| |
Written by PC3
––––––––
“I’M TELLING YOU, HE had a guinea pig up his ass,” Dr. Hawthorne says, his clean-shaven face turning red with laughter. “It wasn’t even like a little mouse or hamster. It was a goddamn guinea pig.”
The four doctors around the table laugh heartily, the other diners in the hospital cafeteria carrying on with their lunch without notice. “How did you get it out?” Dr. Chong asks between snorts of laughter.
“Well, I thought I was going to have to send him to surgery ‘cuz every time I shined a light up the guy’s rectum it would wiggle further up his gut. So, of course, I sent him to radiology for an abdominal series. I’ll have to show you those films. These little guinea pig bones right in the center of this guy’s colon. So I get the idea that the little critter must be too big to travel on up into the large intestine.”
“Wait,” Dr. Nancy Carthidge says, “How in the world did the guinea pig get in this guy’s rectum? I must have been getting coffee when you told that part.”
“Oh, he shoved it up there,” Hawthorne says, triggering another snort of laughter from Chong.
“What?! Why?!”
“Hell if I know. Marcus said it’s a gay thing. The guy had tied a string around it and then shoved it up his ass, presumably with the string dangling out like a damn tape worm. His plan, from what I take, was to let the thing run around in his ass for a bit while he got-off. I don’t know. But when he was done he was going to pull the guinea pig out with the string. The problem was, he wasn’t so good at tying a knot. He pulled on that string and all he got was string.”
“Oh, good god,” Carthidge says.
“Well,” Hawthorne continues, “Once I determined that it wasn’t making its way into the guy’s large intestine I decided I had to just go digging for the little bastard. I called for a couple of units of blood to be on standby just in case it went to thrashing while I pulled him out. But it didn’t put up much of a fight surprisingly. I guess it was probably tired of being up a shit hole.
“So, I had a nurse on either side of his ass, pulling his cheeks apart. And I got in there with some hemostats, fishing blindly for its tail or whatever else I could get hold of. Well, it took me about fifteen minutes, but I got him. Pulling it out, the guy was hollering like mad. Made me wonder how he got it in there if it hurt so bad. But, anyway, I got it out. It was covered in shit of course.”
Hawthorne laughs, as do the others. Carthidge comments that she couldn’t believe he would tell such a story over lunch. Chong argues that medical professionals could eat through anything, even shit covered guinea pigs.
“That’s nothing, Nancy,” Hawthorne says. “It’s a nasty case, but I’ve seen more messed up stuff than that and I’m sure you have as well.”
“I saw a guy that had an arrow that entered the side of his head and its broad-head tip stuck out his eye socket,” Chong says. “His brain and eye survived. I still don’t understand how the eye made it. It was like his eye just kinda moved aside so the arrow could have room.”
“I did surgery on a lady that swallowed twenty-three nails,” Carthidge says. “Then, when she woke up from anesthesia, she jerked a syringe with an eighteen gauge needle out of the hand of a phlebotomist and swallowed it.”
They all laughed and shook their heads at this. “What about you Dr. Garfield?” Hawthorne says, turning to the older doctor who had remained mostly quiet during this conversation, nibbling on his tuna salad and sipping at tea. “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever seen?”
He chuckles, lacing his long fingers together atop the table and smiling at Hawthorne. Sam Garfield is a big man for seventy-two: just under 6’ 4” and still stout. While the other physicians at the table sport pressed white coats and neatly done hair, Dr. Garfield wears his simple light blue scrubs (the top tucked into the bottoms) and a surgeon’s cap covering his head. “Hell, Dave,” he says with a slow southern accent, “I’ve been working in healthcare for fifty years. I’ve forgotten crazier things than you’ve ever experienced.”
Hawthorne laughs at this then says “Seriously though, what would it be if you had to pick one thing? What would be the nuttiest?”
“The nuttiest, huh?” Garfield says, his eyes drifting to a distant memory. “Now you know what happens when you get an old man to talking about the past.”
“We have time,” Chong and Hawthorne say simultaneously.
“Me too,” says Carthidge. “Though I’m a bit nervous to hear what you have to say.”
“Well, I reckon you should be nervous, pretty lady,” Garfield says. Then, turning to Hawthorne: “Dave, the nuttiest thing I’ve ever seen is unlike anything you’ve ever heard. Frankly, I don’t know how I kept on in healthcare after experiencing it. I suppose I just did my best to push it from my memory. Anyhow, I wouldn’t have been the only person to quit after that night.”
“Damn,” Hawthorne says. “That’s a good intro. Now give us the goods!”
Dr. Sam Garfield chuckles, then begins.
“Well, if that was the intro, then let me outline the setting before I get started. I guess y’all know I don’t hail from Chicago. I got into the University of Illinois med school and just kinda never left. But, originally, I came from Texas. Twin Oaks, Texas to be exact. Northeast of Dallas a bit. Born there, raised there, and raised hell there.
“Got a brother, Lyall, still lives in Twin Oaks. He was lawman there for many years. Now he owns a diner and, from what I hear, he’s doing damn good with it. I’ve never been. Hadn’t been back to Twin Oaks in years. Lyall and I call each other every now and again and send Christmas cards and such, but we’ve kinda lost touch to be honest. Never were that close, I suppose. Not that we didn’t love each other; don’t get me wrong. We just didn’t have the same interests, you know.
“Once school let out or we were done with our chores around the farm, Lyall would head out to the ballfields, playing whatever sport was in season. He was damn good too. Me, I’d run out to the woods or down to the creek to see what kind of critter I could find. My mother would have a fit every time I brought home another animal. Frogs, rabbits, squirrels, turtles. Hell, I brought home everything. But I took care of them, and I guess she got used to it.
“Anyway, by the time I graduated high school- Valedictorian, Twin Oaks High School, 1962, thank you very much- I had a pretty good idea I wanted to be either a physician or vet. Up until the event that I’m about to tell y’all about, I had figured I would hold one of those two professions in Twin Oaks. As it turned out, I changed my mind.
“Well, my pa was a very social man. Most farmers have more cows than friends, but not my pa. My brother turned out to be the same way. Pa had bowling Monday night, poker on Tuesday night, church on Wednesday night... I don’t quite remember what he had Thursday night, but I know he attended the high school football games on Friday nights during the season, even after Lyall had graduated.
“So, after graduating high school, Pa had already lined up a summer job for me with a physician he played poker with. Dr. Columbus Chambers was his name. He was a family practice doc, which back in those days in small town Texas meant he did just about everything, including making house calls and working shifts at the hospital.
“The hospital was a tiny thing back then. It only had six or seven rooms, including the waiting room which would turn into a patient holdover area on the rare busy day. They built a new hospital in seventy-seven and have added onto it several times since then. But back in sixty-two, that was all we had. The building that used to be the county hospital is now a couple of doctor’s offices, from what I heard. A psychiatrist on one side and a proctologist on the other. If you have trouble up top you go to one side, if you have trouble at the bottom you go to the other. I guess that’s where Mangle County residents go if they happen to find a rodent stuck up their rear.
“Anyway, my job that summer was to assist Dr. Chambers with whatever he was doing. I would take vital signs or help patients with ADLs, you know. But really, I was just following Dr. Chambers around to learn what I could learn. Of the different things he did, like house calls and seeing patients at his office, his shifts at the hospital were what I enjoyed the most. And that’s where I found myself on a hot-
***
-SUNDAY EVENING IN LATE July. Sam Garfield, walking through the revolving doors of Mangle County Memorial Hospital, ran his hand along his cheek, feeling stubble on his otherwise smooth eighteen-year-old skin, wishing he had shaved. He groaned silently, knowing that if Dr. Chambers noticed the stubble then he would be promptly sent to shave with whatever razor he could find lying about the hospital. Dr. Chambers treated work as a formal event and expected Sam to do the same. He was required to be clean-shaven, with hair trimmed and slicked back, and wearing a tie along with pressed slacks. Never mind that he was regularly required to change into scrubs when anything invasive came up. Sam adjusted his tie as he walked through the tiny, empty waiting room.
“Good evening, Sam,” said Carl from behind the reception desk. Carl was one of the three orderlies employed by MCMH and, being the lone black person amongst the staff, he was also the least trusted by Mangle County’s elderly residents. Sam, however, had found Carl to be hardworking, jovial, and rather intelligent. Seated beside Carl was Mrs. Langston, the secretary, her head lowered to a book of poetry as it usually was. Mrs. Langston was one of those elderly Mangle County residents that didn’t think to highly of Negroes working in healthcare.
“Hello, Carl, Mrs. Langston,” Sam said, the old harpy making no attempt to acknowledge his presence. “Busy night?”
“Heck no, Mister Sam. Not a single patient in the whole place. I was just about to find some Little Richard on the radio and take Mrs. Langston dancing around the waiting room floor!”
Mrs. Langston’s gaze slowly lifted from her book to Sam’s face and dryly she said, “Not likely.”
Sam laughed and, returning his attention to Carl, asked if Dr. Chambers had arrived yet.
“Sho-nuff, Sam, he’s here. Back in room three with his feet up last I checked. Better hope he don’t notice your four o’clock shadow though.”
Sam winced as if he had a sudden sharp pain in his gut.
Room 3 was the only portion of the hospital’s ER that could be considered an actual room. The other four “rooms” were merely curtained off areas of the greater ER floor. Room 3 was generally used to treat patients with significant trauma or some other life-threatening medical emergency, like a myocardial infarction or stroke. Thus, Room 3 was home to the only gurney in the ER that allowed for the head to raise. MCMH had two other such beds (produced in 1960 by Turner Health and Medical, “The Future of Patient Comfort”), but they were reserved for admission patients.
Sam Garfield walked past the emergency room nurse’s station, which was little more than a desk with stacked notepads and medical dictionaries, and into the open doorway of Room 3. Laid back on the Turner bed in a brown suit and tie was Dr. Chambers, his graying hair plastered to his head with enough pomade to make a paper mache castle. Pushing a cart stacked with medical supplies and stocking them into the room’s multiple drawers was the ER nurse, Daphne. Daphne, a curly redhead, stood less than five feet tall and had breasts larger than her head, making it next to impossible for her to find a nurses uniform that fit properly. Her tight white dresses regularly came unbuttoned in the chest area when she had to reach up for something or take a deep breath or, most exciting of all because she couldn’t immediately repair the wardrobe malfunction, when she was doing chest compressions on some poor sole.
“Is that you, Mr. Garfield?” Dr. Chambers said, his eyes closed and hands clasped over his chest.
“Yes, sir,” Sam said from the doorway. “Looks like we’re in for a busy night.”
“Indeed. How did you spend your day, young Garfield? Did you get in any rest knowing you would be working all night?”
“Not really, no sir. I flipped through my copy of Gray’s Anatomy for much of the day. It’s an old edition, but I don’t think the human anatomy has changed much in the last hundred years.”
Dr. Chambers chuckled at this, still laying back with eyes closed, and then said, “That’s probably true, but our understanding of the human anatomy might have changed a bit. It’s good that you’re reading up on such things before starting college though. Very good.”
“Yes, sir,” Sam said. “I’ll probably read through some of the books at the desk if we’re in for a quiet night.”
“Good,” the doctor said, nodding. “Just don’t forget the other thing you need to do before the semester begins.”
“What’s that, sir?”
Dr. Chambers finally opened his eyes and nodded towards Daphne. She was bent over a drawer, rummaging through supplies, her rear pointed in the air. Sam could clearly make out the floral print of her panties beneath her white dress. The left side of her underwear had slid a couple of inches into her ass crack and Sam had a quick satisfying vision of reaching up her dress and fixing them for her. “Have fun,” the doctor said with a knowing smile. “Once school starts you won’t have time for much else. So have fun.”
There was a sudden clatter of sound from the waiting room and a man yelling something in Spanish. Daphne was out of the drawer in a second, running out of Room 3, her heaving breasts brushing against Sam as she passed him in the doorway.“Thanks a lot, rookie,” she said under her breath as she scampered towards the waiting room.
“Young Garfield,” Dr. Chambers said, coming to a sitting position on the gurney with a grin on his face, “don’t ever use the word ‘quiet’ in healthcare unless you want the shit to hit the fan." A woman began screaming from the waiting room; a scream of agony. “Now,” the doctor said, pointing his finger in the air, “that woman has one of two problems: a kidney stone or-”
“Dr. Chambers!” Daphne’s voice screeched through the ER, “We’ve got a baby on the way! And we don’t have much time!”
“Yep,” Dr. Chambers said as if he had known exactly what was coming through the ER doors. He hopped off the gurney and walked casually to the room’s doorway with his hands in his pockets, looking like there was nothing more than a kid with a runny nose being brought to him. “Looks like we’re in for some fun tonight after all, Mr. Garfield. When we’re done, you make sure to shave that stubble off your face.”
Daphne, looking frantic, rounded the corner from the waiting room pushing a wheelchair occupied by a Hispanic woman looking even more frantic. Beneath the woman’s floral dress was a beach ball sized belly, her hands massaging rhythmically along its sides. Behind the nurse and the laboring woman was Carl and a Hispanic man in western attire. Carl was asking questions and apparently getting nowhere.
“Does anyone here speak Spanish?” Daphne said, almost screaming, as she hauled the woman past Sam and Dr. Chambers into Room 3.
“Afraid not,” Dr. Chambers said calmly, his hands still in his pockets. Sam was amazed by the doctor’s composure. He wondered how many babies Dr. Chambers had delivered. How many situations very similar to this one had he endured over his career? He wondered how many it took before such frenzied moments ceased to accelerate your heartrate any more than a cup of coffee. Sam’s own heart was thumping away like a home-making woodpecker, but he had an idea that Dr. Chambers’ heartrate was barely over seventy beats-per-minute.
Reaching the gurney, Daphne and Carl got on either side of the woman, grabbing her under the arms and heaving her up and onto the mattress, the woman screaming as they did so. The button above Daphne’s breasts had popped undone and Sam felt a twinge of arousal in his groin. He was mildly disgusted with himself.
Dr. Chambers was removing his sport coat and rolling up his sleeves and Sam began rolling up his own, as Daphne pulled up the woman’s dress without any consideration for being discrete. Upon seeing the woman’s pelvic region, swollen and surrounded by black hair and leaking clear amniotic fluid from the vagina, Sam instantly became faint, his stomach becoming queasy and sweat seeming to crop up on every inch of his body. His wide eyes looked about the room in foggy, slow motion panic. Carl was adjusting the pillow beneath the patient’s head, then brushing his hand across her dark hair, calmly and quietly saying something that she undoubtedly couldn’t understand. The Hispanic man was standing against the wall, a rosary in hand, praying in Spanish. Daphne pulled a stainless tray alongside the gurney and was stacking it with towels and blankets and instruments: forceps, hemostats, speculum, scissors. Sam was quite sure that if he watched those instruments being used and watched the baby spill out in a mixture of blood and amniotic fluid, then he would become ER patient number 2, laid out on the floor with a crack in his skull.
“What?” Sam said, suddenly realizing that the doctor’s hand was on his shoulder and he was saying something.
“I said, are you feeling alright? You look pale.”
Sam wiped sweat from his brow and nearly confessed the fact that he was on the brink of fainting. He breathed deeply, his mind clearing a little, and nodded to Dr. Chambers.
“Good,” the doctor said, smiling and shaking Sam’s shoulder. “We’ve got to get started.”
“I’ll get an IV started!” Daphne said, clearly unable to conceal her anxiety.
“No time,” Dr. Chambers said, raising his voice for the first time as the pregnant woman began screaming again. “You can start an IV after we get the baby. She’s contracting and it’s coming! Does this bed have any fucking stirrups?!”
“No, sir,” Daphne said. “Sam, Carl, grab her legs and hold them back. All hands on deck. Mrs. Langston! See who is on call from OB!” From somewhere down the hallway Mrs. Langston acknowledged she would do so.
Carl wrapped his arm beneath the woman’s right leg and Sam reluctantly did the same with her left. Her leg was damp and slick with either sweat or amniotic fluid or both and Sam repressed the urge to spew his dinner all over the floor. Daphne draped a sheet over the woman’s knees blocking Sam’s view of her pelvic region; he was silently thankful. He wondered what kind of doctor he would make if he was having so much trouble surviving the sights and sounds of labor. Perhaps OB/GYN was out of the question.
Dr. Chambers had donned gloves and was sitting on a stool between the woman’s legs, his glasses coming dangerously close to sliding off the end of his nose as he looked at whatever horrors of birth that Sam gladly couldn’t see for himself. The woman screamed, then gritted her teeth, spittle dripping from the sides of her mouth, sweat from her brow and tears from her eyes doing the same.
“Push, darling, push!” the doctor yelled.
“Push!” Daphne echoed, holding a blanket across her hands in preparation for receiving the baby.
The Hispanic fellow had somehow made his way to the head of the bed without Sam noticing and was now crouched down to the woman’s face saying something that the staff couldn’t understand and that the patient probably wasn’t listening to.
“Push, senora!” Carl hollered, as if using a Spanish word to address her would allow her to understand the English instruction.
Whether she understood or not, the woman began pushing with another booming scream, her face twisting and turning red, a vein jutting out in the center of her forehead. Sam thought the expression on her face was probably the same one he would have if he were trying to shit out a football sized turd. The doctor bent towards her from the stool. From his perspective, Sam could see beading sweat on the balding spot atop Dr. Chambers’ head.
“Get ready, Daphne,” Dr. Chambers said. “This baby is coming fast.” Daphne stood beside him wide-eyed, shifting her weight from one leg to the other like a tennis player awaiting the serve. The button above her breasts was still undone, but Sam failed to derive any pleasure from it now.
Sam heard a wet expulsion that reminded him of squeezing the last few spurts of mustard from a bottle. Fluids pattered against Room 3’s tiled floors as the woman squealed through clinched teeth. Daphne gasped and one of her hands let loose of the blanket and went to her mouth, her eyes going from anxiety to worry. Or was it sadness in her eyes? Sam wasn’t sure. But he was suddenly fully aware that something was wrong. His nausea and light-headedness were squashed out by the new onset of fear. While the birthing process could be a difficult ordeal to watch, it was still, Sam thought, a miracle. A life was being brought into the world.
“Shit,” Dr. Chambers said through pursed lips, and a moment later he emerged from beneath the sheet with something in his hands. Sam had read through multiple medical books that described birth, but nothing quite prepared him for what he was seeing. The baby, a boy, was small; impossibly small. It couldn’t be more than a few pounds and was bluish purple and covered in blood and cream colored gunk. It was limp and silent.
The doctor swiveled on his stool and placed the baby in Daphne’s blanketed hands. A second later his stethoscope was in his ears and he was listening to the baby’s chest. After suctioning its mouth, Daphne roughly scrubbed the flaccid body, simultaneously cleaning the baby and trying to bring it to life. “Nothing,” Dr. Chambers said, shaking his head and looking intently at the lifeless baby. “Nothing for some time I don’t think. Hook him up to the monitor and breathe for him just in case. But I think he’s long gone, Daphne.” The doctor turned, looking sorrowfully from the woman, who appeared to have either passed out from pain or fallen asleep from exhaustion, to the man, who stared silently at the unmoving newborn. “Relax her legs a bit, men,” Dr. Chambers said.
Sam and Carl did so and Sam was surprised to notice that his arms felt like they had just gone through an intense workout. He leaned his head down, wiping his damp brow on his shoulder. As he did so, Sam noticed the umbilical cord hanging off the end of the bed, severed, and hemostats clamping off the exposed end. He had not seen Dr. Chambers cut the cord, but there it was, clearly cut. Sam suddenly noticed that it was getting longer, slipping from the woman’s vagina like a slow moving snake.
“Sir?” Sam said, gaining Dr. Chamber’s attention. He nodded toward the cord.
“Ah, the afterbirth,” the doctor said, donning a new set of gloves and glancing back again at the lifeless baby with a frown. He instructed Sam and Carl to pull the woman up in bed and they did so, Dr. Chambers placing a couple of clean sheets beneath the woman’s pelvis. The woman breathed out a moan of discomfort, but did not awaken. Then, with far less excitement than the birthing of the baby, the placenta slid out of her and onto the sheet in a bloody splat.
To Sam, it looked like an oversized, flattened roast, with the exception of the blood vessels that stretched across its surface like streets on a city map. It was greyish red and covered in blood and amniotic fluid. To Dr. Chambers, it must have looked like something else. It must have looked wrong. He sat frozen, a puzzled look on his face. Was it too large? Too small? Too flat? Too veiny? Sam hadn’t a clue, but he knew it looked wrong to Dr. Chambers.
“What the,” the doctor said, leaning in for a closer look at the placenta. He leaned so close that his nose was nearly touching the lump of tissue, as if he was closely inspecting a microscopic organism. And then it moved.
Dr. Chambers leaped back in horror, falling from his stool, his rear thudding against the tiled floor. Sam and Carl simultaneously dropped the woman’s legs and jumped backwards, their eyes never leaving the thing that shouldn’t have moved, but did. It had swelled like a lung taking a deep breath; swelled and then deflated. It did it again, swelling and deflating.
“Jesus Christ,” Dr. Chambers said, still sitting on the floor, staring at the placenta with amazement. Carl backed slowly toward the door, his eyes like saucers. The Hispanic man’s eyes were even larger. Sam was franticly looking from the doctor to the placenta and back again, trying desperately to find an understanding look on the doctor’s face; a look that said, Oh, I know what has happened. I know exactly what is going on. I know precisely why the afterbirth just appeared to take a breath. But he saw no such expression from Dr. Chambers. It inflated again and, unbelievably, rolled onto its side.
“What in God’s name,” Daphne said, having momentarily looked up from the dead baby. “Did that just move?” No one said a word, but Dr. Chambers nodded his head as he slowly rose to his feet. Sam Garfield’s heart beat like it had just endured a marathon run. He shook with anxiety. What the hell was going on? Surely Dr. Chambers knew. Surely he and Daphne and maybe even Carl had seen multiple instances where bloody, disgusting placentas spontaneously moved. But even in the infancy of his medical career, Sam knew this was all wrong. He knew that he was witnessing something that none of them had seen; maybe something that no one had ever seen.
Suddenly, there was a tearing sound from the placenta and from its side, an appendage, only a few inches in length, shot forth, spraying blood all over the Turner bed as it did so. There was a collective gasp as the occupants of Room 3 watched in terror. Loose pieces of red flesh hung from the tiny arm and three fingers and a thumb ripped apart at its end, making a sound, Sam thought, like pulling the skin off a catfish.
“No! No! No!” Daphne screamed, her eyes wide and fists clenched in front of her breasts. Carl had backed to the doorway and one hand held onto the doorframe as is if he may fall over if he let go. Sweat poured down the Hispanic man’s face. Dr. Chambers stood in stunned silence like his brain was working uselessly to solve an unsolvable problem. The woman from which this retched thing had come remained unconscious.
Simultaneously, an arm tore from the other side as legs shredded out of the base of the placenta. The appendages were not breaking through the tissue, like a chick hatching from its shell, but instead, unfolding from the tissue itself, ripping apart like an intricate origami from Hell. The umbilical cord, which still dangled off the end of the bed, suddenly whipped once from side to side, causing everyone to take a frightened leap backwards. Carl stumbled from the room, then gained his balance and sprinted from the ER floor. Sam could hear Mr. Langston asking what in the name of Saint Christopher was going on.
“Get out, Mrs. Langston!” Sam heard Carl yelling as he ran for the hospital exit. “Get out now! There is voodoo shit going on in there! Voodoo shit!”
The appendages of the ghastly thing on the ER bed thrashed about and the umbilical cord had taken on a rhythmic motion not unlike a snake. The greater placenta, the body, bulged at its center, the veins and grey/red tissue pulsating with a sickly, wet sound. The bulge tore upwards, showering the bed and floor with blood and gore. What had ripped open from the placenta’s body was a head, red with blood. The thing’s eyes were matted shut. It was noseless and, where its mouth should be, with a slit that went from one side of its face to the other. Long, pointed ears jutted out from either side of the small head.
Screaming, Daphne ran from the room, her arms flailing in front of her as if she were trying to beat away swarms of mosquitos. Sam wanted to do the same. He wanted to sprint from the room and the ER and the hospital. He wanted to hit highway 38 at full speed and not stop running until the horrors of Mangle County Memorial Hospital were a distant site, if not a distant memory. But Sam could not run from the room. In fact, he could not even move. He was as frozen in Room 3 of the MCMH ER as surely as the statue of Sam Houston was in front of the Twin Oaks courthouse. Sam was quite literally petrified with fear. Dr. Chambers and the Hispanic man seemed immobile in much the same fashion.
The creature that should have been a lifeless placenta, an organ whose sole purpose was to provide nourishment to the growing fetus, rolled its head about, the way someone would stretch their neck after a long nap. Then, with some difficulty, the thing’s eyelids, fighting through blood and amniotic fluid, opened. The eyes were completely white, with the exception of small red veins that crept along their edges. The slit on its face opened in a soundless yawn, revealing rows of jagged teeth.
It turned, the umbilical cord, its tail, continuing to whip around like a serpent, and looked, if its eyes could see, at the Hispanic man still standing relatively close to the head of the bed. This set him in motion. The man bolted from the room, his cowboy hat falling from his head. “El diablo! El diablo!” Sam could hear him yelling as he ran from the hospital.
The placental devil stood on wobbling legs and looked at the woman that had birthed it. She remained unconscious and unaware that the child she had likely been so excited to bring into the world, was dead. And unaware that what came with her lifeless child was a revulsion that she could never have imagined. The creature’s mouth opened and from it came a shriek unlike anything Sam had ever heard. It was part scream and part roar and as loud as a siren. Sam’s hands shot to his ears. Wearily, the woman’s eyes struggled to open. They widened instantly when she saw what standing in the bloody mess between her thighs.
As she began to scream, the creature leaped across her torso, its umbilical tail spiraling in the air behind. The thing landed at its mother’s neck, the claws of its tiny feet digging into the flesh above her collarbone, the claws of its hands puncturing the tissue under her jaw. The woman screamed loader, her body thrashing about as her hands grasped the slick umbilical cord and pulled. The creature would not be pulled away, its claws digging deeper into the mother.
The creature’s head opened in a tooth filled grin and then lowered to the mother’s neck and bit. Her screams became wet and muffled, her hands leaving the thing’s umbilical tail, reaching for her injured neck. Bright red blood spurted between her fingers and around the small head of the placental beast. The woman’s legs kicked as she struggled for life, the creature digging into her flesh, burrowing into her neck and throat.
Sam Garfield watched this entire scene since the birthing of the placenta, which had lasted just over a minute, in stunned horror, his mind not wanting to see what his eyes were clearly seeing, his body refusing to take action. He was like a child watching a scary movie; wanting to cover his eyes, wanting to run and hide, but unable to do so. From his peripheral, another character swooped into the scene. Mrs. Langston, outfitted in her plaid skirt, gray sweater, and spectacles, had entered the room and without hesitation grabbed the scalpel from the bedside tray. With a quick sweeping motion of the secretary’s arm, the scalpel in her hand opened up the devil’s backside. It spewed fresh blood and the thing released its grip on the mother and shrieked. Mrs. Langston swung again as the creature turned around, slicing the area where the thing’s nose should have been. Then, holding the scalpel over her head for just second, a look of wild fury in her eyes, the secretary brought the blade down one last time, swinging with enough force to cause her glasses to fall from the tip of her nose. She buried the scalpel between the placenta’s white eyes.
***
“THEN IT JUST FELL TO the floor,” Dr. Garfield says. “Dead. The mother was dead too, of course.”
After several moments of silence from the other three doctors, Hawthorne says, “That can’t be true, Dr. Garfield. I mean, it can’t. A placenta is just-”
“I know where you’re going, Dave,” Dr. Garfield says, “and I agree with you. It couldn’t be true. But I’m telling you, it happened.
“Dr. Chambers killed himself that next morning. He went home, took off his clothes and folded them neatly on his bed. Then he put an old single-shot Montgomery Ward shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. I don’t know if he did it out of shame for not saving that woman’s life, or because he suddenly realized that, despite all his schooling and experience, that there were things in this world that he simply could not explain.
“Carl never came back to work. Neither did Daphne. Only Mrs. Langston stayed. And ultimately it was Mrs. Langston that talked me into staying in healthcare. It was after the doctor’s funeral and I was walking with her alongside the church. I was quiet and I think she knew that it wasn’t Dr. Chambers’ suicide that was on my mind, but the incident in the ER. She stopped us walking and put her frail hands on my shoulders—it was hard to believe those hands had wielded a scalpel so confidently. ‘Samuel,’ she said, ‘you’ll make a fine doctor someday. Don’t go trying to make sense of the universe and don’t go dwelling too much on the past. Keep looking forward. Do those things and you’ll be just fine.’
“And,” Dr. Garfield says, looking skyward as if he could see through the hospital floors and into the heavens, “I think I’ve done just that.”
END
––––––––
YEARS AGO, IN HIS PREADOLESCENCE, Patrick C. Harrison III (PC3) was rummaging through his parents’ bookshelf when he came across a title that caught his attention: Night Shift by Stephen King. That book set him on a path to consume every morsel of horror film and literature he could get his hands on. In his mid-teens, PC3 completed a cheesy, horror/sci-fi story called “UFO” for a school assignment. His teacher, who will remain nameless, gave him a 98 and added this inscription: “Very good, if it’s your work.”
PC3 has spent time in the military, healthcare, the firearms industry, and writing political blogs (which were arguably more terrifying than his horror fiction). Residing in the quiet countryside northeast of Dallas with his wife and children, PC3 continues to write daily. He has several works in progress and completed; including a novel that will hopefully find its way to bookshelves in the near future. Upon reading the short story “Placenta,” published by Hellbound Books in Demons, Devils and the Denizens of Hell Vol 2, PC3’s wife lovingly remarked, “You’re fucked up.”
You can find more from PC3 on his website: http://pc3horror.com/ and on Facebook.com/PC3-Horror