“Gladys, you can’t keep this… gross behavior up. People won’t take you seriously.”

She was in the hospital, smeared in her own feces, with a broken everything. Pick-up-truck-old-lady-sandwich, on stale ciabatta.

“But doctor, I’m on the… the…” she croaked.

“What, Gladys? What are you on?”

“The installment plaaaannn” And she coughed and wheezed and her back splintered and darkened ooze, a dipping tobacco molasses soup, sprang from her mouth. “Ohhhh Richard.”

The doctor turned to his nurse, who was writing Gladys’ every word and action onto a clipboard, and whispered, “Installment plan. Keep her going.”

“Ohhh Richard ! Richard!” Gladys erupted, and so did her intestines.

“I’ll prepare the injection, doctor.”

“Good. Until next time.”

Gladys writhed, as much as she could with her broken everything, gashed her left armpit on a bit of metal from her bed frame and ink flowed out, flowed to the sheets, to the floor, to the pattering of black gums slapping and spewing, “the installment plan.”