Newborn Pink E-Book

Shawn Wayne Langhans

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Paulie Galamb is the hapless hero of this story, no matter if he likes it or not. The unattractive, unassuming divorcee was good at his job as a taste-tester of lab-grown meats - until his body turned against him.

All Paulie ever wanted was to live his boring life inside the We-Store storage facility. Now, that dream is tossed out of the window, after a simple dental procedure takes a turn for the weird and he notices a strange growth in his throat. What's even weirder is that the tumor can speak.

While Paulie tries to sort out the absurd, cancerous situation, he finds out that the corporation he works for is prepared to go to any lengths to silence him before he reveals their secrets; what those secrets are is unclear to Paulie.

Embracing his own mortality, Paulie has to navigate a maze of off-beat neighbors, homeless teenage bullies, evil middle managers and a mysterious man who might or might not be who he claims to be. But can he find his way through and live to tell the tall tale?

Leseprobe

NEWBORN PINK

MIDLAND TALES BOOK 1

SHAWN WAYNE LANGHANS

CONTENTS

Part I

1. The Talking Heads

2. Its Starts In A Dental Engine

3. We-Store Storage

4. Barstool Banter, Part One

5. The Dream Sequence

6. A World Where Bugs Could Talk

7. A Bird’s-Eye View Of Midland

8. Small Town Teenagers

9. An Otorhinolaryngologist

10. Attempting Beer Math

11. By Appointment Only

12. Smartphones And Porn

13. A Badass Recognizes A Badass

14. The Meat Behind The Curtains

15. A Snail’s Eyeball Stalks

16. Barstool Banter, Part Two

17. Malt Liquor And The Mass

18. Mr. Wing Warned Him

19. The Harvard Vomit Splatter

20. Four Men And A Lump

21. Two Peas In A Pod

22. Wake Up Paulie Galamb

23. The Pea Tree Mass

Intermission

Part II

24. Taxomy Of A Tumor

25. Niles, Meet Parlay

26. Let Me Pick Your Brain

27. The Hedasky Interaction

28. The Work Dream He Had

29. Flowers For Paulie

30. Taxomy Of A Tumor

31. Seeking A Second Opinion

32. The Former Lives Of Edith Post

33. The Area Between Here And There

34. Galamb Meets Another Fejes

35. Niles Vists A Grave

36. A Chance Encounter

37. Parlay Consumes

38. Barstool Banter, Part Four

39. The Persuasiveness Of Parlay

40. The Hedasky Intimidation

41. One Pea In A Pod

42. No More Alarm Clocks

43. The Water Tower Broadcast

44. The Former Lives Of Niles

45. The Scolding Of Arnold

46. Trepanation Situation

47. Barstool Banter, Part Five

48. Saturday Morning Barbeque

49. The Talking Heads

50. It Starts In A Field Of Meat

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright (C) 2022 Shawn Wayne Langhans

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Edited by Graham (Fading Street Services)

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

This yarn is dedicated to my good friend Brad Jones who spoke to the ghosts in his grandfather’s cabin and left this world long before any of us were ready. I remember trying to explain the plot of this story as I was writing it two weeks before you passed away. I really miss you bud, but I know your parents miss you more than I can ever fathom. So, this novel is also dedicated to you Tammy, and to you as well Jeff. I’m sorry for the cruel things I said, Mr. Jones.

This one is also dedicated to all of my grandparents, living and dead, and all of your grandparents too!

PART1

“When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and sometimes they die before they get around to it. You can't make them change if they don't want to, just like when they do want to, you can't stop them.”

― Andy Warhol

1

THE TALKING HEADS

And What They Said

“Good morning, Midland! We’re here with some good news for all you out there that are sick of this dreary rainfall-”

“Tesla stocks are on the rise again since the multi-billion-dollar merger with Ama-”

“In local news the Midland Robins have won the state playoffs-”

“From farm to table might be an outdated saying in the near future what with the rise of the lab-grown meat industry. We’re with Pea Tree Farms spokesman, Arnold Workman who is here to talk about the launch of their newest product-”

“Hey there Midland, it’s Primo Perry here at Perry’s Primo BMW with some exciting news for you!”

“-study shows that the radiation could be coming from the Chumquah fields, however these reports are disputed by the tribe-”

“-and KGVT News will be back after these brief messages from our sponsors, Pea Tree Farms-”

The bartender, having heard enough of the same-old same-old, turned the flatscreen television off, and awaited his nightly patrons. While he put away the last of the pint glasses, the door chimed with the entry of two friends. First came the dentist, then appeared the weatherman, and not long after that the prior shared with the latter a story about a man.

A very loveable, albeit very ugly man.

2

ITS STARTS IN A DENTAL ENGINE

And Ends In A Field Of Meat

The man in white poked across his mouth, and the patient swallowed. “No doc, not there,” he tried to say, but with the various metal tools in his mouth, the statement came out without consonants. “Ohh ocgh, odd ‘ere.”

“Can you open just a little wider? Just a little bit more.”

The dentist seemed to be asking Paulie to dislocate his jaw. “I’m not as young as I used to be,” he wanted to joke, knowing that were he to attempt to say that he’d likely spray the dentist with saliva and only be able to pronounce the vowels. Instead, he stretched his mouth open, feeling that same painful click he’d been experiencing every time he yawned. A squishy pop, not unlike pressing down on the base of your thumb with your opposite hand’s pointer finger and other thumb.

“Quap,” his temporomandibular joint said, quietly, while he accidentally gleeked his spittle on the dentist’s face shield.

“Okay, now hold that. Hold. Right there is perfect,” he said, ignoring the saliva sliding down the clear plastic separating Paulie Galamb and his dentist. Paulie tried hard to focus on the spit itself, and not the mole under the dentist’s left eye. It looked like a tiny inverted square tear or maybe the state of Indiana, painted freckle brown. He was not sure.

Thoughts of Indiana left his mind when the dentist poked something soft, something spongy. Something that was most certainly not made of tooth. Something certainly not wanting to be poked or prodded. Paulie made this clear by yelping under his breath and coughing the dentist’s hands from his mouth. For a moment, Paulie thought he heard the dentist whispering into his mouth, but he was not sure.

“Well, it’s not an infected pocket. In fact, there’s hardly a pocket at all. Mostly just the fresh regards of future scar tissue,” the dentist reassured him, placing one tool down and grabbing another. Paulie half-glanced at the metal tool in his hand and couldn’t help but imagine it as some kind of double-sided fishhook with a pen-sized metal rod between each stabbing implement. Was this the Gracey Curette or the Curved Sickle Scaler?

He only knew these names because before his visit he wanted something to distract him while this man fooled around in his mouth-hole or lack thereof. Earlier in the week he had borrowed a trivia book that only captured his attention when he flipped to a page about the various odd names of dental equipment. There he took it upon himself to learn the names of the tools of his mouth-hole doctor’s trade.

With one hand, the dentist stuffed the mouth mirror back in the deep-far-down area where his wisdom tooth used to sleep undisturbed for forty years before some unexpected pocket of pus formed and inflated and forced this man to pluck the sneaky bonus bones from his jaw. The infection had pushed on the slumbering wisdom tooth, which pushed on his molars, on his canines and incisors. For forty years, his teeth had been good enough for television, but after this muck-up, he was considering orthodontic assistance. Right now, he was considering pushing away the doctor, and leaving this place, but he knew the pain would only follow him home.

“However, I am also seeing no signs of scarring or tissue damage, which only concerns me,” he said, putting emphasis on the word ‘damage’ by poking him somewhere in the back half of his throat with the Curette or the Scaler, “because I am also not seeing any evidence that there ever was a wisdom tooth here.”

With his mouth once again dentist free, Paulie used it to form words with both consonants and vowels used in unison. “Well, that doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

“You’re not wrong, Mr. Galamb. As I recall, I was the one that plucked that pesky poker out of you less than two weeks earlier.”

Paulie remembered. It had been less than two weeks. Nine days by his count. It was high on his list of his most painful experiences ever experienced in his forty-seven years of life. Worse than the double-clavicle break of sophomore year. Worse than his first and second hernia. Worse even, than his divorce five years earlier. For him anyway. He imagined Toni was doing just fine wherever she was in Central City at this point.

But the pain of having that damn tooth pulled nine days ago was not as bad as having his catheter being removed by his angry father when he was seventeen, after Paulie had drunkenly crashed his dad’s Volkswagen into his dad’s wood-working shop.

“Yeah, don’t remind me. After that, I called about the dry socket a few days later but that disappeared after four days. But then the swelling just never went down. I mean, how long does it usually take for this to heal?”

“Mr. Galamb, perhaps I haven’t made myself clear. I am not seeing any signs that I pulled a tooth from your mouth. No scar tissue, no hole.”

“Then why am I feeling the same pressure still? I can feel it when I yawn, when I chew, when I swallow.”

Not that he had been chewing much lately. In nine days since he had his bastard wisdom tooth removed his diet had mostly consisted of blended meals. Swallowing had grown so painful that he had taken to eating like a duck, by staring up at a lightbulb while he poured the liquid meals down his gullet, trying to not choke and his spray his liquid food about while he did it.

It had been greatly affecting his work, his livelihood, as a food product tester.

Try to imagine testing a revolutionary new lab-grown meat product that had to be blended into a liquidy pulp just so you could judge it by its flavor and imagine the look on your boss’s face when he has to tell the lab-coats that the results were non-conclusive because you gagged on the slurry when you tried to swallow it. Sue Ellen, his supervisor, having to send him home because he couldn’t do his job.

Imagine the embarrassment you’d experience if your boss refused to allow you back to work until you saw a dentist again. Or a specialist. Whatever it would take to get those tastebuds back to tip-top shape.

Not that his pain affected his taste buds, no, he could still taste his pain.

The doctor put the back of his blue-gloved hand to Paulie’s forehead, “Well, you don’t seem to have a fever,” Do dentists use thermometers? “But I do believe the back of your jaw is quite swollen. I’m not sure if it’s your lymph nodes, no, too far back, or if maybe it’s a keloid. Most likely that,” he said without an air of certainty.

“What’s a keloid, doc?”

The doctor set his tools down on the tray, with Paulie being able to name the obvious Tartar Scraper next to the Dental Pick and Probe, next to the Mouth Mirror. Though he was still unsure whether that last one was a Gracey Curette or the Curved Sickle Scaler. The doctor turned his back on Paulie, took his face shield off, and changed his cloth mask underneath it.

“A keloid is, hm, essentially an angry piece of scar tissue. However, the lump over the area where your wisdom tooth had been pulled doesn’t look like your typical keloid. It’s, how do I say, larger than I am comfortable with. Normally I would expect to see a convex indentation or a slight divot. At the very least, I would expect to see the stitch marks.”

“But?”

“But here, I see nothing. And instead of convex, I am seeing concave. I see no evidence of stitches, no scars, just a mass,” said the dentist, grabbing a prescription pad and a pen from his pocket.

“A mass?” Paulie asked, while the dentist scrawled out something on the pad of paper.

“I believe it to be a tumor, Mr. Galamb. However I am afraid that this is not my area of expertise. An X-ray from me may confirm my suspicions, but beyond that I am of little help for you further. I am going to recommend you to a specialist, just to be sure.”

“What kind of specialist, Doctor?” Paulie asked, while staring at the freckle of Indiana under the dentist’s left eye.

“I think it best for you to see Dr. Fejes. He’s my wives’ oncologist. I think you should see him about this mass in your throat. Could be nothing. Could be benign. You never know until you get it checked out,” he said, handing Paulie a slip of paper. On the paper was the name, ‘Doctor Joseph Fejes, Oncologist’ followed by a phone number. Elsewhere on the paper was the phrase, ‘Medical Prescription Form’ and the letters ‘RX’ in the corner.

“Oncologist,” Paulie said solemnly. “That’s the cancer doctor right.”

The dentist used his foot to press the pedal on the dental engine, raising Paulie from the dead like some kind of ugly Frankenstein’s monster. “I’m afraid so. Now I don’t mean to worry you, Mr. Galamb, I just think you should see Dr. Fejes as a precaution. Could be nothing. Could just be a pesky keloid. Yes, I’m sure that’s all it is. I mean, I’m not sure. You should go see this man at your earliest convenience.”

When Paulie sat up, he felt and heard his stomach gurgle, which the dentist heard as well. Paulie tried to hide his discomfort, but it was wildly apparent. You can’t hide the Indiana birthmark any more than you can hide the fear in the face of a man who was just told “Maybe it’s cancer?” Nor can you hide the hunger of a growling belly from a man who just had his hands down your mouth.

In lieu of the gurgles heard, the dentist stuck his hand in his pocket and plucked out a tiny red lollipop. He held his hand out to Paulie who was busy putting his jacket on.

“No thank you, doc.”

“I insist. It’s a red one. Red ones are my very favorite flavor. It’ll cheer you up. Always works for me. I eat one of these every time I feel glum, and let me tell you in my line of work, that happens fairly often,” the dentist said, smiling. It seemed disingenuous. Paulie couldn’t help but appreciate how perfect this man’s teeth were, any more than he couldn’t help but glance at the freckled state of Indiana one last time before he left. Paulie reluctantly took the lollipop and made for the exit.

“Oh, one more thing, doctor,” Paulie said, wanting to ask the dentist why he found himself so sad so often, but he realized he had no place. Instead, he asked about the metal things the dentist had put in his mouth.

“Yes?”

“That last tool,” Paulie said, pointing at the small aluminum tray, “Was that a Gracey Curette or the Curved Sickle Scaler?”

The dentist gazed down at the tray of tools and used one gloved finger to stir them. As he swirled his finger around the sharp tools, moving them about in no particular order, he said “I really don’t know anymore, Mr. Galamb.”

Paulie quietly left without a farewell, while the dentist continued to move his single finger through the tray of metal dental tools, longingly. The dentist, he stared until he knew not what he was looking at. I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning. Semantic satiation in the physical sense. When the door closed behind him, the dentist pulled out three red lollies, hastily unwrapped them, and bit down hard on the lot of them with his dentures.

Later that night the dentist would stop by the Ol’ Watering Hole for a drink or two or three with his good friend Tom. Tom Hedasky you probably knew from the ten o’clock news as Tornado Tom, a nickname earned by risking his life filming a twister back in his early days as a meteorologist. Together Tornado Tom and the dentist would probably not reflect on their dormitory days spent together nor the age difference between them nor would they talk about teeth or tornados.

Instead, they complained about their lives wasted, and their professions that most others hated. Nobody appreciated Tom for lying to them in front of a green screen, and nobody ever truly wanted to be lying in the dentist’s chair, while they lied about how much they flossed their teeth and gums.

Here, they sat together as old friends here in mutual understanding of one another’s self-loathing. These two men, they understood their roles in society. To be needed, but also that meant to be hated. Their professions were the crosses that they chose to bear.

The difference here was that the dentist was just getting off work, whereas the weatherman was due for work in an hour’s time. The dentist peered at his reflection in the amber beer mirror below him, looking past the State of Indiana, and thought of his last patient.

“Tom, today I worked on the ugliest man I ever saw again. A real doozy of a face. It’s haunting me right now.”

“Oh yeah? Tell me about him,” Tornado Tom said, looking at his own handsome face in his own amber beer. With the two of them staring at themselves, the dentist told the story of Paulie Galamb.

“He was a very honest man. That much can be said. He was among the very few to tell me he hasn’t flossed since college, and Tom, let me tell you, I believed him.” Thinking back to the stinking breath that no cloth mask or face shield could cover.

Somehow the dentist told details of this man that he had no right to know. Of where he lived, of how he lived, and that which lived inside him. Patiently the meteorologist listened while the dentist spun his yarn.

“You got a moment, Hedasky? Can I bend your ear for a moment?”

You got a moment, reader?

3

WE-STORE STORAGE

And Those Who Remain

Paulie was one of three legal residents at the We-Store Storage Units because he had been grandfathered in, so to speak. After so many years of living here it was only recently starting to feel off-putting. When he first bought the condo here six years ago, he had done so in an attempt to save his marriage, to give his wife just a little more space. A year after that purchase, his wife left him and then We-Store moved in. The storage company had offered everybody in the condominium complex a sizeable sum to get up and go, and almost everybody did.

Everybody except Paulie, Niles, and Edith. Normally, the company wouldn’t allow three people to hold up the construction of a large multi-block storage complex, but their three condos were at the end of the giant structure and could be left standing without the company losing too much ground. We-Store still had to pay them out for the inconvenience of turning the rest of the condominium complex into a gated storage facility. The only catch for the three condo-owners was an agreement that they would rent a storage unit each. These rentals were conveniently located under their condos, in the area that had formerly been their individual garage ports.

Every morning Paulie left for work he would walk through the long twisting streets big enough for one vehicle to drive down, surrounded by a few hundred padlocked garage doors with no discernable difference between any of them other than the number above the door. He did not drive motor vehicles for no real reason, other than maybe he didn’t deem it necessary here in this small town.

In this Midland, just about everyone either drove their own gas-guzzling car or sold all-electric vehicles at their respective places of employ. But for Paulie, a two-mile hike in mostly moderate weather each day did wonders for his awkwardly pear-shaped body.

After so many years, he had this labyrinth memorized. He could navigate himself through the We-Store Storage Unit’s maze with his eyes closed if he wanted to.

And he sometimes did walk blindly through the maze to prove to himself that he could, assuming there were no customers present. Right now, he was busy juggling three-wheeled trash bins with two hands, awkwardly pulling them towards his home and the homes of his two neighbors, so he didn’t allow himself the added challenge of doing this with closed eyes.

Occasionally he’d see someone putting boxes into their own storage unit or pulling boxes out and loading them in their cars. Pieces of furniture, mattresses, always coming and going. Every night he returned, he’d float through the dimly lit semi-streets once more, only this time the only souls that passed through here was his gruff one-legged neighbor Niles, the elderly Edith, and the occasional minimum wage security guard. I think his name is Ken or Kyle or Cal, but he’s not important yet. Not until the end.

At the end of this labyrinth of two stories of garage doors you’d find the three homes at the end of the block. All three homes were located on the second story, with the first floor having been converted into storage units. Their former garage ports that they now paid a monthly fee to store their belongings in instead of owning outright.

Paulie didn’t mind losing his tiny garage port, but Niles did. “That was my man-cave,” Niles had argued a few years earlier. “It was all I had!” It was a pointless argument, Paulie knew, because technically We-Store had paid off their mortgages on the grounds that they paid full price for two storage units every month. One of those storage units being their old garages, and the other being an imaginary one where their homes currently sat. All and all, Paulie found it much more desirable to pay several thousand dollars less every year just to have fewer neighbors.

Not that he had many problems with his neighbors before the conversion, as he typically kept to himself. Niles and Edith, his neighbors of six years to his north and south, had simply become constants in his home life. Niles would gripe, and Edith would dote. Niles was the kind of man who would rather die with his blue jeans on, one leg and all, and Edith was the kind of lady who would fall in love with a man like that in a prior lifetime.

As he got closer to the end of the gated facility, he heard Niles’ 80’s hair metal music from half a block away. If you could call it a block.

When he turned the last corner, he saw the third to last storage unit door wide open, with vape-smoke billowing out just as visible as the Metallica was audible.

Niles poked his head out, his bald head glistening like a freshly waxed bowling ball and greeted Paulie by pointing at him and glaring down his finger as if it were a gun with sights. His typical greetings, mind you. Paulie just lifted his limp left hand in a loose wave as he made his way towards the staircase past the three storage units. He added a fake, nervous smile at the end, to feign friendliness.

Paulie saw that Niles was balancing on his “Monday Leg” as he had called it.

Niles was in his own world beyond that acknowledgement. Just an old biker listening to his music, throwing his darts at the back wall of his storage unit, mostly pricking the drywall with tiny needle marks instead of hitting the board itself. He had a light beer in hand, and his oversized vape cartridge sticking out of his T-shirt sleeve like some sort of technologically advanced greaser. He used to spend most of his time at the biker bars down in Chumquah Flats but that was before he lost his good leg. That, and the local watering hole didn’t quite tickle his fancy.

With his peg-leg and his pirate-like drunken sway, you’d expect a parrot on his shoulder. Instead, there sat an oversized snail about the size of a soggy, squishy grapefruit, deflated, who seemed to be stretching its eyes towards the vapor cloud Niles was exhaling.

Paulie didn’t know much about the man, but he knew he had the snail for longer than Paulie had owned his condo. Why, though, he did not know.

The overwhelming smell of the fruity fog tickled Paulie’s nose as he strolled past his own closed garage door, with the number 102 above it. To himself and no one else, Paulie wondered if pet snails could grow addicted to nicotine like anything else. Surely if beagles and chimpanzees could, why not Niles’ disgusting lil’ companion?

Past that was Edith’s garage door, the contents within he never knew nor hardly pondered as he went up the stairs. He walked by the closed-curtained windows of his elderly neighbor’s apartment, the last on the block. Beyond her was the end of the line, with nothing but a fence. Past that, a water tower. Without saying hello to Edith, he continued towards the second to last apartment on the block. His own.

He’d lie if he ever told you he was happy here, but Paulie Galamb wasn’t much of a liar.

He wasn’t happy. He was complacent. He was reminded of this every time he entered his empty home, as his wife of five whole years had left him for the same reason they had first agreed to wed. The dust on the motivational posters that covered his otherwise bare walls had grown thick, layers of dead skin and Paulie-particulates stacked on themselves, and he found himself unmotivated to clean it off.

Inside his condominium of complacency, there were no photographs of himself, nor were there any mirrors. When he brushed his once perfect teeth, perfect before the bastard wisdom tooth muddled up his already unpleasant face, he did so without staring at his reflection. This was by design, as both Paulie and the former Toni Galamb both acknowledged that they were not pleasing to the eyes. When he dressed himself for work, when he worked, he did so without confirming his appearance in any mirror. As long as he saw his shoes were on the right feet, the buttons all buttoned correctly, he was content. Consistency being key to his complacency.

He pulled the red lollipop out and tossed it in the recycling bin next to the trash can next to his dining room table that had plastic flowers on it, caked in dust thicker than the dust on the poster with the kitten that reminded him to hang in there. “Hang in where?” he sometimes contemplated, with the voice in his head responding, “Here.” Here in the condominium-turned-storage facility, next to the only people he dared call barely friends, next to the only neighbors he had left.

Paulie noticed that Niles had turned his music down, revealing that Edith had her television volume cranked up to previously compensate. The not-so-recently deceased Alex Trebek was in the other room telling three contestants whether or not their questions were the correct ones to his answers. A man named Anton stood behind one pedestal, Klaus behind another, and someone named Afro behind the third. They were important, of course, but not as important as the search for a new Trebek. This was after a year of failed guest hosts didn’t attract the ratings television execs sought, so they just went back to old reruns of Trebek and his digital ghost. If I could bring him back, I would. I swear to you.

(Maybe in the next story, Hedasky.)

He wouldn’t bother knocking on her door to let her know the volume was too loud, because she was likely too deaf to hear his knocks, or fast asleep herself. That, and occasionally he liked to pretend to play along with Alex and his three contestants. Paulie didn’t own a television, so he got his Jeopardy fix through these thin walls.

It was here, sandwiched between Jeopardy and Metallica, where Paulie considered the piece of paper in his pocket. His little gift from the dentist he had only seen thrice before. He didn’t consider the lollipop in the recycling bin, or his poor aim when he threw it there and not in the trash bin.

He read the chicken scratch scrawl of the dentist and said the word “Oncologist” out loud between the cacophony of noise to his north and south. He said it over and over again while pacing inside his mirrorless abode. “Oncologist.” Paulie paced from end to end of his condo, from east to west. from the sliding glass door that went to a segmented porch in the back he never used, through the kitchenette, past the dining room-ish, and into the micro-living room. “Oncologist.” From the barely audible Metallica of his northern neighbor to the overly loud Jeopardy of the old woman to his south. “On-call-oh-jist,” Paulie said one final time before the semantic satiation stole the definition from his mental dictionary.

Absentmindedly he added, “What is the medical profession for someone who specializes in cancer?” to no one in particular. The voice of the ghost of Trebek affirmed this.

“This is a no-shoe house,” his ex-wife used to say, and out of habit he barely obliged. Paulie kicked his shoes off in the middle of his living room and made his way toward his dueling mini fridges in the kitchenette. One sat on top of the faux marble countertop that ran along the north wall, and the other sat in a pocket under the cabinet where once upon a time a dishwasher formerly lived. The one above contained the man’s neutral foods, his plain seltzer waters, his gruel.

These were the foods he’d usually eat and “prepare” for himself every morning, for every lunch, while he worked. Flavorless nothing, as plain as plain could be, so as to not spoil his palette while he tested various new foods at Pea Tree Farms. Plain rice, unseasoned quinoa, unbuttered grits, a slurry of nearly gelatinous briquettes of oatmeal, unflavored corncakes, et cetera. All prepared and packaged in sealed Ziploc bags by the wonderfully bored Edith Post. All she ever asked was for help taking her trash-bins to the curb on Sunday, and return them on Monday, which he had just done.

The other fridge contained the foods he purged on in secret when he was done working for the weekend. The floor fridge was filled with little cardboard trays with segregated portions of mashed potatoes with artificial frozen pads of butter on top, next to a tray of overly salted green beans, next to a slab of ground-beef-themed meatloaf covered in some form of brown gravy. TV dinners. His cheat meals.

If Pea Tree Farms was the company that was going to revolutionize the future of the food world, then these TV Dinners were the ones who had done it in the past. Banquet’s Meat Loaf Platter, Stouffer’s Salisbury Steak with Gravy, Hungry Man Select’s Mac-And-Cheese Dinner. Where Pea Tree Farms was reinventing the meat industry, these former giants had long ago reinvented the meal.

Alongside the stack of frozen trays was a dozen or so different canned beverages, strange flavored generic soda’s that the big corporations wouldn’t touch. These sodas and individually packaged meals were courtesy of ‘Meals On Wheels’, who delivered these dishes and off-brand drinks to Nathaniel Niles on account of his disability. Niles would then give most of them away to Paulie on the same condition as Edith.

He just asked that Paulie took his trash-bins to the street as well.

With Niles missing a leg, and Edith nearing eighty, Paulie didn’t mind the extra chore of juggling three trash-bins down the twisting corridors of the storage unit facility. A trip that took about fifteen minutes there and back, nearly a mile of narrow streets to mosey through, twice a week for free food was a good deal when he could enjoy it. Back before the bastard tooth emerged out of nowhere after forty-seven years of hibernation, ruining his teeth, and nearly costing him his job.

Paulie placed the piece of paper on the upper fridge, wedging it between his breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals and a small magnet that had the insignia of the company he worked for on it. A small yellow and red laboratory flask with a black and white hanging plant shooting out the top. In the center was a small fleur-de-lis made up of peapods in the middle of the flask, above the words “Pea Tree Farms”. Next to his dentist’s note were other important notes, such as the due dates of his library books, his neglected vitamins list, his receipts proving he had paid his taxes last year, a picture of his favorite space shuttle, as well as a list of emergency contact phone numbers that was only five bullet points long. Two of which were no longer in service.

The other fridge, his useless fridge filled with solid deliciousness that he could not currently consume and tasty beverages he could not enjoy without something savory coating his stomach beforehand, had very few items attached to the front of it. Not because Paulie lacked magnets, of which I assure you he had plenty, but because the front of the fridge was not magnetic. Instead, it had a fake wood-paneling look to it, with the paneling itself being made of some kind of cheap plastic to which magnets could not adhere.

As he used one foot to peel off the other foot’s sock, he wondered what harm could come of calling this new doctor now. This unknown Dr. Fejes, the oncologist. Fear of change kept him from dialing the number on his landline phone next to his two mini-fridges. Among the very last landline phones in all of Midland. Paulie Galamb never answered his telephone this late in the evening, nor did he ever call out lest it was an absolute emergency. “The cancer or possibility of could wait until the morning,” he thought as he peeled off the second sock between his big toe and next toe. The pointer toe?

Paulie balanced on one foot and tossed the sock towards the middle of his living room, roughly where he left his shoes. Then he switched feet and grabbed the first sock with his foot-turned-fist and tossed it towards the other.

Or as close as he could approximate for a three-hundred-pound man.

With his toes acting as tiny tastebuds, he stretched his bare feet on the awkward kitchenette carpet. From the top fridge, he grabbed one of the several half-pints of skim milk (that came from Niles and Meals on Wheels, but it was flavorless enough in itself to earn its place up here) as well as one of the quart bags filled with quinoa. He turned around and opened the microwave. Over the sink, now facing the south, he could hear Alex Trebek announcing the Daily Double while he poured the whole half-pint of milk into the Ziplock bag. Carefully he mostly resealed it, leaving a corner just barely ajar. Then he tossed the empty Tetra Pak into the left sink. He’d rinse it out later. In the sink between the discarded milk container and the microwave was a second sink that was filled with various plastic bags that he had meant to clean out earlier. He’d rinse those later as well.

Paulie placed the bag of grains and milk into the microwave, setting the time at one minute and fifteen seconds. He pressed start, and the bag spun in circles inside the box. While he waited between the dueling mini-fridges and the dueling sinks, between the dueling noises of his neighbors to his north and south, he spread his bare feet out on the unnecessarily carpeted kitchen. He stretched his feet open, then squeezed them shut like a kitten kneading on its mother. He looked down at his thick hands instead of his repulsive reflection in the glass surface of the microwave.

For a whole minute and fifteen seconds, Paulie stared at his hands until his vision blurred and repeated the word “Oncologist” until it lost all meaning. His stomach gurgled impatiently, and the tumor in his throat did it’s best to mimic the gurgle. For a moment, Paulie thought he heard the second gurgle, but if he did, he did not pay heed to it.

The tumor in his throat had no interest in the wet milky quinoa his host was about to consume like a duck, but it understood the man’s predicament even if it didn’t understand the noises the man was making. “On-call-oh-jist. On-call-oh-jist.” While the host muttered this, the tumor practiced it as well, in a whisper.

“Aaah-caah-oohh-jizz” it said while it waited hungrily in the pocket of Paulie’s mouth, waiting to be fed.

4

BARSTOOL BANTER, PART ONE

What The Dentist Saw Within

At the Ol’ Watering Hole, Tornado Tom snorted back his laughter in a phlegmy display of sarcastic disbelief, following that with a quaff of his beer and a quippy remark, “So you’re saying this patient of yours has a talking tumor? I know a fib when I hear one the same way my grandad can tell if it’s going to rain based on the aches in his knees.”

“Is that where you get your weather reports then, Hedasky?” the dentist said with a smile, before adding, “Hear me out, Tom, for I wouldn’t lie to you about this. Earlier today, I met the growth, and it changed me. While I stared at the small fleshy marble, I had realized that I had not lived my life to the fullest. A strange moment of clarity had overwhelmed me. I knew then I wanted to protect it.”

“The growth in this man’s mouth?”

“Yes. I mean, no, it is more than just a growth.”

“What do you mean?” Tom asked, waving at the bartender who was busy flirting with a gaggle of out-of-towners. The bartender held up a single finger, as if to say, “Just a moment,”

“The growth, Tom, it’s going to change the world. I don’t know how to describe it, not yet. I knew I needed a second opinion, so I sent him to Dr. Fejes, a friend of mine from Duke University. Before I met you. Not because I thought it was cancerous, no, but because I knew Dr. Fejes would see this with the same curiosity I did. The same fascination.”

“Well, did he?”

“Tom, this was a few hours ago. What Dr. Fejes does next isn’t up to me. All I could do was set the ball in motion,” the dentist said as he scratched the small brown birthmark under his eye. His own upside-down Indiana.

“You can lead a horse to the oncologist.”

“The last thing I did before the hypnosis wore off, was whisper into Paulie’s mouth.”

“What did you whisper?”

“Simply one word. Parlay. I whispered it one time, but while I did that, I focused on the meaning of the word, so much so that I felt the meaning of the word slip out into obscurity. Then I took my hand and tools out from inside Paulie and was once again transfixed by his ugliness.”

“You mentioned earlier that he was ugly.”

“’The ugliest man I ever saw,’ I believe my words were. He reminded me of Ron Howard’s uglier, younger brother Clint, but only if Clint Howard had an uglier, younger brother than himself. His eyes were annoyingly far apart and sunken in, giving him the appearance of someone who was gaunt or underweight. Which was far from the truth, as he was teetering somewhere between obese and morbidly obese. Judging from the way his arm skin hung off his flab, I assure you at one point he was clearly much, much larger than he was now. He wasn’t abnormally tall or short, but the way his gut had settled on his slightly-taller-than average frame made him appear more like a pear than a man. Now, I didn’t see this man’s downstairs business, but I could tell you he wasn’t proud of what dangled between his legs.”

“Oh yeah? How could you tell that?” Tom asked, clapping his still-empty beer on the bar top.

“The quickest way to a man’s heart is through the stomach. And if that were true, then my domain is at the gates of that stomach. Just seeing his teeth, his gums, and my fleeting glimpses at his uvula, I can tell a lot about a man. Not much different than reading someone’s palms or reading the secret details of the tea leaves. I could tell you he had never pleased his wife enough for their marriage to last based on the wisdom tooth I plucked out. I knew he had intestinal issues from the plaque growing on the inside of his incisors. I could tell his belly button was an innie, not an outie, by the subtle rotation of his canines. Hell, I would probably have guessed his birth year based on his lower molars alone had I not already known it from his medical charts.”

“Fascinating,” Tornado Tom said, in such an oblivious fashion that the dentist knew he had lost the meteorologist’s attention. Tom didn’t mean to lose focus, but he was now going on his third attempt to grab the bartender’s eye in high hopes of getting one last beer. The dentist could see this, so he excused himself.

“Tom, I’ll be right back. I’ve got to call my wife. You, uh, you should go talk to those girls if only to distract the barman long enough to get your last beer in. Let’s reconvene here in, say, ten minutes?”

“Sounds good,” he said in a daze, already levitating towards the other end of the bar with his empty pint glass in hand, propelled by his thirst for more beer, not by desire.

The dentist took out his phone and scrolled through his contacts until he found his Joanie halfway down the list. He pressed the green symbol on his phone and waited for the dial-tone.

In the distance, he saw his friend strut up to the three girls, all of whom were obviously not from Midland or the surrounding area, yet still the lot of them recognized him as the man from the news. The charm of a second-rate local celebrity was hard to deny in a small town like this.

An automatic voice spoke to him, “The number you have dialed is not in service.”

“Hello love,” the dentist said. He was blushing now, though that may have just been the booze.

“Please hang up and try again,” the automatic voice said, before the line went dead.

“Oh, I’m fine. I’m just here with Tom at the Ol’ Watering Hole. My day? Oh boy, you won’t believe the day I’ve had.”

Begrudgingly the bartender was filling a pint glass full of amber ale for Tornado Tom, who was now the center of a selfie-circle with a handful of college girls. Elsewhere, Paulie Galamb was eating lukewarm quinoa cooked in milk like a duck. Nathaniel Niles was feeding his large pet snail. Edith was snoring loudly while the dead Trebek droned on.

Even more elsewhere, the real Alex Trebek was probably in Heaven.

5

THE DREAM SEQUENCE

Introducing The Main Players

Everybody goes to bed eventually. And whether or not you believe it, everybody dreams. Remembering these dreams upon waking is half the battle.

What does the dentist dream of when he rests his head in his office? He had a dream about his wife, and the day she revealed she had cancer. He’d wake up crying in the middle of the night, even though he would not remember his dream.

Tornado Tom, after his late-night weather report, goes home to his condo in the next city over called Central City, and dreams of golf courses even though he hates the sport. The vastness of perfectly manicured fields of green puts a smile on the meteorologist’s face, who sleeps with a mask over his eyes to both keep the light out and for its anti-aging effects. He is a face on television, after all.

Edith Post? She relives her wonderful life, even the elements she’s not ready to share with a stranger quite yet. The secret life of a lady nearing her eighties, and what she did in 1970’s.

Nathaniel Niles dreams of Sweet Cherry Pie, which is what he had called his previous Harley Davidson. He dreams of riding his motorcycle, of crashing her, of holding his severed leg in his hand. Then these dreams are interspersed with memories of a rock concert he attended in his late teens with his long dead father.

Even his pet snail dreamt. Of fruits and large leaves, most likely.

Everybody dreams, even the people you haven’t met yet. Such as Dr. Fejes, who had a nightmare about losing his practice again and again. Juan and his gang of runaways and drop-outs had individual dreams about scoring beer and smokes and riding BMX bicycles and sometimes even of their homework. Even Doctor Koop and his corporate stooges have dreams but theirs are unimportant, and mostly capitalistic in their essence. Paulie’s co-workers, the ones who are still alive, they dream. The security guards dream, the naked lady hoarder dreams, and yes, the growth, it dreams too.

But in time we’ll get to them all. Right now, Paulie’s dreams are the important ones. For now. Paulie, after his neighbor’s television automatically turned off after an hour of inactivity and re-runs, he lay in his bed, tossing and turning, his stomach filled with milky quinoa growling for more sustenance than offered.

In his restless sleep, he does not dream of his potential cancer. No, instead he dreams of eating the perfect chicken nugget, savoring every micro-bite, analyzing its full flavor. Like a fast-food sommelier, he takes one bite and chews it thoroughly, rolling it around in his tongue. Morsels ground down by molars, juggled around by the sides of his tongue, so he can taste the perfectly salted breading, the almost-sweet tang of the ground chicken trying so hard to slip down his esophagus. If you could call it chicken. Not due to the way it was mechanically separated like a Slim Jim, but rather the way it was created. In a test tube, instead of from an egg, ending that age-old argument that distraught philosophers for centuries with a post-modern twist. What came first: the chicken or the egg?

Then his ex-wife Toni, clad in a nurse’s scrub, holds out a small plastic cup and tells him, “Spit.” So he does, like a good husband. Only when he goes to look at her, instead he sees his dentist.

“Spit,” he said once more, but the confusion overpowers him into waking up. Alone.

Elsewhere, far away, his ex-wife still sleeps soundly. Somewhere in Central City, so far from Midland. What she dreams of is not known to me or you or Paulie Galamb, nor is she in his thoughts anymore.

Like the dentist, Paulie did not remember his dream from only moments before. Instead, all he can think about is the growth in his throat and the potentiality of it ending his life.

6

A WORLD WHERE BUGS COULD TALK

And What They Would Say

The voice on the other end of the phone was so heavily accented, Paulie had to stick a finger in his ear just to be sure he could hear it and only it.

“You have reach the office of Dr. Fejes. I regret that I could not make it to the phone right now, however, feel free to leave message with your name, number, and brief description of any issues you may be having. I intend on getting back to you as quickly as can, however if it is emergency, please hang up and dial nine-one-one. You can also schedule an appointment in person at my office,” said the voice on the other end. Then the voice rattled off an address that Paulie recognized as being near his favorite bench in all of Midland, which was located in the center of his favorite strip mall in the county. The Midland Park Business Plaza.

Then the voice listed the office hours. Monday through Friday, 9:00 AM through 4:00 PM.

It was now early Tuesday morning. A whole ten hours had passed since the three-hundred-pound man drank his milky quinoa, following that with six or seven hours of light sleep and strange dreams. Eventually the northern music went to sleep along with the southern quiz show, as well as his respective neighbors. Since then he had consumed runny oatmeal, unsweetened, in the same way a duck would eat a hot-dog. Right now, Dr. Fejes should be at his office, though he was probably with a patient. Paulie decided he would spend the day meandering over to the Business Plaza and at the very least try and schedule an appointment with the oncologist.

He’d have to call his boss. But he also knew that his boss was the type of man that would most certainly cross reference the number he called from. Paulie’s boss knew that Paulie himself did not own a cellphone, so he decided he would ask to call his boss from the doctor’s office.

Having finished his sludge-for-breakfast, Paulie got dressed in his bathroom that still looked like a beachcomber had found all of their sandy treasures at an Ikea store. Which was mostly true, his ex-wife was the faux-beachcomber, and Ikea was the faux-beach, excluding the snail shells that his neighbor gifted them each time Slugger grew out of one.

Slugger was Niles’ pet snail. Slugger was somehow older than Paulie’s failed marriage lasted. He, nor Niles, nor myself understood how that was possible.

Paulie didn’t care for the snail, nor slimy things in general, but he was grateful that his neighbor didn’t have a loud dog. Metallica and Jeopardy he didn’t mind, but the grating sound of a dog barking would drive him mad. There was something about an animal wailing and screaming that bothered Galamb; not knowing what they were saying, or what they were wailing and screaming about perturbed him to his core, and at this point in his life he avoided routes that involved loud, angry canines.

As he pulled his favorite sweater, a sweater he had since his early twenties that simply read “Harvard” in all capital letters, he tried to imagine a world where snails and slugs could bark. He pulled his blue jeans up and pulled his belt taut under his gut. He always loved the blue jeans and Harvard sweater combination. Something about representing an Ivy league school (that he had not attended) and the working man’s pants was ironic to him, especially since he had little to no experience doing anything seriously laborious.

He grabbed the piece of paper the dentist had given him from the fridge, now with the address scrawled on the back, and headed out the front door. Paulie was stuck on barking snails and other bugs. Paulie was trying to imagine a fly screaming for its life while a large spider cackled maniacally. Paulie locked the door and laughed quietly when he thought about this made-up scenario where the fly pleaded for its life.

“Parlay!” Paulie demanded, pretending he was the imaginary bug in a world where bugs could talk. Though he had said the phrase quiet enough that his nearly deaf neighbor Edith, who was sitting on her rocking chair outside of her condo, couldn’t hear him.