Feeding the all-consuming thing
by Scott Dille



I watch as the boy forces a fourth Snickers bar into his mouth. I know he hasn't swallowed the first three. I've been watching his throat closely and it hasn't tightened, hasn't made the effort to push anything down. It wasn't until he began unwrapping the third, the first two still firmly locked between his front teeth, his lips stretched wide, that the black spot appeared and I found myself incapable of breaking away.

The boy, who my children told me is known throughout the neighborhood as 'the tub' and is rumored to have eaten the mailman, had consumed two bags of Halloween candy before the Snickers. He walked past the window while we were eating dinner, wearing a dirty gray polar bear costume and carrying two empty paper sacks slung over his shoulder. He returned, trudging past under the weight of the tow full bags, just as Maria was taking the girls out trick-or-treating. I waited for them to disappear into the warm October night, before pouring myself a drink, finding a joint I'd been saving since Memorial Day, and climbing into the hammock on the back porch. Relaxed, peaceful, I drifted into the nostalgia of childhood Halloweens, pleasantly aware that things were good.

A sound, mixed in with the distant shouts of children and the hum of passing cars, jarred me out of my thoughts. From somewhere next door, a wet, violent smacking grew louder. I listened, smoking the joint and trying to place the smacking into some sort of context. A pool drain. A broken water pipe. Grazing cattle. Unsuccessful, I slowly lifted myself out of the hammock and stepped off the porch onto the lawn. I followed the smacking to the hedge that separated our house from the neighbors, found the thin spot in the branches where the previous owners had tried to build a BBQ pit, and scanned the windows until I found the boy, standing over a low table littered with candy wrappers, stuffing the contents of a glass bowl into his mouth in greedy, animal-like handfuls.

I'm captivated through the first bowl, forgetting to keep track of how many handfuls it took him to finish it, but I'm certain it was less then ten. From the far side of the room, he retrieves the second bag and commences to unwrap the candy, using a methodical, almost neurotic, system. Anything the size of a piece of gum is quickly eaten. Things up to the length of his thick meaty thumb are placed in the bowl. Everything bigger is set aside, unwrapped. I missed the pile earlier but now see a stack of Milky Ways, Kit Kats, Snickers, and an assortment of home baked cookies.

His hand begins working back into the bowl, and the mechanical slamming of wine gums, jawbreakers, taffy squares, chocolate kisses into his mouth, and the heavy pounding of his jaw grinding through sugar, caramel, nougat, crème filling, knocks a pair of glasses off his face and it scares me when I see how unaware he is, lost in pure consumption. He finishes the bowl in eight.

The large items went in one at a time and I began measuring them in chews. First twenty, then seventeen, fourteen, ten, five, and then he puts in the first Snickers. The second. A third. He doesn't begin chewing until his cheeks are pushed out at strange angles and he's unable to find a hole between his lips for the fourth, but I can see he's trying hard to open one.

He suddenly moves out of the window and I'm left staring into his empty room - some posters on the far wall of his bedroom, a baby blue dresser with a lamp, the depth of a hallway through the ajar door. The smacking is gone too and I reason that he has finally gone to vomit and this gives me a sense of relief, like I'd been wrong, paranoid about something I really didn't know. Turning, longing for a return to normal, I hurry back across the lawn and up the few stairs to the back porch. I light a cigarette and find the rum and coke I'd made myself over an hour ago. I fall back into the hammock, bring the glass to my lips, and I hear it, first faintly, then breaking through something between us, thick walls, it grows louder.

I move to the far side of the porch and almost fall trying pull myself up onto the railing, spilling my drink. Still having to stretch to see over the hedge, I look into the neighbor's kitchen, a stark white room with overhead fluorescent lighting, a wrap around tile counter, a calico cat sitting next to a stainless steel sink, an open empty refrigerator.

He hadn't vomited, and as he stares into the freezer his jaws still grind away and brown, thick shit is oozing from his mouth and pooling on his chin, bouncing up and down and dripping onto the synthetic white fur on his chest. A melting cube of butter runs down his left hand. He closes the freezer door and moves towards the counters and I notice how white his cheeks have become, how small beads of perspiration have formed on his forehead, how desperate he looks, and he uses his right hand to scrap the butter into his mouth. It's not until every cupboard door has been opened and a bottle of chocolate syrup and an opened box of pancake mix are sitting on the counter, that it's clear by the way his eyes search the room that he's going to eat the cat.

The cat remains submissive when the boy begins pouring the chocolate syrup and sprinkling the mix on top and I'm thinking there's a chance this is rehearsed, a game between boy and cat. Finished, he picks the cat up by the tail, and in one downward thrust, manages to get a little over a third of the cat into his mouth. It takes him five bites, thirty five chews, and he moves over to the living room window, and while wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his costume, his head begins turning down the street, taking in each house, moving to the window facing our house, stopping and staring into our kitchen.

As he puts on his shoes, I jump down from the railing, enter the house and lock all the doors and windows and close the front curtains. I feel protected, assured I can always call the police, knowing there's no way for the boy to get in. The door bell rings and I can hear the smacking and the wine glasses on the shelf begin to rattle, and moving over to the window and drawing back the curtain, I see him swallow the last of the three pumpkins from the front steps. I remain hidden in the folds of the curtain and he rings once more and then tries the handle. He knocks, then disappears around the side of the house and tries the backdoor. When I move into the kitchen, being careful to stay out of sight, I hear him leave the porch, then a low, angry rumbling shakes the room and a wine glass shatters and I cut both my hands and a knee trying to back out of the room.

I grab some paper towels and sneak back to the front window where I pick the glass out of my palms, and wait for the boy to return. He steps out from behind my Buick parked in front of the garage and pushes the front of his stomach as another rumble shakes the house and a painful hungry look tightens the tiny eyes folded into his fat face.

It continues for five minutes, the boy frozen, hurting. I move towards the stairs and the tiny eyes suddenly open wide and flashes of light reflect off their oily surface. I turn to see a group of children carrying flashlights and bags of candy and I know the candy doesn't interest him and he lumbers across the wet grass towards the sidewalk.

I unlock the front door and move out onto the front steps. A car pulls up next to the group of trick-or-treaters and they all pile into the back seat and it drives away and I realize I'm very vulnerable, and before I can slide back in through the open door, the boy spots me. A look of confusion passes between us, neither of us knowing what to make of the situation, and the black spot has become a cancerous hole and his tongue falls out, probing in my direction, and I know he ate the mailman, his parents, and I know he'll continue - children, my wife, my daughters, me.

There's a ripping sound, a vacuuming whoosh, and the hole that has replaced his face begins swallowing the world around us.

The ivy on the side of the house.

Newspaper and bits of garbage.

The mailbox.

The tiles on the roof as they break loose.

A bicycle.

A willow tree.

The Buick.

Both arms are locked around the iron railing and my feet are helplessly pulled out from under me and I can see the strain on the railing's screws, and when they finally break free from the concrete steps, I skim the hard rocky surface where the lawn used to be and disappear between warm, moist folds that seem to go on forever.

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