gauze, and the special glasses needed to correct his vision after one comet
collided with his eye. Some doubted his stories. No one else saw the meteor
showers, but no one needs to see you cut in order for you to bleed. This, Isaiah
learned.
There was a comfort to his adhesive, self-healing armor, and
once Isaiah thought about it that way, he didn’t see why everyone didn’t want adhesive,
self-healing armor. He replaced his socks with fresh gauze, and tailored shirts
of hospital linens, and whenever he spilled something on himself he merely
applied antiseptic and dressed the emergent area, and would then go back to
eating his meatball sub and reading about the rites of mummification.
One Tuesday (after the original Tuesday), Isaiah removed his
brain using a chopstick and a dental pick. Immediately nagging thoughts ceased
to worry him. No longer was he affected by the peer pressure, or the
second-guessing of his father, or by upcoming elections. Somehow it was only
after pulling his amygdala out through his nose that Isaiah realized there had
always been upcoming elections, and would always be upcoming elections, and no
matter the result, he’d never been too satisfied with them, and so he would
return to calculating obscene equations and reading about the lovers of
pharaohs.
That was, no doubt, what made Isaiah remove his heart. It
was easier than the brain on account of the passages between his ribs being
more plentiful and generally broader than his nostrils. No sooner did he remove
his heart then he found it much easier to talk around women. The ancient
Egyptians did not believe the heart to be the seat of lust, but they were all
dead, being ancient. This was another revelation he’d experienced since
removing his brain, and he enjoyed explaining these things to the many women he
met as they sheltered from meteor showers.
Women found him exceedingly clever these new Tuesdays. No
other man had thought to bring a star-proof umbrella to the office, and so
every lunch break he had his own personal harem clustered around him, at least
until they made it to the deli. Then his harem scattered and took numbered
tickets. It felt nice to be so popular.
Being so popular, Isaiah took more risks. He donated all his
blood at a local drive, and several more organs for kids who needed
transplants. He didn’t understand why people would want still more organs, but
if so, then fine, have both of his kidneys, and both of his lungs, and all of
the bone marrow you can eat, little medicinal vampires. He soon forgot why
people wanted these things at all, and read long into the night of his occult
texts to decipher why, and failed to decipher it, and decided their words had
become deceiving because he tended to read them by the light of the meteor
shower. There were no other lights these Tuesdays.
He came in second in the office footrace. He took a pottery
class and sculpted himself a new face to wear over all his band-aids. One time
his heel snagged on a sewer grate and his bandages unraveled until there was
nothing left of him. Isaiah balled himself up and forced himself to go to work.
He was out of sick days, and he thought the vampire in Accounting fancied him. He wondered if he might offer himself to wrap around her for when the months turned cold.
Then came August.
Counter est. March 2, 2008