The boy has been awake in bed for close to an hour, staring into the darkness, reasoning with himself. Logic fails and he sits bolt upright like a capital L. He touches his arms and legs, his stomach, and under the waistband of his pajama pants. Everything feels normal, but he isn’t convinced.
The lamp next to his bed clicks on and bathes the room in yellow and the light tints his milky flesh in a sepia shade like a faded Old West photograph. The autumn hues of his summer tan are all gone. A breath escapes his chest in a grateful wheeze. It is 6:17 according to the shiny steel clock that sits next to his lamp. It has two bells riding atop the round body and white face. The bells reflect comical shapes at him like funhouse mirrors. The boy is named Henry and he sticks out his tongue. The reflected images of tongues are wider than his real tongue.
They show no rot.
He breathes easier.
Everything rots, but not Henry. Boys don’t rot. Boys are due to become men and then grey before they rot. Henry is okay for now.
And still.
He touches his arms, legs, stomach, and nether areas once again to be sure everything remains firm and smooth. Henry exhales from healthy lungs, and then looks to the other side of the room.
The bedroom is of common bedroom size and Henry steps away from his twin mattress with ruffled grey sheets to the slated pine accordion doors of his closet. Through the window above his desk, the sun is not up, but it peeks, offering a cold peach wash that seeps into the lingering night hues. Far to the east, a pink horizon buds like a scratch not deep enough to bleed.
The accordion doors swing open and the bad sweet scent wafts free, soon there will be trouble arising from this odor and he’ll need to do something about it. The light with the string that dangles from the ceiling offers a much healthier glow to the space than the lamp across the room had. Henry reaches past the clothes on hangers to the shelf. Up high are books, sweaters, and three boxes. One is a shoebox.
Henry’s father is a Canadian and wanted his son to love hockey despite living in Muskego, which is only seventeen miles from Miller Park where the Brewers play baseball. But Henry’s father is the reason he had a shoebox brimming with Topps hockey cards as opposed to Topps baseball cards. Henry’s father sees, without voicing it, that Henry has lost interest in hockey cards, but does not know that the box no longer holds cardboard photographs of athletes. The cards went to a boy four houses down the block. That boy carries his Koho stick everywhere he can because he wants to be Mario Lemieux. They’d only just moved to town from Pittsburgh the summer before.
The mostly empty shoebox is white with the word K-Swiss in big blue letters. It is like a coffin and it stinks, but not like shoes. Henry bristles at the scent and it readies his other senses. Inside is what he wants to see. Needs to see.
Eleven years old, Henry is in between. He has an interest in growing up. He sees that some of the girls in his class have budding nubbin breasts and one boy even has a skunk patch of pubic hair that he shows off in the locker room before gym class. Henry recognizes no real physical signs that he too will soon take the next step into metamorphosis from boy to man. He sits on the floor cross-legged like the child he is physically and puts his left hand over his nose, pinching his nostrils.
When he lifts the lid, the scent is so full he can taste it and it makes him gag, but only a little. An apple has been in the shoebox in his bedroom closet for eighty-four days. It is soft beneath the fine layer of deep brown flesh. It has a mucky black crown that was once fuzzy white that was once shiny red. There are no bites from this apple. It serves the purpose of a rotting thing. It has not been for consumption since he took it from the crisper drawer and displaced his hockey cards in order to stow it away.
Henry stares as long as he needs to at the decay and replaces the lid, rises, and returns the box to where it belongs. A chill rushes up the skin of his bare back and he again checks his young, taut flesh for rot. It is not his time to rot.
—
“What’s up with you lately?” Father asks Henry.
They sit at the kitchen table with white bowls before them. Father’s bowl has milk residue from the fibre heavy cereal that he ate. Henry’s has much cereal and milk remaining. Froot Loops. They’ve gone soggy, growing like sponge donuts in the pink liquid.
“Huh?” Henry says.
“You’re moody as a little girl,” Father says.
Mother makes a cluck sound of disapproval. She stands by the window looking out at the falling snow, wishing sexist things did not amuse her husband so.
“What’d I say?” Father asks, knowing well, but enjoying the game. “He’s being like a moody little girl.”
“Am not,” Henry mumbles and begins shovelling the cereal into his mouth. Froot Loops have a short lifespan. They rot in a different way to flesh. Though they become disgusting, Henry likes the mushiness of decay against his tongue and the roof of his mouth.
—
Henry turned down an offer from his father for a ride to school. But his mother made him take it. The offer came thanks to the snow. Still, he will walk home and that’s what matters. School days are long for Henry, have seemed unbearably so for the past ninety-one days, since a week before he put the healthy red apple in the shoebox.
Finally the last bell rings and Henry hurries out of the classroom to his hook. He dons his bulky blue Brewers coat and his clunky black and brown boots. Outside, he is the fastest boy moving. He can’t be too late home, but there is a window for dawdling. The next-door neighbor girl will be at his house before he gets there, but she will watch TV and never ever notices ten minutes of stolen time as she’s paid by the hour.
She is a high school dropout with a bun in the oven and can’t do much on account of her size. Being single puts her in a precarious place, that’s how his parents describe it. Some on the block judge her. People at school talk about her sometimes, never nice things. Henry and his parents do not judge her. She comes over partly to get out of her house and partly to earn two bucks an hour to watch a TV that is not hers.
If Henry rushes, as he has done every school day for the last ninety-one, he has twenty-four minutes to spend in the park.
Cutting, on a mission, Henry navigates away from the trail and through the thin bush to the spot where his obsession began.
—
He was on his way home from school. It was still hot during the day but cool at night. They’d only been back from summer break for a week and Henry’s mind was a wishy-washy place while he strolled until he heard the cooing voice of a man. The man made baby talk, so it sounded. Henry wanted to see. Weird men in the park made for good stories. Through the trees, much fuller was the foliage in the heat of early autumn, he trudged until he nearly bumped into the man. The man was large and bent over something bulky but hidden. He wore hunting camouflage and when he turned to face Henry, he grinned something awful.
“Oh, it’s you,” this hunter said.
Henry recognized the man from church, the man knew his father, but Henry did not know this man’s name.
“You got a big mouth on you?” the hunter asked.
Henry shook his head. This was a half-truth. Before that moment, he was terrible at keeping secrets, but from that moment on, secrets became like pocket lint.
“Good, come here and see this.”
Henry did not want to. There was a scent on the air. And an aura of wrongness. He went because when a trusted adult gives an order, a smart boy heeds. He stepped forward and the hunter pulled back a blanket designed to resemble fallen leaves.
Henry gasped and the influx of smell made him gag. Sweat bubbled on his forehead and up his spine. Sudden humidity sucked autumn from the atmosphere and replaced it with deep summer.
There was a body on the ground. A Black woman. She was big with many rolls that seemed to spill off her like greying molasses folds. Her breasts flopped to either side of a boney chest plate and her nipples were as big around as wheelbarrow rims. The expression on her face was frozen pain.
“Come here, down on your knees,” the hunter said.
Henry dropped next to the man and sat on his white sneakers, knees pressed to the damp earth. There were bugs in the dead woman’s mouth and something had taken bits of flesh from her arms and legs. Flies circled like vultures.
“Give me your hand,” the hunter said.
Henry paused, despite what he knew about obeying elders. This woman was dead and this was not right in many ways. He wished he were someplace else, somewhere that seeing this dead naked form didn’t stir strange butterflies in his lower belly.
“Come on, kid, I won’t bite, and neither will she.”
Henry lifted his hand.
“Good. Bet you’d like to feel some pussy.”
Henry wanted to say yes, but not a dead woman’s, and yes, but he could wait until he was older. Instead, he let his body follow the arm as the hunter made a knife of Henry’s hand and slid all four fingers between gummy cold lips.
Tears fell from Henry’s eyes as he felt the inside of the dead woman. His mind told him all the bad gooey stuff in there was rotting things and evil bug nasty ooze instead of spilled ejaculate from the hunter’s repeated visits.
“I had her today. You can do a go of her too. Lose your big V. Kids still call it…?”
Henry heard no more. He was on his feet and running.
Henry wanted to tell but wouldn’t.
—
Through the woods and to the spot. He hadn’t seen the hunter there again, but he’d visited seventy-seven times since that first time. The body changed less lately, but it was very much different from what it had been.
Henry does not touch her, but he looks and straightens the cover. Animals often eat bits of her flesh and with every visit, he discovers new marks, this despite how the body has gone from rotting to rotten, from cold to frozen.
—
The Minnesota North Stars face the Quebec Nordiques and Henry watches next to his father on the couch. His mother is in an armchair crocheting washcloths. Henry gazes blankly at the hand that was once a knife used to part cold, ruined flesh.
“Okay, what’s going on?” Mother says, putting her work in her lap, fed up.
Henry does not hear her.
Father lifts the TV remote and silences the play-by-play. “Henry,” he says.
Henry lifts his eyes from his hand. “Yeah?”
“Henry, what’s wrong. I know when something’s wrong, I’m your mother. Is it a girl?”
Henry’s eyes bulge and he wonders how she figured it out, but quickly realizes she does not mean a rotting dead thing in the woods, but instead she means a schoolyard crush. A living girl with nubbin breasts and an interest in Tiger Beat magazine and Corey Feldman.
“No. I don’t know what you mean,” Henry says.
“What the heck is going on?” Father asks.
Henry shrugs.
“We’re your parents, you can tell us anything,” Mother says, there is a whine in her voice.
“There’s nothing wrong!” Henry says and storms off to his room.
He kicks the door closed behind him, flops onto his bed, and dozes almost immediately; it has been another long day. He awakens abruptly at 3:11, the moon is high, and frost has crystalized over the windowpane while he slept. The glow seeping inside is a sparkling blue that wears its temperature like a coat of paint.
Henry feels all over his body, knowing the rot has begun, knowing his skin is in the first stage of gushy brown. His fingers prod and indent. It is all there. He is whole and firm with healthy elasticity despite knowing the rot is everywhere. It’s on him, in him.
It isn’t.
He climbs from bed. He opens the accordion doors of the closet in the dark and withdraws the shoebox under only the moonlight. Eyes closed, the rotting woman lies over his headscape. She is there with him now, in the closet of his bedroom. He pulls the shoebox lid away with blind knowledge. Feeling with smell, seeing the rotting woman on the insides of his eyelids, he lifts the apple and forces it into his mouth.
XX
Bio: In August 1984, Eddie Generous was born into a family born to shit the bed. He has a print-journalism diploma from a community college, which is important if he ever accepts one of the job offers to rewrite articles vomited out by AI technology. He was the first of his household to go to college—and first child to avoid institutionalization, thus far.
Currently, Eddie lives on the west coast of Canada with his wife and their three cats. He is the author of close to 40 standalone books, has edited 6 anthologies, and put together 19 issues of Unnerving Magazine. More than 100 of his short stories have seen print in anthologies or magazines. He created and operates Unnerving Books, a small press responsible for publishing 85 titles and counting. He enjoys getting stoned and dancing around his living room.
For more about Eddie Generous, visit jiffypopandhorror.com
*THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH HENRY originally appeared in Vastarien Journal (2016)
This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.
No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.
THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH HENRY © Eddie Generous