Screaming

(continued from Awake)

When Raju arrived home later that night he could tell, by the sound of the water shushing through the pipes, that his wife, Larry was in the shower. He was tempted to join him, but let that thought go. Since deciding to devote his every waking thought to God he was tending more and more towards celibacy. He found the ins and outs of sex to be rather distracting and way too basic for his needs. As he locked the door behind him he debated, for the millionth time, on telling Larry about the malignant tumour. He let that thought go too.

Walking into the kitchen he put on the light and began to take ingredients from the fridge for a simple meal: spinach, mustard greens, cucumber peel, endive, green scallion, watercress, collard greens, Brussels sprouts, broccoli, lettuce, cabbage, turnip green, – all in the blender with a half pint of spring water.

Minutes later, as he poured out the greenish gloop, and was considering whether he should reflect on which might kill him soonest – the cancer-killing diet or cancer itself, Larry walked in, a towel around his waist, hair still wet from the shower. Raju’s thoughts about food and cancer spontaneously stopped.

Larry was badly in need of a hug. The scare he’d had in the empty building had shaken him, and that, combined with his work anxiety, had left him in desperate need of a human touch.

After reaching home, he’d spent a good fifteen minutes lying in the dark, anxiously stroking his thick beard and trying to think of nothing so much as nothing. Concluding that this was doing precisely nothing for him, he’d repaired to the shower instead.

Coming out of the shower, Larry heard the sound of the blender in the kitchen. Still hot and wet, he wrapped a towel loosely around his waist and padded through to join Raju. As he walked into the kitchen with a seductive look on his face and a careless roll to his hips that he’d calculated would sway the towel open more than a little, he smiled at Raju and rolled his eyes at his glass of green slime.

As Larry’s eyes hit eleven o’clock, the lights went out. All of them. By the time they reached one o’clock the windows had blown inwards, and as they snapped towards Raju’s shocked and uncomprehending face, the screaming began in earnest.

(continues in Boom)