"I'm sorry John, but this has got to stop."
Trying to halt him has about as much chance of success as a gingerbread man holding an empty bucket aloft in hope of preventing a tsunami from hitting the shore.
John is a churning wave of destruction as he spills down the stairs - all twenty stone of him. Once hard muscle turned to pale, sagging flesh.
Sausage fingers grasp at the wall, at the bannister, tips little more than ruined nubs of gnawed nail-flesh. Blood spatters in the shape of fingerprints. Bright smears of red against nicotine paint and unvarnished pine.
"Son of a bi⚊"
Glass shatters and explodes as a picture is loosed from its moorings by John's porky digits. Its sharp guts spill from the frame and sink into feet the size of sledgehammers.
"John!"
"God-damnit Mary."
A slender hand reaches out, an attempt to press the pause button on a bomb which has already begun to detonate.
Broad shoulders heave, shoulders which once were straight and true. Tight. Strong. Corded. Shoulders which are no longer so, now gone to seed, doughy and undulating. A pair of flat tyres flapping atop a hulking spine.
Fshlap, flopp, fwapp.
"John...No..."
He continues on, this man-mountain, sledgehammer feet crunching through broken glass and filthy clothes, a trail of sanguine rust in his wake.
He reaches the bend at the bottom of the stairs, tries to turn.
Fshlap, flopp, fwapp.
Huge arms pinwheel, stubby finger-nubs scrabbling for purchase, the mountain begins to crumble, the beginning of an avalanche made of flesh.
A shard of glass pricks in to a sledgehammer sole. Neurons fire. Self preservation kicks in. The mountain rights itself. Continues onwards.
"Mary? Mary, I'm sorry."
"It's alright."
"Talk to me Mary, please."
"John, I ⚊"
"Fuck!"
An arm the size of a tree trunk sweeps across formica, utensils clatter, dancing over a pitted linoleum floor as the aftershocks rattle through the foundations of a house that the man-mountain built with his two doughy hands.
A bottle shatters against the wall above her head. Mary ducks against the onslaught. A hailstorm made of glass chippings rains down around her, into her.
"John!"
"Damnit Mary, I told you to buy more fucking bourbon."
She sits quietly at the table. Dead still, dead silent. John picks his way clumsily towards the stove, stained pajama-bottoms flapping around ankles thick as telegraph poles. Picks up a knife. Puts it down again with a shake of his cannonball head.
Click, click. The sound of the stove's ignition. A whoomph of gas.
Calloused fingers stroke through hair. Mary shudders, even though she stopped thinking of it as her hair a long time ago. It's someone else sitting at the table. Someone elses hair whispering like tinder-dry straw beneath those bleeding nubs. She wants to scream⚊even tried it a few times, but it's futile. She knows this now.
"C'mon Mary, you gotta eat."
"No, John."
"Mary...please," he begs.
She looks into his eyes, those oh-so-familiar eyes, once blue as the ocean, now dead like her heart.
"I made you soup." He sounds so hopeful as he brings the spoon to her lips. Prods delicately for entrance.
Plink.
"I can't." The spoon scrapes against her teeth.
Plunk.
Plink.
Something pearlescent floats in the bowl's murky liquid. John's face twists into a grimace. His hand drifts to the bowl, fingers shaking, they plunge in to the liquid.
He looks momentarily confused, great eyebrows like engorged beetles plunge down towards the dark shadows of his eyes.
"Cold," he mutters. "Too cold." He shakes his head. "S'okay Mary." Tomato soup spatters against his pajamas, hands patting his pockets for matches that haven't been needed for a decade or so.
"Do it, John," she whispers; a tooth plops to the table, bounces and rolls before coming to rest.
He bends to the base of the stove, lights a match...
Whooooomphhhh
*
"Been dead some time," the officer says, poking at charred remains with gloved fingers.
"Shame," the other replies. "Guess he just couldn't let her go, carried on."
Mary twines her fingers through John's blackened stumps as he watches. A helpless outsider. A ghost, like she was all this time.
"Love you," she whispers.
