Like a Chainsaw With Malice

What nerves you must have, absorbing paradise in your flip flops and that cheap Hawaiian shirt. Don’t you know what goes on behind these walls? The dogs are fighting for scraps and I’ve misplaced my bag of angry rats; things are only going to get weirder from here, I’ve been off my meds for days now and that’s a bad thing to happen under any circumstance.

The cantina was my future sanctuary and I desperately needed it, I was screaming at all the tourists and I slept in horse shit the night before, I would have looked like an abstract shell of a man, speaking in tongues, stinking up whole blocks on my way to the cantina.

After the long surreal struggle to “THE CORPSES CANTINA” where I was received as royalty, or at least the kind of royalty particular to the island. I arrived with the stench of hell, vomiting, screaming and really thirsty, fortunately this was a common occurrence so the staff new how to handle things, they even pinched in some of their tips to buy a defibrillator. I stopped screaming after about a half hour, two beers and two shots of rum.

Lately I’ve been misplacing my bag of angry rats; I use it for protection, I mean, who’s going to fuck with someone carrying a bag of angry rats. I treat them well, at the bungalow where I’m staying they get free reign, abstract thought was the only way to survive the island, turns out I left them at the cantina, that’s one thing they really don’t jive with.

As I continued to consume I tried putting the grueling remnants of the debaucherous night together, seemingly extracted from what was once my brain. I knew I stole a boat, that was a vivid recollection but I hadn’t a clue where it was nor who it belonged too. It wasn’t a big deal; people steal boats all the time on the island, there was no law or cops here, it was like a pirates paradise, but mostly inhabited by those who would prefer not to be found.

Anyway, as I stared down at my cheap Hawaiian shirt and warned out flip flops, some of the dizziness began to leave, I seemed to be feeling better, as the psychotropic cocktails kicked in.

Bikini Beach Bloodbath

Jack Ashley and Joe “Show No” Mersey were speeding down the coast in a black top down Jeep, three days into a two week lam from work and any shred of responsibility. They were best friends, approaching their mid-forties and clinging to what looks they still possessed.

Joe turned the radio up full volume and sang with the oldies station: “Motorin’/ What’s your price for flight?” They were celebrating his most recent divorce, his third. Jack only had one under his belt. Between them they had three kids to accompany the four ex-wives. This trip was to relive former glory, to briefly recapture a moment of their youth they missed. They planned to party like they did in their twenties, if age allowed it, following less traveled paths and touring whatever dive bar along the highway drew their interest.

The trip, so far, had found tequila shots and a topless billiards contest in a little town called Casla. Jack got a hangover, Joe got a t-shirt proclaiming him a FREELANCE GYNECOLOGIST. In San Guerre del Bendita they met a “biker chick” named Lola Monroe whose claim to fame was blowing JFK before he shipped out to WWII. Seeing Joe’s t-shirt, she hit him up for a pro bono exam. Bets were made whether he would or would not. Whiskey fortified him as Lola removed her dentures and led him to a back room with a drippy smile. Afterward, when questioned, Joe would only say, “I don’t want to talk about it,” as Jack counted his money.

By the fifth day, Jack and Joe arrived at their ultimate destination: Baniki Bay, a small beach town that learned early to get tourist dollars by advertising themselves as Bikini Beach.

Baniki thrived on out-of-towners and their expendable cash. It was brimming with mom-and-pop shops, restaurants and the odd chain business. There were boat and jet ski rentals for fun in the summer sun, deep sea fishing, and any number of artisans crowding the streets and beaches to sell their crafts. The laws were lax on Bikini Beach, clothing optional, if at all, with ragers and keggers going all night during the height of the tourist season. Local law enforcement didn’t have a drunk tank, they had the beach. Everything was good as long as nobody was severely injured.

The bendable laws are what brought Tri-State Chemical to Bikini Beach, or Baniki Island more accurately. The island sat just offshore, far enough away from prying eyes but close enough for an easy commute. Tri-State donated generously to the town, which got it through the off season, and town officials ignored improperly disposed industrial waste. Tri-State took residence of the island from Longview Prison for the Criminally Insane. Lethal treatments of questionable legality, and body dumping, closed Longview once federal and state authorities learned of its practices. But none of those things were listed in the Chamber of Commerce’s brochures and they were expunged Bikini Beach’s history.

***

When Jack and Joe made it to Bikini Beach, Baniki Island was a dot of silhouette on the horizon thanks to the setting sun. Music blared from various venues while a band was strumming at one end of the beach near the cliffs. People were dancing and jamming, raising drinks to the tunes.

Jack parked the Jeep in the lot of Bikini Motor Inn, which set right on the beach. “Doesn’t look like anything has changed,” he said. Cars inched along the boulevard, throngs of people going from one good time to another. There was laughter, chatter, and a pervasive vibe of happiness and freedom— a groovy kind of spirit.

Joe scanned up and down the lane. “I wonder if that tattoo place is still here?”

“I count four just looking,” Jack said.

“No, don’t you remember? Agony and Ecstasy Tattoo and Body Piercing.”

“Oh, yeah. You were too afraid to go inside.”

“So were you,” Joe said.

Jack grimaced. “I’m not big on the agony part.”

They checked in, they got their room keys, 9 and 10, adjoining. They unpacked and refreshed to discard road grime. For dinner they sought the Gator Tail Seafood Shack, a place they had enjoyed years prior. They were happy to see it still a staple of the local cuisine, and that the waitresses still wore short-shorts and cut-off t-shirts.

After a feast of gator tails and coconut shrimp, the guys hit up Skeeter’s Bar for a couple of Coronas and an unflattering turn on the dance floor for Joe. It was there they met Janet and Ronnie, cousins and divorcées fresh from their thirties, on their way back to Baja from a family funeral with a couple of days to kill.

“So what do you do?” Janet asked Jack.

“Does it really matter?”

“No,” she said. “We’re not using our real names,” which sent her and Ronnie into rolls of laughter.

Joe said, “I wish we’d thought of that.”

Most personal talk ended there for the foursome, other than Joe’s last IRS audit. They talked in generalities, adult topics that would bore the predominantly younger crowd: paying bills, fine wine, expensive meals, cell phone overage charges, great works of literature, guilty pleasure movies, dream vacations in exotic locales, Joe’s next IRS audit. They cracked wise about the “poor, dumb kids” and pointed out which ones would be burned by their vacation hook-ups.

Once a couple of rounds had come and gone, the newly formed group made their way to the gathering on the beach. The band was playing fifties and sixties pop songs and the accents of the waves yawning on shore added a dose of heart to the performance. Jack and Janet slow danced to a slithery instrumental of “Sleep Walk” while Joe and Ronnie were half buried in the sand in each other’s arms. That’s when the earthquake hit.

***

As far as earthquakes go, this one was a sneeze. It didn’t register on the locals’ Richter scale. Shelves rattled, pictures fell, some nerves frayed. People clung to each other as police, paramedics, and firefighters arrived. Aftershocks were nonexistent. No buildings crumbled and neither did the earth open wide to swallow the town. No one was seriously injured and mass hysteria was avoided. Not even the rocks of the cliffs were disturbed. Within an hour and a half it was business as usual.

Under the water it was different.

The mass graves of barrels that Tri-State Chemical had discreetly dropped under the placid waters of Bikini Beach were disturbed. A large number of those barrels were cheaply made and improperly, even incompetently, sealed. They shifted beneath the waves and foam. Caps popped, sides split. Chemicals leaked and mingled, and while a slick surfaced, some compounds settled on the seafloor where other things rested long buried.

Those things woke. Those things stretched limbs, flexed fingers and jaws.

Those things gave up their dark burial sites and inched their way through the water to the morning rays that were breaking over Bikini Beach.

***

Jack woke up and checked his phone. A little after eight, no messages, no calls, battery at half life. Janet was asleep beside him, her long brunette hair fanning over the white slip of the pillow. The sheet covered her naked body and he admired the roundness of her hips. Next door, he heard an irritated Ronnie cussing at Joe’s snoring.

He got up and slipped on his underwear to fetch a Pepsi from the mini fridge. He peeked out the curtain of the patio doors as he drank. People were already sunning on the beach and swimming. Gulls darted a cloudless sky as the sun was gearing up for a scorcher.

Janet woke. Sitting up to stretch, the sheet fell below the full volume of her breasts. Her large dark nipples were hard in the air conditioned coolness. Jack’s dick twitched in matted pubes at the sight of her.

“Please tell me you have coffee,” she said.

“No,” he said, adjusting his beginning stiffness. “Joe’s the coffee drinker.”

A loud snore like a landslide came from the closed adjoining door. It was followed by Ronnie, “For shit’s sake…”

“I’ll pass,” Janet said.

Jack put his drink on the nightstand. He laid beside her, on top of the covers. Hands behind his head, ankles crossed, the head of his cock poked through the fly of his tented boxers.

Janet snuggled partially atop him. Her breasts were cool when they touched him. She spread her leg over him, nudging her knee against his erection. She teased her nipple with a long pink fingernail. “I can pass on the coffee, for now,” she said, biting Jack’s nipple hard enough to make him wince.

He kissed her, feeling kind of silly for smiling so big. Janet threw her head back as Jack kissed her neck and traced his teeth down her throat. When she guided his hand between her legs, he found her fevered and wet. Before he could probe too deeply, she pulled his hand to her face and smeared his moist fingers across her mouth.

Jack crawled out of his shorts and forced her flat. He partedd her legs with his own. She gnawed at his chest as he traced his cock along the folds of her pussy. A small yelp escaped her lips when he slapped it against her clit.

Janet pulled his head down to hers. Her breath in his ear wrung his spine.

Her heat intensified as he patiently entered her inch by inch. The ache in his balls threatened to explode inside her as his thrusting became feral. Her nails raked his back as she tried to suppress her moans and screams. But she did scream as she clenched his pounding cock, her cries filling Jack’s ears and shaking his bones while her body trembled and shook beneath him.

Jack yelled as he came inside her with a stabbing fury. He kept going, slick and slippery between her legs, plunging as deep as he could, urged on by every tense twitch of Janet’s writhing body, by each moan and prayerful breath.

His hips slowed even though her body still gripped him tight. Utterly spent, he licked the sweat from between her breasts before rolling off her.

Janet dipped her fingers from where their juices mingled and closed her legs around her hand. “I’m throbbing…”

“I’m dying…” he replied.

She eyed his erection still at full salute. She grabbed it and yanked it like a gearshift, and he jerked from the sensitivity and laughed. She licked him from his asshole to the head of his dick. She rolled his balls in her mouth, lapping up anything that tasted like sweat and cum.

With a fistful of hair he guided her down his dick. Her throat was as scorching as her gash. The clouds of desire thinned in his head and he wondered how she could still be screaming and choking on him at the same time. He let go her hair and she came up for air, teary eyes and a big grin dangling a thick cord of spit.

“What’s wrong?” Janet asked, following him as he abruptly left the bed.

“You hear that?” he asked, pushing the curtains apart.

She did. Screams. Bloodcurdling screams. Pleas for help.

Jack stared out at the unfolding commotion on the beach.

“What in the actual fuck?”

***

When Roger Banks, the mayor of Baniki Bay, answered his cell phone, he listened intently to the harried explanation being blurted into his ear. His response was an irritated, “Not again…”

When Chief of Police Lacretia Sullivan received her reports from the beach, she simply asked, “How many this time?”

When Mayor Banks spoke with Chief Sullivan, she didn’t mince words.

“We’re fucked. I’m en route, but there’s no containing this one, Roger. We’re being butt fucked with a live chainsaw on this one. It’s all up in our asses. Pictures, videos. I’m sure this shit’s gonna be plastered on the web. Some little fuckhead is probably live streaming on some bullshit something right now.”

“Sweet Italian Jesus,” Banks said.

Sullivan disconnected the call. She never could stomach a grown man crying.

***

Jack pulled on his jeans and a pair of shoes. From a duffel bag in the closet, he removed the gun case in which rested his Glock 22.

“What is all this?” Janet asked, standing at the window naked and glistening.

Jack chambered a round and released the safety. “I don’t know.” He had an urge to kiss her neck, to bite her ass or smack it, but there’d be time for all that later. At least he hoped.

He pounded on the connecting door. “We got a situation,” he said through it.

“You got a fucking gun?” Janet asked.

“Cop.”

“You looked like one…”

The door opened. Ronnie was mostly dressed, but her hair was disheveled with bags under her eyes. Joe, in tighty-whities and a FREELANCE GYNECOLOGIST shirt, already had his Glock locked and loaded. “What’s up?” he said.

“Not sure,” Jack replied. “Lock the doors,” he told Janet and Ronnie, before charging outside.

***

Five things had crawled from the waters. The early beach-goers had assumed junk and seaweed had washed ashore. Then the things stood on two legs, like men, and walked, like drunks, toward the sun addicts. The things reached with arms. Grabbing a burly jock who wore a too form-fitting speedo, one of the things bit into his neck with a chomping mouth. The other four things lunged for stunned sunbathers, and those that couldn’t grab a meal dined with the creatures who were more successful.

When Jack and Joe came running onto the beach, the things had taken down three victims. Joe tried stopping a busty girl that was running by with a tit flopped out of her bikini. “What’s going on?” he asked her.

“Terrorists!” she shrieked, not tarrying as she ran straight by.

“Did you see that titty?” Joe asked Jack.

“Couldn’t miss it,” Jack replied, continuing toward the chaos.

Friends of the burly jock beat at the creature eating him. Another of the soggy monsters fell on them. They thought they had that thing beat down until it rose and plunged a hand through one of their tight, tanned stomachs.

Joe fired two rounds into a creature presently munching on a woman, face deep in her guts. The bullets hit the back of its head and it lay motionless, buried in a mound of intestines.

Jack aimed for the heads of the other two eating the jocks. One bullet hit a jock in the chest as he tried to dodge grabbing hands. He fell screaming, staring up at the rotted maw as it closed over his face. Jack’s next shots finished both the creature and the doomed jock.

“Fucking zombies…” Joe said, scratching his balls.

Jack swiveled his neck until it popped. Meanwhile, the water had spit two more creatures out onto the beach in search of a flesh buffet.

“Who’d have thought, after almost thirty years,” he said, “this shit would happen to us, here, again?”

“Wasn’t in my crystal ball,” Joe replied, raising his gun to pop the head of one the waterlogged bastards. “I ain’t giving this place a third chance though, that’s for sure!”

“To old times then,” Jack said with a smirk.

Guns raised in unison, together they closed in on their targets.

Superhero With a Bad Back

I take another hit because I can’t throw no more punches. I mean, I haven’t officially retired or anything, but I will never again be called back into action. Of this much I am certain.

Once a week, some ungrateful civic servant comes and checks on me. She asks some questions and ticks some boxes. When she leaves I pick off the gum she sticks under the coffee table, put it in a plastic baggie and place it in the fridge. I don’t know what I plan to do with the evidence, confront her maybe?

Someday…

Anyway, I can’t fly like I used to anymore, but sometimes hookers will sleep with me for free if I promise I will take them up for a cruise. I tell them to get on my back and then I jump off the bed, then we float about a foot or so off the floor. In all honesty, the jumping (and I guess the sex) has taken its toll on me.

When they discover that I am impotent all round, they leave all pissed off, unfulfilled by a man once again.

Most of the week is spent on the couch or in bed on some relaxants or, when I’m in the mood, some prescription weed. No one hassles me about it, enough of my neighbours are old enough to remember what I did for the city, but the kids are becoming a concern.

They’ll be starting to outnumber this generation soon.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and die (if I can) before I’m completely out of my stash.

I look out from my sixth floor window. Should I just go ahead and jump?

It seems I don’t have that much of a choice, as none of mankind’s weapons have ever worked against me. In the old days, falling would be nothing, but I’m old now, so who knows..?

I’m relaxed about it, y’know? I’ll let gravity do its thing and maybe we’ll meet in mutual agreement.

The window opens, I exit and hover.

Scales & Fur

The window was cracked; spirals dancing like a spider’s web singing. That’s when I knew. I reached for the door, found it standing open a hair’s breadth. The darkness radiating from inside was heavy, hot, the rank breath from something waiting, something awful just biding its time.

With the toes of my scuffed boots I pushed the door in. It swung on creaking hinges and met something that impeded its progress about halfway open. I squinted into the darkness.

“Can’t see shit,” I said.

I swear I could almost feel the room breath, a sucking in of anticipation, an electricity bordering on painful.

I put one foot in front of the other with careful hesitancy but it still felt every bit the mistake it was.

“Hello,” I called.

I could hear the trembles in my voice and gritted my teeth.

“Anybody home?”

I knew there was but there was no answer.

Four steps inside the door, I stopped, held myself erect, muscles singing in rigidity, waiting for my eyes to adjust. A slithering gripped the room. I felt like the walls were twisting, gripping a little closer in the space around me.

I debated the merits of calling out that I wasn’t the police, that I was with the Homeless Youth Outreach Program but saw junkie teenage sneers and snickers and bit my tongue.

I could make out the dim shapes of things around me: a couch against the wall furthest away, a coffee table near it, a television sitting directly on the floor to my left. There was a gaping, rectangular hole to my right signifying a door to another room.

“Hey,” I called.

I made my voice as sharp and as cutting as I could, hoping to startle whoever (or whatever) into making a noise and revealing themselves.

Nothing.

I walked over to the couch and, with shaking hands and tingling fingers, reached down to pat the cushions to make sure nothing was lying in wait there.

God did I wish I had a flashlight or a cellphone or a lighter but the only flashlight I owned sat in the junk drawer of my little place in Ferndale, the city was too broke to supply cellphones and I quit smoking three years ago.

The cushions were stale, dusty coated and my fingers came away somewhat sticky but not in a wet way. I wiped them on my pants and made my way to the door, where a darker darkness yawned out.

That’s when I remembered the door. It hadn’t opened all the way.

Stupid. Stupid to forget something as glaringly obvious, right?

I spun on my heels and that’s when it happened. Happened as quick as they say it happens. Everything changed.

Blinding light, flashes and stars and noise, erupted from all around me. The room tightened its grip to a choking. I saw nothing save the light.

“Welcome,” it said.

I couldn’t breath. I couldn’t see. My ears felt plugged with barbed cotton. Panic sunk in like a searing knife.

I flung my arms wildly, connected with nothing, but kept swinging.

“Help,” I tried to scream. “God, help me.”

No sound escaped my lips.

My head began to spin and the light flickered like fading afternoon sunlight on rippling water.

I’m going to pass out, I realized.

I did but I caught a fleeting glance of the room before the lights went out. The walls were scaled, red and coiling. The floor was not carpeted. It was fur-covered. I saw it growing in lurid detail as I fell.

***

Time is a strange thing. It comes in leaps and bounds. It sticks with clumpy, sap-like tenacity, refusing to budge. It does what it does.

I don’t know how long I was out. When I woke the first thing I realized was that I couldn’t see. All was dark again. The next thing I realized was that I was bound, completely engulfed in fur. Little bristles of hair lined my body as snug as any coat I’d ever worn.

My breath was hot and close against my face bringing sweat to my pores and tears to my eyes. I could breath though.

“Wha–”

Motion enwrapped me. The fur moved all around me. I had to close my eyes as the hair poked and stabbed in its coiling. Whatever it was, it moved from right to left, slowly unfurling itself.

I kept my eyes shut. I didn’t want to see. My body shook and I couldn’t stop it.

Why? Why did I have to choose this house? Of all the abandoned, derelict houses on the block–shit, in Detroit, for that matter–I had to go and choosethisone.

I steeled myself as best I could and slapped my eyes open.

Darkness.

I blinked and blinked and blinked but everything remained dark. I kept my eyes open and waited.

Slowly, painfully slowly, time as globbed sap, my eyes adjusted and I saw that I was in the same room. I was on the floor. I could make out the couch against the wall, the coffee table near it and the television to my left.

Move, I told myself. Get up. Move.

I jerked my hands into fists, feeling the hairy carpet under my arms. I wiggled my toes inside my boots and found them working too. I sucked in my gut and threw myself forward, the first sit-up I’d done since elementary school.

“Ok,” I said, huffing for breath. “Ok.”

I looked around. The front door, the one I’d come in through, was nowhere to be seen.

Must be shut, I thought. Shit.

I looked for its outline behind me but could see nothing. I got to my feet, stopping with my hands on my knees as the room swayed with my light-headedness, then made my way to where the front door of the house should’ve been.

It wasn’t there.

Nothing but a wall. I ran my sweating hands along it, searching for doortrim, a knob, the eery pane of glass I saw from the outside, a crack, something. My hands found nothing. Just the smooth but somehow lumpy-in-exact-patterns wall.

Red scales flashed in my mind.

I jerked my hands away and nearly tripped over my feet stepping backwards.

Window. There must be a window. You can leave through a window.

I forced myself to step back to the wall and place my hands back on it. I traced the largest loops my arms would allow, praying with each inch that my fingers found glass. I didn’t care if I lost a hunk of my finger in the process. I just wanted out.

I followed the wall towards the corner, taking half-steps as my hands searched. I was nearly to the corner, which I could just make out in the murk, when a sharp bark of pain leapt up from my right shin. I stumbled over something and hit the ground, barely stopping my face from smashing into the weird, furry carpet with my right arm.

I kicked my feet wildly and they struck something. It felt insubstantial, flimsy even. I sat still, waiting for my chest to quit heaving and squinting into the darkness at whatever it was that I’d kicked.

The television.

I saw the outline of it finally and laughed a little. It was a nervous thing, that laughter. It wasn’t forced but I could hear the tremble in it and knew it wouldn’t take much more to push me over the breaking point.

“Just the television,” I said, pulling myself up to all-fours. I crawled over to the television and ran my fingers along the top. It was smooth and cold.

There must cable cords in the thing, I thought. If there’s no goddamn window in this fucked up house, I’ll just pull the damn wall out where the cable comes in.

I moved to the backside of the tv, still on my hands and knees, and started feeling up the wall. My hands found nothing but the oddly lumpy surface.

“The fuck?”

I turned back to the tv and moved my fumbling hands along the backside of it. It was completely smooth. Not a port or cord to be found.

Time, bounding back to motion, reared its head. The television flashed into life. Light flooded the room on the other side of the tv. The couch and coffee table blossomed into view. I saw the wall behind to, indeed, be red and lined with scales. The carpet was unlike any carpet I had ever seen in my life. It was a dingy, off-white fur that shimmered and bristled in places like a cat’s arching back.

I felt paralyzed. I was behind the tv. I felt no cord, not even a power cord, but the television was on and beaming. I forced myself to crawl around and see what it was showing.

The brightness was nearly too much. My eyes narrowed into slits and it took a few moments to adjust to the light.

“What the–”

The screen was a negative image of the house from the outside. The night sky was alive with a matte light and the house was lined in shadows and darkness. It looked ghostly, pale but shimmering.

My mouth hung open and I felt my breath quickening.

I watched as the shape of a portly man came into the lower left-hand side of the screen. He lifted one leg over the rickety fence, struggled for balance awkwardly, then swung the other leg up and over. The man readjusted his pants, picked a wedgie from his ass, then started up the overgrown yard towards the looming house.

“Oh god,” I whispered.

I watched the man pause before mounting the steps to the porch.

The television screen began a slow but steady zooming in at this point. The portly man looked around the porch, walked to both sides searching for a window but finding none, returned to the door and hesitated.

The screen was a closeup of the back of the man’s head now, standing at exactly the same level as the man.

“Oh jesus.”

The man reached for the knob but stopped short. His shoulders hunched and I watched as a shiver ran up the length of his spine. The man felt somebody behind him. The man swung around and I stared in open-mouthed horror at my own wide-eyed, sweating face in negative on the television screen.

I flung myself away from the television. I scrambled backwards and bashed against the coffee table.

“What?” I sputtered. “What is happening?”

I struggled against the coffee table but it backed against the couch and moved no further.

My eyes on the television screen scanned right and left but saw nothing. Did not see whatever it was that was filming me directly in front of me like the eyes of some invisible monster. I watched as I turned around and noticed the cracked window on the door. I watched as I noticed that the door was open. I watched as I opened the door with my foot.

Don’t go in, my mind screamed.

But I was already inside.

“What is happening?”

I felt the ground under me move. It jostled me, just a little at first, then with a power that cowered me. It lifted me up and sat me on the couch. I did not resist. I curled myself in closer, brought my knees to my chest.

The television was just light now. I was nowhere to be seen. The house wasn’t in view either. The screen vibrated with a light that danced like a candle in a gentle breeze.

It was captivating. I couldn’t look away even though it felt like the room was circling me, closing in.

I’m not sure when I noticed it, it must’ve been happening for a while, growing in intensity, slowly, until it was damn near deafening: a hissing, like a gigantic teakettle stuck at just the moment before it howls. A shaking like the kettle’s top bubbling on scalding water, everywhere and, for the moment, unseen.

It gave me the distraction to pull my eyes from the television set.

I sucked in breath and found no exclamation profound enough to utter. The room was teeming with movement. Hundreds, thousands probably, of strands of the wall, red and scaly, were slithering, coiling, just a few feet away. The room was wrapping itself around me with a strength of such finality there was nothing to do but let go.

***

I could’ve been anything. That’s what I like to believe. I say it, well I guess I don’t say anything anymore, I have no real voice, in disgust and regret. I could’ve been safe somewhere in an airconditioned, cubicled office, crunching numbers for a chain of dry cleaners. I could’ve been working the door at one of the scuzzy clubs in Greektown. Shit, I could’ve spent a lifetime passing out Gatorade to the Pistons.

But no, I had to be the do-gooder. I had to be the guy who thought he could make a difference. Shit. I like to think a lot about the Homeless Youth Outreach Program now. Was it even really a thing? When they came flyering up Wayne State, I thought they were about the greatest thing I could imagine. College educated helpers swooping down from their rising place in the social stratum to help the kids on the streets, the kids sleeping behind the tagged dumpsters downtown, the kids sleeping in the hundreds of empty shells of businesses and factories, the kids sleeping in the thousands of derelict, abandoned houses sprawled for miles and miles. I wonder how many houses sat silently laughing like this one, waiting, biding its time, hungry.

The turnover rate was astounding. They had to tell me. I took it with a grain of salt. I was young, eager, knew I wouldn’t burn out because I was going to make it happen. I was going to be a constant for these kids in a world of inconsistency.

Shit.

This house. That’s all there is now. Me, the coffee table, the couch, the fur, the walls and the television. Red scales and fur and light. There is no time, time in globs or time as a whip. I am the bug in amber. I am in a place, seconds like centuries with teeth, without end.

I thought there’d be heaven or, a remote possibility, hell but there’s nothing. I’m not sure if it’s the house, taking whatever essence, call it core or soul or being, and holding it over my head, trapping me here, or if there just isn’t anything else. My thoughts twist around these ideas like the “walls” of this place, shifting in a circle never ending, grinding to what seems like a stop only to shift, as if for comfort, then to pick up right where it left off. Round and round and round it goes.

It doesn’t speak to me. It doesn’t even really acknowledge that I’m here. It keeps me, forgotten, unattended, neglected, like a nest egg, some dragon’s fortune that it has no use for but won’t give up.

I know it’s terrible but I hope somebody from the Blight Commision makes their way here. I wonder if maybe, just maybe, it’ll trade me out for someone new, someone alive. There’s nobody else here but me so it’s not hoarding.

I just sit and watch the television hoping for flickers of life and a shot of somebody that isn’t me coming up the overgrown yard to the door with the spider-webbed window.