The September Editor's Pick Writer is Andy Mee

You can email Andy at: amee@cynffig.net

DELIVERED
by Andy Mee

It was the last time she’d ever open a package and see a severed finger; this was the tenth, the last. The amputation seemed neat, like the others had. Surgical. There had been no ripping. The bloated middle finger, with thick-lipped skin peeled back like curled wallpaper, revealed the rounded ivory knob of once-socketed bone.

It would have made most Domestic Avenue housewives pass out there and then, but she had grown tough. Eileen Fulas believed you could get used to anything if you had to. Her father, who long worked on disposal duty in the city’s abattoirs, had once said, “Spend so long in a place that smells so unimaginably foul and you don’t even notice it.” She now understood what he meant.

The deliveries had begun with that single, bloated eye. One of two she’d seen so many times before, now wider, un-socketed, and, seemingly, more unimpressed than ever. It had burned a permanent imprint on her long-term memory, in Technicolor. Ironically, when she closed her own eyes she found an open one in her mind. His. Forever staring.

The first brown-papered package had caused her empty stomach to lurch for countless days after. His eye! That first dreadful moment continually played back in slow-motion, stuck on ‘repeat,’ no matter how much she searched for ‘shuffle’ or the forward button.

As she ran the key down the spine of the brown tape, breaking the seal and pulled back the cardboard wings, she had looked deep into the blue iris of the single, bloated eye, looking right back at her. It looked fatter than she imagined a naked eye would look, but she had known straightaway it belonged to him. The brown spot (a sign of calcium deficiency, they’d said) a small island in a sea of blue iris that only she would notice. The world swam momentarily in a wave of blurred incredulity which spread from the peripheries of her rippled vision and seemed to quickly head to her wringing, twisting stomach.

Then delayed spasms finally kicked in. Grief- and shock-stricken, arms sent lashing, she knocked the box over and saw the eye half roll, half lurch out of the box and slap down, onto the hardwood of the kitchen table, rolling as a three-quarter pumped basketball might; a yellow-cream, red-stitched ball, with an iris instead of a sponsor. It rotated, as if to inspect the table, as it once habitually had. The flapping of the optic nerve was the final nail in Eileen’s tentative grip on consciousness. The world closed, then went black.

She fell like a toppled redwood, hitting her skull on the marble floor in a wince-worthy thwack, the impact like a stubborn cork being pulled from an age-old Cava. Spread-eagled, with her left arm twisted awkwardly underneath her, hot blood ran in tributaries down her pale face, puddling on the white-tiled kitchen floor. High above her, on the work-surface, Henry’s bloated eye sat, lidless and staring, as if surveying the cleanliness of the kitchen surfaces the way it used to. It was missing its inspecting partner; a dust gathering index finger (which would arrive that Spring). With spreading rivers of blood staining and pooling upon the white tiles he’d once worked so hard laying, the old patriarch, Henry Fulas, had started his long journey home.

Eileen woke ten minutes later on the floor, choke-lurching and vomiting bile. She sobbed uncontrollably, barely able to catch her breath, until she had recovered her senses enough to stagger to the phone in the swaying hall and punch the numbers of the detective in charge of Henry’s disappearance. Her fingers had seemed disobedient at first, too big to hit the numbers, but sucking in a few deep breaths, the stars subsided and she punched in the digits she’d been dialing twice daily.

She couldn’t separate the ringing tone from the ringing in her own head. His “Hello…hello…?” had been initially greeted with single-syllabled puff-choking sounds, before she finally found her voice. Thank goodness he hadn’t hung up! She couldn’t recall how long it had taken to sob her way through explaining the shock delivery, but guessed it had taken some time.

“Stay calm,” Ellams, the detective, said. “I’m on my way.”

She flopped to the hall carpet, buried her head in her hands and sobbed.

Ellams had arrived sometime after the blue uniforms. She wasn’t sure how the chamomile tea had ended up in her hands, the medicine for all manner of tragedies. The world started to slowly arrive once more with each tired sip.

Ellams sent the package off to the forensics. They confirmed it was indeed Henry.

But Ellams was answerless. In rare cases, fingers had been mailed, but these were after an initial refusal to meet ransom demands. There had been no ransom in her box. There had been no letter. There had been nothing. Except the eye, Henry’s eye. Left to roll in its box on its way to 622 Walkington Drive. Back home.

*****

Eileen had gone three months without a package until the final finger. Last October, she’d got two in a week. There had never been a pattern throughout the four years Henry had been slowly arriving back home. Sometimes they’d come Fed-Ex, sometimes UPS, sometimes private courier.

Ellams had initially tried to intercept the packages; all her mail went via the Precinct, but relying on the Postal Service and the Station’s sorting process caused her to grow frustrated. All her mail was sitting in the Precinct offices for days. It seemed as if her husband’s case had soon lost its initial seriousness and her re-delivered mail was getting lost amidst the urgency of other police-work. Finally, Ellams submitted to her badgering and agreed to allow all mail to return to the home address. Some boxes she opened, some not. With some, you could just tell.

Detective Ellams broke the news of Henry’s ‘criminal dealings’ to her. They’d taken his computer in the office to find answers to Henry’s sudden disappearance. They’d noticed access codes to Eastern-European bank accounts. Henry had always been a very skilled banker. The specialists confirmed that the first eye package had also been sent from Eastern Europe. At first they thought it was Macedonia (Eileen wasn’t even aware such a place existed, ‘Ma-su-doe-nee-ahh’). But the second parcel, one which Eileen never saw, the severed toe, had been mailed from The Ukraine (another place new to Eileen Fulas, ‘You-Crane’). Just as they were re-testing the package, certain that the ‘You-Crane’ results were flawed, the third package (and the first of the fingers) came. The specialists confirmed that the finger had been sent from Romania (finally one Eileen had heard of!). Three parcels, containing three pieces of Henry Fulas, from three different countries. Before it had even really begun, the trail ran cold.

Laying almost dead center in the open box, at first she didn’t recognize the lozenge of cleanly cut pink-red flesh. It was thicker than it once had been, swollen. She was sure it was his, but it could have belonged to anyone; there were no distinguishing fingers. It had reminded her of Japanese Sushi food she’d seen in cheap supermarkets. They’d stopped spooking her now and she open it as freely as she would the rest of the mail.

After six long years, she couldn’t help but occasionally speculate as she opened each box. Ellams had told her not to. The questions still haunted her if she allowed herself to think about them: How much of him had been delivered? Was it conceivable he was still alive, with all those mailed… bits… missing? Would it even be possible for Henry to still be alive with four years worth of him cut away? Was he alive and conscious during the cutting?

The questions made Eileen feel faint, so she tried to bury them; the gin usually helped, but this morning she turned on the radio instead. She hoped Bill Withers would be right with his rather optimistic melodic prediction that it was ‘gonna be a lovely day,’ If it hadn’t been for Withers’ long ‘aaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy’ filling the kitchen, she would have heard him. 

Henry was home.

Without eyes, the limping man groped his way toward the front door he once knew, patches of white bone visible between clumps of thinning grey hair and broken brown teeth visible through the holes in his cheeks. Without a tongue, the man made a guttural glugging.

The clean white van that had uncermoniously dumped him in a pile on the lawn had, just as unceremoniously, rolled to the end of the road and turned at the lights. The final delivery delivered.

It took what was left of Henry a slow, painstaking minute to rise from the hot spiky lawn. Trying to stand on half a foot, most of it just unskinned bone, made rising, and staying up, painfully difficult. He guzzle-groaned, but the lack of tongue made it sound more like a raspy, moaning sigh rather than the squeal of pain it warranted. Without a tongue, Henry’s squealing days were over.

His fingerless left hand pushed against the dusty lawn and, with an arthritic, spasming quiver, he got to what was left of his feet. His right arm was gone from the elbow down, and above it the shoulder skin curled around the top of his humerus, like a half-eaten chicken leg. He used the more recognizable right arm, with just occasional chunks removed, to fumble along the fence’s rail. Each drag of the trailing foot caused another throaty glug of discomfort.

Bill Withers finished up singing in the kitchen and they had started to play ‘that hokey rubbish,’as Eileen called it. She couldn’t listen to that. Rather than spinning the dial, she flicked it off. She would need to bleach the side again. First though, she needed to empty the trash. She popped the lid, grabbed the binliner and started to tie it.

It hadn’t taken Henry long to recognize where he was. His brain still worked; incredible after all it had been though. He remembered the smell of pine and blossom. As he breathed in through his nose more deeply, the skinless hole on its bridge caused a whistling hiss. He smelled it, though—

West Avenue. He was home. This was his rail on his fence.

Lost in joyful relief and tearlessly cry-choking in a fit of sudden raw emotion, Henry forgot the single step halfway up the yard. His swelled, right half-foot thudded into the concrete step, causing the human-like torso-remains to collapse like a dropped burlap sack. Hack-groaning and moving his fingerless hand instinctually to his newly grazed knee, Henry, a butchered rag-doll from some sick horror flick, turned his cupped black eye sockets to the skies and choked out noises of thanks.

Eileen finished tying the yellow cord on the bin liner and pulled it out of the metal cylindered bin. She held it out in front of her at arm’s length. She should never have put the salmon tin in there. Phew. She made her way toward the front door and toward the big bin in the front yard.

It was a good job that Franklin Avenue slept late on Saturday mornings. Henry’s zombie-like drag-trudge and the tendons hanging from his eyeless half-face would have caused the toddler trike-club a lifetime of nightmares and sent them screaming and bawling back down their showhome driveways seeking the comforts of motherly protection.

Henry, lifting himself once more in a fit of rasps and glugs, continued his lurching drag toward his old front door, his shirt coming untucked and revealing some thick, folded tube poking out through the circular incision in his pale, purple-veined stomach. Presumably his intestine was trying to escape a lifetime’s imprisonment.  

Eileen saw the silhouette in the frosted glass as she approached the door. Early for the milkman, she thought as she transferred the binbag to her right hand, reaching for the doorknob.

Henry heard the click of the door and turned to face in its direction. He tried to call out his wife’s name, but it came out in a low, volumous gurgle. He instinctually reached out with his fingerless and skin-removed arm.

Eileen looked into the black pits where Henry’s eyes had been, before her vision opened up to take in the yellow skull with its islands of hair patches and blackened skin. She thought that the thing was grinning and could see its remaining teeth clenched through the holes in its face. She lurched backwards as it fell forwards towards her as if searching for a grotesque embrace, dropping the bin liner. The can of empty salmon rolled toward the monstrosity in front of her as she inhaled, then screamed.

Startled by the shrill, piercing scream, Henry lost his balance, lurched forward into his house, and lay faced down on the tiles he’d once laid. In dried brown blood, haphazardly scrawled on the back of Henry’s shirt, were two words: DEBT PAID.

Andy Mee is a teacher of English Literature working and living in the Welsh valleys with his wife and young daughters. Occasionally, when finding time away from analyzing other authors’ writing in the classroom, he likes to dabble with language and spin a yarn of his own. Andy has written short stories and poetry for a number of small press publications.