Spicy Hot
freshly engraved into my flesh, and then, the world explodes.
The pain that tears through me no longer has anything in common with the methodical pricks of the needle; it’s a detonation, a fire that suddenly ignites every nerve in my hip to climb back up along my spine like a flow of lava, an agony so white, so total, so blinding that it shatters in an instant all the dikes I had erected, and I hear a scream tear through my vocal cords, an animalistic, primal sound that I didn’t know myself capable of producing, a howl that springs from the depths of my belly to shatter against the walls of this bedroom that has suddenly become a torture chamber, and I collapse forward, my forehead almost hi