Roto Rooter Man


Are you OK?
Come on. It's just a septic tank.
We clean these things out every day.
Sure, it's a little smelly, but it comes
with the territory.

There was a time....
something I remember...

He's out of it.
This smell is pretty foul, and in this heat - .
Unzip his rubber suit.
What's he saying?

Just let me walk here where the ground is dry.
Let me feel the hot sun on my shoulders,
even if it burns me to the bone.
I want to feel the perspiration roll.
I want to feel my palm upon my cheek,
smooth and firm and altogether whole,
the soft sense of my fingers on my skin,
its porous membrane taut around my soul.

Listen to him -
He's talking crazy -
Look at the size of the rat down in that hole.
They'll eat anything.

I remember now.

The ceremony's over.

A swirl of greasy soot is drifting down.
The sky is dense with flickering shapes and shadows,
a gloom of soaring birds,

a haze of vultures swarming in the sky,
constant aerial whispering, like thin black combs, the silken sound of wings.

There's no surface anywhere that's dry.
Dark blood saturates the sodden ground
and where it drains into the limestone pits it forms thick pools of fat clots.

They lie there,
the dying victims, flayed like rabbits, drowned
or crazed in their own fluids, their broken limbs
like sinewed insects,
twitching at the sky.

The glutton sun will live for one more year.
Tonight, the blistering eyes of many fires
will light the stinging dark,
and while the priests are feasting on
the bravest of a thousand slaughtered men,
I'll harvest what is soaking in the pits,
and take them to the tannery and dry
in one whole piece their sun-brown skins
until they're near-translucent. Then I'll dye
the skins and soften them with their own lard.

Tomorrow they'll make a good supply
of pliant sheaths hung on the drying stakes,
and when the priests awake
to dawn half-dark with soot from charnel fires,
they'll glide into my limp, light armory
like snakes returning to their castoff scales,
and slip into them.
First the flaccid feet, and then they'll slip their hands
into the supple skin, and snug it tight,
and then into the head,
joining at the crown with the eyeless dead,
and finally they'll be laced up at the back
by silent and attentive acolytes,
and paint with blood the faces of the ones
whose visages they wear, and trace the veins
of empty men who've been turned inside out,
devoid of muscle, sinew, bone and brain.

The smoke-red sun is rising, bloodshot eye
above the pits where rats have come to feed
on what is left of those who once have been.

The priests turn on the people with a yell
when they come out to greet the hazy morning
hungry from their all-night revelry,
smothered in a mist of sick-sweet smell.

Vultures flap away,
sullen and patient, to the nearby trees.
Their horn beaks oozing red,
their dark unthinking eyes absorbed
with the excoriated dead.

And now the chase begins:
the people flee along the streets, fear-blind,
pursued by those who dance and yell behind,
and neither priests nor people think to heed
the serpent mouth of death that follows them,
unhurried,
taking all the living in,
enfolding them
in its expanding skin.
.

Jerry H. Jenkins

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