‘Blood’ by Blake Butler
From The New York Times:
He began having trouble sitting down. After only a few minutes in the chair the blood inside his legs would thicken. His thighs would become tight and hard until he couldn’t feel them. When he tried to stand he would often fall unless he waited posed and frozen like a urinating dog to let the platelets loosen up and flow back through his body. The mornings were the hardest. Sometimes getting out of bed took longer than the increasingly spotty sleep itself.
He went to the doctor. The doctor didn’t look at him, but rather beside him, even when he spoke, like there was someone else there he couldn’t see.
“You’re getting older,” the doctor said to the almost empty space. “Your shape is changing. It’s nothing new. All those years of food and sun and work, they’re all crammed in there, thrumming in your body. This will go on till you die.”
The walls seemed very near around them, white and edgeless.
