Nothing That Needed Eyes
Here is a bit of flash fiction I'll turn into something longer one of these days. Copyright 2012 by Bob Sanchez, of course.
NOTHING
THAT NEEDED EYES
By
Bob Sanchez
No good
would come from disturbing this old house, I thought, applying my crowbar to an
ancient oak plank. Still, there could be money squirreled away somewhere in
this mess. Rusty nails creaked and snapped; the board popped up to expose a
shallow dirt cellar crawling with centipedes and roaches.
Nellie
Westhaver had lived here alone, at first pitied and then ignored by the
townsfolk for the shiftless husband who had held lots of odd jobs and fast
women until he and some mini-skirted trash named Luann disappeared for good and
good riddance, probably on the Greyhound to Boston. He’d left his rattletrap
Buick behind, but Nellie didn’t drive.
I’d
recently spent ten years’ worth of medium security in Walpole and didn’t have a
dime left to my name. Crazy Nellie had been my next-door neighbor, the type who
never answers the door, fills every room with newspapers going back to Genesis,
and lets you know she’s dead when she starts to smell. The house dated back to
Revolutionary times, with its low ceilings and stone fireplaces in every room
and not a single wall or doorway plumb or true. Not having many job prospects
as an ex-con, I decided to see if the old bat had hidden any cash.
The stench
had finally told her fate last week—masked EMTs carried her body out feet first
on a stretcher, and police closed and padlocked the door. Already I hear
Seven-Eleven wants to buy the lot.
Evidently,
someone had made half an effort to tame the terrible odor, but the place still
smelled like air freshener overpowered by death. Rot gnawed at the wood while
mold spores and silence filled the air. Old Look magazines and Lowell
Sun newspapers sat in dusty stacks. A small TV with rabbit ears looked like
it hadn’t been used since Lawrence Welk died. At the window, a fly struggled in
a spider web as a daddy-longlegs sidled up to suck out its juices. I knew how
the fly felt, an inmate at the mercy of a sadistic prison guard.
Home
improvement for this house would have to start with a match, but I’d never
torch it because I’d be the number one suspect. This was the first place I’d
ever broken into, the first place I’d ever been arrested, back in my juvie days
when Nellie and Ashton still held backyard cookouts and enjoyed sipping
martinis and electrocuting moths with their luminescent bug zappers.
Nellie’s
bed smelled about right for her having died in it. I felt in the stained
pillows and covers for hidden cash, knowing perfectly well some cop would
already have checked all those obvious places and pocketed the prize. Cabinets
and closets and dressers turned up the usual jetsam floating in a sea of dust
bunnies as Nellie sailed on to her next life.
I pushed
the queen-sized bed aside to rummage through the tattered cardboard boxes
underneath and found old letters and bills, a broken telephone, stained
Melamine plates, nothing even fit for a yard sale. If this house had anything
less than ten years old or worth more than five dollars, I’d have been shocked.
Frustrated, I kicked a box. There was no point in looking any more—but wait, this
was odd. Several floor boards looked lighter and newer than the rest: pine
surrounded by oak, galvanized nails bent but not rusted, hammer-head
impressions in the soft wood suggesting slapdash carpentry.
Eagerly I
pried another board and looked into the darkness. Some godforsaken life form
squeaked and scurried away. I turned my flashlight on a pea-green Army blanket,
and a thousand miserable bugs scattered in all directions. Only a fool would
disturb that filthy piece of trash, but I was a plain and simple fool.
I went to a
closet and found a wire coat hanger that I used to fashion a hook. I tried to
catch one edge of the blanket, but the hanger slipped out of my hands and out
of reach. Disgusted, I lay on the floor and reached down to pull away the
blanket.
A sudden
visit from the police couldn’t have brought me closer to cardiac arrest. I
didn’t care anymore about money.
A pair of
skeletons in rotted clothing lay one on top of the other. A hatchet rested
inside the skull it had shattered down the middle. Toadstools grew out of both
eye sockets—but there was nothing here that needed eyes.
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