On Having a Seizure: part 1

It’s like turning around to the erection of tidal wave. Your back was turned for a moment and now that your facing this monster, there is no time to run. Of course there is no surviving.

First the brain is flooded with hot syrup, and immediately you can feel the heavy slug spread over the rubber. And the brain, like a child drowning under the blue wing of rabid ocean, sparks and screams to grab on to its little life.

The brain becomes a body trying to wrestle itself out of a shark’s mouth, it becomes the arrows of terrified fingers, and the wild kites of elbow and knee. So it jerks, it jerks to break free. Again and again in the same direction the brain bangs on the door of the giant molasses wave. The old splintered house is being flooded but the bedroom door is stuck, and so the knees and elbows and eyes and lips of the brain jerk together like a mob of men to break free. It has to break free.

And then every muscle becomes that child behind the locked door, and every muscle is also the mother outside on the street screaming for someone to save her baby. Every muscle is mother and child together. And every muscle screams. The eyeball and in the hair and down the legs and through the fingers heave and writhe in saving this child.  Until the entire body is a scream for the last red glares of hope, a scream for life slipping down like a feather off a table.

The child dies under the ocean, under the floor.

*

When you wake up you are a soaking dog. Stinky and moldy and slick. Every joint is trembling with the storm. What a lonely wet dog you are.