Contributor: Regina McMenamin Lloyd
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There was a sound. It was ear piercingly loud. My chest was ripped open. It felt like the warming sting of heartburn, like the time as a girl I swallowed a whole blue mint and waited gasping for the sugars to melt. It was reminiscent of the panic attack I had on a roller coaster when I was a teen, it felt like the first time Pete Gorman, my first boyfriend, made my toes curl between the rumpled sheets of my first dorm room cot. People say at death’s door your life will flash through their eyes. For me it was my brain remembering the feelings of this throbbing anguish and trying to identify the source.
I felt myself float out of my body. Before that moment, I had felt the body that housed me was me. But I knew all of me was still here in this purple plasma jelly. I tried to force my body to pull me down, like the string on my jelly plasma balloon soul. I felt unformed and free. My body is solid, concrete like a stone of unmovable flesh below. My soul is a float in a mass of spilling energy like the hot gas of the sun.
I watched the shooter taken out in handcuffs. I had no idea who he was or why he had shot me. The news reporters will probably say “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
But like trying to read in a dream, I cannot speak. I hear talking but it is murmurs and I can’t make out the words. It makes me angry to listen, like the adult on the phone to my Charlie Brown ears. My body lay against the blacktop in the street. Strangers are circled around me.
I followed my body to the morgue. The undertaker took photographs of my body. His hair was greasy black and combed over the waxy balding spot of his head. He measured the bullet wound. My body was naked and I felt humbled. The gaping hole in my chest looked so shameful I longed to cover it up with newspaper or a paper blanket. I stared at that weird mole below my left breast. I had always thought it was ugly.
The undertaker moved to my breast and flicked my nipple. I watched annoyed. I saw him turn and run his hand over the length of my body. The hair stood up on his forearm. I could see he was aroused. His hands pawed my body in a frantic molestation. I was disgusted at him even though I couldn’t feel his exploitation of my corpse.
When he finished with my body, I lingered. Where would I go now that my carcass had been killed, and violated? The doors opened. A corpse is wheeled in. She is about 9. Her hair hung in 2 long French braid pigtails. Someone had lovingly cleaned the vomit from her angelic face. Her purple jelly plasma balloon wafted in after her body.
The undertaker began taking off her clothes. The hair stood on his arm. I was finally able to move my own purple jelly plasma balloon away from my remains.
“We are done here; I will take you to a playground.” I say.
“Where are we?” She asks.
“I don’t know, but we’ll find out together”
This time, I was in the right place at the right time.
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Regina McMenamin Lloyd is a mother of two young children, a wife, and a Writing Arts Major at Rowan University. Regina recently was an honorable mention winner of the 2012 Denise Gess Literary Awards for poetry. Regina McMenamin Lloyd’s writing has been featured on Smithsonian.com, Your Kind of Town.
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There was a sound. It was ear piercingly loud. My chest was ripped open. It felt like the warming sting of heartburn, like the time as a girl I swallowed a whole blue mint and waited gasping for the sugars to melt. It was reminiscent of the panic attack I had on a roller coaster when I was a teen, it felt like the first time Pete Gorman, my first boyfriend, made my toes curl between the rumpled sheets of my first dorm room cot. People say at death’s door your life will flash through their eyes. For me it was my brain remembering the feelings of this throbbing anguish and trying to identify the source.
I felt myself float out of my body. Before that moment, I had felt the body that housed me was me. But I knew all of me was still here in this purple plasma jelly. I tried to force my body to pull me down, like the string on my jelly plasma balloon soul. I felt unformed and free. My body is solid, concrete like a stone of unmovable flesh below. My soul is a float in a mass of spilling energy like the hot gas of the sun.
I watched the shooter taken out in handcuffs. I had no idea who he was or why he had shot me. The news reporters will probably say “She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
But like trying to read in a dream, I cannot speak. I hear talking but it is murmurs and I can’t make out the words. It makes me angry to listen, like the adult on the phone to my Charlie Brown ears. My body lay against the blacktop in the street. Strangers are circled around me.
I followed my body to the morgue. The undertaker took photographs of my body. His hair was greasy black and combed over the waxy balding spot of his head. He measured the bullet wound. My body was naked and I felt humbled. The gaping hole in my chest looked so shameful I longed to cover it up with newspaper or a paper blanket. I stared at that weird mole below my left breast. I had always thought it was ugly.
The undertaker moved to my breast and flicked my nipple. I watched annoyed. I saw him turn and run his hand over the length of my body. The hair stood up on his forearm. I could see he was aroused. His hands pawed my body in a frantic molestation. I was disgusted at him even though I couldn’t feel his exploitation of my corpse.
When he finished with my body, I lingered. Where would I go now that my carcass had been killed, and violated? The doors opened. A corpse is wheeled in. She is about 9. Her hair hung in 2 long French braid pigtails. Someone had lovingly cleaned the vomit from her angelic face. Her purple jelly plasma balloon wafted in after her body.
The undertaker began taking off her clothes. The hair stood on his arm. I was finally able to move my own purple jelly plasma balloon away from my remains.
“We are done here; I will take you to a playground.” I say.
“Where are we?” She asks.
“I don’t know, but we’ll find out together”
This time, I was in the right place at the right time.
- - -
Regina McMenamin Lloyd is a mother of two young children, a wife, and a Writing Arts Major at Rowan University. Regina recently was an honorable mention winner of the 2012 Denise Gess Literary Awards for poetry. Regina McMenamin Lloyd’s writing has been featured on Smithsonian.com, Your Kind of Town.
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Regina McMenamin Lloyd
