Free Toxic Affections by D Sean Page B

red-rimmed from lack of sleep—unsettled because of their break-up—and the worry he now harbored because of the scene before him. This was supposed to be the start of their adventure together. Kerri and Larson had decided to board a train to, well, anywhere. They thought it would be fun to pick a place at random and that was the only part of the excursion that was actually planned. They’d each taken off a semester from school to travel, but a few days before their scheduled departure, Kerri backed out.
     
    * * *
     
    “Larson, I can’t go with you,” she’d said tearfully into the phone.
    “What do you mean you can’t go?” Larson was already fuming, knowing the words weren’t hers, but her father’s. He heard her sniffle and pictured her ruddy cheeks and neck splotched red as it always did when she was upset. He couldn’t stand for her to be unhappy, even momentarily. Neither of them spoke for a few long minutes.
    “I can’t see you anymore.” The words seemed to strangle Kerri as she said them. She could hardly speak, layers of her voice shaved off with the tears she shed.
    “Kerri, please don’t—” Larson began to plead, but the line went dead.
    He slammed the phone down on the table, picked it up and slammed it again. Then he pounded it repeatedly until it was nothing, but recyclable pieces.
    * * *
     
     
     
    “I can’t get a clean stick,” a woman shouted. “Something’s blocking the vein.”
    “Try the other arm!” one of the male doctors countered.
    “You should see this.”
    “What?” The agitated doctor turned his head, but kept his hands steady upon Kerri. “What is that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    He made his way to the other side of the bed, taking hold of Kerri’s arm as he squinted at the bulge beneath her skin. He picked up a scalpel and pressed the sharp metal into Kerri’s arm, making a linear incision. Larson stood on his toes, trying to see what they were doing. As he balanced from one foot to the other, swerving in either direction, someone leaned away. It was just enough space for him to get a view of the gaping wound where her flesh lay exposed. If he were a cartoon, his face would have flushed green. He rocked back on his heels and then slid laterally against a nearby wall, knocking over the linen bin as he fell to the floor.
     
    “Somebody, get him outta here.” Larson had been so quiet that no one noticed he was in the room. Two of the nurses left Kerri’s bedside to tend to Larson, stripping him of his oversized backpack.
     
    “Name’s Larson Bales,” one of the nurses said.
    “Got it!” They put him on a gurney of his own and situated the bed in the hall, just outside of Kerri’s room, before heading back in.
     
    “What the—” The doctor held a small, tube-shaped object between the fingers of a pair of tweezers. He peered at it closely. Beyond the blood that covered its glass was a green liquid inside. He turned it around, looking at it from different angles when a tiny spurt of the liquid squirted into his eye. “Ahh!”
    He stumbled backwards as he yelled, dropping the tweezers and tube to the floor. Blindly, he felt his way around the room, trying to find the sink. His screams became louder as the substance singed his eye. He bumped into a tray of medical instruments, the metal clanged as it hit the floor. One of the tools landed just under Kerri’s bed alongside the tube. A few medical personnel pulled away from the bed while a couple others came rushing into the room.
    “What’s happening?” one of them asked as he crouched down next to Neil trying to contain his thrashing. “Can somebody tell me what’s going on!”
    Neil, the doctor, had made it to the sink. The water ran freely into the basin, but he now writhed on the floor with his hands over his face.
    “Fluid from the patient got in his eye. Not sure what it is.”
    The two men flushed Neil’s eyes with water before taking him out of the room. Suddenly the monitors attached