Organic Decay

Connie Mae spent her entire life in bed. Do not allow the question of “why” torment you, for it is resolved in a sentence. If she were to stand up her bones would crack and crumble under her weight. Her face would end up in the floorboards. A nail may puncture her eye. She had bones like glass. In other words, she was a broken person.

So, she stayed in bed forever. She was given sponge baths and fed herself soup made by her maid Mary. One day she started talking about how she “might like to go to bed forever” and asked for alcohol, which she never did before. Mary had to go down to the shop below and buy a bottle of Vodka. Connie Mae insisted on vodka because “The Russians won the war, you know.”

She began to drink more, and more, until one day Mary moved her bed beside the window overlooking the street below. Connie May grumbled and fussed as Mary pushed, saying her skin would dry up, perverts would stare, but upon looking out the window she became intoxicated with this study of life. Here she found the world renewed and offered to her on a silver platter. She got to witness it all without the pain of experience.

She began to dedicate herself to the outside world. She recognized the faces and bodies that walked past daily, sometimes even more than just twice. Some only twice. Others she didn’t see every day but weekly, and when they walked past a second time, they were carrying an armful of groceries.

A man with an intellectual air would walk by smoking cigarettes. At first Connie Mae despised his nonchalance for life, toying with death between his fingertips, but eventually the man began to grow on her. He appeared true.

She saw him the most, he was always walking, always smoking. Even in the middle of the night, when the streets were empty and bare, he would sit on a bench under a tree across the street and smoke. Connie Mae was often awake in the middle of the night on account of her life being pure and only pain, and she could rely on the fact that 50% of the time he would be there, outside below the window to her apartment, walking, or smoking, generally looking contemplative.

Connie Mae never felt emotions, she adopted within herself a numbness to cope with the suffering that was her own body, but this was when she began to fall in love. Or one could call it something else entirely, infatuation and loneliness, but to her it was a love pure. She loved him from a distant. Like God.

It felt spiritual until one afternoon, watching him on that bench, smoking yet another cigarette, she was overwhelmed with emotion and tenderness, and demanded her maid Mary go fetch him and bring him up here to talk to him. And so Mary did. He followed her up into the apartment until stood in front of her was the man she had watched and admired for so long, yes a truly intelligent face, sharp eyes and long nose, youthful skin but beginning to show wrinkles, certainly from his smoking habit, dark hair, thin lips. It could be said he was an attractive man, Connie Mae thought so. He brought into the room with him the stench of cigarettes.

“Mary, make us some tea.” Connie Mae ordered. “Please sit down.” She motioned to the chair beside her bed where Mary would sit and read to her.

He sat in the chair, his lanky body looking out of place in a room that had never seen a woman under 5’5 inside, let alone a man. He appeared totally unphased by his presence in this stranger’s room, and this furthered the conviction in Connie Mae’s mind that they were similar. He knew why he was here, he must have felt equally as drawn to Connie Mae and her apartment as she was to him.

“My name is Connie Mae. What’s yours?”

“I’m Elijah.”

“Elijah.” She smiled. “Well, I know you are thinking why I brought you up here. I spend a lot of time in this bed, and I always see you out there, thinking. I get the feeling we are similar. Contemplative.”

“Oh,” He sipped from the teacup. “well yes, I do spend a lot of time thinking. I think I have dedicated my life to it.”

She smiled again, each word he spoke came out in such an assured manner, and she knew she could trust his sincerity. Connie Mae knew that most people were not to be trusted, they live as lies - saying words they don’t mean, doing things they don’t mean. This she observed on the streets. The people that looked like everybody else and everybody looked like them, empty faces which adopted any of society’s projections onto it. They walk with the shame of obedience, but if one were to leverage any responsibility towards them for living like cowards, they would shirk and squirm away, claiming it was their own desires that motivated them, not the convenience of following a pre-approved path. Elijah was not like the others.

“I have also dedicated my life to it…” Connie Mae began. “But my choice is out of my hands.” She smiled coyly and gestured at her bed.

“Mmm. Yes well I have been walking more at night as you have surely noticed, I am working through some things, I am coming up with a novel..” The corners of his lips lifted without intention, his eyes confident with the expectation she would be impressed and ask him to elaborate. The love in her heart was replaced by disgust. He was like all the others. He didn’t care about her, he didn’t want to know her, he wanted to tell her about himself. She already knew all there was to know about him simply by observing, what about her? Didn’t he care about her? This girl that invited him up? This girl that lay nearly immobile in her bed?

“I knew we were alike, I’m a writer too.” She tried to save it. To bring him back to her.

“Yes, well at this point I don’t know if I could be called much of a writer, I haven’t touched the thing in weeks.” He balanced the teacup on the lap of his crossed legs. “I’m stuck between a dilemma of my main character, what he will inevitably choose, the ease and simplicity of married life, or continue to live on as a bachelor, different women every week, loyal to nothing but himself?” His lips turned up again, this time his eyes crinkled too. “I guess it’s a dilemma I go through myself.”

She felt betrayed beyond comprehension. He was just like all the others, but worse, he believed himself to be different. He pretended to be different. Something broke inside and she screamed at him to get out.

She lunged towards him for the teacup in his hand to splash in his face but he rose at the last second and she fell instead onto the floor. Her skull shattered and bone impaled her brain. She lay dead as Elijah fled and Mary screamed.