The Gargoyle Read Free

by débriding me, scraping away the charred flesh. They brought in tanks of liquid nitrogen containing skin recently harvested from corpses. The sheets were thawed in pans of water, then neatly arranged on my back and stapled into place. Just like that, as if they were laying strips of sod over the problem areas behind their summer cabins, they wrapped me in the skin of the dead. My body was cleaned constantly but I rejected these sheets of necro-flesh anyway; I’ve never played well with others. So over and over again, I was sheeted with cadaver skin.
    There I lay, wearing dead people as armor against death.
     

     
    The first six years of my life.
    My father was gone before I was born. He was evidently a most captivating good-time Charlie, quick with his dick and quicker to split. My mother, abandoned by this nameless lothario, died in childbirth as I surfed into this world on a torrent of her blood. The nurse who was grasping my greasy newborn body slipped in a puddle of it as she attempted to leave the delivery room, or so I was told. My grandmother first viewed me as I was whisked past her in the arms of a red-on-white Rorschach test of a nurse.
    The delivery went wrong for me, as well. I was never told exactly what happened but somehow my body was cut from stomach to chest, leaving behind a long scar—maybe it was an errant scalpel as they tried to save my mother. I simply don’t know. As I grew, the scar remained the same size until eventually it was only a few inches long, centered on the left side of my chest where a romantic might draw the heart.
    I lived with my grandmother until I was six. Her bitterness towards me, as the cause of her daughter’s death, was obvious. I think she was not a bad person but rather someone who never expected to be predeceased by her own daughter, nor to be charged, so late in life, with the care of another infant.
    My grandmother didn’t beat me; she fed me well; she arranged all the necessary vaccinations. She just didn’t like me. She died on one of the rare days that we were having fun, while she was pushing me on a playground swing. I went up into the air and stretched my legs towards the sun. I came back towards the earth expecting her hands to catch me. Instead, I sailed past her doubled-over body. As I swung by her again on the forward trajectory, she’d collapsed onto her elbows. Then she sprawled facedown in the playground mud. I ran to a nearby house to alert the adults, and then sat on the monkey bars as the ambulance came too late. As the paramedics lifted her, my grandmother’s corpulent arms swung like bat wings with the life squeezed out of them.
     

     
    From the moment I arrived at the hospital, I stopped being a person and became an actuarial chart. After weighing me, the doctors pulled out the calculators to punch up the extent of my burn and calculate the odds of my survival. Not good.
    How did they do all this? As in any proper fairy tale, there’s a majick formula, in this case called the Rule of Nines. The percentage of burn is determined and marked on a chart not unlike a voodoo map of the human body, divided into sections based upon multiples of nine. The arms are “worth” 9 percent of the total body surface; the head is worth 9 percent; each whole leg is worth 18 percent; and the torso, front and back, is worth 36 percent. Hence: the Rule of Nines.
    Of course, there are other considerations in rating a burn. Age, for example. The very old and the very young are less likely to survive, but if the young do survive, they have a much greater capacity to regenerate. So, they’ve got that going for them. Which is nice. One must also consider the type of burn: scalds from boiling liquids; electrical burns from live wires; or chemical burns, be they acid or alkali. I ordered up only thermal burns from the menu, those strictly from flames.
    What, you may wonder, actually happens to living flesh in a fire? Cells consist mostly of liquid, which can boil and