A Dark Red

        My steps sound coldly against the hard rubber floor, the bottoms of my boots squeaking as my body pushes them downwards, but the sounds can only reach me. Sliding and spinning steel drowns out everything else, and no one looks up to see my face, a long gray reflection of the ferocious machinery that angrily roars like a hungry animal, starving for more flesh. I reach for the office door with my right hand, but open it with my left.
         I sit down at the chilling metal table, a bright silver that reflects the fluorescent lighting and pours a thick silence into the room. The door shuts, and my former employer and I are zip-locked in the uncomfortable air tight box. A soft, smooth sliding shuffles a small envelope across the table from his hand.
         "Your severance. With benefits." His voice croaks.
         I grab the envelope and stuff it into my shirt pocket. The stiff shuffling of my body sounds against the much colder, more firm objects touching me. He leans forward.
         "You do understand that ... well, there's really no more opportunity here for you. I'm sorry."
         "Yeah."          
         The backs of my knees push the chair backwards, a screeching shriek climbing back up it's legs from the floor. As I leave the violent machinery behind me, the roaring motors yanking on screaming saw blades and drill presses that tear at metal sheets, conforming them into shapes, their gnashing teeth snapping up and down, back and forth, I look to my left. A small sign on the wall reads:
         "Accident free for (0) days!"
         My lungs heave with the metallic air, exhaling into steel shards glistening through the air until there's nothing left, just the door.
         
         The doctors let me keep my arm locked in a plastic formaldehyde bag. I had requested it. My severance wasn't too bad, so I could wait a little while to find something, anything, else I could do. My mind found itself in bed, wasting away the hours like time I never wanted back. But there is no sleep. Sleep was for those without worry. Sleep was for those with the ability to rest. I can not rest, but I also can not move.
         My mind wandered throughout the night, and as the days went on, my food went with them. I am starving, the air in my lungs cold, while the air inside made my skin burn, a thick warmth that crawls under my eyelids and into their sockets. I couldn't go outside, it would burn me alive. I was too weak and needed food.
         I kept the formaldehyde bag in the fridge. It seemed the best way to preserve it. As the skillet sizzled with oil, a delicious steam coming off of it, I just took a little bit off of the back of the arm, defrosted now, and dropped it in. It screamed and bubbled atop the boiling oil. It was just a little slice.

         The mop slides forward and back along the tile floor, a swishing of water and soap in total silence, pivoting around my right prosthetic, a metal and plastic contraption with a crude claw at the end. My new janitorial job is nothing like what the machine shop used to be, but it's money and easy hours. The sky is nice and dark as I come home and the air is cool with an easy breeze. I've been getting more sleep.
         I find that if the night is hard and the sweat dripping from my face stings my eyes and the dogs howl through the walls of my bedroom, I'll cook up something sweet, a nice filet, just a little slice.

         I inhale a plastic air, the carpet reeking of latex and cheap air fresheners. All I can really hear is a tapping, louder and louder, just a little, each time. A small ponytailed head sticking just slightly out of the front window in the waiting room, and that pencil just tapping on the counter a little bit louder every time. The room is filled with it. They're like gunshots going up in caliber, it's stinging my ears like sharp needles jabbing every time with every tap, tap, tap. My eyes flinch with fear that that pencil is just going to tap, tap, tap into my ear and stab my brain with knives and needles and thorns.
         "Can you stop tapping?" My voice is louder than I had wished. The tapping stopped and the ponytailed head slowly receded into the window and could no longer be seen.
         "Thank you."
         The door opened with a disturbing movement of the previously stagnant air.
         "Uh, Mr. Morey?" A white coated doctor states. I look around the room confused. All empty seats except for mine.
         "Yes, right here." I stand up and the doctor greets me. Our movements through the hallway are silent, the walls moving past us like a series of images, almost as if we aren't moving at all.
         "Yes, now lets take off your prosthetic. You've been complaining of pain around the area of removal?" The doctor's voice enters low.
         "Yes, right around that area, lots of pain."
         The doctor removes the prosthetic and squeezes the area, a purplish sore spreading around.
         "Well it looks quite infected. I can prescribe you some medicine to keep your immune system up and the infection down, but this needs to be taken to the emergency room."
         
         The night grows icy, a frozen wind pulling through the air. New bandages suffocate my arm. I can't stand it. With the blood pumping out and the stitches being torn, the bandages come off in rags. In my backyard, under the cool night sky, my own blood drips down my face and along my chin, the liquid like sweet nectar with every drop making me thirstier and thirstier.
         I go inside. I've been defrosting some meat and now it's dinner time.

         Some new bandages wrap my arm, the prosthetic over it just barely, being pushed against by a strange growth in the underneath bones in my arm. I sweep back and forth, a small javelin to impale trash and drop it into the bin. I see Bill walking out, his mop over his shoulder with his head down low.
         "Hey, Bill!" I yell to him. His head picks up and turns to me. An easy hand moves up into the air with a lazy wave as he begins walking towards me.
         "Hey man, what's up?" He says.
         "Just finishing up shift. We still going out this weekend, get some drinks?"
         "Yeah, the misses ain't got anything on it. Hey, say man, you look kind of pale."
         My left hand reaches up towards my face, slipping fingers down under my eye.
         "Pale?"
         "Yeah, you don't look to good. You've been working double shifts?
         "No."
         "Well, maybe just call in sick a couple days to be sure."
         My hand falls down to my side, my eyes falling down with my voice. My voice turns soft.
         "Yeah, maybe."
         Bill slaps my shoulder and begins to walk off. As he opens the door, his cigarette voice yells through the room.
         "See you later, man!"
         The room dampens with the silence, nothing but my own breathing. I feel like my breaths, the heaving of my chest, only becomes greater and greater with every passing second. The sound becomes louder and louder, roaring like a giant machine, deafening and terrifying. I hold in my breath, my lungs painfully expanding and the air pushing at the walls. My eyes roll back and push their way out of my sockets. Then, the air releases, my lungs collapse, and the room becomes very dark, a rushing of noise and then nothing. As light comes back and the room finds its way back towards me, my muscles relax and my eyes wander through the dimly lit room. I continue to mop.

         My freezer is empty, the cold air oozing out with nothing inside. They were such little slices, and there's nothing left. My arm stabs with needles at the area of removal, blood crawling out of the bandages. The freezer door slams shut and I tear at the wrapping under my prosthetic, the limp plastic claw falling to the floor.
         The white tile is sprayed with red, a dripping fluid coming through me, as if it were falling straight through the ceiling and traveling through me to reach the floor where it pools into a darkened abyss and the only noise is the stabbing knives within my ears that rattle my numb brain. My eyes fill with blood, and I can't see the white tile anymore. The bandages fall to the floor, and as my body sinks into an unconscious state, my mind goes black and my teeth sink into my raw flesh.

         There is no more sleep. The bones in my arm curl into a gnarled structure. Blood lines the walls of the bathtub as my body soaks in the red fluid. My head leans back in the warm water, and my eyes shut but never close. My ears below the water, I lay in silence as the blood dries to my skin.

         Tear at me,
         The veins of life,
         The ones of pain,
         Anguish, and strife.

         Let my skin
         Turn to red,
         The color of war,
         War on the dead.

         Death grows weak,
         And I grow more,
         Live life as thought
         To settle the score.

         It'll all go away,
         At last exhaust,
         At peace I'll be,
         In darkness, lost.

         The machines roar with rumbling steel and raucous anger as they forge metal into shape. The heat and fire spits from the pit of Hell. My body crashes through the doors, the heavy noise moving up and down, back and forth, hits me and pulls at my body, pushing it back through the doors, but my numb mind pulls my legs forward towards the noise, the gnashing teeth.
         My ears deafen, and as the men scream and yell and grab at my body, I do not notice them, for the machines drown them out.
         The roaring blade, like teeth it moves around sawing through thin metal sheets, pulls at my body, the noise penetrating my eardrums. I pull the bandages off of my arm, the bloody mutation moving about like a deformed, gray hand, the veins protruding through the skin and blood gushing out like saliva as it screams at me a violent, merciless screech, drowning out all noise including the roaring saw. For a moment, it's just me and the screaming mutation twisting and turning in, reaching towards me with oozing pus and blood, and darkly red and gray mixture that seeps through the holes and cuts and bite marks.
         The screaming reaches my brain, and I push the arm into the saw, the bones snapping and veins and arteries tearing, the muscle ripping and shredding into thin strips that sink into it with blood spraying out and drowning the sound of death.
         I pull my remains out and fall backwards onto the ground. The men gather around me, trying to pick me up, but their grips slipping from the fresh blood. My body lay flat on the machine shop floor, red drops still raining from the spinning saw, and a dark pool forming around me as the red becomes more and more black. The lights burn my eyes, their brightness boiling my retinas, but the warmth is nice. And as I fade away, the warm light shows even through the darkness. My tired eyes can sleep, finally.

        And the darkness ran at the sight of the light, for fear is its creator and destroyer.