Son of the Slob

by Aron Beauregard

What measure of mortality remained in the morbid snow globe that I was trapped inside of? It felt heavy and daunting when I estimated. Much of me had given up on the ludicrous happy endings I often fabricated in my mind. The fantasy could never manifest, the dream always mutated into a nightmare halfway through. How much longer can the pain go on? How bad can life get? As I broke the threshold, the weight got heavier. My shoulders ached, my spine compressed, my intestines turned to worms; flailing inside like they’d been lit on fire. I had the feeling…

I can still see my sister’s vessel; bulging eyeball volleyed out of her skull, winking at me while jammed in the grimy heating vent. The darkness in her skull splattered all over. While her soul had finally escaped to go wherever souls go, her pulpy, corrupted cranium was left behind.

He dropped his hairy hand down into the half-filled vase and used his crushing grip to capture a dusty hunk of Beatrice’s burnt body. Harold dropped the entire mouthful of mourning sickness between his jaws.

While I had hope, the facts were the facts. He’d already found a way to eat a dead woman before hitting puberty. Sure, he’d done so inadvertently; I don’t see how Harold could’ve known what was inside that container. If he can’t comprehend basic mathematics, he certainly doesn’t know what an urn is. Yet, still, part of me wonders…

Shelly rose to her feet and began to brush the hard rice grains that were embedded into her enflamed kneecaps off to the ground.

When my eyes reached Harold, I couldn’t help but be reminded of his father. The woman’s intestines were tangled around his body, and her blood was stuck to various parts of him and his clothing. He’d seen fit to remove one of her ribs and sat grinding his rotten teeth against each side of it.

“What about the baby inside her that didn’t even take its first breath? Did he fucking deserve it too?!” Daniel’s voice escalated and he was now trembling like ocean waters. “Maybe… if he was going to turn into one of them little mutha fuckas that run into a platoon with an uncorked grenade after a few years, then, yes! He deserved it! It’s a war, Daniel! Just because it ain’t in the papers and on the television no more don’t mean it ain’t still going on. The shit don’t end… not for you, not for me, not for any damn one. The shit’ll never end.” Morris remained eerily still in the chair despite the unhinged passion he conveyed.

“Seems like she was some kind of fucking whacked out religious zealot. She sexually abused her son, carved up her disabled husband, killed the nun, hacked up whoever that girl is, and God only knows who else. Would’ve probably killed the kid too if we didn’t show up. But after all this… I’m wondering if he’d have been better off dead…” Detective Wells pondered.

“Well, I don’t know if you remember or not, Detective, but the devil was an angel too.”