Unprompted: Retreat

It started out simply enough – a sensation of pressure within the ears. I thought nothing of it. I'd been swimming, living, singing, and far, far worse at the spa retreat. It was only natural that God would throw an ear infection my way as a sort of biological penance. I felt like I deserved it, that I'd earned it. It was a minor discomfort to balance out the best of bliss in the best of places.

At the time, I thought it only fair.

The sensation was a minor annoyance for several days. A slight pain here and there, a sensation like flowing water at times...it wasn't anything I hadn't felt before. At the worst, it sometimes felt like a fly were wiggling about inside my head – disturbing to say the least, but no sort of agony. I ignored it with drink and painkillers, and set about my daily fun. A mistake, perhaps, but how could I have known?

The first headache struck me on the fourth day, a sudden jackhammer strike into my temple that left me gasping on the ballroom floor. I laughed it off, once I could breathe again, but the damage was done. They'd left me room for air – no one came closer. They could smell the illness in the air now, and they were all afraid.

The headaches spiked and worsened, slowly at first, but growing closer and sooner with each passing hour. The sensation is liked to the contractions of a pregnancy, or a slowly awakening heartbeat. I am not so poetic; to me, it felt like a methodical villain were piercing my ears with an ice pick according to some devious calendar of his own design. It was just off enough from clockwork to leave me constantly wondering, constantly worrying. The pain only worsened with the surprise.

By the seventh day, I could no longer speak. I was mad with pain, drowning in it, gasping it in with every breath. I had to be restrained, and I was not alone. Complaints of ear infections were on the rise, and the part of me that couldn't scream was made to laugh for hours on into the night. They attempted to sedate me – it failed utterly. How can you offer chemical peace to a body so wrapped in the heartbeat horror of this agony? It only made me laugh harder, of my own free will.

That was the next to go. By the ninth day, my teeth had distended and then fell out completely, replaced with blackened, hungry needles. They moved and writhed and cut my gums apart like they were paper. The blood in my mouth was more satisfying than a drug, laced with the dulling poison coursing through my sweating skull. It was my first taste of relief...and a promise besides.

By the tenth day, the needles had progressed down my throat, thick enough to tear my neck restraint apart. It cost my the flesh on my wrists, but I was free. I was so hungry I hardly heard the scream of the nurse, or of the orderly. The sounds soon turned to pleasant moans in any case, murmured complaints of angels crawling into their ears, cracking their skulls. I hear the whispers of the others now, vibrations in my now-invaded skull.

I felt so much better now. When I'd signed up for this retreat, I'd felt alone.

No longer.