Joel Robertson

“Bestseller, duh,” the girl rolled her deep brown eyes. “It’s a phenomenon. Go call the publishing company. It just became a New York Times bestseller.”

“What?” I stared at her.

“I know, you should have seriously visited me when you got that thing published in the first place.”

I think I may have cried a little. Mademoiselle spread open her smooth, new arms and embraced me.

Finally, Mademoiselle said, “I bet your Mom will be looking for you.”

“Yeah, probably.” I doubted it.

“Keep writing.”

She paused for a moment.

“Let’s keep my little visit between the two of us, okay?”

“Um, okay. Goodbye,” I teared up more. “Thanks for everything.”

“See ya!” Mademoiselle turned her back and slipped into the crowd, never to be seen on planet Earth again.

I wiped my tears and stood looking at the place Mademoiselle departed.

To my surprise, Mom appeared from the crowd with Jaime behind her.

“Oh, Jenni!” She gushed. ”You’ve missed all of the stories! She’s been everywhere! Oh, I wish you could have known her better.”

“Yeah, me too.”

I pushed aside my most recent draft and grabbed a fresh spiral notebook. I took my pen and scrawled across the first page: “They call her Mademoiselle.”

The Dead Man and the Moss

Joel Robertson

There is a dead man on the warehouse floor. I’ve seen him, though I’m not sure anyone else has. He’s tucked away in the corner of the warehouse between shelves K37 and K38 with his head slumped down onto his yellow safety vest. Dried spittle mars his chin. I don’t know how long he has been there.

I stand frozen at the scene. I don’t know this man, but he must work here. He isn’t an old man, but he certainly isn’t young. He floats in the void of middle age. Perhaps, he’ll rot some day, but right now, I doubt he ever will. He’s leaned against the metal shelf just as naturally as one might lean against an oak tree for a nap, the line of dry spit a wheat stalk hanging from his mouth.

My heart catches up with my brain. There’s a dead man on the warehouse floor. I need to do something! Run and grab my supervisor. Try and remember CPR. Move the body away from the shelves. Instead, I stand still. Terror rises up from my stomach like moths seeking the light. It comes from my throat as a moan that turns into a sniffle that turns into a sob that turns into a wail until suddenly I am screaming from the top of my lungs.

A hand grabs my shoulder.

“Corin! What’s wrong?” I open my eyes which I didn’t realize I had closed. Rob is standing over me. “Here, take my hand. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. That’s right.”

I sit up from where I have collapsed on the concrete floor, my breath still hitching in my throat. “Th-thanks Rob.”

I move to stand, but Rob blocks me with his arm. “Woah, easy there cowgirl. Let’s keep sitting down for a little bit.” I groan. “Have you ever had a panic attack before?”

“Rob, I’m doing fine. Look!” I point to the dead man. He looks over his shoulder then back at me.

“What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“The dead man! Right there between 37 and 38.” He turns around to look one more time, a slight frown on his face.

“Corin, there’s no one there.”

He looks back at me and I see it. Clumps of moss are growing from his pupils. I only see them for a millisecond before they dissolve.

“How about you go home for the day? You’re obviously shaken up and I don’t think you’re gonna get much work done like this. I’ll call a ride for you okay?” I nod, and he helps me to my feet. The dead man stares holes into my back.

My father died two months ago. We weren’t ever close. Far from it. I stayed in my corner of the world and he stayed in his.

He wanted a son. That much I know. He and Mom tried for years. They had two miscarriages, one stillbirth, and then me, his spitting image in all but genitalia, which didn’t help matters. They began trying again after my diagnosis. A miscarriage later my mom said no more.

To his delight, I was a rough-and-tumble child. You could always find me playing with our dog in the small wooden garden behind our house. Sometimes, he would join us, and in sitcom fashion, Mom would playfully yell at us to get in and get cleaned up for supper.

At 13, I had my first schizophrenic episode. I became utterly convinced flesh eating parasites were in everything I ate. Mom made all my favorite foods: apple pie, mashed potatoes with chives, biscuits and gravy. I refused it all because I could see worms crawling in and out of every dish.

After that, my father became convinced I was made of glass. Even after it was under control at twenty, he still felt I could break at any moment. There was no release for me at the funeral. No secret revelation of how much he loved me and wished he’d been there. He left me his boat and some money and a deck of gold foil playing cards. Everything else went to Mom.

I’m a stocky woman. Big-boned, my father used to call me. He often wondered out loud how “someone near 190 pounds could be scared of so many things that are so small.” After some help, I turned out pretty stoic, but he never believed I had changed. After last week, maybe he was right. Because of my size, I usually end up assigned to tracking down and moving larger products from inventory to shipping. Right now, my tablet is sending me on a hunt for a small TV somewhere on shelf L40. Not thinking, I cross through shelf K37 on the way.

Even weeks later, the dead man is still there.

His body has begun to grow. It twists up and around the rungs of the metal shelf like a grape vine. The man’s skin has turned green but not with rot. It has simply shifted hues. It somehow feels more natural.

I reach into my pocket and pull out my orange tube of lurasidone, swallow a tablet, and wait. The man doesn’t disappear. He doesn’t even shrink.

“You doing alright?” Rob asks from behind me. I turn around. His eyes are filled with moss.

“Yeah. Just trying to find this TV.” I show him my tablet.

“Gosh, I saw that back there a few days ago. You want some help with that?”

“No, I'll be fine.”

He looks back up at me with moss-filled eyes. “You sure you’re okay?”

I’m on the lowest dose of lurasidone that I’ve ever been on. Dr. McGraw thinks I’ve reached stability. Schizophrenics don’t really recover, we just learn to cope. Dr McGraw says that someday I might not even need drugs. I’ll just be able to subsist on talking through my feelings with her.

I really don’t see that happening. Even on lurasidone, I still hear things sometimes. Lately, I’ve been hearing people snapping, but I haven’t had a visual hallucination in years. Dr. McGraw thinks I’m being pessimistic.

My pill bottle is my lucky charm. I keep it in my pocket at all times. Sometimes, when I’m feeling nervous, I’ll rub the cap clockwise with my thumb. I read somewhere that repeated finger motions help mental stability. It rearranges your neurons or something. Beyond that, it tethers me to reality, reminds me that my eyes can no longer lie to me.

The man keeps growing and I know he is real. His neck is now as tall as the shelf itself. It spirals over and through the rungs like a broken giraffe. His limbs twist about the concrete floor. People step on them on their way to and from grabbing packages. I can hear his bones cracking from shelves away. They don’t notice though. Their eyes are filled with moss.

I have begun avoiding that part of the warehouse. Whenever I get an order from K or L, I ‘accidentally’ get the wrong item. They can dock my pay. I don’t care.

The moss has begun to stay in their eyes even when they’re not looking at the man. Some of them even have it running down their faces like bleeding mascara now. It is becoming increasingly harder to breathe.

“Corin!” I jump and my tablet falls out of my hands. Rob comes out from behind a shelf.

“What did you do that for!?”

“A little. What do you need?”

“Nothing in particular. I just thought I’d ask if you wanna get lunch with me today?”

“Oh, sure.” I try to muster up as much excitement as I can. I don’t like him that much, but I will do anything to get out of this godforsaken warehouse.

“Cool! I know this great little cafe down the block. They have these amazing croissant sandwiches. Last time I was there I had three of them but-” I tune him out, and notice the package he’s holding under one arm. It’s dripping.

“So see you by my car at 11:30 then?” I snap back to reality.

“Uh, yeah… sounds great.”

“Perfect!” He turns to leave, but the package he is holding collides with the side of a shelf. The soaked bottom gives out.

The dead man’s head rolls to a stop at my feet.

It is even more green than when I last saw it. The same line of dried spittle hangs from his lip. Moss that is more slime than solid leaks from his neck onto the floor.

I scream, partially because of the head at my feet, but more because I finally recognize the man. It’s my father. Well, not exactly. My father had all of his hair on his face while the dead man has it all on top, but structurally, they are identical. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before. I fall back onto the floor, and I can no longer hear myself. Rob looks down at me, moss dripping from his eyes. I feel myself scream. He reaches down to touch me.

I slap him. He recoils and brings his hand to his face. A chorus of snapping fills my ears as I fumble for my pill bottle in my pocket, but I can’t

The world shrinks as I look out between my fingers. The shelves and boxes have become nothing more than ants. They crawl up over my shaking body until I am the warehouse itself, a living breathing storage closet.

Here, on my wrist, a flat screen television. On my lower back, packages of dog food. In my hands, the dead man. Everything else is still shrinking, but he is growing. I grasp him tighter, trying to stop him, but he breaks free. His body twists around mine. Every place where his skin touches mine feels like it’s on fire. I hear his spine cracking as his torso loops around me. His fingers slowly grasp my throat and-

Rob pries my hands from my eyes. A mossy handprint marks his cheek. I look down.

My hands.

My hands are leaking moss.

I haven’t been back to work in two weeks. I don’t know if I’ll ever go back. I don’t know if I’ll ever go anywhere again.

I sit in my apartment with swollen rubber gloves. I put them on as soon as I got home that day. I’ve gone through ten pairs and am about to go through an eleventh. The moss fills them up and bursts through the rubber. I only have one pair left. When those burst, I will move onto mittens, then real gloves, then paper towels, then bed sheets, then anything that can possibly contain it.

I begin what has become a habitual procedure. I carefully remove each glove by the fingers and make sure to keep all the moss inside. Then, I take a nail file and scrape the remaining moss into the gloves with the rest. I tie the ends of each glove like a balloon and open the cabinet beneath my sink where I keep the trash with my foot. I toss the nail file and the gloves in, confident I have not contaminated my home. I will not contaminate my

home. My phone buzzes in my back pocket. Another call from Dr. McGraw. Despite myself, I pick up.

“Corin? Are you there”

“Yeah.”

“How have you been doing? Your work called me about what happened.”

I say nothing.

“What were you hallucinating Corin?”

Again, I stay silent, but this time she does too, waiting expectantly for me to answer. I break first. “I haven’t been hallucinating.”

“Corin, I haven’t been completely honest with you lately. I’ve just been so confident about your recovery and-” The cabinet beneath the sink begins to rumble. “-this is extremely difficult for me to confess. I want you to know that I did this with every intention of helping you. The pills I prescribed you last-” The trashcan falls out of the cabinet. “-were not lurasidone. They were a plac-” I drop the phone as the dead man’s head rolls out of the can half formed.

I pick my phone back up and throw it at the head. Instead of hitting it head on, my phone slowly sinks into its ear like putty. I scream and run towards my apartment’s door.

I douse my hands with kerosene. It cascades down onto my garage floor. The moss yellows as it soaks in. Where are my matches? I tear through the storage cabinet. Pliers. Rat Poison. Aha! There it is.

I slide the white box out of its sleeve and remove a match. Something is wrong. I’m missing something. Suddenly, it hits me. I take two jugs of kerosene out of the cabinet as well and walk over to my car. I put them both inside my trunk.