She spoke quietly to him over the phone. “Are they still there?”
He considered how to answer. The images of the broken bodies came suddenly. “Yes,” he said finally. “Still there.”
In the silence that followed, he could hear her breathing irregularly. The bodies had upset her. More so than he had expected. Maybe he had grown accustomed to the sight. Desensitized. It shouldn’t be a surprise that, after five years of living with the host of death on his doorstep, the sight now failed to evoke his sympathy.
“I love you,” he said suddenly, irrelevantly.
Behind the window blind, a trapped wasp buzzed and then stopped.
“No.” Her breath now catching. “No. I can’t. Goodbye.”
With the suddenness of this ending, he found himself standing for several moments with the phone pressed to his ear, listening to silence.
Carefully, he placed the phone in its cradle.
…
He awoke later on the couch, the room in darkness. In the street, a car slipped past, and he involuntarily hoped that it might be her returning with a change of heart. He chided himself. Foolish. It’s done.
It was done. How had it happened? The dead. The dead had defeated him. It was just, he thought. It was just, because hadn’t he ignored them, day after day, until weeks became years?
Years? When had it begun?
The wasp buzzed again, it’s body pinging helplessly against the slats of the blinds.
Yes, he thought, it was five years ago when he had seen the first one outside, resting on the first step of the stairs at his front door. It was a curiosity. He had paused for a moment to watch it. Its head twitched, registering his presence, then it shifted its weight slightly and was still.
Conscious of the possible danger, he moved on; the violent potential of the intruder hadn’t been forgotten. He closed the front door and locked it behind him.
The next day, he opened the door to find two of them. He hesitated. Was it safe to pass? He paused and watched for signs of activity. The new one was motionless — it probably wouldn’t move until the morning sun warmed the air.
The first one lay on its side, it’s body curled in on itself. The rigour of the dead.
Had it really been five years since he’d seen that first one? As he lay on his couch he turned his face into the cushion as if to hide from the memory.
He had slipped past the live one without rousing it, made his regular commute to his cubicle, and spent an entire day dwelling on the image of the body on his doorstep. Could he have helped it when had first discovered it? Where did it come from? Why did it choose his doorstep to rest?
The progression of weeks brought more visitors to his doorstep, and each time, his ability to decide whether to help had faded. He was chained to the path of denial, and with each passing day the decision tightened its bond on him, compounding his guilt. He would not help them.
But they had kept arriving. They rested on his doorstep, then found themselves too tired to continue. Daily, he would find a new visitor. And a new corpse. The individuals became a pile in the corners beside the steps. Spiders and pill bugs emerged from hidden crevices and dwelt among the detached parts: here some legs, there a head or two. Black shapes in a darkened corner.
The wasp behind the blinds was silent for several minutes, as he lay stretched on his couch in thought. The silence was distracting. He could open the window to let it out. He didn’t move but to cover his face with his hands. Maybe the wasp was dead.
Presently it buzzed again then was silent. No. Not dead yet.
Slowly, he manoeuvred himself to a sitting position, and after a pause he rose and made his way across his darkened apartment to the kitchen cupboard. He opened it and his hand blindly came to rest on the bottle. The cork slipped free smoothly, wetly, releasing the sweet, peaty aroma of scotch. He considered the glasses that were stacked in the corner of the kitchen counter, but they were still dirty from last night.
In hindsight, it was obvious why she would have been upset and it was his failure for denying the reality. He had heard the taxi pull up out front and, smoothing his shirt, went to the door to greet her. He opened the door with a smile that faded suddenly. She stood, frozen, several feet from the front step, her face a picture of horror.
She left. She turned without a word and walked away from him into the night. The steps had been littered with corpses, the crippled, and the dying. He had phoned her, but it was futile. He had lost her the moment she stepped out of the taxi.
The wasp emerged around the edge of the blind and threw itself into the air. It made a single curving flight around his head before plunging back into the gap between the blind and the window.
He took a mouthful of fire directly from the bottle. This would end now. Placing the bottle on the counter, he strode purposefully to the window, raised the blind, and threw open the window. But the gesture came too late. The wasp lay on its back now, its legs flailing helplessly in the air. It was dying.
Had he taken action sooner…
With a puff of his breath, he blew the wasp from his window sill out into the night air. It fell, gently, silently and came to rest amongst the dead. Eventually, it too began to decompose, it’s wings and legs and head joining the growing pile of black body parts filling the corners outside the house and extending into the yard. The dust of death swirled in playful winds, dancing as it never had in life.
Sometimes, something I read triggers a flight of the imagination. This is what I hacked out immediately after reading a blog entry by Babak H. Saradjeh. (Link: Scratch Pad: The Fly Who Died) The stairs to my apartment are in an open-air atrium. Architecturally, it’s an interesting feature of the building, but for whatever reasons, flying insects — especially wasps — become trapped in the corners. Tenants regularly sweep the landing to clear away the dead insects. It’s very strange, when you think about it.