Literature
Suicides Learning To Speak
It’s 6 a.m. A girl is beginning the journey back from Oz, anchored to life by the whirr and beep of machines and tubes. Above her emaciated body, nurses pace, write on clipboards, click their heels and purse their lips. She is oblivious. Her mind drifts in freefall, stuck in an eggshell skull wrapped in nasal gastric tubing and an oxygen pipe forced down her throat like a synthetic umbilical cord. Somewhere, neurotransmitters are sewing themselves back into conscious awareness. There is a person lost somewhere in that body. There is a mind overboard in a black sea, sending up a flare. The nurses are afraid that she will stay in there fo