yanking her by the hand. Boy, this pisses me off, he fumed. I’ve got a kid for God’s sake. Some chemical company asshole dumps this crap near kids? Yeah, what a world.
“I saw a falling star, Daddy,” Jeannie remarked as they headed back to Smith’s cedar-shingled Colonial. It cost 150k, in a nice cul-de-sac. Smith worked hard for it, and for everything to keep his family comfortable, and then some thoughtless creep pulls a stunt like this. Word gets around and the whole community could go to hell. Smith envisioned the headlines. TOXIC WASTE DUMPED IN STORYBOOK TOWN. PROPERTY VALUES PLUMMET. Assholes, he thought. “What did you say, honey?”
“But it wasn’t really a star,” she enlivened on. “It was that drum. I saw it last night.”
“You saw Star Trek last night is what you saw, miss.” Kids, Smith thought. Then they were back at the house, back to normality. “Dinner’s ready,” he said. “Don’t forget to wash your hands.”
««—»»
He’d reported the incident to the police anonymously; he didn’t need a slew of questions. With my luck they’ll think I had something to do with it. Smith reasoned that whoever had dumped the sludge had brought it down the old logging road on the other side of the treebelt, and that’s what the authorities would conclude.
That night he slept fitfully, dragged in and out of chasms of dreams. He never had bad dreams; his job had cauterized him since med school. Smith was the county coroner, and after so many years of autopsying human grotesqueries atop his Aimsworth pitch-tilt powerdrain morgue table, he could eat a tuna on rye with one hand and fish through gunshot intestinal vaults with the other. No big deal. Tonight, however, towlines of nightmares hauled him through rank mind-muck visions the likes of which his slumber had never before offered up. “She’s eating, Daddy, she’s eating! Isn’t Mommy pretty when she eats?” Jeannie smiled in her Care Bear pajamas, gazing down into the nighted ravine. Meanwhile, Smith’s wife knelt naked at the opened drum. With enthusiasm, she plucked lumps out of the stinking black spillage and sucked them off her fingers. Moonlight shimmered through the trees, a tinseled vertigo. Jeannie’s eyes shined wide as brand-new silver dollars. “Eat, Mommy, eat. I’d eat too but I’m too little.” Smith wanted to puke in the dream. Yeah, bend over and let ’er rip. It was not an easy thing to watch your extremely inhibited wife eat lumps of chemical shit out of a bubbling, odorous mass of toxic waste. No, this was not an easy thing to watch at all. “Oh, it tastes simply scrumptious, dear,” Marie remarked. “You really should try some.” No thanks, hon. That stuff’s probably not on the Atkins’ Diet. “Daddy can’t eat that,” Jeannie was quick to relate, which relieved Smith in his dream-paresis. He seemed to be lashed to a tree, forced to watch this disgusting play of nightmare in his boxer shorts. “The Mother,” Jeannie kept chanting from the hillock’s edge. “The Mother, the Mother.” Freud would shit in his pants if he could see this dream, Smith managed to muse. He fairly understood the psychology of dreams: eroto-societal symbolism, sex-death links, and all that. But— Sex-sludge links? he wondered. What did this scenario say about himself? It came as no surprise when, next, Donna, the lissome neighbor of the dental floss bikinis, traipsed down into the hot ravine. She too was buck naked, and she wasted no time in joining Marie’s putrid smorgasbord. “Donna can eat too,” Jeannie rejoiced. “It’s only Daddy who can’t eat, not here.” The dream seemed to peel Smith’s eyelids off; Freud’s manifestos forced him to watch. Good God, he thought, aghast. Donna and Marie openly caressed themselves in the lump-laden bilge. They were kissing! “Here,” Marie invited. She passed a lump, about the size of a walnut, from her own mouth into Donna’s. “More,” Donna panted. Good God, Smith thought again. Would somebody PLEASE wake me up! Marie, lying back in the black scum, had placed more of the lopsided lumps up and down her belly and betwixt her breasts, for Donna to eat off. “Your husband’s got a hard one for me,” Donna commented between morsels. “Don’t get your hopes up,” Marie laughed back, caressing herself in the slime. “He comes way too fast, and he’s not very big. Sort of like one of those little breakfast links.” They cackled at this remark, like witches breathing helium. Smith fumed in spite of his revulsion. Breakfast link, huh? “God, this stuff is really boss,” Donna delighted. Soon, when she and Smith’s wife had sufficiently filled their bellies, they focused their appetites on each other. Smith was sweating. This was like the lesbian porno flicks they’d shown at his bachelor party, only they hadn’t included curdled toxic sludge in the production. Donna and Marie slithered over one another in the muck, beslicking their bodies. They shined like black human lacquer. “Isn’t this great, Daddy?” Jeannie inquired, clapping with glee in the moonlight. No, Smith thought. This is not great. “Oooo,” Marie cooed. “You do it so much better than my husband.” Smith frowned. Donna’s face, amid a sound quite similar to that of a big, hungry dog tearing into a pile of Alpo, busied itself between Marie’s spread legs…
Smith didn’t know how much more of this he could take. Aw, it’s only a dream, he dismissed. “You’ll have to eat too, Daddy,” his daughter informed him again. “But not here, not at the Mother’s.” What the hell are you talking about, you little imp! Smith thought in a burst of frustration. But then Marie and Donna were drifting up the ravine’s slope. Giggling, they took Smith away from the tree and lay him down paralyzed into the sludge. “Not too much,” Marie warned as her hands roved her husband’s rather flabby chest. “I told you, he comes real fast.” Smith frowned again. When he glanced past his burgeoning belly, he noted that Donna was fellating him, and via a considerable level of proficiency. The coed stopped a moment, disengaging her mouth long enough to chuckle and remark, “You’re right, Marie, it is like a breakfast link!” This infuriated Smith further. What, a guy’s gotta have a leg of lamb between his legs to keep a woman happy? Christ. “He’s close, you better get on him now,” Donna suggested. The sludge crackled as Marie prepared to mount him. But then it was Smith’s daughter’s face that bulged forward, warped in cherubic youth like a fisheye lens. “No!” the demanding little voice echoed. “Daddy’s not ready yet! Daddy has to visit the Father!”
««—»»
Smith spent the next day at work hungover. At least that’s what it felt like, a bezeled drill bit spinning through the pulp of his brain. He’d stopped drinking years ago; he’d opened too many Parke-Davis cadaver bags full of too many mangled drunk drivers, and he’d histologized too many swollen, sclerotic livers too many times. Yet his head pounded all day. Splinters raged behind his eyes.
The dream, he kept thinking. The nightmare.
He saw the heinous black wads everywhere: in the autoclave, in the chromatograph receptacle, on the flat top of the Vision Series blood analyzer and in the morgue table’s stainless steel runoff gutters. He even saw them in the Polar Water bottle, and in his lunch…
But only for an instant.
When he blinked, they were gone.
Backwash, that was all. The nightmare had wrung him out. Get your act together, Smith. He’d bungled two y-sections already today, and had to jink the autopsy reports. Thank God Smith’s clients could tell no tales. He hadn’t been so off the mark in years.
Eventually he dismissed the dream as frivolity, just a lewd mindstage of fear and guilt. Fear that a drum of chemical waste had been dumped behind his house, and guilt from his voyeurism. He felt much better about the whole thing when he called home that afternoon. “The police were out back earlier,” Marie related, “and then some cars with EPA seals came. They took the drum away in a big truck. It was like a movie, men in gas masks and white rubber suits were poking around. They sprayed some kind of foam all around the ravine and left notices in everybody’s mailbox saying that the area is safe and there’s nothing to worry about.” This news relieved Smith fully. The white drum was gone now, and its black spillage decontaminated. End of story.
But not end of headache.
When Smith drove home, he spotted Donna walking away from the bus stop. “Need a lift?” he offered.
“Sure, thanks,” she replied and slid into Smith’s big Buick. Her blond head cocked, though, and she peered at him. “Are you all right, Mr. Smith? You look, like, oh, I don’t know, like you’re all tensed up or something.”
Mr. Smith. Christ, she makes me feel like a dinosaur. “I’ve had a rip-roaring headache all day, that’s all.”
“Well, wait, put the car in park,” she oddly suggested.
“Why?”
She slid right next to him, smiling. “I’ll rub your temples.”
Smith blushed. “Uh, well, uh, you know—I’m kind of like, you know…Married.”
Donna laughed lackadaisically. “Mr. Smith, letting a girl rub your temples isn’t exactly what I’d call being unfaithful.”
