Sick Day!!!

I was screwing around with words, just trying to get a mood. I'm not sure how good it turned out, but here's a little story.


It was night, and I walked past the body of Sam Turkaloo. He had been stuck in the same snow drift since early January. The Ravens had been at him some- but he was remarkably well preserved - and still frozen solid. I barely glanced at him as I made my way to my apartment, but it was beginning to get to the point where something had to be done about it.

When I first noticed his corpse a big raccoon was guarding him, like a dog over his dead master. I have wondered since, whether the raccoon was guarding him because he wanted to eat the corpse, or if he didn‘t want anyone defiling the body. Either could have been possible. But Sam wasn’t the most likeable guy, an asshole, I’d call him. So I gave the whole scene a wide berth and just went along my way.

That was the last I saw of the raccoon, but, that was another issue. I figured the cops, or dead animal control would have picked him up by now - near four weeks later. That’s a lot of days to walk past a corpse without it doing something to your psyche. And now, it was deeply imbedded. The whole neighborhood seemed to be on the same wavelength too. Directly at 4:37 am every morning, people would wake, lights would come on, and they’d just start their day, they were too freaked to sleep anymore.

On the second early morning when I started to wake up like this. I kicked on the space heater, and made some tea. The roommate came out in a hideous terrycloth robe, and asked if she could have some. I said “sure.” We watched the stove’s blue flame flicker around the bottom of the tea kettle until it whistled. I poured a couple of mugs, and we drank tea.

Then she blurted out. “I can’t get Sam Turkaloo’s teeth out of my head. I had a dream where, I was just standing in the street watching Sam in that snow bank. Then it just became about his teeth. They started chattering, like one of those wind-up chattering teeth toys. And it kept on getting more and more violent. The enamel started breaking, and his teeth started cracking. His teeth shattered, and blood oozed from his teeth-stumps, and out of the holes where his teeth had been chattered right out of the gums. And his lips had been caught up in the whole affair and ripped off by his mouth. Then his gums started banging together, becoming a mass of bloody flesh, by the end, even his gums were gone. Just a bloody chattering jawbone, banging against his face.”

I knew. I had the same dream. I’d been having the same dream now every night for four weeks. I debated whether I should hunt down the raccoon, and kill it, since obviously it knew something. But, I gave that idea up as impractical, besides, I knew where Sam was. The next morning at 4:37, I got up, grabbed the hacksaw, and went down to Sam’s corpse. I proceeded to saw off his head. It wasn’t easy work, sawing through eight inches of frozen neck and spine, but it got done. I dropped the head into a wicker basket, covered it with a blanket, and caught the first bus down to the river.

There’s things you’ll learn about yourself when you’re carrying a severed head in a wicker basket on a bus full of normal people going to work, but I won’t bore you with the details. I got off and made my way down the snowy banks of the Mississippi. By now, (late February) most of the ice had broken up, and there was plenty of open water. I went to the edge, and drifted the basket out into the current. It bobbed along with some ice flows, and I watched it for ten minutes or so before it slipped around a bend towards St. Anthony.

I turned , and came face to face with a huge old geezer staring down into my eyes. He had a broken nose, a black eye, and wore two thrift-store coats over each other.
I about pissed myself.
“Chattering teeth huh?” He wheezed.
“What?” I was able to squeak out.
“Guy dies, freezes to death - gives the whole neighborhood dreams of chattering teeth - hideous nightmares I should say. Time it’s over, the poor bastard don’t have any teeth, or gums or nothing. Just a bloody jawbone.”
“Yeah.”
“Only thing to do is to cut off their heads and set ‘em down the river.” He paused, hacked up something black and red from his lungs, and spit it on the snow. “Seen it lots of times. Seems to, how should I say, calm their aggravated souls. Stops ‘em from doin’ the chatterin’ dream any-how. You must be a good man to do this for him.”
“Yeah.” I said, and quickly got away.

I waited for the return bus, stamping my feet to keep them warm. The bus came about the time they were numb. On the way back, I thought about Sam, and what the creepy geezer had said. By the time I passed his headless corpse to get to my place, I realized, if our positions were reversed, no way that fucker would have done the same for me. He wasn’t the most likeable guy, like I said, he was an asshole.

I was home by six-thirty, but by then I’d decided, today, I’d call in sick.