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The old man was dead.

It was the cancer that got him.

It started by nibbling at his lungs and then at his liver. The doctors fought it with radiation and chemicals. The priest fought it with prayer and belief. But the cancer ignored the best efforts of science and religion and continued to eat. It found the old man’s bones and gnawed at the joints as if they were chicken gristle. Finally it found his brain and the Grande buffet began.

Thirty-five years earlier the old man’s wife had too died of the cancer. It consumed her ovaries before taking her; devouring her womanhood with what the old man imagined as flashing white teeth, snarling and tearing, horrid jagged fangs encrusted in a darkness that went beyond night, a darkness as deep and dense as eternity. Other times he imagined the fangs as clumps of demented fungus erupting out of the soil of her flesh to eat with ravenous gulps. He could never reconcile the dichotomy of hard enameled fangs and soft fruiting fungus but the image remained; forever branding his memories of her demise.

The old man’s son stood at the end of the bed upon which the old man lay. It was a hospital bed brought into what had been the dining room turned dying room now death-room. He thought: How truly old the old man looked. Storybook old. Biblical old. Shriveled and sunken. The cheeks sagged. The nose hooked as if the tip had deflated. He wondered when that had happened. The son flashed on an image of the nasal holes in the skull beneath and remembering someone telling him that the nose was the first fleshy bit to rot off and his stomach churned.

The son glanced at the wall clock but the clock was gone and all that remained was a circle two shades paler than the surrounding wall. The walls (and ceiling) were a sickly yellow the result of thousands of cheap filterless cigarettes inhaled following decades of fatty fried meals. The son wondered if the new owners would ever be able to scrub the poison out of the walls. Wondered if even a dozen coats of paint could cover it. Wondered if the death-room stench could ever be aired out or masked with room fresheners.

He fumbled a watch out of his pocket and checked the time. Another half an hour before the men from the funeral home would come and take the body away. Another half hour till he could get into his car, go home and take a shower. And still early enough to get to a club for a few drinks and with a bit of luck, a good screwing.

The face moved.

No. A moth fluttering across the light. Throwing odd, awkward shadow. The son realized with a mixture of amusement and embarrassment that he had jumped back from the bed. His stomach felt hollow, weightless and he recognized that as fear. The old man was dead. Very, very dead.

I need a drink.

The son turned. His eyes followed the folds of the nicotine impregnated curtain that masked the death-bed from the world outside; the curtain that undulated in the dry breeze as if it were the breathing mechanism of some horribly twisted beast. Never mind.. Soon the curtains and everything else in the house would be gone, sold by the estate sale people or given away to charity. Or burnt. Yes, burning would be the best choice. Consumed in flame and up in smoke and when done all would be as if it had never existed.

"Don’t you even want a photo?" his sister asking.

He shook his head, poured a drink, flinched as someone rubbed his back in a show of drunken sympathy.

He wanted none of the old man’s junk. He wanted nothing to carry with him when he left the house for the last time. He wanted nothing that bore any mark or memory.

He entered the living room. He surveyed the wreckage of the wake. Tumblers, overflowing ashtrays, paper plates montaged in grease and smears of condiments and chewed bits of food. He briefly considered straightening out, at least collecting the tumblers and stacking them in the sink, the plates and napkins and plastic utensils and throwing them in the trash. Decided, fuck it, let the new owners do it. Not my house. Never my home.

An hour earlier it had been shoulder to shoulder. The few remaining relatives. How many years before grandmother joined her son, this women who had already lost two of her five children? What was that horror like? How many more years before the uncle passed? And how much more time could Aunt Lila possibly have? The way she smoked and drank he wondered how she could still be breathing. His sister, the youngest blood kin there, who like him had fled the house the second it became possible to do so. Who unlike him had returned upon occasion. The one who called to tell him the old man was dying. Two other brothers and another sister no shows.

The rest he had no idea. People he had never met in his life yet all of whom seemed to know him. Friends of his father from fifty years back, old men who had worked with him, partied with him, known him in some way shape or form. Neighbors. Even two old girlfriends at least 20 years younger than the old man, the bloat of pregnancy weight-gain never lost on one, the other all cheap dyed hair, the odor of garage sale perfume and Nicorette gum. They embraced him like a long lost child, lips thick grubs mashing his cheeks and one, the back of her hand brushing his cock, a leer on her face as she stumbled away. "You look just like him…" Drunken slut. He turned away and his sister was standing there, watching, eyes slightly unfocused. Also drunk? No, he peered closer and saw, not drinking, just tired, bone-weary and done with it all. The wake her last service to the old man.

"How long?" he asked her, third drink in hand, third that hour, "How long was the old man sick?"

"I wish you wouldn’t call him that," she said.

"And what should I call him? Father?" Father was said with a sneer and a viciousness that surprised both of them.

"Three years," his sister said, "About. Maybe four. It all, I don’t know, the time just blurs doesn’t it?"

He’d had no idea. "Four years?" he gestured toward the curtain, the curtain that moved like shed snake skin still possessed of some vestige of life, "He was like that for four years?"

"Oh, god no, not, not that bad, not, that, was really quite sudden, just toward the end, that’s when it started to move so quickly."

"How did he find out he had it?"

"He had a sore throat that wouldn’t go away. He finally went to see the doctor. They found lesions on this larynx. All those years of smoking. So they started him on chemo and radiation and he beat it, beat it back. Oh he lost a lot of weight before, god, he looked like a memory of himself, like his own ghost all thin and frail ready to shatter at the slightest touch, but he beat it and got better. Looking at him after that, you’d of never known. Never known."

"But it came back."

"Yes. First his lungs, then his liver, then, one morning he got up and walked into the living room and bent down to pick something up a plate a paper something and fell over and couldn’t get up. His right side went all numb and the neighbors took him to the emergency and they found it had spread to the bone, to the brain. That’s when I called you."

He realized he was staring at the curtain, but he was seeing through the curtain, the old man on the death-bed, sunken and pale and hooked nose and inside the disease that had eaten at his liver and his lungs and his bone and his brain and he jerked away moaning.

His sister’s hand on his shoulder bringing him back.

"Is it dead then?" he asked her.

She blinked several times, processing the question, not understanding it. "Dead? What do you mean is he dead? Of course he is."

"No, I mean, the cancer. Is it dead too?"

"Of course it is. It’s not like it exists outside of him. It was part of him. His cells gone mad, his body devouring itself. It’s not like a disease you can catch. It’s not contagious for kripe’s sake."

"But that’s what took mother."

"It takes a lot of people. It takes people in China. There’s no connection."

"Still, do they really know? Where it comes from? What causes it? Could be a virus. A microbe. Could be sexually transmitted. Could be in the air, right now as we breath, flowing out of that dead flesh and into our living lungs!" A new thought entered his mind. "I wonder if he could hear it."

Her eyes searched his face. Uncomprehending. "Hear it?"

"When it was eating away at his bone. At his brain."

He could hear it. Like teeth grinding into clusters of chicken gristle encountering an exceptional crunchy bit. He thought he might have shuddered but wasn’t sure. His sister was staring at him as if he were some bizarre insect just come out from under a rock.

"What’s wrong with you?" she whispered and quickly walked away.

He moved through the kitchen and down a narrow hall. He paused to glance into the tiny bedrooms that fed off the hall. This room had somehow held his two sisters, this room his two younger brothers, this room the master bedroom. So small. Confining. More like closets. Like prison cells. The single bathroom they all shared. What had the old man been thinking? How could he have expected seven people to share this claustrophobic space without going mad? Without being driven to hatred and violence? But of course they had not.

The old man’s second wife was mad, completely and utterly mad. Diabolically. Evil. Her screaming began first thing in the morning and continued late into the night. Every move was watched, every word listened to. The slightest infraction would trigger verbal assaults that seemed to never end. And every infraction was remembered and stored away for future use. To be brought out and added to the others, events that had taken place weeks, months, even years before brought back for review, a list of transgressions compiled and used as razors to cut and cut and cut. Sometimes her words took form and arrived as blows. Across the face, across the back of the head. Or belt straps leaving throbbing welts.

That she’d died a long wasting death was some consolation. Kidney failure. Her body filling with her unfiltered wastes, poisoning her with her own piss and shit. Fitting somehow. Bloody fucking poetic you might say.

His room had been in the basement, under the stairs, a storage space turned living quarters large enough for a cot and a dresser and little else. Your own room he was told, all to yourself. But it was a way of getting him out of the family, of moving him closer to the day he would leave, get on his own, no longer a burden, no longer a source of the troubles that plagued the old man’s world. That fed his wife’s insanity.

He left when he was 17.

Now, thirty years later, he was back for the first time. A phone call from his sister whom he had not seen in ten years. The old man was dying. Really dying. A week perhaps. Maybe two. Or sooner. Could he come? Would he come?

For some reason even he did not understand, he made the journey. Not just the sickness but the assault of the toxic cures had ravaged the old man. Chemo had caused his hair to fall out leaving a few wisps floating over a scalp marked with age spots and flakes of dry skin like bits of translucent crust. The radiation transformed arms muscled from years of physical labor to clammy gray flesh hanging off sharp bone. His voice, always so deep and commanding, now a whisper staccato with bursts of pain. Teeth cracked, stained slivers flowing down his chin in thick strands of saliva.

A sound very much like the old man’s whisper spoke his name.

The son jerked. He was standing on the landing gazing down into the darkness of the basement. He glanced at his watch. Was surprised to see how much time had passed, how long he had been there, lost in reverie.

A sound. A sound that turned his stomach hollow once again.

The sound of the old man moving in his deathbed.

The crackling of the plastic beneath the sheets, the shhh of the thick plastic tube that collected the old man’s wastes sliding over the sheets, the ripping of the wool blanket snagging his gnarled toenails.

Silence.

Only his heart beating wildly in his ears.

Where in the hell were the funeral people?

He moved quickly through the house, to the front door. Threw it open, stepped out onto the porch, looked up and around. A scattering of stars flickered in the clear late fall sky. Far in the distance a street light appeared then vanished then reappeared on the whim of the tree leaves between it and him. He checked the time again. They’d said nine right? Nine-ish? It was past ten. Late for their own funeral?

He reluctantly re-entered the house. The sickroom smell even worse now that he had tasted fresh night air. He considered calling the funeral home, realized he didn’t have the number, realized the phone no longer worked.

He poured a slug of scotch into a tumbler that looked half clean, considered, added another. Contemplated the dining room. Dining room. Dying room. Death room. Funny little sing-song that. Funny.

He tossed the double down his open throat, felt it hit his stomach like a lead weight and burn. He put the tumbler down, belched acid. Drunk he told himself. And poured another. Standing at the end of the death-bed. Not really sure how he got there. Once again studying the old man’s face.

Thinking: Shouldn’t I be feeling something?

He felt he should. But in fact he felt nothing. Not sorrow. Not loss. Not a tear. Not a lump in the throat. Not a thing. As if what he were looking at was not his father, not a fellow human being at all, but a slab of beef, a clothing store mannequin, a funhouse prop.

He heard the voices of the others, the words spoken to him during the wake by the family, the friends, the lovers. The old man had been a good son, a good sibling, a good friend, a good lover. He was a straight arrow a straight shooter on the ball up and up type of guy a man’s man a woman’s man a hard worker he was he was he was…

A terrible father.

Incapable of showing love. Unwilling to provide guidance. Quick to anger. Quicker to judge. Seldom to forget and never to forgive.

The chasm between the man they knew and the man the son was raised by was so vast they might just as well have been two different people altogether.

"I hate you," he said and was shocked to realize that he had spoken out loud.

He hated this shell that lie before him. Hated it for its anger, its intolerance, its inability to show love or offer comfort.

And mostly I hate that I am just like you.

The tumbler was empty. He suddenly felt very sober and didn’t want to be. He went to get another drink.

A tall man wearing a hoodie was standing in the doorway.

"Christ!" he gasped, heart racing, "I didn’t hear…are you from the funeral home?"

"Funeral home." Said the tall man. His voice was soft and wet, his pronunciation a lisp, vowels sliding across pools of saliva. He stood well over six foot. Was sickly thin, wasted. His shirt sleeves barely reached his wrists. His pants just touched his ankles, ankles that looked lumpy and phosphorescently white.

Without a word the tall man moved toward the death-room. There was something unnatural about his gait, a fluid flow that suggested a lack of bone or joints that locked, a movement strange and unhealthy.

"It’s, he’s in there…" the son managed to stammer gesturing at the curtains, "You gave me quite a jolt there, wasn’t expecting…"

As the tall man passed, the son stepped back. He flashed on a vision of those fingers, those long doughy fingers that erupted from the puffy balls of hands, closing around his wrist, sinking through his skin, chewing into his flesh. He didn’t think he could bare it. He felt he should scream.

And the smell. God, what was that, not body odor, not just unwashed or undeodorented, but something from deep in the earth sprouting in soil that was damp and dark in a place the sun seldom reached, in a place where black beetles crawled and clicked.

But then the tall man was behind the curtains, his shadow even taller, even thinner with edges that appeared razor sharp yet strangely soft at the same time. As the tall man neared the death-bed his shadow elongated even further, became impossibly distorted, shifted and flowed as if the light were filled with struggling moths beating their wings frantically against the consuming heat of the bulb with dying, agonized spasms.

"Have you been checked?" His sister again, the wake over, the end sudden and without preamble. People there, drinking and laughing, then gone. Only him and his sister. She had to go. The in-laws only willing to keep watch on her children for so long. Knew they wouldn’t say a word to her but would go up one side of their son, her husband, then down the other should she arrive past the agreed upon time.

"Checked" he asked not understanding, "Checked for what?" His sister angry now. "Checked for what?

"For that. Both our parents died of cancer you know. I get checked every six months." She couldn’t understand his blank look.

"But its not, you can’t catch it, you said…"

"It’s genetic." She said. "It’s in the genes."

"But no one else in our family has it." Her eyes drilled into his and he saw, behind their glaze, what he had thought was drink, then believed was weariness, was instead the dull light of illness just begun.

He pulled away from the memory. Focused back on the curtains and the writhing shadows that contorted across them.

What is that godawful sound? What is he doing to the body?

He stepped forward, reached for the curtains, the sound a ghastly slurping, watery oatmeal sucked between clenched teeth.

He threw open the curtain.

If he could have screamed he would have done so until his larynx ruptured, but instead his throat constricted as if bound with wire.

The tall man had ripped his father open from base of throat to groin.

The tall man was reaching into his father and tearing out great clumps of the still pulsating cancer and cramming those dripping fibrous clumps into a mouth that filled the tall man’s face, a mouth lined with row after row of contorted fangs.

He wanted to run. That’s all he really wanted to do. Just turn and run as fast as his legs could take him, for as long as they would, for as far as he could go. But instead his legs betrayed him and the fact that he couldn’t breath wasn’t helping. He felt his knees buckle and he sank down to them, all the while unable to remove his gaze from the horror taking place right in front of him.

"Wha…" he choked, "What…."

The tall man extracted another clump and shoved it deep into his mouth. His nose and eyes have moved to the sides of the face to allow the mouth to open so wide. One eye, near the ear, considered the son and blinked very slowly.

"Harvest" said the tall man. "Plant the seed and harvest the feast."

The world went very black and the son fell into its embrace. Minutes, hours, days. He didn’t know. His eyes opened and for one sweet blissful moment he believed he was at his apartment, laying on the floor, asking himself how he had gotten there, wondering which bar he had drunk too much at, hoping he had not made too big a fool of himself, thinking of an excuse to use to call-in sick if it were any less than three hours before he had to be at the office.

Then he realized he was at his father’s house still and panic seized his limbs and threw each in a different direction as he scrambled to his feet and away from the horror he had seen, all the while his brain refusing to accept any of it and a stream of incomprehensible moanings of fear and disgust cascading out of his mouth.

The tall man was gone.

His father’s body lie on the death-bed, unviolated.

A nightmare? Had he fallen asleep waiting? Passed out? Most likely. Not the first time.

He felt like laughing and nearly did.

He turned still chuckling and the tall man pressed a long, bloodless tendril of index finger to his forehead.

It touched his mind and showed him his future.

He ran screaming out of the house and into the night. He screamed in fear and hatred, pain and despair, loathing and dementia. He screamed until he felt his soul begin to shred and crashed to the hard-packed earth in a choking cloud dust. Tiny rocks scored his palms and knees, but that pain was nothing compared with what eventually would come.

Now he began to sob, deep shuddering gasps that tore his sides and rubbed his lungs raw. He dug his fingertips into the dense soil, tearing two nails clean off the glistening flesh beneath. He felt the pain but again, it was nothing compared to what was coming.

Finally he lay still. He rolled onto his back and gazed into the vast night. It was like staring into the darkness that he knew existed deep within him, waiting.

He knew, for in that glimpse of the future he had seen.

In that glimpse he had been given.

A seed had been planted. A garden would grow in the soil of his flesh. A harvester would come.

Call it death for lack of a better term but it was far, far more terrible than that.

It might begin in a few days, a few weeks, a few months. Perhaps years, even a decade. As much as two decades if the darkness would be so inclined. But eventually…

…oh, eventually.

The cancer would come dark as night, filled with rows of teeth like armored fungus, come with a ravenous hunger, a masticating desire.

And he knew, knew that slowly at first, but quicker with time. He too would be eaten.

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