TV Land

The blue fire was my best friend. It showed me things I’d never seen before. Things I didn’t even know I wanted to see. My favorite was the Hawaii one. I liked to watch the waterfalls and listen to the waves. The blue fire let me watch my memories, and it let me make new ones. I would spend all my days watching the blue fire because the little ghosts never got close to it, and watching was the only thing I could do with all the damn poison jellybeans the devils at the hospital were trying to kill me with.

One night there were lots of people in my room, and they were bigger than the normal ghosts. They wore the dark blue uniforms of emergency personnel. Sweet as sugar on the outside but I could tell there was nothing behind it. They had done this thousands of time. They didn’t care about me. It was just a mechanical process for them, now. Watching them was like one of my memories from the ER on the blue fire but in real life, real time. I heard someone say schizophrenic but it can’t have been in regards to me. I knew from my time working the ER that schizophrenia did not make my legs hurt, or make me unable to breathe. Hypoxia was what I had. I think, maybe. All the medical lingo is all jumbled so they can keep us normal folks from understanding when they rob us of our money and our lives.

The nurse called ‘em here to take me to the hospital. I hated that damn nurse. Always trying to get me to take my pills, which I most definitely did not require. She wouldn’t let boys come over at night: said I had AIDS or I was crazy or some bull s*** like that. I only let the ambulance brutes take me cause I  needed to see a spiritual healer about the ghosts anyways. They told me there was a priest at the hospital, which would suffice.

They took me away from the fire to where it was cold, like when I lived in Antarctica. Everything hurt when it moved, so I asked the guy to my left, under the light like heaven, if everything was copacetic. He chuckled and told me it was, but he lied, I could smell it. I called him a damn cheat, in my head, and devil horns popped out of his hair so I smiled and giggled. I hoped I had scared him. I twisted to my left and there he was, “Who are you”? I asked. He told me his name but now I forget. His eyes kept flitting up to something beeping in the corner. The numbers he saw made him smell nervous. Some sort of number wizard he was, riding along with the ambulance. Why was this sorcerer allowed to see me in my embarrassing state?  I turned back to the bright light of heaven and he just faded away. I was left with the helpful devil man.

He put an I.V. in my arm to stop my blood from boiling out of my skin. I guess medicine might do some things right. His hands were soft and warm like Hawaii. I told him about the time my mom pushed me off our deck and my spine split in half. It was still split, I said. He just smiled and nodded. He didn’t believe me, but what I said was important. He didn’t listen when I told them about my job and my health insurance, he probably just pretended to. Nobody cares about you. Not even the people whose job it is to care about you care about you. Shut up! Why? Are you afraid? Afraid Ma’s gonna push you off the deck again? Afraid we’re gonna send you back to that room with no windows, sissy? Boom. The lights shut off and so does the ghost.

Devil man and someone else with little, cheating piggy eyes helped me out of the ambulance and into the hospital. The gurney let me float and I could only see the up. Damn science magicians. The tall numbers guy walked along by my side kind of shifting left and right. Couldn’t see his legs. He must not have any. Must just be floating by magic. His hand rested on the side of the gurney and my brain felt comfortable. Once we were in the doors they all flitted away like fairies to their hand sanitizing stations so they could cleanse themselves and repeat the dead, lifeless, monotonous process all over again with another unfortunate soul. They didn’t care about me.

I was wheeled into a room full of all new angels and devils, but my brain couldn’t focus on anyone or all. I decided instead to follow my brain paths back to anywhere but here. I traveled because they didn’t care about me, my money, or my situation. I looked up and my eyes locked onto the blue fire above my head, the light of heaven. After these freaks in gowns and scrubs ‘tried’ to help me out, ‘tried’ to get me a priest, I would just go back to my blue fire life. Maybe it was fake, maybe not. But none of these medical experts could figure how to get me out of the blue fire and into the real world, how to get me out of two ambulance rides a week. Maybe they didn’t even want to.