The Ninth Circle.

In the ninth Bolgia, sitting on a cold metal folding chair under the cast of one naked lamp, your cheeks poked full of dry rice, you wait.

Here’s a special place for you, the doctor says, affixing wires to fingertips, fingertips which dance atop a worn table, tapping the prevaricate rhythm of your vibrating nervous system.

Your thoughts, they walk wide circles. Around and around again, these thoughts come to pass the same decisions, the effects of which open in your imagination like a deeply infected wound: pussing, leaking. Back round the bend of the same circle, slowly the wound heals: inflaming, proliferating, remodelling, the tissue matures into a hard cast of time and skin, a reddened protective layer. Fingering the scab, you are relieved. But another pass around and its broken open again, fluid trickling from your ripped up flesh.

In your left hand, the doctor places an egg, its shell smooth and white. You cradle it in the lifeline folds of your palm, your fingers reaching up and around the oval, casting shadow over layers of membrane, the albumen, the vittellus, the truth of simple nourishment.

You start to speak, but dry kernels of rice spill out your open gap. The doctor motions one finger to lips: shh.

On the wall, a projection: your life in reverse. There you are: last week, last month, last year, last decade. A quick clip in time and you are six: the first time you discovered the salty addiction of scandal and schism.

The first time you got away with it.

Pressing stethoscope to bare chest, the doctor listens to your heart. Hiding scribbles on a concealed clipboard, the doctor’s head nods up and down, mouth pursed and concerned.

Here at the gateway to Cocytus, the doctor asks: do you believe in these things?

On the wall, a list: love, blood, honour, hospitality.

You nod, yes: your heart a simple beat, neither quickening nor slowing but instead reaffirming the delusive belief of a deficient conscience.

Here in the layer of the Malebranche, the doctor asks: do you respect these things?

Do you treasure love, blood, honour, hospitality?

Breaking beads just under the row of fine hairs laying flat against your forehead, you cannot focus.

Your hand, it shakes; the egg, it rocks.

Here is a special place for you indeed, the doctor says.

The egg, it falls; the shell, it smashes.

The doctor, he laughs.

xoxo
M. L. H’art