SWARTHOS

It was a hell of a morning in Los Angeles, one of those blistering summer days when the sun hangs in the sky like a buzzard, picking at the bones of any poor soul unfortunate enough to step outside. The air was thick and cloying, a thick soup of smog and despair that seemed to glide over the asphalt like a drugged-up snake. I was headed to the dermatologist, of all places—an industrial bunker of sterile white walls and fluorescent lights, the last bastion in the war against skin cancer.

I walked in, half-dazed, and was immediately met by a lovely young nurse sporting fiery red hair and enough piercings to make a punk rocker blush. She had that strange charm, a post-apocalyptic aesthetic that drew me in—like a moth to a flame. My skin felt like it was crawling, paranoid tendrils of whatever malignant entity was burrowing into my cells. She shot me up with a numbing agent that hit me like a freight train full of lead. My face sank into a dense fog, muscles slackening as if I’d just chugged a cocktail of sedatives and regret.

Then came the doc—a wiry figure, wild-eyed and manic, with a thick accent that could slice through the air like a hot knife through butter. He came from Ghana, or so he said, and right off the bat he launched into a tirade about Chinese women and the sorry state of affairs in the United States. There was something otherworldly about him, a gleam in his eye that suggested he was soaring high on whatever concoction was swirling in his skull. Lord knows I wouldn’t mind scoring some of what he was on—the man had the uncanny ability to make a biopsy sound like a back-alley existential celebration.

As he carved me up—three sections in all, pristine white skin turned into a grisly canvas—I felt nothing. Not a whisper of pain, just the low thrum of that numbing agent deadening my senses. He ranted on, and I nodded like a dazed sage, trying to keep up with the high-octane chaos spilling from his lips. We were deep in the throes of absurdity, two lost souls on a sinking ship navigating the murky waters of dermatological existentialism.

After what felt like a surreal eternity, he stepped away, leaving me a different man than he’d found. I stumbled out of that medical purgatory, my forehead and arms bandaged and raw, glancing into the waiting room filled to the brim with desperate faces, the living embodiment of anxiety and hope. It was a scene straight out of a dystopian nightmare, bodies bouncing off each other like pinballs in a broken machine, all waiting for their turn under the scalpel.

Now, I sit in the aftermath, the sun blazing overhead, simmering doubts bubbling in my mind. The results will come soon—cancer or no cancer—but for now, the world continues to spin, and I am left with only the echo of that deranged doctor’s rants in my head and a new appreciation for the madness of life. Welcome to Los Angeles, baby.