Today, I am nervous. I have probably contracted a form of superleprosy that makes everything decay until there is nothing left of me.
I pull the blinds aside with my weak fingers, staring into the empty street outside my house. I wonder who wiggled a diseased, remote controlled syringe into the crack in my door, the one that was never properly weather sealed. Whoever it was, they flew it silently into the back of my elbow. I didn’t even feel a prick. The superleprosy is in my blood stream now, forcing my veins into straight lines at every intersection, stretching them out and nearly popping them as it goes along on it’s path to my stomach, where it will rest like an arrow in a balloon.
I can feel the necrotic tissue spreading underneath the dermis. It doesn’t hurt. It just writhes. I can still feel my arm. The gratitude I feel for one more day with this poorly functioning body is unparalleled.
Tomorrow, I will have a half-arm. The world will see through my skin and fat. A phlegm-like green pudding will drip from the exposed helix of bone in my forearm. The next day, I presume both my legs will go at the same time. This is the kind of luck I have. This is the way the world works.
I will be walking on blades of muscle and bone that end at a blunt tip, clambering around the house on calcium daggers. The atrophied muscle will hang like a tattered blanket of sinew around the deteriorating skeletal frame. It will look like my half-legs are wearing a meat dress.
The next day, my legs are completely gone. My arm down to the shoulder. I use my last remaining half-arm to scramble my way to the refrigerator. I cannot reach the good stuff. The eggs, the milk, the last remaining bottle of citrus green tea (I shouldn’t have caffeine anyway). Nor can I reach the chicken breast. Nor can I reach the oven controls to cook it. Nor can I reach the barbeque sauce to give it the flavor it so desperately needs.
I sit at the base of my refrigerator wondering where I went wrong. My cat comes up to me. She is fat. She is always hungry. I imagine that she’ll lick my half-arm and start to nibble at the torn ligament and muscle. Eventually I won’t be able to feed them. I’ll have to use my teeth to open the Tupperware full of their food and throw it to the floor. They are not finicky about where the food is; only what kind of food it is. But when an animal is hungry enough, it becomes the most open-minded creature of all.
I will be a head at the end of my life. A head with a half-spine dangling from the hole in my neck. I will jump on the spine like a pogo stick and jump into the bay window of my kitchen. It is eight feet by eight feet. There is a good view of the ducks that wrestle each other outside. When one alpha duck fights another, I will watch and he’ll see me – a head with half a spine – and he’ll feel like he’s not totally alone. Eventually, I will be a paste on my window sill. My cats will take the oat bread in the pantry and sop me up with it.
Never let it be said I was a bad father.