A Deceased Leech

Rudy

Rudy pulled off I-75 at the Williamstown exit. He wasn’t very far outside of Cincinnati; not at all distant from the third-floor sanctuary of his bedroom at his friend’s house in Latonia, but he needed some gas. Rudy didn’t trust his dessert-tan, 1993 Toyota Camry to make the drive around the southerly side of the circumference of 275 – the bypass encircling the greater Cincinnati area.

Crows cawed as he made the right turn off the exit onto Wainscott road. Scattered trash rolled across the street like a dancing tumbleweed – a flipping, flailing ballerina bag of empty Cool Ranch Doritos. Looking up, Rudy saw a large billboard – white block letters on a black background:

HELL IS REAL, it said with authority.

Rudy pulled into the Marathon gas station and exited the vehicle. He grabbed the remnant of previously devoured breakfast – a lone banana peel – from the gunk-encrusted passenger-side cupholder and threw it into the trash can next to the gas pump. He pressed regular/unleaded, shoved in the nozzle, clicked it on, and then walked inside the building. Rudy had to piss like a Kentucky racehorse. He also needed some coffee.

After exiting the grimy, foul-smelling restroom, Rudy was stopped momentarily by a large map of Central Kentucky painted on the wall.

“I’m here,” thought Rudy, “And Abry is here. Latonia is right here, just south of Cincinnati.”

Rudy loved maps. He was so impressed with this map on the wall. He wished he could travel to every one of these places, just teleporting everywhere – seeing everything!

Rudy grabbed a cup of coffee – Colombian dark roast, with two individual packages of coffee-mate Irish crème – and walked to the counter. Sliding his coffee across the counter, which wobbled as if to spill, he looked at the salesclerk. She stared back apathetically, not touching the steaming beverage.

“Shit!” Rudy thought, “She doesn’t need to scan that!”

He removed the coffee from her vicinity and inserted his card into the chip-reader. It declined.

“I’ll be right back,” he said, backing into the snack aisle and pulling out his phone.

He grabbed a bag of Combos while making the call – the pepperoni kind, the best kind.

Sonia

Sonia’s phone buzzed again and again from within her purse. Music blared out from inside, it was the ringtone she had chosen for all her immediate family members – Hooked on a Feeling, by Blue Suede. Its tribal chants blared percussively throughout the room.

It was always so jarring, but she never forgot to answer her phone when her husband, or one of her children, called. Plus, the chants were followed by beautiful brass and melody.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hey, mom,” said Rudy.

“Hey! What’s up?”

“I’m at a gas station, on the way home, and my card declined.”

“Why did it decline? Didn’t you work mowing grass all summer?”

“Yeah. I don’t know… I guess I spent it all. It declined.”

“Well, I’ll send you over some money, just give me a second. How much do you need?”

Rudy

Rudy shoved his phone into his pocket. He walked back to the counter, slid across the bag of Combos (which did need to be scanned) and looked confidently at the zoned-out salesclerk. She didn’t care about his financial change in fortune.

Rudy turned the key and ignited his Toyota, which upon starting squealed like a screaming ghost-swine. It always did that – the serpentine belt would never stay tight. Rudy had gotten it checked numerous times, and a couple of months later, it always went back to squealing. It was so embarrassing, but Rudy had learned to live with it – it was the only car he had, after all. He was no mechanic – it would be fine.

The Toyota shrieked its way out of the parking lot and back onto the interstate, ceasing its wail once Rudy had revved it up over about forty miles an hour. He flipped on the local alternative rock station – 100.7 The Project – and turned up the volume. It was Running Up That Hill, but not the Kate Bush original, it was the Placebo version. Rudy turned up the volume to max and rolled down the window.

Rudy lifted and then removed the plastic top of his coffee, throwing it spinning counterclockwise to the passenger’s side floor. The cup was still piping hot, but Rudy didn’t care – he needed it. It had been a long weekend, and he was struggling to stay awake. The cup was filled to the brim with swirling, cloudy liquid, and some of it spilled when an abrupt gust of wind pushed the small Toyota across highway – from the furthest lane right briefly onto the vibrational sleeper-lines of the shoulder. More coffee spilled with the car’s rattle across the bumps.

“Fuck,” thought Rudy, veering back onto the road, finally lifting the cup of coffee. While raising the Styrofoam to his lips, he saw in the rearview mirror a semi-truck barreling down the road – its towering cargo wobbling back and forth in the blasting wind.

“Oh, shit!” said Rudy. He veered hard left, attempting to dodge the speeding truck, which hadn’t slowed and didn’t appear intent on doing so.

Rudy was so close.

The truck clipped the back end of the Toyota, throwing the small vehicle spinning into the guardrail on the opposite side of the highway. It struck the railing and flew over it, then corkscrewing downward into the brush of the nearby wood. From within the vehicle, Rudy’s eyes were wide. Hot coffee from the opened cup sprayed all over his face and clothes, but though it was steaming hot, he didn’t notice – he didn’t have time to notice. He didn’t have time to do anything.

The rolling car then struck a tree. Glass sprayed out onto the colorful fall foliage – an infinite collection of jagged, autumnal windows – startling but not injuring a nearby squirrel, who bobbed his tail up and down rhythmically, gave a couple hoarse barks, and scrambled frantically up the tree.

Rudy, unbelted, himself sprayed out with the glass, painting the previously seasonal foliage red with blood and pieces of bone. He died instantly – the thick trunk of the elderly tree saw to that.

Back on the highway, the truck corrected and managed to right-ship. The driver’s heartbeat was up – likely more so than his doctor would advise – but he was unhurt. He grabbed a Pall-Mall Orange cigarette from the pocket of his sweat-stained tee-shirt and continued speeding up the hill, northward toward Cincinnati.

Sonia

It had been months. Sonia had been a recluse since her son’s death. She had shut herself off completely, talking to no one – not her husband, her siblings, or her remaining children. She hated talking to people. Conversation required thought, and she had tried ceaselessly to prevent herself form thinking about anything – anything at all. Thinking brought memory, and memory brought pain.

She stirred at her thick bowl of oatmeal while sitting miserably at the dining room table. It was five-thirty in the morning, usually her favorite time of the day. It was such a perfect hour – cool, dark, quiet, though alive with the activity of the wildlife. She didn’t care about that sort of thing anymore; she only awoke early by habit. She didn’t like oatmeal anymore, either. She still made it the way she liked it; with fresh oats, whole milk, a heaping spoonful of brown sugar, and a dash of cinnamon, but she did that only by rote as well. Flavor still existed, she assumed – food was still necessary – but it meant nothing to her.

She took a bite. Its taste was pointless. She could barely even register the lumpy texture or the fragrant cinnamon. She looked out the nearby window. It was still dark – it would be for another hour or so. She saw in the side-yard – in between her house and the neighbor’s – a raccoon sifting bandit-like through the neighbor’s trashcan. She didn’t care about that. Raccoons needed to eat, too. She wondered if they tasted their food – if they cared about that sort of thing. The neighbors would be angry, but such was life.

She stared vacantly at the painting on the wall opposite her place at the table. It was so complementary against the maroon-painted wall of the dining room. It was a Van Gogh print copy of the shifting waters of the IJ bay surrounding Amsterdam – so fluid, so dark and unreal. That’s how Sonia felt. She had bought the painting simply because she liked the colors and needed something to fill the wall space, but now she felt as if she better understood it, though it wasn’t good to better understand it. Life was torture. Experience was pain. Van Gogh knew that.

“Hey mom?” came a voice from around the corner, in the kitchen. Neither of her remaining children were currently visiting – it couldn’t be them; who was it?

“Yes?” said Sonia uncertainly.

“I…” the voice continued, “My card declined. I might need some money.”

Sonia was confused. Was she crazy? She abandoned her bowl of now lukewarm oatmeal and stepped cautiously into the dark kitchen, making her way to the switch and flipping on the light. No one was there – the only new movement the counterclockwise spin of the fan, which came on immediately at full blast, rattling around as if to detach from the ceiling and decapitate her. Collected dust sprayed from the tops of the wooden blades and floated to the floor.

“I need to pull myself together,” Sonia thought to herself.

“I need some money, please,” came the voice again, this time right in front of her face.

She could feel hot breath – noxious, coffee-infused breath – from just in front of her. She felt the rhythmic push of the rancid breath – it continued.

“Huh?” she said, “What?”

“I’ll check back later,” said the voice. It was then gone.

The fan spun, clanking chaotically against its brass encasement as Sonia stood vexed atop the well-worn tile of the kitchen. She walked back to the table – to her bowl of oatmeal – but she didn’t eat it. It was mostly gone! Something else had scarfed it down. Sonia looked around – a window into the side yard was open. Sonia liked the cool morning breeze; she always opened a window.

“Damn raccoons,” she said to herself, sitting exhaustedly back down at the table. It was going to be a long day, as it always was.

Rudy

Rudy was dead – he was certain of that. “I am certain of that,” he said wordlessly to himself. Or was he? What the hell was going on? One instant he was spinning off the side of I-75 and the next he was… wherever the hell this place was. All he knew was that he needed some money – his card had declined; he was broke.

“Broke as a joke,” thought Rudy, “That’s what I am.”

He moved around in that swirling, foggy space. He couldn’t see very well – only dark, perfectly geometric shapes amid an otherwise chaotic, spinning blackness. He didn’t feel bad – not necessarily – but he didn’t feel good, either. He felt mostly nothing. He needed some money, though. He was broke as a joke.

He came into contact with something living. He couldn’t see it – it looked only like a cloudy, unhappy, whimpering shadow -- but he recognized it emotionally as his mother.

“I’m broke as a joke,” again thought Rudy from the void.

He asked the being identified as his mother for some money, but she didn’t give him any. He could read her emotions, though – he inhaled them like an otherworldly vacuum – they affected his own feeling. Though Rudy’s base-emotion was now one of complete apathy, he could still suck like a leech the emotions of the living. He noticed that with this mother-spirit. She was at first sad and detached, though upon recognizing his presence, she shifted emotionally into a paranoid state of uncertainty, though with a pinch of excited anticipation. Rudy consumed these emotions greedily, though he didn’t know why – he didn’t like them. He wanted her to by happy. The ripples of her emotion nonetheless sustained him. He felt full. He still needed some money, though. He wasn’t really sure why – he knew that he could no longer buy anything – but he was broke as a joke. That much was clear.

Sonia

Sonia dumped the remnant, unfinished oatmeal into the sink, then flipping on the garbage-disposal. It ground and coughed like a sick robot, greedily chewing up the food she couldn’t bring herself to eat.

The day was beginning to brighten. Sonia walked to the backdoor and looked through the dirty, double-paned windows to the outside. Birds were chirping, fighting amongst themselves for the abundant food at the feeder. A chickadee – its head darting spasmodically – grabbed a sunflower seed and flew in that wavy, floating chickadee way from the feeder to a nearby lounge chair. It stuffed the seeds into a crevice in the chair – savings for later. From the ground, a bulbous dove hopped around in the grass, picking in the dirt at seeds dropped by the other birds. It cooed, it’s eyes alight with innocence.

“Doves are such good people,” said Sonia to herself monotonously.

Sun pierced the window into Sonia’s eyes. She winced, turning from her watchful place at the backdoor. Her husband wouldn’t awake for a while, she knew. He had stayed up late last night, moving the TV out onto the back patio so he could watch the Kentucky Wildcats football team around the firepit. Sonia, though not staying up for the full game, had checked the score. The Wildcats had beaten the Florida Gators again – that made it back-to-back years! What a strange world.

She then grabbed her book and stepped out onto the side-porch, sitting heavily at the swinging, rusted glider. She was reading The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho. She had read that book numerous times; she found it inspiring, like an uplifting, opposite contrast to Albert Camus’ The Stranger. She loved that one, too, but it seemed to dark. So final.

The glider screeched angrily as she rocked back and forth. A hummingbird, sucking at the sugar-water in the hanging side-porch feeder, detached itself, glared at her in vexation, and spun off. Sonia couldn’t force herself to read. She loved the book, but she hadn’t been able to interest herself in much of anything – not lately. She stared vacantly ahead to the chaotic wall of foliage blocking the side-porch from passersby on the road. The gigantic, scraggly bush was ugly, she knew, but she loved it – it let her sit on the porch in peace without having random people come talk to her. She was invisible. Conversation brought pain.

She saw a collection of blackbirds fly overhead toward the tall row of yellow poplars lining the backyard. They were grackles – black bodies merging seamlessly into indigo heads. Beautiful birds, but her husband hated them. He for some reason associated them with crows – couldn’t tell the difference, she guessed – and crows shit all over the backyard.

Clouds covered quickly the previously bright morning sunlight. Thunder rumbled like an upset stomach from the suddenly swirling gray clouds.

“The sky is ill,” thought Sonia. “It’s going to regurgitate all over us today.”

Rudy

Rudy flew around on the side porch near where his mother sat swinging. He wanted to communicate with her, but he had no idea of how. Being a spirit was still new to him. He noticed the sudden change in the weather. Rudy liked storms – he liked thunder and wind. His mother shivered. He wondered if it was from the weather, or from the presence of his spirit. He had heard that ghosts did that – made people chilly, but he wasn’t sure whether that was just a bunch of bullshit or not. It probably was.

Lightning flashed. Rudy’s being – of whatever it was at this point constituted – detested the lightning. The sudden, momentary brightness combined with the static traversing through the air – its electricity moving through beads of moisture in the air like a connect-the-dots game – pained and infuriated him. “Fuuuuucccck,” he wailed in misery.

His mother jumped at the sound of Rudy’s moaning voice – the glider shook and creaked.

Cloud-cover again consuming the skyscape, Rudy was mostly blind. The world, to him, was already a dark place, and the quick flash of lighting, combined with the subsequent darkness, had rattled the vision of his ghostly eyeballs like the flash from a powerful camera. He felt around with his cold hands, briefly brushing across his mother’s shoulder. She jumped again. He knew it was her.

“Money, please,” he said, “I’m broke as a joke.”

Sonia

Something weird was happening out here. Sonia, previously incapable of any sort of real emotion, now felt suddenly startled. She was scared, but also curious. There was an answer to what was happening – some misunderstood form of communication.

The clouds swirled. Thunder rumbled. Rain started – at first only a drizzle and then erupting suddenly into a heavy torrent. More grackles fled to the safety of the backyard canopy. Sonia turned over-shoulder to watch them go. She noticed in the middle of the backyard – not yet to the safety of the large poplar trees – a circular collection of crows. Not grackles, but real, big squawking crows. They were being pelted by the downpour, unblinking in their apathy, their wiry legs planted in the soft mud like skeletal hands wrenching upward out of the grave. She respected crows – such intelligent birds – but she had never seen them commune so geometrically perfectly like this. Especially not in her backyard.

Another group of crows gathered in the backyard, forming another outer ring around the first. The wet, rain-beaten grass in the middle of the ritualistic-looking circle began somehow drying up and withering away – turning to fossilized dust and blowing like chalky smoke up into the pushing wind.

“What the hell is going on back there?” thought Sonia. She lifted herself off the glider, pushed open the curtain of foliage created by her protective bush, and stepped out into the driving rain. Her curiosity was getting the best of her, and this was the first time she had felt curious about much of anything in quite a while – she had to see what was going on back there.

Rudy

Rudy found himself in the middle of the backyard, now surrounded by an ever-growing, circular collections of crows. The grass below his ethereal figure was crackling and sizzling, then becoming scorched and dying. Rudy was confused – he wasn’t sure how he had gotten to the backyard; it was as if he had been drawn there like a magnet. He still felt the electricity from the lightning surging through him. He was already dead, he knew that, but he still – for some reason – felt afraid.

He was also broke as a joke – that much was clear.

Looking to his left, up toward the house, he saw his mother walking toward him, from her place at the side porch, through the downpour.

Sonia

Sonia’s clothes were quickly drenched. She was still wearing her pajamas – an Abry High Blue Herons hoodie and a pair of Kentucky Wildcats sweatpants. She had flipped her hood up, but it didn’t much matter – her clothes were heavy, totally soaked.

More and more crows gathered at that spot in the middle of the backyard. The eye of the murder – that sizzling circle of grass, continued burning. Sonia noticed static energy surging up and swirling around in that place like some sort of alien orb. She should have been afraid, but she didn’t have much of a reason to fear anything anymore – she was still curious, though.

Arriving at the edge of the circle, the crows parted as if expecting her, creating an aisle through the swirling, feathery miasma. The smoldering, ashy dirt at the center of the circle then erupted with a whoosh into a rising flame, like an ignited gas-range stove. The flames merged with the darting, continuous static and exploded into a sudden, blinding flash of white-light. When the light – which had briefly consumed the totality of the previously dark and stormy physical reality – subsided, and when Sonia’s vision returned, she saw spinning amid the inferno a static phantom. The surging electricity outlined within the flames a humanoid figure. The wiry electricity of its skeletal structure flowed like a collection of radioactive rivers and tributaries toward its two bulging, ghost-white eyeballs. The eyes pulsated as if to burst, swelling continuously larger by the second.

“I’m broke as a joooookeeee,” came a pained, anguished cry from the creature. The murder of crows flapped and squawked excitedly, then taking to the air and flying circularly around the entirety of the backyard like an avian tornado. They were ravenous for something.

“Moneeeyyyyy,” came another cry from the ghost.

The driving rain continued. Sonia raised her hand visor-like to shield her eyes from the barrage. She squinted into the face of the creature, seeing within its electricity take shape the face of her deceased son, Rudy.

“Rudy?” she said.

“I’m broke as a joooooke, mooooommm,” said Rudy, still in such pain – so confused, so alone, but incapable of uttering anything other than this singular, pointless request.

The flames continued. The crows began diving like suicide-bombers at the center of the blaze, burying their beaks into that humanoid static. Another instant and everything was gone. The fire subsided, the static ceased – even the wind and rain stopped. The crows, returning from rabid chaos to their more mundane nature, roosted in the canopy of the yellow poplars lining the backyard. Several of them rained liquid bombs of shit down into the yard.

Sonia no longer felt Rudy’s presence. She stood silent, confused, finally falling to her knees exasperated. She breathed heavily. She was alone again.

End