[Rabbit Hole Day] Sorry to disappoint...

I'm sure at least one of you scanned your friends' list and wondered why I didn't make a post for Rabbit Hole Day. Unfortunately, my dedication to Carroll wound up a little up-close and personal.

See, yesterday I got hit by a car.

I'm fine now, I mean, nothing broken or anything. I'm a little stiff on one side, and my face looks a rotten eggplant, but I'll recover alright. The fun part came right after the sudden smack and the full body jerk of the impact, and then the white flash and me feeling like someone hooked a bungee cord to my sternum and strung it out through my back.

The place I wound up had a sky the color of a cigarette filter and red earth packed so tight you'd call it concrete, hemmed in by four gray buildings. It was me and about six other people, talking in about four different languages. Half of them didn't seem to care that I was there; only one of them bothered to talk to me. He looked like Nick Nolte's character in Mother Night.

I, of course, asked the brilliant question that proved my wit and mental acuity: "Where am I?" He shrugged, and smiled the way you smile to a cancer patient. "We're sitting in whatever's left."

I joke all the time about how the world seems like it's being directed by this or that person. Whatever weird pain-dream I was having, it was clearly based on something by Sartre.

The man's named turned out to be Dick. He'd died from blood loss after taking an entire sheet of blotter acid and attempting to fuck a lawnmower. His last word was "Beethoven" and his last memories were fluorescent lights, crying, and people trying not to laugh. He was sad, but he made it pretty clear that had nothing to do with death; he'd been dead for a decade, which apparently is enough to get over the whole thing.

Dick's good people, one of those few who I can always count on for a relaxing and engaging conversation; as long as I didn't shift from leaning against the wall I forgot about the tugging in my chest. Which of course meant that it was time for someone to go apeshit.

One of the other five guys lost his mind; he kept pointing at me and screaming in what I think was French, maybe some sort of creole. He tried to explain something rapid-fire to one of his friends, then to another; when I stood up he let out this one syllable yelp and just charged me head-on. It's happened three times in my life and I still haven't learned to brace for impact.

He screamed in my face, jump-cuts of anger; punched at my clavicles, shook my shoulders. He demanded, then he begged, but he never listened, and when he finally got that whatever I was saying meant that I didn't understand, he staggered back, started crying, hit himself in the temple as hard as he could, and bull-rushed one of the walls.

That, for some reason, was worse than him committing assault. Dick and the other four people charged after him, grabbed him by the arms, hissing like a bag of angry snakes and trying to clap their hands over his mouth. He punched one of them, kicked someone else, and he just kept shouting, and every time he yelled I felt the cord in my chest vibrate. Then my spine iced over, and my brain exploded, and my whole body became one nauseating post-morphine chill.

I realize everything scary looks kind of like a man, but seriously, this guy looked kind of like a man, an athlete rolled in gray African river mud and then left to starve into muscles and twigs. His head was gone, or stretched, or something; his mouth and nose were stretched taut into a hooked beak, and I tried to tell myself it was like the female lead in Beetlejuice but it wasn't really helping. It looked down at the five men as they scrambled, and talked in a voice that sounded like reel-to-reel tape rewinding, a gummy sound-loopy mess that only occasionally sounded like a person with laryngitis. All I could tell was that the thing was agitated. The five men prostrated themselves and begged; Dick yelled at me to kneel down.

Again, I was witty. "What the fuck is that?" Talking almost made me vomit.

"It's the thing they left behind!" Dick yelled.

It looked at me, and it started screaming; and the cord in my stomach snapped, and my world went brown, smoky black, too white and painful; and then LH was jumping up and running over to my side and wishing me a good morning through her happy tears. I think I made a joke about hating IVs before I fell asleep.

I still feel raw inside my chest, even though X-rays say nothing is there. Which of course is standard, and it kind of annoys me that my one real experience with this stuff has to be so pedestrian, which I guess is why I haven't gone looking for information on Dick--no need to be yet another Fox Mulder.

I'm going to try to go back. I just hope the next trip doesn't take me getting hit by a car.