I woke up in a hospital bed. Before I noticed that I couldn’t move, I realized that the ceiling wasn’t mine. I couldn’t remember the last time I woke up in someone else’s room. I couldn’t remember the last time I even left my room. It was nice to be somewhere that was nice and clean, even if the brightness was suffocating.

Hospitals are always yellow. They smell yellow too. Maybe it’s all the catheters dug deep into the patients’ special parts. Maybe it’s the lysol that strips the walls and floors of any smell of humanity and mistakes. Or maybe it’s the people inside that won’t get any better and as each day goes by they turn a more disgusting shade of puke.

I tried to move my head but it was strapped down with warm leather to the edges of the mattress. I could just crane my neck enough to see that wrists and ankles were tied to the frame. I guessed that they had heard about my habits with strangers.

“Hello? Uh, hey? Nurse?” I called out feverishly to the door, open but a crack.

There was no sound outside the white door. I couldn't hear a single footstep, nor life support machine for as hard as I strained my ears. But it didn’t matter. Finally, a hospital that could let its patients rest, I thought.

I peered around the room. Penetrating deep into my veins was an iv drip. I followed the plastic tubing with my sticky eyes up to the bag next to my head. Through the thick plastic I saw a cloudy liquid. It was a pale sunset and full of chunks and pieces that were leaching colors of crimson and puss into the bag, and they swirled around eachother, creating a cacophony of putrid abstract sludge. The serum was rotten, though I couldn’t tell if it was rotten when they hooked it up to me, or if I had been there so long that even my medicine had grown sick of me.

Obviously at that point I decided it was time to leave. I called out for a naked nurse a few more times to no avail. My bindings were tight against my gray skin- was it always that color? I managed to move my paper blanket off my flesh enough to reveal the state of myself.

My arm was covered in deep blushing gashes, grotesquely stitched up with a thick black cord and caked with dried blood. From the top of my spindly hand to the hem of my shirt sleeve stretched a leaking gouge that I had no memory of receiving. I looked like some moron’s first quilt, made of scraps of fabric that her mommy gave her because she wasn’t allowed to waste the nice expensive stuff.

I gently tugged at the strap and heard the metallic jingle of the lock hitting the bedframe. It echoed through the entire ward. The strap felt as though it were only made of a few frail threads that with the slightest twitch would fall apart, though I could clearly see that it was leather, strong and solid. I flexed my tattered arm and my leather binding snapped cleanly. My eyes grew wide. I tore the rest of my bindings off as easily as if they were nothing more than party streamers.

And then I began walking through that empty hospital. Every time I caught a glance of my reflection a chill ran down my spine. I truly looked like a living corpse, decaying alive. I had no memory of how I ended up at that hospital, and there were no answers to be found as I stepped, barefoot, down the deserted halls.

I pushed my way out the front doors to find I had not been in fact transported to one of the upper crusts of hell, but in a back alley of the outskirts of my beloved city. I won't divulge the name of the city, for fear some man madder than I intends to hunt me down. The familiar smells of piss and rot raped my nose and I knew that I couldn’t be that far from my apartment building. I looked up and squinted at the small dots of blue peeking through the tops of the skyscrapers. I had ended up a long ways down.

There was only one person I knew I could trust. He was a prostitute, one of the most fabulous gigolos in all the world. Mainly infamous for his distasteful films, not the least of which involved electrocution, an attempt at collecting every STD known to man within 24 hours, dubious snuff, and a deep look into the psyche of a maniac like him. I figured his brothel couldn’t have been far. So I started walking.

On my walk to the prostitute’s house, I attempted to piece together all that I had discovered since I awoke. Something had happened to me that caused almost life ending wounds all over my body, and yet I felt no pain. The hospital that stitched my wounds was deserted and spat me out into the most disgusting part of town I had ever seen. And most importantly, I had no memory of hurting myself, nor being admitted to a hospital.

It was too early to begin thinking up theories, after all my head was still a bit fuzzy. I wondered how long I had been asleep. I hoped not years.

I don’t know how long I was walking, or how I knew where to turn, but eventually I stumbled into a screaming nightclub. I don’t recall if there were any lights or music, or people. I can only recall dragging my feet up the rickety stairs to the upstairs suite and seeing the face of an angel before collapsing on a pink couch that reeked of cum.