I was in home room when the speaker came on and said to go to the auditorium for an assembly. Mr. Blair was confused but directed us down the hall into the auditorium. On the stage sat a man in a lab coat at a table with the principal and the assistant. He talked aout a new disease. Lepracy. How it is becoming more common and how we should be aware of it. And what would happen if one of us got it.
The long cautious days went by. My friend and I were talking about this disease while playing video games. We disscussed how it makes your limbs fall off. What a gangrenous fate! To be deprived of your extremities one by one slowly rotting exponentionly to a grussom demise. It was on a Tuesday when the the tests were mandatory to adhere to.
Mom drove me and my sister to the family doctor. There was an enormous amount of people in the waiting room. If one had it, the rest of us were skrewed. We would all have it by now. I was called back into the check up room.
Turned out I have lepracy.
The only one.
The only one in Middleton, Colorado. Well…I always did want to stand out.

They cast me out. Alone. Humiliated. Pre-extinct. Nearing my end. I arrived in a private air port on a private jet and private quarters and private food. It tasted worse than it smelled.
I bore now bull s*** rags for clothing and sat on a shitty wooden chair. I leaned over to itch my foot and it fell apart. My foot shifted under the chair and my butt landed on it. That was what I expiecienced as my fist pain. In my foot. It hurt more than a regular injury like this. I yelled and screamed profanities as loud and elequent as I could. Nothing phased the piolet. I was locked in a cage of sorts. A barrier between the human and the…disease. The lazar! The outcast! The pariah! The very thing I thought miniscule of just days ago.
We landed on an island. The plane opened then the cage opened electronicly. As I was concourced to an unknown destination I thought about how far I had come. A family of acceptance. A school. A church. A clique of friends. A right. A freedom. And here I am exiting a cage on some plane somewhere in Asia. I had to escape. But no such luck. I hope I left enough bits of retention behind for my home town to remember me by. Not just the article in the newspaper or the ‘Breaking News’ on channel 3. So they know how much it hurts to be cast out like a lore while fishing. Except not to return.
My previous clothes were being burned in a field to my left with all the other lepers. They had me shave my head with a buzzer and choose a pair of flip flops that looked like they had been through Vietnam.
As days passed in my hot canvas tent, a harch reality hit me. There is no salvation. No forgivness. It god causes them, why is he punishing me? I did do poorly on that one test. And did forget my tie on Sunday. Surely god would forgive. I thought harder. There cannot be any god. And if there is no god, there is no heaven. No hell. No retrobution nor eternal damnation. I have no purpose or destionation besides where this plane has taken me.
I over heard the cafeteria guards talking. They spoke in dialect hard to decypher. But I made out what they said a little. I am on the Korean penninsula…South Korea…no…NO! Sorok Island! The place the lab coat guy mentioned. This is not happening! I banged on the wooden cafeteria wall. The guard looked back and yelled something. I relised it was “Watch out!” when it was too late.
The beach rover jeep slid out of control on the loose sand and the front left corner spun right into my chest. The force exerted by the jeep blew me into the steel doors. I hit them and blew apart like wet, limp, rotton lincoln logs.
My entire reason I am on this island did not cause by death but became and accesory to it.
Well, the trip was interesting. The food was bad. The landing was horrendously anticlimactic. The camp all around was worse. I rest in peace and in pieces here…and there on the beach of Sorok Island, South Korea. Hoppfuly I will give a message to the other lepers. How no one cares for us castaways.
I lay. I leave. In memorium. Bits of me.