At this point the sound of his own voice within his thoughts became an impenetrable noise whose source was the pain and anguish his chest felt. The delirium caused by the pain in his knee and the developing pain inside his middle ear canal, had caused him to have a “trip” much like the type too much acid can cause when taken on the wrong night. Jeremiah stared at the ceiling as he held his breath during intervals of ten seconds, due to the pain inhaling and exhaling caused him. He was trapped under years of collected clutter. He was unrecognizable now, his eyes were sunken two inches deep into his eye sockets, they looked like two yellow grapes that dried up under the sun. The veins that protruded his emaciated body seemed flat surfaced instead of oval. A cockroach climbed within a molar that was so badly decayed that it suffered from a cavity the size of a watermelon seed, he could feel the movement inside the cavity. Jeremiah was starving, to the point that he wished that cockroach would make a fatal move so that it would slither down his dry throat ready to be digested.

How did jeremiah find himself in such a precocious position? As a young man he did not have many friends, he was an orphan, overly paranoid by the dangers posed by the outside world (a paranoia developed at the orphanage where nuns as evil as Lucifer himself would fill his head with paranoid propaganda about how the outside world posed dangers that would take his soul), so after the war he collected his government issued checks, monthly hired a person to do his grocery and leave it by his door so that he could lock himself inside his apartment never to ever come out.

Throughout his life he collected the New York Times newspaper, every single edition from 1965 to present day, all stacked randomly in his apartment, towers as fragile and profound as his state of mind. He collected all the junk he bought from the home shopping network, heaps of it, most unpacked since he was a compulsive buyer. Jeremiah purchased several grills for example, knowing full well that he would never go out to the park on a picnic. Throughout the years he exhausted the space available in his tiny 1 bedroom apartment.

One fateful day Jeremiah noticed an intruder in his home, the first life form he had seen from his side of the window since he began to seek refuge in his tiny apartment. Worst of all, the intruder was black. Jeremiah reached for a chimney broom he had ordered (although he didn’t have a chimney), and began to beat the black cat into a bloody pulp. The cat was now a puddle of blood with patches of black fur dispersed throughout in a gory soup. The old senile man ignored the puddle of cat as he walked around it for the following two days.

On the third day it had become a waxy stain on the floor except for the intestines and bones that protruded out of the mess. While navigating through all the junk he had stored within his apartment Jeremiah slipped on the feline he had murdered and accidentally caused an old microwave he had ordered in 1981 to fall on his knee rendering the old man immobile. So there he lay, with a giant microwave on top of his knee while resting on top of a rotting cat, the smell of the decaying feline body far worst than anything Jeremiah could have imagined possible. The smell seemed to be a partner heavier than the monolithic microwave resting upon him, the stench carried a weight with it that seemed unnatural to Jeremiah, an aroma that he could feel entering his lungs with every exhaling and inhaling breath he took. It made him dizzy, to the point that the smell acted as a sedating agent, because of the smell the pain in his leg seemed less severe, he was getting high off death.

The pain caused by the monolithic microwave after the third night had developed into a dulled feeling; the complete left side of his body was numb. The hunger he felt in his stomach was the second most devastating pain afflicting Jeremiah at the time. The first was a slow throbbing pain he felt within his ear, the type of pain that has its own pulse. Even then he didn’t regret ever purchasing a phone since he believed it was a tool, used by the government to send subliminal messages with the purpose of controlling his life.

Jeremiah always suffered from earaches as a child. His mother poured hot cooking oil in it to relieve the pain when he was a child.

Without reaching his medication, Jeremiah felt doomed and angry. Made desperate by the damned puddle of cat that caused him to be in this position. The combination of all the pain he endured for what seemed an eternity on the 8th day, caused vivid hallucinations within Jeremiah’s state of consciousness. At one point he hallucinated that the cat’s decaying, pasty fur had taken over the room like a jungle of the feline persuasion, not only that but this jungle of fur was alive and angry, wet with blood and vengeance rubbing every inch of his body with an evil slither that caused Jeremiah to laugh insanely, no other emotion was suitable for jeremiah at that point, his mind too far gone. Deep down inside he knew he was the cause of all the insanity surrounding him, and the irony of the towers of cluster that he once built as a means of some sort of lunatical protection against the world, had all caved in on him and this meant that he was the single worst element in the drawing of his fate.

The pain began with a slow thumping within his inner ear. The type of thump you feel when a finger gets hit by a hammer or slammed by a door. The thumping soon progressed to the feeling of a million microscopic needles being shoot into every surface area within his ear canal. The infected ear had caused him to swell up all the way from his lower neck to two inches above the top of his ear. He felt his inner ear would be the cause of his death before the microwave a top his kneecap, or the starvation at the pit of his stomach. So there he laid now 9 days, and his face becoming more mummy like by the day. Except for the ear that appeared as big and juicy as uncooked hamburger meat, all bulging from his ear.

Trapped under all his garbage (a nearby stack of newspapers had fallen upon him) he died slowly day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second, until time didn’t make sense and it was simply eternity. He developed a lung infection apart from the ear infection that had made his ear hole disappear, no doubt the cat’s stench was taking its toll. With every breath he consumed his lungs and throat gargled, owing to the pus that lined his putrid insides, everyday resembling more the damned cat that he rested upon. Jeremiah wanted to die but he was immobile, if given the chance he would kill himself without thinking about it. At that point if his conscious had given him the capacity to create a complex thought, he would have undoubtedly considered himself to be the unluckiest man in the face of the earth.

As luck would have it he did not die of a lung infection, ear infection, starvation, or the loss of blood caused by the microwave’s impact. No, it seems that the black cat he had murdered wasn’t alone in his home, it was a mother who had her group of off spring, nearby.

The six little hungry kittens wandered his apartment searching for their mother, their instincts drove each of them to search for nourishment. But instead they clawed their way through the stacks of newspapers and boxes and found Jeremiah, underneath the scent of their mother. Jeremiah being half dead and with no strength to fight them off, they began consuming him. The biggest of the pack with careful curiosity climbed his chest and began eating his lower lip, biting slowly and meticulously, working its way to the tongue. Another clawed away at his infected ear searching for the delicious aroma of bloody meat that slightly escaped the infected ear’s opening.

The other kittens worked on his chest, eating at the nipples first, until there was no more meat and an ooze of pus found its way out of the decaying body.

After a month of being eaten alive the stench of death had flooded the whole building, firefighters broke into his home and after several hours of clearing all the junk within the apartment they found Jeremiah’s half eaten body with six fat cats stalking the corpse. Jeremiah’s green eyes stared at the ceiling with a look of horror so powerful that at first glance could almost fool you into believing he was still in pain, even in death.

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