An Obvious Symptom #fridayflash

John was about 30 when the creeping feeling began. He woke up crying in the night, and the sleep paralysis he had when he was little came back. It felt as if he were being erased. As if someone were deleting him from the inside.

With the creeping deleting feeling, he started to cry at random. The situations were varied. He saw no pattern just increased frequency. Once a week became once a day and within a few months twice a day he would break down. The sleep paralysis was daily. He just kept feeling like he was being deleted, as if his essence was being taken way.

He mentioned it to his wife once. She didn't worry too much about it. Why would she? She couldn't help and she would point that out and didn't want to deal with it so could he just forget about it okay? She was not a bad person, though. Not really. What would you do if someone you loved for years just told you this? What would or could you do? Not in the hypothetical romantic-bullshit way but the real action-oriented way? It's an easy promise to make but not to act on. That promise is a lie waiting for reality to catch up.

It got worse. He was fired because he stayed in bed, paralyzed every day for a week. His boss, Tom, didn't believe the doctors' note.

"Like that restless leg thing. Bullshit," Tom said.

"Like that cancer thing was bullshit, too? Right, Tom," John said and knew it was wrong. Tom's hair was just coming back.

John didn't have to be told to clean out his desk and to leave the premises and that his last check would be mailed. So he went home to stay in bed, deleting. By the time he was 33, he was crying at least once an hour.

Not long after, John was in the shower one day cleaning out his navel. He noticed he could stick his finger right into it. At first he was interested because: How cool is that? It was the most exciting thing in months. Then he was elated because what he had been feeling was real. It was a thing. Here he was with a hole in his stomach. How could a doctor argue with that? How could his wife? Would she keep calling the divorce attorney? At least stop sneaking around when she did it? He went to her, naked and wet and full of potential as when he was born.

"See, see," he said. "See! I am not going crazy. See?"

"See what, John? Your belly-button? I'm just amazed that you got out of bed and took a shower."

"Just look, please. If not as my wife then as a human being."

She looked and there it was. A hole all the way through. She could see the banister he was standing in front of needed paint.

"What do you want me to do?"

He started crying again and went upstairs. He dressed. Got into the car. Went to his doctor.

"What do you want me to do?" The doctor asked.

And John didn't know, because he wasn't a doctor was it John's responsibility to know and what is the correct course of treatment for this.

"Fix it?" he asked.

"How? It is interesting, but I've never seen it before."

And so no-one did anything. And so it just got worse.

The divorce came. Her attorney said to the judge, "Really what kind of father is that? Stuck in bed for hours after a working man would wake and be at work. What kind of parent? It's about the children, isn't it? What kind of child does someone like that raise? His problems are not our concern. It's about how the children are affected. They are the important ones. They are the future. Right?"

John stood up and said, "Right." And he believed it. She got the house. The car. The dog. The kid. No objections.

The hole in his stomach had been growing slowly, but the next day it was the size of his fist. The insides of the hole looked like slices from a visible body exhibit, sectioned-off organs still pumping and undulating as if they had any purpose. There was no blood.

The erasure continued. Every morning he couldn't move for longer and longer. He didn't know what would happen when the hole reached across his entire abdomen. Would his chest fall off and his legs keep walking? The day after that he noticed that the hole was expanding up toward his sternum faster than out toward his sides. He put his wallet in. It fell into his stomach. He hoped the credit cards wouldn't give him heartburn.

The doctor didn't know how John stayed alive. How he walked. The spine was severed. The stomach was halved. Intestines had gaps. The doctor wanted tests, but all John wanted was the deleting to end. He left the doctor's and went to the 1 bedroom apartment he got after the divorce.

The next week, when the hole got to his lungs, John couldn't talk. When he breathed out, the air just escaped out the bottom.

Weeks later even his ex-wife started to worry. She went to him. Kicked down the door. When she saw him she dropped her purse. All there was left of her ex-husband was a head and his chest. A living bust on a couch.

"John."

He looked at her, crying, with his big, wet, and red eyes.

"There's another hole," she said and unbuttoned her blouse. John could see that the wall behind her needed paint.