Ignore the Dead by Jay Sizemore

Author:Jay Sizemore [Sizemore, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

12

NAUSEA

The drive home from Elizabethtown was normally just over thirty minutes, but Richard barely made it. Even with his foot to the floor on the WK Parkway, the engine whining like an elephant, truck shaking, he considered making an emergency stop. Swerving into the shoulder and puking in the weeds. The nausea was unbelievable. He had never felt such violent sickness. His stomach churned and moiled; his mouth slicked with excess spit. Like he had swallowed a dozen raw eggs, and somehow they incubated to obstreperous life inside him. Clawing. Biting. Pecking their way through the muscularis, the serosa, trying to dig their way back to the light and the air. These alien chicks weren’t made of mere feather and blood and bone. No. Something sharp and barbed protruded from their flesh. Raw scaly appendages, thorns, for with every movement he knew such stabbing, fervid agonies.

Thought was an impossibility. He was consumed, impelled by limbic desire, hyper-focused. His stomach should be empty. Where was this pain coming from? Was this the cost of Ka? No warning could have been enough. This illimitable thief of reason exceeded all notion of threshold.

His truck wheels slung gravel as he pulled into the drive; he burst from the door, letting it hang open and emit its incessant beeps as he stumbled his way to the trailer, bleary eyed and incoherent with need. Somehow, he made it to his toilet. The vomit expelled itself from him in a torrent of viscous, bile-laced flow, splashing to the shallow water below his face and sending droplets every which way. It came up in a geyser-like surge, between his small winnowing cries. Once. Twice. A third time. Salty tears leaked from his eyes.

It seemed to subside, and left him gasping, dry heaving, his throat working in spasmodic efforts to keep anything that remained inside him from making an unscheduled exit. Strings of saliva hung like drag ropes from the zeppelin of his skull, and he wiped them away with the back of his hand, staring slack-jawed at the contents of his toilet.

He expected there would be blood, maybe, among the yellowish consistency of the liquid diet he had been consuming. Nothing solid could have possibly remained. But instead, the bowl was filled with black liquid. Deep black, like the unexplored dark, used motor oil spilled from a cracked engine block, a syrup-thick consistency of nightmarish ooze that had no business being and no explanation. It stood in stark contrast to the porcelain surface of his toilet, which for reasons unknown was a brown mustard hue that must have been someone’s idea of a joke. He reached for the flush lever, but paused.

Something in the bowl moved.

Richard’s brow wrinkled. His lips pressed a tight thin line.

That’s not right, he thought.

But the liquid in the bowl rippled, its edges lapping up in symmetrical rows.

His eyes narrowed, concentrating, trying to see it again. His heart and his breath seemed at odds with one another. The silence of the trailer felt uncomfortably close as his ears strained, hearing only the tranquil drip of water through a pipe.

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