After the third day, it reached his bones. That's when he chose to stop breathing.

It started as a rash where she had kissed him; two red marks on his forehead, meeting at the corners, spreading outwards through his skin. He said it felt right, at first. Warm. He called it a miracle, the divine will of his flesh made manifest, enacting its inherent desire to change. When it reached his eyes, he said the world unfolded around him.

"I think," he told me once, as I tended to his bleeding, "I think I see Heaven. It's a place for the meat, once it escapes."

"Escapes from what?" I asked him,

He looked me in the eyes. His irises were spirals.

"From the offal."

His situation worsened on the second day. He preached his new gospel to the nurses, the doctors, and the other patients; we learned to ignore him. He told us about the offal: the brain and the heart, the soul, and how they stayed on the slaughterhouse floor, shattered shells of the worldly egg, once the meat broke free and ascended.

On the third day, she came to visit him. None of us dared turn her away; her lips were blood-red. She found his room without looking, and when she saw him, standing at the threshold like a snail without a shell, her eyes welled up with tears. "By God," I heard her whisper. "You do see."

She placed a kiss on his forehead, as she had done before, and for the first time, he looked afraid.

A dogwood tree grew where we buried him. Its branches bend like he did.