Ronald Morgan woke up and he could see through his eyelids. They weren’t transparent: it was like looking through a fruit roll-up.
But Ronald Morgan was hungry. He decided not to worry about the eye thing and get some breakfast instead.
He tried to pull his sheets off of himself but couldn’t find his arms. They were still asleep. He sat up and shook his shoulders until the blood flowed back into his limbs. His skin was all pricks and pins.
There was a bunch of bananas on top of the refrigerator. Ronald Morgan ripped one off, peeled it, put it in his mouth. He spat. The banana tasted like old cabbage leaves. He took another look at the bunch. It was crawling with spiders— tiny brown things with bright green eyes.
“What are you twerps doing in my apartment?” Ronald Morgan asked. He swiped his tongue over his teeth and found his answer, spat out a shred of gauzy black stuff. An egg sack. He looked at the floor, where he’d spat the banana, and saw dozens of delicate black orbs clustered together in the meat of the fruit. They were too big and irregularly-situated to be seeds. Eggs.
Eggs.
“Eggs,” Ronald Morgan said.
---
Ronald Morgan anticipated having a rough night ahead of him, but he was still hungry. He opened the fridge. Inside was the rotisserie chicken he’d picked up from the store the day before. The chicken was moving in its container, which was clear plastic. It reminded Ronald Morgan of the incubators in which premature babies were placed in order to cook a little longer. Ronald Morgan picked up the container and opened it. The chicken wheezed. Ronald Morgan prodded the meat with his finger and then flipped over the whole thing. He saw the rib cage. Inside were two lungs, puny and pink and struggling to stay alive.
“Hmm,” Ronald Morgan said. He threw the chicken and its container in the garbage and then returned to the fridge. There were some apples in there that were encrusted here and there with human teeth like barnacles on the side of a ship. There was a bottle of spicy mustard. Wedged on the shelf built into the door was a fat bottle of orange juice with something black and slithering swimming in it. Next to that was a quart of milk.
It was whole milk, which Ronald Morgan didn’t like. Megan drank it when she came over, though she hadn’t been over in a while. Her parents gave her whole milk growing up. Whole milk and velveeta cheese. Megan was from Ohio. She had scars all over her knees from playing in the trainyard behind her school. She drank her whole milk straight from the container.
Anyway, the milk was expired.
“Grocery store,” Ronald Morgan mumbled. He talked to himself a lot.
---
The people at the grocery store were covered all over with tumours. The tumours were shaped like tulip bulbs with long hairs growing out of them. The hairs twitched like they were sensing the air around them.
One woman had tumours growing all over her upper arms and one sprouting newly on her face, close to her eye socket, so that the flesh around the eye was raised and pink and the white of the eye was gray and the pupil was fully-dilated. She stood smelling the skin of a plum. Ronald Morgan watched her. The fruit was an inch away from her face. She bit into it. Ronald Morgan blinked. The fruit was full of raw pork. Blood dripped from the woman’s chin onto the tiles.
How could she bite so hard, Ronald Morgan wondered, without any teeth?
He meant to ask the woman, but she walked away— hobbled away: her ankles were swollen with useless flesh— and Ronald Morgan didn’t feel like following her. He only watched. The woman’s shoes squeaked. The tiles had recently been bleached.
---
When Ronald Morgan returned to his apartment, he found Megan sitting crosslegged on his couch.
“Hey,” she said.
Ronald Morgan said hey.
The television was on and Megan was watching a public access station. A preacher with a white eyepatch was retelling a story from the Bible.
Ehud was a judge sent by God to deliver Israel from the Moabites. He entered the compound of the Moabite King Eglon under the pretense of delivering the Israelites’ annual tribute.
“I have a secret message for you,” Ehud said.
“What is it?” Eglon asked.
“It’s a secret.”
So Eglon dismissed his servants, and he was alone with Ehud.
“What is your message?” Eglon asked again.
At that point Ehud withdrew a shortsword from his thigh and stabbed Eglon in the abdomen. The blade shishkabob’d through the king’s organs, and he shat himself. His anus released a gazpacho of feces and viscera that soaked into his clothes and spread in a pool around him. And the king, he was so fat, his belly swallowed the shortsword up to the handle and sealed the wound.
Ehud left the king dead on the floor covered in shit and blood. He called the murder “a message from God.” God didn’t dispute this.
Megan loved religion. She told Ronald Morgan so.
“I love religion,” she said.
Ronald Morgan nodded. He had forgotten it was Sunday.
The sermon was over, and Megan shut off the television. The couple stared at a black reflection of themselves in the glass.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been around in a while,” Megan said. “I’ve been busy.”
Ronald Morgan said that it was all right. He told this not to the real Megan but to the tiny Megan sitting across from him, the one made of sunglare. The real Megan was hyperthin and hadn’t showered in a few days. She was wearing a t-shirt and men’s sweatpants. On the front of the t-shirt, a pink cartoon cat with a ponytail was kicking a soccer ball. She was kicking the ball so fast that blue and black lines were trailing behind it.
“Play like a girl...” the t-shirt said, “If you can.”
The sweatpants had nothing to say. The fabric repeated the image of a busty mudflap bikini girl in black silhouette.
---
While they were making love, Ronald Morgan noticed that Megan’s eyes had been gouged out. He could see into her skull.
The spiders hatched in his stomach and crawled as an army through his intestines. They escaped his asshole in every direction. They nibbled his cheeks. They hopped onto Megan and snuck into her eye sockets and moved in formation under her skin. Megan moaned.
“Oh God,” she said.
---
Ronald Morgan woke up Monday morning and Megan had already left. The smell of her sweat and saliva was still in the sheets.
He stopped at McDonald’s on the way to work and bought a McGriddle and a large coffee. The coffee was hot and killed his tastebuds. He kept dragging his damaged tongue under his molars to tear off the dead tissue. It hurt, but he couldn’t help it. When he got to work, his mouth was raw.
He worked for four hours, took a break, worked four hours, went home.
Megan wasn’t there. He took the spoiled whole milk from the fridge and threw it out on top of the chicken and condom wrappers.
He turned on the television. Everything was on. He could watch anything he wanted. He didn’t.
He went to bed. In his dreams, he was a scientist studying sea lions. The sea lions were hungry for penguins. They ambushed the silly little birds and dragged them into the ocean.
Suddenly, he was a sea lion. He torpedoed through the ocean with his ears flattened against his head. It felt okay to be a sea lion. Ronald Morgan swam deeper, until he couldn’t see anymore, until the water was too cold to feel, until the pressure nearly killed him.