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Static Shock Other than for heart attack, the Golden Hour after an accident is largely myth, coined during Vietnam as field surgery stepped into a golden age now surpassed—we can keep so many wounded alive—amputees, the paralyzed. This is what I am thinking about after the fourth orgasm, not the first or second or third, but the palliative fourth. It’s as if I’ve been shot with morphine, my mind untethered from my supremely relaxed body, rising above our bed, through the roof, to the oily sky where I am aware something is operating on me, cauterizing old griefs raising their cicatrix heads like cicadas after years underground. I am paralyzed in my own vertical hour, his love after all this time an aspirin. When he touches me for a fifth unthinkable, impossible time, I shake my head no, but I can’t feel my head lying below me in the battlefield of our bed which has never been a battlefield, but has been a surgery, a triage site, a hospice, yes, a morgue where I have interned myself over and over only to be re-animated, resuscitated again and again. This is an unthinkable, impossible analogy: amputees report feeling pain in the limbs they have lost, and I report feeling God in what is stripped away. I hear him whispering to me just a little higher, as if the ground was above me and filled with insects ready to burst through, their golden shells falling like shrapnel, electric and heart-rending.
Laura McCullough | Mudlark No. 32 |