Barton hated cameras because who didn’t. He didn’t have one, or a phone, anymore. But three years ago flesh-eating bacteria consumed several swimmers in the Gulf of Mexico, the bureau chief gave him the lead, and his writing touched average hearts from coast to coast. He appeared on CNN to discuss what he had learned from his talks with the damned. “Nothing,” he said. The camerawoman put her hands to her throat and squeezed.
At no time during this period, high or low, did he call the pregnant woman. He liked her well enough every other weekend, but he liked more often the whirring of a box fan. She wanted him to love both her and child.
One afternoon he had a taste for eel. Few restaurants on the beach listed it on their menus. The sushi place offered a black-and-white roll, but he didn’t trust the Japanese. At last he found a hole in which eel was grilled and served atop mushrooms and rotini pasta.
The waitress could not explain why a rooster had been printed on his napkin. He said the rooster called to mind a breakfast cereal mascot. She said she hated breakfast. He ordered water with his meal.
The victims had come ashore with a tingle in their skin. Their bodies pinkened and bubbled. Friends and onlookers stepped aside. The woman did not talk at the hospital, though doctors assured Barton that the bacteria had not yet reached her voice box. Her right leg had been disappeared already. Her other limbs soon followed. Then she died, as did a man and a child. Not a family, but they could have been. They bore some resemblance to one another by the end.
His entrée had the appeal of a blown tire. He guessed that the eel had been microwaved between fifteen and twenty minutes. She refused to take it back. He stood. She said her dad was a cop. He sat and ate.
The walls were papered with ads for roommates and junk cars. Above a light socket, though, he spotted portraits of the embryological development of a chicken. He knelt before them. They charted its growth from doughy nothing to alien doll to nearly bird. He imagined it born, used, eaten. The waitress touched her shoe to his back. She was ready to settle the check.
That evening his stomach wrung itself like a towel. Both his head and his mattress seemed full of water. A hundred-thousand moths fluttered up from the A/C vent. They died in his box fan. He couldn’t brush his teeth clean enough. He crawled into the tub, where he stayed for a good while before removing his shoes. Then he felt ready to explain the key ways in which he was bereft. He staggered into the hall. His neighbor wouldn’t let him use her phone. Fine, fine, fine. It almost was. He might have said “bereft,” but to whom? He could not remember the pregnant woman’s name, much less her number.
Marcus Pactor wrote the short story collection Vs. Death Noises. His recent work has been published in TheEEEL, Heavy Feather Review, and Menacing Hedge. He lives with his wife and children in Jacksonville, FL.
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–Art by Menerva Tau