Tom was a psycho. Behind the collapsed cheeks and eyes that vanished into their orbits was a deeply fucked up brain. I tolerated his behaviors, well really I guess it was Tom who tolerated me. My normalcy would seem to have been loathsome to him but every time I knocked on his door he answered and welcomed me into his apartment. Hell, he even kept some Sierra Nevada Pale Ale on hand for me.

I stopped going to work on the one year anniversary of my meeting Tom. I was sure that I would be fired but I didn’t really care. The lack of sleep and nightly visions of Tom made me just not give a shit about anything anymore. The day before my abandonment of work I was at Tom’s house and he convinced me to pull my thumbnail off with a pair of cheap dollar store pliers. He showed me how it hardly hurt by pulling his own off first. As the nail pulled free there was a horrible sound, like a bandage being ripped free of a sucking wound. Tom did not even cringe. I pulled mine off and it fucking hurt. Christ on a stick did it hurt. Mine did not go as smoothly as Tom’s. After my first yank the nail was still embedded by the quick. I stayed away from Tom’s for three weeks after this incident. But as always I was compelled to go back, as if drawn by an invisible hand. Over the next seven weeks I pulled off the other nine nails at Tom’s request.

I, of course, was fired from my job. I had a little money, enough to live frugally for about a year. I had to give up beer snobbery. The natural choice for me was Blatz. Tom always had it and he seemed to welcome me to his world of swill. I was spending more and more time at Tom’s house. I was sleeping even less and subsisting on Ramen and Spaghetti-Os. I looked like a Romero extra.

My money started to run dry sooner than the year I had calculated. It was surely all the bandages I had to buy to keep all of my various self-inflicted wounds from bleeding out that sent my budget to hell. I moved in with Tom to save money. I had no finger nails, no toe nails, no pinkies, no ears, no hair, and stigmata like holes in my hands. All of this was done by my own hand at Tom’s urging. The wounds seemed to hardly heal but somehow infection never set in. I drank a lot of Blatz to dull the pain and to block out the every increasing terrible smell of Tom’s apartment.

On the last day I knew Tom I decided to impress him by sticking a metal skewer bent into a hook up my nose and then yanking it out. When Tom realized what I was doing he started to yell and lunged at me. It was too late, I was determined. I thrust the skewer up my nose. The pain was immediate and nearly caused me to collapse. I felt the warm flood of blood down my face and neck. Tasted the iron. I grew light-headed. I looked up to see Tom staring at me bloodshot eyes agog at what I had done. My vision started to gray. I quickly yanked the skewer back out feeling an unexpected resistance, as if there was something in my head pulling back. Then again maybe I was just growing weak. I pulled hard and the skewer came loose just before I hit the hard linoleum floor of Tom’s kitchen. I looked up, Tom was gone. Vanished. I was in my apartment. The skewer lay beside me with a quivering black mass impaled on its hook. What had I done?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.