SAGE
The itching went on forever, inside my body, outside my body, all over every inch of skin and tissue and muscle I had.
I wanted to scratch away my stomach, my heart, my intestines, my bones, my arms, my legs. Did I feel blood on my skin? Had I done it to myself?
I tried to lift my head. My vision tilted and blurred.
And then, it really began.
I would have taken the scratching for a million years not to endure the pain that came next.
I was being pulled in half.
A force outside of me—a giant, horrible machine—clamped onto me and pulled my skin, and my bones, and my cells in opposite directions. Something cranked my limbs apart. I was getting torn into chunks, my arms and legs pulled from my torso, my core ripping into pieces, cracking, splitting, expanding. The strap around my waist snapped. The gag around my mouth and head tore slowly, until it popped apart and dropped away from my face.
The pain was relentless, unending, unyielding.
People at a small country church back home talked about burning in some hell for eternity if you weren’t “right” with God.
I hadn’t believed it … no pure, good, loving God would do such a thing to anyone.
But now, I was already there. I’d made a choice—an idiotic choice—and now I was in an eternal, burning hell on earth.
Somewhere, deep in my subconscious, beyond the torture, I knew only this: my body was morphing.