Read Tears of the Ancient and Other Stories Page 5
Mr. John M. Paulson woke up as he did every morning with crust in his eyes, a crick in his neck and legs like stilts. He kissed his sleeping wife and stumped down the hall, passing his son’s room and grunting “morning” to the boy sitting on the toy-strewn floor playing something explosive on his own flat screen.
In the bathroom, he splashed his face and patted it down. That was when he found the bump. He brushed his hair back and near the top left side of his head at about the hairline he found a hard lump had formed just under the skin. It was skin cancer, he was sure.
His wife thought it might be a cyst and that it would soon go away on its own.
She suggested he see someone.
“I’ll go with you,” she said and added, “we’ll go as a couple.”
Go as a couple? It made no sense. This was a physical problem.
“It’s something on my head, not in it.” He laughed it off until she laughed with him.
After researching cysts, he agreed with her diagnosis and would not have bothered making an appointment, but for her eagerness.
The day of the appointment came and went.
“It’s nothing. Besides, I’m swamped at work.” John Paulson did not see his wife’s disappointment. He was having trouble reading her emotions. Soon he would find it impossible.
A second lump, springing up on the other side of his forehead, went unnoticed. No one said anything about it at work.
Work, that time-stretching plane of dreary existence, where stress alone threw off monotony. He began to feed off the stress, eventually longing for it until it identified him. He created tension and manufactured pressure, which in turn bred an anxiety that he willed into a welcome angst. This was killing time and that was a living.
At times all the stress and pressure passed forbearance and its only relief was trauma, to which he was completely blind. Marks appeared upon his son’s neck. His wife cast blame. Paulson would not listen. The only sign the accusations might be true pointed to his fingernails, grown surprisingly long as if overnight. “Like an old man who has let himself go.”
His thoughts beat loud upon his wife’s cutting blame. They’d not spoken civilly since…he couldn’t recall. If he spoke to her at all these days it was with a bitter tongue lashing hot resentment for her complaints and contempt. Her scorn was answered with a vile brew of derision recently discovered in the depths of his own personal cellar. His dwindling stock of vintage goodwill he saved for work. If he lost his job, where would they be? Where would he be?
Such worry rocketed his blood pressure to new heights. He needed no doctor to tell him what he could see in the mirror: skin flushed red as rising mercury. He wasn’t taking care of himself. His personal hygiene had slipped. Up from a scorched throat his breath billowed foul, an embarrassment if he’d still cared. He did not.
Now as never before he cared only for peace. Away from work, he wanted only solitude. Above inner gales cacophonous and piercing, outer bleating and blasted mind games, he wished for peace with the core of his wilting soul.
Then one day, he couldn’t say if it were the next day or a decade of days later, the man woke to nothing. The tempest of work and home was no more. All sound sucked into a vacuum. He slunk from room to room through charred remains of a past life, a loathsome remembrance in stasis, a regrettable interlude between an agreeable childhood and now.
What was now? His red-rimmed eyes scanned about the charred void around him and he grew immensely tired. A chair presented itself. The walls drew in around him. The light diminished. A scaly, barbed tail slithered from his backside and coiled around his feet.