MicroHorror

Max Kimball wanted to die.

Without his five-year-old son Conner and his wife Julia, he didn’t want to live. Julia was a twenty-six-year-old cashier at an EZ Serve gas station located twelve miles north of their home just across the bridge that led into town. She worked long hours to support her family of three. She’d had to. Max was unemployed, and in the face of a depressed economy, hadn’t worked in thirteen months.

“Don’t give up, honey,” Julia had said, her eyes fearfully widening at the row of beer cans and empty bottles of Wild Turkey on the floor. Max dropped to the floorboards that morning, crossed his legs and encircled himself with the containers, erecting a barrier in which to contain his sorrow.

“Maybe they’ll call tomorrow,” she said.

Max rocked silently inside his ring of grief.

“What’s wrong with daddy?” Conner had asked as Julia led her son away. She’d stopped answering that question some time ago.

Late Tuesday evening Max discovered Julia’s solution to the situation hidden in a shoebox at the bottom of the dirty clothes hamper. Just like everyone else who stopped believing in him, she assumed he was too lazy to do anything, even laundry.

She was right.

He found the stashed money accidentally, stumbling around in the middle of the night, searching for more alcohol. In the darkness he tumbled over the hamper. Reaching out, his grimy fingers opened the exposed box.

The discovery made the hushed conversation Julia had on the phone weeks ago with her mother, the one about needing to get away for a while, suddenly make sense. She was planning to leave.

Max shut his eyes. He would miss Conner’s feathery blond hair and soft blue eyes the most. They were much like his had been before they darkened, seared from blistering exposure to constant failure. Max’s once feathery blond hair was now sparse and matted. He’d not yet had his twenty-fifth birthday, and already he was balding.

He opened his eyes. The drooping fleshy shell that stared at him from the bathroom mirror disgusted him. And now without even Julia to care about his sagging, ninety-pounds-overweight exterior, he would never become the successful man he should have been.

Sweet Julia lay battered, her face smashed into a chunky soup, on the living room floor.
In the bathroom beside Max, young Connor’s body draped the fiberglass side of the tub, face down, the back of his head cleaved apart, exposing a red meaty interior. When he came home from a seedy downtown bar hours earlier to find them this way, the same configuration in which he’d abandoned them before seeking out liquid anesthesia to numb the pain, Max didn’t yell, sob or call the police. He simply drifted from room to room with the serenity of a county librarian, examining each scene with detached interest.

Max tore his weary eyes from the bloodstained mirror and fished a crumpled receipt out of his front pocket. A local phone number was scrawled across it. He picked up the phone and dialed.

“Yeah,” a gravelly voice answered.

“It’s Joshua,” Max said.

“From the bar?”

“Yeah,” Max said. “Um, I know you’ve been paid. But I need to make a change.”

“Sure,” the man said. “Delivery hasn’t been made yet.”

“He’s… he’s got to atone, ya know? Pay for what he did. But he shouldn’t suffer. Can you make it quick? Painless?”

“Right,” the man said. “Same time and location?”

“Yeah,” Max said. “Any minute now. He’s at the gas station, midnight sharp, like clockwork. Tan Cutlass Supreme. And remember. No blunt trauma or stabbing.”

“Got it. That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

The line went dead.

Max checked his watch, 11:35 PM. He could make it to the EZ Serve in fifteen minutes.

In the living room, he found the keys to Julia’s Cutlass three feet from her body. Without looking down, he stepped over her, not bothering to close the door on his way out.

• Copyright: © 2003, 2007 JJ Collins