The Death of Mr. Townsend

Charley felt uneasy when he woke up two-forty-six in the morning in vain condition, “What happened to me last night? My head hurts.” He slightly bent his robust shoulders to have a good stretch when he noticed bloated patches of nerves scattered all over his arms. “Am I drunk last night?” he murmured while striving to gather himself up to prepare for work. A stench of rotting meat filled his nostrils that almost made him blow his throat out - realizing how he cleaned his fridge last Tuesday, got rid of anything that might cause an unpleasant smell for he had - usually - difficulties of eying every day his things because of his bread-and-butter needed a full-time effort to be maintained. He was a computer programmer: almost consumed everyday by stress, fatigue, and the clamor that he nightly obtain through the answering machine: “Hey Mr. Charley, just wanna remind you that Fran, you’re little girl, has a camping tomorrow; don’t fool me with your naive alibis, cut it out!” Sophia, his ex-wife, regularly called him every night to fetch the financial support of her daughter as they both decided to part ways behind the reason of immaturity.

Charley left his bed for a good sip of coffee when the pendulum of his clock abruptly stop from its usual swinging, and fell on the ground that made a resounding thump as it hit the placid floor. “That’s weird,” he said. He stepped out of his bedroom and probed his box-like apartment in search of the light switch. As soon as he reached the living room, he noticed that his eyeglasses were left beside his lampshade stand, so he ran back for them. Upon reaching the room, he had seen his glasses were deteriorated: the rim was bent in an unusual way that it was hard to be recognized as it was; the glass parts were scattered all over on the lampshade table, and some of it were missing. "Am I really drunk last night?” he muttered, “I can’t remember a thing." He reached the phone and dialed the number of his office mate, Lisa, to ask what happened to him the night he got home as it struck his mind that they were together until dawn. The moment he raised the mobile console and reached his ear, he noticed that the line was cut. The stench of rotten meat got enough of him. He threw the mobile console straight to the mirror, and the scattered pieces of the latter broke into his face that made him crumble on the floor, “What in the world is happening!”

Outside his apartment, sounds of different variety filled the entire vicinity, and lingered to his aching head that caused a poignant attack that made him thump his head on the floor a dozen times that open-up a swelling on his forehead, with blood pouring down on the floor - he stopped. He managed to stand up and continued his pursuit to the missing light switch that seemed to be allocated by such entity for he knew the exact location of its position even with the lights off, but then, looking the whereabouts of it. He continued the probing that he started to get bored of, and unlike his pursuit to the missing switch, he doesn’t have any aim in mind while he probe the place. It seemed that he was walking at the longest road of his faith; and the stench had clearly consumed his whole sanity that he started to see a kind of reverie that laid him a lot of trouble through walking. His surroundings swirled with mists all over, creating a cyclone-cone view with all the objects spinning around as if a storm rummaging the room; it made a transfiguring state with every piece, changing the atmosphere to a form of eerie schism. He stumbled several times to flower vases, and other mud pots of the room. “This looks so real,” he said. When he reached the end of the ravine, he saw a cliff with grasses spreading the platform across the other end; marching fawns filled his eyes with specks of blood from a certitude spot, moved his view to the matter where the blood spots were formed; and at the middle of it, a man wearing a specified trouser for officers; his polo-shirt was shred on the collar part as if shrewd by a clawed vermin; the man’s tie was oddly wrapped around the pulse, changing the color of the arm to a russet-clot patch, allowing the veins to be malignant, down to the nails with formed blood by the pressure of the knotted swelling - hanging to a tree-branch with a rope gripped on his neck. He seemed to be alive at that moment for he was still wiggling that made the stems to crack and the leaves to fall. As he planned to get near on the man, he was struck by an imperturbable feeling that kept him from walking. He knelt down on the dry ground and smiled on what he witnessed. He seemed to recognize who the man was and doesn’t bother to be alarmed on the man’s current state of torment.

The scenarios that he had been through drifted slowly around him; wrest everything within his eyes could reach: the dry ground shone up to its peak; the ravine was contracted as one huge rock formation and transformed into a big chest-like furniture, later recognized as a monster-like closet for its antiquity. He gathered himself up planning to probe the new place he was currently into. Upon reaching his level of stance, he noticed a bed - a master one - filled with blood down from its bed sheet up on its poles. He saw a foot swung against the beams of the bed and made a resounding noise when it dropped on the floor. The resiliency of the stench filled the room and shown its fierceness that plagued a struggle on his breathing - almost knock him down. He crawled towards the foot and saw some blood on the carpet where the foot was laid down. His breathing became more difficult while he slowly approach the foot for he found that the rotting stench was coming from it. When he had seen the rest of the body parts through the spectacle crowded with blood-feasted worms and stuffed flies circling around the corpse, a reel of flashback plagued his thoughts, continued to linger for eternity.

“Luis, you’re fired! You dumped all the resources of the company!”

“You dope, fat-ass moron! Fire me, and I’ll kill you!”