The Love Story
(c) 2004 - Kevin Alborough

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Monday

He woke up in the middle of the night with an unexplained itch on his left forearm. He could not get back to sleep. He scratched at it furiously and tried laying in different positions, but it wouldn't go away.

Somehow, he managed to eventually fall asleep, still itching painfully.

In the morning, he woke up in a pool of blood. The lower half of his left arm had been torn to shreds, bone even showing in places.

"Goddammit," he muttered and rolled over, covering it up with the soaked comforter, glancing at his alarmclock which was blinking 12:00. "Now I'll be late for work." Then he went back to sleep.
 

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Tuesday

The exact moment she tore that tag off of her matress, the SWAT team burst through the door of her two-bedroom apartment, shooting her down on sight.

Members of the media soon arrived, but had trouble finding an angle for their stories.

 

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Wednesday

He was sitting in class. The teacher was doing a lecture about giving blood. The teacher asked for a show of hands for how many people would, in a hypothetical situation, donate blood. He was the only one not to raise his hand. Suddenly everybody seemed to notice and they all gave him dirty looks. He felt guilty and there was a pain in his stomache.

He told the teacher he was not feeling well and was excused from class. When he reached the washroom, the pain was unbearable. He stood in the stall and was not sure whether he would vomit or shit himself, so he stared at the toilet. All of a sudden his stomache started to expand rapidly, until it actually burst out of him, all over the front of his body.

"Christ." he thought, realizing he would have to go back to class now, "I don't even have an extra shirt to change into."
 

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Thursday

He woke up in a hospital bed with an itch on his left forearm. He reached to scratch at it, but couldn't find it! He looked under the covers to find that his left arm had been reduced to nothing but a stump.

He picked up a newspaper and read a story about a girl who removed her mattress tag and was gunned down by the authorities. "Fuck" he mumbled, gaining a sudden sense of urgency as he realized he had been using the wrong slot in his toaster when toasting only one piece of bread. He had been doing this for years.

He sat up in a cold sweat, anxiously awaiting the arrival of the toaster police.
 

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Friday

The doctors had replaced most of his stomache with some sort of plastic pouch and connected his innards with thick rubber tubing. 

In the next room over, a beautiful young woman was being treated for bullet wounds. Every now and then, he would peek through the space in the curtains to look at her. It may have been something to do with the extensive amount of painkillers, but he was pretty sure he had fallen in love with her.

He started fidgeting subconsciously with the tag on his matress.
 

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Saturday

He tried to call his sister to tell her about the accident. Her roommate answered the phone and told himshe was in the hospital with multiple bullet wounds, but she would be OK. He told the roommate about his own misfortune, and hung up.

The roommate came to the hospital later that day to visit the sister and the brother. - He now had a stump for an arm, and she had found a new love, who had a plastic somtache and heart of gold

 

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Sunday

She found out that he was the type of man who didn't like to donate his bodily fluids, and she dumped him. Later that day, the toaster patrol came to the hospital and arrested somebody whom they referred to as 'the one-armed bandit', for not using the right slot when toasting only one piece of bread.

The roommate and the plastic-stomache man ended up meeting and fell madly in love. Even though he did not like to donate blood and she liked to wear a scary eyepatch.

 
 

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THE NED
       ^(END)