I'm Supposed To Be A Writer

(I made this entry to another blog that I've decided not to follow through with.)

So, write. Dammit. Dammit!

Nothing. No ideas. No school yet. Did the reading for Environmental Law this morning. Good stuff, but the day just keeps going on and on and on. The library was closed, so no new movies for me to check out. Damn.

And I know this feeling. This is fly-caught-in-amber, this is pure stasis; I've been here before, and this is a bad, bad place for me. This is the place where I drink like a fish and can't stop because alcohol is the only thing that turns my brain off, even a little.

I feel like I'm in a cage, and I want to get out.

Jumpstart something. Come on. *rattles bars*

An old finger-exercise

EMT

Everything had gone to shit, the blues out there running after their killer and the Feebs pretending they had it all under control. Didn’t take much to tell they were lying, it was there the way SAC-and-don’t-you-forget-it Liotta hunched his shoulders like it was 20 degrees instead of 80. Lieutenant Goyo wasn’t much better, though his Japanese face had more practice at inscrutable.

Fielding and Romano carted on up to the third floor about 2 steps behind the detective on point. Safety was less important than finding the vic. Assuming she was still alive.

They turned the corner and ducked back when Heisig glared at them from an open doorway. The balding detective disappeared into the room for about 2 seconds, then yelled “Get in here!”

They got. The Knicks killer had struck again, yes sir, but she wasn’t dead.

Heisig backed out as the two EMT’s barrelled all their stuff in and all three actually stared, slackjawed, immobilized, until the lumpy mass on the mattress moved.

It was a person, or had been. Her clothes were still smoking from the acid, they had been that close to the son of a bitch. One eye was gone, or at least Fielding couldn’t find it.

Romano started talking to her, it was a her, it had to be a her, they were always women. All 10 of them, so far. Now eleven. Eleven women drowned in acid, this one going down for the second or third time, coughing her life out and breathing in her death. Pink foam bubbled at what was left of her lips.

Heisig in the background spoke into his walkie, a little sitrep back to the bigwigs on the ground outside.

The victim, the woman, fluttered a little against the mattress, like a burned moth. It was hard to tell where she ended and the mattress took over. Both were blackened, holed by the acid, little wisps of smoke trailing up into the air. Heisig retreated into the corridor.

Romano kept talking. Fielding tried to pick through melted bits of the woman’s clothing, looking for the person inside. A gooey lump on one side of the mattress resolved itself suddenly into the outline of an arm. Washed away by aqua regia, the mother of deadly waters.

There was a smell, like dead flowers.

The woman’s skin moved down her face like thick syrup falling off a stack of pancakes. Things skin was never meant to do. The one eye, lidless now, was a bright, birdlike blue.

She gave a couple more gasps, high and muffled in the oxy mask Fielding held to her mouth, and then exhaled.

She went down for the third or fourth or fifth time, and didn’t come back up, her chest falling in on itself like putty, when Romano tried to start CPR.

It would have been easier getting her up with a wet-dry vac than a stretcher, but what do you say to grieving parents, we vacuumed up your daughter? The M.E.'s office arrived to take on that task, and the FD types headed back to the station.

It was quiet on the way back. Neither one could think of something to say, aside from Romano’s “God, I hope we never do that again.”

Fielding looked a little yellow for a white guy, but it wasn’t until both of them were seated at the little kitchenette table, the one with the metal legs levelled out by bits of cardboard, talking to Casey, that it hit.

Case took a bite out of his jelly donut and Fielding went from yellow to green and then greener. Stood up, wobbled a titch, eyes fixed on the blob of red goo that drooled out of the backside of the donut. Casey just chewed, looking at him, not getting it at all, not evening knowing a tenth of the story yet. Romano got it, but she refused to think about it, and in the end Fielding got up, tried to make it look normal and walked over in the direction of the toilet. Like he puked his guts out every day.

Romano kept her jaw clenched shut, and then her eyes when the sound of Fielding retching emerged from behind closed doors.

Sat still and waited her turn, tuning out Casey chewing, and her partner vomiting, and the fact that bile was dancing at the back of her throat, just dying to give up the old heave-ho, Gloria, didn’t that red blob drip apart just like that woman’s face? Didn’t it?

The tap in the bathroom started and she ran.