John Rotten

"OK, so I left her, so what! What business is it of yours? She was a miserable cow, always moaning. A fountain of bitterness and rage that just never stopped flowing. After a while, a guy just loses his tolerance for that level of toxicity." John said with some indignation. But he noticed that none of his friends around the wooden pub table in the local Royal Oak replied and he realized that he was venting on something that no one had challenged him on. He felt ashamed at his sudden eruption.

"Sorry, I don't know where that came from, I guess I am more shaken up by leaving April than I thought." He added shaking his head.

One of his friends tried to calm the waters a little, "It is a major change for both of you. We were not judging you John, we know both of you well enough to know that there were problems and have been problems for a while. It is not our place to comment on that, we are just here for you ok. We are old friends and every life has its ups and downs."

John ran his hand through his hair, a mixture of guilt and shame disturbing his inner peace. He had a thousand things to say but not now, he had yet to process all these feelings. He was angry, guilty, ashamed all at the same time and the confusion of passions inside him made him restless and was quite overwhelming in fact. So he simply said, "Sorry, I need to go now, I guess I am still processing all this. I need a little time for that."

He left the pub, images of his sick wife, April, in his head, bedbound and hospitalized with acute back pain. The doctors were having problems identifying the cause. At first, he visited her every day, sitting by her bedside chatting. She put on weight as she lay there over the months, her skin changed and her bed sores and spots became distracting to him. April's frustration with her own condition and his own impatience with the situation increased as time passed and the relationship became more and more strained. He wanted to move on from her, fed up with her instructions and nagging and he missed sex.

He started sleeping with a neighbor's wife, Maggie. Her husband had put on a lot of weight recently and was not performing in the bedroom. Maggie and John found an outlet in each other with angry sex that became something altogether more intimate over time. Finally, Maggie split from her husband and demanded that John do the same with April. He could see no reason why not as they were already effectively living together. It was a simple formalization of something that had happened months before.

But telling his wife was a lot harder than he envisaged it would be. At first, she cried shouting at him for removing whatever incentive she had to get better by telling her that she had nowhere to go when she left the hospital. Then she had screamed at him from her hospital bed cursing him with words that he would never forget,

"So you are going to abandon your sick wife and go off with some whore. I curse you John Beaumont, may you rot in hell, may everything you touch wither and die, and may you have a miserable and painful death. That is what you deserve."

He had stormed out, angry at her, angry at himself, but without words. The curse stuck in his head and deep down he knew he would never shake himself free of it.

######

A month passed and John and Maggie were happy in John's house. John moved April's stuff into cardboard boxes. An irate brother-in-law came around to pick it up. That encounter might very well have ended in blows were it not for the fact a police car passed the house while the loading was occurring and then seeing the angry verbal exchange between the two lingered for a while.

John built a pigeon loft on the roof. It was something he had always wanted to do and something that April had never wanted. For him, it was a symbol of his liberation from oppression to happiness.

But then came the big storm. The roof of his house would have withstood hurricane-force winds in normal times but not with the extra drag of the pigeon loft that he had added. The hurricane ripped his roof off, blowing the pigeons out, never to be seen again and the rain poured into the building, soaking everything. A few days later he had erected a tarpaulin over the space and called contractors to fix the roof. But the earliest they could start was two months time. The damp walls inside his house erupted with an assortment of fungi. Insects poured in through the gaps in the tarpaulin in biblical numbers. Termites started gnawing away at the wood. Moths got into his clothes cupboard and holes appeared in his favorite outfits almost overnight.

Over the weeks that followed he found out that it was not just his house that was falling apart. His hair started falling out and his teeth became loose. While eating a steak with some friends in a pub two of his teeth came out while chewing the meat. His skin sallowed and he wondered if he had contracted something.

Visiting the hospital for an MRI appointment he passed April's ward he saw that it was empty. He checked her Facebook, she had forgotten to delete him, or maybe like John with her kept the link to keep tabs on him. He read that she was celebrating a remission of her condition that she referred to as a miraculous recovery. She had a new romantic relationship now and there was a picture of her new friend and her arm in arm before a Venetian fountain from a holiday in Italy. Her comments and replies to friends were positive and human not at all like the witch he had made her out to be when he left her. Reflecting on this made him feel guilty. If only he had hung in there then maybe things would have turned around in good time.

The problems with his hair, skin, and teeth proved too much for Maggie. She was only a fair-weather friend and left him to return to her husband.

By now his house was being eaten away by the termites and holes appeared in the floorboards. A roof beam broke over his head and he broke his arm trying to stop it crushing him. Even his food started tasting odd, sweet spices tasted somehow rotten. The MRI results came back. He had some kind of osteonecrosis resulting from a lack of blood flow to his bones causing the bone tissue to start dying and rotting away. He was in continual pain. They recommended he move into the hospital but he resisted that.

Because all his clothes were full of holes he started sewing segments of different clothes together. He looked increasingly like a clown. He lost his job and had no money to move out and nowhere to go anyway even though he knew that any health inspector worth his salt would condemn the place. He could not afford the contractors to fix the house and the insurance refused to cover the cost since they cited the pigeon loft as the cause of the disaster with his roof. This had not been a part of the house when the original insurance appraisal was made.

It was at this point that he wondered if the curse that Maggie had placed on him was real. He was too proud to go to her directly and ask for forgiveness. She had already moved on and by now he looked a state. He did not want his ex-wife to see him like this. So he went into a church instead hoping for some kind of free ticket out of this. He sat in the back listening to a man reading from the lectern. He was reading from Isaiah

Therefore as the tongue of fire devours the stubble, and as the dry grass sinks down in the flame, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust; because they have rejected the law of the LORD of Armies, and despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.

Filled with terror he ran from the church and back to his home. As he entered the house collapsed upon him and killed him instantly.

######

Maggie viewed the ruins of her old home from a distance with her new fiance, Martin. insects of every kind swarmed all over the place which was reduced to a kind of sludge. Fungi growths grew out of the muck but there was almost no wood of any sort in all the mess before her. Only the brickwork in a mainly wooden house was still standing.

The site inspector had been told that she had lived there and approached her.

"Mrs Beaumont, my understanding was that this was your home? Do you have any idea of the events leading up to this?" The inspector waved his hand in the direction of the horror show behind him that was once her home.

"This was my home, but I have not lived here in more than a year and the title deeds were all in my ex-husband's name. I was in hospital and then my husband and I separated. What happened to him and to our house?"

"We were hoping you could tell us. What we do know is that we found fragments of what look like human remains in the middle of all that mess but maggots, worms and insects had eaten all the flesh away. The police identified your husband from what was left matching it with DNA found on the steering wheel of his car in the driveway and on a spare jacket in the boot of the car. The bones also were completely rotten and were crushed into a sort of pulp. As you can see Termites, ants and beetles completely infested the house. There is little left of anything here. To be honest I have never seen such rottenness and devastation. This house collapsed three days ago, but there is virtually nothing left. In all my professional career I have never seen such a thing. The speed of deterioration is remarkable and if I had not seen it with my own eyes I would have considered such a thing scientifically implausible."

"He was a rotten man and an awful husband and I will not miss him, maybe someone cursed him?" April said with some steel. With that, she turned away hand in hand with Martin and walked away.

Notes ▼

CONTEST:

FORUM

The Science Fiction Short Story Contest  (18+) A contest inspired by the serious need for more good sci-fi #2140378 by BlackAdder

PROMPT: September Prompt: Rot
In honor of the home repairs, I've been engaging in for the last few months (actually, mostly paying experts for), in September any science fiction short with rot or decay as a theme will be accepted as a valid contest entry. May the most decayed and putrescent entry win!