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The Silence of a Beating Heart in a Fat Chest
*Ok. This is my first post. It is 2:35 in the morning and I'm bored and strung out on Red Bull. I'm writing this as it comes to me. A drip of mental snot that I am wiping on my sleeve. I hope you enjoy. It isn't very good, probably, but better stuff will come now that I have found you all. Please comment to my randomness, like a orderly talking to one of the commited through the window of a bleached room.*
Heartbeat. A tender second when the valves in your chest open up and gulp blood out of one chamber and into another. The cardiovascular process goes on ceaseless for all human beings, day and night until we die, but we rarely even acknowledge it. Maybe if we noticed the little things more regularly and quieted ourselves for just a few moments a day to listen to our heartbeat… well maybe we would appreciate life more and how grand and perfect our inner workings are. That’s what Buddhists call self-awareness.
Fred Clayton isn’t a Buddhist. He is a Lutheran who never paid attention to his own family, let alone his heartbeat. He enjoys bacon and racecars, adultery and a hard day’s work. He’s half sitting half laying on his kitchen floor trying to pull himself back up into the chair he just fell out of. Food is drooling out of his mouth, a Salisbury steak microwave dinner. He didn’t normally eat at the kitchen table, in fact it hadn’t been used since last Christmas, before his wife left him, but tonight he was feeling lonely and nostalgic and nothing good was on television.
As the beads of wet corn and slimy strands of mashed potatoes oozed out of his maw and splattered onto his pale hairy breasts he contemplated his life and tried to straighten his right arm that was crippled in pain.
Betsy reverted back to her maiden name and that scared him tremendously. She couldn’t possibly have gotten over him that fast. After all it was just a one-night stand with a poker buddies wife. Nothing too bad. Right? That’s what he told himself.
Can you believe that? On his deathbed he was still lying to himself. But when a lie digs its roots that deep into your soul it becomes a shade of truth. He knew deep down that he had been having one affair or another for ages, but Betsy didn’t know that. She suspected but she didn’t know for sure, but what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. However what she did know hurt her enough to drive her to divorce. “Just a one night stand,” he thought as his hands turned into frozen claws and his eyes rolled in opposite directions.
His son was married and hadn’t talked to him in years. His daughter was devoted to her career. They didn’t even send cards on holidays anymore. Hell, honestly they didn’t even remember his zip code.
All of his mistakes flooded his mind and were projected on some hidden screen in the back of his subconscious like old black and white silent movies. For each mistake he recalled he also remembered a particularly pathetic, creative, or dubious excuse.
He really did love Betsy. He loved her like he loved his heart. He needed her more than he would ever know. But, like most things, he neglected her and like his own heart she couldn’t bear to live under his constant strain and abuse any longer and decided to throw in her chips. Now he is dying on a floor that hadn’t been mopped since her departure and thinking about how incredibly ironic life is.
Little dust rings line all the furniture where her little knickknacks used to sit. He never noticed how empty the place was without her things to clutter it up. He thought to himself that if he survived he could apologize to her. Nah, she wouldn’t care. She would think it was just another lie. It isn’t worth the humiliation. He then thought if he survived he would just dust away the memories and pick up a hooker. “Yes, a hooker, and when I’m done with her Law and Order should be on.”
That was his last thought. His head dropped back against the tiled floor with a skull-bashing crack as all three hundred pounds of his body decided they were better off dead than attached to his spirit. His heart pumped one last time, a slow feeble pump. A pump that he felt and was keenly aware of. A gulp of blood that stabbed like an ice cold knife. Apparently repentance was also a concept foreign to Fred Clayton.
When his ex-wife found his decomposing corpse three weeks later stray dogs were gathered on the back pouch howling and hungry. He stunk like hell, which seemed appropriate. Betsy cried when the realization hit her that her husband of thirty-four years was nothing but a rotting pile of manure. Flies were crawling out of his eye sockets and the gravy around his lips was crusty. Everything else was teething with maggots.
Two days later they had his funeral. His daughter couldn’t make it because of a meeting in the city the next morning and his son showed up, but was late. No one cried. The pastor called him Ted, after all, he hadn’t been to church for the better part of a decade.
Fred (or was it Ted?) Clayton lived a very uneventful, uncaring, mild mannered life. No one will ever remember him. If he would have stopped one night, in the bathtub, or while on the sofa, or even when laying in bed next to his wife to just quiet his mind and let the wind of creation sweep the dirt off of his palms serenity would have followed. If he had reviewed his mistakes as lessons learned and not situations that he avoided professionally peace would have come in abundance. If he would have listened and respected the thump and gulp of his heart his body would have appreciated his thoughtfulness. I guess what I’m trying to say is if he would have used his heart he could have kept it ticking.
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Invictus,
-Temp
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