Fiction

The Stain
by Randy Chandler

It found him in the dark.

A cool droplet smacked his forehead and misted his lashes. He switched on his bedside lamp and there it was above him: a wet stain marring the ceiling, another liquid bead bulging from its center like a pink eyeball.

He heard water droning through the pipes in the flat above him, number 10, where she lived. He stared at the stain, fascinated by the pattern it was creating on his ceiling. He watched the pink eyeball detach and fall. It splattered on his forehead.

He phoned the landlord and reported the leaking water in number 10. He pushed his rumpled bed to the side, then lay on his back and studied the ceiling’s stigmata.

Events unfolded above him. He listened. He stared at the stain.

They found her dead in a bathtub overflowing bloody water, wearing a thousand cuts. He tried to imagine how her breasts looked when they found her. Did they still float with puckered nipples above the surface of the water?

The detectives questioned him the next day. How well had he known her? Had he ever had sexual relations with her? Had he heard any unusual sounds coming from her flat? They seemed satisfied with his answers. They looked at the stain. They looked at him. They said they would be in touch. He moved his bed back to where it had been.

He spent hours staring at the dark blemish. He didn’t go to his job. Didn’t answer his phone. He spent his nights with the light on so he could contemplate the discolored blotch, its spiderlike tendrils reaching out from a dark center. He slept very little, if at all. He stood on his bed and touched his fingers to the stain’s rust-colored hub. It was soft, damp, like cold mottled flesh. Her flesh. He licked his fingertips. Tasted her, tasted the damp blotch of her life’s culmination, a sad summation of mortality.

But she wasn’t dead. She was alive in the stain. She lived for him and no one else.

She was his.

He stared into the stain’s density. Night and day. He poked his finger into its mushy center. Punched through. Deflowered, it began to whisper to him. On tiptoes and a stack of phone books on the bed, he pressed his lips to hers. He licked her jagged edges. Tasted menses-flavored sheetrock.

He pushed his bed aside and moved his writing desk directly beneath her. She whispered to him and he wrote down her stories. Tales of dark wonder and awe. Of flesh and fantasy. Of black dogs and gargoyles and cranial holes opening upon other worlds. She showed him wondrous geometries far beyond the four-cornered world of his drab room.

The stories accumulated as his body withered. He drank cheap red wine and pissed blood. He didn’t bathe. He shrank to skin and bone. He wrote longhand on a legal pad. His fingers grew as thin as his Number 2 pencils. Flesh diminished. Fantasy flourished.

The stain crooned and cooed.

They banged on his door. He ignored them, scribbling frantically.

They broke in and threw him to the floor. Snapped steel bracelets on his wrists. Arrested him for murder.

He laughed at their stupidity.

“You can’t murder your muse,” he shouted at them.

They locked him in a cinderblock cell. He wrote out his confession, recounting weeks of stealthy stalking; in graphic detail he described how he’d sculpted himself a muse out of feminine flesh. “I didn’t murder her,” he concluded in scrawling hand, “I created her.”

Now he writes his tales in crayon. The blemish on his forehead darkens every day, and he feels the way opening. Soon there will be a true in-breathing and his muse will set up shop in his skull.

Then he will create his masterpiece and they will know he killed no one.