“Can you feel this?” the doctor asked, her fingers moving slowly down the HDMI cable as she gently squeezed the casing. I nodded and hummed my approval. She repeated the process, moving on to the micro-USB. Its flexible outer layer made the light pressure feel vague, not as sensitive as skin.
“What about here?”
There was no hint of surprise or worry in her tired monotone, but I thought I could detect a quiet puzzlement. She marked down my responses on a battered notepad and scribbled comments in the margins; I couldn’t read the scrawling script, but I didn’t really need to. It was obvious what she was writing about.
The shock of computer cables protruded from the back of my neck, just above where my first vertebra met the base of my skull. Cables of varying lengths hung down almost to my shoulder, like the coarse hairs at the end of an elephant’s tail. The USB cord was the longest and had its base in the center. Shorter wires tangled around the outside of the mass, large enough that my index finger and thumb barely touched when I grasped them all. I had been tying them into something like a ponytail with a thick rubber band, which had left a shallow indent in the black rubber shielding.
She hesitated for a moment and I knew she had noticed the other imperfection — a thin raised line across the outer two wires, a pair of AV cables ending in red and yellow plastic and 3.5 millimeter jacks. She ran her finger over it and I nearly flinched out of habit, but I was pleasantly surprised to feel no more pain.
“What happened to these?” she probed, a practiced sympathy entering her tone. I stopped myself from rolling my eyes.
“I tried to cut them off.”
“Why did you do that?” she pressed.
“Gee, I dunno. It’s getting a little long in the back.”
She sighed briefly.
“I’m just trying to help. I know you’re confused, maybe even scared, but I can’t get you what you need unless you work with me.” She went on. “How did it feel?”
I described the attempt. How at first, going through the rubber, it felt like peeling off a loose fingernail, or picking at a callous on my foot. But when the scissors hit the copper wiring on the inside a bolt of lightning streaked up the wire and into my brain. I woke up on the floor a moment later, covered in my own vomit. A viscous fluid the color of molasses was seeping out of the wound, and had already covered the exposed metal. The scar, as I was calling it, was about a week old at that point.
The doctor scribbled all of this down, barely looking up from the page. She asked if I minded her bringing another doctor in for a consult. I didn’t.
I reached back and rolled the AV wires between my fingers. As recently as the night before, just touching them wrong had provoked a spasm of discomfort, but now they felt just like the other wires. Even squeezing them in my fist did nothing. My fingers drifted down to the end of the wires, running over the ridges of the metal jacks. It was satisfying for a reason I couldn’t explain, even to myself. I scraped my fingertip over the wide HDMI jack, the rectangular USB, the asymmetrical DisplayPort with its flattened corner. I flicked the plastic lever on the RJ-12 with my fingernail to hear the sound. Over and over again, the tick tick tick vibrated ever so subtly up the wire. I pressed harder, again and again, until all I could hear was tick tick tick tick tick from just behind my ear.
The door opened. I started, jerked my hand back to my side. My nail caught on the fragile lever, used to disconnect the male jack from a female plug, and it snapped off. It felt like chipping a tooth; painless, but a chill went down my spine. A piece of my body had been separated, flicked off accidentally into some dusty corner.
Irony Poison 