I’m listening to The Organization. I had a dream last night. I luckily don’t normally dream thanks to weed, but once in a while they slip through. I have never knowingly dreamed about this call. All day it has kept playing over and over in my head because all night wasn’t enough. How many times can I relive the same fucking call? How many times do I have to walk up on that dead contorted young man with the split-open thorax whose mother is screaming from an apartment floors above us?

By the time of pronouncement there was so much blood it was as if a can of paint had been spilled in the back of the ambulance. Sticky coagulating dead paint.

I’m always going to have to hear that scream periodically. The anguish of a mother over her dead child is asphyxiating. I still tense up every time. I still clench my jaw. It still becomes difficult to expand my chest wall to breathe. The emotion reaches down my throat and pulls my stomach up into my chest.

We couldn’t save your child.

I hate it. I can exercise control over the body but not the mind. It pisses me off. It’s my mind, why does it get to inflict this on me? No reason. Angry? There’s no reason. What does being a dick prove? I still have feelings afterword. I’m still going to have to do this again.

I don’t even remember his name.

I was just there to mop up the blood. Figurative and literal.