Paresis – I. Impact

-Blow. Impact; paresis, slight paralysis of the machine, a partial retardation of the system. The system; the body. Bones unfractured. Integument ruptured, droplets of crimson falling. Tearing and emptying, along with a continuous spewing from deep within, the plasmatic flow of warm animating cells. Breath frozen, stilled, obstructed. A complete loss of consciousness. A plunge into the abyss. Eyes dilated, lids shut, staring into a world apart, slipping. Heart slowed, warmth escaping, a shutting down of the machine. A slipping away from this temporal presence.
Blades, razor sharp, stirring and biting away, tearing through clouds. Scratching and nicking the patched blue sky, slicing through the falling rain, rain that never reaches earth. Claws extended, swooshing down and landing, devastating leaves and dusty roads. The whirling blades cutting at the darkness befallen. Bodies spilled from behind passenger doors. Airbags deployed choke on their emptiness. Dust covers the slowing mechanisms with outstretched twisted limbs.
Quivering limbs and dark red puddles approached by EMTs. “Breathing shallow,” words, as they gather around the fractured frames of spilled bodies. Stretchers and paddles follow the procession of medical caretakers jumping from the helicopter with nylon bags and coverings around equipment. The zipping of the bag open, the charging of the paddles. Unzipped, funnels and plastic passages for air are unraveled and the tubing is introduced to the failing mechanism, after the charge of paddles has been transmitted from synthetic hearts to the flesh of the fallen machine.
Resuscitated, brought back from the plunges of the abyss, but still remaining on the brink of passage from one world to the next, the system shakes, empty and wanting nothing more than to shut down. Shut down the cold embrace wrapping itself around frustrated arteries with flailing valves, weakened by the absence of pressure. Shut down the stressed pumping by chambers that attempt to fill and regulate the system. Shut down the two sacs that fill because of artificial airways inserted into the system. Shut down the sensor that still feels pain, though everything else is numbed and vacant.
Writhing and twisting; first in the direction of one of the twisted limbs, then the other, rotating, twisting, limp to limb; even as the medical care takers place the writhing mass into a stretcher and into the hull with razor sharp blades. The mass continues writhing even as the blades tear away at the crest fallen sky, leaving purple shreds behind. They remain huddled around it, huddled around the bleeding mass with artificial airways and still twisted appendages. Lids are pulled back and dilation shrinks, a perfunctory response. Convulsions continue.
Incisions are made and machines are attached. Clear plasma is inserted; a continuous flow of lucid rivers dripping through the metallic intrusion in a tiny incision. Other such intrusions feed the flailing valves and strengthen them enough to weakly shove the rivers into chambers and allay stress. Sudden change exacerbating convulsion into seizure. Lids still held back over blurry spheres. They roll back as more intrusions and incisions are perpetrated against the mass, the system, the failing machine.
Dilated spheres roll back to black pinheads drowning in tears. Lids are allowed to fall, close, shut. Convulsions cease and the mass lay still, a labored movement lifting the frame and flesh, as sacs are fed through tubes. There remains a quivering as the system’s muscles quake, fed by and starved from plasma, as arterial valves begin to fully function, as chambers fill fully and the system’s sacs begin to demand more from their feeding tubes, raising the frame and flesh even higher, returning some stability to the failing machine.
Shredding dark veils, dusk, the blades slow as the helicopter thumps down its landing on the concrete roof top. The failing machine is carried out by stretcher and carried in on a gurney. Rolling through hallways, medical caretakers rushing along side, rushing from and rushing to as the quivers grow to convulsions and the writhing returns. The feeding of sacs becomes quickened, the rising and falling of the flesh short burst and labored. The machine demands further incision followed by intrusion. Plastic bags of crimson plasma are applied to the metallic intrusions readied in the hallways. They are applied, even as the machine’s mass is transferred onto a bed in a white room.
The plasma enters ushered into the lucid river, shoved along, mixing, then filling the weakened arterial passage ways. Writhing stills, convulsing continues. Dilation is evident as the lids are pulled back and the spheres shrink slowly. The rising slows, the feeding of sacs stabilized. Quivering is all that remains and even that is slowing. With one last and sudden convulsion the machine falls still, the system becomes comatose.
In the dark, the stabilized stilled system lays in a bed. The last lingering nurse untwists its still twisted limbs. The flesh and frame rise and fall steadily. The lids are closed and the quivering is gone. The mass is stilled and saved. The nurse takes a pulse and in the dark veils of night walks away from the system, the mass, the body, the nine-year-old boy.