Vancouver Prison Hospital

Everything was going swimmingly until these idiots in bad maxi dresses landed our Hovercraft at the only Prison Hospital in Vancouver. Now I'm half drunk and standing next to this screaming, naked, pregnant woman on a gurney and there's not a doctor in sight. Her glistening globe of a belly is beginning to swell deep purple, and now it has started throbbing, too. She's begging me to help her. She keeps begging and begging and begging.

I lied when I said there wasn't a doctor in sight. There is a doctor in sight. But he's occupied. He looks really tired and he's talking to this woman who doesn't have a face anymore. She has a mouth but everything else is gone, just blood and tissue. She's imploring him to kill her. Her mouth is forming lamb sounds and I find myself in pause, trying to figure out the word for lamb sounds. That's the rub about being a writer. You find yourself in pause, searching for words, at the most inappropriate of times.

Bleating.

I'm running now. I'm looking for another doctor. There's this rolling metal picture frame with pieces of person suspended from little clothespins. A mouth, an eye, intestines, and other insides. They mouth laughs and the eye blinks. Evil cyborg, it rolls at me and blocks my path wherever I turn. The top of my hand brushes against the intestines and I decide that this is the worst day ever. I fake the cyborg out and run through the cinderblocked hallways.

Doctors en masse are helping this other woman give birth - she's pretty and blonde while my pregnant lady is dark and dirty and naked. I run back to my pregnant lady and she's screaming and she's popped the blood vessels in her eyes. The belly throbs bigger.

I run in another direction and there's that goddamned cyborg again, and there's that woman without a face, and there's that tired doctor. Every hallway is the same. All obstacles and no help, until I see two men in unitard uniforms and I bleat at them, every bit as base as that faceless woman and that pregnant bitch that I'm trying to save, now. The uniforms respond to my bleating by laughing and showing me the thick hoses that they're using to wash away the blood on the floor because they're just custodians, and they can't help me unless I want them to mop up some fluids or something.