Show us, show us
Suckle the teat
Pleasure, pleasure
On golden seat
Cultivate the flowing soil
Throbbing, pulsing, brought to boil
Plant them, plant them
Seeds beneath us
Harvest, harvest
Shred to pieces
Scattered by the wand’ring Jew
We’ll cut you up and bury you
A kitten lay stone still in the mulch below an ancient, rotting oak, it’s throat torn out and spread wide like a child’s mouth, screaming at the sky. Swollen white flesh pooled around the edges like pallid lips, glowing in the autumn sunlight. Sinewy strands reaching from the clumped and mottled fur around the wound resembled the emaciated fingers of fallen angels, clambering out from that black abyss to herald the end of days.
Sadie soaked in each morbid detail with enamored disgust. She had never seen anything so lifeless before. So vulnerable. It was a gruesome, yet beautiful sight; as if god himself had thrown this festering creation down from on high to kiss the earth below upon its pestilent landfall.
From someplace far away, a songbird trilled its mournful melody. A haunting hymn of heavy, wracking sobs that echoed throughout the entire forest. Sadie wondered if the sorrowful bird had lost a chick. The thought brought a memory rushing up through her: she had come upon a baby bird one day after school, pushed from the nest too early. Ants had been ravaging the chicks broken body as it cried out for its life. She had wept the rest of the way home.
But this kitten was indifferent: it didn’t cry out for her sympathy. It didn’t need her to acknowledge its pain.
A deep chill coursed through her, an electric blue shock that rattled every bone in her body. Even though it was mid-day and the sun was casting a faded golden light through the boughs of the firs, the dead of night had come to this place. A lurid darkness invaded the air and rustled its black wings down her clenched throat, into her lungs. A sharp pain knifed it’s way into the pit of her stomach and Sadie suddenly became very, very tired.
She wanted to run away. Hide her eyes. Cry out until her mother came running to hold her and comb her fingers through her dirty blonde hair and coo soothingly that everything was going to be alright. But at the same time, she wanted to lie down, submerged in the dead leaves until the life ebbed from her body. Unsure of which course to follow, Sadie extended a nervous hand and consoled the kitten with long strokes along sunken ribs. Her fingers played them like jagged keys on some nightmarish piano, and a terrible waltz began to play in her mind.
As if on cue with the music, the kitten seemed to shake itself to life. A tiny song flittered out from the wound in its throat; a dissonant squeak that sent quakes and shivers through its once lifeless body. Sadie giggled, pleased to see the attention she was giving had produced such a reaction. The kitten’s midsection squirmed as she continued to pet it.
Shivering again, Sadie realized that she couldn’t just leave the animal out in the forest to freeze. Winter was peeking around the corner, and she couldn’t let the weather have its way with this poor creature. So it was decided. With care, she gingerly scooped the kitten up to her bosom and cradled it in her arms. She suppressed a shriek as it’s right leg snapped from sinew and fell off in the process, making a soft, wet thump on its return to the earth below.
Sadie realized her hands and arms were now covered in thickly viscous muck: a dark red paste oozed from the animal and ran down her chest, staining her flesh and favorite yellow school shirt. The shirt was decorated with little yellow ducks covered in felt. Their bills curved up to give the impression that they were smiling about something or other, and were fuzzy to the touch. The ducks were swallowed up in the crimson soup.
Like a mother cradling her newborn infant, covered in gore and bile and mucus, Sadie held the kitten with solemn pride and inflated joy. She turned away from the old oak and began to make her way home through the clustered trees.
As her shoes crunched the dead leaves underfoot, the kitten rose up and down in her arms, nuzzling her chest. It continued to squirm in her grasp, it’s crusty black fur occasionally spotted by pale November sunlight. The light danced through the leaves like magic, which seemed appropriate: this was a magical day.
Sadie had never been known to have a strong voice. She never saw the need to fight for attention from her peers, and because of this, her classmates never went out of their way to include her in their daily endeavors. Even her teachers seemed not to notice her, and never acknowledged her other than as a name on a list. She was a ghost, fading into walls and sinking into chairs as if they were lakes. Aloof from the other school children, she liked to spend her recess hour counting the bark chips that surrounded the jungle gym, or flushing handfuls of gravel down the toilet in the girl’s restroom. When she could, she liked to talk to the trees on her frequent outings to the forest that separated the schoolyard from her neighborhood. They were her only true friends. The only ones who listened to what she had to say.
But now here she was with a newfound friend. Someone to talk to, and if she was lucky, someone who would talk back. She smiled as she wondered if anyone or anything could hold a conversation with nothing in their throat to make the words come out. The notion seemed ridiculous and Sadie quickly forgot about it.
Then the kitten mewled. A weak gargling sound, but still a sound nonetheless. Sadie stopped dead in her tracks, sure she was imagining things. But sure enough the sound came again, softer this time. It sounded wet and choked with decay; a plague wind groaning through a ruined highway tunnel.
And that’s when Sadie noticed the smell. It had always been there she supposed, but after the creature’s soft cry, it seemed to fill the air around her and it was getting worse by the second. The kitten continued to sigh in a series of strangled mews, intermittently choking one moment and lying still, before ebbing into tiny spasms and once again erupting into it’s hellish song. That terrible waltz came again into her mind, and her feet moved in cadence with the music. The smell worsened with each sigh, a reeking gas seemed to pour from the tear in its throat and her vision caked with the nightmarish pollution.
Sadie suffered a fit of coughing and choked back tears, but continued her gait in the direction of home, her mind consumed with the fantasy of giving the cat a very thorough bathing upon her return.
Pulsing with her steps, the red paste continued to ooze out of the kitten. Except now it was accompanied by the flowing of several other liquids that coursed down her chest and coalesced into a reddish-brown pool of filth. The last of the fuzzy yellow ducks were drowned. She could feel the thick pool soaking through, the cat’s reeking juices meeting with her sweat and running in rivulets from her bosom down to her hips.
A high-pitched croak began to sound from the hole in the animal’s neck, like a miniature air raid siren. A stiff paw stirred and clutched at Sadie’s shirt collar. The creature’s hideously dead face was raised up to hers and its vacant eye sockets peered into hers. Its lolling tongue fell from slackened jaws and it began croaking in an odd rhythm. It sounded almost like laughing.
Sadie wanted to laugh too, but every forming giggle died in her throat. The fog of putrefaction engulfed her entire world. Thick gases began expelling from the cat’s open throat, turning her brain to mush. Her ideas came in formless clouds, nervous spasms of unintelligible thought that made no attempt of escaping her lips. In place of words, she opened her mouth and began to spew vomit, coating the animal in her arms with coarse, black bile.
Through the tears brought on from becoming sick, Sadie could make out a muddied line of blotchy colors past the tree line: her neighborhood was coming into view.
Rows of pastel houses culminated into a maelstrom of society; a forest in and of itself that loomed in front of her more ominously than the darkest sea of trees imaginable. The houses rose and sagged like swollen sores on the earth’s skin; a stained and faded batch of rotting easter eggs that some enormous child had forgotten to eat.
A stray dog noticed her approach and trotted towards her, sniffing the air. But before coming too close its tail shot between its legs and the hound skittered away, yelping in pain.
Outside of the protection of the trees, the dwindling sun was much brighter. It was neither setting nor rising, just a fading orb in the sky, a slashed cosmic artery spraying it’s dying light on a dying world. But even through the all-encompassing last light, a sharp chill pervaded the air, bastardizing the promise of warmth the sun once held. The blissful evening cool brought gooseflesh running down Sadie’s arms and back.
The deathly fog had gone from her vision, but the stench remained. Low, guttural groans continued to pour from the creature’s throat and its belly began to twitch and rub uncomfortably against her chest. Sadie only then noticed how large its stomach had become. Bloated to almost ridiculous proportion, the pale gray belly flesh poked out from the forest of crusty black fur, slowly rising like some macabre pie crust.
This last thought made Sadie realize she hadn’t eaten in hours. She was starving. Licking her dry, cracking lips, she dreamed of what her mother must be preparing for dinner.
As Sadie made her way into the cul-de-sac that marked the entrance into the neighborhood, an instantaneous change occurred. No longer could she hear the cries of the songbird, or the wind stirring the trees. Even the twisted waltz echoing in her mind died suddenly. Instead, a terrible quiet seemed to fill the world, a tangible sea that stretched on for eternity: an ocean of silence. No motors rumbled, no doors opened or closed, no sprinklers chattered, no child laughed or screamed in glee. A vast nothingness lay beyond her.
Sadie’s vision was blotted with unnatural colors and shapes. The thick cement she walked on acted like a reverse tin-foil hat: no thought could enter her mind, and no thought came out. The void invaded her mind as well; a numb oneness that enveloped her, a marriage between nothing and nothing. She was submerged and embalmed into a briny stagnation.
Unbeknownst to her, a small group of neighborhood children had begun to gather and stare at her in bemusement. But once they caught a glimpse of the garish gift writhing and wailing in her arms, they fled without a sound. Like spritely spirits in silent terror, they gaily flew back to their abandoned easter eggs, where they floated like yolks until they spoiled and rotted.
With eyes that could no longer see, Sadie continued her mad jaunt down the street, up her driveway, ascended the steps to her front porch, and came to a pause at the door.
The smell of her mothers cooking wafted through the mesh of the screen door and mixed with the reeking of the black mess in her arms. Bile pooled up in Sadie’s mouth and began to run from the corners, pouring down her chin. Fear welled up with the bile in her chest and she felt suddenly and terribly that she could not enter the house. She was no longer allowed to enter the house. She could never again find refuge within it’s white walls and slide into her soft bed with it’s soft white sheets and wait until her mother would enter, robed in white silk, and kiss her good night. Tears coursed from her eyes; she longed for just one more good night kiss, thirsted for it like the love of god.
Indignant and forlorn, Sadie burst through the door as if she were storming a kingdom and stomped through her living room, tracking mud and dirt and blood on the innocent white carpet. Through the partition into the kitchen and dining room, her mother seeped into her darkening vision, the radiant nightingale queen of all the earth.
Sensing Sadie’s approach, her mother turned from her cooking and was met by something that didn’t quite look like her daughter. Thick glasses slipped down her mother’s beak-like nose and with inquisitive beady eyes she stared at the dripping mass of flesh and fur in Sadie’s arms.
With demented pride and maniacal joy, Sadie lifted her putrid prize up for her mother to gaze upon. The cat’s arms extended stiffly, jutting out in caricature of a greeting. One leg dangled limply below.
Outside the window, the sun went out: the last of its blood expelled.
Before her mother could react, a final siren wail erupted from the black canyon in the creature’s throat. One last fit of possessed spasms coursed through the its body, and the world began to crumble around them.
The bloated belly ruptured, a seam split cleanly from bottom to top with a ghastly ripping sound, and everything held within began tumbling out. Blackened blood, liquefying fat, decaying tissue, and rivers of foaming liquid poured onto the floor. Maggots and other festering larvae joined the grim cascade. Flies crawled from the gaping throat and filled the kitchen in a black, diseased cloud. The light radiating from her mother went out, swallowed in the tumult. Flies flew up Sadie’s nose, flew into her mouth, tousled in her hair, rested on her eyeballs. She could feel the eggs they left behind in the corners of her eyes and under her eyelids. Still, the filth and dark liquid and maggots flowed freely from the newly opened creature.
From the massive pile of gore on the floor, centipedes and beetles surfaced and crawled over Sadie’s feet, up her legs, into her skirt. A piercing pain drilled between her hips and she began to feel the trickle of blood. She tried to scream, but nothing would come out. Instead, scores of insects flew into her mouth and filled her insides until she felt she would burst.
Locusts buzzed in the air and covered the walls and ceiling. The furniture vanished under the terrible regime of ravenous termites. She could feel her legs and feet bleeding as they were torn and picked apart by hundreds of thousands of tiny jaws.
Worms began to poke their way up through the mess and writhe on the surface, gasping for air. They ate their way through the once-white linoleum and Sadie’s once-white flesh like soft earth. An army of ants coated her entirely and ravaged her broken body.
A sea of maggots filled the kitchen floor below, and clouds of flies and beetles hung overhead. In between, the air was thick with the disembodied squawks and screams of Sadie’s mother. For one suspended moment, the entire world was filled with substance. Then her mother’s cries stopped short, and all that was left was the filth and the stench.
But Sadie had known this would happen. She had known even before even coming inside. In fact, she had known the entire time. Had known her entire life. Before her existence. As the insects bore their way into her and out of her, as the sea of gore and insects rose to her waist, as the eggs hatched in her eyes and the larvae ate at their succulent jelly, as the unholy pain consumed every inch of her being, it was so clear: this is what happens to everyone at some point or another. It is what we are born for.
Her cracked and bleeding lips formed a smile, and she began to croak in an odd rhythm. The world around her melted into blackness.
*********************
Sadie was found deep in the forest outside of the neighborhood, half a mile from the schoolyard. Her body lay stone still in the mulch, shaded by an ancient, rotting oak. She was half buried in a pile of fallen red leaves.
Her throat had been slit clean across, and blackened blood ran down her neck, staining her favorite yellow school shirt; the one decorated with fuzzy yellow ducks. Her skirt lay several feet away, stained with red splotches and torn to ribbons. Deep wounds were drilled into her arms and legs. Her vacant eye sockets formed cavernous red pits, gouged like the shells of devoured melons that had grown soft in the sun.
Upon reaching the grisly scene, the men scratched their heads, the women buried their faces in their hands, and the children murmured amongst themselves, occasionally wiping a tear from a watering eye. A collective chill coursed through the townsfolk, a searing cold that brought one fleeting moment of clarity like a bolt of lightning. Sadie’s mother wiped at her beak-like nose and trilled a mournful cry through deep, anguished sobs that rolled like thunder. One by one, the surveyors turned and trekked home, the storm passed, and the day flowed into the wavering light of evening time. But in their sagging shells, the yolks continued to shiver. For even though the sun was casting its faded golden light through the boughs of the firs, the dead of night had come to this place.
It was a long, drawn out birth. The light formed around her and gave her shape. The air filled her lungs, and life wrapped itself like a glove around her spine. Christie Ann opened her eyes and showed her teeth: she had arrived. Yet no one cheered. No standing ovation, not so much as a clap from the blackness that stretched out before her and filled her vision.
This is odd, she thought to herself. Her mind could not grasp the aspect of not being celebrated. The silence ate at her being, confused her to no end. She had expected to appear from backstage, from nothingness, and be exalted. Was she not the star of the show? What was this undisturbed quiet that greeted her? With no choice but to follow her script, Christie walked towards the couch that served as the centerpiece of the living room and began to recite her lines.
Enter Mortimer Munn, stage right. Mort followed in her steps and jumped onto the couch, spreading his entire body out just as Christie was about to sit down. There was no room for her to sit. Just as the script told her to, she let out an exaggerated sigh and crossed her arms expectantly. Nobody laughed. Christie turned towards the blackness offstage and sighed again, louder this time. No giggle, no chortle, no guffaw sounded from within. It occurred to her then that perhaps no one had come to the show’s taping. But that seemed impossible. Surely there had to be someone out there?
Mortimer let out a greasy chuckle. Her little brother was a definite comedic device, delightfully pudgy and the deliverer of the show’s best written jokes. But no one, especially not Christie, was laughing as Mort’s laugh cut short and he broke into a frenzied cough. In his hacking fit, he rolled off the couch and onto the ground. And that’s when Christie noticed the swollen lump of pallid, gray flesh on the back of his neck. As if sensing her prying eyes, Mort groaned and rolled onto his back.
Christie was shaken, her younger brother was not supposed to roll off the couch in the script, and she didn’t remember anything about a skin disease being introduced. Chalk it up to what the people want, these things aren’t up to me, she thought. She continued to deliver her lines.
But Mort was not responding with his own dialogue. He only wheezed, coughed, and laughed. Only moments ago, the young boy was so full of energy and life. And suddenly his flesh had gone white and he would not move from his position on the floor of the set. The swollen lump on his neck had begun to multiply and sprout elsewhere, and within the frame of a few seconds, Mort’s entire body was ravaged by these obtuse growths. He began to groan in obvious pain.
Something was wrong. No one had reviewed this change in plot with her. She turned to the side of the stage, but the director was not there. There were no producers staring at her or wordlessly voicing their concerns. She turned her gaze to the blackness in front of the stage, but that silence held no guidance for her either.
Enter Catherine Olek, stage left. The matriarch of the show, Cath descended the stairs that led up to nothingness as softly and lightly as an apparition. Her pale hand followed the banister like a tram to tracks, guiding her down in the only direction she could possibly go. On reaching the set floor, she turned to face the audience in full glory, yet no one clapped. No one cheered, no one hooped or hollered. Her entrance into the world was greeted just as silently and ungratefully as that of her children.
Christie no longer thought of her script, the thought of lines vanished from her mind. All she could do in her shocked state of mind was point at Mort, writhing like a snake in pain on the floor, his body contorted by rising growths and sinking flesh. Cath briskly walked across the living room set and stared down in realization at her son on the ground. Mouth open and lips curled in disgust, Cath buried her face in her hands and began to sob.
Something was wrong. Christie backed away from Mort and Cath, unsure of how to react to the unfolding horrors in front of her. She opened her mouth, but no light escaped from within as she had hoped. Instead words clumsily fell out, and dribbled onto the floor. “Cath, what is going on? What’s wrong with Mort?”
Cath removed her porcelain face from her porcelain hands, and peered directly into Christie’s eyes. Crimson tears poured down her face, leaving tracks running down her cheeks, like someone had been dragging leaking bodies through the snow. Her cupped hands were full of the tears, a miniature red sea that parted as she moved her palms to her sides. The liquid splashed onto the carpeted floor below, and the stains began. “What did you do!?” she screamed. “What have you done to my poor son!?”
But Cath didn’t wait for Christie’s response. She continued to weep her life’s blood away, and collapsed onto the couch above Mort. Her sobs echoed and shook the foundations of the set.
Christie could not scream, could not speak, could hardly even will her lungs to take in the air around her, which suddenly tasted very heavy and stale. She again turned her gaze toward the darkness of the studio in front of her, awaiting a response from someone, anyone. But still nothing came. Cath’s sobs and Mort’s painful, wheezing gasps were the only sounds that filled the world she knew.
Enter Judah Sims, stage left. His hand did not grip the banister as his boots stomped down the stairs. His footing was sure and confident, he had done this a hundred-thousand times before. The father, the source of order and tradition, he too heralded no cheer from the blackness upon his arrival. But the look in his eye told that he was not expecting one.
“Judah, I don’t understand what’s happening to Mort and Cath!” exclaimed a shaken Christie. “Look at them, they’re in such misery and pain. Why does no one care? Why won’t anyone do something? Is there anyone here besides us?” Surely her father would know what to do. He was the backbone of the family, the bread-winner, the shield that protected them all. But the look in his eye told that he had other things on his mind.
Judah stomped to the couch in the center of the living room, which was now running red, stained by the mother’s tears. He stared down at her, and his lips began to quiver. He reached out to touch her, an attempt at offering some solace to his broken family. But suddenly, with severe force, he threw back his head and began to roar with laughter. Christie could hear the sickening crunch and snap as her father’s neck broke and his head lolled to one side. His laughter continued to erupt, uninterrupted.
The joy, sorrow, and pain flowing out of her family melted into one wracking cry. It manifested, naked under the stage lights, and flew into her with vicious ferocity. Christie was hit in the chest, and the terror that surrounded her finally found its way into her heart and seeped up into her mind. The screams came then. But in the blackness, no one screamed with her.
Mort continued to choke on ragged breaths. His entire body was now covered completely in gray lumps. They had eaten away at his flesh, and blood pooled under his writhing mass. It was almost funny, Christie thought, seeing him roll back and forth in such agony. He was a caricature of his former self, an undulating storm cloud that squeaked thunder and drooled lightning. His eyes rolled in cadence with his body and he gazed upwards at the approaching form of his father.
Judah stopped laughing and shifted his shoulders so his head rolled around to peer at Mort. He kneeled down so he could be at the same level as his son. “They told me to kill you,” Judah exhaled, smiling as he said so. “They told me to kill you, and I have to do what they say. You are the offering. You will satiate them.”
Mortimer choked and chortled for several moments, before looking up into Judah’s eyes with cool finality. “You aren’t my father.”
In a miniature eternity, Judah rose up and brought his boot down onto Mort’s contorted head. He raised it and brought it down on him again and again and again. Blackish muck and oozing pus sprayed out of what was once Mort’s face and splashed onto the stage and the couch that served as the centerpiece of the living room.
For a moment, there was silence. Cath stopped her sobbing, Judah stopped his laughing, Christie stopped her screaming, and Mort’s wheezing halted forevermore. The darkness beyond the stage continued its silent roar.
Judah puffed out his chest, brandishing his fury and purpose like a wicked blade, and gave one last loving kick to Mort’s corpse, sending it sprawling to the other side of the set. The laughing, sobbing, and crying commenced once more.
Christie ran to Cath’s side and attempted to shake her into reality. Raising Cath up off the couch, Christie dragged her as far away as she could from the maniacal father. Daughter embraced mother, not caring that her beautiful white dress was being stained by the mother’s red sorrow.
“Poor Mort. What a waste of life,” Christie muttered into Cath’s ear.
“But don’t you see daughter? Every life is a waste,” Cath replied, shoving Christie away. “What is life, other than fighting that choking balance between hot and cold, waiting for the sweetness of comfort to wrap itself around your skin?” Cath began to disrobe, letting her bloodied garments drop to the floor. “I’m too hot. My blood is boiling. My entire life, the burning has been so painful…I can’t take it anymore!”
From over Christie’s shoulder, her father began to laugh again. His broken vocal chords sang a sickly tune as his feet stamped in her direction. She could hear the slush of her brother’s remains on his boots as he came closer.
“My first-born, my beautiful daughter, come to me!” croaked Judah. “You think you have seen everything, that you have all the answers because you are fresh on this earth, but I’ve been around far longer than you! Come and kiss me, lay with your father so that I may impart unto you the knowledge that we all crave!” Judah laid his hand harshly on Christie’s shoulder and spun her around to face him. She felt bile rise in her throat as his gaze bore into hers. His face rested on his shoulder, and his terrible grin threatened to open at any moment and close around her. Breaking free of his grasp, she turned and ran.
In circles around the couch she ran, peering behind her and seeing the horrendous form of her father lusting after her. Her brother slushed on his boots, his head thumped against his chest, against his torso, further and further down as the flesh on his broken neck began to stretch from exertion. His stamping pursuit never wavered.
“Help me! Someone please help! Anyone!” Christie’s cries went unanswered. In the blackness, no scream, no cry, not even the tiniest noise came to her rescue.
Breaking from their circuit around the couch, Christie came to a stop in front of Cath. The mother stood stark naked in front of her daughter, the once white flesh stained red by her tears. “I’m still too hot…I’m still too hot…” Cath was babbling to herself. She brought her hands up to her head, but this time she did not bury her face into them. Instead, Cath dug her fingernails into her cheeks and began to tear her flesh away in bloody strips. The crimson ooze streaming down her body no longer came under the ‘guise of tears. Strips of flesh peeled away and piled around the discarded garments on the floor. In moments, Cath was reduced to a pulsing, trembling mass of muscle and tissue.
“I’M STILL TOO HOT!” the mother screamed, her skeletal face filling Christie’s vision, a burning beacon of bloodied flesh. Cath continued to strip herself away, grabbing at chunks of muscle and tearing them from the bone. She sighed with relief as she threw clumps of meat and veins to the ground.
Staring transfixed at the grisly scene, Christie didn’t notice Judah coming upon her. His head was dragging on the floor behind him, the flesh on his neck stretched thin by the same gravity that anchored them all to the stage set for them. From below, Christie heard a high pitched laugh and knew her father was about to strike.
But as he lunged for her, he tripped over his neck and lurched, tumbling down into the awaiting mass of Cath’s flesh. His head followed suit and rolled swiftly into the muck. It did not emerge. Christie watched as her father’s legs kicked and his body squirmed. Inside the violet mountain of skin and meat, Judah’s mouth filled with his wife’s blood. Chunks of muscle and tissue were forced down his throat as he tried to scream. His boots kicked violently for several moments before coming to rest on the ground. There would be no more stomping.
The flesh of the mother was covering the entirety of the set. There was more meat than one would expect to find on any one person. But Cath was comfortable for the first time in her entire life. As if suddenly becoming aware of the fact, she ceased tearing herself apart and fell to the ground, dead. A long sigh escaped her on the way down, and lasted for what seemed days. Every last breath escaped from those lungs that would never rise again. Unfortunately, all her work was for nought. As her eviscerated form sank down once again into the flesh she had only just cast off, veins slithered into muscles, muscles attached to bone, and flesh melded onto their respective tissues. Even in death, the mother was uncomfortable, and her corpse began to twitch and spasm uncontrollably amidst its own mire.
Christie stood amidst the devastation and quivered. The once-white living room was now stained in gore and in shambles. The couch that once served as the centerpiece for the living room now lay in a tattered crimson heap. She turned away from the indiscriminate carcass of her family and for the last time turned her gaze towards the blackness that lay beyond the stage.
“Why won’t you help me!?” she cried into the uncaring dark. “I’ve been calling and reaching out to you! Why won’t you listen to me? Is there even anybody out there at all!?”
And then there was light.
Everything was illuminated as the studio floodlights came on above her. The light probed and prodded until every bit of darkness had evaporated from her vision. And they were all dead, every one of them. A menagerie of corpses was spread as far as the eye could see, some slack-jawed and sunk into their seats, others with their heads thrown over the backs of chairs as if they had met their demise mid-laugh.
But no sound escaped from that void. No anticipated cheer or guffaw or hushed cough came away from that place. And even amidst the full light of day, that place was darker than it had ever been before its unveiling.
Christie Ann had been acting her entire life, to the best of her ability, waiting for someone to acknowledge her hard work, her unquestionable dedication, her good-ness. Yet here she was at the end of the show, and no one clapped, no one cheered or whistled. No one celebrated her. She mourned for herself. A life wasted, yearning for the approval of unseen things in the dark.
Defeated, lacking purpose and the will to live, Christie turned her gaze away from her cadaverous audience. Alone…she had always been alone, through her entire performance. She plummeted, a falling star, onto the couch in the center of the stage. The lights fell on her and formed her, giving her shape. Yet now the light formed everything else around her, and it was no longer good. She sat in silence with the dead crowd, waiting to give birth to god or fade away entirely.
The dark omnipotence of the theatre manifested itself and quaked in Marshall’s wrist, reverberating up to the tip of the knife he held pressed against Suzy’s throat. A tiny sob creeped out between her pressed lips as she realized she could no longer hold back the tears burning the lids of her eyes.
In front of them, the lone member of the audience was a red balloon with the word “Mac” scribbled in black marker over what had once read “Congratulations!”
Suzy’s tears came to full fruition as Marshall pressed his kneecap deeper into her stomach and deeper into her unborn son. She was downing a terrible cocktail of fear and pain. The stage lights passed through Marshall’s face and haloed around his head, making him resemble a water reservoir, or Father Abraham.
“So you’re pregnant now? And I’m the father?” he screamed in rage. ”Fuck that! I ain’t havin’ no fucking kid! It’s gotta be somebody else’s!”
The balloon marked “Mac” floated closer.
Out of desperation, Suzy squeaked from under the knife, “You’re right! It’s not yours, I lied!” But her voice was not her own, and it escaped through her lips like vapor under a door. Her breath was carrion.
“I ain’t takin’ that chance!” came Marshall’s response. ”You die tonight! And that kid ain’t never even gonna breathe a breath!”
The balloon marked “Mac” floated closer.
Suzy let go, and her head began to float away. But Marshall grabbed a hold of the string attached to the base of her neck. He wouldn’t let her get away that easily.
Her ascension halted, Suzy opened her mouth and let a pleasing amount of bile out onto Marshall’s fat head. The air smelled of fried, greasy fat. The skin on Marshall’s face began to dissolve, but it didn’t stop him from smiling.
The balloon marked “Mac” floated closer. And it laughed.
“Mac is the father. Mac is the father. Mac is the father. Mac is the father. Mac is the father. Mac is the father.” Suzy wailed like an ambulance siren. ”Mac is the father.”
Mac the balloon bumped into Marshall’s fat head. Taken aback, he let go of the siren’s string. Stumbling backward towards the stage’s edge, he mumbled to himself, “Mac is my father.”
Marshall tripped and plummeted over the edge, and never hit bottom. He’s still falling.
Suzy’s still floating.
This is the product of a writing exercise where I had to create a work of flash fiction using basic plot criteria created and given to me by someone else. For this I was given:
SETTING - Stage
PROTAGONIST - Suzy
ANTAGONIST - Marshall
SECONDARY CHARACTER - Mac
CONFLICT - Pregnancy
RESOLUTION - Trip
Unfortunately I couldn’t quite muster up the gumption to pen the teen drama story someone was obviously steering me towards…not completely.
Anyone who knows me and knows me very well knows that I write. Or try to write. I do so very often but the majority of it never sees the light of day. With “Night Gaunts”, I hope to shed that wall of self-consciousness and worry and just throw the things that I do out at the unsuspecting world. I want my friends and people I don’t even know to read the things I write down, regardless of how shitty or well-written I think it is. Why? Because I want to share what is important to me. Because I want to bare the essence of myself and my innermost thoughts and lay them out on the table for everyone to see. Because I want a public toilet to spray my shit into. Because the world REALLY needs another writer, right?
-Andrew Echeverria (October 2011)
