Mr. Morris Digs a Hole - There Goes The Neighborhood Part 4 (Final)

Content warning: death, attempted suicide, animal death

MILES MORRIS: Narrator, old man (also appears in Meat the Jones’s)

MISTER JACKLES: Salesman of sorts

I lost my wife today. I didn’t know it could happen, just like that. Like God snapped his fingers and took her. I have a bad heart. I thought I’d go first. I never thought I’d have to say goodbye to Wilma.

I just got home from the hospital. My wife is turning cold on a slab by now. An hour ago she was getting the potting soil ready in the spare bedroom where she grows the seeds for the flowers she plants in the garden in the spring. That woman was always digging. There was still dirt in the creases of her fingers when I held her hand at the hospital. An aneurism took her…the kind that kills you SNAP! Just like that.

I smell dirt when I walk inside the house, and my heart clenches in my chest. I’m used to smelling it when Wilma’s in the next room. Now the house is empty. I don’t think I’ve ever been here alone. Wilma didn’t drive—never learned how—so she never went anywhere without me. I’ve never heard quiet like this.

The TV is still on—another reminder of how much can change in an hour—but the sound is turned down. I only ever turned the sound up for the morning news and when Wilma and I watched Jeopardy every night at six. Otherwise it’s just a picture tube that I like looking at when I’m not watching the birds out the front window.

The dirt, the TV. This is my living room, my house, but I don’t belong here without Wilma. I can’t sit in my chair by the window; that’s where I was when I heard her call out. And I can’t go to my bedroom at the end of the hall because I’d have to pass the second bedroom where the dirt is and where her body was, and where there’s still a little blood on the floor. I stand in the doorway for a while, then I sit on the couch—not on my side or Wilma’s, but right smack in the middle. I stare at the TV. Someone is selling something. Someone’s always selling something. It’s all so useless now. I watch, unblinking, until my eyes are so dry and heavy, they close without my help. I sleep.

It's been sixteen hours since I lost Wilma. When I woke up on the couch to more people selling more things, I hoped it was a dream. Then I was disappointed that my own brain didn’t think to bleed while I slept. I could be with her right now, if it was more cooperative.

I drink coffee in the morning—one sugar, no cream—in a light blue ceramic mug that I find beside Wilma’s beige mug in the strainer next to the sink. I don’t know where she keeps the coffee. The kitchen was Wilma’s domain. Just as she never set foot in the garage except to climb in the car, I never entered the kitchen except to eat. I recognize a toaster on the counter, a big jar that says FLOUR. Another jar, smaller than the first, that says SUGAR. Then a third jar, the smallest, that says COFFEE. I take the top off the jar and the rich smell of coffee grounds hits my nose and socks my guts like I’ve just been punched. Every morning I woke up to this smell creeping down the hallway and into our room. Wilma always had a cup waiting on the table between the chairs we sat in to watch the birds out the front window, and we’d sip and talk about how the blue jays made such a mess of the feeder, and how pretty the cardinals were, and ponder how to keep the squirrels away.

I put the lid back on the coffee grounds. I can’t decide if I’ll make a cup. I wouldn’t know how even if I could find the coffee pot. Wilma said it’s something called a percolator. I know it’s tall and shiny, like chrome. It isn’t on the counter. She likes things so neat and tidy. I’ve always appreciated that about her, even if I grumbled when she reminded me to take my shoes off at the door or hang my coat on the rack instead of draping it over the back of a chair, but today that means I open every cupboard until I find the percolator neatly tucked on a shelf to the left of the sink. I set it on the counter, remove the lid, and all kinds of pieces come tumbling out. It’s the loudest thing that’s happened in sixteen hours and I startle at the sound. I leave the pieces on the counter and go put my head down on the table.

My stomach growls and I realize I haven’t eaten since yesterday’s toast at breakfast. The toaster seems easy enough to use. When I feel less rattled by the percolator, I open the breadbox on the counter—conveniently labeled, like the coffee—and it’s empty. Taped to the fridge is a shopping list. We were going to shop for groceries yesterday afternoon, after Wilma finished potting her seeds. Cream, lettuce, chicken, bread. Things I would have to go without for a while. I could drive to the grocery store, if I had the wherewithal to make the trip, but I don’t have any cash and Wilma always wrote the checks. I wouldn’t even know how. If I had gone first, she would’ve been the one staring at this grocery list, wondering how she was going to eat, knowing she couldn’t drive to the store and it was too far to walk. I wouldn’t wish that on her, so I guess it’s better that it’s me left behind to wonder how to live when half the house, half our lives were hers.

It’s been four days since I lost Wilma. Mrs. Crowley, our dutiful neighbor who Wilma always said was sweet on me, stopped over today as soon as the funeral announcement hit the paper. She would’ve seen the ambulance too, and I’m grateful that she hasn’t come by sooner. I could just hear Wilma tsking, muttering something snide about how Mrs. Crowley sure didn’t waste any time, and I had a little chuckle until I realized that Wilma wasn’t really here to say it, and in a few days I would bury her forever.

I was dozing on the center couch cushion when Mrs. Crowley knocked. Though the sound jacked me out of my sleep, it unfortunately didn’t stop my ticker. I clutched my chest anyway because loud sounds always rattled my heart, and I found Mrs. Crowley bundled against the January cold holding a pan wrapped in foil. Lasagna, she said. I took the pan, still warm from her own oven, and my mouth began to water. I hadn’t eaten more than a slice of cheese and a banana turning brown since the toast Wilma made me the day she died. As soon as Mrs. Crowley left, I dug into the pan with a fork and ate myself sick.

I buried Wilma today. It’s been six days since I lost her. There’s still dirt in the second bedroom, still seeds in potting soil that won’t grow because she hasn’t watered them. I haven’t looked into that room because I don’t want to see the dirt or the small amount of blood on the floor from where she hit her head when she fell. I held my breath and stared straight ahead this morning to make it past the second bedroom and into my own room for the suit wrapped in plastic at the back of my closet.

I wonder if the neighbors know about Wilma. They’re a nosy lot, the neighbors. Kids everywhere at all times of the year. So many blasted cats because people leave food dishes on their porches. We had a rat problem three, four years ago. Now we have a cat problem, but no rats. I don’t know which is worse. The rats didn’t poop in Wilma’s flower gardens.

I wonder if the neighbors know about Wilma because, aside from Mrs. Crowley, none of them come to the funeral. A few members of our old congregation paid their respects, and Mrs. Crowley sent me home with a bag of groceries (bread and cheese and a few other staples) but that was all. After Wilma’s sister passed, we were the last members in either of our families. Miles and Wilma Morris, the last in their small, respective lineages. We never had kids, not for lack of trying. It just wasn’t God’s plan, so we stopped going to church since there didn’t seem to be a point, and Wilma used the second bedroom for her flowers—her babies, she called them—and life moved on.

Until six days ago. Until…

I can’t believe it’s been eight days. A whole week and then some. The days pass I in a blur of news and infomercials and Jeopardy at six. I sit on the couch. I look out the window. I smell something off in the kitchen so I stop going in there. My stomach is becoming hollow. For a while the emptiness gnawed, but that pain has stopped. My stomach is a shell. I am a shell. I am not a man. This is not life. This is…something else.

There is something rotting in the kitchen. I finally enter the space that is painfully absent of my Wilma and find that the other casseroles Mrs. Crowley has dropped off have begun festering on the counter. The oldest, the lasagna pan, is covered in tiny white worms. Maggots. Black flies feast on the green and black mold collecting on the others that remain uneaten.  I don’t touch any of them when I open the cupboard above and to the right of the sink where I grab a glass and turn on the tap. My head pounds as if my brain is ten sizes too big for my skull and I can’t take it anymore. If it meant a swift end for me, I’d allow it to continue, but dehydration is an awful, agonizing way to go. There are knives in a drawer. I’m not sure which drawer but I have the time to look. I’ve heard of people sitting in the bathtub and slitting their wrists. I won’t mess with the tub. I don’t want to be found bloated and green three months from now when the cable man comes to retrieve the cable box for unpaid service. And I certainly don’t want poor Mrs. Crowley to lay her eyes upon my naked, wrinkly body if she becomes suspicious sooner. I’d be dead so I shouldn’t care, but I’d rather sit down on the kitchen floor, fully clothed, where the blood will be easier to clean.

It's been twelve days since Wilma left me. I sip a glass of water each day while I think about knives. And pills. And poison. We never owned a gun, but wouldn’t that be something? Loud but quick. Death as fast as a speeding bullet through my aching skull.  I can smell the rotting food from the couch now. I don’t think I have the strength to throw the pans away, even if I cared enough to do it. They rot just like I rot. Inside them, a juicy mess of maggots and festering mold. Inside me, the drying husk of a soulless man who hasn’t the energy or will to end his life properly. I keep waiting for my heart to just give out and it never does. Mrs. Crowley knocks again. Calls my name. I don’t answer and I wonder if she’ll send the police to check on me. What would they find if they broke down my door? I think about going for a knife again.

A knife. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I’m not going to change my mind. I’m slowly killing myself anyway by sitting in front of the television while my husk shrivels around me. I could be lights out, for good, in the commercials between Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.

One more Jeopardy, I think. One more for you, Wilma. Then I’ll be seeing you.

I wait as the contestants tell prompted stories about their happy lives, and press their buttons to answer questions, and bet their money to try to win more. Final Jeopardy is a question about flowers that I know the answer to because of Wilma, and that’s it—that’s my sign that’s time.

The music at the end of the show plays me off the couch and across the living room. Every step is agony. My muscles ache, like they’re filled with tiny knots that pull and stretch each time my feet hit the floor. There’s comfort in knowing I won’t have to make this walk again. I’ll never leave this kitchen, even if my body could carry me back out.

The stench from the rotting food feels warm, on the verge of combusting. It’s thick, like it lives here, coating the air, the counters, my aching husk. I go for the knives, intending to open every drawer until I find them, when the knocking starts. Someone’s at the front door, and I can’t even think to answer it. I can’t walk that far, for one thing. For another, I don’t want anything or anyone to stop me. I bet that Mrs. Crowley called in a welfare check after all. If I don’t answer, they’ll bust down the door before I’ve finished the job. I haven’t even found the knives yet. I haven’t—

“Hello? Anybody there?”

I’m out of time. To my left is the stove and I get a new idea. Something that I hope is quicker.

The pounding continues.

“Hello? Mister Morris?”

“Go away,” I call out, but I haven’t used my voice in days and it’s as dry and flaky as the patches of skin that have been collecting on the couch.

I turn a knob on the stove. It ticks—tick, tick, tick—but doesn’t light. There’s a box of matches on the back of the stove that I don’t need to ignite the burners. Not today. I flick all four of them on, past the ticking, until the gentle breath of natural gas fills my nostrils. I drag the welcome smell deep into my lungs while the pounding at the door continues. I’m hoping to be too far gone to be saved by the time they make it inside.

After a few more breaths, I don’t hear the pounding anymore. There are such beautiful stars in front of my eyes, then the floor rushes up to meet me. I hadn’t thought of the energy it would take to stand for so long. But maybe I’ve had enough to do the job. The room looks funny. Slanted and shadowed. I wonder how that picture above the kitchen table doesn’t fall off the wall at that angle. Or is it me? Am I the one tilted? I can’t feel the floor underneath me or the cabinets behind me. Is this…death?

Or is death a man? The one in the long, black trench coat that’s suddenly in my kitchen. I smile at the reaper, or try to, before the tail of his coat engulfs me and I willingly say goodbye to this world.

“Hey…wake up.”

The voice is far away, echoing around me as if I’m at the bottom of a canyon and the words bounce off the sides before hitting my ears. They vibrate my skin. My skin. I can feel my arms and legs and the pounding in my head—

No.

No, no, no.

“Come old timer, shake it off.”

The voice is closer now. It draws me back from the abyss, that wonderful, perfect blackness that surrounded me. It’s getting lighter already. There’s something hard underneath me, and what feels like a cold pair of hands shaking my chin.

“Hey, I mean it, it’s not time for you.”

A cold hand slaps me in the face. I feel the sting, feel the way my neck snaps to the side, feel the other side of my head hit something hard. The kitchen cabinet. I don’t smell the gas, just the sour, fetid rank of the casserole pans and…something that reminds me of burning garbage.

“Mister Morris, wake the fuck up.”

I jolt, finally plucked from the in-between and back into the kitchen. There’s a mouth just inches from my face, and warm breath—

I gag as the mouth smiles and I get a whiff of something deeper than rot despite rows of gleaming, white teeth.

“There you are,” the gleaming mouth says, still grinning. The rest of a man’s face comes into focus and I think I’m looking at a young James Cagney from his Angels with Dirty Faces days—big eyes, high cheekbones, and serious, pointed nose. “Thought we lost you.”

We? I can’t see around him to know if there’s anyone else in the room. He sits back and I notice the trench coat. He must be an off-duty cop since he isn’t in uniform. Damn the well-check and damn Mrs. Crowley. I was so close.

“Gave me quite a scare. You’ll be happy to know, I’ve fixed your stove. Next time you try to off yourself, it won’t be so easy.”

“What?” I croak.

He smiles. We’re both sitting on the kitchen floor. I hear ticking that isn’t from the igniters firing, but the spinning of the big wheel on Wheel of Fortune in the next room.

“Did Mrs. Crowley—”

“Here, let me help you up,” the man gets to his feet and holds out an arm. I can’t lift mine to grab his if I had any will to get off this floor. “Come on, can’t stay down there forever. You tried.”

You…tried? I don’t understand. He doesn’t sound like a cop. I don’t hear sirens from the ambulance he surely called.

“I don’t want to go—” I started.

“Oh? Change your mind, have you?”

“The hospital,” I force out. “I don’t want—”

“I can see what’s happening here.” The man finds the cupboard with the glasses on the first try, fills a glass with water, and puts it to my lips. I don’t want it, so I close my mouth and shake my head. I want to die, and I don’t want anything else slowing me down.

He raises his eyebrows, his own lips a pursed line of disapproval.

“We need to talk. And to do that, you need to drink this. Now.”

He pushes against my lips until the glass clangs against my teeth and I open, allowing a slosh of cool water to coat my tongue and throat. He lifts the glass so I choke and water dribbles out the sides of my mouth and onto the sweater I’ve been wearing since after the funeral.

Wilma’s funeral.

I start to cry. I’ve never cried in front of another man before, but I can’t help it. I can’t—

“Please,” I sob and he sighs and I can tell he thinks I’m a sad, pathetic man, and that’s okay because that’s exactly what I am. Put me out of my misery, I want to beg.

“Up,” the man commands. “Unless you want to do this on the floor.”

“I just want to die.”

“I know. Why do you think I’m here?”

My eyes ascend up his trench coat to his taut, James Cagney face, those big, knowing eyes burning into mine.

“I won’t go to the hospital. My Wilma died there. I won’t go.”

“We’re not going to the hospital, Mister Morris. No sir.” A smile engulfs his whole face. There’re so many teeth in his mouth. “You’re going south.”

This man, who calls himself Mr. Jackles, gets me to a kitchen chair and sits beside me at the table, close enough I can smell his sickly breath cutting through the maggots and rotting food on the counter. There’s something off about the man. I can’t put my finger on it. The wide set of his eyes, the way he holds his neck, the odor not only from his mouth but drifting off his skin. I can’t tell how old he is. The absence of any lines in his face and hands—and I mean any lines, not even the ones I’d expect to be there—suggests he’s in his twenties, but the look behind his Cagney eyes is something much, much older.

He's put on a pot of coffee. Mr. Jackles not only found the percolator and the coffee grounds but knows how to brew a pot. At the swish/burn of the brewing coffee as it percolates, my heart plummets to new depths of misery that don’t kill me, unfortunately, but close. The sounds—ones I haven’t heard in twelve long days—are a portal back to Wilma, only she’s not here. This…man is…and it’s wrong. All terribly, terribly wrong.

He doesn’t say much until I have a cup of steaming coffee with one sugar in front of me.

“Who are you?” I ask, though I don’t want to know. I want this to be over, whatever this is, and get back to the business of dying. From here I can tell that Wheel of Fortune is wrapping up, but since I don’t know what day it is I’m not sure what program will be on next.

“I told you. I’m Mr. Jackles,” he smiles. He’s always smiling, like this is all so funny to him. “I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, there will be no ambulance. No hospital.”

“Yes,” I say, and there’s something very wrong about that too.

“And no dying,” he adds. “Not yet. Not on my watch.”

“Your…your watch?”

“Drink. It’ll help. I have food coming too. Talk about Mother Hubbard in this hovel. Not a crumb fit for a mouse.”

“A bone.”

“What’s that?”

“A bone. She doesn’t have a bone—” I break off and sip the coffee. It’s like life hitting my body again, hot and bitter and unwanted. “Never mind.”

“Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to fetch her poor bitch a bone,” Mr. Jackles sings. “That’s right. See? You’re coming around. That’s wonderful.”

I take another sip that awakens my stomach, and I know I can’t drink any more without throwing up.

“That means it’s time to get down to business. Not the business of dying—”

The business of dying. How does he know I thought the same thing, those same words, two minutes ago?

“I opened the windows to let the gas out. Hope you don’t mind.” He winks, “Can’t have you dying on me.”

The room spins and I nearly topple out of my chair. He catches me, rights me in the chair, and I say, “I need to lie down.”

“All in good time, old timer. All in good time. Plenty of rest for you after you’ve heard my offer.”

“Offer?”

There’s a knock at the door. My heart plummets again. All of these shocks can’t be good for my ticker.

That alone is worth a smile, if I had the strength to curve my lips.

“I’ll get that.” Mr. Jackles stands and turns, then glances back at me. “Don’t do anything stupid. I’ll just bring you back again.”

I don’t move, and not just because I can’t. It occurs to me that this is my chance to call for help—that whoever is at the door might save me from this man, Mr. Jackles with the Cagney face and cryptic promises. Do I want saving? If I yell—if I can conjure enough voice to reach whoever is outside the door—the police will come, and they’ll take one whiff of Mrs. Crowley’s rotting suppers, and one look at my emaciated frame, and deem me unfit to live alone.

A life connected to I.V.’s and tubes at the mercy of kids who drew the short straw after medical school is probably worse than whatever is going to happen with Mr. Jackles.

Probably.

I’ll just bring you back again, he’d said. What did he mean by that?

The door closes. Any choice I had is now gone. Mr. Jackles comes back in the kitchen with bags full of Chinese food. He starts pulling cartons from the bags and opening them, setting them in front of me. It smells wonderful. It smells terrible. I want to vomit. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to live. Can’t he see that? He uses a plastic fork to stir a pile of brown noodles that smell like soy sauce and the floor of a taxicab.

“Eat,” Mr. Jackles says. “It’s all for you. Except the crab rangoons. Those are mine. I love those fucking things.”

He sits with his carton of what must be the crab raccoons—I have no idea what they are—and starts shoving them in his mouth whole. I think I will be sick. I push the taxicab noodles away from me with what little strength I have in my right arm. Mr. Jackles finishes chewing the raccoon in his mouth and sets the carton of noodles back in front of me. His lips are shiny with grease when he says, “Eat. I mean it.”

“Who are you? And what do you want?”

“Eat. And we’ll talk.”

“I don’t want to eat.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” he says, glancing around my kitchen with a frown. “There are easier ways to kill yourself, you know. Starving to death? That’s slow and painful. And that business with the stove? Not as quick as letting the car run in a closed garage. It’s got me thinking you don’t really want to die, you want someone to save you. Well, here I am.”

“There is no saving me.”

He shrugs. “Remains to be seen. Eat. Now.”

I don’t move. He leans over the cartons on the table.

“Eat on your own or I will spoon feed you until your guts burst with lo mein. Now that’s a rotten way to die.”

I believe he’ll do it too, and I don’t want to go that way if I have a choice in the matter. I pick up the fork and bring a spoonful of taxicab noodles and stringy vegetables to my lips. It tastes like it smells but the beast in my guts doesn’t care how the slickness coats my tongue, it wants more. More. More. I start shoveling it in, my traitorous hands stuffing my face before my brain has a chance to weigh in.

“There. That’s a good man,” Mr. Jackles smiles. He crunches another crab raccoon between his teeth, swallows, then says, “I need you strong, because, like I said, I don’t think you want to die.”

I stop shoveling and am about to argue when he puts up his hand. “No, no. Trust me. Death comes swiftly to the willing, and even quicker to the eager. You, my friend, are neither.”

“I’m not your friend,” I say with a full mouth.

“What I’m about to offer you makes me your best friend.”

I notice, for the first time, a giant black duffle bag in the middle of the kitchen.

“You a salesman?” I ask.

He glances at the bag and laughs. “Very good.”

“I’m not buying.”

“You don’t even know what I’m selling.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not buying.”

“Oh, I think you will.”

He dangles another crab raccoon over his greasy lips before chomping it down and my guts threaten to roll up my throat.

“I can’t…Please,” I say. “Go sell to someone else.”

He chews, swallows, and sighs, putting his elbows on the table and appraising me like he’s deciding on his best pitch.

“Here’s the thing,” he says. “What I’m selling is unique to you. No one else.”

“Unless you’ve got a bottle of arsenic in that bag, I’m not interested.”

He laughs heartily. “You—you’re a funny one. I’ve got something better than that, actually. What if I said I could give you what you want. What you really want?”

“I don’t want anything, except to die. You going to help me with that?”

“That’s not it…you want Wilma.”

He has my attention now. I knew there was something very wrong with this man, and this proves it. Of course, if he read the papers he’d know about Wilma. But the nerve of this stranger, this salesman, to try to capitalize on my grief…

“Get out,” I say quietly. “Get out of my house.”

“And you’d do anything to have her back,” he adds. “Am I wrong?”

“Get out of my house,” I say more forcefully.

“I can give her to you.”

I can give her to you.

And just like that, the kitchen changes. The air becomes heavier, weighing on my skin. The color seeps out of the walls and the yellowed light above the table turns grey. Mr. Jackles is smiling. He’s the sharpest thing in the room, as if everything around him and behind him has gone out of focus. His nose and chin point at me, waiting for my response.

“I can give her to you,” he says again, or maybe for the first time.

“I don’t—”

“You don’t understand. I know. This is a lot to take in.” Mr. Jackles pushes another carton in front of me, this one mostly vegetables drowned in a sauce that stinks like the noodles churning in my stomach. “Try this. It’ll help.”

I shake my head.

He sighs and says, “Listen, Mr. Morris. Miles—can I call you Miles? I sell exclusively to desperate men, and you sir are a desperate man. You lost your wife. You think dying will—what? End your misery? You think you’ll join her? You’ll accomplish neither at the rate you’re going. What I’m offering—what I’m willing to do for you is bring her back. Yes, your dear, sweet Wilma down to the last wrinkle right back here with you, sitting on that couch, cooking your meals, sleeping in your bed, as if she never left.”

“How?”

“Magic,” he grins. “Let me worry about the how. What I need from you is payment.”

“Payment?”

“I’m a salesman. I give you Wilma in exchange for a service.”

I lick my lips. Is he an angel? The devil? If I had gone to church more, I might recognize the man in front of me for who—or what—he really is. Still, I’m curious and find myself asking, “What service?”

“I need you to dig a hole.”

“A…a hole?”

It’s a joke. He’s joking. But for once the man looks serious.

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“It’s not complicated Miles. I need you to dig a hole. You dig the hole, I bring back Wilma.”

“What kind of a hole?”

“A deep one.”

“Where?”

“In your backyard.”

My backyard is the smallest in the neighborhood. Where would a hole even fit? As if reading my mind, he says, “It doesn’t have to be wide. Just deep.”

“How deep?”

“Deep.”

“But it’s winter.”

He takes a moment to crunch on another raccoon before asking, “So?”

“The ground is frozen.”

“I’ll take care of that.”

“What’s the point of this hole?”

“The point of it?”

“What is it for?”

“Ah—good question. Which leads me to the second part of the deal.”

“Second part? You just said I had to dig a hole.”

“Yes, well, I also need room and board.”

“Room and board? For you?”

“For me…and a few of my friends.”

I’m getting tired and we’ve strayed so far from Wilma I’m not even sure what we’re talking about anymore. Mr. Jackles stands and pulls me to my feet.

“Come on, I can see I’m losing you. Why don’t you get some rest and we’ll get started in the morning.”

“Get started?” I ask as he guides me to the hallway.

“Digging the hole, silly.”

I’ve had the worst dream. My head pounds and my mouth tastes like the floor of a taxicab. Wilma won’t want to kiss me this morning—

I roll over and find her side of the bed empty and I realize I’m alone before I remember why. Will it always be like this? Will I always wake up and reach for her?

“Morning sleepyhead!”

A loud voice calls and I yelp when I see the shadow in my doorway.

“It’s about time. Your breakfast is getting cold.”

I sit up and my eyes adjust on the nightmare come to life. It wasn’t a dream. Mr. Jackles is standing just outside my bedroom. I vaguely remember him putting me to bed the night before.

My heels, ankles, and knees protest, and my back cracks in about twenty different places as he helps me stand and pulls me down the hall to the kitchen where he’s disposed of the rotting trays of Mrs. Crowley’s food. There’s a lingering funk in the air from the mold and maggots, mixed with last night’s Chinese and the sulfuric punch of expired eggs that have been fried and put on a plate with a piece of moldy toast. He sits me in front of the food, and before I ask how he expects me to eat it, he apologizes, touches the edge of the plate, and the bread becomes a fresh piece of buttered toast and the eggs golden, instead of green.

“Trust me,” he says. “It’s delicious.”

I’m ravenous so I eat and he’s right. It’s delicious, and I almost forget why he’s here.

“Good, that’s good. We’ve got to get your strength up so we can get started.”

I swallow a mouthful of food with a hot gulp of coffee.

“Get started on what?”

“The hole, of course.”

The hole. That’s right. That’s what this nonsense is all about. I wonder if it’s not too late to call the police. Then I look at the eggs, the bread, how they changed at Mr. Jackles’s touch, and I know that I’m beyond reason here. I know I’ll be digging that blasted hole.

I haven’t been in the backyard since last fall when the leaves needed raking. Today it’s full of snow, except for a path cut straight down to the brown grass underneath leading to a circle of brown grass about four or five feet across in the middle of the yard. A brown tarp is strung above the circle, and at the edge of it, shovels and pickaxes tumble out of Mr. Jackles’s big black bag.

“What do you think?” he asks, smiling like he’s proud of his work.

“You were serious,” I say.

“Dead serious.”

The cold winter air clears some of the cobwebs from my brain and I think it’s possible I died last night and I’m about to dig my own grave. I stop before I hit the circle and Mr. Jackles comes up behind me, squeezing my shoulder and urging me forward.

“For Wilma.”

Underneath the tarp it’s warm, as if the makeshift covering is retaining heat from an unknown source, and I feel a little less like arguing and a little more like digging for Wilma, because somehow I’m going to get her back.

My back groaning, I lift a shovel from the bag.

“My friends are going to be so excited to meet you.”

I push the pointed tip of a shovel into the center of the circle and stop.

“Your friends?”

“The second part of the deal, remember? You get Wilma, in exchange for digging the hole…and room and board for a few of my closest friends.”

“We didn’t talk about that part.”

“Well start digging and I’ll fill you in.”

Mr. Jackles has a carton of crab raccoons in his hand. He crunches on one as I remove the first shovel-full of grass and dirt. It comes out surprisingly easily.

“I don’t have a lot of room,” I say. “We don’t usually have guests.”

“You have plenty of room. And my guests don’t need beds, just a safe place to stay.”

“When will I get my Wilma back?”

“When? Little eager, aren’t you Miles? You’ve only removed one patch of dirt. My friends haven’t even arrived yet. Wilma isn’t a gift. This is a business arrangement. You need to work for it.”

I push the shovel in again.

“So, here’s the rub,” he says, crunching on another raccoon. “Dig the hole. When you get to the bottom, you get Wilma.”

“How do I know when I’ve hit the bottom?”

“Trust me, you’ll know.”

“You’ll tell me?”

“You won’t need me to tell you. When you hit bottom, it’s the end.”

“The end of what? The hole?”

“The end of this whole godforsaken place.”

Mr. Jackles’s first friend shows up in March. I’ve been digging for four weeks now.

After some tense negotiating, we decided that I won’t take lunch outside the hole if digging ends by six every day so I can still watch Jeopardy, how Wilma and I used to do. Mr. Jackles was reluctant to agree, but now we watch it together and he seems to enjoy it. I get the feeling he knows all the answers, just lets me chime in to keep me interested. I don’t like Mr. Jackles much—this is a business arrangement, after all—but the nights are easier when I’m not alone and I’m so tired from digging that I have no trouble falling asleep.

The first friend, an obnoxious punk who arrived one evening in the middle of Jeopardy and talked through the rest of the show, was maybe twenty, skin and bones, bright red hair, a face full of metal piercings, and tattoos of flames—blue, green, and red—covering every inch of his otherwise pasty white skin. Five minutes listening to him whine about how long it took to get here and I am thankful that Wilma and I couldn’t have children of our own because we didn’t end up with one like him. He looked like one shock after another for his parents, every piercing a nail in their coffins, every tattoo a minute closer to death. I want to die more than ever since he arrived.

Mr. Jackles says the kid is harmless. I’m not so sure. Compared to the kid—Firebug, he’s called—Mr. Jackles is a breath of fresh air. Literally. The kids reeks of whatever he’s smoking. It isn’t long after he arrives before the fires start.

The glimpses of morning news I catch while I eat breakfast are about the fires that keep popping up in Plank: at the grocery store, on the high school football field, in a few neighborhood garages. Firebug, who doesn’t seem to sleep, watches every broadcast with sharpened focus—the only blasted time the kid is quiet. I don’t like it and I don’t like him. He’s left so much soot behind on the couch that I’ve kindly asked him to use a metal folding chair from the garage instead. Easier to clean, and Wilma won’t want to come back to a mess.

The only good thing that has happened since that smelly Firebug graced us with his presence is that the cats have been disappearing. Mr. Jackles tore some of the MISSING posters down from nearby trees to laugh at over his crab rangoons (not raccoons as he clarified for me one day). People and their cats, he’d chuckled. I don’t know what’s funny, but I’m happy that someone is finally taking care of the problem.

April brings melting snow and unexpected warmth to the hole and an interesting fellow named Felix.

I’ve just finished digging for the day after a tremor rocked the hole and sent half a day’s work crashing in over my head. If it wasn’t for Mr. Jackles, I might’ve been stuck down there. He helped me out, brushed me off, and told me there was someone he wanted me to meet. I’m fresh out of a well-deserved shower when Mrs. Louis—a kindly, albeit strange old bird—from one block over knocks on the door, and Mr. Jackles tells me to let him in.  

Him?

Turns out our newest arrival wears folks like a suit. Mr. Jackles tells me to get used to it, that Felix—that’s his name—is a necessary evil.  

Mr. Jackles and Felix spend a lot of time talking. Felix has a British accent, as far as I can tell. That’s the weirdest part—hearing that gravelly voice coming out of that sweet woman’s mouth. As if sensing my discomfort, Mr. Jackles pulls me aside and reminds me of why I’m doing this. Even shoves a picture of Wilma in my face as if I don’t think of her every time I push that shovel into the dirt.

I take her photo and sit down for Jeopardy, and they all join—Mr. Jackles on the chair by the window that Wilma used to sit on, now angled toward the TV, Firebug on the folding chair, and Felix wearing the Mrs. Louis suit on the cushion beside me, grinning from ear to ear.

The days get longer in May. Hotter. Mr. Jackles sends a hose down the hole with a nozzle that sprays gently enough to drink from when I’m thirsty. Not much has changed in the last month. I dig. Mr. Jackles keeps me hydrated and fed and tries to hide the fresh burn marks from whatever things Firebug has incinerated in my home. The toaster, a plant from the corner of the living room, the curtains in my bedroom, the small table where I used to set my coffee when I watched the birds. I don’t know how long this has been going on. I noticed things were going missing, then one day I popped inside in the late morning for a break from the heat and saw the black burns on the carpet, the counter, the walls. Turns out Mr. Jackles is as good at hiding the damage as he is at making whatever food I want to appear on my plate at supper. I don’t ask how. I don’t want to know. I just hope this whole place doesn’t go up in flames.

I’d gotten used to sharing the couch with Mrs. Louis for Jeopardy when out of the blue a new face shows up at six one evening. I don’t recognize the man, but he has a British accent and I guess Felix has found himself a new suit to wear.

June is an ugly month. The sun is so hot underneath the tarp I suck down gallons of water from the hose and pray for a breeze, but I don’t think anyone upstairs is listening—not when I’m digging a hole so far South. I sweat so much I don’t pee and the salt stings my eyes as it runs down my face. Mr. Jackles plugs his nose every time he lifts the tarp to check on my progress. Any day now he says we’ll have our next visitor, and that’s one person closer to Wilma.

I dig. And dig. And dig. I’m deep in the hole when I hear the sirens. It’s too early in the morning for that many police, I think, but the sirens don’t stop. I climb the ladder out of the hole—a rickety wooden beast with more rungs appearing every day—and lift the tarp as two police cars screech past my house. Mr. Jackles, in a suit and tie despite the heat, hitches up his slacks and says, “It’s really taking off now.”

“What is?” I ask.

“You’ll see. Back in the hole, Miles.”

I head back down and figure it’s about an hour before the sirens stop. They’re somewhere close. Firebug must’ve lit a real doozy this time. That, or…

I haven’t the imagination for what actually happened. The news is on every station that night. A man named Henry Carver killed his wife and child and the young priest that presided over Wilma’s funeral. I don’t have the stomach to hear how he did it. Mr. Jackles is bouncing off the walls, sharing a bottle of liquor with Firebug, who melts the wallpaper with the careless brush of his fingertips on the wall. They offer me a glass and I take it—not to celebrate but to make it through the night.

Felix doesn’t return for Jeopardy. On one of the commercial breaks, local news breaks in with a mugshot of Henry Carver and I recognize Felix’s latest suit. I drink my liquor but it isn’t strong enough to burn away the guilt. I think of Wilma—and try to forget Henry’s wife, his baby, and the priest while tears spill over my eyes, blurring Ken Jennings and the first Daily Double.

I’m going to hell. I’m sure of it. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Jennifer and Ella Carver—Henry’s wife and daughter. Or the priest that left the world in tiny pieces.

Mr. Jackles says it’s not my fault. Felix did what Felix does and it wasn’t for me to understand or assume responsibility for. I think about stopping. Ending it all. What would happen if I stopped digging or—god forbid—filled in the hole? I’m so deep now it takes longer and longer to climb up the ladder and Mr. Jackles had to extend the hose with his magic, or whatever it is that allows him to change things for my benefit. He’s a pinprick against the tarp when he hollers down the hole to ask how I’m doing. I’m getting so deep I can hardly hear him at all, and every day it gets a little hotter inside that pit.

I’m much too deep now to sling dirt out of the hole. For some time, I’ve been using a bucket on a pulley system to haul it out. It’s backbreaking and time consuming but I’ve got nothing but time and my back and legs and arms are stronger every day. Every time I fill the bucket and attach it to the pulley rope, every time I raise it up and climb the ladder after it, I remind myself of something Wilma said the one and only time I tried potting plants with her.

Slow and steady, she’d said. And that’s how I empty the hole: slowly, steadily. Sometimes Firebug waits at the top to dump the bucket for me, saving me a trip up the ladder. Sometimes Mr. Jackles, usually crunching on crab rangoons, will dump the bucket, if he’s already up there to check on me.

It’s the middle of July when the earth rumbles beneath my feet. I jump on the ladder and scurry up the rungs before the sides of the hole cave in. They hold, for the most part. That night I meet Ulga.

Ulga is the oldest woman I’ve ever seen. Wrinkled skin hangs off her bones, nearly dragging behind her as she shuffles to the spot vacated by Felix for Jeopardy. She smells awful, worse than Firebug and Mr. Jackles, and different. Like…death. Decay. Like her saggy flesh has already started to decompose. I shift a little farther away from where she sits hunched beside me, her lips crusted white and curling back over narrow, green teeth as she smiles at a joke Ken Jennings makes with a contestant. Mr. Jackles is in rare form tonight, spurting every answer to every question before the rest of us get a chance to chime in, like he’s trying to impress this ancient, withered beast, and I can’t for the life of me understand why. She reeks so terrible I think I might vomit, and it’s the first time since I started digging that I go to bed before final Jeopardy.

Ulga only stays with us a few days. Mr. Jackles says she prefers solitude and that’s fine with me. It takes more than a week for the stench she leaves behind to clear. I hear she’s taken up residence in a small house down the block—one that’s been empty for a while. Before long, children’s faces take the place of cats on the MISSING posters in the neighborhood. I try not to notice, just as I pretend not to make the connection to the woman who carts her stinking bones up the street and into my living room at six for the daily episode, gingerly fingering a necklace made of small, white teeth.

In August I start asking about Wilma. Mr. Jackles has been so busy with the new arrivals, he hardly makes time to visit me in the hole and check my progress, which has slowed. It’s almost unbearable at the bottom, the deep summer heat catching beneath the tarp, nearly roasting me alive.  

All Mr. Jackles will say about Wilma now is that it depends on me. I guess he knows I’m dragging my feet. I tell him it’s getting hot in that hole and he warns that it’s going to get a hell of a lot hotter before I’m done. If he’s right, I don’t know how I’ll stand it. My reluctance finally gets Mr. Jackles’s attention because one particularly sweltering afternoon he aims a radio down the hole and plays me Wilma’s favorite music. Sinatra and old Dino always put a spring in her step, and it sets me digging hard again. He also makes sure a giant pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade is waiting at the end of the day, and serves me a bowl of ice cream every night with Jeopardy. I wolf a few spoonfuls down before Ulga arrives because I can’t stomach food with the smell of death clogging my nose. Mr. Jackles still treats her like some kind of queen. I don’t think I’ll ever understand it and I don’t want to.

We’re a few weeks into August when all hell breaks loose.

First, the rumbling in the earth. I don’t make it out of the hole, just clutch the ladder a few rungs up—my lifeline—as the ground shakes around me for what might’ve been a whole minute. Dirt sticks to the sweat on my face and arms, chokes me, stings my eyes. I can’t see Mr. Jackles at the top of the hole but I hear him holler down:

“Get on out and clean yourself up. Tonight we celebrate.”

“I’ll celebrate when I get my Wilma, thank you very much,” I tell him.

“You’ll celebrate tonight. Only two more arrivals to go before you get your wife back,” Mr. Jackles says.

I’ve been digging since February. I spend my days in a pit in the ground. I haven’t spoken to anyone outside of Mr. Jackles and occasionally Firebug in months. Mrs. Crowley has stopped cooking for me—stopped coming around at all, and good riddance. I know she’s peeked over the fence more than once. Has seen the piles of unearthed dirt—the stuff Mr. Jackles hasn’t hauled away yet—and the tarp. Heard the music. She’s probably dying to ask why I’m digging and I wouldn’t know how to answer her if she did.

Mr. Jackles doesn’t try to hide the damage around my home anymore, evidence of Firebug and his carelessness. He doesn’t pretend the creatures I’m unearthing are anything other than foul beasts with no other way to enter the world than through the backbreaking acts of a desperate man. I’m surprised but unimpressed by the latest arrivals—a whole blasted family. We have to bring in all the chairs from the kitchen to accommodate everyone for Jeopardy. Mr. and Mrs. Jones look like they were plucked from the nineteen fifties, all prim and proper and smiling from ear to ear, gracious to Mr. Jackles and to me as they take seats angled toward the screen, keeping a small, childlike thing on Mrs. Jones’s lap (it’s a little girl, but she doesn’t move or smile or coo like any child I’ve ever seen) and a young boy on the floor by their feet. We watch and they laugh with the contestants, and Mr. Jackles gives the boy some of my ice cream, and the kid eats it as if he’s not bothered by Ulga’s smell.

Mr. Jackles says I can take the day off from digging to attend their barbeque, but they’ve invited the whole neighborhood, and I haven’t seen most of them since before Wilma died, and I still hold a grudge that none of them paid their respects at her funeral. By now, Mrs. Crowley has told them about my houseguests, the tarp, the piles of dirt, the digging. I’d rather climb down into my hole than face their questions—which is where I am when Mr. Jackles starts hollering in a language I don’t understand and pulling my hose up. I can’t work without water, so I climb up after it and find Mr. Jackles cursing—in English now—about cats and sloppy work, and when I follow him into the front yard, I see what he’s talking about.

Cats. Everywhere. Screeching, running. On fire.

Some set shrubs ablaze, others have the decency to keel over in the middle of the street, leaving behind a sticky, smoking pile of bones poking through charred flesh and barred teeth. The smell is nothing worse than Firebug—nothing close to Ulga, who I’m not certain isn’t a rotting corpse—and I’m confused why Mr. Jackles is using a hose and not his magic to douse the flames on the burning cats that stumble into my front yard.

“Can’t,” he says when I ask him. “My shit doesn’t work on Firebug. Or—on Firebug’s flames. Not until they burn out.”

I should’ve known Firebug was responsible. More than one shed burned to the ground—or so Firebug brags—filled with mangy felines. I feel a little bad—I want them gone, but this is a truly awful way to go.

“Shit,” Mr. Jackles swears. “I missed one. It’s headed up the block, toward the Jones’s.”

I’m turning back to the hole when Mr. Jackles says, “Grab a shovel.”

“I plan on it,” I say.

“No, I mean go after the fucking thing.”

I squint at him in the afternoon sunshine. Chasing after burning cats isn’t my job. I don’t even have to remind him that, his face changes so fast and so horribly that I’d rather not ask. I pick up one of the spare shovels at the top of the hole and leave my property for the first time in months. It occurs to me as I step off the lawn in the direction of the Jones’s house—which used to belong to the Miller’s—that I haven’t so much as gone grocery shopping or mowed lawn since Mr. Jackles and his band of hell creatures entered my life. Other than wipe my own keester and take my own showers, I’ve been waited on, hand and foot. I certainly haven’t walked anywhere so this jaunt in the midday sun stretches the muscles in my back that have curled up from bending over a shovel all day, every day. I feel exposed out here. I miss the darkness, the safety of my hole. I don’t like the way this place has changed. Kids’ faces plastered on trees. Signs in yards asking about lost pets. Trees and shrubs burned down to blackened skeletons. No flowers either…something I might not have noticed if Wilma didn’t marvel at them every time we drove to the grocery store. Today, all the usual flower beds are withered and brown. For a moment I panic and wonder what kind of world I’m bringing her back to if all the flowers are dead.

I don’t have time to dwell on it because I hear the screams and follow them to the backyard of what used to be the Miller’s two-story craftsman.

“Out of the way please,” I tell the people who have gathered around the screeching feline.  Mrs. Crowley’s there of course, and she asks me what I’m doing.

“What needs to be done,” I say, before I bring the tip of my shovel down on what I think is the cat’s neck, separating its head from its body and giving the poor, flaming beast some peace. Mrs. Crowley hollers at me as I leave but I don’t stop. I have a hole to dig.

I meet Nykki in September. The earth shakes the longest before her arrival than anyone’s. She’s brought six dogs with her.

Hounds. Hell hounds. Mr. Jackles doesn’t try to tell me they’re anything else.

I should stop this. Somewhere deep down inside me is a decent man who knows this is wrong, but I’ve dug a pit in my own body and shoved my soul into it. I’ve gone too far to stop now. I don’t even know if I can. I made a deal with Mr. Jackles, and while I don’t believe he’s the devil himself, I don’t think he’s the kind of man that will let me walk away with my life—my soul—if I don’t finish digging.

I’m in the hole when the hounds get out.

Nykki doesn’t stay at my place. She’s a lovely woman but I’m grateful she’s taken her dogs elsewhere. There wouldn’t be anything left of my home for Wilma to come back to if both the Firebug and the hell hounds took up residence. I hear she’s got them locked up a few streets away in an apartment complex—temporarily, she tells Mr. Jackles—while she searches for an appropriate co-handler. The hounds aren’t supposed to be unleashed for a while, or so I heard. That’s why I’m surprised when alarms start ringing and police cars fly by and people start screaming about crazed beasts tearing the streets apart. Jeopardy just ended and I am heading to bed but I can’t on account of the noise outside and Mr. Jackles cussing up a storm in my kitchen.

“If she couldn’t handle the dogs on her own, why send her up without fucking help?” He whirls on me. “Well, no time to fuck around now. You’ve gotta finish that hole. We work double-time.”

“D—Double time?” I stutter. I’m already working all day. I’m already so damn tired by the time I’m done.

“You want your wife back? Time to kick it into gear. With the hounds out, it speeds up the timeline.”

“Timeline for what?”

“For the boss’s arrival.”

It gets ice cold in my blood when he says that. The boss.

“The others are just here to play. The hounds pave the way. The last arrival is bringing Wilma and he doesn’t like to wait.”

We head to the backyard when I should be showering and getting ready for bed. A spotlight shines into the hole. I dig and fill the bucket. Mr. Jackles raises the bucket and dumps it while Firebug attaches another to the rope and sends it down. I dig and fill the bucket again. The Jones’s arrive after midnight when my bones are about to give out, and Mr. Jones takes my place. I sit on a patio chair outside the hole, the Jones’s strange children playing in the piles of dirt nearby, and Ulga brings me a glass of lemonade that I can’t drink until she shuffles away to play with the children. Mr. Jackles continues emptying the bucket, the Firebug sending another. Mrs. Jones makes more lemonade and brings out food that Mr. Jackles suggests I don’t eat—he’ll get me something else—and on we go.

They throw me back in the hole after I’ve been dozing off for a while. It’s against the rules, technically, for others to dig.

“Not that I’m opposed to breaking the rules, from time to time,” Mr. Jackles says. “But the boss is almost here and I don’t want anything to go wrong. You’ve worked hard. You deserve to get her back, Miles.”

He squeezes my shoulder, the kindest gesture he’s ever mustered, and I lower my bones down the ladder.  

“A couple more feet should do it,” he calls out.

They’re all looking down at me from above. Watching. Waiting. I dig. I think of Wilma. All this has been for her. All this will be worth it.

Exhaustion like I’ve never known threatens to put me down. I worry my heart might actually give out. Wouldn’t that be something? To die just when I’m going to get her back?

The sun is cresting the horizon when the earth shakes and it’s terrible. I grab the ladder, try stumbling up it but the walls are caving in on me faster than I can climb. Dirt spills into my mouth and I’m choking on it, blinded by it, going to be killed by it until I feel hands on my shoulders pulling me up and out, then it’s Mr. Jackles’s hands brushing the dirt out my mouth and eyes. After a few ragged breaths, Mrs. Jones hands me a lemonade and I drink.

When the ground stops quaking, every single being in my backyard puts a hand on me and says thank you. Mr. Jackles helps me to my feet and Firebug grins at me, setting the tarp on fire with the snap of his fingers.

“You’ve done well,” Mr. Jackles says with what sounds like pride.

“Wilma?” I ask tiredly, weakly.

“Why don’t you go on inside.”

The sky is different than any sunrise I’ve ever seen. Dawn of a new kind of day, I suppose. A day of monsters. The ones in my backyard aren’t so bad. They almost feel like friends.

I don’t know why I decide to go in the front door, instead of the back. I think I sort of want to see it—what we’ve ushered in. In the red light of morning, fires burn in every direction. I don’t hear police sirens anymore, but there is a lot of screaming. Glass breaking. Car horns honking. Gunshots. Unholy howling from the lungs of ancient beasts under Nykki’s command.

I flinch when I see Mrs. Crowley’s body face down on her front lawn. She’s missing a leg, probably more. She was a nice woman, but a busybody with the best of them.

My porch light is on. It’s the only light on the street, I realize. My house, the only place unaffected by the nightmare that has landed in Plank. That I’ve unleashed from that blasted hole.

I open the front door. For the first time in weeks I don’t see the damage done by Firebug’s careless hands, smell no trace of crab rangoons or Ulga’s rotting flesh. There’s just…coffee. And something stirring in the kitchen. Something careful and concise. A woman who knows her way around the cupboards and my heart. When I round the corner and see her at the sink, washing dishes that have piled up on the counter, I lose whatever breath had been holding me up and think I’ve died and gone to heaven. Wilma, my love, my life, wipes her hands on a towel, turns to me, and smiles.

I think I smile back before my heart gives out.

Life is pretty much back to normal for me and Wilma.

Well—almost.

We don’t leave the house. I’m not sure we can. Mrs. Jones takes care of the grocery shopping. Wilma still does the cooking. Mr. Jackles takes care of everything else.

In the morning I watch the birds with my wife. Ours is the only lawn with trees and grass, the only safe place for the bravest birds—the ones who haven’t fled Plank—to rest. Mr. Jackles uses his magic to hide the rest of the neighborhood from Wilma. It’s only when he gets busy and lets his guard down that the smell of charred houses and cars and flesh seeps under the door. And it’s only in rare moments when I look past the blue jays and cardinals that I see the rubble. Fires still burn, but not like before. Now there’s a river—something that cracked open from within the earth with the last and final quake—that runs directly past my house, and it flows orange and thick like magma from a volcano. The air conditioner runs all the time now and still we sweat, but Wilma—god love her—doesn’t mind. The heat is good for the plants that have taken over the spare bedroom. Mr. Jackles and Mrs. Jones often admire them. Even Firebug has kept his flames to himself in the presence of my wife and her floral creations.

My Wilma’s so happy to be back that she doesn’t even mind that Felix found a new home within my withered body. He gives me plenty of hours with her throughout the day, time when I’m in the driver’s seat—a gift only possible with his help. I’m fortunate he was nearby when my heart gave out. He’s grateful, I suppose, for setting him free. For setting them all free. I’m grateful that he puts me to sleep during his gruesome, erotic, visits with Ulga. Funny thing, though. With Felix doing most of the driving I don’t mind her rotting smell. Actually, I kind of like it.

We still all meet promptly at six, and for a half hour every day we sit together in a neighborhood that’s burning down around us, safe in our little haven, Wilma at my side, holding my hand, watching Jeopardy.