Wrenching the Human Machine

The biological gears of the human machine slowed to a crawl and then stopped. The flow of blood was oil at peak performance, then molasses, then cold gravy, wet sand, then stagnant water. Thicker than nothing. We stood in a circle around the center. Our intellectual minds knew what had just happened but our emotional minds were trapped in the seconds before, when the platelet assembly was still pumping plasma and little red inner tubes. The woman from Denmark disappeared. Grandma became a body. A derelict machine. There is no humanity in a corpse.