Pariah

partner. The fifth shot removed the top of Larry’s skull and he collapsed onto the girl’s remains. Abe spat bile onto the floor, took a gulp straight from the bottle of Cutty Sark, swished it around, then spat again.

“Okay,” he said, affecting as much calm as possible. “Okay.”

He wiped his mouth with his hankie, took a box cutter and sliced open one of the myriad boxes of his unsold stock of Baby Sof’ Suit^® infant winter onesies. “Okay,” he said, “time to redeem yourselves.”

Five-foot-five Abe, with his thirty-inch waist, stepped into an XXXL pair of Bender’s Breathable Sub-zero Shield^®Sooper-System™ Weather Bibs, a double-insulated hunting overall for fatties who like traipsing off into the wilderness to shoot helpless critters. Leaving the bib down, Abe began stuffing onesies down the pants, padding himself from the ankles up. When he’d reached maximum density he pulled up the bib, heaved on the matching camouflage parka, and stuffed in more onesies. With the hood cinched tight around his scarf and a pair of snow goggles, Abe resembled Santa Claus geared up for combat.

“Okay,” he said again, this time muffled, “let’s go home.”

July, Now

Flat on his back, Dabney lay awake in the open, the sky above him a slab of starless slate. No clouds differentiated the opaque murk that hung above, but it wasn’t a rich blackness, either. It was grayed out, lifeless. Stars would be nice. Maybe the moon. Something. Instead there was nothing, nada, zip. How could that be? Maybe his eyes were going. Beneath him the silver-painted tar paper was lumpy and hot, still retaining the heat of the day. He felt the texture with his thick fingers, creased and peeling, much like his own skin, which was sunburnt from spending all his time up here on the roof. Let the others rot in their apartments, he figured. I’d rather rot in full sight of God.

Dabney touched his forehead and plucked a strip of his peeling skin away and pressed it onto his tongue, tasting his own acrid saltiness on the paper-thin jerky substitute. He let the rind sit there for a while, building up sufficient saliva to swallow it. He knew this was disgusting behavior, but so what? He was doing a self test of what senses he could stimulate. Taste: check. Touch: check. Sight: negative. Hearing? All was quiet above and below so Dabney forced an acidic burp. Check. Smell?

Smell.

Smell had taken a beating in recent months, not that smell had ever been his favorite. The nullification of smell was sort of a blessing, given the circumstances. So, three out of five, for the time being. Morning would come and sight would soon return to the roster.

Four out of five.

Not bad.

“Jesus, even a little air movement would be an improvement. Movement. Improvement. A breeze through the trees would please as it rolled over my knees like a disease or honey from bees and it would ease my… my… Fuck. Lost it.”

With the rhyming game over, Karl rolled over on his side; the mattress where he’d been lying was damp with perspiration. Moisture he could ill afford to lose. Karl stared at the wall, or at least in the direction of the wall. It was so dark he couldn’t see it, but it was there, a thin layer of protection between him and them. And he wasn’t even thinking about the big them. The capital T them. He was just thinking about the them that constituted the others in the building. His neighbors.

All the windows of apartment 5B were open but you’d never know it, the air was so still it felt like a vacuum. Karl inhaled deeply through his nose, some buildup within the nasal passage creating a high-pitched whistling noise. He breathed in, out, in, out, changing the tempo, attempting to negate his insomnia by nose whistling some half forgotten pop tune, the melody of which had come unbidden from the depths of his subconscious. What was that tune? Now he began to hum it, a ditty sans lyrics. But there were lyrics. He knew that much. This was killing him now. The more he hummed, stretching out the notes, the less the words came into focus. This was killing him. Well, not really. But it wasn’t helping.

Weighing, like, a hundred or so pounds was killing him.

Being dehydrated was killing him.

Not sleeping was killing him.

The earworm was merely aggravating.

With internal creaks and pops belying his actual age of twenty-eight, Karl swung his legs over the side of the bed and touched his toes to the bare wooden floorboards, which were as warm as everything else. What kind of world was this where even the floor was tepid? Floors were supposed to be cool to the touch. Even in summer.

Before stepping from the bed, Karl groped at his night table for matches. Though he was loathe to strike one and add to the heat even a little, he was more averse to stubbing his toes or tripping over something. After living in this apartment for the last few years you’d think he’d know the lay of the land, even blind. But he didn’t. His sweaty palm found the book of matches and Karl snapped one into life, the brightness singeing his eyes for a moment as they adjusted to this pinprick of light in the absolute dark. The small dancing light found the blackened wick of one of the candles, which sputtered to life, creating a pool of comforting incandescence.

Karl had lots of candles, gifts from his mother, aunts, grandma, and past girlfriends. Even female coworkers- Secret Santa crap. What was it with women and candles? He’d gotten them as gifts, pretended he’d appreciated them, then thrown them all in a box in his closet. Now he was grateful for them-except the scented ones. He’d learned that lesson the hard way. The fresh, fruity, cinnamony, flowery aromas reawakened his dormant sense of smell, unfamiliar odors rousing the olfactory receptors, which in turn refreshed the revulsion from the overwhelming tang of rot outside. It had only taken one Apples ’n’ Spice candle to teach him his lesson. He’d lit the wick, basked for a moment in the delicious bouquet, and then puked from a crushing whiff of the ceaseless alfresco parade of putrescence.

So, unscented.

In the light Karl could make out the trappings of his bedroom. The posters on the wall-Kiss, Slipknot, Metallica, Judas Priest, Ozzy, Motorhead, Korn-reassured him, though none of those bands was responsible for the rogue melody assailing his brain at the moment. What was it? Familiar yet unfamiliar. It was sort of pretty in an annoying kind of way.

Karl’s eyes roved to The Wall of Beauty, a veritable tapestry of pinups, centerfolds, magazine clippings, and most personally gratifying (and now, in retrospect, most painfully sentimental), Polaroids from the good old days when he was “getting some” and could occasionally convince his conquests to pose for him in the raw. When things had been different he’d been discreet and kept these pix salted away in a private place, but now? Now they were on permanent display.

Karl got up from the bed and shuffled over to the wall. The flickering candlelight made the images seem to writhe. Though there was some mild twitching south of his personal equator, it was insufficient for the purpose of autoeroticism. Eroticism! What a joke. Is there anything less erotic than jacking off before an altar of two- dimensional representations of nubile flesh? Of any flesh? In this case, dead flesh? All dead. At least Karl assumed they were all dead. So, did whacking to these beauties’ images constitute virtual necrophilia? Back in the day, one of Karl’s fave porn starlets offed herself. Consequently, his massive cache of videos in which she’d appeared became anathema to his libido. He gave the tapes away to a friend less burdened by… what would that be? Sentiment? Conscience? Ethics? Empathy? Plain old decency?

Decency seemed an antiquated concept. So when he could work up the energy these days, he spanked to dead ladies. Were there any other kind?

Karl ran his fingertips over some favorite images. Long of leg, wide of hip, narrow of waist, all with come- hither eyes. His prize was the Polaroid of Dawn-Anne McCarthy, his junior high crush. He’d run into her years after they’d graduated, on line at a store here in the city. Her disdain for him in junior high had vanished and for a few dazzling weeks they’d fulfilled every last one of his adolescent fantasies about her, and several his pubescent mind