Spawn of the Pickle Loaf

Part 5, In Which the Terror Begins

I admit it.

In the subsequent months, I completely forgot about the pickle loaf sandwich putrefying behind my refrigerator door. Such is the disposition of my mind. If I wish to compartmentalize something, lock it away and throw away the key, I can be disturbingly successful.

A year passed, I think. During that interim, I spent most of my time watching television. I lived on canned cuisine, stacks of beeferoni from the storage cabinet, baked beans and potatoes. Survival food. But I don't mind eschewing luxury. I never have, and I never will. Especially what with the current state of the world.

Two or three more times I tried to rearrange the music room, but in every instance, that damned tangle of cords hijacked my efforts. So I didn't venture into that section of the house much either. In fact, I started avoiding most of the space beyond the living room, vacating my bed--which had become a repository for CPU's, mother boards, cooling fans I'd given up on selling--and sleeping on my couch. I sleep best with white noise, anyway, even if it is all explosions and gunfire and pundits strangling each other over tables.

I think the world must've really fallen into disarray at some point during the interim. I don't know exactly what happened--who first attacked who, for instance; or which party released the deadly chemicals into the atmosphere--but I did grow to suspect that something was awry when the mice stopped visiting. Also when my television suddenly spluttered and displayed only silver static.

One night, as I drifted in that lambent space between sleeping and waking, I suddenly remembered it (the pickle loaf, goddamnit!), and I experienced a fear more fathomless than any I'd yet encountered. I felt as if my stomach had been replaced by a singularity, a cosmic abyss which would devour the rest of my body, collapse me and suck me in, flopping like a mannequin. The fear was so overwhelming that I knew I would never sleep again unless I faced it, so I stood and tiptoed to where the pickle loaf lurked, probably a horrifying cancroid by now. How long had it been sitting there? I wondered. What grotesque form had the sea of hairs grown into?

I had to circumnavigate a number of things. Since the first fateful night, I'd accumulated a bicycle frame, an Olympic bench press, and a number of smaller oddments over which I had to mount and climb and grunt. And once at the refrigerator door, I became so scared, I felt I would black out then and there, just collapse onto the kitchen tiles.

But I gathered myself. I took a deep breath and put things into perspective. Whatever the pickle loaf had become was only organic matter, after all. I wasn't in any real mortal peril. The grotesque might have an indirect effect upon one's biology if revulsion is strong enough, but only a deranged man would fear physical consequences from a moldy sandwich. Perhaps I could treat it like a kind of science experiment, something a biologist might perform under controlled lab conditions. Like the biologist, I could detach my emotions and examine the specimen with analytical fascination, no matter how expansive its anatomy had become.

No polyps, cilia, or fungi, no spinellus, no sabdariffa or hyphae, no hairy walls of excrescence, no slimy appendages from yellow adenoids could scare me.

Maybe the outgrowth had died even, withered and crumbled into gray dust. This I assured myself as I gripped the door handle, heart hammering in my tonsils. I stood like that for a few minutes, just clenching the dusty plastic, preparing myself for the emotional strain I'd doubtless undergo. Perhaps that was another mistake--forming expectations. I tried to anticipate the horrors therein and only set myself up for shock when the creature subverted my presumptions.

I ripped open the door and beheld a nightmare.

Nothing.

The Sargento had withered away into blue soot, and the olives sat hunkered in their cloud of brine, but the corner between them lay empty. Nothing. The plate, the bread, the pickle loaf, were all gone, vanished without a single crumb of residue to divulge their bygone presence. Absurdities upon absurdities. My mind performed cartweels, clawed after explanations.