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Ethan’s Halloween Mask

swings

My cousin Ethan and I grew up together, but I never liked him very much. His family was rich, so he always had the best stuff. Mine wasn’t. I didn’t.

On Halloween, 1985, we were going trick-or-treating together. I was the Terminator, he was Freddy Krueger. His mask cost almost a hundred dollars and it looked exactly like Freddy’s face. The scars, the sneer; everything was just right.

I didn’t have a mask. My parents couldn’t afford one. I had torn aluminum foil taped to the side of my face. It was meant to look like the Terminator after some of its skin had been ripped off. A few splotches of ketchup on the foil were supposed to look like blood. As soon as it dried, it looked very little like dried blood and very much like dried ketchup.

Despite my terrible costume, I was still excited to trick-or-treat. We didn’t have candy very often at home, except maybe on Easter. My parents encouraged me to go to as many houses as I wanted to get all the candy I’d be able to eat. It felt good to know they wanted me to be happy.

Ethan and I went out at sundown and visited house after house. Every time, the homeowners would gush over Ethan’s mask. They’d tell him how scary it was. How realistic. Then they’d turn to me and ask who I was supposed to be. I’d answer, then they’d say something like, “oh of course, how could I have missed it!” I could tell they felt sorry for me. One even handed me an extra few pieces of candy.

When we were done, our pillowcases stuffed with treats of every sort, we began the long walk home. As we went, Ethan rooted around in his bag of loot. I could hear him grumbling and complaining through his mask. Then he started throwing candy on the street. Stuff he didn’t like.

“Go ahead and pick it up if you want it, Bill,” he called out, heaving handful after handful into the gutter. “I know you can’t afford to let anything go to waste.”

I didn’t say anything, but I reached into my pocket and pulled out the lighter and one of the two cigarettes I’d stolen from my dad. I’d been smoking on-and-off for the last few months, and even at 13, I knew it was bad for me. I just didn’t care. It made me feel good.

I stayed a few steps behind Ethan as he tossed more candy away, and as much as I hated myself for it, I ended up picking a few pieces off the ground and putting them in my bag. Ethan caught me once and laughed. “You’re going to be as fat as your mom if you eat all that.” I kept my mouth shut.

“Is that why she got fired from the restaurant? Did she eat a customer’s food?”

I knew Ethan was joking. He did it often. I’m sure in his mind, he thought he was being harmless and playful. Still, I’d told him more than a few times to leave Mom out of the jokes. She had diabetes. And she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone other than my dad and me, but the doctor told her she might end up losing her foot. That’s why the restaurant let her go. She couldn’t walk around and wait tables anymore.

“Change the subject, Ethan,” I said. I knew he heard me, and he didn’t talk for another minute or so. Until he did again.

“You think her and your dad still fuck? I wonder how he manages to get it in there.” He cackled, then insisted, “ok, ok, ok, I’m sorry, I’m done. Promise.”

I seethed as we took a shortcut through the elementary school soccer field.

“Let’s stop here for a minute,” Ethan said. We’d gotten to the school’s playground. “I bet I could scare the shit out of some kids if they come by.”

He sat on one of the swings with his pillowcase on his lap. He kicked his legs and the swing moved back and forth. I stood there, hating him.

“I think I see some kids coming over the hill,” I told Ethan. “I’m going to hide behind the slide and sneak up on them if they come over to you.”

“Go for it,” Ethan told me, his voice deep and distorted through the mask.

I left Ethan on the swing set and walked over to the slide. I watched him swing as his hateful words rang in my ears. Tears came to my eyes as I remembered Mom smiling from her spot on the couch as she encouraged me to go out and have fun. She was such a good person. So, so good. She’d never said anything negative about Ethan. In fact, she’d always complimented him on his grades and his wins in basketball and even his looks. “You’re going to be a handsome man, Ethan,” she told him. “I bet we’ll see your face in a magazine someday.”

Even after her kindnesses, Ethan still felt it was okay to trash her.

I heard him laughing to himself from across the playground. I didn’t know why, exactly, but I had a pretty good idea. I reached in my jacket for the other cigarette, knowing the smoke would calm me down. But it had come apart. My pocket was full of loose tobacco and paper. Loose tobacco, paper, and the lighter.

Ethan was still laughing as I fingered the lighter in my pocket for a second, then pulled it out. I walked up behind him. He didn’t know I was there as he shouted out, “ok, one more thing and I’ll never say anything about her again – but unless your dad’s got a big dick, he’ll never manage to –”

I flicked the lighter near the back of Ethan’s neck, right where his hair and mask met. The hair went up quickly, using his hairspray as an accelerant. Then something happened that I didn’t expect. The mask burst into flames.

Ethan jumped off the swing and ran in a loose circle, trying to pull the mask off his head. I saw it ripping under his fingers. He couldn’t get a grip. The material bubbled. His screams, barely muffled as the molten chemicals clung to his skin, echoed off the brick walls of the elementary school.

After a few seconds, he fell and rolled around on playground, pushing his head into the sand to put out the fire. And he succeeded. But the damage was done.

He turned over on his back, no longer screaming, but gasping in shallow, hyperventilated breaths. In the moonlight, I saw the mask was completely fused to what remained of his skin. One of his eyes had apparently burst, but his other darted around almost like he was confused and wondering where he was.

I saw something moving on the other side of the field. Kids were coming. I yelled to them to call an ambulance, and I waited, unsure of how I felt, until the paramedics got there.

I took complete responsibility for setting Ethan on fire. I said I’d been sneaking up to scare him by flicking the lighter near his face. And yes, I got in a lot of trouble. But everyone believed it was an accident.

Ethan’s face was destroyed. He had skin grafts and bone grafts and all sorts of reconstructive surgery. He never recovered. Not physically, not emotionally. He killed himself in 1990. His parents had a very expensive funeral. I was invited. They’d forgiven me for my part in his accident years before. In fact, their subsequent lawsuit against the mask company is the reason why Halloween masks are now made of flame-retardant materials.

Mom died a few years before Ethan, but not before complications from her diabetes took her left leg. Dad and I were with her in the hospital at the same time Ethan’s parents were there to see him through another round of reconstructive surgery. They visited Mom, Dad, and I while Ethan was still under, recovering after a successful set of grafts.

We chatted for a little while about Mom’s hopes for recovery, and then the topic moved to Ethan. Ethan’s mom was gushing about a plastic surgeon that had recently joined the hospital after working in Switzerland. He was the best, apparently. He’d taken on Ethan’s case earlier in the year, albeit remotely, and wrote a substantial article about the new techniques he’d be employing. In the world of plastic surgery, it made a big splash, if only for its ambition.

Ethan’s mom reached into her purse and pulled out the publication. She flipped it open to the page that showed various photographs of Ethan’s burns and the notes and explanations the surgeon had written to accompany the article. I could tell Mom was holding back tears. I knew why, too. Her eyes met mine, and she couldn’t hold back any longer. She began to weep. Dad and Ethan’s mother held her while she cried. I just watched.

Mom was thinking that she’d been right all those years ago. She’d been right for all the wrong reasons, but right nonetheless. Just like she’d predicted, Ethan’s face had finally made it into a magazine.

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There’s something dangerous living near the power plant in Bridgeport, CT.

plant

I don’t know if any of you are familiar with the area, but the people who live over here have been talking about it for the last couple weeks. No one can agree on what it is, but the one thing they know is a lot of pets have gone missing. Birds, too. The power plant’s on Long Island Sound, and there used to be seagulls and herons all over the place. Not anymore.

The Connecticut Post’s main office is only a few blocks away on State Street, but they haven’t published stories about anything out of the ordinary. Same with News 12. That doesn’t mean they haven’t heard rumors, though. A guy I work with, Dion Hargrove, called up the Post last week to tell them about something he saw over by the old Remington building.

The Remington building is right across from a walking park that runs parallel to the University of Bridgeport campus. The park’s beautiful during the day, but at night, like the rest of the area, it’s sketchy as all hell. If what Dion saw was after dark, he wouldn’t have thought much of it. He wouldn’t have stayed to watch. But at 11am on a sunny day, he knew what he was seeing was very out of place.

While Dion walked, he noticed a person crouching by the front door of the Remington building. He wasn’t too close, but it was a clear shot across the street through the chainlink fence. The person was wearing a heavy, green NY Jets coat, despite it being almost 80 degrees out and humid. In his hands was a cat. And he was eating it. Now, Bridgeport has its share of homeless people, many of whom are mentally ill. If you remember that story from Florida about the homeless guy who ate his friend’s face, well, he was originally from Bridgeport. But I digress.

As Dion watched, the guy buried his face into the poor cat’s belly and gnawed away. Then he looked up and saw Dion watching him. He dropped the cat and ran, but not before Dion could see something was very wrong with him. First off, he looked extremely overweight. That alone isn’t worthy of mention, of course, but there was something deeply unsettling about his bulk. It shifted under the heavy coat as he ran, but not with his steps. It moved on its own.

Right before the man turned the corner into the rear of the building, something fell from his coat. It was like a reddish-gray slab of skin. It trailed behind him as he turned, but then lifted on its own and disappeared behind the building.

Dion didn’t know what the hell he’d just seen, but he figured he probably had to call the cops. Bridgeport cops have an unpleasant reputation, but considering the guy was so close to the University, Dion was worried the he might try to hurt a student. The cops came and took his statement, but he never heard anything back. His call didn’t show up in the Post’s police log.

Dion’s report is the most detailed, but it’s not the only one. Not by a long shot. Boaters in Long Island Sound have complained about their motors getting snagged and ruined as they passed by the power plant. Nearby residents, aside from losing their pets, have made noise complaints about a low, screaming howl coming primarily from the area surrounding the plant, but sometimes as close as the street outside. And then there’s David Chung.

David was a student at the University of Bridgeport. He’d just moved into his dorm in August, and the security cameras showed him walking around the campus and heading off down the street to the beach.

The next morning, David’s body was found in the water near the power plant’s dock. There was a brief investigation, and it was determined he drowned while swimming and the damage to his body was the result of being struck by a barge delivering coal to the plant.

My friend in the police department, though, told me he’d seen floaters hit by those barges. David didn’t look anything them. To make matters worse, the official report didn’t mention the kid’s wounds. The holes. Holes all over his body that looked like they’d been sucked out, rather than punctured. And the report also neglected to mention the fact that David had been found wrapped in a heavy, green, NY Jets coat. The same one Dion Hargrove had described to the police.

To anyone who thinks this warrants more of an investigation, I implore you to spread this around. I want people to see what’s happening here and not let the violence get swept under the rug like in every other urban community. Because I know something very wrong is living near that power plant. Something that’s now moved on from birds and cats to people. And every night, as I shiver behind locked doors with my rifle, I can hear it howling.

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Know It All

meat

The hospital I’ve called my home for the last 30 years can only be described as an asylum. While the word has fallen out of favor, the situation inside has remained consistent. Days stretch in interminable swaths of gray and white; gray from the medication in the mornings, white from the medication in the afternoons. Only the blackness of night frees me from the consuming palate of mid-winter rain clouds used to paint my days away.

I am here by my own volition. The fact I used the law to enact that volition is a mere technicality. The fact I stole the volition of someone else to gain use of the law is another. At the end of the bloodbath – at the end of the steaming orgy of crimson and savagery – I’d gotten my wish. I’d never need to harm another living thing for the rest of my life.

The sights and sounds which etched themselves into my soul on that May morning in 1986 still flash through. Between timed doses, gray melts into red. Red bleeds into white. To any other man, those flashes would be the proof of his madness; the seeping of illness into medicated docility. But I know far more than any other man.

On May 3rd, 1986, I awoke to find my young son in the room with me. We stared at one another for a moment. Then I rolled out of bed and went to the garage. By lunchtime, I had chopped him into 400 pieces. On May 4th, the front page of the newspaper featured a picture of his blonde hair stuck to the blade of my axe.

To those who read the story or saw the news, I was labeled a monster. To those who served the courts and reviewed the evidence, I was labeled insane. To me, however, the person who conversed with the pieces as they were liberated from my son, I was not a monster. I was not insane. I was a man who needed knowledge. My boy held the secrets to it all.

I discussed what lay beyond our universe with Aaron’s left foot. The foot laughed. It was Aaron’s small voice. It told me to ask the shin. More blows of the axe brought the shin into our discussion. But it could tell me very little; only that the knee had much more information.

And so it went.

The leftmost quadrant of Aaron’s lower mandible informed me I was close, and his upper-right incisor screamed with delirious laughter while it spoke of the secrets I’d learn from the uvula and tonsils. When the axe would no longer suffice – its blunt brutality too clumsy to properly extricate the tiny pieces with whom I needed to converse – my pocket knife and its keen precision continued the work. Three hours later, with 400 pieces of child organized around me by order of their knowledge, we began our formal chat. And I learned everything.

I write this today as a prisoner. As a patient. As a father. In this unmedicated interstice between gray and white, I can reflect on the red. Not the red of blood, but the red of It All: the rich, vermillion expanse of flesh and organs on which this universe is a scab.

On the last night of his life, an emissary from It All visited Aaron as he slept. It whispered its secrets into every part of him, and my son, who was the most caring, generous person I’d ever met, knew he had to share it with me. So he waited, patiently, for me to wake.

On the morning of May 3rd, 1986, I lifted my sleep mask to see Aaron floating above my bed, watching me. Bright sunlight streamed across us. The dancing reflection of light against the shiny crimson of his sclera dazzled me. Enthralled me. He opened his mouth, but remained silent. He tried again, but it was no use; It All was inside him. His mouth contained no cavity – only solid red streaked with veins. He brought his pinky finger to my ear and placed it inside, and the fingertip told me what I needed to do. Four hours later, I’d brought It All out of Aaron and into my mind. And now into yours.

Daily fogs of grays and whites desaturate what I’ve seen, but they cannot hide the presence of what I know is there. I am not insane. The red which courses through the arterial network of multiversal organs and flesh is beyond sanity. Beyond mind. But not beyond body. At the end of my life, whenever that is, I know I’ll get to touch Aaron again.

Even now, through It All, I feel him pressing against the walls, reaching for me, and speaking to me; each part of him singing choruses of thanks and praise. It’s the praise which gives me the most comfort as I sit, day after day, year after year, and wait. I wait knowing I am loved and appreciated. That’s more than enough. It’s the dream of every father to give It All to his son.

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My Trouble With Fairies

Growing up, whenever my brother would get hurt, I’d blame it on my fairy friends. My parents never believed me and I’d get punished. It didn’t help that my brother said I was the one who pushed him or punched him or scratched him. No matter how much I protested, at the end of it all, I was the one who got in trouble. So, at a young age, I learned I was the only one who could see the fairies.

For some time, it was a mixed blessing. Having friends only I could see meant there wasn’t anyone who could tell them to leave me alone or that they had to go home because I needed to go to bed. It was nice to never feel lonely. The issue, unfortunately, was that the fairies were mischievous. They’d rarely listen when I told them to stop doing something. They would just laugh and flit about and continue with their fun.

Most of the time it was harmless, albeit obnoxious. They’d flutter their little wings under someone’s nose and make them sneeze or they’d knock someone’s elbow against a glass and spill their drink all over the table. That kind of thing. On occasion, however, their activities were more serious – especially when it came to my older brother.

The fairies didn’t like how Todd would talk to me. I didn’t think much of it; I was the younger sister and he was my bratty teenage brother. I just thought that’s how the world worked. The fairies begged to differ. And they wanted to make it known. That’s why they’d scratch and hit him. It went on for years as his treatment of me got worse and worse.

On a Saturday morning when I was in bed being lazy and listening to the rain fall outside, I heard a muffled scream from Todd’s room on the other side of the wall. The scream was followed by retching and gagging and Todd streaked past my doorway and into the bathroom where he vomited loudly and often. My parents noticed the commotion and came to his aid. Mom’s shout was loud enough to cut through the sound of Todd’s puking and Dad swore. That scared me. He never did that.

I stood in the doorway while the fairies giggled and floated in an iridescent orbit around my head. I knew whatever they’d done to my brother had to be worse than things they’d done in the past. My father father stormed from the bathroom and entered Todd’s room. He came back a second later with his fist full of something. He stood in front of me, eyes glazed with rage and disgust.

“What the hell is wrong with you?,” he hissed, and opened his hand.

I shrieked with surprise and disgust when I saw what he held. It was the body of a small bird, a sparrow, maybe, that was cut up and bleeding. Dislodged feathers stuck to the blood and greasy white discharge oozing from its truncated rear half.

“Do you have any idea how sick your brother can get from this?,” Dad asked. Behind his rage was a tone of deep concern and even fear. His fear only amplified my own.

“I…I didn’t,” I stammered, and my eyes darted back and forth as I followed the hysterically-laughing fairies as they swept back and forth across the carnage in my father’s palm.

“Stay here,” Dad ordered.

“But…,” I tried to interject, but he grabbed my shoulder hard with his free hand and held me against the doorframe. The din of giggles stopped. I heard them whispering amongst themselves.

Dad leaned down and pushed his forehead against mine. When he spoke, his words were clear and smelled like the coffee he’d been drinking.

“You are not to say another word. You are not to leave this room. I am taking your brother to the doctor, and if your mother tells me you’ve said anything or set foot outside, I promise you will regret it.”

He squeezed my shoulder harder and I winced and tried to fight back tears. He stared at me for a full ten seconds without saying anything, then he let me go.

Dad turned the corner to head downstairs and I saw what was coming but was too afraid to speak up. As he started down, I saw the fairies hurl themselves against the bottom of his foot before it had made contact with the first step. His foot landed awkwardly and his ankle twisted, sending him face first onto the uncarpeted wooden steps. The sound of his face impacting with the stairs seemed louder than anything I’d ever heard.

Mom called from the bathroom where she was still attending to Todd. Dad didn’t answer. I peeked around the corner. He was on his belly at the bottom of the stairs. He was moaning and weakly flailing his arms against the hardwood. His legs were still on the steps, but they didn’t move at all.

Mom came out and down the hall, glaring at me before turning the corner and seeing her husband. She gasped and rushed to his aid. Not wanting to make them any angrier than they already were, I turned back into my room. I winced when I put pressure on my right ankle and limped back to bed, where I sat and stared at the fairies.

They were laughing again. They flew like a shimmering, animated constellation around the room, weaving in and out of closets and drawers and galoshes. My ankle throbbed. The fairies formed a line in the air and held the formation for a moment, then they made a beeline for the dusty corner behind my dresser. They burst into peals of uproarious laughter and blinked out of view.

As the faint sound of sirens in the distance entered my ears, I gingerly walked to where the fairies had gone. I noticed a tiny feather. And then another. And another. When I reached the dresser and peered behind it, there was a clump of feathers and some blood right next to a small knife from our kitchen. I felt a pang of confused, disconnected recognition, but was shocked back to my senses by a fresh wave of pain from my foot and ankle.

I sat on the floor with my back against the dresser. I pulled up the leg of my pajama pants and examined my ankle. It was swollen and red. The top of my foot hurt, too, and I drew my knee to my chest so I could get a closer look. Again, I felt confused and out of place. The sirens were loud and close but I wasn’t paying attention to them anymore.

I looked around for my fairy friends, but they were nowhere to be seen. For the first time, when I desperately needed to ask them a question, they were gone. My confusion grew teeth and fear pricked the skin of my back and neck. My ankle hurt, but that wasn’t what was scaring me. It was my foot. Because even though I watched the fairies trip my dad, for some reason, the imprint of his work boot was etched in the skin of my foot – and my heel was stippled with tiny handprints.

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Why I Don’t Hike Anymore

leaves

I don’t want to write about this. I’ll try to keep it short. My doctor suggested I put it down on paper, though, so he can have a better idea of how everything happened. He’d never seen such a thing in his 30 years of practicing medicine and he actually wants to talk about my case at an ENT conference next summer. So why am I posting the story here? Because if I have to suffer through writing it, you might as well suffer through reading it. Yeah, I’m a prick.

I’d always been an avid outdoorsman. Hiking was my thing. After my divorce, I did what I thought I had to do: quit my job and hike the whole Appalachian Trail. You know how your coaches always used to say “walk it off” after a bad hit? Well, after being sodomized by the vicious cock of alimony, I needed the longest walk I could think of. So off I went.

It was March when I started and I was pretty damn cold for a while, but I knew it’d warm up as the hike progressed. Contrary to the wishes of my friends, I’d insisted on going alone. I was an experienced hiker. No, I hadn’t gone such a great distance before, but I was definitely in good physical shape and knew quite a bit about outdoorsy stuff from spending time in the woods with my father before he died.

To be honest, the first six weeks bored the living shit out of me. Yes, the scenery was beautiful. Yes, the feeling of accomplishment I expected to experience at the end of it all would be memorable. Still, it sucked. I found myself walking faster and faster just hoping to finish a day or so earlier so I wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore.

On cue, when my boredom had reached its peak, I got an awful cold. It was a nightmare. It seemed like every ten steps I had to stop, pick up an old leaf, and blow a gallon of snot out of me. For those who are laughing at me right now and saying I’m stupid for not just blowing out snot rockets, hey – I’m glad I could give you something to laugh at. But the reality of the situation was that the shit up my nose was like rubber cement. The one time I tried to blow without a leaf, I got a trail of yellow slime going from my left nostril to my knee. So thanks for laughing, but fuck off.

Anyway, as the days went by and I’d Hansel-and-Gretel’ed the forest with mucousy leaves, I started to get concerned that my cold hadn’t gotten any better. Quite the contrary. My sinuses were packed with snot. And I mean packed; you know when you’re in bed and you put your head on one side and you can feel your sinuses drain a little and get some relief? There was no relief. And every few minutes, I was blowing progressively-thicker goo onto anything unfortunate enough to get within my reach.

There was one morning in early May, after I’d been sick for two straight weeks, that I knew I needed to hop off the trail and find a local clinic. I was fairly sure I had a sinus infection and it was severely affecting the amount of walking I wanted to do every day. I took a turn off the trail and in the general direction of a town.

The map indicated I’d be off the trail for almost a day. It wasn’t the ideal situation, but I really wanted to get some antibiotics. The way out was through. A few miles in, though, the pressure in my sinuses turned into blinding pain. I had to sit down and rest. There was no way I’d be able to get to town before dark at the rate I was going. I did my best to blow out the horrible contents of my nose, which was now dark yellow and as viscous as chewing gum.

I used my fingers to pull out as much as I could. There was almost no relief, though. Most of it was deep in my sinuses and no amount of picking or blowing was going to get it out. I wandered over to a small stream to wash my disgusting hands. As I pulled the slime off my fingers, I caught sight of something that caused me to gasp. I looked under my index fingernail. Buried inside the compacted dirt and snot was the unmistakable segmented body of a white worm.

Now I was really, really freaked out. I dragged the piece out from under my nail and inspected it. It wasn’t a whole worm. It looked like my fingernail had broken off either the front or back end of the thing. The pressure in my sinuses only intensified as my panic grew. I told myself the piece of worm had to have been under my nail before it I picked my nose. It was futile consolation. Every night for the last couple nights I’d heard what I thought was the moving and settling of my sinus contents. Now I knew. I’d heard them moving around. And that realization was where I lost it.

Rather than trying to blow out, I snorted the contents backward, trying to get them into my throat so I could spit them out. After a couple powerful snorts, I felt something hit the back of my throat. I spit it onto the ground. On the brown pine needles, a fat white worm half the size of my pinky wriggled in yellow snot. I screamed.

Over and over I tried to spit more of them out. Only one came. With the slightly diminished sinus pressure, I could feel them for what they were. This was the first time they’d been able to make any significant movement because they’d been so tightly packed together. But now, they wandered. I felt their thick bodies crawling around behind my nose and under my eyes. I started to hyperventilate when I felt one start to slither down into my nostril. I scratched and pulled at it with my fingers, but it wouldn’t budge. It just sat there, writhing.

The sensation was indescribably horrific and I needed the fucking thing out of me. I squeezed my nostrils together with my hand as hard as I could. I felt the worm burst inside and a torrent of gray sludge poured out of its destroyed body. Now deflated, I could pull its body all the way out. It was almost three inches long. It slapped on the forest floor like a used condom.

While the terror I felt was immeasurable, having expelled three worms from my sinuses gave me more relief from the pressure than I could have imagined. I still could feel others slithering inside me, though. But my breathing was much, much better. I started to run toward town. I didn’t stop until I got there.

There isn’t much else to say. I got to the main road and a kind soul let me hitch a ride to the clinic in the back of his pickup. The local doctor was pretty surprised, but he didn’t seem to think I was in any danger. He asked where I lived, did a little research, and found a highly-accomplished ear, nose, and throat specialist only a couple miles from my house. Later that night I was on a plane back home. The pressure change of the airplane wreaked havoc on my sinuses and it felt like the worms inside were throwing party, but I managed to stay somewhat composed. The guy next to me didn’t particularly like how I kept snorting up phlegm and spitting it into the puke bag.

The next morning, I met with the ENT guy. He did a whole bunch of stuff with small cameras that made me gag and he made a lot of sounds like he was absolutely fascinated by what was in me. After he pulled seven of the things out of me and warned that there are probably eggs inside that’ll need to get dealt with sooner or later, he tried to figure out how they’d gotten there. It only took about 20 minutes before he concluded I’d gotten their eggs in my nose from one of the leaves I’d used as a tissue when I first got the cold. Lovely.

So that’s that. Over the next couple weeks, he did some stuff to clean out my sinuses and gave me some pills he said would kill anything else that might be up there. Last week, he asked me to write this shit so he could share it with his ENT buddies who were really jealous he’d gotten to treat such a cool case. Well, hi guys. Every time I blow my nose I expect to see a fat worm looking up at me from the tissue asking why I evicted it from its home. Have a great conference.

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