MicroHorror

Coffee and newspaper.

I start every single day with coffee and newspaper.

The newspaper is delivered to my doormat.

The one that says “Home …eet…”

The rest is worn off.

Has been like that for as long as I can remember.

The coffee I get from work.

(I work at home, so you could say that I get my coffee from home.)

I never leave home (or work).

When I call Dad, he sends men to my house and they never leave.

At least not for a while.

At least not before they have travelled through me, out of me and through the sewage drain and finally out of my home (and workplace).

I get my coffee from them.

Bone is hard and when I grind it, it makes a lot of noise.

My neighbors complain a lot.

I will invite them for coffee soon.

I can’t believe I’m doing the splits. A forty-year-old man is not supposed to do the splits for the first time.

Makes me wonder what else I can do.

Let’s see. Here’s how the process works. I find the pain in me, look at it, go to the location of the discomfort, look at the sensation from within the sensation, and the pain sort of melts.

That works in the physical, but will it work in the mental? I guess I’ll just have to try. So, where’s the pain?

A few months ago. We’re separated, just to get some perspective. I’m staying with my parents. She texts me, tells me she has a confession to make, then forces me to pry it out of her. She says, “I had sex with someone in November.”

Okay, still sitting in the splits, feeling the torment of my wife’s words. I close my eyes, look at the hurt. It floats out in front of me, like a gas. I expect a battle. No, it just leaves.

Odd. Maybe that was too easy. After all, sex is just sex. That part didn’t hurt too bad. But then I asked her why.

“Because he gave me what I wanted.”

Here comes the inadequacy. I look at it. It brings its questions for me to answer. I ignore the questions and just look at the pain. It’s brown somehow. It hangs out, takes longer to go away, but eventually dissipates, like smoke into a massive sky.

Wow! I don’t feel so bad. In fact, I feel calm, kind of nice. What else?

We work through the affair from November. I’m still willing to try. I’m still at my parents’ house. More pain is delivered.

She pauses. My heart feels like it will explode. “Yes,” she says, but not in a guilt-ridden voice, but with the sigh of a love-stricken person.

I look at the associated feelings. That’s strange. They’re violet. Somehow, they don’t stick around long.

Wow times twenty! This trick is magic. But there’s no way it would work on that night, the night of the aftermath. Well, maybe. Let’s give her a go.

I lie in the makeshift bedroom of my parents’ house. A thousand miles away my wife is with her new boyfriend. How many Benadryls have I taken? Somewhere between twenty and thirty. Is that enough to kill a man? I hope so. I’ll just fall asleep and die. Nope. Here comes the nausea. Here comes the hammering heart, the cold sweat. Every time I close my eyes, I can’t breathe. Here comes the image of her with him, kissing him, while I die.

Out in front of me, it’s like a red smoke, billowing, but not dissipating, constantly replenishing itself. I repeat the whole suicidal sequence, remembering it all from beginning to end, see myself get up in the morning, vomit sticking to my skin, my chest tight, but alive. The smoke is less intense. I repeat again. I can see through the smoke. Then it dissipates to nothing.

Un-freaking-believable!

I’m going to be okay. When she asked me to come home, I thought I’d never feel this way. After all, he’d dumped her, and she’d made me her second choice. With all of her newfound faithfulness and love, I still couldn’t recover. Now I think I can. I can overcome the pain. The feeling is rapturous.

I wish I hadn’t killed her an hour ago. I feel just horrible. I want to forget about her face, and the way it looked while dying, about the knowledge that we’ll never be together again. I know I can’t handle the associated feelings?

But wait? Maybe I can.

So, she’s in the shower and I walk into the bathroom with a knife. I open the…

“Huh,” Phil muttered. Considering he’d just ripped his cock off, he was surprised by how calm he felt.

It’s not that detaching his dick during his daily wake-up round of tug-the-pretzel didn’t concern Phil on some level, but a pleasant, boozy numbness had just smothered him from head to toe. Any feelings of pain or anxiety had been flushed faster than the gruel spilling from his ragged wound onto the bed sheets.

Phil remembered the pillow talk of a blond pharmacist he’d banged last year. Before she’d finally swallowed his hammer, she’d talked about shock triggering the body’s production of “reasonably effective” pain-killing hormones. Reasonably effective? If he had them to thank for his current state of relaxation, thought Phil, his hormones had to give heroin a run for its money.

Through numbed indifference, he stared at the meat in his hand, wondering how something so familiar had become unrecognizable. As his johnson drained, its shape warped and flattened, turning his rigid bone into a bloodied sandwich bag. From its severed base, blue veins sluiced between his fingers like pasta through a colander.

The alarm clock wailed from the nightstand, and Phil slapped it off with his clean hand, almost knocking off an unopened box of Trojans he didn’t recognize. Should have picked up some band-aids instead, thought Phil, and surprised himself with a chuckle.

There was a watery belching sound from the hole in his lap, and the smell of copper wafted up his nose. Still no pain, though, and any memory of last night was obscured by a thick belt of fog. Besides the Trojans, the only clue was an obnoxious trail of crumpled clothes. Stabbed by darts of morning light, it wove a drunken path from the door to the bed.

Must have been a bender with Greg and Derek, Phil figured, and–right on cue–his iPhone brayed from the floor. He flung his hand over the side of the bed and snagged it off the carpet. “Talk to me.”

“Dude,” Derek began. His vocal cords sounded like they’d been attacked by a belt sander. “Are you calling in sick or what?”

“Considering it,” said Phil.

“And what about last night? Have you considered that?”

Phil could tell Derek was smiling. “No fucking clue what happened,” he sighed.

“Oh, so now you’re going to try and tell me you don’t even remember the zombie?”

Phil paused. “Zomb–?”

“Hey, no shame,” said Derek, cutting him off. “If I was into them, that zombie would be the first one I’d fuck the shit out of.” He hawked up what sounded like a fistful of phlegm. “That is, as long as I double-bagged my unit with a pair of those raincoats you picked up.”

Phil’s eyes swung back to the box of Trojans, sealed tight and forgotten, then down to the floor. The sun now exposed not only the heaving wrinkles of his clothes, but an ugly dress, worn and faded. Splashed with a flower pattern the color of puke, it twisted around the corner of the bedroom door in a mangled snarl. One sleeve was rust-stained and shredded. Black scars scorched the other.

“Uh, you still alive there, buddy?” asked Derek, and Phil hung up. The trail didn’t end at the bed, he realized. At the bed was where it started. Where it ended was his apartment’s living room. He’d just come back to get some sleep.

After all, there was only room on the couch for one.

The fog soon returned, wolfing back every memory in his infected brain. Engulfed in numbness for good, Phil found he didn’t care at all.

Shadows follow time. Have you ever watched them as they move across a room, across a field, cast slanting rainbows through glass? Have you? I have. A day of shadows is indiscernibly slow. I have watched them very closely and with dread for I know what it is they do. Many think that shadows are driven by time. They are not.

It happened the night Button died. I looked at her little broken body in the hospital. I watched the hours tick by and the angles change until there was no more light to see by and even hope darkened. When they switched that machine off, a shadow crossed my heart, a darker shadow than I had ever known, a thing of hatred and rage–a vengeful clamor that would not be silenced. It was a shadow in deep shade, a pit of blackness within the dark, bitter and slow–so slow it clung to the floor and demanded my attention.

As I watched, it took form, lifted itself up onto the wall, wavered before my eyes welled with tears and held me still in my sorrow and despair.

“What would it be?”

I didn’t really hear a voice. It was more like a breath exhaled.

“What would it be?”

“What?” I asked.

“Your will. Speak it,” breathed the shadow.

I felt a sob rise in my throat, stifling the words I thought to speak.

“Speak it.”

“That bastard should die!” I said. “That damned driver should die for the death of my child!”

“You will this?” said the breath. “You would see it done? And in your turn you would aid others?”

In that moment revenge was all my heart, was all my soul, was all I had. But the shadow needed me to speak the words and it drove me on.

“You will it…?”

“I do will it,” I said, “with all my heart!”

What happened then was as a dream. I saw the man enter a cell. His head was hung with remorse but I felt no pity. He lay on the bed. My little girl did too but she breathed no more. He stirred suddenly and looked around him as if he caught a glimpse of… something. I witnessed the approach of many shadows and his eyes grew round with terror. They crawled velvet black across the floor and he recoiled, drawing away to avoid their pall. He called out but his voice was muffled by this darkest of clouds. They pooled around his feet and crawled upwards paralyzing him slowly from the feet up with icy cold, fearful fingers, reaching his torso, then his throat. He screamed horribly as blackness filled his eyes. I saw them there inside him, the shadows, filling his whole being. They turned his flesh to blood and rendered him lifeless on the floor.

I found myself once more by the bedside of my beloved daughter but the moment I beheld the innocence of her face, I knew I had done a great wrong in her name.

Half a century I watched the shadows creep until they came for me and I became one with them. I had learned their discipline. Shadows are not driven by time. They are outside of it. Eternity is their plaything. But they are not permitted to act alone. They must await the summons of a vengeful heart and exact from it a terrible price. Yet there are always those willing to pay. God help me, I cannot warn them for the promise binds me and all darkness is blind.

“What’s the matter, honey?”

“Oh I had a horrible dream where there was a huge dog chasing me and I couldn’t get away and it jumped on me and ripped my dick off then I turned around and I was holding a knife and I stabbed it and stabbed it in the stomach and its intestines poured out and swung around my neck and it was choking me and choking me and I cut its head off but then I was drowning in blood and I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t breathe then I was running again only the whole world was made of bleeding meat and I couldn’t escape and then I knew it was a giant throat and it was swallowing me and I plunged my knife into it again and again and again and finally I saw light and I opened a hole in the meat like being born all over again I squeezed out and oh it was horrible just horrible.”

“It’s all right, dear, it was just a nightmare. It’s not real. There’s no monsters here. You’re fine. It’s all going to be okay.”

Martin cradled the severed head to his breast, kissing it gently on the forehead. “Thank you, dear, you always know just what to say,” and he went back to sleep.

A stranger dressed in black glared at Harry as he walked by, and then started following him.

The guy kept pace with Harry as he made his way through the dark, dilapidated neighborhood, turning when he turned, slowing when he slowed. For a while he kept his distance, but then he began to close on him.

Harry knew better than to be on these streets, at this hour, alone. All the clubs were long closed; all the shops were locked up tight. There wasn’t even a cop or a prostitute in sight. There was nowhere to hide, no one to help him. He was alone in a dead city.

When the stranger’s footsteps started closing quickly on him, Harry started to run.

His muscles began to ache almost immediately, and his lungs started to burn soon after. His feet blistered after only a block, but still he continued on as quickly as his flabby legs would carry him. Finally it was a piercing cramp in his side that forced Harry to slow and eventually to stop. Eyes tearing, chest thumping, and breath coming in short gasps, he turned to face his pursuer, cursing his lack of conditioning.

But there was no one behind him. The street was empty.

“J–Jesus,” Harry said to himself, laughing nervously. His hands were on his knees. He was breathing deeply. Spittle was on his chin, and more of it fluttered in front of his mouth each time he exhaled. He felt more than a bit foolish for his sudden panic attack, but relieved as well that his pursuer had apparently been a figment of his overactive imagination. How the mind plays tricks! Shaking his head, Harry turned to resume his walk home, and the stranger dressed in black was there, in front of him, silent and unmoving.

They stood facing each other on the deserted city street. Harry felt himself begin to tremble. The man wore a black hooded sweatshirt, and his face was in shadow. His hands were at his sides, unnaturally long fingers flexing and wriggling like snakes. The man shifted, and for an instant the dim streetlight lit his face, and what Harry saw beneath his hood he could barely fathom. It wasn’t human. It had to be a mask. But it couldn’t be. It was crawling. Harry tried to speak, to ask it what it wanted, but he was unable to utter a sound. He could only stare in disbelief, as the thing began to crumble.

He felt them on his legs before he saw them. He was transfixed by the man-shaped creature in front of him as it began to shrink inside its clothing, losing its shape, as if suddenly turned to sand. When he felt them on his ankles and his calves, inside his clothing, crawling, and climbing over his skin, he looked down and suddenly understood. They were spilling out of the stranger’s pant-legs, swarming over the crumbling tarmac, and skittering up Harry’s legs, crawling up and over his body. Then they began to sting him. At first the pain of their assault was unbearable, and he began to frantically and vainly brush them off. He fought them with everything he had, but they were many, and they quickly filled his mouth, silencing his screams. Slowly, their venom brought euphoria. Harry was drunk on their poison by the time they completed their infestation of his body and started feeding on him.

He glanced at the empty pile of clothing where the stranger had been, and ducked into the shadows of a nearby alleyway. He was no longer Harry. He waited there, thoughtlessly, as the swarm consumed the last of him.

Later, in the wee hours just before the dawn, a stranger dressed in black glared at him as he walked by, and the thing that had been Harry started following him.

There would be little time between daybreak and the hanging, so Geneviève rose early to prepare for the wake. Since the marketplace would be crowded today–hangings were popular, especially among the young men–Geneviève had bought supplies previously, but the preparations were still daunting. There was barely time to properly cook the stew, and certainly no time to shed tears for Henry, long since split from the family and little mourned by any, not even their mother. The Danforths were respectable and pious, and not inclined to be forgiving of a son whose impropriety was denounced by the bishop himself.

Alone in his cell, praying piteously for salvation, Henry was not to know that he was the luckiest Danforth that day. His death would be nearly instantaneous as the sharp drop broke his neck. While his body twisted in the breeze, helped by the pelting rocks of the younger children, his family attended the wake. Few were sad to see Henry hang, but all were glad to partake in the feast.

While Henry’s family did not suffer overly from grief, they did suffer greatly afterwards. Since trichinosis would not be discovered for centuries, the villagers blamed evil spirits who, not satisfied with taking the son, took the whole family as well, but only after several weeks of prolonged, hideous suffering.

“It started with my wife. She works nights.”

“I know. I watch you.”

He hesitated to say more, not knowing what she wanted him to do.

“Continue,” she said.

“She called and yelled at me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter why, really. She just yells sometimes. Then I felt like smoking. So I walked to the gas station. The attendant yelled at me because my shoes were wet. I left with the little cigar, but it didn’t taste good. A car drove by and honked. Somebody shouted something and flipped me off. I’m pretty sure I didn’t even know them.”

“Then what happened?”

He didn’t understand. Didn’t she know all this already? Still, he continued. “I felt like I just needed something. I got on the computer and played poker, just to chat with the other players, maybe feel human again. But even they were rude. I felt hexed.”

“And then?”

“And then I took several Benadryls and chased them with three beers. I just wanted to be out of it.”

“Did it work?”

“Yes and no. Yes, I was out of it, but sleep was no escape. I dreamt of the day my dad told me I was stupid. I dreamt of the time we were at the restaurant and my mother told me I looked retarded when I ate. Then I woke up.”

“And then?”

“And then I heard you whispering. But this time I wasn’t afraid.”

“So do you understand?”

It took only a few seconds to piece it together. He knew what she had shown him. “I’ve heard you before at night, but I’ve always been too afraid. My fear drives you away.”

“Yes.”

“But this time I wasn’t afraid. I hated this world so much that anything unworldly was welcome.”

He lay there in awe for a few seconds, before speaking again. “I’ve been asking you to come and help me for so long, but I had to get to a state where I welcomed you before you could show. How did you do it? How did you make all those people be mean to me?”

She smiled. “The only one I affected was your wife. That got you to a dark plane. The rest fell into place.”

He thought for a few seconds. “So there really are different realities that we travel between.”

“Yes, and now that you’ve finally got me here, you just have to decide where to go next.”

So many memories stirred. “And what of vengeance?”

The disembodied voice laughed. “There are many places for that.”

The fancy name of my fear of buttons is koumpounophobia. All my life I’ve had this thing about buttons. I’m not sure what they will do to me, but I’m certain that sometime, someplace, some button will get me. My shrink says this is some form of obsessive-compulsive behavior and doesn’t know what causes this fear. She believes the only way I will ever get over it is to expose myself to buttons. So I took this job, here in this shop that sells only buttons.

The shelves surrounding me in the small store are piled with boxes of buttons, each with a sample attached to the outside. The samples are like eyes, hundreds and hundreds of them, all watching me silently, monitoring my every move. I’ve looked at and touched them all although it had taken all my strength to do so. Mostly, they’re small and smooth to the touch, slimy, clinging to my fingers, eager to possess me. It’s easy to imagine them all over me, sliding effortlessly down my throat, blocking my windpipe, and closing it off as I choke to death.

Sometimes, when there is no one in the shop and it’s dark outside, I think I hear little movements in the boxes, tiny scratching sounds. I see the cardboard sides heave a little, as if the buttons have life. Soon, the sounds begin to get louder and the movements more obvious. The button eyes stare at me more and more intently. I can’t escape their gaze. Can they see into my soul? I wonder if they know how much I hate them.

I don’t feel like my shrink is taking me seriously. Whenever I start to tell her about my fears of buttons covering and suffocating me, I think I see a twitch of her lips. I’ve asked her not to wear those sweaters with the big buttons, but she seems to have one in every color. Is this her way of testing me? One day, she asked me to put on her sweater and button it up. I couldn’t even reach out to take the sweater from her. All my clothes are fastened with zippers and Velcro. Just the idea of touching buttons makes me tremble and want to vomit. I must wash my hands after every customer I’ve served, to make sure the slickness and the smell I feel coming from the buttons doesn’t stay on me.

Today, I went to see my shrink. To test me, and to see if I’ve dealt with my fear, she pulled a can of buttons out of her desk drawer and threw them all over me. It was like being suffocated by hundreds of cockroaches, slimy, slippery, whiskery things, sliding all over my body, into my ears, slithering into my screaming mouth. Scattered and fallen buttons watch me fixedly as I jump on her, put my hands around her throat, and choke her until she stops breathing.

I get to watch myself decompose. That was the deal I made, and I’m happy it’s been granted. I’m sure others have made a similar deal, so I don’t know why my friends are appalled, but you should hear them.

“That’s disgusting, Andy!” “Why would you ever want to do that?” And so on.

Hey, it’s not like they’re saints, and what does it matter what you do once you’re in your coffin and buried? We get one shot so it should be something that matters to us, and who should judge what that is?

Manny has asked to witness his own funeral. He says he wants to gauge the grief in the room. It’s important to him, he says.

Wendy wants to feel what it’s like to do something malicious. She hasn’t decided what yet, but she’s working on it. Probably something with guns, she says.

Then there’s Carrie Ann who hopes to plunge a sharp object into the corpse of her cheating husband before she passes over. Revenge is sweet, they say.

And what about Emil’s deal? It involves an experiment with his stepsister’s eyes. What exactly he refuses to say, and nobody seems to want to learn more.

Oh, yes, and Jan is weighing two possible options. One involves sharks and the other potassium cyanide.

So what’s so demented about wanting to watch your own body molder? I’ve always been a curious person, and this is something I would never get to see if I didn’t make this choice. So am I being weird? I don’t think so. You can’t witness something like this if you don’t make it your final deal. After all, you’re dead, right? How else can you watch yourself decay if that’s what you want to do?

I strongly defended my choice and ultimately convinced my friends that my reasoning was sound. So we decided to avoid talking about the afterlife deals we made or planned to make and returned to our conversation about the virtues of cremation or lack thereof. We quickly concluded the answer to that one was obvious.