Alfred Beatty sat cross-legged on the dingy beige carpet of his apartment floor and glared at the dirty squeeze bottle of mustard on the shelf opposite him.
“It’s over, you bastard.”
The bottle chortled, spraying flecks of brownish mustard on the mint green wall behind it.
“I don’t know if you’re cursed or from outer space or what, but this has got to stop.”
A week earlier, Beatty had come home from work, looked at the dishes precariously stacked in his sink and decided to make himself a turkey sandwich.
He lived alone in a tiny apartment in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood. It was a few blocks up from the University of Pittsburgh campus and sort of a low-rent refugee camp for grad students, hipsters and other undesirables.
Beatty lit a cigarette and opened the fridge. He immediately noticed a jar of olives sporting a thick blue crust of mold. Beatty puffed on the cigarette and tossed the olives in the trash. He went back to the fridge, opened the deli tray and found the turkey he’d picked up – a week ago? Two weeks ago? – had turned a lurid shade of green. He heaved that into the trash bin as well.
So it went, from the top of the refrigerator to the bottom, as he pitched half-eaten gyros, part of a pizza that was growing some kind of whitish fuzz, a crumb of cheddar that had turned rock hard. After twenty minutes, he’d gone through two additional cigarettes and completely stacked his trash bin.
All that remained in the fridge was a six-pack of IC Light, a bag of reasonably fresh bagels, half a can of corned beef hash he’d opened for breakfast, and a large yellow bottle of mustard he didn’t remember buying.
It looked like one of those generic mustard bottles you might see on a food cart. No label, no brand, just a plain yellow squeeze bottle with a little brownish mustard crusted around the top.
“Whatever works,” Beatty said, grabbing one of the IC Lights and twisting off the cap. He took a long, slow chug and grabbed the bagels, hash and mustard.
The folding table that passed for his dining room table was stacked with hand-written notes and an embarrassingly large number of empty beer bottles, each about a quarter filled with stale cigarette butts. Beatty looked at the overflowing trash bin, and opted to make his sandwich on the coffee table instead.
He smeared the hash across one of the bagels with the back of a spoon he’d plucked out of the sink and rinsed with some hot water. Then he grabbed the mustard bottle and squeezed a thick blob of grainy brown mustard on top. The bottle wheezed, almost contentedly, when he set it on the table.
He took a bite and swished the greasy concoction in his mouth, doing his best to chew it into a rough ball before swallowing it down.
His ferret Conan rattled his cage and stared in Beatty’s direction, licking his lips and rocking his head from side to side.
“You want no part of this, pal,” Beatty said. He washed the next bite down with another big gulp of IC Lite.
His television had been broken for the past six months, so Beatty got up and grabbed one of the outdoor magazines he’d stacked on top. He flipped to an article entitled, “The best strategies for field dressing your next moose.” Beatty had seen a moose once, at the zoo, and he didn’t own a gun, but there was something interesting about taking such a big animal apart. It looked kind of like a wet jigsaw puzzle.
He finished the hash sandwich and the IC Light and grabbed another. He sucked that down while reading an article about gathering wild mushrooms. He briefly thought about giving this a try sometime, but figured he ate enough questionable material as it was to risk throwing wild mushrooms into the mix. Another IC Light went down the hatch. Then another. Then he noticed it had begun to rain and opened the window to enjoy the ambience. He finished both his six-pack and his pack of cigarettes and fell asleep on his futon out of boredom.
The next day, Beatty woke with a start to see the sun blazing high in the sky. His head throbbed, and his unbrushed teeth still tasted like stale bread, white grease and mustard. He flung himself out of the futon and pulled on a pair of khakis and a wrinkled gray shirt from his “relatively clean” laundry pile.
A half-hour later he was sitting at his desk, staring at a frozen log-in screen.
“Rough night?” said Joe Eckes, leaning around the corner of his cubicle.
“Not really,” Beatty said.
“Right,” said Joe. “Looks like you forgot to change your shirt.”
Beatty looked down and noticed a garish splash of brownish-yellow mustard across the front of his gray shirt. His ears started to feel hot. Joe just smiled.
“We’ve all been there,” he said. “Look, I need you to try to get the initial non-ferrous report out by two today – New York’s been riding my ass about it, and I’m going to need at least an hour to pull the charts from the server and re-upload it.”
“I didn’t even wear this shirt yesterday,” said Beatty.
Joe shifted his weight to the other leg.
“Yeah, so like I said New York’s really being a bitch about this report, for some reason. Do you think you can slap something together by two?”
Beatty nodded and absently touched the mustard stain. It was still a little tacky.
The report didn’t get finished until just after three. Beatty slunk out of the office at the stroke of five. By seven, he was well on his way to a thick buzz at the Jaggerbush Pub down the hill from his apartment.
“Rough day?” said the bartender, gesturing at his mustard-spattered shirt. “Another jack and Coke?”
Beatty just nodded and nudged his glass to the edge of the bar.
“And a shot of dark rum,” he added.
Beatty leaned against his door frame and fumbled with his keys. His stomach was growling and his head felt like it was a million miles from his feet.
He lurched into his apartment and sprawled onto his futon, setting the six pack of IC Light he’d brought home from the bar on his coffee table. He sighed, closed one eye to keep focused, and plucked one from the cardboard pack.
His stomach gurgled hard as he took a swig and reached in his pocket for a cigarette. Mid-gurgle, something rattled in the little galley kitchen.
Beatty leveraged himself up off of the futon and swung his head in the direction of the refrigerator. The rattling intensified as he crossed the small apartment in four uneven steps and pulled open the door.
Conan glared at him through the frosted plastic of the deli tray.
“How in the hell,” Beatty said, pulling open the tray. Conan struggled out of the tray and into his arms, shivering.
“You were almost a weasel popsicle,” Beatty said, stroking his head. He walked him over to his cage, vague guilt building in his chest. I must’ve passed out and left the cage open, he thought.
Beatty tucked Conan into the cage and he immediately curled up under an old sock.
I don’t even remember letting him out last night, Beatty thought. He mentally jogged through last night, and found a disconcerting amount of the timeline blank.
Beatty returned to the futon and lit a cigarette. He ripped through two IC Lights in quick succession and briefly considered making another hash-and-mustard sandwich, but reconsidered when he glanced down and remembered the brownish slash across his chest.
As he fell asleep, he thought he heard another rattle from the fridge. He boozily glanced over at Conan, snoring in his cage, and closed his eyes.
Beatty woke to the sound of his phone furiously dinging as text after text rolled in. He looked outside. It was still pretty dark. He cursed. He’d slept in on Friday and was now up and about at sunrise on Saturday. His head felt like a bowl of chocolate pudding. He grabbed his phone and it nearly slipped out of his hand.
Through grimy smudges of brown mustard, he could make out the name “Dina.” Beatty hadn’t seen Dina in over a year, when they had a very loud and public falling out in front of the Jaggerbush after a few too many jack and Cokes. He frantically scrolled through the texts.
Apparently, he’d initiated the conversation just after two in the morning - luridly. He couldn’t believe some of the things he’d apparently written. Neither could Dina.
The phone continued to ding. She alternately begged him to call and explain and suggested he find something large and sharp to go fuck himself with.
Beatty walked through last night’s timeline. The last thing he remembered was Conan snoring noisily in his cage. He grabbed a half-empty bottle of IC Light from the coffee table and swallowed the warm swill down to keep his head from cracking apart.
The refrigerator rattled.
Beatty jumped to his feet and pulled the door open. The inside was absolutely covered with brown slop. The mustard bottle slowly compressed and decompressed, hissing slightly.
Beatty slammed the fridge shut and stumbled into the hall and down the back staircase.
He came back later with a fifth of Old Crow whiskey and three packs of Camel Menthols. He twisted off the bottle’s cap like he was trying to break a neck and took a long swig. He flung the fridge door open, grabbed the mustard bottle and set it on his bookshelf. The sun was just starting to burn through the morning fog outside.
“What do you want?” Beatty said, finally. Half the bottle of Old Crow was gone. The mustard bottle was still chortling. Brown mustard bubbled down its side and pooled on the shelf. Dina was still pinging his phone every half hour. It was just after noon.
“What are you?” he said. “Why me?”
The bottle squeezed itself, hard. A blob of mustard hit the top shelf and splashed hard enough to put little brown dots on Beatty’s glasses. He grunted, heaved back another burning glug of Old Crow and sprang at the shelf.
“Is this what you want? Is this it?” he said, grabbing the bottle.
It hissed as he put it to his mouth and clenched his fist. A stream of rancid brown mustard hit the pool of whiskey at the back of his throat. He closed his eyes and swallowed it down. He clenched his fist again, and the bottle began to shake and twist in his hand.
“I don’t know where you came from,” he said. “But I know where you’re going.”
The bottle writhed in his fist as he grabbed the whiskey bottle and poured both down his throat. One swallow, two, three, four. Beatty’s eyes were streaming. The bottle began to shriek.
Beatty sank to his knees as he swallowed the last of the whiskey-mustard mix. He burped, tossed both bottles behind him and sank to the carpet. The smell of cigarettes, alcohol and vinegar filled his swimming head.
“Fuck you,” he said. “I liked that shirt, too.”
He thought he saw the mustard bottle twitch in the corner as he closed his eyes.
“Al! Al, open the fucking door. I can hear you in there,” said Dina, banging on Beatty’s apartment door. “What is your fucking problem? You can’t just text me shit like that and not call me back. If you’re drunk, I swear to God.”
Dina opened her purse and fished around for the little brass key she’d never returned. She found it on her spare keychain, the one with the little beaded panda.
“I don’t even fucking care, Al,” she said. “You open this door or I will. We’ve got some shit to talk about.”
She paused for a beat, then slammed the key into the lock and pushed the door open.
The door missed Beatty’s head by about an inch. He was laying on the carpet in a pool of brown gunk. An empty Old Crow lay on its side near his left foot. Conan perked up in his cage, yawned, and slid back under his sock.
“Al?” she said, nudging his head with her foot. He didn’t move. “Al?”
A weird, hissy wheezing came from Beatty’s galley kitchen. Dina put her purse on the floor next to Beatty and peaked around the corner.
A filthy old mustard bottle - like the ones you might see on a food cart - was sitting on the counter. It was pulsing, rhythmically, and oozing a steady stream of brown mustard onto the counter.
“Al? What the fuck is that?” she said. “Is that mustard bottle fucking laughing or something? What is this?”
Beatty didn’t respond.
Submitted June 11, 2015 at 11:17PM by GreensburgZombie http://ift.tt/1L037Ov DarkTales
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