Little Deaths

by John F. D. Taff

  Brief though his bewilderment was, it was deep. So deep, it was as if, his job now done, they had pushed an internal reset button in him.

  * * *

  He came to in his car, driving. Twitching the steering wheel in surprise, he blinked his eyes, steadied the car.

  He was on a busy eight-lane highway with a broad, grassy median. Twilight had settled in, and the cloudless sky was dappled blue and violet and peach. His window was open, and the air outside was comfortably warm, comfortably humid. It smelled of something primal, just beyond his perception. Salt, perhaps…

  He looked at himself in the rearview mirror. His face was stretched, gaunt, his skin looked like paper. He felt queasy, shaky.

  On the passenger seat was a map of Florida, its shape instantly familiar. He saw a city circled on it… Fort Myers. Rolling atop the map was a prescription bottle and a bottle of water. He reached over, grabbed the medicine.

  Take for nausea as needed.

  There was a doctor’s name from Masonville, Missouri.

  That city brought a low, nagging memory from the recesses of his mind. And that brought more, thin, evanescent ones that evaporated in the light of morning.

  He’d been sick. He’d quit his job, found another in Florida. He was moving there now. He remembered this, but it didn’t seem real, didn’t seem to hold the weight of a real memory… of reality.

  He popped the top of the prescription bottle, tilted a pill out, took it with a mouthful of water.

  On a whim, he got off at the next exit, found a restaurant. Before he went in, he opened the trunk. His possessions… all of them, he guessed. He didn’t have much. A few cardboard boxes here, but mostly clothing. He flipped through them, vaguely looking for something, but not clearly knowing what.

  Didn’t I have a black suit?

  But he couldn’t find it, and he was hungry, so he let it go.

  He closed the trunk, walked across the grit of the darkening lot to the restaurant.

  Pausing at a newspaper machine, he read the headline on the copy of USA Today showing through the small window.

  Massive Bridge Collapse in Missouri

  Death Toll Now at 48

  He shrugged, walked inside the place wanting, more than anything, a plate of chicken-fried steak and to be left alone for a while.

  DARKNESS UPON THE VOID

  The first one squeezed through the soft, smooth skin of his forearm and dropped with a little plip! onto the card table as he ate his dinner. It was a plump, featureless white, slightly glossy, and Ed didn’t notice it immediately.

  And then it moved…

  … squirmed.

  Calmly, he looked at the arm nearest where the maggot wriggled. There was a small dot of blood there, a thin line snaking from it to the table.

  Calmly, he set the fork down and peered at the white thing writhing beside his dinner. The silky taste of pork fat spoiled on his tongue. An image came into his mind, unbidden; chewed clumps of green meat, tinged with rot, with…

  Calmly, as if this happened all the time, he leaned forward and vomited. Everything that had been on the plate before returned in a hot, liquid glurt, barely digested.

  He pushed back from the table, pushed back and stumbled toward the bathroom.

  Dropping to his knees like a penitent, he slapped the toilet lid up and expelled a double-cheekful of his dinner, closed his eyes and spat out saliva, flecks of food that swam in his mouth.

  Calmly, he lowered his head against the cool, battered rim of the toilet, and vomited again.

  After he had brushed his teeth and rinsed his mouth thoroughly, he sat on the couch before his blank television and licked his lips. He wanted to make sure that he had removed all traces of pork grease, because even its hint made his stomach lurch.

  As he sat there on the swayback couch, he tried to think where a maggot might have come from––the single maggot that now moved down the sewer lines enshrouded in a wad of toilet paper.

  Rubbing absently at his forearm, his fingers tripping lightly over a bump, a small bubo raised slightly over the surrounding skin, dimpled at its center. He had forgotten about it, forgotten about the blood.

  There were quite a few other bumps up and down––not only that arm––but his other as well. Each seemed tight and hot, infected. Whatever was beneath them felt loose and unconnected.

  Scratching, he returned to the bathroom, the smell of vomit exorcised by the good folks at Clorox, and he removed a tube of salve from the medicine cabinet. Absently, he applied a dab of it onto each bump, capped the tube, replaced it within the rows of similar medicaments and tinctures, and prepared for bed by brushing his teeth once more.

  Before he climbed into bed, he knelt at its side as he had learned as a child, old knees creaking as they touched the floor.

  He knelt and tried to pray, but the words wouldn’t come.

  His prayers had backed up, kept within by some essential clog.

  The voices.

  He knew it was the voices.

  Instead, he tried to visualize something, anything… world peace, an end to hunger, an end to suffering. But images disappeared beneath the incessant babble as easily as words.

  Sighing, he pulled himself up, slid between the stiff, threadbare sheets and tried for sleep.

  * * *

  The voice of God had once filled Ed’s heart and head. It was as clear and as resonant as a choir in a small church.

  The voice of God had been big enough to fill all the spaces within Ed.

  And he needed nothing else.

  Now God no longer spoke or even whispered to him.

  Now his head was filled with them, the voices, leaving no room even for his own.

  They had crowded out his God, and he had lost Him. Because of this, he lost his church, his flock, his sense of self––all gone, gone not as in disappeared, but rather as in smothered, drowned out by the rest, lost in a chorus so dense, so overwhelming that he could no longer find himself within it.

  Often, he wondered if Ed Martinez really existed anymore as a separate being, an individual. Or if he was a walking polity, the whole of a million voices packed inside, struggling to be heard.

  Struggling to get out.

  * * *

  Ed’s spare apartment over the closed butcher shop suited him. After his church had been forced into bankruptcy, he needed a place to live. He received a small severance from the church, a pitiable amount for 20 years of devotion to the congregation, to God. He’d been able to stretch that for 10 months now, getting this apartment, paying the utilities. Food stamps covered his groceries, which weren’t much.

  That money, though, was running out. Each week, he walked to the bank and checked his balance. Even though not much went out, the balance got smaller and smaller each week.

  Ed volunteered a few days a month at the homeless shelter a few blocks over, doing laundry, making sandwiches, ladling soup into bowls, occasionally leading a service in the chapel. Sometimes, he ate meals there, sometimes they even let him take a shirt or a pair of pants.

  He took it all, the clothing, the food, the welfare. But what he really appreciated was the opportunity to preach, to speak to people.

  Because it was getting harder and harder to do this.

  Sometimes, during a service, he lost his train of thought, stumbled over words, forgot passages of the Bible committed to memory long ago.

  It wasn’t age or infirmity. The din of the voices made it hard for him to hear his own words in his head.

  The staff at the shelter had noticed, began finding ways to cut his hours back. They thought he was drinking or tweaking or huffing or smoking or just plain going nuts.

  A dim part of Ed knew this, understood it, felt bad about it. He was embarrassed and deeply worried about becoming one of those vagrant street preachers, men with dirty clothing, dirty beards and eyes like a mad prophet’s, hurling imprecations at pedestrians.

  The staff at the shelter were to be forgiven because they simpl
y couldn’t know what was wrong, how difficult it was for him to hold things together these days.

  He felt he was disassociating, coming apart like limestone ground into thousands, millions of grains of fine sand, each with its own voice.

  They all wanted to come out, to spill out of him.

  If they did, when they did, they’d take everything with them.

  Ed was frightened that, God already having deserted him, the voices would leave him, too, leave him alone inside himself with nothing.

  Like an empty church.

  * * *

  He rose early, his dreams still echoing in his mind. The voices didn’t let up in sleep; they were cacophonous, insistent, though he never knew why or what they wanted.

  Wearily, he rolled over to the simple alarm clock alone on the TV tray that served as his nightstand. The little radium-illuminated hands glowed a dreary blue-green 5:15. Outside, dawn shone grey and pink through the smeary glass of his bedroom window.

  Ed threw the covers back, and the cold assaulted him physically. Autumn was here, and the nighttime temperatures were plunging into the low 40s. Ed couldn’t afford to turn the furnace on just yet, perhaps not at all, so he just kept adding covers to the bed.

  Stepping lively, he went to the bathroom, closed the door on the tiny space. Reaching into the shower, he turned the hot water on full blast, let steam fill the room.

  He stepped out of the sweat pants he slept in, kicked them aside with his boxers. A quick look in the mirror—old, grizzled, droopy, with the rheumy eyes of his father—then he sat heavily on the toilet.

  Feeling the constriction of his bowels loosen, Ed leaned forward, closed his eyes. The hot water was doing the trick, filling the bathroom with clouds of wet, rolling steam, deliciously warm.

  As Ed waited there on the toilet, a terrific cramp sliced through his gut, so unexpected, so painful that he bent his head forward until it touched his knees. His stomach bore down, clenched around something inside that wanted release, yet couldn’t accommodate to the size of its exit.

  Sweat broke out on his forehead as if pressed from his pores by the force of his exertion. He grimaced, gritted his teeth, pushed with all the fervor of a woman giving birth.

  Something came out, much to his relief. He could feel it slip from him, feel it touch the cold water in the bowl.

  Yet, it was still inside him, too, dangling from him.

  And it moved.

  Barely restraining a scream, Ed pushed to his feet. The pressure from this was enough to dislodge whatever it was. He felt it slip from his rectum, inch after surprising inch, curl into the toilet with enough force to splash water on his bare bum.

  His feet tangled in the pile of his pants and boxers, stumbling as he turned to see what it was that he had expelled.

  He expected blood, some extravagant bowel movement curled around itself like a great brown snake.

  There was blood, to be sure, spatters and sloshes of it beading against the inner walls of the bowl.

  Looped within this bloody water, though, was not a bowel movement but a snake… an actual, living snake, black with a rusty crisscross pattern along its thick, muscular length.

  It wound within the white porcelain, easily a yard long. Its head, angular and viperish, lifted from the water, apprised him with deep amber eyes and a flicking tongue.

  “Ed.”

  Its voice was a breathy whisper, clearly audible in the echo chamber of the bathroom.

  Ed’s eyes widened, his heart faltered, and he slapped at the toilet lid, brought it down with a ringing clunk! There was wet thrashing from beneath, and he reached out cautiously, flushed.

  The toilet went through its cycle, and he flushed it again… again… and again.

  Still sweating, still pantsless, still breathing as if he’d run up the steep steps that led to his apartment, he lifted the lid cautiously, prepared to drop it and flush again.

  But the water was empty, clear, placid.

  As free of snakes as Ireland after St. Patrick.

  He stood there for a moment, blood trickling between his cheeks, down his thighs, stood there leaning against the toilet tank, trying to get his heart to slow, his breathing to steady.

  Had it really spoken his name?

  * * *

  Ed cleaned up, returned to the rumpled bed, his sheets dirty, smelling of Fritos and unwashed body. He buried himself in the bedclothes, wrapped a thin pillow around his head, rocked back and forth, back and forth to steady his teetering mind.

  In his gut, he felt thrashing now, as if the snake he had just passed, that had just slithered out of his body, had not been alone.

  He wondered, wondered as he lay there, his mind racing, his body rolling across the bed, wondered what else was inside him.

  As that thought crossed his mind, floated atop the rush of voices that swirled in his head, Ed wept.

  He thought of Christ on the cross, harassed, tortured, empty.

  Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?

  * * *

  Thursday was his one day to volunteer at the shelter, and he would not miss it.

  He took an uneventful shower, dressed in his black pants and his black shirt with the collar, which he seldom wore these days. He had a cup of instant coffee and a Pop-Tart over the cluttered kitchen sink.

  Locking the door, he made his way down the steep stairwell of his building. At the bottom were two doors. There was a sign on the one to the left, a notice that the landlord had locked out the tenant, the closed butcher shop. A battered lockbox was clamped over the doorknob.

  Ed pushed through the grimy glass door and out onto the street.

  It was cold that morning, and the grey steam of the walking people rose into the grey sky that closed over the city like a lid. His breath mingled with this respiratory cloud, floated like ectoplasm tethered to his mouth, unable to detach completely.

  His feet shuffled the few blocks to the shelter. He nodded to the fat security guard at the front door, made his way into the kitchen. It was already a hive of activity. A few of the workers serving breakfast greeted Ed.

  A few twists and turns along the bland, institutional corridors and Ed found himself in the bland, institutional room that was the shelter’s chapel. The walls were the same pale green cinderblock. The windows were barred. The floor was the same scuffed linoleum that lined miles of floor within the building. Only the small crucifix on the wall, crooked, gave any clue that this room was different.

  Folding chairs filled about three quarters of the space. At the front was a simple podium, small and battered. Ed spent a few moments tidying, straightening chairs that were already straight.

  By nine o’clock, there were about 20 people in the room––mostly men, three or four women. All looked blasted. Their eyes had the faraway stare of people who had lost sight of hope so completely it wasn’t even worth looking for anymore.

  Ed cleared his throat, stepped behind the podium and began the service.

  At first, he was surprised at how fluidly, how easily the words came to him. As he gained confidence, he became more animated, feeling the strength of the words as he once had.

  He got through most of the service without incident, and he was feeling better, revived somewhat. So much so that he opened his Bible to a random passage and began reading.

  “From Ezekiel 36:25, ‘I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you…’”

  There was pain in his mouth, sharp, stinging.

  Something dark caught his eyes, scurried down his arm onto the podium.

  The words filled his mouth, slowed, faltered, and he scanned the verse again, tried to find his place.

  “Ehh… ‘I will remove from you… your…’”

  He felt sweat bead on his upper lip, his forehead. Lifting his arm to wipe his brow, he felt something tickle across his lower lip, fall down his chest.

 
; His breath locked inside, he looked down.

  A cockroach scuttled along the podium, climbed atop his Bible.

  He slammed the book shut on it. There was crunch, a splat of thick, yellow fluid from between the pages.

  “… ummm ‘I will save you from all your uncleanness. Then you will remember your evil ways and wicked deeds…’ ”

  He realized his hand was still raised, ready to mop sweat from his brow. He felt hot and cold, faint, his legs wobbled.

  As he opened his mouth again, he felt a spill of things fall from his lips, bugs of all kinds, small moving legs, flittering wings, hard, chitinous bodies. They were making a curious, crowd sound, like a plague of locusts or a chorus of small, vibrato voices.

  They pushed from his mouth, tumbled down his black shirt, piled atop the podium with a sound like potato chips emptied from a bag.

  Ed looked aghast, felt the last two or three insects crawl from his open mouth, fall onto the mass that swarmed atop the podium, and over his Bible.

  He heard curses from the congregation, gasps, a few women cried out.

  Backing from the podium, he stumbled against the wall, his back sliding down it until his butt thumped the linoleum.

  A few men jumped to help him, and Ed was glad for that.

  He touched his mouth to wipe away any remaining bugs. There was pain, cuts within his mouth, across his lips.

  His hands came back smeared with red.

  * * *

  The administrator of the shelter, a stern, iron-haired black woman who towered over Ed, brought him into her office, sat him on her couch, gave him some water. The staff physician looked at him, peered into his mouth, cleaned him up.

  When he was steadier, they gave him coffee, asked him to empty his pockets. They poked through the jumble of stuff he brought forth, surreptitiously removed what looked like a flat package of razor blades, a small folding penknife.