The Slob Read online

  The Slob

  Aron Beauregard

  Contents

  Dedication

  Quote

  THE REMNANTS OF VIOLENCE

  HOMEGROWN HORRORS

  THE PERFECT STORM

  ONE WEEK

  THE SLOB

  RED RUG

  SEPARATION ANXIETY

  SWALLOWED SERENITY

  BETTER OFF DEAD

  THE BARNYARD BLUES

  THE COLLECTOR

  YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

  THE CLEAN UP

  SILVER FOX

  PIZZA PARTY

  ON A POSITIVE NOTE

  About the Author

  1ST EDITION BONUS ART

  THE CLEAN UP CONTINUES…

  Copyright © 2019 Aron Beauregard

  All rights reserved.

  Cover & Interior Art by Anton Rosovsky

  Original Cover and Interior Artwork by Andriy Dankovych

  Mix Tape Art by Katherine Burns

  Cover Wrap Design by Don Noble

  Edited by Laura Wilkinson

  Printed in the USA

  Maggot Press

  Coventry, Rhode Island

  WARNING:

  This book contains scenes and subject matter that are disgusting and disturbing, easily offended people are not the intended audience.

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  Dedication

  For my family.

  We are not “normal” but we are pretty entertaining.

  “What if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us?”

  - Joan Osbourne

  THE REMNANTS OF VIOLENCE

  As I laid on the red rug, I struggled to maintain my awareness. My most basic faculties were plummeting away from me at freefall speed. My brain was cloudy and shorting out like a fried circuit-breaker in a dingy basement. The knots swelling and rising all over my bludgeoned head and the gaping lacerations only expedited my descent. I was a misshapen heap; peaks of fleshy mountains with the drooping valleys occupied by a warm scarlet river of flowing plasma in between. My expression had become a metaphor for life. Its many ups and many downs entrenched in the patterns that had been savagely thrashed into my face. I felt just as utterly ruined inside as I did on the outside.

  The nauseating flavors of my most personal parts had been extracted to dowse my palate. The intimate violation that he’d seen fit to drag me through was incomparable to anyone with any semblance of a soul; a tier of torment that the average mind is unable to comprehend until it experiences it.

  He seemed like such a docile and harmless man, pathetic in many ways. Someone that you wouldn’t expect to be able to tie their own shoes. Someone who didn’t harbor the capacity to wash themselves properly. Yet, somehow, he was capable of such atrocity and unmatchable hatred.

  In retrospect, all the signs were there. I just gave him (and the world) too much credit I suppose. I thought projecting my good intentions onto others would act as a safeguard. But benevolence, charm, and charity will be of little help once you fall into the clutches of a heartless heathen.

  I had been in his godforsaken bedroom for far too long waiting for him to cook up his next assault. The worst part is knowing that he was coming back. He is always just mere seconds, minutes, or hours away from turning that grimy silver doorknob again. The mental anguish is almost as horrendous as the physical violence and defilement.

  My desecrated body begged my brain, trying to convince it to agree. Posing the existential argument for death. My carnal form wished he had just finished it already while my heart ached thinking about Daniel. He’s all I have now. Well, I don’t even have him really, but I have the thought of him at least. Knowing that he needs me is my lone remaining comfort as I await the diseased mind of that fucking slob to plot the next manifestation of his diabolical values.

  There are no bounds to his perversion, no moral to his blueprint, yet, somehow, I feel as if he’s still holding something back. Like there is some sort of sickening surprise that he’s kept veiled but still has in store for me. For us, I should say.

  I looked back at the girl with the black garbage bag on her head. She was bound to the chair. I was too destroyed to attempt communication. She wasn’t moving or talking anyway. Had he done something to her while I was knocked silly, or had she passed out from the stress? Her still bleeding frame told a tale similar to mine. If we ever did get to talk, it seems we’d have a lot in common.

  As I coughed up another mouthful of blood and gist, it splattered all over my forearm and hand. I looked up from my dripping extremity and toward the infinite piles of filth in the utterly hopeless bedroom.

  The bedroom was a place that was supposed to be reserved for slumber, peace, and love. I felt like we couldn’t be farther from the most basic form of relaxation. The place of rest had been dampened with my blood and tears. It looked like the bedding of a serial killer or murder scene. It very well might be.

  The scent of the violence was still in the hot stagnant air, blended with the overall stench of the rotting rubbish that filled not just the room but the entire property. It was a playground for the uninvited guests—the squirmy insects and hairy mice.

  I could clearly hear the wild scampering scrapes from the army of wiry-legged pests that roamed the nightmarish hellhole with excitement. Their bulky overfed silhouettes raced around in the darkness beneath the bed. The house was a blacker degree of abyss than I could have imagined. He must have enjoyed them… were they his pets? I certainly was. I was the pet of a vicious psychopath and surrounded by the repellant reincarnations of my dirty past.

  Suddenly, I felt even dizzier than before, like my surroundings were twisting around like a cinnamon swirl. I no longer had the strength to move or plan, it seemed I had entered an autopilot state. My life was being presented back to me.

  Was I dying? Was this what people described as their life flashing before their eyes? There was no way to be sure, but somehow, I was back at the beginning again…

  HOMEGROWN HORRORS

  My preoccupation with cleanliness started as far back as I can recall. Some of the earliest snapshots of my existence consisted of me holding a rag with a pail of discolored water by my side. At first, I didn’t even realize that we were different, I don’t think anyone would until they had something to compare it to.

  It took me socially interacting in kindergarten to receive that initial epiphany. I visited my best friend Caitlyn’s house for her birthday, and instantaneously, I could see a discrepancy so vast that it was damn near a crystalized black and white comparison.

  There were places they could sit in their house, the couch wasn’t entirely overrun with newspapers, trash, and dated unopened mail. The walls were not filthy to the touch and there was not a slew of seemingly useless objects that just appeared to be collected for no specific purpose.

  Piles of clothing that would never be worn didn’t comprise whole rooms in Caitlyn’s house. Every dish in their cabinet wasn’t soiled and heaped up around the sink or stacked in other random areas. There wasn’t mold manifesting in the corners of the walls and ceiling of the bathroom. It was easier to breathe and smelled like freshly folded laundry, not spoiled food.

  Maybe the part I enjoyed most was that there was nothing else living inside the house aside from Caitlyn and her family. No dead or dying mice emitting shrill cries of agony, twitching in insensitive traps. No pellets of their feces sprinkled in their cereal and no sounds of them scratching about the walls to leave you restless at night. They drove our husky shepherd absolutely mad. Buddy was constantly barking and chasing after them.

  We had even encountered a few rats in our time,
so monstrous and vicious that traps weren’t enough to eliminate them. Whenever they surfaced, it would usually take my father hobbling around the house and beating them to death to resolve the issue. One time, he’d seen one walk right up to Buddy’s dry food dish and start eating out of it.

  After clobbering a few, he finally got tired of it and decided to sniff out the source. He learned that they were coming up from a hole in a grimy unused toilet in the basement. He plugged it up eventually, which solved the rat problem, but there were still so many other creatures traveling throughout the property.

  The mice and rats weren’t even what bothered me the most. What bothered me the most was reserved for an even creepier, stealthier type of appalling vermin—the cockroaches. A mouse wasn’t going to crawl into your ear or nose while you were sleeping. A rat wasn’t going to lay eggs in your bed that could hatch in your sleep, but those little bastards most certainly would.

  A few weeks after Caitlin’s party, once I realized just how abnormal the conditions of my existence were, I found one inside my lunchbox. I pried the lid open after gym class one day, salivating at the thought of my bologna and mayonnaise, only to feel my drool dry up just as fast as it had dribbled out.

  The roach was a fat, repulsive thing. It shuffled around fearfully once the light invaded the box and tucked itself underneath the plastic-lined soggy white bread. The gag-worthy bug was fully matured with thick auburn wings resting on its back. It terrified me when it suddenly flailed them and began to flutter about around my lunch noisily.

  I killed it discreetly before it could alert the others. As squeamish as it made me, my reflex was to use my palm to mash it down into a juicy porridge. While the squirming prickly insect frightened me, the thought of everyone else knowing I’d introduced it into our classroom frightened me more.

  I pretended to eat my lunch, but instead, I just sat there sipping somberly on my apple juice box and gazing into the roach’s guts and beige filling. I think that was probably the first time I can recall feeling shame. It was a pathetic belittling sensation that rocked back and forth inside me. It made me sick. So sick that it altered the very fabric of who I was. You can’t change what cloth you’ve been cut from but you can at least try to wash it.

  After the roach incident, a fire flared up inside me. My way of life needed to change. At about five-years-old, I began to clean every inch of my room fanatically. Most kids at my age would have been concerned with going to a friend’s house, playing games with the other girls on the street, or maybe discussing their very first crushes. But not me, I was different. We were different.

  The problem was, I didn’t want to be different and if I wanted a push to normalcy, it was going to have to come from within. I decided that there would be time for friends later. Plus, if the other kids understood the conditions my family and I lived in, they most likely wouldn’t be my friends for long anyhow.

  I decided it was better to make my friends after the abnormalities in my home were remediated. My once frequent contact with Caitlyn diminished, and before long, we were more casual classroom acquaintances than the gossipy girls we had connected as initially. I was slowly putting up a wall, and I made sure it was cold and impenetrable. It wouldn’t drop down until things had changed… until I was ordinary.

  Fortunately, I was a smart kid. That early foresight and intelligence helped me avoid the constant ridicule of my peers. That youthful wisdom came from a deep understanding of my surroundings and taking note of how others around me behaved. There were many children that were not as fortunate and couldn’t yet grasp how social settings and ruthless pecking orders functioned. If they found out that you smelled, or if you were dumber than everyone else, you were done for. Because right when they found out, the first thing they did was exploit it for their entertainment.

  From that point of discovery moving forward, you were a walking punchline. I knew I needed to keep the irregularities that plagued my family close to the vest. If anything got out, I would be tortured and teased forever. Because of those sticky circumstances, for the better part of my childhood, I lived in continuous fear. No sleepovers or girls’ nights out, just the struggle to both conceal and change who I was.

  It took me years to clean the house, no one else seemed to ever want to help no matter which way I sold it. Maybe it wasn’t that they didn’t want to help, more like they couldn’t. Everyone had their own specific problems that they were always faced with. There was a circle of sadness rotating within my family. It seemed like I was the only one unaffected and somehow motivated to change things. A house doesn’t just turn into hell overnight.

  My father was still in the grips of the war, dealing with the nightmares when he slept that carried over to when he awoke. His leg had been blown off by a machine gun after just a few years of service. He wasn’t partial to prosthetics and couldn’t find much of a reason to leave the house anymore anyway. For the most part, he just sat on the couch and watched boxing or political speeches while he sipped his iced tea and sucked back no-filter Camels religiously.

  My mother tended to him as best she could but the despair had leeched onto her as well. As I was growing up, she was always working full-time and also caring for me, my father, and my older sister, Lisa.

  Looking back, I was probably still the least difficult of the group. I was a kid, sure, but I was quite mature for my age. I never generated too much worry or the darker variety that expelled itself elsewhere. My father was a handful to be there for, both physically and emotionally, so I tried to help Mom out with whatever I could. But Lisa was a much different story.

  Mom’s grief was more the product of my father’s and Lisa’s spiraled together than her own. We did everything we could for Dad but it just seemed like he was set in the darkness. Maybe the war could account for that or maybe it was just shit genetics that wormed their way into both him and Lisa via our unfortunate lineage.

  However, one glaring distinction was that my older sister’s situation was much more extreme than my father’s. Dad was always at a low boil, and Lisa was the bipolar opposite. She was scary to be around. We all feared for her safety but also for our own.

  Lisa had a fascination with killing herself since she became a teenager, but only sometimes. It swung back and forth like the flip of a switch. Our age gap was a large one so most of my friends with a similar family structure looked up to their older siblings with a great sense of pride. It was like they were almost another parent to many of them. For myself, it was just another thing to hide, another dimension of myself to deny and pray never saw the light of day.

  Over the course of a few years, I did a marvelous job of pulling the house out of its gloomy standard. My mother and father (to a less enthusiastic extent) were probably as upbeat as I’d seen them in ages. Chipping away at the rubbish suffocating the family had finally earned us a bit of breathing room.

  I’d bagged and thrown out the clutter little by little, week by week, month by month. I wanted to donate the mounds of seldom used clothing but nothing really seemed salvageable. It was all chewed up and covered in mouse droppings and dead insects. It was hard for my mom to part with the items for some reason, but as I increased my persistence, she did a much better job of letting go.

  Once the trash was tossed, there was finally some room to work. I was able to see areas of the walls that hadn’t seen daylight since before I was born. I washed each discolored wall in every room and also detailed all of the smudged and foggy windows. For the first time in years, the place was starting to shape up and it seemed like there might actually be changes afoot.

  The mice and bugs were starting to reduce with the garbage having been eliminated. There was enough space around us now, so I was able to locate and target many of their nests. I placed generous baskets of poison pellets in close proximity and hoped they’d bring it back home and kill their families.

  I had to be careful though and ensure that I wasn’t placing them in places where Buddy would be sniffing around. I sw
ear that dog only seemed to enjoy eating things that he shouldn’t. We used to joke that his favorite food was plastic. I made sure to lock the doors where I’d set poison and keep him out of harm’s way.

  The one thing I never could seem to get clean was the carpet. The damn thing was almost black in some areas. It had reached the stage where if you moved a piece of furniture, you could clearly see the outline of grime around where it had formerly resided. But cleansing the carpeting wasn’t a quick fix, you couldn’t just take a rag or mop to a carpet, believe me, I tried everything. It was 1969, that sort of cleaning had to be done professionally back then, which, of course, we didn’t have the money for. So, they just had to remain looking like filth magnets.

  I finally finished cleaning up the many mountains of dishes, and even with everything else I was working on, I forced myself to consistently stay on top of the new ones being created. The less food we had hanging around, the better. I felt like this was a big reason why the mouse count had dropped and the plump, well-fed roaches weren’t as rampant.

  I eventually learned the roaches required much more focus than just the cleaning. I ended up having to use the money I saved from my summer job at The Ice Cream Machine to buy a couple of dozen cans of Raid. The slogan is still “It kills bugs dead” and I was probably the most relieved person in the world when I confirmed that it wasn’t just a slogan. The stuff actually did the trick.