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Excerpt from WIP titled 5/27
Katherine Talbot-Jones, 26
South Lake Union, Seattle
4:32 a.m.

She does some high knees to keep her heartrate up while she waits for the crosswalk signal. In the background, there’s the dull low-frequency susurrus of traffic to underscore the Cyndi Lauper from her earbuds.

Her mind is wandering. She leans over to spit but then stops out of fear. She’s noticing that she’s started to spit up some sort of translucent goo, and she doesn’t want to confirm her fears by spitting it up again, as if not spitting would forestall whatever onset illness was causing the issue in the first place. If it’s, like, even an illness at all, she thinks uneasily. She can’t tell where the goo is coming from, but she suspects her lungs are the culprit—except she doesn’t hack it up, it just comes up naturally, bubbling up from her lungs or from wherever until globs of the stuff agglomerate to the fore of her mouth, convenient for spitting. It looks pretty innocuous. It’s translucent, for Chrissake. But goo is goo, she thinks, frowning. Goo is always bad; goo is never good.

The crosswalk signal changes and she sets out running. She has her phone in her hand, but that’s all she takes with her on her jogs. The jogs are her time to disengage from the world a bit. She runs from her apartment on the corner of Harrison and Yale down to Fairview, where she cuts across the street to the park and begins her usual circuit around the lake.

She couldn’t tell you what she thinks about during the runs. She’d probably say ‘nothing,’ but that’s simply not true. Obviously it’s not. It’s just that her train of thought is vectorless—her thoughts are scattered and directionless and unguided—and so her jogs are meditative in this way. She’s not thinking about running, or her pace, really, or what’s happening around her. She ignores the laminated posters for film festivals and organized protests and upcoming concerts, the ‘HAVE YOU SEEN ME?’ foolscaps bearing photos of lost pets, the flimsy and tattered advertisements for cello lessons or amateur theater that are taped to streetlights and dumpsters. She maintains a proactive awareness of the circumambient homeless and the goings-about of the seamier varieties of street traffic that tend to populate the sidewalks and alleys in the early mornings before daylight pushes them into the city’s penetralia, wherever it is they go—she will arc around them wide, as necessary, and she avoids eye contact. If any of them approach her she ignores them and if it goes any farther she’s got her SABRE kwik-release pepper spray lanyarded to her wrist. Thankfully, she’s never had to use it—she attributes this to her deportment, which (she believes, and has been told) is austere, dispassionate. Basically, she doesn’t look like the sort of woman anyone’d be encouraged to fuck with.

Her morning runs are essential for her to feel in control of the subsequent day. It’s just nice to be out here in the middle of it all when there’s no one playing, no people around to fuck it up, when it’s dark, and all the light is amber and makes the world feel cloistered, comfortable. Where for once she doesn’t have to think about anything and she can just run.

But this morning is different. She runs with a furrowed brow, a grimace. It’s the lung-borne goo. What could it be? What is it? She’s not getting sick, is she? It’s that stuff that clings to the lips when you spit it out, wobbling erratically in a long and thinning glutinous strand, arcing back and forth with your movements like a pendulum before invariably sticking itself to your shirt or jacket. It fetters the mouth to the garment this way. This happens now, and she removes the strand with a pinky, wipes her shirt. The stuff is viscid. She inspects a little orblet of it on the tip of an outstretched finger, holding it up to the light to see it better. She squints. The stuff is pellucid and a little milky. She pinches it and finds that, to her horror, it retains its shape upon release. More gel than goo. This shit is inside of her? She coughs to listen to her lungs’ report: not a productive cough. Her lungs sound shrill and dry and healthy.

She thinks really hard about what could have fomented the phlegm. Her pace slows as she thinks about it. She’s now become conscious of her every respiration, feeling for the trace of a rasp or a whisper appending an exhalation, a stogged throat on the air’s intake, anything. But her breathing seems fine.

She thinks about her lifestyle: she doesn’t drink. She eats one meal a day and the meal is generally pretty healthy. She stays very hydrated. She gets eight to nine hours of sleep a night and uses an app to track her sleep quality. Obviously she exercises. So what could it be?

Now she’s passing the lake. The long stretch next to the MOHAI, the whole body of water spread before her, so still it would almost look like it’s not even there but for the purple reflections of the nebulously shadowed masses surrounding it, the buildings, the boats. Long panes of light from the city are scattered every which way across the lake’s glass surface.

She slows her jog, braking to a brisk walk. It’s time to deal with reality: maybe she’s getting sick. Ralph had been coughing and sniffling and stuff when he had come over, but that was four nights ago. Maybe whatever it was had been incubating in her for ninety-six hours and was just now ready to reveal itself. Ralph hadn’t mentioned anything about being sick since then, but he’s not the sort of guy who would mention that he was ‘feeling sick’, no, not Ralph—he was content to suffer in silence. She lifts the back of her hand to her brow: not super warm, or anything. Her breath doesn’t feel hot in her nostrils. She doesn’t feel tired. Maybe she’s just making a big deal out of nothing.

She orders her usual from the Pike’s Roast on Mercer Street: an Oat Milk Vanilla Latte. The barista eyes her from the register with the distant wariness you would entreat on someone who you know is sick, but still have to interact with professionally. Is she holding her breath while I’m talking to her? Katherine thinks. She notices the barista gives her some napkins with the drink instead of just the drink itself. Usually napkins are furnished from a dispenser by the straws and sugar and other beverage-fare. This confirms Katherine’s suspicions: she must be sick. Or at least, at this point, she’s pretty sure she’s getting sick. Now that she’s really paying attention to her own body, it does seem like she’s overexerting herself a bit doing things that usually wouldn’t wind her, like walking, and she also notices that she feels a tad more tired and sleepy than she usually does when she finishes her jog. She’s been sweating more, too, and she keeps sniffling, which isn’t totally unusual, because it’s still technically springtime, and the pollen was pretty bad this year, but it could also be that she’s coming down with something…

What could be the cause? The flu? The common cold? In May? That didn’t make much sense. Something Ralph gave her…maybe. Maybe…but she can’t shake this odd feeling of dread that whatever this is is something worse. Much worse. It’s the gears of her intuition that are turning now, a sort of tingling instinct informing her that something grave is occurring beyond what her five senses can intuit. Could it be a malignant tumor, dormant but now metastasizing? Crazier things have happened. She’s hypothetically too young for such a thing to occur, but crazier things have happened, yes, for sure…could it be the work of some aberrant illness which is just now beginning to germinate? Some new, exotic disease? Patient zero, the first host to the world’s next pandemic…I mean, no, she thinks. No, now you’re going crazy…it’s probably nothing. You just need to calm down.

She walks westbound on Mercer Street, her head down, tuning everything out now, her mind’s eye fully engaged with entertaining her various conspiracies, indulging in the deeply insular fantasies of her paranoia, Cronenberg-type stuff. She still has her Airpods in but no music is playing. She’s now become acutely aware of the sweat beading on her forehead, even though the morning is cold and she’s long since stopped running. She’s starting to take note of the general dirtiness of the sidewalks, the overfilled trash cans like suppurative pimples leaking the effluent of those thousands of passersby who had frequented this very same street, breathing this air, this exhaust-tinged air. She sniffs. The air smells like shit. Literally, like shit. No doubt the work of one of those community members, she thinks, glancing around warily, what a funny name for them…these remnants of people. Look, there’s one now, squatting in an alleyway, just wailing to himself…or, wait, no—he’s not alone, no. He’s caught in some sort of entanglement with another vagrant—possibly erotic, or maybe violent? What’s happening? Her eyes are drawn to the scene out of some morbid curiosity, the same flavor of curiosity that compels one to check the bowl after an especially excruciating shit: is this guy getting fucked, or something? She squints. No. That’s not it, either.

But he is wailing. It’s quiet, but he’s moaning in pain. She opens her mouth tentatively but stops short of saying anything. He’s writhing on the ground atop a flattened cardboard box which is streaked with mud and is waterlogged throughout due to the morning’s condensation. He’s wearing a horrible mismatch of clothes, a filthy and tattered puffer jacket which bleeds polyester filling, a Seattle Sounders FC T-shirt underneath, its original lime-green color bleached, faded, the shirt mottled with stains. A rag is wrapped round his head, or, wait, no—it’s a beanie, soaked through with sweat and hanging loosely from his pale skull. His pants are too tight, and upon closer inspection she realizes they’re women’s leggings, torn up and down the stitchline around his thighs and knobbed knees. His face is a rubicund mess of scars and lines, a patchy beard and dark, wild eyes. She approaches him unconsciously as if she is being summoned. The other, the one on top of him, seems to be fading in and out of the long shadows of dawn, and is obscured. She can only see bits and pieces of him. What she sees disturbs her: the guy is really big. Really, really big. Almost twice the size of the struggling dude. And it looks like this guy is reaching down into the wailing guy’s face, not touching his face, maybe, but his—mouth, is what it looks like. It is now apparent to her that what she’s looking at is not erotic in nature at all. It’s some sort of attack.

Now Katherine is starting to feel actually sick. Not the fake, hypochondrial kind of sick she was feeling before, but actually sick, the latte feeling hot in her stomach, a depthless nausea coming over her. And yet she still keeps walking forward, very slowly. She doesn’t know why and she doesn’t even particularly want to, but she walks forward all the same. She squints.

The bum’s mouth is open impossibly wide. His jaw is stretched taut and the muscles in his face are bulging and strained. His eyes stare up at his assailant. The assailant is so large that she at first mistakes the bum as being remarkably short, but now that she’s really looking at him she can tell he’s of average height. The assailant’s hands are black—not dark-skinned, but jet black. Her eyes trace his limbs to his body and she realizes that the whole of him is black, as if someone had spraypainted him. He looks like some kind of fucked-up shadow. He doesn’t have a discernible face. No mouth, or nothing like that. And when she looks closer, she realizes she can’t really tell where the guy ends and the space around him begins. It’s like he’s almost formless. She’s either looking at him or she’s not. Trying to make sense of him and what he looks like is like trying to make sense of some Penrose stairs—it hurts her brain to look at him.

She can see that the bum is bleeding pretty badly out of his mouth. It looks like this thing is reaching into him, through his mouth, and is working something out of him real slow. Its one arm is stuck way in there. The bum makes some muffled noises which would probably be louder if his mouth was empty. He can’t move his head but he must know that she’s approaching because his eyes turn toward her and his hands flail for her blindly. She’s just barely out of sight.

She raises her hands to her mouth in horror. The bum’s broken teeth have fallen into the creases of his puffer jacket. The mud that she mistakenly assumed was smeared across his cardboard bedroll is actually his own blood, dark and viscous and thick. The smell of him is overwhelmingly bad; he’s vaguely shitsmelling. She can now hear the gored ruin of the bum’s mouth, the clicking of his wet innards’ squelched plosives as they shift to accommodate the thing’s forearm—she can hear the dull popping of bone, the tines of sinew being severed as his mouth is opened ever wider, the man’s gurgling and wordless protest. The thing continues about its work. It ignores the bum’s flailing arms as he feebly attempts to subdue it. It does not seem to notice Katherine Talbot-Jones’s presence, nor react when she pulls out her phone and, with shaking hands, dials 911.

‘Eee,’ the bum says. ‘Eee.’

‘Oh my God.’ She keeps blinking. The line rings out once before the call connects. A brisk voice sounds in her ear:

‘911, is this an emergency?’

‘Yes, it’s an emergency! Someone’s being attacked at, uh,’ she screws up her eyes— ‘the breezeway between the McLeigh-Barsson building and the, uh, building just west of that—on Mercer! Send someone!’

‘Ma’am—’

But Kath hangs up the phone. She looks around desperately for something to throw, something heavy. And then she remembers, stupid, of course: her pepper spray. Jesus Christ, how could she have forgotten—it’s there in her hand right now, she’s been holding the fucking thing this whole time, for Chrissake—

Kath fumbles with the Kwik-release. Her sweating thumb slips on the detente before it settles true. She brings the spray up to a firing position, her arm extended, her hand shaking, and she aims—

And it’s gone. Just like that, the assailant had disappeared. She almost gives herself whiplash trying to figure out where it coulda gone. It must have slipped into a side passage between one of the buildings, or through an alleyway door—it couldn’t’ve gotten far—

‘Puhleesh…’

She shrieks. It’s the bum, on the ground. He’s reaching up to her, both of his hands clawing at empty air as if he’s still struggling with his attacker. She walks over to him as if he could be some sort of threat, although he’s clearly not. It’s just that, in the back of her head, even though she herself doesn’t realize it, the guy does present a sort of threat to her, even moribund, supine on the cardboard like that—it’s because he’s sick, because she registers him as being dirty, that she’s wary of approaching him, although she doesn’t have the mental faculties to put that together, in the heat of the moment…

‘Puhleesh,’ the bum says. His face is open. She doesn’t understand how he could be talking, how he could be forming words through his ruined mouth. His jaw bulges and distorts where it had been broken. His eyes are permanently squinted. His maxillofacial lineaments had been so thoroughly decimated that he appears to be constantly O-facing in an expression which communicates an exaggerated enthusiasm. She winces, she falls to her knees.

‘Puhleesh,’ he says one more time, before the glaucous sky grows very very dim all of a sudden, before his sight fades to one singular point, like the old cathode TV he remembers from his fuckin childhood, oh, how long ago was that—the seventies—nuhhuh—the late sixties—that house with the cherryred wallpaper strung up everywhere—his mother turning the TV off from behind him with the remote, nagging him to do his chores, to do his homework—the TV’s light bending and collapsing on itself until it was a singularity, and then nothing, and then darkness, and then his cloudy reflection, his confused expression, staring back at him indolently—and this was sort of a similar feeling—the blackness coming all at once, his arms going suddenly slack, feeling a sort of what the fuck?, and then—

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Eric Angal was born and raised in Seattle, and he still lives there and works there. His work is published or forthcoming by Nut Hole Publishing, Don’t Submit!, and The Argyle Literary Magazine. His short story collection Defiler is available for purchase through Nut Hole Publishing. He can be found on Twitter: @MrZoris, and on Substack: @erickangal