The Wound Learns Its Name
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The first thing I knew was the taste of copper, and I thought perhaps I was a wound. There was nothing at all on my legs or my body, and a speck of sweat ran over the back of my neck gathering moisture; a single fly crowded noiselessly along the bed-slat; a cockroach touched with its foot a dead fly. There was a very light rain on the metal roofs, and a kind of a sucking noise when a water-filter sopped up; on one occasion steam existed around me without my being aware of it. My prickly hair was dry. But between this and my pillow I felt hands. I felt them passing over my body like the hands of nurses in a hospital comes to me. In a trifle of time they had lain on my pillow without taking off their dust. I remember edges of sheets against my lungs, and chloroformed breath on the nape of my neck. The children's squeaks that came to my door were deadly to this old man because he had often been a boy, and he was frightened alone to think of children so young in such a place. There were children's little words: love and beat and touch and Lord Heavens! he wondered how often those two aforesaid hands◆ About the ending
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