Maven lays in the hospital bed, a packet of printer paper that the nurse stapled together for her laying beside her, her wrist slowly working out some of the things that were going on within her mind. There are some doodles and things surrounding the handwriting, the first line retraced a few times over.

—-

Sometimes, I feel like my skin will literally crawl off of my body. 

I don’t do drugs. Is this normal? I can tell the nurses are trying to walk around me, since they rarely come within a bed’s length of my own. If Nana were here she would probably say something like, “Rude, much?” But I can’t say I blame them, I mean… I smell… Bad.

I feel like I have been waiting forever for Voltai V, to show up and help me get to the bath house. He doesn’t smell as bad though he pulled the rotting oozer off of me, but maybe he smells worse than I can tell? Who knows. Well, the nurses do, I suppose. The other patients seem pretty out of it to care much if I stink. I care though.

So, while I wait, I am slowly etching out this “Entry” (that’s what the nurse called it when she suggested I write about my nightmares, but let’s just not. Okay?) to kill time, since looking out this window is getting pretty old. It’s taking forever though, my hand hurts- I sprained it when the tall walker fell on me.

There’s a story. I’ll write about that then.

After the quake I went out in search of Nana, she had left the place we shacked up in over the past week to go hunting. I still haven’t told her I found V… I guess I should have woke her up or something. So yeah, I went out looking, and instead of Nana I found a lot of water. V must be upset, the place he calls “The Den” was under some nasty looking sea water, I can tell the water’s gone down from the window but I can’t tell if the Den is dry again. Maybe if I could walk to a different side of the hospital?

I’ll ask V when he shows up.

So when I went out I couldn’t find any trace of Nana, I thought the eights might be a good place to start looking- if she were hunting and ran to high ground during the quake. Then, there it was. Wheezing and drooling and gross. In short, it lunged at me, and I almost died right then, but I was able to stumble out of reach. I have this horrible bruise where it grabbed my hair and latched on, my scalp popped from my skull, such a horrible feeling. I was able to stick my knife into it’s jaw, I was aiming at it’s hand on my hair but who needs to know?

So, jaw half pinched closed, tongue lolling out trying to lick me (by the way, this thing smelled too bad as a whole to even get a whiff of it’s breath, just saying). I was screaming I guess, a lot. All I know is Giulia came out of no where and knocked it off balance; it tugged me closer and my blade came out. It’s snapping still haunts my nightmares, on top of the other things. Like the sound of it’s skull crushing when my blade pushed through it’s forehead, then the lack of sounds. It was like nothing existed anymore, the earth stopped rotating until my blood filled my ears again. I don’t remember anything after my head smacked the pavement though.

All I do know is, before that nasty oozer fell on me, I didn’t have 1 broken and 3 cracked ribs. My ankle and wrist were working perfectly; my skull only had the bruise and missing chunk of hair, no accompanying crack and stitches. No broken nose or bruises on my face. Also, I didn’t smell like this… crap.

I am so tired of this all… it’s so much easier to paint my nails and pretend like I still have my guitar, like we are on the road trip we left for to begin with. Why can’t life be that simple again? I just wish that things were nor-

——

Entry cuts off.