A piece from "In the Rusted Hospital"

Meat shack, paddy whack, give the men a loin. All these children come running home, stitches in their ears and long tears across their legs. [Oh little darlings, the men hum. Won't you visit our bedrooms? We have cans of ham and curdled jars of jam and pieces of our flayed out hands.] The men cough. Mucus sticks to the undersides of their bandages, leaving dark gray stains across their mouth regions. The men walk through an open examining room, large meat chunks dragging behind them. The meat clings to the backs of their feet.

Scarlet trails overlap on the floor. The children jump in between the marks, coughing loudly while gnawing their thumbnails. [You aren't our friends, the children gasp.] The men giggle. Their bandages stretch thin. Fabric edges fray. The men push their fingers into their open mouths and move them around, pressing against the cheeks and spreading the lips. [Can you see what's inside of us now, the men ask.] The children grumble and lie across several blood tracks at one time. Their backs ache. [Didn't this used to be a slaughterhouse, the children ask.] The men fall to their knees and sigh. They bend until their legs stretch to opposite sides. [This is an operating room. Of course it's a slaughter place. Every doctor is just another butcher, the men say.] They yawn and fall flat on their backs. The children break their chins with their fists. [Our mouths just won't stay open, the children whisper. We shattered the mandibular joints.] They flick the bones but the jaws just drop. The children climb into the bandaged men's laps and cling to the broken swan necks. [What if we decided you could all be our fathers, the children asked. We used to have a patriarchal member in our families but the phalluses grew old and dropped off. Then that man was just a person who sat at a table in a small wooden chair, becoming thinner and weaker until he decayed into a pile of ash. So we have been missing a masculine role ever since. It is painful but we're persevering as best we can. Would you like to add that additional Y chromosome to our daily lives?] The children stick their fingers into the many stitches protruding from the men's necks. Thick black fluid dribbles out of the openings. The children pucker their lips and place them against the blood flow. [It is like a faucet of black pudding, the children sigh, lapping with their tongues.] The men go faint. These little children are like malaria-carrying mosquitoes. They do everything with their tongues and even more with their hands. With the tiniest pinprick, they can steal a gallon of bile from a lung and at least a bathtub's worth of spinal fluid by slapping their hands against a flat flesh surface. [Our mothers always said that the longer we lived within the closet, the more their wombs dried up. So we are to blame for their infertility. The truth is, we stole their organs on our way out the canal. We pulled everything with us and gobbled it up before anyone saw. So they suffer and we are left without a paternal bond, the children say.] The children pull their fingers out of the men's necks. They wipe them on the men's torn thighs. [Have you always been so hideous, the children ask.] The men unhinge the little tacks on their chins. Their faces open and the children cry.

Inspired by a Silent Hill homage