Sleaze City Stories - By Ryan Hendo

ON ANY NORMAL DAY

Sleazy City. It’s a selfish and unforgiving place. A human meat grinder, or something like it. It’s a city whose denizens find themselves caught in an infinite feedback loop of violence and sadness that are indistinguishable from one another. For every trash strewn sidewalk and needle filled alleyway, there’s someone being lost to it. 
A single mother struck down by a hit and run driver, her skull collapsed underneath the rear wheel of a Nissan GT-R that paints a block-long patch of blacktop with the leaking crimson contents of what used to be a head. The driver, a 53 year old dentist unconcerned with manslaughter, speeds off to track down his wife’s lover and offer some impromptu dental work by way of a 1985 Louisville Slugger… and being done just in time for happy hour. 
A forman laid off from his job at the vinyl window factory, only to find himself stabbed through the back of the neck with a rusted combat knife at a peek-a-boo show in a red light district nudie booth. Worse even, the robbery isn’t over money. It’s over a half pint of Jim Beam that a passing vagrant witnessed the forman conceal and sneak into the show. The forman dies slowly, gurgling, and behind the blood painted window, a young sex worker is traumatized...More so when the vagrant reaches down his scud crusted trousers to reveal a throbbing and gnarlled unit. Violently jerking with one hand and pouring whiskey down his throat with the other, he hoops and hollers. And while the contents of the whiskey mostly miss his mouth, splashing across his face, shirt, and the gurgling forman at his feet, he is having the time of his life. 
The young sex worker will never forget his tooth decayed face. 
For as mean as the city can be, it can sometimes act with a bastard cheshire smile on its face. Consider the case of Leonard Smalls, who on one particularly grim afternoon, was quite literally swallowed by that exact bastard smile. 
On a crowded uptown corner Leonard waited to catch the 28 bus to his day job. He worked as maintenance man for a ramshackle tenement complex even further uptown than he. While it wasn’t an ideal job, it was honest work, and he was an honest man. Within the walls of the tenement complex existed a close knit community of neighbors who cared for each other and even cared for him. Just as the community cared for each other, he took care of them well. For that, he earned himself the deserved reputation of honest, hardworking, and thoughtful. 
While it was a mostly normal day, and seeing as the bus was normally late, Leonard opted to have a quick cigarette, as per his normal ritual. Only it is important to remember that this day was only a “mostly” normal day. The abnormal element occurred when Leonard stepped back to have his cigarette. As he flushed his back to the wall of some ambiguous urban storefront, the ground beneath his feet quaked. And as he began to light his cigarette, the sidewalk underneath collapsed, plunging Leonard into the oily black depths of a 15ft deep chasm, swallowing him completely.
And while this took place on a crowded street corner at a particularly busy time of day, there was not a single witness. All bystanders were soon to be passengers, and they were all distracted by the arrival of the bus, for as the second abnormality of the day, the bus had arrived early. One by one the previous passengers exited, and following suit the new passengers boarded. As they did, no one could hear the muffled whimper of Leonard beneath the street. 
As the passengers situated themselves, the bus doors closed, traffic cleared, and the bus pulled away to continue on it’s route. As it would, on any normal day...
A normal day in Sleaze City... 

FEAR OF RATS 

15 feet beneath the sidewalk, Leonard breathed a short and panicked breath. 
Then he passed out. 
On the brief fall into the belly of the city Leonard’s face had been skinned against jagged chunks of concrete and miscellaneous piping, the upper eyelid of his right eye catching something sharp and tearing like crimson tissue paper. While the brutal fall had happened too quickly to register the individual smacks and jabs, the landing was less forgiving.  
The impact alone had snapped both of his ankles and imploded his feet; the result of which had sent a violent reverberation up through his body and into his jaw, the lower half meeting in shattering conflict with the upper, rendering the severed tip of his tongue an unfortunate casualty in a mouth full of blood and fractured bits of broken teeth.
Leonard faded in and out of consciousness for what he could only interpret as an eternity. The moments of waking awareness were full of unimaginable pain. A warm, wet, and throbbing pulse of fire coursed through his entirety, growing more sharp at the furthest reaches of his extremities before starting all over again. Pulse, pulse, pulse, followed by the temporary darkness of unconscious relief. 
After several intervals of this cycle, he found himself in the darkness of mind, removed from his body, floating in peace. Silence. Darkness. Calm. 
Until the chattering...
At first soft and subtle, the chattering grew to cut through the darkness like a morning alarm interrupting a tranquil dream. 
Leonard awoke to find himself fully conscious with his head turned and resting against a concrete wall. The pulpy tragedy of his face had been subsciously turned away from the wall that had so violently brutalized it. His body had landed upright and wedged firmly in the narrow opening between to concrete walls. He had seen this kind of space before. The empty corridor between the substructure of a building and sewers, or any variety of service tunnels that exist under the city streets. A sort of makeshift access tunnel, though one that would require a concentrated approach to access rather than a standing vertical drop. As he was mangled and wedged, he couldn’t quite move his body, though surprisingly he had free use of his arms. Despite having fallen flailing the whole way down, they had come out the other end remarkably unscathed. 
While his face was ripped to shreds and he didn’t have use over one eye, he was able to reluctantly open the other. His skull, as well as his neck, also seemed okay. At least as okay as any potentially concussed man could identify. His entire body may have been injured beyond repair but his nervous system seemed to have responded in a way where the throbbing pain had been reduced to an inability to move freely, with his swollen feet now feeling more like immovable boots of stone than socks full of broken glass.
Still though, while he had command over one eye, it was not of much use. Save for a small spotlight of ambient light above, the one created from the hole he fell through, he was surrounded by darkness. The light itself seemed to only illuminate a quarter of the way down the chasm. Leonard spit out a mouthful of blood and tooth while holding what was left of his tongue in his mouth. After that, he did what any human would and began to weep. 
Then, more chattering... And squeaking. 
He heard it but couldn’t comprehend it as it was far beyond his ability to interpret. His only thoughts were “How do I get out of here, how will I find help, will they find me, and why can’t I just die?” But that’s when he started to notice... though it may’ve been already happening and he had been too stunned to realize. A warm and weighted thing brushed against his ankle. Once. Twice. Thrice. At first it felt like comfort but as the thing pivoted and scampered across his feet the feeling of comfort was replaced by a charge of pain that shot up and through his body, forcing even his injured eye open. 
“Gahh!!!!!,” he remarked as the first was followed swiftly by another. He reached down below his waist to swipe but could not reach. “Aghghhgg,’ he wailed, mouth full of blood. “Rats,” he thought. “It must be rats.” His traumatized brain knew it immediately. 
“Are you okay?,” a voice from above called. “We’ve called for help. We’re going to get you out of there.”
Relief was Leonard’s first feeling, but that was quickly punctuated by the realization that it was not just one rat dancing across his feet, but a steady stream of the creatures about one ankle deep in measurement. A teaming river of chattering and squeaking. Back and forth. Back and forth. 
He wiggled and writhed to the best that his body allowed but it was no use as the stream grew to a raging river and the raging river grew to violent sea. He swiped and swiped but could not reach until the river grew deep. When he could reach, the rats began to nip at his fingertips. And though he pulled his hands away, the rats began to scale his body like a makeshift scaffolding. And when they reached the peak, clamoring over his clothes and limbs, they began to lick his wounds. Again he felt comfort, but that comfort was quickly diminished when they began to nibble with their large rat teeth. 
When one reached his torn eyelid and started to lick, his body began to tremble. And when that one began to nibble at the splayed flaps of torn flesh, he receded back into the darkness of the unconscious.  
There are an estimated two million rats living beneath the streets of the city…
That, as Leonard would soon learn, was a criminal understatement.
———
And she was dead. 
Dead and decomposing on the vintage Lazy Boy recliner where she had spent the better part of her waking days and sleeping nights perched upright and lopsided with cushion formed to her failing septuagenarian posture.  
She had died as she lived. Alone in her apartment with no one to visit and no one to find her putrefying body surrounded by a hoarder's collection of magazines that had been long out of publication. Towers of boxes lined the walls floor to ceiling while loose stacks and poorly tied bundles covered just about every other surface. The usual smell of the apartment was a peculiar combination of stale, wet, and mousy,  beneath a layer of gut knotting stench; the stench of someone who had long lost the ability to clean themselves properly. The sweaty sweet smell of foot fungus and poorly wiped privates had swirled together into a humid stew that blanketed the apartment and regularly seeped out into the hallway where passing neighbors in the know held their breath, while guests and visitors gagged and choked back bile. 
But that’s the thing about Sleaze City. Incomprehensible stench was no more unfamiliar than the sight of a man passed out on the sidewalk, a woman digging through the trash, or a Rattus norvegicus weaving and darting its way through a tent city. Poor hygiene and its associated scent is, was, and always will be a staple of the city’s personality. 
This is why it came as a surprise to no one that it took nearly two weeks to discover the body of Eileen Rosner, 91, in her rent controlled tenement apartment uptown. She had been living alone there for thirty five years since her husband departed, and it had been maybe twenty since she had any regular visitors. Most relatives and friends had become names in the obituary columns over the years, and her only son had stopped visiting long ago. As he was a petty criminal and pathological liar, Eileen had imagined that he had found himself in trouble that he simply couldn’t get out of, and subsequently in the bottom of the south river. She took solace in this thought. The alternative being he simply chose not to see her. 
In her years of solitude the sadness and loneliness that Eileen felt had eventually bled away into neurosis and dissociation, her mind falling away from reality; gone from the mortal coil well before departing the corporeal realm.
It was the smell that had reached an excessive peak that had led anyone to find her. What had once been a familiar, albeit unpleasant, waft of poor hygiene and old apartment had gradually evolved into something no one recognized. Aroma of putrid fruit and empty bowels baking in an invisible sun began clinging to the walls outside of Eileen’s apartment, sticking to passing neighbors and guests a perfume of death that they carried with them to their workplaces and homes. Co-workers gagged and partners recoiled. 
“Holy fuck! What the fuck? You smell like a dead fucking cat. No, you smell you fucked a dead fucking cat. In the ass!” a chef says to his line cook.  “What the fuck is wrong with you, Josh? Tuesday you smell like shit. Wednesday you smell like cat shit. Thursday, I don’t even see you so I don’t even know what the fuck you smell like, and today you come in here smelling like all of it in a blender. Have you even showered this week?” (He had.) “Do you not have a sense of smell?” (He doesn’t)  You absolutely can’t come into work like this. This is a fucking kitchen and you handle food with your hands. (Chef doesn’t know this, but Josh, after taking a whopper of a crap, had failed to wash his hands before leaving the bathroom. He does this a lot. His termination is reasonable.) 
“Where have you be….?” a wife tries to say to her husband who’s been caught sneaking into the house late at night. Though she tries, she’s been violently interrupted by a projectile stream of thick chunk vomit, painting him face to his groin. (Well deserved, though. He was with his mistress.) 
Nothing however could compare to the tidal wave of warm rank air that rushed from the apartment and into the hallway as first responders gained entrance to the property. With hurricane force the life had been sucked out of the two officers. 
“Christ on Earth…”
Senior officer Dennis Akins had seen this before on a few occasions.  While it never got easier, he had learned to keep a peppermint oil soaked handkerchief on him for this purpose. The moment the thick waft of death air his face,  he swiftly retrieved the handkerchief and tied it around his face. 
Rookie officer Tanner Holt was not so fortunate. He was only twenty two years old and had never experienced something so noxious. Overcome by a storm of dizziness and horror, he had dropped to his knee and shielded his face with his arm. The sensory experience was so strong that his eyes burned and while they were closed it did not stop. Though this odor was completely new to him, something deep in the pathways of his brain told him exactly what it was.
Death. Pure and simple, though stagnant and in a very advanced state of decomposition. Something no one should be made to smell. Something only a small percentage of people living on this planet had experienced.
Tanner’s world swirled around him in a period of lost time. A sudden flash forward in thought haunted him as his mind quickly wandered from his present and into the future. He saw an older version of himself visiting his mother in a nursing home. She had been there for a while and he hadn’t checked in for quite some time. He knew this and felt bad. For every day he didn’t visit, his anxiety about visiting increased, making it all the more difficult to bring himself to see her. Until it was too late. 
On the eventual day of his visit he would feel the dread deep within his bones, and at the moment he turns to pass through the doorway of his mothers nursing home room, he will feel what scrap of a soul he has yanked from within him and tossed out into the ether. He sees his mother, and while he shields his eyes from the ghastly horror of eldery rot that is actually in front of him, his imagination won’t allow.  
The older Tanner sees his mother facing him in a chair, lifeless and bloated, but most upsettingly, alone. Upright and with a slight lean to the side, she wears a face that says something along the lines of  “nice of you to stop by.” She appears as Eileen smells, melting to her favorite chair from her expired bowels.  A deep black liquid drips through her gown and flows out from between her legs forming a puddle on the carpet floor beneath her feet. 
Tanner winced and wished that he was anywhere but here as he sank further to his knee and tightened into a ball. The noxious death odor wrapped him like a warm blanket, caressing him with cold uncaring arms, kissing him with a perfume breath of trauma. A perfume that would require sterilization to expel. He would have to burn his uniform and bleach his skin to banish it. And though he didn’t yet know that he would carry the smell with him so strongly, he knew at that moment that he had formed a new memory that he would never be able to shake. 
But that’s when something happened. Something he didn’t expect. From beneath this alien odor, a new smell cut through to his olfactory senses. A bad smell, but a familiar one, and with its appearance, Tanner felt a fair bit of relief. 
He had relieved himself of his bowels. 
(Let us for a moment imagine, Tanner is a bad cop, and a racist cop, because it is with this, we can find levity in his situation.) 
Senior Officer Dennis Akins had seen that even fewer times before, but knew what needed to be done. With his handkerchief pressed to his face, he used his free hand to gently close the door. He knew exactly what he had seen, and knew what needed to be done. An old lady had died in a tenement apartment uptown, and it was likely no violent crime. It was time to call the coroner. Then it would be time for someone to clean this up. 
Officer Dennis did not pity the man who would likely be responsible for having a good hand in cleaning this up. After all, the man had been very pleasant in assisting the officers this evening and had been especially useful in gaining access to the room. Still though, it was times like these where Dennis felt it was much better to be on this side of the situation. While he was a cop, and any Sleaze City cop outside of rookie had to have a constitution of steel, he was glad that he didn’t have to physically handle any dirty work. That was for forensics and those privatized cleanup crews. Though perhaps it was a policeman’s hunch, something told him that the landlord didn’t intend on hiring out a third party to do the work. Especially when they had their own maintenance man… 
An unflinching man with the deep scars of an unknown world war on his face…
———

Something brews beneath Sleaze City…

A series of sprawling sewers, access tunnels, abandoned subways, underground tributaries, and a near infinite number of connecting corridors comprise a labyrinthian metropolis for the city’s unseen denizens. The homeless, the forgotten, and the unknown. 

At the labyrinth’s perimeters, many of the city’s unhoused population have taken refuge and formed communities. Their tent cities and ramshackle neighborhoods crafted from found objects demarcate the border between two worlds. The world above, hostile and cold. The world below, dark and unknown.

While many in these communities have found a sense of comfort and safety that has mostly proven illusive in their lives, others opt to journey beyond the camps and into the darkness. Sometimes it’s to escape the often hostile tribalism of rival communities. Other times it’s to escape life itself, and to disappear into a world of inky black solitude. These are The Undergrounders…. The people who have chosen to live underground. The streets can’t keep them and the camps won’t have them. As above, they are the unwanted. So below, they are the forgotten.

Social workers and emergency response units seldom visited the camps, but when they did, they had no reason to venture further. Even active police pursuits would be called off if a suspect was able to escape into the sewers. It was simply too dangerous to navigate and too unsanitary to do so without the proper equipment. With the unpredictable nature of the Undergrounders added to the mix, anyone who entered this world alone could safely be presumed dead. 

Not since the C.H.U.D. incident of ‘88 had anyone considered the realm that existed beneath their feet. Even then, it was too late. 

After having been exposed to chemical waste that had been illegally  dumped by a local pharmaceutical titan, many of the Undergrounders of that era had mutated into slimy, muscular cannibals who fed on nearby homeless. No one noticed. No one cared…

Until their food source ran out. 

That’s when the scarcity mindset kicked in. The C.H.U.D.  grew hungry and unruly, and like any animal would, set out to find new resources. The problem clawed its way up through the sewers, spilling out onto the streets. Casualties occurred as a number of citizens combatted the ensuing rampage. Most were either devoured on the spot or torn limb from limb until they were reduced to an unrecognizable pile of gore and clothing scraps. Others were dragged away screaming as C.H.U.D. reached up through storm drains and latched onto ankles, pulling their victims through iron openings too small for an adult body as their flesh peeled against concrete and bones snapped against metal. Broken and unnaturally contorted people were carried away into the darkness, never to be seen again. 

It is speculated that they were used as surplus food storage. Their remains were never found.

The City Tribune, Sleaze City’s oldest and most conservative newspaper, ran a particularly graphic photo of the havoc on their front page. 

A traveling fashion photographer had captured the image of a hulking C.H.U.D. with a garishly dressed pimp pinned under its feet. Beneath his purple feathered fedora, the pimp wears an expression of unfathomable pain. His mouth is agape and spewing saliva while his eyes are rolling back and into his head. His arms have been torn off and only a long and skinny flap of flesh remains. Above him, the C.H.U.D. towers, standing erect. In it’s left hand it brandishes one of the pimp’s arms like a club, swinging it violently toward the heads of two fleeing sex workers. In its right hand it grips the other “pimp arm”, holding it to his mouth like a plump chicken drumstick, gleefully gnawing through purple jacket fabric and into flesh. 

The City Tribune ran this photo along with the headline: “VIOLENT VIGILANTES CLEAN UP THE STREET.” 

This was part of the coverup. 

With the whole ordeal having occurred in a less desirable part of town, and since corporate and pharmaceutical corruption was (and still is) so deeply embedded in both city and state political administrations, cover up was easy. The few remaining witnesses were paid, threatened, or both. Others disappeared. The company responsible for the incident  played the fiddle and the newspapers danced their dance. 

And, as it would on any other day, the citizens of S.C. kept their heads down and looked the other way. The horror of that day, disappearing to time. 

———

As traumatizing as the incident was, there’s another tragedy. It was the silent genocide of an unkown population. 

Surviving C.H.U.D. who had made their way back into the world below were effectively hunted down and executed by a dirty dozen death squad of battled-hardened mercenaries from various war torn regions of the world. These men were provided by a private military contractor hired by a secret benefactor, who was paid by a rich man, who had many connections to both local politics and, you probably saw this coming, the pharmaceutical company responsible for the C.H.U.D. incident in the first place. 

There was no vetting process. No one to confirm these men were humane, reasonable, or sane… And there was no one on site to supervise their behavior. 

These men knew their men knew their mission. They knew their targets and they knew that their targets were monsters. As soldiers they had been conditioned to identify their enemies and as soldiers of fortune they had learned to be assigned their enemies. Through years of violence-induced psychosis, trauma, and war, they learned to abandon their hearts. In turn, they garnered a sick taste for the hunt and were rewarded by the sick thrill of murder and torture. They were also paid handsomely. They also knew that if they didn’t fulfill their objective, they would pay a price. 

If in thirty years, a lone surviving C.H.U.D. emerged from the bowels of S.C., each surviving mercenary would be tracked, located, and find himself greeted by another group of men just like himself, albeit, paid far less. 

So they did their job, and they did it well. They did it with no conflict between each other and they spent months living underneath S.C. in order to thoroughly execute it. They found and tracked each and every different C.H.U.D. 

Compared to a surprise attack on an unsuspecting neighborhood, the C.H.U.D. stood absolutely no chance against heavily armed paramilitants. Anyone that fought, died where they stood. But this is not the reason we use the word “genocide.” 

With months spent underground, the death squad tracked and located every last C.H.U.D. 

In doing so, they had uncovered something that had not yet been realized. Whole communities of C.H.U.D. had set up camps throughout the labyrinth. There were families. There was culture. These creatures had gained something that the previous Undergrounder iteration of themselves hadn’t yet found. They had learned to fit in. They had found each other and learned to build communities, despite being unable before. 

Rather than kill and eat, they had learned to welcome newer Undergrounders.  People who otherwise couldn’t fit in with the demarcation camps were able to safely participate in C.H.U.D. culture. The Undergrounders found ways to relay food and resources from the fringes of the world above them to the burgeoning kingdom below. 

It was the dirty dozen death squad that discovered this. 

What they did cannot be discussed, but their treatment of women and children C.H.U.D. would earn them a proper cell in hell. 

The C.H.U.D. were no more…

And that’s why they’re the unknown. 

The violent men had come to do their job, and they did it well. They left no witnesses, Undergrounder or other. They gathered bodies and found an isolated chamber to store them in. They had assessed the chamber and identified it as a place that no one would ever discover, and they were correct. They sealed off the chamber with some mild explosives, and saw their job as executed. 

Each man would return home to live a violent yet fulfilling life. Three would eventually die on various contracts, and another would succumb to heart health issues. The remaining men would continue until the day they heard a knock on their door and opened it to find another man like themselves. 

While they had eliminated every last C.H.U.D., they had made one small mistake…

A mass grave of C.H.U.D. doesn’t sit well beneath the streets of a city with an estimated population of two million rats….

SOMETHING BREWS BENEATH SLEAZE CITY….

—-

The City is known for many things. Outside of it’s insane murder rate, incomprehensible amounts of violence, massive class disparity, horrible sanitary conditions, and soon to be, a really, really, really, big rat problem, Sleaze City is iconic. After all, it’s the one from all the movies. It’s the one that imports and exports just about everything in the country. It’s the one where all the cool art and music came from. It’s the one where you can get just about every kind of food from everywhere in the world. Hell, it’s the one where City Hall was temporarily displaced in a parallel universe when those physics bending terrorists accidentally unleashed all of those Fulci ghosts. 

The list goes on, but as far as what the city is known for, one thing stands out above all. 

From its landmark financial district made up of phallic corporate skyscrapers, to the gothic architecture and gargoyles of Old Downtown, the skyline is as iconic as it is haunting. It is a testament to the powers that have for so long influenced the soul of the city, and continue to do so to this day. The wealthy powers. The corrupt powers. The powers that have exploited, pillaged, and conquered. 

Viewable for miles in every direction,  Sleaze City stands as a dark sentry, almost sentient in nature. It casts its gaze in 360 degrees and it can see for miles. To those in the suburbs, its gaze is unavoidable. 

“It’s no secret that the people in the suburbs are scared of the city because they think it’s dangerous. Other folks is frightened because they know it’s dangerous. But it’s a more or less a open secret that many of the more superstitious suburbanites think differently. You get it? They’ll tell you that the city looks just plain evil. They’ll tell you about how when you live near the city, it sometimes feels like you're being watched by something with, something like, real mean intentions. Especially when the sun is high and the skies are crystal clear. You might even hear that, that if you catch the city on one of those sunny days, just when the day begins to pass into night and the sun is hitting just right, and you have just the right little perfect vantage point, you can catch a glimpse of a very special kind of illusion. Something like a sheet of wiggling light distortion. The city look like if it frantic. Just kinda frustrated and adjusting itself. Buildings will shuffle from place to place, swapping locations and reorienting itself, for no reason until the sun drops low enough that it begins to correct itself and return to normal.”

But that’s just the day version of the city…

Nightly sounds of gunshot pops and sirens project from deep within the city’s diaphragm and out into the surrounding sprawl. Together they form the chorus of the night, singing the song of the city. On particularly agitated evenings the song grows strong, emanating from the streets, reverberating off of walls made from glass and concrete, and amplifying as it swims through the unnatural acoustics of narrow urban corridors before launching into the ether.

It can be difficult to sleep in the suburbs..

What originates as a baritone growl of hellish horror arrives in suburbia as a ghastly soprano whisper. So subtle. So faint. Just enough of a frequency that it can travel undetected, floating across river, drifting down one of many main streets, snaking through the negative space of a pristine white picket fence, and worming into the ear of an unsuspecting stepford wife, imbedding itself deep within her subconscious. 

Just the right amount of pinch to create just the right amount of anxiety. The anxiety comes in the form of uncertainty, but an uncertainty of what? She does not know. 

At first she has difficulty sleeping. After dinner with the family, packing the kids lunch, checking her schedule for the next day and winding down with her ritual of a cooldown yoga session, hot shower, and chamomile tea, she begins finding herself lying in bed, but unable to feel drowsy enough to drift of to sleep. Nothing a little melatonin can’t fix, she thinks to herself. But the trick only works for so long. Next to her husband in bed, she finds herself on her back staring at the ceiling.  She can’t turn her brain off. 

She can’t help but to think of the average concerns of a person like herself.  Family. Bills. Work. Neighbors. Cars. Groceries. Laundry. Time, and how to fit it all in. They are quite normal things, but not the normal things she usually thinks about at this time. Also, she’s very uneasy about them which is not something she’s used to feeling. These things don’t usually worry her. They never do. 

It starts to become a problem. 

She can’t quite put her finger on the root cause of this new issue. She mentions it in passing to her husband, but after two more weeks or such, it turns into a little bit of an issue. Night after night, the same thoughts swirl, and only end when her body finally gives up and passes out, and she gets only 3 or 4 hours of sleep. Less sleep means poorer performance across the board and before you know it, bills and laundry, and packing the kids lunch, all start to fall by the wayside. It’s startin to become a problem. She’ gettin inefficient.”

She goes to the doctor and is prescribed anti-depressants and one of those subtle / not so subtle sleeping meds, but they don’t work. Her body starts to be able to fall asleep, kinda like when your legs fall asleep if you spend too much time playing on twitter on the shitter, but her mind, her mind just doesn’t turn off. Her mind like churns and churns, and the thoughts bounce around, but it just ain’t turn off. Her normal ass problem starts growing and changing. She sees where she’s dropping the ball and it starts to make her extra anxious. Suddenly her thoughts include a new tone…

She starts to think, it’s like everything’s her fault.

Plagued with self cannibalizing thoughts, she stops sleeping entirely. Then she becomes paranoid. It’s impossible to tell exactly when she lost track of things, but in her delusional state her family suffers. It falls apart.

“But that’s when it gets really bad… She’s stopped eating. She’s shed as much weight as anyone could. Her hair’s falling out. She’s scaring the kids. She refuses to allow help. She’s frequently assaulting her husband. The neighbors come over and she pulls kitchen cutlery on them. By this point, she’s even starting to say things like ‘the city is watching,’ and ‘something’s stirring! Something’s stirring!!!!’ Screaming at people. Peering out the window at neighborhood children, hiding in the attic. Shitting herself and panting the walls with it. Losing her fucking mind”

“Would you shut the fuck up!?”, says Leonard Smalls as he scolds the unusually petite handyman that he’s very unfortunately been tasked to work with. He retrieves a stack of tied up magazines from the bed of a rented box truck and heaves them backwards out of the truck and into an open recycling bin. He’s 15 for 15 at the moment, and not very happy at the lack of effort his comrade, Little Gary, has contributed to the job at hand, and he’s very perturbed by the stench of the old dead woman that clings to every single thing they are in the process destroying. Little Gary really didn’t get the hint. 

TO BE CONTINUED