The needles entered him like sunshine. Thousands of them in tight rows laid across his back, their sterile tips blurred together into a single immediate pressure. It was Friday again, and it had been another week like the last. Each week he waited for this. If he wasn’t pining at his desk by Wednesday then something unusual had gone right for once. More often though the drudgery consumed him.
He was becoming dependent, he could admit that. The weekend had become a time to convalesce rather than enjoy. Without the treatments, he knew the pikes of the work week would run him through. Once he’d come to the conclusion that the violent day dreams were beyond him, he sought another solution.
The nurse lowered the heavy metallic roller to the hard canvas backing that held the needles in formation. The mechanisms that control the roller whined a steady electric hum, that became meditative by the end of it. He usually went about 20 minutes with the needles, beyond that it affected the healing time and he needed to be back at the desk Monday.
The roller began at the small of his back, and moved toward his shoulders. At the base of his neck it reversed. Back and forth it hummed with a steady even pressure that eased the needles beneath his skin and aerated the tension. He measured his breathing carefully, shallow, slow breaths. Breathe too deep and he would force the needles further into himself, a lesson learned very clearly during his first visit some months back.
The sensations evolved as the pressure migrated over him and the session progressed. Heat and numbness and chills and euphoria swept through his nervous system and mingled with the dehumanizing memories of the week. The catharsis bordered on hallucinatory.
A solitary ding sounded when time was up and the roller retracted . The nurse reappeared to ask how it went and prepare for the next stage. Through latex gloves she kneaded his back, squeezing and stretching the fresh wounds. It wasn’t pleasant, but the real pain came beneath the shower head at home.
Once his muscles were loosened and the pores and sores gawked wide, the nurse pulled a sleeping blindfold over his eyes. The new darkness filled with the the smell of earth and insects. It reminded him of catching lightning bugs in a coffee can as a kid. Mutiple patches of awkward cold materialized upon his grieving skin and then the heavy office door would click shut.
“Don’t move around, I’ll be back in half an hour,” she would say.
In the earthen fragrances of the dark he waited for the ugliness of the week to leave him. The movement on his back was slight and random but in the utter stillness it was unmistakable. He could breathe deeply now and imagined each long exhale pushed the vitriol out through the wounds on his back.
When the door opened again, the last of the process went quick. One by one the sticky, cold blobs were plucked from him, and dropped into a plastic tub with a dry plunk. It was his favorite part. The nurse would gently gauze his back before she removed his blindfold. His shirt was always right there for him.
The tub sat at the back of the small office on a counter. He took the anxious steps closer and examined it with a grand satisfaction. Distended, corpulent leeches looked back, thick with the poisons of fluorescent light and traffic and clients and co-workers. Every common and uncommon horror the work week spit in his face was personified right there, too fat to move.
The nurse would push open a stainless steel door in the wall. Just a small one, below a glaring red and white placard that said “incinerator” and he’d drop the leeches into the furnace one at a time.
Posted in prose
Tags: alternative therapy, leeches, stress, tgif, work
the eulogist
Golden Knuckles
m.londus.pike
