John Burley - The Absence of Mercy

She reversed course and threw the door wide open, letting in the maximum amount of light to illuminate her ensuing inspection. She’d hoped, perhaps in vain, that the enhanced flow of fresh air would also dissipate most of the offensive odor. What she saw inside the shed amid the flood of sunlight was, in essence, unremarkable. Tools leaned lazily against the corrugated aluminum walls in their usual positions. The lawn mower sat dormant, patiently awaiting her husband’s return. Even the bags of topsoil appeared unmolested, their white bodies congregated in the corner of the shed like a small crowd of curious onlookers. Nothing seemed out of place, and there was no dead animal lurking in the recesses that she could see. Still, the smell was as pungent as ever—even more so now that she’d stepped inside.

She made her way to the back of the shed’s interior, allowing her nose to guide her rather than her eyes. It was here that the smell was most powerful, and she got down on her hands and knees to inspect the corners of the small enclosure, to push the bags of topsoil aside.

She found nothing.

Susan returned to her feet, hands placed squarely on her hips, as she continued to scan the inside of the shed from top to bottom. The stench was so noxious that she was forced to pull the front of the her T-shirt up over her nose, the smell of her own sweat and—yes, let’s be honest here—body odor preferable to the alternative olfactory assault. No matter how hard she looked, however, she was unable to identify the source of the odor.

Well, I’ve given it an earnest try, she told herself. This would be a job for Ben when he returned. It was one of the divisions of labor in their marriage. She had carried Thomas in her intractably expanding uterus for nine months, and was now three months pregnant with her second child and repeating the process all over again. She had been plagued by frequent episodes of nausea and vomiting during the first trimesters of both pregnancies, and by varicose veins and intermittent lower back pain at the end of her third trimester with Thomas. She had already pushed one child’s enormous head out through the smallest of orifices, and her body had been permanently altered by that experience in ways she would never feel completely at ease with. Now it would be her husband’s turn to retrieve dead things from the tool shed. It still wasn’t exactly a fair division of duties—he was getting off much too easy—but right then she was more than happy to cash in on her investment in their nuptial arrangement.

Susan exited the shed and slid the door closed behind her, glad to be free from whatever fetid thing still lingered inside. She was on the verge of crossing the lawn and returning to her gardening—perhaps, in retrospect, it would’ve been better if she had—but the obnoxious smell still hung in the air, even with the door to the shed closed and latched, and she remembered thinking to herself, What if it’s not inside the shed at all, but behind it ?

Even then, she’d considered letting the matter go. It wasn’t her responsibility to go on a half-day scavenger hunt looking for this thing. The days that she truly had to herself, with her husband out of town and Thomas off with his friends, were few and far between. She ought to be enjoying the day, not traipsing around the yard searching for clues like some veterinary medical examiner. The hell with it, she decided . I’m going back to my goddamn garden.

And yet a moment later she found herself peering around the rear corner of the shed. The front of her shirt was once again pulled up over the bridge of her nose like a bandana, as if she were more intent on robbing a stagecoach than exploring her own backyard. That was when she spied it, the source of the odor. At first, she wasn’t quite certain what she was seeing—the mass of flies swarming around it was so thick. She took a step forward and shooed them away with her hand. The majority of the airborne insects retreated a short distance, although they still loitered in the area, waiting for her to depart and leave them once again with their prize. At her feet lay a large Tupperware container, its underside pointed toward the sky. It sat in a small patch of dirt behind the shed, facedown on a two-inch-thick section of lumber, which completely sealed the container’s only opening. Along the edges on all sides, a series of nails had been driven through the container’s plastic lip and deep into the wood beneath.

Condensation had accumulated on the inside of the chamber, making it difficult to clearly make out the details of the amorphous form inside. Its dark outline was perfectly still, its body nearly filling the confines of the small compartment. There was no doubt about one thing, however. Whatever had been purposefully imprisoned inside the container was quite dead. The reek of its decomposing corpse wafted up through multiple punctate holes in the plastic, obviously created with one objective: to allow the passage of air in and out of the container so the animal could breathe. And that was where her eyes kept returning—to those small air holes designed to prevent quick suffocation. Obviously, the animal had been meant to die. But it had been meant to die slowly.

She’d backed away in revulsion, moaning slightly. In doing so, she managed to trip over her own feet, and she sat down hard in the grass a few yards from the makeshift death chamber. If there had been an upturned nail in the grass, she would’ve sustained a significant enough injury to land her in the emergency department, but she was lucky in this regard—all of the available nails had been used for other purposes. The flies took this partial retreat as a sign to resume their swarming, and they did so with new enthusiasm, desperate to get inside. One of them flitted onto her forearm, and she swatted it away in a spasm of disgust. She pushed herself backward along the ground, crab-walking away from the pitiful shape in front of her as fast as her adrenaline-laced appendages could carry her. All the while, her eyes kept returning to the air holes.

Die slow, thing inside. Die slow. The thought sloshed around inside her head like a rotting jellyfish, and suddenly she turned clumsily over onto her hands and knees and vomited in the grass. The stink of it mingled with that of the dead creature only a few yards away, and the axis of the earth seemed to tilt unpredictably as she vomited again, abdominal muscles clenching each time the spasms passed through her bent frame. Small beads of sweat broke out on her back, her shoulders, her forehead. Her hands balled into small fists as she clutched the grass, afraid that if she let go now her body would simply slide away from the earth and into the blackness that surrounded her. She remained that way for a long time: eyes shut, fingers dug into the soft dirt for purchase, flies buzzing in her ears, the ground shifting dangerously beneath her.

When the worst of it was over, she simply lay motionless in the grass, waiting to recover. A rogue fly landed on her calf, and she twitched it away. She wasn’t certain how long she lay there. She had the place to herself, and no one came out to ask if she was okay. During that limitless space of time, she thought of many things, but mostly she thought of Thomas. She thought of her strange, dark boy staring at her from across the room at the age of six. She did not wonder whether he had done this, for in some deep, primitive part of her brain she knew with a mother’s simple certainty that he had. Instead, she wondered about the insignificant details: Where did he get the hammer? From the shed, of course. Where is it now? She was fairly certain that if she went back to look for it, she’d find it hanging in its usual spot on the wall. He returned the hammer, but left the animal. What does that mean? Why didn’t he try to hide it? The question made her want to cry, for what it meant to her was that her son was broken in some deep, irreparable way. She thought of the neurologist, with his thick-rimmed glasses, bow tie, and doughy body: “ These episodes … He’ll grow out of them. Something else will take their place. ”