I can still feel the shock if I hear the sound.

That morning, I showered and put heat protectant in the ends of my hair, but I didn’t think to rub it on the palms of my hands. When I went to unlock the doors of my morning workplace, my knees sunk into the carpet and the fabric of my denim jeans did not burn. I plugged the lamp into the socket and it did not set on fire. No lampshades swiped into a molasses, heat brown, and I sang along to an Amy Winehouse song without any lighters nearby. There was no alcohol resting in the back of my throat, waiting, eagerly, to catch aflame.

The internet tells me that 411 people are electrocuted at work each year. Electrocuted.com is a website dedicated to lawyers who only work on protecting shock injury victims and families. They have an “About Me” section that features photographs and biographical profiles on the lawyers that call themselves “electrocution experts.” They even run a small blog. A window pops up asking me if I’d like to start a live chat with a representative. I begrudgingly say no. As I click the red X button, someone besides me crumples a soda can like it was a receipt in their back pocket. The crunch is like ripping apart Velcro, and the sound begins to conduct a symphony in my nervous system.

Let me back up and start from the start: Before I got electrocuted, I was watching A Clockwork Orange. I didn’t like it. I’m not writing this to start a debate, but now I only associate it with being electrocuted- which I suppose, in fairness, is relevant in the whole systematic-torture-Ludovico-technique theme, which we are all familiar with, I am incredibly sure. The film’s main character, Alex, is driving down a road, with a massive Beethoven score raging in the backseat. Like a bull behind the bars, my laptop (which is projecting the film) wails with a 3-toned DING DING DING, interrupting the scene to translate its need to be connected to a charger.

That’s when it happens,

Alex is saying, “I was cured all right,” I plug the charger into the wall socket. Then, in my hands, I suddenly gain the ability to wield fire, and a sphere of hot-blaze red orange light makes home in my palms. It only shows its face for a second, but leaves a trail in its wake, the heat of its birth nuzzling into the insides of my left and right wrist. The sound is like cotton balls stuffed into my ear drums and the wick of a lighter.  It pops like Sunday morning frying pan grease it’s nostalgic, and I see my Dad poking our living room fire. In some weird way, I want to press this memory into my pocket.

The pain is there, but I hold onto the battery of my power chord for a few seconds longer than I should. My left arm surges like an overflowing syringe. Somewhere in this, I fling the chord to the ground and laughter spills out of my mouth, frothy and unswallowable. For some reason, I can’t stop laughing. I am coughing up a generosity for life while feeling the spout of energy bubble and bubble in my veins over and over again.

Stanley Kubrick is standing behind the screen and he’s trying to change my life. Someone is pressing a lighter to the skin of an orange and trying to find the circuitry underneath. I am running my index finger over the incinerated blue green wires and perfuming my wrists with smoke. Beethoven’s 9th symphony is playing in my right ear and I am feeling the vibrations in my left hand. Alex is saying “I was cured, all right,” and I am signing the forms for a demolition of the veins in my arm.

I feel like, sometimes, there is a small city inside of me, and each day I am shown a new way of burning it all down.