The Slob

Numerous night-sweats sourly scented Sara’s thin summer sheets. The sun fought through the grime on the arching window, filtered in past the crusty screen to settle on her sleep-creased face. She reached out to the shaky nightstand beside her, paddling about for her phone to see what time it was. No new messages. No missed calls. No big surprise. She rubbed the dust she found down the side of the mattress with a yawn, taking in the fact that she had slept through her 10am alarm. Or she’d forgotten to set it. Either way.

The blue indicator bristles on Sara’s splayed toothbrush had given up months ago, resigned to being ignored. The only color on the bristles now was from bacterial colonization. She was fairly sure toothpaste killed that stuff. Sara pulled her fingers through her dark hair, noting the way it clumped together. It was darker than it should have been, the strands clinging together and not allowing light to filter through. Her highlights were made of dandruff rather than dye lately. She reasoned that showering too often was bad for your microbiome. Sara’s microbiome was rapidly becoming a macrobiome. She was testing whether or not her deodorant’s claims of lasting 48 hours were true or not. At hour 39, it seemed to be false advertising.

In the kitchen, Sara bent down to swipe some lost hairs and crumbs off the soles of her feet where they tickled and prickled her skin. Easily remedied. Sara shuffled to the leftover laundry on top of her washer and dug up a pair of socks. She noted that there was one more pair of underwear available before she’d have to start turning them inside out to squeeze another day from her supply. Safe from noticing anything else she stepped in, Sara moved uninhibited through the kitchen. Letting the dishes soak had devolved into an aquarium project of sorts; the question evolving from how long can a pot sit before rusting through, to how long does it take wet scrambled eggs to produce new lifeforms? It already smelled like the fish tank too murky to tell if the fish was still in it or not. Sara paid fleeting mind to the swampy environment before picking up the open box of cereal bedside the sink, plunging her hand into the Frosted Cheerios and ignoring the O’s that escaped her clutches on the way to her mouth. She sat down at the small, round table near the small, square window of her breakfast nook. Breakfast nook was what had been in the townhouse’s advertisement. Sara considered it a windowed hole at best.

She eyeballed the little wicker bowl four or so inches from her hand in the center of the table. There was a peach sitting there. Sara hated peaches. It was the only fruit you ate when it was fuzzy with that creepy peach skin that seemed to lick you back. How that peach had managed to infiltrate her home was a mystery. It must have fooled her, rolled into the nectarine side of the fruit stand, snuck in beside its smooth cousins. Unless it was a nectarine after all and it was simply time which had bestowed these peach-like qualities upon it. Sara regarded the potentially offensive fruit before reaching for it. Her thumb went straight through the weakened skin. She lifted it with a slight grimace, its unexpected weight souping the fruit’s stringy innards through her fingers until she felt the resilient pit. A furry jade green haloed the sticky wet spot at the bottom of the woven bowl. The nectarine corpse hit the rest of the trash with a muted splash. Sara wiped her hand on a stiff dishtowel hanging from the microwave handle and walked to the living room with a sniff of overripe beneath her fingernails.

The sofa wasn’t the right color. It was a color, but it was not the sandy speckled thing that it had once been and had perhaps had hoped to remain. There were streaks, splats, plops, and burps pressed deep into the thinning fabric. Every color had a smell and every smell went sour after enough butts pressed down on them. Sara made the mistake of laying on the couch just one time. That was not a mistake one made a second time. Not if you had a gag reflex. Flipped cushions couldn’t turn back time on this reclaimed sidewalk gem. It was one of those things she told herself she would replace as soon as she got that job she had now. About six years ago.

Sara lasted about an hour before nodding off. Even in slumber her body knew to direct her head to fall forward, not to risk her cheek resting on the deflated cushion behind her. Sara dreamed of crisp, white linen that floated over her smooth, silky skin. She smiled at her friends, accepted praise from her coworkers. Sara reveled in her life of just a few weeks ago, now only attainable in slumber. She strolled about in brilliant sunshine, running manicured fingers over sepia wheat tufts, and sighed into a glowing sunset.

Sara woke up for no particular reason. The TV was still on a low volume, a monotonous voice detailing some grisly homicide. She wiped a bit of drool from the corner of her mouth. She slid her feet on the floor a bit, shifting to drift back to sleep, but finding an unexpected sensation. Her left sock was wet, there at the toe, at her big toe. It was kind of cold and the dampness wicked through the cotton to the ball of her foot. Further inspection proved the floor was dry. Sara stared at the anomaly, unable to fully process it. She wriggled her toes and found it felt as though they were moving in warm jam. A little sticky. A little gritty. Sara reached down to peel off her sock and found as she lifted it for inspection that it was heavier than expected. Something gooshed through the cotton fibers, tacky on her fingers. When she pressed them together and pulled them apart, the skin held for a moment and a few webby lines spanned between her thumb and forefinger for a millimeter or two. Sara tried to wiggle her toes again, now naked against the fake hardwood floor. A squishing, sliding sound came up to her ears. Again, she leaned over the edge of the couch to discover the source of the sound and was bewildered not by what she saw, but by what she didn’t see. There was visible, through some slick, pinkish goo, the wee little piggy that cried all the way home. As for the rest of the piggies, well, she had to assume they were what had filled her sock because they were no longer on her foot. Before her very eyes, Sara watched as her final toe sank, pancaked, the nubbin of a toenail sliding lazily away like a melting pad of butter on a flapjack. The bones of her foot gleamed through the goo until they too softened to marshmallow and moved out across the floor.

Terrified, Sara lifted her leg only to find that it tore like wet crepe paper, everything below her knee sloughing to the floor in a waterlogged plop. She pressed her hands into the sinking couch, willing her body to move up and away from this nightmarish scene. She noticed her perspective leaning to the right. Sara tried to pull her right hand from the old couch only to see skin and sinew stretching up from the furniture in a melted mozzarella kind of glory. She thought of her phone, still in her bedroom, measuring the distance in smears: too far. But the front door leading to her shared stoop on a busy street, that was merely a slip and a slide away. Her left foot seemed to be maintaining structure so she stood up on it, primed to spring towards the door. It compressed between her weight and the hard floor, briefly an accordion of leg components before skin split and bits flowed beneath the couch. Sara’s upper body landed with a comfortingly solid clunk on the ground. Her pajama pants were soaked, heavy from the various bodily fluids they’d wicked up. Her loose shirt pulled against her neck, suctioning to her right ribcage as much as her ribcage tried to suction to the floor.

Sara squirmed on her belly in her slippery slop. She slapped her left hand toward the door, bent her elbow, and felt herself spill in that general direction. While she knew she shouldn’t, she glanced back to discover how her single slimy arm could possibly pull her whole body. The once blue, flowery cotton pajama pants lay in a sodden heap a foot or so behind her, filled and covered with shimmering pinkish jelly. The bottom of her shirt sagged emptily and Sara started to notice a garble in her breaths. Her head began to wobble on suddenly unstable vertebrae. She watched as her teeth plunked from her lower jaw as it peeled down until her head sank in a softening pile. Her vision of the door a few feet in front of her slanted, blurred, then vanished.

A few hours later, Sara eventually slid beneath the seam of her front door. Her neighbor left a post-it on Sara’s door the following day, asking her to clean up the sickly smelling, slightly sticky somewhat slick, sludging substance. It was attracting flies.