Recently, I started pissing out Surge each time I go to the bathroom. The liquid is a light, almost fluorescent green. Picture the aurora borealis distilled into a carbonated, caffeinated, stream that could remove rust from a boat engine. If you were wondering, yeah, it does glow in the dark.

My doctor didn’t have a lot of answers. Surge was initially developed as a competitor for Mountain Dew in the 90s, boasting more caffeine and tastier chemicals. It was discontinued in 2003, though a few test markets have reintroduced it in a limited capacity. Regardless, even if I had access to the beverage, it should not be flowing out of my body unaltered, as pure and ferocious as the Angel of Death descending upon Egypt. As long as it wasn’t painful, my doc said to observe and hope the issue goes away.

That was three days ago–two days since I started feeling lumps. The abscesses had edges, rectangular but blunt. There was pain, then, a soft agony that rode my nerves from the bottom of my stomach to the back of my eyes. With every breath, I heard them whirr. My inner workings, my clockwork cancer. I returned to the hospital, pants soaked with neon citrus soda. They wheeled me into the ER; apparently, I was crawling the last few feet towards the door.

Lumps became tumors became pustules. I heard the ripping before I felt it. My skin split and the material emerged, shiny and dark, little islands in the ocean of me. The whirring grew louder, so loud you couldn’t even hear the nurse screaming, or me screaming.

The tapes spilled out of me and clattered to the floor. More Surge leaked out until the room was flooding. It reeked of orange, lemon, and that vinyl smell of fresh VHS. I lay open on the table in my paper gown, body dotted with hollow holes, a new cassette crawling out every few minutes.

I have to return some videotapes but I have nowhere to take them.