Eternity Lies In The Weeds

I drive by it every day from work, right before the bridge, on that desolate road pinched by trees. Work allows me to lock it away in my mind, fall into a routine, but on that road I know I’m approaching it. I know where it is and feel it emanating before it's even in sight. My eyes twitch at the thought of it and I desperately reel them back into position, but not before I make note of the decay–lost promise. It still has its eyes…

Eventually, I make it back to the gravel driveway to my first floor apartment of a dingy old house, rot festering in the foundations. It has never bothered me, people don’t come out here and the landlady seemingly wants me to finally be rid of me despite being the only person who would pay a premium for this place. Tonight, she paid me a visit again.

Glassy eyes looked up at me and the echo of blue blended into her curly gray hair. Her face fell into itself in ripples and puffed out in between. She took a few moments to catch her breath, and I wonder if she's only here because she doesn’t have anyone else. “You best start looking for another place soon, they’re looking to condemn this house soon.” Before I could give my usual response, her eyes went level and she quickly craned her neck to the left then right of me. “Well…” I started, inhaling and exhaling like it was something I just had to make peace with, “Oh, I didn’t know you had a cat!” She blurted out as if there wasn’t already a conversation. I did a half step, careful to not let the landlord see too much and responded, “Oh, yes. Ray is a very good, old friend of mine and I couldn’t be anywhere without him.” Ray stared from a doorway, half obscured by the wall, his rounded pupil dilating at my response, the brown forming on the slightest ring, and the pronounced whites empathized the jitteriness of his eye. I doubt the landlady noticed it, years of conversations with that eye has sharpened mine to its subtleties, yet by her staring, I got a flash that she was trying to. A pang of jealousy, and worry, shot through me and I stepped onto the porch with her and closed the door behind me. The rest of the conversation wasn’t noteworthy, although the landlady kept blinking and looking around like a newborn child, as if trying to prove everything is real.

After she had driven away, I opened up the door to my apartment, musk and dark hanging heavy over our space. Stepping in I scanned the area, looking for Ray. The cheap blinds filled the room with a yellowish-orange that became sickly as it entered. The couch filled the right side of the space, to the left was the door to the kitchen where Ray was watching the landlady and I from, and between was his dishes and litter box. The litter box was empty and the dish overflowing with a mound of food, the base of which seemed so old that they formed a bumpy lava flow around the exposed parts of the dish. I stared at it with a fire rising inside of me, after all, I tried to give him whatever a cat needs yet he didn’t even have the respect to play along, to accept it. He was, however, my best friend and those memories deflated any fire inside of me. Ray was nowhere to be seen, probably off hiding like he usually does whenever I come back.

Today I had to fire the kid who wore dress shoes everyday. I blame that stress for my reaction on the ride back. I passed it again, right before the bridge, and couldn’t take my eyes off it. The fur and blood had mixed together, turning the body into a landscape with thick brown rivers flowing down a forest. There was still some beauty left in it. 

I came back in a cold sweat as the images still flashed through my mind, despite how much I tried to push them out. Tumbling onto the grimy loveseat, all of my power focused on talking myself down. How easy it would be to turn them anew again, give two beings a second shot at life. Yet, I could not let myself be enticed by that allure–I had brought so much pain to Ray, that's part of the reason I needed him. The cushions on the couch had more give after years of rot, and sinking in deeper, I called for Ray.

A faint whimper came from behind the cracked closet door. He knew I needed him to and would come to remind me why I shouldn’t follow through. I saw the eye first peeking out of the cracked closet door, those massive whites giving away any chance of secrets. Truthfully, that was all I needed to see, Ray’s eyes have always portrayed more than his words ever could then and now. Yet he kept coming, meekly pushing the door a couple centimeters and desperately contorting his body, causing him to fall on his left side as soon as he managed to get out. Their body hasn’t changed at all since I found them, rusty orange with a tire mark along their side, right side of their head crushed, eyeless, and their back-legs hanging on. Yet the eye kept looking, kept flicking all around my body, focusing on my hands, my legs, my face. That eye made me set aside my temptation, I owed it to him for what I did.

Work couldn’t distract me from thinking about the promise today. I closed my office door all day and stared at my computer screen without seeing it. Doesn’t it deserve another chance? Countered with a flash of Ray limping, his strained eye. Ray’s just ungrateful, why should he determine it for others? I was shaking my head back and forth whenever a coworker eyed me through my door. I realize that he probably thought I was reading a disagreeable email, but at the time I couldn’t help but the thin brown circle in his eye lingered even whenever he didn’t. I took off the rest of the day. The eye’s have rotted, it has morphed into vague flesh…

Turning onto the empty road of my apartment, I noticed the landlady’s car parked in the gravel driveway. Suspicious, I slowed down and peered as I drove by. The front door was cracked with the landlady wondering about the side of the house, looking for something. At the sound of my car on the gravel, she looked up like a caught child and after a couple of seconds began walking towards me. I swung my weight out of the car, greeting her, “I didn’t realize you would be around today.”

“Well, I…” She responded, stopping and recoiling as my path neared her. Only to start again as I turned towards the front door, “I needed to check on the gas usage and water usage. The company has noticed an unusual uptick here.”

I peeked into the door and swept the area, “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” I responded and nodded at everything seeming normal inside. “Although,” I lingered on the last latter half of the word, “I’m not sure why that would require you to enter my apartment.”

She seemed cut by my gaze, only offering, “I needed to check if there were any leaks, nothing was touched.” Her eyes fixed firmly on the ground before her. 

Before she could follow that up, I asked her, “What were you looking for outside?”

Her eyes glanced briefly up at my face, then back down to their previous point. “You see, I opened the door and your cat ran out.” She clutched herself. 

Without thinking, I walked up to her and grabbed her arms below her shoulders, “You what,” I shouted, “did you at least see where Ray went?” 

She mumbled something, and tried to move her arms which I took as my signal to let her go. She pointed towards the woods behind the house, flabby skin dangling from brittle bones seemingly growing like a vine, “I think he went that way.”

“Well,” I made a dramatic scooping gesture with my arm pointed at the woods, “we should go look for him then.” A couple of seconds went by, then I could see the muscles of her face go slack.

“I suppose it’s only right,” she said with a gravitas of someone who hasn’t been needed for years and marched on. I followed behind, looking over my shoulder for any sign of Ray.

We had been walking into the woods for some time whenever the landlady stopped to catch her breath. I knew by then it was hopeless and looking away from the cause of it all to regulate my emotion, but this was shattered by her half-confession. “You know, I’ve never seen a cat like that before, those big human-like eyes, and the state that it was in. It looked like it got hit by a car the day before. It could’ve walked right past me and I wouldn’t have moved an inch with how surprising the sight was.” I looked down and kicked at a root in the ground, trying to let the feeling rising in me transfer into the earth. Thump, thump, thump. She continued, “I mean he truly is a remarkable thing. I knew I had never seen a cat like him before because of that eye alone, and that’s before I saw the rest of him!” Ray was gone, because of this woman, THUMP, THUMP, THUMP, and now she was pretending to have known him. I pivoted one the same foot that was kicking the root and hit her right on her temple. She fell, clutching her face, and let out a moan. I don’t know exactly what happened after that, I came to in the forest on top of her, lifeless, glassy, scared eyes staring back up at me. 

I pushed off of her and crawled backwards until I hit a tree. As soon as I couldn’t move, I clutched my hands to my face, pressing so hard that I thought I was gonna go blind. Even if I did, however, it wouldn’t have helped. The images of Ray’s body staring up at me, flashed through my mind like a slide-projector, using my hands as a screen. I couldn’t handle the eyes, his body was at the only exit to our shelter, and I couldn’t handle scaling over those eyes. I don’t know how I stayed huddled in that corner being pierced by those eyes, I took my pocket knife and scoped out his eyes, dispelling the wall they had on me. I climbed out and ran until I hit a road, where I would find the fresh roadkill of a cat, both eyes popped up and one socket crushed. This overwhelming urge came over me to right my sin and I jammed one of Ray’s eyes into the cat’s socket. The misshapen eye filled the socket and I stood staring at Ray’s eye looking back at me. Then the eye blinked. At first I ran again, but I knew it was Ray looking at me again, so I went back and found Ray hobbling down the road. I grabbed him and held him close and hid him away.

After all that time Ray got to spend revitalized, I was always so heart broken that he never seemed to understand the gift I gave to him–the gift I could have given to others. However, I couldn’t stand the thought of losing him, he was my best friend, and make no mistake, Ray was still in there. His eye would jump whenever he heard his name, yet it was always so strained, always watching my every move and steadily shaking more the closer I got to him. He kept me in check, but he’s gone and I’m sitting across from a dead woman staring like Ray did. I scooted closer to the landlady’s corpse.

The bag almost fell out of my hand, I was shaking so hard with the excitement of being able to do it again. I already sent a message out to my employees notifying them that I won’t be in for an unforeseeable amount of time and drove back to that bridge. 

Tripping over myself with wonderful intoxication, I dove to my knees and drove my hands under that pile of loose flesh, wrinkles folding in on themselves. The rot had taken away much more of it than I originally wanted, but the sensation was still enthralling. I rolled around the carcass in my hand, absorbing all of the decay that I could prevent. Suddenly, the mass was illuminated by a passing car, a cold, sterile blue. I saw it, some notion of a socket still remained and I pressed my face to it, much like I did with Ray whenever I became convinced it was him. The light moved on, albeit slower than it came, and I felt that it was my queue, I bundled it up in my shirt and drove home.

As soon as I made it back inside, I unceremoniously dropped the vessel onto my cheap dining room table placed directly in the center of my kitchen. I gave it a pat of reassurance and opened my freezer. All was empty except for a bag encasing the landlady’s eyes. They looked just as glassy and just as beady and just as gray as I held them over my head in the yellow light, but they were at peace.

It took a couple of attempts before I found the correct angle to not damage the eye too much, thankfully the wrinkly flesh had some give to it and I managed to aim it directly at me. I took a couple steps back, giving the life some breathing room, but nothing happened. After some more time passed, I decided that I needed to readjust the eye. Then, as my forward foot touched the ground, I saw it. The eye quivered, the pupil got wider, but the flesh did not move. The only movement was Gloria’s eye tracing me.