Chop the willow

'I ask him why above he crawls, scratching apart my bedroom walls. And he looks down through white eyes peeping, And says... I'm not crawling, I'm simply creeping.' - Music & lyrics by Billie-Joe Kimble. The job of a mortician is to belittle the profound horror and loss of death, while simultaneously profiting off of the misery of others. No one in the industry aside from myself has the balls to say it, but the simple fact is that it's true. We take the deceased and pretty them up; dress up their hair, throw them in some nice clothes and drop them under six feet of dirt. But the dead don't really care do they? Well, we don't do it for the dead. No, we do it for the grieving friends and family. We make it easier to say goodbye, like an emotional crutch if you will. We let them cry and come to terms with the fact that their friend or mother or son is gone for good, all while collecting a fat paycheck. The reason is of course because of fear. People fear death, and when someone close dies, it forces them to accept their own mortality. Animals don't have this problem. A few moments of fear and pain will be a squirrel's only awareness of the impending void. Humans though, we live our whole lives knowing that it could all end without reason or warning, so of course we make up these little rituals to get us through it. And of course, somebody has to facilitate this entire process. Squirrels don't have this process. Squirrels don't need booze money. I only say any of this because as upsetting as it is, dying is at least a natural thing. You can see that it happens, that it is concrete and constant. You can understand it. But there are some things, dark and squirming things that crawl into our world. Things that don't make sense, things that are just plain wrong. I was staring at a clock when she called. It was just after 3 a.m. I'd been having trouble sleeping for some time now, and when I can't sleep I have a tendency to obsess over minor dilemmas. Take this instance for example. I was trying to cut out a newspaper article on this type of black mold that can apparently wiggle its way into a brain and release trace amounts of bio toxins to alter the behavior of mammals, when the ticking of the clock above my dresser distracted me. I stared at it without moving, and I started to think about how the rhythmic ticks were my only connection to a linear time line. In a room without motion, a static environment, time could be moving at whatever pace it wanted and I would have no way of knowing. Without the clock, I could be sitting still for what could be years and I wouldn't be able to prove otherwise. I was lost in a trance until the phone rang. I picked up. It was Billie. 'Hey, Stephan, you're awake. That's awesome. So guess what? We have a problem,' She said over the phone. 'It's Harris, and can it wait? I'm conducting some rather important business here.' I lied. 'No, not really,' She said. 'We need to deal with this now. That hitchhiker at the Broken Window apparently stumbled upon some polyps down on Christian Light Road. The chuckle fucks tried to get him to eat some.' 'So? Get Terry to go with you.' 'No good,' Billie argued. 'Terry's watching the hitcher. Gotta put him in quarantine right? We can't have some teenage blonde boy runaway spreading this shit. You said so yourself.' 'Alright damn it, but you have to pick me up, I think I'm still legally drunk.' I sighed. She was right. This couldn't spread past the town limits. Why I cared is beyond me. Hold on; let me back up a bit. A few months ago I moved Charlottesville, N.C. when a new embalming position opened up. I took the job and things went well for a few weeks. That was until I discovered a mysterious jar with an even more mysterious thing inside. It was labeled, 'Harlequin No.7.' I learned not long after that there were more of these worm-like things, as I found out the day after a botched attempt to study the freaky little bugger while embalming a man who died that same night. From what I could gather, they apparently live inside of people's heads, doing whatever it is