Short Story: An Odorous Swine
By: Raviakash Deu
Tags: Short Story, Short Fiction, Short Story Writing, Literary Fiction, Thehiggler

The tall and spindly birch trees lining either side of the country lanes we drove down curved inwards at their peaks. They surrounded us but were nowhere near our grasp. They formed a tunnel enclosing the car and the sticky tarmac in the distance. My hunch was that the autumnal sheaths existed to remind us of our own fragility. And there I was, feeling uneasy, unprotected and vulnerable.

Most of us know, while sat in the driver’s seat, travelling at speed, the number displayed on the speedometer often seems 10–20% greater than the number we have in our mind. As a passenger though, I had no access to wishful confidence. Every pothole bump, gravel skid and whoosh of wind chill, I could feel. At times I’d even scream for help when he went too fast but he never slowed down. He carried on accelerating through those narrow lanes in maleficent jest, meandering through the middle of England, in search of the most conducive spot to hide the treasure I’d helped him procure.

His methods of burial were odd and deranged for those not privy to them. Depending on the value of the treasure, he’d dig an equivalently deep (or shallow) pit. If the treasure had exceptional worth he’d cover the earth (used to refill the pit) with a sprinkling of bank notes — twenties, usually. The one time I questioned him on his peculiar garnish, he refused to answer and threw more notes onto the covering. I never asked him about it again. Anyway, he ordered me to remain in the car while he was digging. He said he didn’t need my assistance for that part of the process. He was fastidious like that. I had no choice but to assume he enjoyed my company on these excursions. I was silent, moral support. A kind of vital audience member for all his performances, whose presence was enough for him to continue without apprehension.

Each piece we’d curated took a maximum of three hours to bury. That was the higher-end, of course and it all depended on its value. He was meticulous while he worked and had a fascinating attention to detail. I was usually never worried that he’d become unstuck and leave a big job unfinished, only for someone to spot it and report us. Clinically and without waste, he ploughed on like an unbreakable motor and there were often instances where he made you question where the time had gone after the last heap of dirt had been dumped.

“Darling,” he’d shout, breathy and drained, “start the engine, will you? We’ve got to get out of here quickly!”

It pains me to say, but all this efficiency and precision was sorely missed on our last and final burial. I was still performing as a back-up singer for local artists at his club in the centre of town. He’d hired me half a decade earlier as a waitress but two weeks into the stint I told him I could sing. After he persuaded me to perform a rendition of an old Roberta Flack song from the sixties (a favourite) in his apartment the following evening, my weekly income changed in line with my new job title. He was always happy with my performances going forward and sent praise my way as often as his reticence would allow. He was slightly older than I but had the air of an accomplished businessman in the twilight of his career. After all, he was only thirty-five when I began working for him, so I deemed him an impressive fellow. In that sense, by the time of our last burial together we’d become sufficiently acquainted on a personal and professional level.

With each event he’d purposely alter the location so I’d never know where he was taking us. That night was no different. The lanes we entered however were gloomy and stripped of light. My temples throbbed relentlessly and I was nauseous throughout. Something was off. I could sense it. Without noticing my discomfort, he spoke towards the end of our journey. On the final stretch before our destination he lifted his left hand from the gearstick and placed it on my thigh. Gently he said,

“Sweet, you know I appreciate everything you’ve done for me…don’t you?”

I nodded in response and he smiled back at me.

“Now I don’t mean to sound pious but as I’ve previously mentioned, what we do, and what I’ve been chosen to do is compulsory under the guidance of the Almighty. I’ve been handpicked especially to carry out the divine burials…to show the world that regardless of the ‘man’ one claims to be, he will only be judged by the almighty provider as a beautiful corpse, not someone adorned with the riches of his labour and monetary achievements while he was on earth. The man we have with us today, you have beatified, and we will bury him as the lord has asked me to.”

“I understand.”

“Promise me that you do understand this?” He sought to confirm.

I repeated my initial answer and I could tell this pleased him immensely.

Approximately a few hours before we’d set off to dig, I was responsible for making the corpses presentable. As they were always male, the first thing I’d do was shave their facial hair. I did this with a handheld razor blade and had become pretty good at it. My baby didn’t want to see any nicks or small cuts. All men needed the right send-off. At the rear of the club was an unofficial pathology suite, much like the ones used in hospitals for post-mortems. There was a human-length drainage table made from stainless steel for the treasured cadavers to rest on and a large industrial cabinet in the corner of the room. Inside the cabinet was a plethora of paints, creams, foundations, lipsticks, mascara tubes, eyeliner pencils and brushes for me to use.

The man lying beneath me that night was Jim Worthington. He was a local blues musician who played a regular slot at the club, and who I’d sung with on many occasions. Strangely, he hadn’t turned up to the club for at least a week prior to his death. My baby told me he was hiding because he was afraid. I thought he was too well known to hide forever. Achieving local notoriety as an artist in our town wasn’t difficult. Jim accomplished the feat in his late twenties but failed to use this springboard to leap in with the big fish in the capital. It seemed to us that his ruinous battles with alcoholism and excessive whims after his initial taste of recognition had severely stunted his growth in the music world, despite his obvious talents. The other problem was he owed my baby a lot of money; which meant he owed both of us a lot of money.

In the back room Jim lay prostrate on the table. He was naked except for some briefs I’d hastily put on him to save even his essential spirit from the embarrassment of his pathetic size. His moist, grey skin reeked of sweat, cigarettes and cheap, dirty coffee. His eyelids were shut but his mouth was wide open and no amount of mine or my baby’s initiative could prise it shut. I opened the cabinet in the corner and drew out a medium sized brush and some appropriate foundation to layer a basecoat onto Jim’s rather grotesque, unfurnished face. Next, I applied a high-grade white, face paint, which I pasted on him like plaster, making sure to cover every nook, cranny and crevice open to suggestion. It was then time for the fluorescent blue lipstick that I painfully reapplied three times over, so it was garish enough to see. Oh how I wish his mouth had been shut. I then suddenly realised his eyes were bare and sunken so I used a pencil to highlight the rims of his pink eyelids. He begun to look more like an old-fashioned mime than I’d initially liked, so to offset this I went for an even deeper blue eye shadow. That felt better and I finished him up by adding a small touch of blusher before patting him patronisingly on the shoulder. He was done. Jim was primed and ready for burial. All I needed to do was wait for my baby to arrive so we could transfer him to the zip-lock bag and load him into the back of our car.

Once we reached the undisclosed location I still felt sick. My baby hurled the bag out the back of the car onto the forest floor. As he unzipped it, instead of Jim’s usual stench there was a much fouler, putrid, evil smell emanating from him. My baby covered his mouth and nose with a sleeve but I opted to hold my breath. I hated vomiting. I didn’t want to vomit — ever. Hell-bent on discovering the source of the odour, I tugged one half of the material of the open bag towards me and let my eyes wander around Jim’s person. I found nothing untoward or anomalous in the bag or attached to his body. Once out of the bag, everything seemed exactly the same as when we’d placed him inside. We both stood perplexed with frowns the size of Jim’s arrears in the middle of the forest wondering what to do next. I eventually decided to put it down to a necrosis of internal tissue with his open mouth as an outlet for the rotten gas to escape. What other explanation did we have? My baby could hardly think. He was stressed and exhausted. So was I. Thus in order to expedite the process, I sat back in the car (as my baby preferred) and watched him dig. Tonight’s grave would be a shallow one for a former musician who favoured hedonistic exploration and the obsessive ingestion of noxious, mind-altering chemicals over a wider dissemination of his God-given talents. Jim quite rightly resembled a psychopathic clown clad in underwear laced with his own excrement. Fitting you might argue for a man who owed us not just in cash but now in breathable, fresh air.

He dragged Jim by his ankles into the pit he made. It was three feet deep and wide enough for the gluttonous corpse to wiggle around in if he so wished. My baby relayed the dirt from the mound over Jim and patted it down as flat as the forest floor permitted. Through the earth, bark, stones and foliage, the rancid smell remained. I kept thinking that the body would be found pretty swiftly in this part of the forest if the smell continued to worsen overnight and into the following day. It was rather inevitable.

“Hey baby! He still stinks. Maybe you ought to dig him a deeper grave to mask the smell?”

“The odorous swine doesn’t deserve a deeper grave! His value was a smidge above nil, and only that because of his decent musical abilities. We cannot flout the rules simply to avoid capture. The Almighty wouldn’t look favourably on that.”

“But baby!” I shouted once more. “Surely even he provides you (his holy messenger) with exceptions for you to continue your role as his steed without unnecessary alarm?”

My baby paced up and down Jim’s grave, his sleeve over his face, moving his eyeballs wildly as if to summon advice from above. “No!! It’s not what he would want from me. I am to act and conduct myself with the utmost compliance to the mission he has exclusively set out. If Jim is found, then so be it. My fate remains the same. We perform his work and continue to the next target irrespective of our circumstance or situation.”

It was no use penetrating his dogma. He wasn’t going to budge.

“As you are,” I mumbled, and waited for him to drive us home.

The journey back was in stark contrast to the journey there. We hardly spoke and an awkwardness hung inside the chassis of my mind, as my baby refused to turn on the stereo and offer up something else to focus on. I couldn’t handle the silence as long as he, so I finally questioned him on something that was bothering me.

“I usually don’t ask you this but it’s been on my mind since we left poor old Jim.”

He puffed on his cigarette and squinted pensively at the road ahead. “What is it?” He said.

“How did you kill him?”

My baby paused and shook his head. A sarcastic grin washed over his lips. “What do you mean, sweet?”

“How did you kill him? … Jim?”

“I didn’t.”

“What?”

“I didn’t kill him,” he said.

“Wait, so who did?”

“Not sure, sweet.”

“Baby, what are you talking about? He was dead when you buried him. That smell, for god’s sake!”

“Yeah, of course. He was dead when I found him. But…last night I sneaked up to his flat window braced with a hammer (and a pistol in my trousers for good measure) and when I entered his room he was already dead.”

“Huh!?”

“Yeah, he was lying there on the floor in his own vomit. He must have been dead for at least a few days prior because the newspaper spread out next to his body had a date on it from last week.”

“But baby, I thought you said you were only to bury those that died via your hands, of your own volition? That was the precedent sent down from the Almighty!”

His face changed colour. He growled a devilish growl and banged his palms onto the steering wheel repeatedly. “He owed me money!! He owed us money!! He deserved his burial as well as his (albeit self-inflicted) death. I would have killed him myself if I’d got there quick enough! I know it. I’m certain I would have done it.”

“But baby,” I said. “You asked me never to let you break rules from the Almighty. That we’d only ever bury what we shoot, like God’s hunters. That we ought never to take someone else’s treasure. You said it was sacrilegious to disobey the lord…”

Somewhere between crippling shock and dejection, he continued to apply pressure to the accelerator and refused to look my way. “I know what I said, but this was different.”

“How was it different?”

“It just was, sweet. It just was…”

“You should have told me that you found him dead. I would have stopped you from doing this, baby. That’s what I’m here for. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know.”

I screamed at him. I scratched and slapped at him. “Why didn’t you tell me?!”

“I don’t know…”

He’d lost his defence.

I stared out the passenger side at the night sky and listened to my baby’s silence. I hated him for his heresy. He gave nothing for the rest of the journey and I couldn’t forgive him. I became more and more desperate for him to speak, to say something, to tell me this was all an elaborate joke. Why had my baby succumbed to a base act of revenge? He’d done so well thus far. He’d followed every word spoken from above and pleased the Almighty tremendously. For his loyalty and competence our lord had paid us handsomely in strength, wisdom and love. All that would now stop. Now, he’d betrayed me as well as his keeper.

Toward the heavens, horizontal streaks of cloud-dust spread themselves between each layer of blood red and the resulting blotchy canvas began to descend slowly. Absent was any vapour or sign of hope in the dark jungle we inhabited. We chugged on through trouble thinking of Jim, remembering how Jim sang the blues and how by refusing to pay us back he’d in turn made us blue, too. My baby had suffered enough. He went past every birch tree and grain of gravel holding in his anguish. He eventually told me that Jim shouldn’t have received the divine burial and that all he wanted to do was to go home and rest. He prayed to the Lord in those last moments. Over and over in his mind he asked silently for his master to take him home.

In the distance iridescent bubbles of blue became evident in every reflection we had access to. They were numerous and gaudy. My baby looked at me and touched my hand.

“Sweet, I’m tired,” he said. “I’m so tired…are you?”

I said nothing in response. I knew those bubbles were true memories of Jim, our friend, who had paid us back the only way he knew how. The bubbles increased in size and influence around us. Gradually, an ocean enveloped the windscreen and discoloured his face before mine. We sat there treading water, waiting to drown in the newfound light. The car slowed down. I turned my face towards my baby. He was smiling at the sky. No more were the autumnal sheaths shrouding me in dank uncertainty. No longer did I need anything else to abate my worry. I finally felt safe. At this speed, I was finally safe. Safe, secure and complete.

“It’s time to go home, baby.” I said.

Dil Sher