Dead Weight

None of us believed that Harrison had a wife. Sure, he wore a gold band around the third finger on his left hand. Sure, he seemed to be on the phone with her every day at lunch. Yet we had never seen her, ever. Not so much as a picture.

We asked. “Harrison, gonna bring the wife to the company party this weekend? We’d love to finally meet her.” “Hey, Harrison, wanna get dinner tonight with the wives? We’d love for you and Suzie, that’s her name, right? We’d love for you and Suzie to come out with us.”

He always had an excuse. “Oh no, fellas, we have too much to do around the house this weekend.” “Suzie hates going out. She has social anxiety.”

At lunch, the rest of the guys talk. After Harrison goes off to his secluded bench in the courtyard, the rest of us huddle around the microwave to gossip.

“I think he’s got her tied up in the basement, like one of those serial killer guys.” “I bet he’s got a bunch of wives tied up in the basement.” We would laugh, punch each other in the shoulder. How ridiculous.

Except I was cubemates with Harrison. I noticed things. The black under his fingernails. The little stains on his shirt. Sometimes they looked like bleach stains. Sometimes they were darker, a rusty brown on the cuff of his sleeves. And sometimes he came in on Mondays and stunk. Reeked of death and dirt. He would go to the bathroom and come out smelling like air freshener, like he realized the putrid odor lingering around him and out of embarrassment (or guilt), sprayed Febreze under his arms.

One day he smelled particularly bad. He had arrived at the office before me, and walking into our cubicle, I was hit with a wave of stank I imagined would come from Jeffery Dahmer’s own apartment. I gagged but swallowed the bile rising in my throat.

“Seriously dude, whose corpse are you living with?” I had spoken without thinking, but terror washed over Harrison’s face. The connections between the dots were forming slowly in my mind, and as if I was lagging, the ideas downloaded until the complete file formed. Harrison shoved his way past me, interrupting my train of thought and pulling me back to reality. Harrison fled the office and instinctively I followed in quick pursuit.

He was easy to follow. Pretending I was a private investigator, I tailed him, but cautiously. He couldn’t know I was following him, but I’m sure he suspected it. I’d never been to his house; no one had. And yet he led me right to it. Parked a few houses down, I watched him go inside.

His curtains were sheer. I could see right in. I watched in stunned silence as he wheeled someone out from a back bedroom and placed them in the supposed living room. He grabbed them from under the arms and heaved them to standing. Except they couldn’t stand by themself.

There was an oblong box casting an unnatural shadow against the curtains. It seemed as though Harrison was struggling to orient this person–his wife? –into the box. I needed a closer look.

I decided to go around from the back. It was more likely that his backyard had windows that were uncurtained, providing a crystal-clear view into the life of my cubemate. Instead, as I hoped the fence, I was greeted with a gaping hole. A grave sized hole. Gooseflesh pricked my arms as I realized I was peering into a pit of darkness carefully hidden by a man I thought I knew. Turning my head to glance instead towards the house, rather than this yawning abyss, I saw Harrison inside.

In his arms, a grotesque bloated, human-sized doll. He was struggling with it, trying to waddle it towards the box. The opened box, adorned with pleated velvet and pillows: another gaping hole of darkness that chilled the sweat beaded on my forehead. The doll was limp and yet rigid, supported entirely by him. Its head lolled to the side, stringy hair matted and dirty against its stuffed head. Its back was to me, Harrison’s face hidden by the bulk of their body.

Then I realized its hands were black. Rotted, decomposed, bloodless, lifeless black. Unoxygenated, long since dead, black. This was not a doll. The more I looked, realization slowly dawned. Their clothes were tattered, moth-eaten and mottled.

I ran from the backyard to the side of the house and collapsed for a moment, hidden from view. Images burned into my mind flashed quickly before me. Bloated limbs. Rolling head, stiff joints. Dirt. Grimy hair, rotted hands, and Harrison.

Taking a deep breath, I ran to his front yard and tried the door. I wasn’t thinking straight. I needed in– to know the truth. The door was unlocked. Harrison had run from the office in a hurry and neglected to lock the front door. I eased it open with caution. A single creak of the hinges would give me away. Once open, I was hit with that familiar stench of rotting death. It made me gag, as I had that morning. I slapped a hand over my mouth and nose, but the putrid odor invaded every orifice and my eyes watered. She had been dead for a long time.

I tiptoed through the front entry and heard Harrison grunt with effort. He was in the next room. I peered around the corner.

I couldn’t help it. A scream escaped my lips before I could hold it back, and Harrison yelped himself, dropping the corpse. I retched, watching the limbs of that thing contort and snap as she fell lifelessly backwards. My breakfast was now all over his kitchen floor and dribbling down my chin. Harrison gazed at me with holes for eyes. Black pits had replaced the brown eyes I was familiar with. The corners of his mouth drooped, and a snake-like tongue darted out and tasted the air before licking his lips.

“It’s not what it looks like,” Harrison spoke through a fog. I stumbled to my knees, my hands splattering in my own vomit as I fell. “I love her so much, you wouldn’t understand…” Darkness encroached on my vision, and I looked up at Harrison through a pinhole. He loomed large and intense. 

“I couldn’t live without her…” He smiled a crooked, toothy grin. Stooping down, he easily picked me up and hoisted me over his shoulder. My breath came in ragged spurts; I tried to kick, to scream, to do anything, but Harrison was too strong, too used to carrying dead weight. He slammed me into the coffin and a dankness overcame my nostrils. Once again, my stomach lurched and suddenly I was sputtering on my own vomit. My head was heavy. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t sit up…

The lid of the coffin slammed shut and I was entombed in an inky black darkness, unable to take my last breath.

Photo by Robert Nagy: https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-photo-of-man-3173492/