CW: Death, Religious guilt, Discussions of corpses, Self-Harm, Fuckery with eyes and heads
The end is in sight, a whirling shockwave of static. The air was inlaid with heaviness. It held the atmosphere in a type of morose mellow. There wasn’t anything to fully describe the end of it. The high - the euphoria - you could hitch on like a surfer on a wave. Ultimately the tide would eventually pull them backwards, fastening them down onto the rock that was hurtling around nothingness like it had some sort of purpose.
Caramilk could feel all of that speed, the way it had everything off kilter and swung in a wild pendulum of life and death. Maybe he was just being dramatic after coming down from a high, but it felt like his veins had been infected with a solemn coolness. By any standard, he was having a shit day.
With pupils blown wide with drug addled wonder, he was able to stumble his way around the house of death. Pointedly ignoring the woman mouldering on the couch. If he ignored the lounge and how the television had been playing for a solid three or four days. If he ignored her stare - the wide open eyes that peered into his putid core - he could pretend like he hadn’t just left her. Sitting on that couch, head slumped over and resting on her shoulder, he could pretend she was in slumber. So he did, for six whole days.
On day two - he got into the medicine cabinet, crackling it open with enough brute force and prying. Her sleeping pills didn’t work on him, which was another reason he was a servant of the devil - according to her. But her host of other medicines definitely had some kind of effect on him. Curling their intangible fingers around his mind and tugging it to and fro. Caressing his muddled body and blood stained hands with gentle strength, consoling the devil.
There wasn’t much else to do, other than maraud her freezer and plunder the meat that was left frosted over. Leaving the licked clean packages strewn around. Though they always stayed a foot or two away from the entrance to the living room. Not even garbage wanted to venture close.
There was one living room in the house, but the only one in said room wasn't living. Cal remained fixed to the fridge door, holding onto the glass bottle with white knuckles. He could hear dripping in the lounge, resoundingly refusing to go and see what it was. He was arguing with himself with a ferocious intensity, and yet somehow was still losing.
The static ringing had made his head home once again. He could feel the claws and teeth of the bottle, nipping and twisting at his feeble mind. Trying to push his hands around the neck of the bottle and the head into his dry mouth. To wet his sandpaper tongue and soothe his raw throat. To drown out the dripping he could still hear. It was thick, like a dribble of honey shyly rolling over a teaspoon and onto a piece of toast. Dribbling down with liquid reluctance. It didn’t even do anything. The sound just repeated. Drip. Drip. Drip. Over and over.
Cal felt like he was going entirely mad.
Maybe he was - with his spring madness that lingered in his blown wide eyes. The ruby red taken over by the gaping maw. His flushed skin was somehow still a sickly grey. The sun had not had the chance to lap at his skin in what felt like years. Could you get sick, if you haven’t seen the sun in too long? He thinks it might drive you loony. He certainly feels mad. Like he’s rolling out of control, his fine line of control over his own body was loosening its grip.
Most like how his grip was losing around the bottle. Letting it slide down his fingers, a slew of feelings. He fumbles with it, pulling it behind his drawn up knees. Tucking it into the cavity in between his chest and knees, cradling it with care.
He called out, “Ma’am?”
She answered with a slow viscosity. A gentle drip and drop that felt like a strike.
“I- I’m going to- come in-…” He promised, a flicker of his tone upwards marring his sureness. He didn’t move, waiting with a tremble in his breath for the woman to respond. Cal didn’t know if she’d even answer him. He knew so much and yet so little about this woman. He knew her worries and woes, loves and hates (most of which were just him) but not her name. It was better that way, he couldn’t look at her with a name to a face.
Caramilk whined to himself, pinching his brows together and letting his head fall onto the open head of the bottle with a hollow thunk. C’mon, you need to do this - he thought to himself.
With a tip of the bottle upwards, and a burning of his throat and watering of his eyes. He pushed the bottle onto the grimed floor. Crawling at a pace of skittish dread, towards the entrance to the living room. At that one moment he wanted badly for her to jerk upright, turn channel four off and stomp into the kitchen. Drag him by the ear back downwards to the basement that attended to rats and the growing mould and green moss. Kick him in the side and stand on his haphazardly bandaged hand with her cane. Poke him in the side until he crept away from her, the devil subdued.
The woman did no such thing.
She just dripped her slow nonsense.
She’d be enraged by Cal’s flushed cheeks and neck, by his wide blown pupils and his stumbling gait. So he pushed himself to a stand and staggered into the living room with a blundering blind confidence.
The stench was worse there. It was bad in the house, obviously - but it was worse here. He squeaked, a frightened mouse. Turned around and hiked his shoulders to his chin and hands to his eyes, the childish protection. His tongue was coated in a film of residue, guilt - and an emotion that he didn’t know but it bloomed in his gut all the same - tangled with his saliva and made his mouth a place of bitter regret.
He never bought into her crazed delusions, but he understood them now. Good god, what he would not do to have such faith.
If he had been born to a body that was not a lie, maybe he could live in the way the woman wanted. Maybe he could be some sort of godly child. He would be anything she wanted, if only he were good. Yet he was not - and neither was she. Because in the end she was equal to him, she rotted all the same. Cal could feel bile rising in his throat, and he keeled over on the carpet and heaved. Grasping at his neck and gasping for breath through the closing up panic of his throat.
“I’m sorry,” he moaned, pushing his fists into his eyes, “I’m so sorry! I’m so so so s- sorry! I- I- I- I wish…-”
Cal could wish now, of course. He could wish for anything he wanted. But he couldn’t wish for foresight, because he was someone that couldn’t do things right. He had to roll over and show his belly - when there wasn’t any point any longer. He turned back to stare at the woman’s body.
Her skin sagged, a glove that didn’t fit a hand. It hung off her frame and puffed up like a grotesque balloon, blood and other liquids rolling out of her orifices. Her head was turned somewhere to the floor in front of her, but he could feel her eyes staring straight at him. Cursing him from thereafter.
Blood dribbled out of her nose and mouth, tumbling over his chin and puddling in her skirts. A slow dribble that rolled with the lethargy of a dead woman. There were flies buzzing around her, with other insects clinging to her skin. She was already a rather stout woman, but her expanding waist had her skirts straining to hold. Cal could feel bile rolling in his throat again, and he turned away from the woman to heave again.
“I’m sorry,” He repeated, stumbling and swaying side to side.
The woman looked up at him, accusing eyes tracking him. She dribbled blood, eyes flooded with the red. “You devilish child, you monster, you thieving lying little bastard!” she crowed, lurching towards him on unsteady feet.
He gasped, running on quaking legs out of the living room and slamming into the fridge. He spun backwards, holding his hands out in front of him and begging the woman to take mercy on him. Promising he would do as she says, that he’d pay for his offence. He’d be good and obedient, if only she’d take mercy on him.
—
Waking up was strenuous. It felt like someone had taken Cal’s whole body and put it through a blender and then folded him into sixteenths and stuffed him in a box. His head was a cacophonous noise of pain. He groaned, rolling over onto his side and grousing himself upwards.
Back in the basement it seemed. Despite that woman being dead, so dead, he still obeyed her cloddish whims. Really, what was he doing? Rolling in filth while he had nobody to confine him or tell him what not to do or what to do. He could do what he wanted. Right now, he wanted to take his own life in hand.
He yanked his body from the stone, powering up the steps on feeble legs. He strode through the house, shouldering the backdoor open with a savage anger in his body. It had him shaking, and he could scarcely think if not for the red vision that covers his eyes. He was in control, and he could prove it.
The axe was laid in the shed, and he swung it around and held it in his two hands. Leaning on walls and gasping for breath, pushing further into the house. The house was boiling, no air circling through the rooms and doors shut to try keep himself from panicking. The air in the house was thick, ripe with the heaviness of fresh death.
He shoved the door to the kitchen open, shoulders tense.
Stalking through the kitchen, he could hear his breath catching in his throat. Stuttering and spluttering like an old car that couldn’t make it through the final hurdle.
Launching forward with the axe raised in stiff fashion behind him, he hurdled the axe downwards with a cry of determination and terrified exertion. The axe cracked through the woman’s paper joints and found its mark in the wooden support of the couch. Cal panted, putting his foot on the couch and yanking the steel out of the couch. He pulled it back, as if going to batter at a ball and not a dead woman’s head. He swung the axe forward, and the head flew off the woman’s head to score home. It smacked into the wall, a wet sound full of revolt and aversion. It should be heavier. The head of a person. That was where all of the person was centered, it was the person themself. And yet it only weighed a few kilograms, all those memories and emotions. All that faith and belief, all stuffed into a 5kg piece of meat.
Cal dropped the axe to the floor, heaving for breath through the thickness of his tears and the smell.
“Ah…no...no- um…no- I...I’m sorry,” He stuttered, rushing over to the head of the corpse. He laid it on his chest, shaking and trembling fingers pushing the hair out of her eyes. It was greasy and it smelt of death. Putid and vile. He pushed his fingers onto her eyelids, trying to push them close. His two fingers sunk into the wet flesh, and he let out a sob as his fingers slid into the piercing blue of her iris.
“Ah-”
He stumbled to his feet, wandering over to the body with a mindless daze. He lay the head onto the body, propping it up pillows that had congealed blood and gore marring it’s floral pattern. He shuffled it around, sniffling to himself and gagging at the smell. The mangled cut of her neck left flesh missing, scoring out a message of hate on her body.
“I don’t hate you…I- um…Yeah.”
He took a step backwards, wringing his hands together.
The people on the T.V laughed, and he jumped. Spinning around and shoving the device off its stand in mild panic.
“Sorry!” he blurted out, tripping over himself as he scampered backwards. Skittering towards the kitchen, trying to make his exit without annoying the woman. He winced, eyes being drawn to the message of hate he scored into her flesh with a weapon of loathing. Cal rubbed his upper arm, looking at bottles that lay sideways on the kitchen floor. The empty packets scrunching underhand as he crawled over to it, picking it up with careful care. He scooted himself to the side, pushing his back to the fridge and his knees to his chest.
He tipped the bottle back, swallowing the stale fire it supplied in big sickening gulps.
Cal tucked the bottle into the cavity between his knees and chest, protecting it with a careful guardianship.
“I’m sorry,” He muttered to the air.
