It's a glass Coca-Cola bottle.
Eight inches tall and two inches in diameter, with an aluminum cap. White script, only a pin-sized knick beneath the "O" in "Cola." And you're crazy if you think I ever opened it.
What, after all, is the point of a vintage collector's item with a broken seal? The liquid's still there, every ounce, isolated and made air tight in 1985, as good a year as any. I'll bet you my whole jar of pennies that it would last the apocalypse too, the liquid. I'll bet you a hundred years, two hundred years'll pass, and that glass lady will remain intact, pristine, unblemished. Maybe a layer of dust and/or uranium on the surface, but underneath, where it counts, she'll keep her carbonation. You wanna know how I know? Because that's good old American make for you.
In a thousand years, you could shake that thing up and turn it into a geyser.
I plan on opening it eventually. Not any time soon, mind you; but some years from now, when I'm knocking on death's door, I might dig it up from my sediments of cardboard boxes, give it a good shake, crack off the rusty old cap, and watch the golden froth seethe over the top. Maybe I'll even take a sip, if I'm feeling daring. Taste some of that 1985 and go out like I'm eighteen years old.
Or at least, if I could find the damn thing, I could.
Some facts about me: I might be the last civilized man on earth. I say "might" because I haven't ventured outside to check in some time (a number of months or years—who can say?). I haven't done it, because that's just the sort of cliche stupidity that gets a man killed or mutated in an apocalyptic scenario. Behold our ill-fated extra as he waltzes out his front door, dim-witted, blissfully unaware of the noxious fumes permeating the atmosphere; watch as he collapses to his knees halfway to his mailbox and begins to change, eyes becoming milky and deranged, brain matter rotting in on itself, muscles shriveling into rusted iron.
Some might consider this an unlikely scenario, hardly a possibility to mull over when beginning one prosaic day amongst thousands of others. But I ask myself, "Isn't that exactly how death would creep up on a man—like an utterly banal morning?" Isn't that exactly what happened to millions of oblivious persons when the apocalypse arrived like a thief in the night? Or the morning? Or what-have-you. So I don't tempt fate. I don't even let her get a good look at me. I've boarded up all my doors and windows to repel whatever decrepit wolves haunt the streets, and I eat from the canned meals I stored-up in my pantry for a sequence of events such as this.
Another fact about me: I possess an unfortunate disposition which deters me from cleaning up or throwing things away. I'm not a hoarder. No. That would be a misnomer. I'm simply a habitual creature—the kind who falls into rituals and patterns—and, rather than change the very disposition of my psyche, I've resolved to make the best of my condition, embrace it as a lifestyle, if you will. I let things accumulate. I let them collect, compile, assemble. Sometimes, I even let things congeal. But it's a deliberate, controlled process, my mode of survival on a condemned planet awaiting the Lord's impending arrival.
I admit my lifestyle does come with some disadvantages. For instance, I tend to misplace things. Or rather things tend to misplace themselves. I leave my appurtenances where they belong, I occupy myself with separate tasks (a stroll to and fro the hall, a cat nap to make up for lost sleep), and I return to find the goddamned, cursed things missing. Escaped! Goddamned pieces of shit! I place my toothbrush on the kitchen counter, I let it sit there for just five minutes while I hunt down some toothpaste, and it's performed a quantum leap by the time I reenter the room! Events like these are befuddling, infuriating, and—given that I live completely alone and possess a relatively sound mind—disturbing.
Which brings me to my current predicament: the mystery of my missing Coke bottle. Made out of pure can sugar from Mexico, I should add. I left it where I always leave it, its spot on the shelf between the glass bust of Thomas Jefferson and my stack of Maxell reel-to-reels; and now it's vanished without a trace. And given the conditions of its departure, I can only conclude that horrible things are beginning to happen again. Boarded up inside my safe house, I might be insulated from the blood-tinted clouds and the acid rain and the scavenger hordes, but that unspeakable void at the belly of the cosmos saw fit to curse me with something else.
Now, considering the exceptional nature of the following story, I want to assure the reader that my mental faculties are completely in order. I'm not mad or insane or loony or otherwise. I'm not the sort to chop a man up and hide his pieces beneath the floorboards, if you understand my meaning. I couldn't reach my floorboards if I wanted to.
Nor am I the sort to mistake hallucinations for real things. I know the difference between the two. I realize, for instance, that I'm not currently speaking to an actual, tangible person, but rather a narrative device, an abstract projection by which I can traverse the corridors of my memories. I know it's unlikely a projection would possess it's own mind and much more unlikely the mind in question would be a skeptic's mind. All the same, I'll endeavor to prove the logic of my conclusions.
Behold the evidence: a circular imprint in the dust, which suggests that an item sat on the wooden shelf for an interminable period of time, only to change location recently. I've exhausted every possible explanation for its disappearance. Explanation one: maybe I picked it up absent-mindedly, felt around its smooth contours as I made my rounds, and then placed it somewhere else without thinking. Explanation two: maybe I suffered a spell of sleepwalking, and my subconscious sought out the bottle amongst my other mementoes and then played a nasty trick on my waking self. Perfectly logical, rational, reasonable theories—it hasn't taken me long to reject both.
Riposte: I'm not omniscient (some might describe me as only sporadically self-aware), but even a man like me should possess enough wherewithal to recall such a significant deviation from his ritual. I admire the bottle frequently, appreciate how pure it remains, locked away from the forces of entropy, dust, time, decay. It's perpetually at the forefront of my mind, hardly the sort of possession a man would pick up idly and discard. I'm absent-minded, yes; but I'm not completely negligent. If a man can't trust his memory, what then can he trust?
And, while the sleepwalking theory might sway me under different circumstances, I think I can reject it outright for my current quandary, because it's only been a few hours since I last observed the item in question—sparkling from my peripheral, as I hunted through the music room for a particular issue of "Home Studio"—and I know for an indisputable fact that I haven't slept since I made that trip, not a wink, not even a catnap.
(On an unrelated note, I never found the issue either, but given the much longer span of time since I flipped through its pages—a decade possibly—I'm less concerned with locating it immediately. An old dilemma that I'll solve some day, whenever I get around to it. Old things have a propensity to turn up in chance locations, but that's the natural way of things.)
What's unnatural is a vintage bottle of Coca-Cola sparkling in a man's peripheral one hour and vanishing into dust the next. And once a man has exhausted all of his natural options, he's left with only the preposterous ones.
Like, for instance: The damn thing just sprouted legs and ran away, leapt from the shelf and circumnavigated all the sediments of books, lamp stands, underwear, shirts, tank tops, china, broken cardboard boxes, cellophane wrap, discarded cans, bottles, tupperware bins, present wrapping, curtains, mugs, tomes, wires, computer circuitry, monitors, bullet casings.
Like, for instance: Our sentient bottle tripped and slipped down into the morass and came to rest upon the oldest strata, the nether realms of used napkins and spilled coffee, a region I'm unwilling to explore at the moment. Or maybe our friend succeeded in his escape, traversing the garbage heap and shoving his spherical circumference through a gas pipe.
Excluding the more hackneyed explanations like legs and mischievous poltergeists, there's always the possibility Christ finally stuck his head beneath the blood-tinted clouds and acid rain and, declaring our disgraceful generation beyond saving, raptured-up this one nondescript bottle, which would account for the vanishing act and the decided lack of tiny dust footprints.
Of course these theories are all flights of fancy. I know what happened to the missing bottle, and I might even know why. My mind may be scattered and hanging with cobwebs, but I understand patterns. A man needn't consider every explanation for a phenomenon, when he already possesses the most-likely answer. Step outside to find everything covered in water, and you'll reasonably conclude that it rained.
Thus I've deduced that I'm not alone, that I've acquired an unwanted houseguest, who lurks somewhere beneath my quagmire of possessions. And I've come by this conclusion honestly. By noticing patterns. By tracing the succession of events back to their perfectly banal origin.
A final fact/working hypothesis: I am haunted by a monster of preternatural origin, who won't stop stealing my things.
And it all started with a normal Pickle Loaf, which I procured from a normal super market.
YOU ARE READING
Spawn of the Pickle Loaf
HorrorOur tragic hero lives a relatively normal life for someone surviving the apocalypse. He spends his time walled up in his safe house, eating canned food and watching television. He sleeps every once in a while. He thinks about tidying up his messy ro...
