CONDOLENCES

It all started when…

The village was tormented. It had been six months since Mihai’s death, and a rot had crept into the community since. Only a small gathering had come to the wake, including his widow but not his daughter. Mihai lay in his casket, coins and rosary in hand while the candle wax began to melt over his forehead. There was conflict of opinion between those who avoided speaking ill of the dead and those who avoided lying. But everyone that stopped by the church during the two day wake could agree on one thing about Mihai. He was dead, of that there was no question.

It was not long after he was buried that the trouble began. That same day he was put in the earth a fire consumed the granary. They were able to quash it before it spread and consumed the village, but a farmhand was swallowed by its flames and lived. For days he howled in agony as his skin sloughed from his bones, his cries echoed throughout the village day and night. When he passed, his screams were replaced by a chorus of weeping from his mother and sisters.

The chickens began to lay eggs already rotten black, while the milk soured in the cows’ teat. The villagers suffered in silence at first, each farmer fearing the other’s sabotage. But the corruption was a flood, unimpeded by their denial. Fever gripped the newborns of the village, culling the next generation in a matter of days. Birds fell from the sky, their flesh lousy with worms.

The crops were all rot, fit only for the plague rats that flooded the village. The rats consumed anything they could overwhelm, including dogs and orphans. They brought fleas who brought pox and black boils upon the pathetic villagers.

Young Hildegard climbed to the top of the bell tower and leapt to her death. She left no note behind, no reasons why to be found in her twisted corpse.

Desperate, hungry and diseased, the villagers sought to end their misery. Within the confines of the church, Mihai’s daughter confessed that she still spoke with her father, that he would visit her at night and augur.

The sexton dug up the Mihai’s grave before the angry villagers. Within the rotted casket, buried nearly three months past, was Mihai. His corpse was flush and full of color, his hair grown wild and his lips a saccharine red.

They took the corpse far from the village to a crossroads where they cut off Mihai’s head and stuffed his mouth with garlic. A grave was dug twice as deep as they would for any man and let the body inside. They drove a stake through the corpse’s heart, pinning it to the earth. Wrapped in rope and rosary, Mihai was buried again.

Health and fortune returned to the village.

 * * *

Six years ago my father and I stopped speaking. It was mutual. I hated him. He hated me.

Three months ago he killed himself.

His funeral was a week later. I didn’t go, and the entire day my mother was calling me to find out where I was, why I wasn’t there. It was obvious to me why I wouldn’t attend, I thought it would be obvious to her too. But after the funeral I knew she would need help with his things, with the transition, with everything. So after dragging my feet for months, I came back.

I didn’t go straight home. Instead I called Wendy, let her know I was in town, and asked her to meet me at Wesley’s for a drink. Wesley’s was an old bar when I was a kid, fucking ancient now. When I walked in it had the same three bubble gum machines in the front, probably with the same bubble gum inside.

The bartender wasn’t old enough to drink what she served. It was barely after 1 so it was just me and a couple at a booth in the dive. The bartender kept friendly conversation while I waited for Wendy.  About three beers later I got a text from her telling me she couldn’t get out of her kid’s soccer match, but would really like to see me tomorrow night. I text her back ‘sure.’

Let the bartender know the beer’s flat. She just shrugs.

Being back in the town I grew up in was an uncomfortable feeling. A sticky film that clings to your skin every time you faintly recognize a corner or house. Not quite nostalgia, but a private embarrassment, like when you heard the word ‘sex’ before knowing what it meant. The anxiety settled into the background noise as I rounded my old street and saw my parent’s house. Is it possible for something to look exactly how you remember but at the same time not recognize it?

My mother greeted me at the door, hugs and kisses. She was always a wiry woman, as tall as she was thin. I wasn’t shocked to see her so skinny, but I was shocked at how tired she had become, eyes exhausted from tears and face wrinkled. When I hugged her she felt even lighter than she looked.

She could sense my concern and attacked it head on “I know everything is a mess, but it will get better now,” she promised squeezing my arm “Now that you’re here.”

She wanted to know about my flight, if I had eaten, was I hungry, how many servings I wanted. She had been like that my whole life, quick to change topic, always quick to the forget before the forgive.

Maybe I’m being hard on her. She was glad to have me back in her nest, and she loved my father. When I insisted I wasn’t hungry we settled on coffee in the kitchen and she told me about all her friends, people she assumed I’d remember and their coming to support her. Her kitchen was a cluttered arboretum of flower and fruit bouquets, her fridge so overloaded with spreads and Tupperware that that they spilled out into the counter space.

“Everyone’s been so generous,” she explained, making me a plate anyway from the donated food. “Your father  and I were truly blessed.” She fell silent with a heavy heave and I thought she was about to cry, but instead she just reached out and took my hand.

She was the same woman I’d left behind for the most part. We danced circles around the topic of my father as I caught her up on my life and she caught me up on the neighborhood, my aunts. The people hadn’t changed but the town had, I’d seen as much driving past the dilapidated buildings that had formed my childhood. She reminisced while scratching at her neck and I noticed that she had a small cut there and mentioned it.

“Oh, nothing just a rash.” She answered and I didn’t press.

I was listening but when my coffee had cooled to a point where I could drink it the taste was immediately off putting, like drinking hot salt. I told my mother that there was something wrong with it and noticed that she was near tears.

Wiping a tear she broke eye contact with a laugh and walked away from the table. The percolator has been busted, she explained, so she brought out the moka pot but she didn’t know how to use it. My father had known how to fix things around the house but now he was gone and the percolator was broken and a bird flew into the upstairs window and cracked it and he never finished patching up the leak in the basement and now there was one in the guest room to and she wanted to call Mr. Stanton up on Glory Road to take a look at the brake light but she still has to meet with the family attorney…

I didn’t know how to comfort her so I just sat listening until she worked herself into tears. When the tears came I only sat in my chair, squirming in my skin and wishing she’d stop. I said some comforting words while staring at the floor, counting the different muddy foot prints left behind and wondering when was the last time anyone cleaned the kitchen.

My mom offered me my old room, but I opted for the guest room. As she changed the sheets I checked out the rest of the house. Same furniture, same paintings on the wall, same kitchen, new tv. Through the kitchen I saw the backyard and my dad’s unfinished rock garden. Growing up the backyard had ended in a thick of woods I’d spend days getting lost in. Now the area was being developed for homes, and only a skeleton of the forest I knew remained. My father had been building a rock garden here in the final years, twisted stone idols against a backdrop of dead trees and development. I recognized this place, but the memories, they belonged to someone else.

In the guest room, like most of the house, was one of my father’s paintings. They were all mostly houses or interior spaces, my father had created quite a collection before he passed. The one in the guest room was a painting of the room itself, the perspective from the window sill looking in, the door to the hall painted wide open. It wasn’t an exact match, as the room had been rearranged since the painting had been done.

The guest room was next to my parent’s room. On the ceiling was the stain just as my mother described, a small discolored spider stretching under the paint. Setting my bag down, I noticed my father’s rocking chair in the corner of the room hidden under kitschy pillows.

When I was a kid he would sit in that chair in front of our TV. I’d sit on the floor, my mom reading a book on the sofa, and him in the chair, letting off the steam and rage from his work day. It didn’t really feel like he was gone. I was angry at him then, I’m angry at him now. What difference does it make?

Said goodnight to mom, pulled out my laptop in bed and got to some work I had brought with me. caught up on some emails and cruised Facebook, tried stalking Wendy’s social media and eventually fell asleep answering emails.

What woke me up was my mother’s voice. My phone said it was after 2 am, but I could hear my mother talking. I lay there both too tired to listen and too curious to ignore it, trapped in the paralytic comfort of bed. It almost sounded as if she was outside (but that wouldn’t make sense). I listened to her, unable to make out her words until sleep found me again.

The next morning she was awake before me. When I asked her about what I heard she just shrugged it off.

“I have trouble sleeping since your father left.” She said with her back to me. She was making a breakfast from the fruit baskets still decorating the kitchen. All the platters were still out on the counter, crackers going stale, meat slices going black and fruit beginning to wither.

“You should put this in the fridge mom,” I told her. At that she opened the fridge door with a laugh, revealing how stuffed it was.

“So much food, who could possibly eat it all?” She laughed.

I couldn’t help her, I didn’t know how. She flitted about her morning, wavering between resilient strength and the edge of weeping. After phone calls with her sisters I helped her back to bed. She revealed to me then that her doctor had given her pills for the grief, to help her sleep. I was uncomfortable, seeing the pills on her night stand like that but as she drifted away I was relieved to see her at rest.

I found myself standing in front of the door to the garage. That’s where he did it. She had found him in there, afterwards. Right there for her to see. Son of a bitch.

In the kitchen I found the moka pot behind a bouquet of flowers, same one we had my whole life. I filled it with water, then the coffee, set it on the stove, turned it to hi, and waited for it to start bubbling. Then cut the heat, used an ovenmit to pour it since the handle was metal and got blisteringly hot, and served myself the coffee.

I was back in my home town to help my mother clear out the garage of my fathers junk and help her with the attorney. It wasn’t a lot, and we were never so rich as to warrant a big complicated inheritance. But she asked for my help, so here I was. My coffee came out tasting like shit again so I poured it out, stuck the moka pot into the dishwasher and set off on my day.

I had planned to tackle the garage but felt sick of it already so I grabbed my jacket instead and went out.

My first stop became my only stop as I spent the day with my aunts, who had taken on the responsibility of arranging the funeral. They made sure I felt sufficiently guilty for my absence. I sat in there living room as they told me about the funeral.

I recognized one of my father’s paintings, hung up in their living room, a painting of their house. They’d had this painting for years I remember, but as I was staring at it and slowly realized that the paitning had been damaged. It looked like there was a dark smudge on the over the paints, obscuring the door. Or was that a shadow?

My aunts noticed I wasn’t a paying attention and called me by my  middle name.

“Excuse me?” I replied, returning to reality.

“I said closed casket. The mortician did his best but it was so awful, we thought it best to have afforded him that final dignity.” Aunt Elma explained, glancing over at her sister who was watching me carefully.

“Oh,” I said. “That’s good.”

Returning to my parent’s home I found flies buzzing around in the kitchen. It was all the goddamn platters and fruit bouquets just sitting out there, I could now smell the fruit rotting.

My mother had been right, the fridge was packed with donated food. There was another fridge in the garage so I grabbed a bouquet in each hand and went out to find it.

When I was little my father had turned this garage into his art studio. He would sit in here on his stool, Led Zeppelin on the radio, tapping his brushes like drums. I remember the cigarette smoke he’d tried to hide, the globs of acrylic paint on his pallets. Little me would stand in the corner of the room, thinking himself unnoticed as my father gave form and function to the canvas.

That man took out his old gun, sat on that same stool and shot himself in the forehead. He didn’t leave a note, didn’t say goodbye. Just walked into the room, shot his brains out, and lay there waiting for my mother to walk in and scream and scream and scream…

There were no screams now though. Everything was silent. Stacks of canvases against the wall, a tangle of easels in the corner. The fridge was buried under half finished paintings, so I had to awkwardly stack the bouquets in order to make space enough to open.

He only ever painted houses, that was his “thing,” Like the painting at my aunt’s place and in the guest room. Houses and interior spaces. He would paint a portrait of our home, our friends homes, houses he’d see on his drive or on vacation. Never people, or animals, or cans of soup. Just homes. The man would take photos of houses he’d want to paint and spend weeks recreating each individual detail; the oil applied with surgical precision. One time I asked him why he painted houses but I don’t remember his answer.

These unfinished paintings that were piled on the fridge were different. It took me awhile to understand what I was looking at, as they were mostly canvas with pencil sketches and the first applications of paint. I realized they were interior spaces when I recognized one as my parent’s kitchen.

Moving them aside I saw one that was going to be a painting of the foyer, and another a view of our backyard through the kitchen window. In that one he had already painted the standing stones and the rock garden. Having grown impatient with the art show I tossed the rest of the canvases aside without any kind of gentleness. Just more garbage he had left behind for us to clean up. I thought the fridge was free but the door was still jammed by a painting I had missed.

I had crushed it, the wooden frame of the canvas snapping like bone. When I pulled it free I got a look at it and it was… bizarre.

It was also unfinished and without color, only scratched and smeared graphite. A door way, from the perspective of inside the garage. It was clearly the garage because of the faintly sketched easels and tool shelf, but in this painting there was a person standing in the doorway. Something my father never painted and it showed, as the figure was without detail and didn’t really seem to blend with the uber realism of the rest of the piece. It was like my father had just scratched the pencil raw into the canvas creating a shadow that resembled a man, staring into the garage.

I looked up and saw my Mother in the shadow’s space staring into me.

“Jesus fucking Christ mom!” The canvas rattled loudly when I dropped it to the floor.

“Don’t curse!” My mother hissed.

“Scared the shit out of me!”

“Not in this house!” She stamped her foot and stared up at me as if I was crazy. I grabbed my chest and turned away from her, that awful painting face down on the floor and smashed. She asked me what I was doing in here and I explained through my racing heartbeat that I was trying to make room in the fridge.

She saw the unfinished paintings tossed aside and grew even angrier. She scolded me for not being more careful as she began picking them up, beginning with the smashed one. Mother explained that my father had been working on these before his death at her request. That he was trying new things and these are very important.

“Mom…” I said running my hand through my hair. But she was still angry and told me I shouldn’t be in here. The paintings were too much for her so I took one from her hands and helped her stack the rest in a corner. She was annoyed with me, clearly, and didn’t even listen when I told her about the bugs and the bouquet.

She walked me out of the garage and into the kitchen. I noticed that she had put a band aid over the “rash” on her neck but would keep scratching at it. I was gonna say something but was more bothered with how dirty her fingers were and said as much.

She held her hands out to look at them, examining the layers of dirt under her nails. “From your father’s rock garden. I’ve been trying to finish the path he started.”

“Mom those rocks must weigh a ton.”

“Oh they do!” She held up her middle finger to me, revealing a cracked nail with dried blood underneath. She began to giggle and then outright laugh at the obscene gesture. I wanted to press but it was nice to see her laugh. Maybe moving rocks was a helpful for the grieving process, who am I to judge?

“Still, you’ve gotta be careful with those rocks Mom.”

I knew that my aunts were coming over for dinner. I was in no mood for a third round of judgement so I zipped out shortly before their arrival to meet with Wendy.

Since I was in such a rush I arrived way early to Wesley’s. It was pretty dead for the night so I took a booth and just had water while I waited. That same young bartender was there but a waitress came to check on me instead. There were flies in the restaurant, and one or two were hovering over my booth. I watched them circle around and zip away only to come back.

Wendy arrived not long after, sliding into the booth with a smile.

“It really is you…” She said, as if in amazement, “You look exactly the same.”

In truth so did she. Her hair was drastically different, those long summer curls had been cut short and dyed dark with red highlights running through. But it was like she aged into her true self in all these years. She looked more like Wendy than the Wendy I remembered.

She showed me pictures of her daughter, Kelly. Fourteen years old now. Doing well in school. “She’s into bugs, wants to be a biologist. I don’t know.” Kelly’s dad had been a senior when I was a sophomore in high school. I didn’t ask about him because I could easily guess at the quality of life he ended up with.

I told Wendy what my life was like, what work was like. I was explaining how stressful it was to be away from it at the moment but Wendy leaped on that opportunity to express her condolences.

She put her hand over mine and told me how sorry she was, she asked me how my mother was and how I was, and how the family was… the answer was ‘fine’ to all of it. That fucking fly lingered above, but Wendy was stoic in her focus on me. The insect droned away, dipping in and out of sight. Wendy however remained aggressively emotive, trying to draw a reaction from me. She was never the kind to let a question go unanswered, and she kept prodding until the waitress returned with food.

“Well, I knew better than to expect you to talk much.” She sighed, scratching her head really quick. Ever since she was a kid she would do that, scratch her head the way other people roll their eyes. “Just had to try….as long as you know I’m here.” (I told her I do know that.) “I heard you skipped the funeral.” She said bluntly

I reminded her the kind of man he was.

“Oh I remember.” She said.

We ate. I had ordered a burger and she had ordered the fish (my beer was flat). The flies hadn’t left us and continued buzzing into my face. At first I ignored it, trying to stay cool in front of my date. But when it landed on my fries I swatted at it with my fork and missed loudly, startling Wendy.

“Are you okay?” She asked, the fly had gone wild in panic.

“There are flies.” I explained. She gave me a look as if it was a rude thing to say and shrugged.

“They aren’t bothering me.” She brought up the fork to her mouth and I saw that the fly was in the bite. It had landed on her fish and I watched it struggling to escape the tartar sauce before disappearing behind her lips.

“How’s your burger?” She asked, reaching for her beer.

Her daughter was spending the night at a friend’s house, so I came by. Wendy offered me coffee or a joint, I asked for both. We sat in her living room, smoking her daughter’s weed. It had been nearly twenty years since we dated, but it was easy to fall back into our same routine. When the joint was finished Wendy kissed my neck and put her hand between my legs.

We made out for bit, I took off her shirt and she undid my pants. I was incredibly stoned and wasn’t responding immediately Wendy began to blow me. I was focusing on getting it up but something was throwing me off. Resting my head back and looking up at the ceiling I saw a fly, flitting about trapped beneath the ceiling.

I didn’t spend the night, and when I got home my head was aching from the coffee and beer and weed. The light in the garage was on and I thought I saw someone watching through the window briefly. I felt bad, even as a grown adult, coming home so late and drunk.

“Mom?” I called as I entered the kitchen. There was a moment of silence. “I’m home.” I said. The sound of a door slamming shut was my answer. The microwave read 1:43. The smell of the bouquets made me sick so I went up to the guest room.

I collapsed on the bed. The world tilted ever so slightly as I lay there so I sat up because I didn’t want to vomit. I made my way into the bathroom, lead by night-light that cast red stripes of glow across the hall. I ran the faucet and splashed my face. Over the running water I could hear my mother talking, same as the other night. But it was louder, clearer. Who was she talking to?

When I looked out the window I saw a woman standing in our yard.

The woman was clutching at her neck and speaking with her back to me and it was all together clear that it was my mother.

I knew I was stoned, and I couldn’t at all understand what she was saying except, maybe she was said ‘I cant hear you’ but I couldn’t be sure, I couldn’t at all make sense of what I was seeing.

I was watching her down there, rambling incoherently in the dark, when a door creaked open behind me. I spun around and surveilled the empty hall. It was perfectly still in the orange night light and blue moonlight. There was silence. No one was there.

I looked back out the window and my mother was gone, the yard empty. I could see nothing but heard the backdoor rattle open. I held my breath listening to my mother shuffle across the kitchen below me, then up the steps, passed the guest room and into her room.

I stayed frozen in that bathroom for an eternity, afraid of being heard.

In the morning I confronted her about what I saw. There were muddy footprints on the floor and there were definitely flies and ants in the kitchen now, the food had gone rotten and the flowers become withered and limp.

I asked her what she was doing outside in the dark and she pretended not to know what I was talking about. Flies were buzzing loudly around the kitchen and I could see her socks in sandals were still covered in dirt from last night. I persisted and demanded an answer. I told her I saw her out there talking to someone.

There were fresh scratches on her neck and when I noticed them she turned her back to me. She began to fix me a plate for breakfast and I snapped. I grabbed at the platter of rotten food and yelled at her, I told her all this shit was rotten. We struggled with the platter between us, spilling the moldy food. I had had enough and pushed passed her and started grabbing bouquets.

I told her it was all garbage, I screamed at my mother that this had all gone to shit but she grabbed at the bouquet I held and refused to let me toss it. We struggled and I shouted at her “Who were you talking to!?”

And she screamed “Your father!” In the commotion the painting of the kitchen that was hung above the telephone slipped off its perch, as if rattled by the yelling, and crashed onto the kitchen floor

“What?” I asked her, in furious disbelief “Mom he’s dead. Dad is dead.”

“You weren’t there! You didn’t see him! You couldn’t even come to the funeral!” She moaned as tears rained down her cheeks. I was holding her by the shoulders at this point and she was clawing at me.  

“Dad is dead mom!”

“He’s not! He’s not!” And she was screaming now and crying and I let go of her and I felt disgusted with myself. She recoiled into the corner, surrounded by wilted lilies and flies and crying.

On the floor was the painting my father had done of the kitchen. Someone had scratched in the shadow figure with pencil.

My father was buried in a cemetery, unremarkable in any way. His headstone had his name, the year he was born, the year he died, and Isaiah 34:14.

It was my first time visiting the grave, I was alone. The grass that had been laid over the plot hadn’t taken, so it was dying and turning white. It was the only plot in the entire cemetery covered in dead withered grass. My father’s grave had become a stain.

I didn’t feel like he was dead. I didn’t feel like anything at all.

A waste of my time.

Wendy could sense my desperation in my texts. Even still, she wasn’t free till the after 8 so I held up in a coffee shop and tried to get my head straight with work. I found it tough to focus. Above where I sat was a finely detailed painting of the coffee shop itself, done in acrylic.

I waited there for hours, ordering three coffees before Wendy was free. She arrived an hour later than she had promised, and came in with an attitude, annoyed that I had blown up her phone. Outside it had begun to rain.

“Alright I’m here, what is so important?” she asked, vigorously scratching her at her head.

I told her about my mother. About everything that had been happening. As she listened her annoyance gave way to empathy and condolences. Wendy began to tell me how we all grieve in different ways and I told her this was different.

I didn’t know how to explain the door or someone else in the room. I told her about the shadow on the paintings, my mother outside in the dark, but it sounded ridiculous as I said it and I couldn’t finish the thought.

Wendy looked at me with pity and took my hand.

“When my sister died, I used to have dreams she would come and speak to me. I remember I started crying at the grocery store cause I thought I saw her squeezing fruit. Death messes with us, its hard for us to… to accept it. To let go.” Wendy suggested grief counseling. I told her my mother is too old school to go for that. There was a fly buzzing around us now; goddamnit with these fucking flies.

“I was talking about you. You wont even talk about him.”

I told her I didn’t need counseling, I wasn’t in grief. But she ignored me and bent over for her purse, fishing for a card.

Wendy was telling me how much counseling had helped her while scratching her head when I saw the writhing, wriggling things in her hair. A whole nest of flies was living on Wendy’s scalp, tangled and squirming against the knots of hair. The insects struggled, a few breaking free and flying away from her head.

The rain was torrential. I was soaked, standing there in the foyer looking into my parents pitch black home. I could hear, I could feel the flies, a putrid cloud emanating from the kitchen. The pouring rain couldn’t drown out the insects. Even in the dark I could see the cloud of them, a menacing shifting cloud emanating from the kitchen but spreadin throughout the house now.

I could only see what the night-lights allowed, dimly lit shapes that resembled our furniture. The light from my mother’s room was on when I had pulled up, and when I reached the top of the steps I saw the door to guest room wide open. My father’s rocking chair was still swaying. Above it was the painting of the guest room, the shadow scratched into the doorway where I now stood. I looked down the hall at the light creeping out from my parent’s room.

“Mom?”

The door to their room was ajar and gave way at my fingertips. As I approached, insects flew into my face and crawled from my parent’s doorway. Inside, the lamp was cast on the floor but on, it painted strange shadows across the room. My parent’s bed was defiled with dirt and foliage. A mound of earth built up on bed and spilled out in all directions. The mound appeared to writhe with insects and dead plants, spread out into the shape of a person.

I could hear her, my mother, and from the bedroom window I could see her standing out in the rain. Drenched in her nightgown she was speaking to the shadows before her but I still couldn’t hear what she said. Her neck was bright red with blood, as if it was gushing from below her jawline.

I was running, driven by terror and panic. I burst out the backdoor and into the rain shouting for my mother but she could not hear me.

She was talking to Him. Her pale fragile specter caught in the abysmal rain. I called for her again and she turned to me then. Her neck was painted in blood that snaked down her chest and seeped into her gown. I could see the deep gashes she had inflicted on herself. Black mud covered her wrist and hands, but her fingers were bloody and twisted. She had no color, her skin drenched through and her eyes had rolled into the back of her head.

I grabbed her, wrapping my arms around my mother as thunder rolled above. She screamed in my ear as I struggled, yelling out to the man who wasn’t there. I dragged her inside as the rain beat down on us, all the while she was begging for Him to step out of the dark, to stop hiding. She was screaming herself hoarse as we burst through the door and into the house.

She started swinging at me then. Several of her fingers were broken somehow, and were twisted in pained directions as she clawed at my face. The flies were a miasma, interfering with us and crawling on our faces and in our mouths as we struggled against each other. I shouted for her to stop, I begged her. But Mother sunk her teeth into me, biting straight through my shoulder and latching on with a razor clench. I screamed then, recoiling at my mother’s hold while her teeth sawed through my skin and I started beating at her head with my fist.

I flung the woman who raised me off my person and she crashed into the dark. She stayed huanched on all fours, glaring at me like a wild animal from across the room, my blood dribbling from her lips and chin and mixing with her own. She was panting, illuminated in red stripes by a night-light. I saw her feet were caked in mud, twisted and broken toes like bloody hooves. Flies were drawn to her neck and sticking to the blood.

The bite was agony and I could feel the wound cringing as it pressed against itself and my clothing.

And then everything grew silent except for us. My weeping and heaving, my mother’s crazed panting. The rain had come to a complete and deafening stop.

There was a slam that startled us both, the front door thrown open and out of view. I sat there, clutching my shoulder and staring at the hall. There was the creak of a heavy step and another loud crash.

“It’s him.” Mother whispered.

The rain remained silent as the house moaned and creaked. He made no foot steps but the house bent and whined against His presence.

A wooden pop as it ascended the steps, and then a long whine and click as the bedroom door shut above us.

“It’s him!” Mother repeated. I watched her crawl away from me, unable to stand on her broken feet, and up the stair case as if she was an insect. She was talking to herself, to Him, saying she was on her way. She was so manic I thought she had completely forgotten about me.

But when she reached the top of the steps she stopped and looked right at me. She said one thing to me and when she did I could see my blood on her teeth:

She told me  “We love you honey, goodnight.”

I don’t remember where I got the shovel. I remember driving. Immediately after she told me that the next thing I remember is driving. I don’t know when I grabbed the shovel.

I drove to the cemetery, bleeding all over my car. The rain had stopped and the roads were slick. At one point I thought I saw Him and nearly careened into an 18 wheeler.

But I wasn’t deterred. I got to the cemetery and I went right for my father’s grave and began to dig. Missing the funeral was a mistake, I never saw the body. Never confirmed that he was really gone. I carved out the dirt, soaked to mud by the rain and kept digging. Water from the storm trapped in the earth flooded the pit as I dug, but I didn’t stop. I was gonna see. I was gonna see how dead my father was.

I reached the coffin and was enraged. All this to torture us, to make us think you were dead so that we could fucking mourn you. I bashed the coffin and throw the cursed thing open.

Inside was my father. And he was dead. Oh God he was dead. His body had collapsed and his rotten face sunk into his skull. His head had been split by the gunshot, a window in the putrid mold leaking from the head- his bones gone loose so that the head was tilted forward towards his- Oh God my father was dead.

I couldn’t look anymore- Oh God what had I done- But the corpse remained, dead and dead and dead. Caught in a grotesque state of decomposition- Oh God! Oh God my father was dead!

My sanity could not bear it. I struggled to climb out but the dirt gave way to mud beneath my hands. The pit was flooded with rain water and I could not escape, oh God I could not escape! The dead thing was my father, turned black with rot, features turned to mush as the insides dried and crumbled. Oh God, oh God! He’s dead!

I struggled helplessly in the company of my father’s corpse.

 * * *

So that was about a year ago now. I spent a couple nights in jail for that, still paying off legal fees and having court dates. (Trespassing, breaking and entering, desecration).

No one in my family will talk to me. Not even my mom. I haven’t seen her since that night. I learned through my lawyer that she was staying with my aunts now while she recovered.

Therapy is helping… yeah it is. It’s good, you know, to talk about these things, to get it out there so you can work through them. I hadn’t seen my father for some years, I didn’t go to the funeral. I suppose, according to my therapist that I hadn’t really accepted his passing. That in my grief I still expected him to return to offer closure for all the shitty things he did to us. My therapist suggested that my mother had enabled me, given me alternate option, that he wasn’t really gone.

That’s nonsense though. Obviously. Sitting here in my therapist’s office, hundreds of miles away from my home town and all that bullshit, it’s clear to me. My father is dead. He is not coming back.

But its an epiphany at a cost. I don’t think my father is rising from the grave to torture me and my mother. I know he’s dead. I’m reminded of that by the image of his corpse, rotten and deformed, lingering at the edge of my vision; a shadow in the doorway when I go to sleep.

For more stories from the Nomidian universe, check out Oni Second Edition