This was supposed to be easy, according to the box.

It even said “EZ”. As in “EZ Slide.” And if there was still a smidgen of doubt, it also said, “Finally, a plastic wrap that is easy to use!” Except it was anything but for Porter Cole, who had dropped the thing at least four times in an attempt to extract a single, uncrumpled piece of plastic from the “handy” sliding bar of the Reynolds box. The sliding bar was actually supposed to cut the plastic but, so far as he could tell, there was no edge, no jagged little teeth. He’d never used it before. His wife always took care of the leftovers.

Porter stooped down once again to recover the box from the kitchen floor … and suddenly stopped. His expression, strained and red with frustration only seconds ago, was now oddly quizzical. Time spun out in relative silence in the pre-dawn darkness of his kitchen, save for the low drone of the television set from the living room and the even fainter complaints of a garbage truck stretching its back several streets away, as Porter stood there with his eyes somehow both fixed and lost on the large pan atop the counter. The pan contained three-quarters of a beef stroganoff that had been sitting in the refrigerator since Friday, nearly a week ago. Porter’s wife, Diane, had made it that night and the next day they were pulling her mangled, decapitated body out of the Cahaba River as late-summer rain pelted down from a November sky. Porter didn’t think the stroganoff had gone over yet. Nor did he care.

Screw the plastic. Use tinfoil.

He stared at the pan. Whenever Diane put away leftovers, their plastic coverings were always impeccable, the surfaces penny-bounce-tight with just the right amount of excess wrap evenly tucked under the edges of the dish, bowl or pan. Even if there were no edges, she somehow managed to make the wrap stick where it was supposed to— something her husband privately marveled at.

And Diane never used tin-foil.

He scooped up the Reynolds Wrap and started all over again. No, he could not use tinfoil. And he would do it right. No bunched-up places or loose ends this time. It had to be done exactly the way she did it. It had to be perfect.

The task took him exactly one hour and forty-two minutes. He placed the pan back into the refrigerator, then turned to the counter again and punched buttons on the microwave. He was an unkept man in dirty socks, underwear and a t-shirt that had stains old and fresh. His hair was a tassel of near-permanent corkscrews, and the puffy eyes and deep lines in his face, which of course had not been there seven days before, betrayed his actual age.

The microwave beeped after three minutes. Porter opened the door and pulled out the plate of stroganoff which had been sitting inside the whole time. He then grabbed a clean fork from the dish-drainer in the sink and went back to the living room. He sat down and ate in front of the television, not hungry at all but eating anyway. He wept as he ate, then went back for seconds.

Indeed, his wife’s broken body was not currently occupying a patch of dirt fifteen miles down the road at Valley Oak Cemetery.

The delicately-wrapped leftover beef stroganoff in the refrigerator said so.

Saturday, 8:51 pm

“Need some quick cash? Call Alabama Title Loans today! Good credit? Bad credit? No credit? Forget about it! Just bring in your car title and we’ll give you a cash loan in as little as ten minutes—and you get to keep your car!”

“Although you’ll never see any of these people advertising their interest rates,” said Diane with a snort. She was sitting on the couch talking to the TV screen but addressing her husband, who had been sitting in his recliner now for almost twelve hours straight. He hadn’t even shifted his position, much less gotten up to take a piss. His bladder nor his colon bore any semblance of a relevancy to him—they were trivial sensations, floating just outside his sphere of self-awareness; and between slipping in and out of what some small, dying portion of his rational mind kept referring to as “skim-sleep,” the last time he registered anything close to thirst or hunger might as well have belonged to a separate age … a separate person.

“Of course not,” Porter said, “because the moment they do is the moment they run themselves out of business.” He laughed and raised a stinky eyebrow toward the couch. “And my I remind you, Missus Cole, that a state circuit-court judge recently legalized loan-sharking, so these yahoos casually leaving out just how hard they’re going to ram your caboose after you borrow their money shouldn’t be a surprise.”

Diane looked at her husband. “I can bitch if I want,” she said primly, and Porter stuck out his tongue, called her a “thankless wench,” which got them both giggling. Diane was so lovely when she laughed, which she did often, the way the curled banes of her Irish-red hair bounced, the way color bloomed into her face as if the freckles there had begun to expand and connect, the way her chest heaved high and the way her eyes twinkled, the combination of all these things making him want her, making him want to get out of his chair and scoop her up and take her to bed, the kitchen, the hallway, or just take her right there where they stood. The detached Porter, the Porter currently existing as a floating dust-speck between universes, the Porter who never attended his wife’s funeral, wanted to do that now—except he couldn’t move. His legs were dead with sleep and if he tried to stand up now he would just tumble into the floor. So Porter stayed where he was and laughed with his wife, who was there but wasn’t, like a signal fading in and out on the radio as a lonely trucker steers his rig between vast hills in the dark cauldron of night. He laughed, only marginally aware that his bladder had let go and the cushion of the recliner beneath him was soaked, only marginally aware that he was the only warm body in the room, only marginally aware that he was weeping as he laughed.

Sunday, 2:27 pm

He was watching a PBS show on black holes in which the narrator (he thought it was Orson Wells, but wasn’t that guy dead?) was telling him that they were collapsed stars, and that the gravitational pull was so strong that not even light itself could escape it. Fascinating stuff, and he kept telling Diane this throughout the program. Sometimes she was there to respond in kind, sometimes she wasn’t. Soon enough, he was nodding off, and he found himself standing

in the rain, surrounded by policemen and paramedics. It felt as though he were standing on an incline, and sure enough, he was—the rocky earth, which was now mud, folding down into a large body of water that was swift with current. Part of his view was blocked by moving bodies in uniform, and whenever he attempted to focus on a face, the image blurred, the features swirling into nonsensical patterns. Clarity here seemed to exist only in the peripheral, except the peripheral didn’t matter—what he needed was straight ahead, through the crowd. He pushed his way through, his heart almost in his mouth, and for the first time in this dream he actually felt the rain, battering his body, slowing him down.

Voices drifted to him: “Are there any witnesses?”

“—thrown forward on impact with the riverbed—”

“— no other visible damage to the car, she might have simply lost control --”

The rain was coming down even harder now and the mud had covered his shoes, acting as a kind of freeze-drying cement. He could suddenly move his legs no further, but it was no matter because he had reached the end: the crowd of swirling faces parted before him so that he now had a full view of the raging river and the object still jutting from the middle of it like a tragic silver exclamation point with wheels. He knew that the car, a 2003 Ford Escort he had purchased for Diane the previous June, had slammed so hard into the already tumultuous topsoil of the riverbed that it was partially buried, deep enough to not be swayed by the Cahaba screaming around it.

She hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt and was thrown through the windshield head first, which came off as glass, shattering with the impact, seared through her neck. Everything from that point down actually ended up remaining in the car. Her head, though, was thrown clear. The river caught it and swept it away.

Suddenly he heard a scream. It came from behind, and before he could even think to turn around he was stopped by the same sight that caused the scream: a ghost-white arm had appeared from the broken passenger window of the Escort, flailing as if in an epileptic spasm, its open hand crashing repeatedly against the door, clawing at it. And then he was trying to turn away, but the mud held his feet fast, he still couldn’t move—

Porter woke up screaming, throwing fists in the air above his head, and even as his waking mind was getting used to the idea that he was still in the dark comfort of his livingroom, he cried out again, the image of her arm still lingering.

Whatever he had been watching on the television before slipping away was over and now it was a bright twenty-six-inch square of static, the whooshing roar of dead airwaves very much like that of the Cahaba in his dream. Porter grabbed the remote on his armrest, but just as his thumb settled on the button, it popped back up again. He no longer wanted to change the channel. The dead-air snow was suddenly something interesting to look at: atmospheric electricity with a face, a frazzle-dazzle of moving pixels stretched across a band of space that otherwise had no vacancy of satellite sponsorship.

Porter sat there in his recliner, staring at the picture-tube, and wasn’t all that surprised when the image began to change: A ripple, almost as if the television-snow were liquid disturbed by a single bull’s-eye drop of a small stone, spread out from the center of the bright, ordered chaos of empty pixels, rolling almost organic-like across the inside of the glass barrier until it bled away into the four corners. He barely followed its progress before a second ripple appeared from the center, followed by a third, a fourth, each one expanding faster than the one before it.

Now the pixels had begun to bleed away to create a solid mass of unmolested white, the dark places squeezed out. The mass then seemed to bulge against the slightly-curved glass of the screen, at first so subtle that he was sure it was but a momentary blip in his own depth perception. Then it bulged again, and this time the glass gave way—only it didn’t shatter or burst, but became elastic, molding itself to the head of the growth as said growth pushed itself forward, like an abscess being forced through a break in the skin by giant invisible fingers.

The abscess, having manipulated the glass barrier to its will, continued to push forward, the conglomerated pixels breaking apart again as it did so, the concentration of effort to go from one world to the next no longer needed. What Porter was seeing now looked like an extending limb, an arm or leg perhaps, but one made of light and fuzz and static. It was a projection without joints, skin or hair, a phantasmagoric freeze slowly erupting from a separate plane of existence in a smooth, disciplined trajectory toward the man sitting in his recliner.

“Catch it,” he heard his wife tell him, her voice flirty and breathless. Was her voice now coming from the couch, or his mind?

“Catch it and take it in.”

What? he thought, yet his body knew the answer before his mind could even grasp it, for even as his face wrinkled with the question his hand was off the armrest and snatching up the straw from the warm, barely-touched can of Pepsi on the night-table next to his chair.

The snow-projection, still gathering its energy from the base, kept coming toward him, its tip aimed directly at his face, and while it moved slowly it had already covered half the distance between Porter and the television set.

Catch it.

Porter gently inserted one end of the straw into his right nostril. He then raised the other end of the straw directly toward the tip of the projection, which sped up in the last few inches of empty space between and flowed into it, setting the entire straw ablaze and exposing the capillaries pulsing beneath the skin of his thumb and forefinger.

It wasn’t hot and it had all the consistency of Pepto-Bismol as it ran down his tubes and over the back of his throat. Immediately there were fireworks, great neon multicolored explosions instantly turning his mind into a bubbling soup of fire, indescribably sweet but powerful enough to throw his head back and make the veins bulge in his neck and forehead as color spread across his face. The receiving-end of the straw was now pointed up, but his movement did not break the flow of energy, merely put its path on an S-curve in absolute defiance of gravity. Porter’s free hand gripped the edge of the armrest. His wide staring eyes were now orbs of electric-blue light bright enough to set the entire livingroom ceiling ablaze.

The stuff kept coming and his body kept taking it in—but such a flow was not without end: Patches of pure darkness had already begun to creep from the perimeters of the television screen. Soon these patches had eaten most of what was behind the glass, with the bouncing pixel-dots of the uninfected themselves being stretched by the magnetic pull of the center-screen opening.

Porter dimly realized that he was screaming and laughing at the same time, rubber-room catcalls of the certifiably bonkers. He found it all very sane, however, and continued screaming, and just before the last of the TV snow was sucked through the screen and into his body, Porter caught a glimpse of himself not through the eyes in his head, but the one in his mind: sitting there convulsing as the light was drained from the straw and then exploding out his every orifice. The eye in Porter’s mind saw this with absolute clarity, as it saw that his television set was now a dark and silent box, having been bled dry.

Porter, now filled to the point of overload, passed into darkness, finally relinquishing his hold on the straw, which tumbled into his lap.

Tuesday, 3:30 am

The dirty, unshaven scarecrow currently stumbling around in the livingroom of his neighbor’s house in the back door of night was no longer Porter Cole, but a man who quite literally saw himself in third-person perspective as a fleshy shell filled with sentient luminescence. He saw the humming electric cancer, a fire of otherworldly purpose, flowing through his own body, manipulating basic motor control and pressing his legs and arms forward in true Romeroesque style to the task of preserving its own existence.

Porter’s neighbor across the street, Harold Womack, a man surfing the golden crest of his eighth year of retirement and who barely even knew Porter, owned a 28-inch-screen Magnavox. Right now it sat on a covered stubbly-legged table amidst the spray of broken glass from the large window adjacent to it. Porter’s forced and very noisy entry had been of no consequence in what now passed for his mind, for the thing that now drove him possessed no capacity for concern in regards to external factors that might prevent its access to more of itself. It only wanted to grow. It only wanted the source.

The cool early-morning breeze lifted the window curtains slightly as he (it) moved toward the Magnavox, moonlight twinkling off the tiny shards of glass embedded in the back of his (its) bloody hands as they reached out to touch the dark curved screen. He sighed when he made contact and fell to his knees, hearing the crunch of glass in the carpet but not feeling the large slivers being driven into his kneecaps—the pain was instantly swallowed by the triumphant squeal of the bright pixel-throttled chaos of nova-white behind his eyes.

Porter’s fingers hungrily searched the television’s side panel in the darkness for buttons. There were none. The set was controlled entirely by remote. More glass crinkled as he felt along the surface of the surrounding table, an action yielding no results, and a whine of guttural panic began to rise in his throat—

“Porter …”

He turned and his detached, third-person self was not startled by the sight of the dead thing sitting in Harold Womack’s Lazy Boy across the livingroom with its legs crossed and the moonlight illuminating its terrible visage. The decay in Diane’s face was profound, the dull gleam of moist bone peeking through the cheeks, chin and forehead. Her grin was too wide, all teeth, the withered skin having shrunk back to reveal gums the color of rust and soured plums. She had lost a good bit of hair, and the neck above the collar of her funeral dress bore a ring of stitched and blackened flesh.

One hand rested in her lap. In the other was the remote control. She was holding it out to him.

But it was the eyes that drew Porter’s focus and beckoned the disease within him: They were empty sockets. No, that wasn’t right—they were black gaping windows that seemed to swell and expand before his own eyes, showing him a place punctuated with actual stars that formed constellations of a universe that could only exist on the nightside of everything, in the necroscape between the grave and the abyss. Except those aren’t stars, the detached Porter whispered to himself. They’re pixels. And with this realization those “stars” began to move in the blackness framed by the decayed portals, began to come together, and the bright white madness surged and screamed within the confines of his skull as Porter started to pull himself away from the television and crawl toward that rotting outstretched arm holding his prize.

“Porter,” the thing in the chair whispered again, and now his own hand was reaching out, the bloody fingers twitching with anticipation as the chaotic but purposeful storm behind his eyes surged a second time—

Something with the force of a swinging baseball bat knocked his arm sharply to the left, and in the split-second before he actually heard the report from Harold Womack’s snub-nosed .32 Porter saw the hole open up in the flesh just inches below his wrist. While Harold himself, blinking away sleep and standing in his robe and slippers just inside the archway that connected his livingroom to the hallway, could not see the face of his intruder, he could make out his shape just enough to know where to put his second bullet.

This time it was Porter’s side-abdomen, the force of the shot driving him off his knees and into the floor. He lay there on his side like a stunned animal, twitching, still feeling no pain, his mouth opening and closing silently. And as that final darkness began to seep into his vision, he caught a glimpse of what was pouring from his wounds: bright, it was. White and blinding.

And full of stuttering black dots.

* * *