South Texas Death Machine

South Texas Death Machine: Part 1

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

-Arthur C. Clarke

Chapter 1

Dr. Felder Ashcroft farts himself awake, engulfed in the lemon morning light, on the last scheduled day of his life. His eyes unglue themselves and focus on the wilting faux-wood ceiling fan above his bed, a victim of the Texas heat.

The bed groans as his delicate body shifts onto its side. He looks over at his wife and wonders what she dreams about, if at all. He knew very little about her. If her personality were a house, he's only spent time in the foyer. All her other doors were closed- perhaps locked, perhaps not. He never cared to test them. As he studies her, the spotlight within his mind guides his attention through the darkness of his cranium, illuminating different sculptures of the same desire: getting blind drunk.

It seems that only a decade or so ago, this desire felt like a slow, continuous drip that fell from the top of his skull to the base of his throat. But now, the flow had frozen, forming into hideous stalactites that hung from the inside of his brain, piercing each thought bubble that floated by. He was impressed with how seamlessly he'd been able to incorporate drinking into his everyday life. How it slowed down life's endless conveyor belt of mundane errands, new worries, and irregular orgasms.

His kids didn't seem to notice his drinking at first, anyway.

Toddlers like it when you're drunk.

That's what no one tells you.

You almost drop them, and they think it's funny.

It's when they're older when that sort of stuff starts to offend them.

But unlike most mornings, instead of going to the pantry, grabbing the whiskey bottle from the empty flour jar, and surreptitiously adding some to his chicory coffee- he just pondered the urge. Certainly, it was his death, loitering around the corner of the day, that caused him to become reflective about his drinking. So he indulged the exploration- perhaps for the first time. To Felder, sobriety was like sitting on a beach, far away from the ocean. It could be nice at times, but you were restrained, uncomfortably so, to the rules and laws of the natural world. A drink or two was like wading into the waves where experimental colors and entrancing oddities were constantly being brought to you by an unseen force. And every time it gifted you something new, it would beckon you closer to the horizon, away from the beach and its discouraging limitations. Half a bottle of whiskey and you could submerge in the pale blue everything and float weightlessly toward treasure, sunken memories, and strange holes. His only complaint was that you couldn't stay forever. Eventually, you'd wake up on the shore, red-eyed with the bends.

The aspect of his death that most excited him, perhaps the only aspect, was slaying his addiction. He would kill it and not the other way around.

Felder liked killing horrible things.

A blink transports him back to the moment, and he turns his focus away from his ceiling fan and his drinking to his current wife, Lillian, who lies asleep next to him. While sleeping, she was not a person to him but a list of ingredients needed to construct a human. A spreadsheet of sepia tones, from the khaki bottoms of her feet to the sienna trapped under her fingernails. A tortilla scalp hidden beneath walnut hair. He watches her stir and swim through every shade of drowsiness as she makes her way back up to the surface of consciousness. It seems that she can sense when he is awake. Or she was just pretending to be asleep. She slides her hand across his chest and slowly twists at one of the dried dahlia flowers affixed to his long, greying beard.