The ambulance rides low and loud, siren chewing through the night while the inside smells like antiseptic, diesel, and something else—burnt herbs and singed denim. Cooter is strapped to the gurney, chest a mess of angry spirals that seem to crawl when you don’t look straight at them.
The younger medic keeps glancing, like he’s trying to decide if it’s an illusion or a trick of the light. The older one doesn’t look twice—he’s counting breaths, watching the monitor, calling out numbers that feel steadier than anything else in the box. Cooter’s eyes crack open every so often, unfocused but stubborn. “Butter,” he slurs, like it’s the only word that matters. “Y’all gotta… put butter on it.” They try to shush him, keep him still, but he fights just enough to get one hand free, rummaging blindly through that overstuffed backpack at his side.
He finds it. Of course he does. A soft, sweating stick of butter wrapped in wax paper, smelling faintly of smoke and something greener. Before anyone can stop him, he drags it across his chest in slow, deliberate strokes, smearing it into the spirals like he’s tracing them back to wherever they came from. The younger medic swears; the older one reaches to stop him—then hesitates, just for a second, because the lines… pause. Not gone, not healed, just… less eager. The monitor chirps an ugly rhythm. Cooter grins, lips cracked. “Told ya,” he whispers.
Then everything goes wrong at once. The rhythm collapses into chaos—then into nothing. Flatline. The ambulance seems to shrink around it. Hands move fast now, practiced and urgent: compressions, airway, pads slapped into place. “Clear.” The jolt snaps through him, lifts him a fraction off the gurney. Butter glistens under the harsh light, streaked through those spirals like a crude ward. Another shock. Another. The doors burst open as they roll into the emergency bay, voices stacking over each other—time of arrest, interventions, unknown substance on the chest. And then—something. A hitch. A beat that shouldn’t be there yet, fragile and defiant.
In the ICU, Cooter lies under too-clean sheets, machines doing their quiet, relentless work. The spirals are still there, faint now, like old scars instead of fresh wounds. One nurse swears they’ve stopped moving. Another says they never were. Someone notes the timing—ROSC achieved after early defibrillation, high-quality CPR, rapid transport. Textbook.
Someone else, later, alone in the room, swears the air still smells faintly like browned butter and something herbal, and that the lines on his chest seem to tighten whenever they get too close, like they remember being told no. Cooter doesn’t wake right away. But when he does, he’s going to ask for his backpack—and if anyone’s got any more butter.
Cooter will not remember the ambulance ride. The rest of you guys will have heard the story from the hospital staff. Clearly butter didn’t do a damn thing… Did it? No. The shocks? Cooter’s temporary death? Did it leave his body when he died and not find its way back? His forearm still hums with power, with the trapped sigul in the Jar of Isaac…