To the embassy

Burst an eardrum today.

It wasn't till I smelled it that I got scared.

The rest I went through pretty well -- the actual bursting didn't quite make me faint. Struggling through the slough of voicemail to reach my husband (working for the day in an obscure department of a national insurance corporation) didn't quite reduce me to tears. Even the rolling-pin sized syringe they used to drain the pus didn't quite switch on my stomach-crawling fear of punctures. Maybe it was just too damn big to flip the needle switch.

But the pus itself -- a cup or so, looking like cream churned nearly to butter -- the smell scared me. The green tiles of the hospital, the floordrains, the unbreakable glassware and loops of clear tubing, are no match for such a thing. Bacteria is such a little word, but they are older than us, and stronger. It's their world.

Hospitals are our embassies.

Hospitals are alien kingdoms.

I knew a man who lost a leg to a mine, and then to some kind of sepsis or gangrene (gangrene I think, but I don't know). "The reek of ether" I wrote of that, pretending to his memory. But surely it must have been this smell, this old kingdom.

I thought about that and the door swung open. For a moment I thought he might walk through. And then someone pulled apart the curtains with a sound like a knife being sharpened.