By Genia Blum
When my boyfriend came home that morning, there was no yelling, no hitting back, no sound or motion on my part, only a barely perceptible rise and fall of the chest and a slight fluttering of my nostrils; probably why—in an unexpected act of kindness from someone who’d once prevented me from seeing a doctor after he’d broken my nose—he delivered me to the E.R.; but only after procrastinating all day, so it was too late to pump out my stomach, and every molecule of every pill I’d swallowed was coursing through my bloodstream and flooding my brain, allowing me to see things that normally remain hidden; like the host of celestial beings who coaxed and coerced me into consciousness, luring me toward light and back into darkness, caressing and coddling, until I awakened in dull twilight, lying on a gurney as walls and ceilings rushed by; and when I grasped at the wings of passing angels, their white feathers dissolved in my hands, as I was now one of the resurrected, no longer deserving of mercy, attended only by Satan, who tore away the sheets and shoved a bedpan beneath me.
Genia Blum is a Swiss Ukrainian Canadian writer, translator and dancer whose work has received a Best of the Net and several Pushcart Prize nominations as well as a “Notable” mention in The Best American Essays 2019, and who haunts Twitter as @geniablum when not tweaking fonts on her website www.geniablum.com.
Photo by Julian Blum.