*
Jacob Fields stood just within the jamb of his front door and watched the neighbor’s straggle back to their houses. They had the look of exiles, every one of them, and it was almost funny. All the lost. They weren’t even seeking direction any more. All of that shit was in the Past. This was a new frontier they were plying now. From where he stood he could just make out the form of Cab Able climbing into the stranger’s car. Poor woman never had a chance, Jacob thought acidly. Polly McNamara was already unrolling the garden hose to spray down the street in front of her house.
He didn’t know what had come over him lately. He was so tired and unmotivated. He’d missed more work the last two months than he’d missed in the previous decade but he really wasn’t concerned about that either. Nothing much touched him. He’d felt a moment of regret when he watched the woman drive down the street, his neighbors already emerging from their houses like cockroaches invading a kitchen, but even that had floated away with no trace.
She had made the wrong choice and it had fixed her little red wagon.
Case closed. That’s why he was sticking close to home. Things were mixed up, he wasn’t thinking clearly, so why muddle in someone else’s business? Nobody could fault him for that, could they? Surely not. His mother had always asserted that good fences tended to make better neighbors and that stood just fine with him too. Why just the thought of her brought a tear to his eye. Dead now for almost eight years. Where did the time go? It crept lightly away while you weren’t looking, heading toward oblivion, that’s where. Because that, truly, was the only fixed thing in the universe.
Molly should have known that too, but she’d refused to acknowledge the obvious. And look where it’d gotten her. He looked down at his scabbed hands, the right one still a little bloody on certain days if he used it much. Yeah, she shoulda known. It would have made things a little easier for all concerned.
He remembered their wedding day, how pretty she’d been. Just like one of those wedding magazines he still remembered her thumbing through every day so long ago, though of course, their actual wedding had been nothing of the sort. She was always one for pipe dreams. He had to laugh now just thinking about her former righteousness, her eager willingness to “change the world” as she’d been so fond of saying. Their only son, Edgar, hadn’t called now in at least six months (Jacob was sure she probably had the date written down somewhere, for some unknown reason) and he didn’t care. It was just one more thing now in a long line of things that really didn’t matter.
He’d tried to make Molly see the reason. Up until the very end he’d tried as hard as he could to paint the sort of picture he knew she had to see. But in the end he had been merely pissing up a rope. She’d seen something with the mailman, she’d tried to tell him, something about little girls and something beastly, but he hadn’t wanted to hear. Not then and not now. You couldn’t stop a locomotive by standing out on the tracks. She’d just gotten more exasperated. Louder. Threatening to call the police if he didn’t do something.
Well…and here he laughed again. He had done something.
And really, as far as he could tell, it had gone a long way to solving his problems. Or most of them anyway.
But there was the smell. Yeah, definitely, there was that.
He wrinkled his nose and backed away from the door, curling back into the darkness that crouched all around him. Even the thickest gauge of Visqueen pinned along the bathroom wall and covering the outside of the door wasn’t enough to keep it at bay.
He moved into the living room, now only a wild menagerie of broken and knocked-over items. The scene of their Last Great Battle. He kicked through the remains of a broken lamp, scattering tiny shards of the light bulb into the general chaos of the room. Fell heavily into the recliner Molly had surprised him with for Christmas two years ago. He stared across the room at the television. Or what was left of it. It had been one of the most expensive items they’d ever purchased but it had been no match for the battle. Now it was broken and dead like everything else. A shattered hull. He thought about dragging it outside to the back yard; perhaps a family of birds or a raccoon would make a home there, but just the thought of the exertions implied was enough to set him to another course. He sat and peered into its broken, dark depths, his mind as black and dead as the thing he stared into.
And as he drifted away to the seamless emptiness of the coming night the smell continued to anchor itself to every surface, the very air itself. This putrescence that had once been Molly Fields, now growing to a vast puddle of sawn bones and corruption in the bathtub.