Tim Curran - Resurrection

Last month she died. She died and that’s that. You never saw her anymore, you didn’t even know what she was doing these days. Was she with one man after another like dad said? Or had it been worse? When she slit her wrists had it been because of her drinking and drugging or something more?

Something like loneliness?

Chuck wasn’t going there. There was pain there and bad feelings and he could not face them. After she’d died, he’d spent a lot of nights going over it all. It was true that he had not really seen her in three years. But she always sent cards and sometimes she called. But Chuck had not acknowledged those cards or returned those calls. He knew why, of course. It was because his old man had encouraged him to blot out the memory of his mother. And he had done so. His mother had left. He lived with his father. That made him feel bitter at her and made him want to do just about anything to please dad.

Well, he never left, did he? He didn’t abandon me. He took care of me.

As dad always said, “It’s just you and me, kid. Your mother wasn’t much to begin with and now she’s gone. It’s just us. You know you can count on me, right? That you can always count on me?”

And Chuck did.

Even though dad had little time for him, he knew he could count on him. At least, he thought he could.

And mom?

She was dead and that was that.

God, where was all this coming from? This sudden concern for others? He’d never cared about anybody before.

Sucking in a damp wind, Chuck opened the front door.

Right away. He could smell something cooking. Something like bacon frying. It had that same unmistakable odor…almost. But not a good smell like bacon in the morning, but something else. Something that smelled like salted meat on top and something almost rancid beneath.

He walked slowly towards the kitchen, certain now what he was going to see. But driven. Pushed in that direction. Needing to see the very worst thing that this night could offer up to him. Something much more personal than that clown or the old witch. Something he could not walk away from unchanged.

The cooking smell was stronger.

It was gagging even.

At the archway leading into the kitchen, he stopped. Stopped, took a breath, found his voice and pulled it up where it might be heard. “Mom?” he said.

There was a wet, smacking sound like an old lady moistening her lips. Then a voice, very dry and cracked: “Come in, dear.”

It was Chuck’s legs that almost mechanically brought him through the archway. Because the rest of him was tensed and crawling and needing badly to run. But his legs brought him in there and he got to see. See what, somehow, through wind and storm and driving rain, he’d been drawn back home to see.

There were perhaps a dozen candles glowing, throwing wavering shadows against the wall like something from a spookshow. And that was appropriate because mom was standing before the stove. The gas stove. The electric ignition was out, but mom was resourceful: she’d used a kitchen match. Mom had always been resourceful that way. Even after six weeks in the grave.

“Are you hungry, baby?” she asked.

Chuck wanted to fall to the tile floor. He wanted to fly apart or drag himself under the table like a sick dog. Mom just stood there, smiling at him as she cooked things in a frying pan. She was entirely naked, a moldering thing with deflated breasts hung with green moss. Her left eye was missing and her right was huge and glistening black, a grayish mucus running from it. The flesh had been eaten away from her ribs as if by animals and her skin was white and lumpy with strange sucker-like growths that looked oddly like barnacles.

“How’s my baby boy?” she said. “Did my baby boy miss his mommy?”

Chuck was repelled, certainly, but more than that he was wounded on a much deeper level. Something inside him, something he imagined to be like boiling red blood, was bubbling to the surface. Coming from a room inside him he’d kept locked and bolted for years. It was the place he’d kept the memories of his mother. The way she’d been before she left and his hopeless childhood fantasies of what things would be like when she came home again. But she never did come home, so Chuck had thrown everything into that room: all the emotional flotsam and jetsam that had collected in his soul over the years, all the love and hate, joy and heartbreak, remembrance and disillusion and pain, dear God all that biting, cutting awful pain, and here it comes, here it all comes?

Chuck began to whimper as all those repressed emotions broke through the levy and flooded him, running wet from his eyes and filling his belly with heat and making something in his chest constrict.

“Tears, Chuck? Are those tears and sobs for your poor neglected mother?” she said. “No, no, no, we can’t have that. Mommy can’t have her big boy crying like a little girl. You let mommy make it better. You let mommy make you something yummy to eat.”

And as Chuck stood there, floored with too many conflicting emotions, mom flipped dark, burning things in the pan with her spatula. A sickening odor wafted from them, almost overpowering her own stink which was that of mildewed, rotting things. As she worked that spatula, he could see where the pathologist had sutured her wrists back up in the morgue. The flesh of her fingers hung in loops like cobwebs. Her knuckles had burst through the skin and he could see red gristle beneath. She hummed some melancholy dirge under her breath and Chuck was certain that she’d hummed him to sleep with it when he was a baby.

He took one step backward.

“Where are you going, baby? Don’t you like mommy’s cooking?”

As she said this, a flap of something fell from her cheek and landed in the pan, sizzling away in the hot oil. And that was what she was cooking up. That’s what she was offering to her son: herself. Didn’t mothers always give their children their own flesh and blood? She had brought him to being within her own body and now she was giving him another helping of that. She wanted to fill him with herself and that’s why the flesh from her ribcage was missing: she’d filleted herself for her only child.

She stood there, humming and flipping the meat, an absolute horror. He could recognize that figure as his mother…but just barely. Most of the hair was gone from her scalp, save a few locks at the back of her skull. And these were not the lustrous red he remembered, but a dry tangle of pale orange hairs like dried reeds or straw. Her lips had shriveled away from her blackened gums and her teeth seemed narrow, rodent-like, just gray with filth caked between them as if she’d chewed her way up out of the grave. The entire left side of her face was enormously swollen, just a great sac of pus and quivering larva.

“Why don’t you talk to mommy, Chuck?” she said, a couple of graveworms dropping from her mouth and frying up in the pan.

“Your dead,” he said and was surprised at how calm his voice was. “You…you shouldn’t be here. You’re dead.”

Mom fixed him with that single black, juicy eye. “That’s what your father said, Chuck. That’s exactly what he said. Right before his heart gave out and he hit the floor. Don’t worry, baby, I didn’t let your father die alone and unloved. I laid on top of him. He didn’t like it much. Especially when I told him how all his partners are robbing him blind and how his mother tried to abort him and?”

“Stop it!” Chuck said, more emotions rioting in him, filling his head with explosions like fireworks. Grief and pain and guilt and anger and horror, oh yes, lots of that.

Mom laughed and it was an awful, screeching sound like grinding metal. “Hungry, Chuck? Hungry? She reached into the pan and her fingers sizzled in the oil, black smoke coming off them. She snatched a piece of meat and placed it between her teeth. She did not chew as a human chewed, but like an animal, a dog or even a shark maybe, snapping her teeth down on it and pulling it whole into her mouth and down her throat. “Yummy. Now, Chuck, it’s time we spoke the truth about your father.”