Flyblown and Blood-Spattered

by Jarred Martin

  She laughed. “You know what you sound like? You sound like an asshole. Also, you're embarrassing me in front of my friends. So why don't you go take your little freak baby and fuck off back off to your room, 'kay?”

  “You know what would be more of an embarrassment to your friends? Getting dragged out of your house by your fed-up husband.” I grabbed her by the collar and started to drag her across the carpet, toward the door.

  The fat man blindsided me. He sucker punched me and I went sprawling into the little table that used to sit at the end of the sofa. I fell into it full-force and it splintered beneath me.

  I lay on my back, looking up at the big man, confused. He was still in a fighting stance, waiting to see if I would get up and come after him.

  And I'll always wonder if what happened next would have happened the same way if I hadn't been hopped up on beef hormones. I guess I'll never know.

  I got up.

  I came after him.

  I killed him.

  I caved his skull in with a table leg. His crew fled while I was still hammering away at the misshapen pulp of his face; while blood and bits of skull flew back up at me.

  I covered the man with a fitted bed sheet and sat with my back against the wall, holding the baby.

  “I remember not so long ago, just before you were born,” I said to her. “Your mother and I were so excited. I wanted a legacy; something that survived me. She wanted a family; something born out of our love. Something to cement us together. I think you really shocked her. From the first time she saw you, you really knocked something loose in her.” I looked around the empty house, at the bare walls and the sparse furniture, at the dead man lying on the floor, blood soaking into a bed sheet. “I wish things had been different. If you had been a normal child, I doubt I'd be sitting here right now. I love you, Cinnabar Hawk Owlet, but I just wish things had been different”

  And then I felt the baby convulse in my arms. Her neck hole begin to expand. It grew wider as it pushed out something resembling a flesh-colored dome. Wider still, and I began to see fine hairs near the top of the dome. Was this really happening? The dome protruded further as it emerged from the hole. It slid out slowly, like a sunrise cresting a distant hill. I felt the entirety of her body struggle as the forehead squeezed through the tiny opening. Eyebrows, and then the most gentle blue eyes I had ever seen staring back at me. “Come On,” I urged as her nose and mouth peeked out. And finally, I looked down at my daughter's face for the first time. And she looked up at me and smiled.

  And then her head rolled back and fell off her shoulders. It hit the carpet without making a sound. Her body went limp in my arms and I looked down at her head, lying on it's side on the ugly brown carpet, and I saw myself; I saw The Song Of The Wind, and I realized that we were together in you, and you were beautiful.

  THAT HYPERBOREAN FELLER

  The alleys: the darkened cracks of the city, teeming with vermin. Host to the unwanted; home to the insane; the lunatics; the hopeless and stepped over. The alleys: the cracks where the shrill wind blows the human debris to lay scattered like garbage along the squalid ground.

  They assembled around the trash can fire, its flames fed by pieces of a broken pallet. It will not burn long. Soon they will burn the garbage that piles around them; heavy, black bags they feed into the blaze indiscriminately. Whatever staves off the cold; whatever gleams in the shadow of winter, however momentarily. And it is only momentary. The cold will eventually worm its way between their layers of foul rags, stiff with mire, and turn the blood in their veins to ice.

  Verruga stretched his palms out over the flaming barrel until the heat stung his hands. He looked from his own long, grime-lined nails to the smoke, rising to disappear against the night sky. He worked his tongue around one of his remaining upper teeth and, without much provocation, it tumbled from his mouth, hit the ground, and bounced away into the darkness.

  “Damn,” he said “that was a good one. It still had some white to it.”

  “No part of you is good,” said Pathosis, hacking lung-hardened strands of phlegm into his beard.

  “That's how I know it was good,” said Verruga. “'Cause it left me. It had the sense to abandon my rotting body, like a rat fleeing a sinking ship.”

  “Aye. Rats is good though, warm when they's alive,” said Pathosis. “Would I could stitch together a dozen or so, I'd have me an enviable garment, or blanket perhaps.”

  “Rats?” Verruga asked. “They'd chew right through you, eat you as you slept in them.”

  “Aye.” Said Pathosis. “Dying in your sleep's good, too.”

  Verruga said nothing. He knew it to be true. He only listened to Pathosis' cough echoing off the brick walls that enclosed the alley.

  The fire was getting low, and Retch came to the barrel, dragging one of the myriad bags of garbage behind him. He dumped the contents out over the flames; Styrofoam, plastic milk jugs, and bottles, egg cartons, and finally, the bag itself.

  They watched the embers glow brighter as the plastic melted, and they leaned over to inhale the black smoke it gave off.

  Retch drew his head back from the black pall and exhaled smoke into the night air. He looked to Verruga, “You the one found Croke?” He asked, his words a lazy slur.

  “I found him,” said Verruga. “Not all of him, though, but enough to know it was him. Probably more to be discovered yet. You lift up a rock, there's his hand. You find an ear beneath a garbage bag, earring in it. You know whose it is. One time I seen me a head blowin' down the alley like a tumbleweed. Just rolling along. 'Course that was in the summertime. Now if yous unfortunate enough to find Reese's pieces, they'll be frozen to the ground in a patch of red ice.”

  “I liked Croke,” said Retch. “He was funny.”

  “I'm the funny one”, Lesion shouted. He sat on the ground with his back against the brick wall and his legs folded beneath him. “Ain’t I the one always tellin' funny things? Stories and the like?”

  “You ain't no funnier than no one else from what I've heard you say,” said Retch.

  “Lies!” Cried Lesion. “You shit from your mouth and talk out your ass, and every word a lie.”

  Retch spat at him. The saliva that came from his mouth was black, and it landed on Lesion's grimy pant leg in one long rivulet.

  Lesion sprang up like a doused cat. “You'll want to watch where you spray your foulness. I just got me this blouse, and I'll not have your expectorations dissolving holes into it.”

  As he spoke, Lesion pulled at the sweatshirt he was wearing. It was red, clean, and very warm-looking.

  Retch took a step toward Lesion. “Say, that is a pretty sark you've got on. Why don't you let us have a try at it? It looks right balmy.”

  Lesion stepped back into the darkness under a fire escape. Retch matched his steps, advancing His eyes shone with greed, and he reached out for Lesion. Lesion turned and bolted down the alley and Retch chased after.

  Retch did not run far before he tripped. He hit something on the alley floor and his legs tangled together. He came down hard, scraping the skin from his palms and tearing his pants at the knee. He cursed as he watched Lesion's laughing figure disappear into the darkness.

  He picked himself up, muttering under his breath, and wiped his bleeding palms across his pants. He scanned the alley floor for whatever had tripped him. He decided whatever it was, that he would break it, smash it against the ground and watch the pieces fly.

  And then he saw what tripped him.

  A pair of long legs stretched across the alley. They belonged to the Greek, a sizable man with a hank of golden hair and a freezing blue-eyed stare.

  The Greek looked up at him, and Retch met his gaze for a moment before turning away, daunted, feeling the anger dissolve within him, Withd by the sobering chill of fear.

  They were all afraid of the Greek. It wasn't his size that they were afraid of- although the stratum of heavy shirts and jackets he wore increased his bulk to colossal proportions- it was
the impassive nature of the man that disturbed them. He sat leaned against the brick wall, unmoving, day after day, like a flesh monolith.

  They never saw him tearing apart the pervasive bags of garbage looking for food, never saw him shit, or darken the brick walls with piss. He never sought the meager comforts of the fire, and for that, at least, they were grateful. He was somehow divorced from whatever flotsam that found itself washed up on the alley floor. He seemed to know it, and so did they.

  Pathosis had claimed to carry on conversations with the man, if that's what he was, although no one else had ever heard him speak. Pathosis would tell them he spoke ancient Greek to him in a hushed whisper, like wind blowing over cracked gravestones.

  Retch walked on through the freezing cold, past the stoic giant, deeper into the alley. He came to the fire again, and warmed himself as best he could alongside his foul companions.

  Verruga spoke. “I recall a conversation me and Croke had once. It was autumn, and cold. Not cold like this, but cold enough so's we can see our breath hang in the air and turn into gray words and pictures that dissolved above us.” He stopped to hold his face over the fire and draw smoke. “Some thing or 'nother had put him in the mind of death and dying and such. And he pondered at me, and he asks me where it is I think we go when we die. And I look at him for a minute, and I just sort of point behind him, at the dumpster. And sure enough, he's there right now. I know 'cause I picked him up in pieces and put him in there myself. He was a good man, a stackable man who fit inside a container without much fuss, and that's as much as any of us can hope to be.”

  “That was lovely,” Said Retch, dabbing at his eye with his shirtsleeve. “I hope when I'm gone, and you've shoved my body into a trash bin, that someone will speak words half as kind as those you have spoke tonight.”

  “I have a story to say,” Pathosis announced. “I have plenty of stories, and fond memories about the man, too. And I suspect I should tell them, lest you believe that only Mr. Verruga knew Croke best, because it ain’t so.” Pathosis cleared his throat and spat dark gobs of mucus into the trash barrel. “It were Summer, or some fucking time of year, but it were cold, and the snow fell on the watermelon patch.”

  “I've heard you tell this before,” said Retch.

  “Hush up, now, you're 'bout to hear it again. Anyhow, we was both of us eating waterlemons, and they was ice-cold, and I was spitting seed out as I ate, and you could hear them hit the ground, loud as boulders rolling down a steep hill. And I give a listen and I can't hear Croke spitting no seed and I says, 'Croke, what have you done with your seed?' And he looks at me for a time and then knocks me down on my back without a word and peels down the skin of my fore 'ed. Then he lifts the front of my skull open like the hood of a Cadillac, and he comes up with one of them little hand rakes and he starts hoeing rows through my brains. Then he spits all the watermelon seed he had in his mouth out into my soft cells, and he plants them and I told him, 'Lord, that hurts me some,' but he don't pay no attention, and he just closes me right back up. Well, I told him it were a foolishness to plant them seeds in me like that where they couldn't get no sunshine. They must have taken root somehow, anyway, because I ain't felt right never since.”

  They stood staring into the burning barrel, lost in solemn reflection. And then Verruga spoke. “I think that was as fair and pleasant a memory as one could ever conjure. You were very fortunate to have been so close to him. I offer my condolences and my sympathy.” And he put one arm around Pathosis' shoulder and drew him in.

  “That was indeed a eulogy fit to make a vulture weep,” said a new voice. The men all turned to look upon three hooded figures, mired in shadow.

  The Coven of Plague had arrived.

  The three women moved closer to the fire. They were hags, nearly identical, each balding beneath their cloaks, with long strands of filthy, gray hair haphazardly twisting out from under their hoods. They had the appearance of witches and even less charm. They were called, Dementia, Edema, and Chorea, and they were insane. They were dangerous, known to be hiding blades beneath their cloaks, and it was rumored that their cunts and assholes were packed with sharp stones and shards of broken glass.

  Verruga welcomed them. “Have you come to say a kind word for our fallen brother, ladies?”

  Dementia made a snorting sound through the black rotten abscess where her nose used to be, “We reserve kind words, and all other words, for them that can hear them.”

  “Then have you come to share the fire?” Asked retch.

  “Or have ye come to make love?” Pathosis inquired, and stuck his tongue out, wiggling it back and forth.

  “We have come,” said Edema, “to speak of our destruction.”

  “And of its prevention,” said Chorea.

  “What destruction?” Asked Verruga.

  “The destruction is our own. And yours,” said Edema.

  “Yes,” said Dementia, “don't play coy, fair Verruga, it is an ill-fitting suit you'd wear.”

  “Coy,” echoed Chorea. “You've been here the longest of anyone. How long have you been here?”

  “He doesn't know,” said Dementia.

  “I don't know,” said Verruga.

  “Nor do we,” Chorea admitted. “But you are the grandfather to this alley. You have seen the ground littered with limbs and hands and eyeless heads in the morning.”

  “And picked them up to put them in the garbage in the day,” said Edema.

  “And burn them in the fire at night,” said Dementia.

  “I done them things. It's true,” said Verruga. “But what have they got to do with you and your lunacy?”

  “It's us you scrape off the ground,” said Chorea. “And it's yourself.”

  “Our blades and our cunning cannot prevent us from being destroyed. The number of our coven dwindles, and we wish to prevent it,” said Edema.”

  Retch spoke then. “But surely there is no shortage. We are constantly being Withd. Even if one of us goes away there are others to take our place. Isn't that enough?”

  “We are aware that that is the way. But we do not like it. It is unsatisfactory.” Said Chorea.

  “Are you saying you want to live?” Asked Verruga.

  Dementia hissed at him. “We never said that. We only want, and that is enough.”

  Verruga pondered this for a moment. “Fair enough. Destruction is evident, and immanent. But if our fate is to the fire and to the ash, then what can be done? We'd freeze if we wasn't to burn.”

  “So let us freeze,” said Chorea.

  “Yes, it is preferable,” said Edema.

  “You've made a choice,” said Retch, “among the equal of two evils.”

  “So we have,” said Dementia.

  “So what's to be done about it?” Asked Verruga.

  Chorea reached into her cloak and pulled out a rusted and handle-less machete that she gripped by the tang in her shaking hands. “We must destroy the destroyer.”

  “Destroy the destroyer,” echoed Edema and Dementia.

  “What is the destroyer?” Asked Retch.

  “We cannot say,” said Chorea.

  “It is unknown,” said Dementia

  “We know only that it dwells among us. It is here right now, though it will not reveal itself,” said Edema.

  “It's me,” said Pathosis. “I'm the one done it. I'm the one dismemberin' y'all. It's me who's the terror by night, who plucks limb and organ from mortals to be strewn about the earthen floor. But it were only accidental, see. And I promises I won't does it no more. You have my word.”

  “See,” said Verruga, “he says he won't do it no more. The search is over. And another chapter of madness comes to end.”

  “It is not him,” said Chorea.

  “Is so me. I'd know 'cause I done it,” cried Pathosis.

  “You're a parrot,” Dementia spat at him.

  Pathosis leaned over the flaming barrel and the light danced madly in his eye. “Will you call the angel of death a parrot? When he desc
ends upon you, squawking, with his bold plumage and talons like razors to swoop down and gather you like so many filberts and cobnuts to crush in his beak?”

  “If it isn't Pathosis, then who is this destroyer supposed to be, then?” Verruga asked.

  “It will be revealed soon enough, I think,” said Edema.

  “But for now, we must seek rest,” said Chorea.

  “The dawn will betray the killer,” said Dementia.

  “We leave you now in black of night, to return in black of morning,” said Edema. And the women exited to be obscured by shade and consumed by dark.

  They all slept, and soon the sunless murk of night gave way to the pitch of morning.

  Verruga rose first. He came to the barrel and looked down into it, to the dull and sullen embers lying in its bottom. He poked at them and sent whirls of ash flying up into his face.

  He chose a bag from the piles and tore it open from its side. He looked inside and selected a soggy, mustard-stained paper plate, a coffee filter full of old grounds and some moldy lemon rinds. He placed the filter and the rinds on the plate and lifted the edge to roll it over. He bit into one end and turned it to suck the stray grounds that had come loose from the other. He squatted there and chewed for a bit, feeling the cold creep in and numb his arms and legs. He looked down the narrow pathway and saw the Greek, sitting against the wall like a recumbent statue of David.

  When he had finished, he picked the bag up, holding it by the torn ends in each hand, and made to haul it to the barrel to burn. As he walked down the alley, he felt his holey, newspaper-stuffed boot strike something on the ground.

  He closed his eyes and sighed.

  The arm was frozen to the ground. He pulled at it and it came up with a tearing sound, like Velcro being ripped apart. He held it in both hands, and looked it over from the mass of pulp at the mangled end, to the dirt beneath the nails at the other.

  “Lesion,” Verruga said to himself. “We called you Lesion, for your severed limbs are many.”

  He fed the arm into the bag and continued. Along the way, he picked up more pieces, a naked foot, another hand severed at the wrist, a large portion of Lesion's chest and torso, things he could not identify. All this went into the bag as well. He walked on and came to the alley's end. Above him, on a fire escape, hung Lesion's head. The spinal cord was still attached and it had been fed through the grating so the head swung in the freezing wind. It dangled there, amongst the frost and daggers of hanging ice. He climbed the fire escape, and dropped the head down into the bag.