A Short Story a Day

by David Michael

Nathan Hobbes sat on the barren floor of his empty home and watched the blackness swell up behind Natalie thinking, This is the kind of thing people believe happens every day in Hell on Earth.

He had talked to the tourists from Suburbia, the few who needed emergency dental work while on vacation or business trips, and laughed at their unfulfilled expectations of demons and devils and vampires and witches on every street corner and human sacrifices in shopping malls.

“Oh, there are the rough spots,” he would tell them. “And places where you don’t want to be after dark. Open. That’s good. But, really, I’m sure life here is much the same as it’s always been. Open. People still have jobs, kids still go to school, and college kids still drink too much. Hmm? Hang on … what? Taxes? Well, yes, that is one nice benefit. I haven’t paid federal taxes in, oh, a decade at least. The IRS, it seems, wasn’t from Hell, after all. Just the bureaucrats …”

Because before today, Hell had barely touched Nathan. He had lived in Hell on Earth since it first Erupted twenty years ago in eastern Oklahoma and tore out a hunk of the Midwest USA for its own. But all it had done even then was reduce Nathan’s choice of possible dental schools to attend. With Chicago now impossibly far away–there had been no commercial flights over the Wasteland then–and with all the conflict and chaos in those early days, his only option had been to stay in St. Louis and attend the dental school there. So he had. After things had settled down.

And since then, except for having to pull or polish or clean the occasional fang or mouthful of needle sharp incisors, his life had seemed normal, the kind of life he had been taught to expect as a child.

Now, though, his wife, Natalie, stood over him, looking down at him–looking down on him–as if considering how much she might enjoy kicking him, if only it wouldn’t sully her shoes, unaware of what he saw.

“I’ll tell the kids when I pick them up tonight from Mom and Dad’s,” Natalie said.

She had her hands on hips, fingers curled back, the red tips of her long nails looking like claws. He couldn’t see her eyes in the shadows from the bare lightbulbs above them–even the light covers had been removed. But he could tell she wanted to argue from the set of her chin, from the line of her mouth. She wanted to fight, to spit venom at him while she tore him apart with her words.

But Nathan only nodded. She wanted to fight, but he had already given up. Had known that as soon as he felt his knees give out and drop him to the exposed concrete of the bare floor. It was over. His marriage. His life. Natalie had been one hundred percent thorough. She had taken it all. She had won. There was nothing he could do.

At least the kids weren’t here. Troy–named after Natalie’s father–and Hattie–named after Natalie’s favorite aunt–were with their grandparents. Whatever creature of Hell on Earth had come for them, at least the kids would be spared. He supposed he should thank Natalie for that.

Natalie’s parents had been waiting when they arrived, outside, leaning on their car, smiling too-friendly smiles and offering oh-so-good-naturedly to take Troy and Hattie to stay with them for the night, let Nathan and Natalie have some time alone after their long road trip.

Nathan had disagreed with the idea, but Natalie had insisted and so he relented. Then he had followed Natalie into the house. Not seeing the emptiness at first, eyes on Natalie’s ass as it swung back and forth in her stylish shorts, happy to be home for the first time over in a week. Looking forward to a night in his bed–their bed–without the kids in the same room, or even in the same house.

But the two of them, husband and wife, hadn’t been alone in the house. Just like Nanna and Pappa had been waiting for them outside, Kent Guerra had been waiting for them inside.

Kent–good old Kent, the childhood friend who had graduated from law school the same year Nathan finished up his DDS, who had been the family lawyer and close friend of the entire family throughout the marriage–had smiled his shark’s smile and handed the divorce papers to Nathan.

“Welcome home, Nathan,” Kent said. “Here are the papers for you to sign.”

Then Kent had stepped up to Natalie, put his arms around and kissed her. Nathan could only watch as their mouths opened, as their lips and tongues came together, as their bodies pressed against each other.

Natalie opened her eyes while they still kissed, and looked at Nathan, lust and hatred mixing in her gaze. Then the blackness had covered Nathan’s vision and the weight of the papers in his hands and the scorn and heat that came from Natalie and the empty house around him had pushed him down to the floor.

When he could see again, Kent had left, closing the door on his way out, leaving the new ex-wife to explain what had happened to the new ex-husband.

While she did, in no uncertain terms, outlining how much she had taken, how little he had left, how much she despised him, how little he could do, Nathan saw the blackness again. But this blackness was alive, not the blackness of despair that had overwhelmed him, but a blackness that could only come from Hell–or maybe someplace even worse.

He watched it ooze out of the hall that connected the living room, dining room and kitchen of their ranch-style house with the bedrooms and the family room, watched the first tendrils reach past the neatly stacked boxes that contained the detritus of his home life and come toward them like shadows growing in the sunset. Like the fingers of Hell stretching out to pull them into the Pit they had seen just two days ago, the point of Eruption, which they had looked at through hot acid haze and sightseer binoculars–just a dollar for five minutes.

“Look at me, damn it,” Natalie snapped.

Nathan pulled his eyes from the moving shadows and looked up at her face, which now seemed even more featureless than before. But he didn’t need to see her face to know it. The brown eyes, so large and soft and enticing. The cute nose that wrinkled when she laughed. Her lips …

He remembered the first time he kissed her, her lips so warm and sensual and yielding, her tongue darting out from between her perfect teeth–

“You’re pathetic,” she said.

Nathan sighed, and nodded. Because he was. He saw that now. Pathetic and despicable. Because he still loved her. He had built his life around her.

The life she had systematically stripped from him, layer by painful hateful layer, in a matter of minutes.

“Pathetic,” she said again. “I can’t believe I stayed with you this long.”

How long had she been planning this? How many weeks or months did it take to arrange the complete destruction of a life? To set up the termination of a marriage as an overwhelming assault using the combined efforts of so many people: her parents, her cousins in Dallas, Kent.

First, the diversion, the teasing, the tantalizing signs of a thaw in the frost that had encrusted their bedroom for the past years. How many years had there been of sleeping in the same bed but almost never touching, in bed or out of it? How long, despite his attempts to reconcile, to talk to her, to give her what she wanted, to pay attention to her, of none of it working but never giving up?

Because he loved her. Worshipped her.

And then her suggestion of a vacation, a road trip. “We all need a vacation,” she said one morning at the breakfast table. “It will do us all a lot of good.” The kids, he remembered, hadn’t been enthusiastic, but they had agreed with their mother when she insisted.

And she said it again that night after he protested that he couldn’t possibly take off a week from work, not on such short notice. It would mess up his appointments for months to come. Then she said it one more time as she reached into his boxers and stroked him. “It will do us all a lot of good,” she said.

Her touch, silk on fire, withheld for so long, burned through him, consumed him. And even though she became unresponsive again as soon as he agreed, taking back her hand and turning her back on him, leaving him unrequited and throbbing so hard it hurt, he had hoped.

Maybe things were getting better. Maybe …

He watched the shadows begin to pile up behind her like his first doubts on the road, when he realized that she had booked only single rooms with double beds so that the four of them were always in the same room. When she continually pulled away from his attempts to kiss her and pushed him away in bed and refused to make love. When they spent the night with her relatives, who had whispered behind his back and stopped talking to just stare at him whenever he tried to join their conversations.

But still, he had hoped. Because she became more alive each day they were away. He had seen her smile, the sunlight flashing in her eyes like gold, like she hadn’t smiled in so long.

He wondered what the little sparkles of gold glinting from the liquid darkness could be. Wondered what this thing was that had waited for them in the gutted shell of what had been their home and was now just the last bit of property that he had to dispose of and split with her.

A new shift in the blackness caught his attention, and he knew then that the blackness knew he was watching it. That it was watching him too, soaking up his misery, absorbing his pain.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” Natalie asked him. “Anything at all?”

“I,” he said. “I don’t think it will matter. Nothing I can say. Or you. I don’t think anything matters …”

“You’re damn straight there’s nothing you can say,” she replied. Then she stopped. “What are you looking at?” She turned around.

The blackness rippled as she faced it, a wave that started at the floor and continued up to its crest over her head, almost to the vaulted ceiling.

Nathan heard Natalie inhale as if to scream. But before she could force any sound out of her throat, a tendril of black ooze, like a horizontal drip of crude oil, shot out of the mass and forced itself into her open mouth reducing her outburst to whimper.

The blackness came no closer to Nathan, seemed at once to ignore him and yet to focus on him as if he were there by himself. Or as if Natalie was there by herself.

Nathan felt something hot and sticky in his mouth, and he screamed as though it were his own tongue being pulled out by its root. And as he screamed, he felt every word that Natalie had ever said to him pulled out of his soul.

The venomous words of scorn and hate, the mocking, the derisive laughter, the bitching, the snarls, the rebukes, the barbs, the biting sarcasm, the emasculating. But also the tenderness, the whispered pillowed talk, the words of love–

He fought to keep the ”Yes” and “I do”, the three words that had defined his adult life, but they were taken away too, and he could only whimper. With those went the names of his children and her breath in his ear and the taste of her mouth after she brushed her teeth and the amusing pre-coffee growls of a woman just waking up and the feel of her smooth teeth on the tip of his tongue and the sound of her laughter when she still loved him.

More tendrils formed and leaped out, one for each of Natalie’s eyes and another wrapped around her neck and she was lifted into the air, arms flailing, leg kicking.

Black hot pokers burned in his eyes and the look she had stabbed him with while kissing his once-best friend evaporated, and the times she had looked down on him and despised him and longed to spit on him, and the looks of abhorrence in the dark when he had reached across the chasm of their bed between them and tried to touch her.

He wanted to look away, but couldn’t. Despite the pain, he could see it all, watch it all fade away.

The tears that had streaked down her face during the wedding ceremony, black mascara running down behind a veil of white, and the brightness of her skin after making love and the impish coy look and the painful determined stare at the tiled ceiling as Hattie was born after eight hours of labor and the burst of happiness when the red-face Troy was first handed to her and the looks of shared excitement on the night of their honeymoon and the first time her eyes had met his and looked back at him deep and brown and interested.

Then, like hot tar poured into ears, Nathan heard her voice fade from his mind and with it the voice of Kent and of his children and his patients and his neighbors and his college professors and his parents.

Natalie’s head was now wrapped in blackness, the features blunted and smoothed by an inky gloss.

Her scents escaped Nathan, her breaths and musks and stinks, all sucked away, wiped clean and antiseptic.

He saw the blackness ooze to surround her, envelope her, and Nathan’s skin melted away from him, becoming numb, removing the feel of her hitting him, pushing him away, pulling him to her, touching him, stroking him, tickling him, scratching him, gouging him, biting him, licking him, snuggling against him …

Nathan–hollow, scraped out, a shell of whoever he had been before–couldn’t remember anything now except that his name was Nathan.

Nathan wanted to scream–because screaming seemed to be the only reasonable response to the blackness flecked with gold that had piled up in front of him and that seemed to be quivering with each beat of his heart–but he couldn’t scream.

The blackness flowed around him, but there was nothing left of him for it to consume, so it left him there.

Nathan blinked.

He breathed. In and out.

Kent found him first. Then the police, when Natalie’s parents, concerned that they hadn’t heard from her–or  from Kent–in two days called in a report that she was missing, last seen at her previous place of residence in the company of her ex-husband.

Nathan still sat crosslegged on the floor, near the packed boxes of his clothes and pictures, and still clutched a set of divorce papers, breathing, blinking every few seconds, unresponsive, dead inside. DNA tests confirmed the skeleton found on the floor was that of Natalie Blanchard Hobbes.

The police closed the case the next day, though, over the protests of Natalie’s parents, when Nathan breathed his last. Because Kent Guerra had connections. Because the police had bigger problems to deal with as open war burst out in all the city-states.

And because it was the kind of thing that happened in Hell on Earth every day.

Copyright © 2006 by David Michael.