METAMORPHOSIS OF THOSE THAT HURT BY Adam Parry

 

I ungainly creature spread-eagled, bloody on the bed like a crucified man in repose. Yet, not a man, this hand-bound, leg-bound being, slavering from my mouth, a cawing of mystery words, wrapping fragments of gold into my blood teared eyes.  I knew a way, stutteringly mumbled, though no-one heard, my voice hoarse like a 60 a day smoker, phlegm bubbling from his unconstrained throat with each syllable I spoke.  I knew a way, longing for this: a freedom of a second thought.  Not this unending nightmare, waiting. Waiting for someone to come. To clean me with sympathetic bandages; salves and tears, and gentle words of sympathy. Always waiting for surcease, but it did arrive. Soon I would die, like all the others in the beds beside me. The mangled, the maimed screaming in the own ecstasy of pain.  I knew a way.

There, I saw it, as the gold in my eyes gold like my hair once, spiralling into my mind, and an ante-Coriolis force, churned and turned about my mind, re-stablishing genetic connections, hurt-wort power reaching into my pain and whip stripes of shrapnel scars, and from within me such an urgency of energy, the healing gold transforming in an unimaginable rainbow, a healing brightness. There is the way the pleasure of returning of life, I whispered into the silent ward.

In the morning.  I had saved myself from my, saved the ward, world, the endless galaxies.  And rose from my prison, a golden headed boy, and from men who for a day forgot pain, laughed with joy at our metamorphosis’.