Putrefaction

A weary office worker learns that sometimes, a few words are all it takes to unravel the pattern of a carefully ordered life.

***Content warning: This episode contains body horror and sexual content. Listener discretion is advised.***

Thank you for listening! If you have any feedback or inquiries regarding the show, please feel free to drop me a line at darkerpasturespodcast@gmail.com.

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

There is so much in our lives that we accept without question, so much that we take for granted. But there is, perhaps, even more that we choose not to see. Our realities – individual, communal, global – are far more fragile than any of us like to believe. And often, interlaced with those realities are threats both overt and subtle which are simply too existential, too pervasive, for us to dare acknowledge.

So, instead, we expend great effort in not seeing that which disturbs, unsettles, or offends our sensibilities – and especially in not seeing that we may be a part of those things. Such willful blindness can lead to devastating consequences… especially in these darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Ten: Putrefaction.

(Sound of fly buzzing at window)

NARRATOR

Her eyes and mind fogged by overwork and insufficient sleep, Scarlett sits at her work desk, trying to power through her twelfth hour of overtime this week. The numerical entries on the computer screen swim, a monochrome soup, and even after all of the extra hours, her manager Gareth keeps insinuating that they may all have to work through Christmas weekend, if the volume backlog hasn’t been whittled down by month end.

She fumes inwardly – she already had to work through Thanksgiving, and she had very much looked forward to spending the holidays with her aging parents and her centenarian grandfather. But unlike most of her coworkers, she makes no outward complaint. Scarlett has always prided herself on her professionalism, on her work ethic. Though she hasn’t dared to give it voice yet, she hopes that it might earn her a raise next quarter, perhaps even land her an assistant manager position at the mid-sized insurance and land management services company she’s worked at for almost three years now.

The only other worker in her department who has accepted management’s strenuous demands with such outward serenity is the new guy, Milo. In fact, she has never seen him express much of any emotion, and he barely even speaks, only ever offers a slight, shy smile. This isn’t all that strange, not for her department. The work is essentially glorified data entry, and often draws the socially awkward and the introverted. But Milo is so placid in his demeanor, that sometimes she almost forgets about his existence.

It’s after a sad, vending machine lunch that she finds herself in the breakroom, refilling her coffee cup for the fifth time, and meets Milo there. He is sitting at the grey plastic table, alone, staring at nothing until she looks at him. Then he slowly, slowly turns his head to meet her gaze, and offers that hesitant little smile of his.

She returns it, gently, finishes filling her cup, and is turning to go when Milo speaks. His voice is so soft, so faint, that at first, she doesn’t hear him and cannot make out his words. It takes a moment to register that he is asking her a question.

Can you smell it?

Perplexed, she looks back at him, her mind scrabbling for a reply. But before she can find one, he continues, as though he’d never expected a response from her.

The rot’s setting in.

As he says this, his smile widens a little. Before Scarlett can make any sort of answer, Milo stands and drifts out of the breakroom and across the department space, returning to his desk.

Unsettled more than she can justify to herself, Scarlett returns to her desk as well, thankfully across the room from Milo’s. She slips in her earbuds and tries to lose herself in an afternoon of true crime podcasts, but his words keep floating up to the surface of her mind, like the waterlogged corpses the half-heard voices in her ears describe in excessive, morbid detail.

And she begins to feel like she does smell something, some wispy hint of unpleasantness that she can neither pinpoint nor fully describe. Once, she asks her nearest neighbor and work friend, Evelyn, if she can smell anything, but the slightly older woman says she hasn’t noticed anything at all.

(Short pause)

It’s the next day that she begins to notice the splotches of dark discoloration.

The smell is stronger, too, and it’s this that she first notices: the overpowering, rank mustiness of a damp basement, left sealed and festering for far too long. Once more, she asks Evelyn, who again smells nothing out of the ordinary. So she asks a few of the other coworkers, and her manager, Gareth. No one knows what she is talking about, and Gareth asks her if she’s feeling alright when she persists, so she finally drops it.

And in the afternoon, she sees the rank patches spreading over the walls, the ceilings. At first, she tries to dismiss them as shadows, as tricks of the light, but they seem to grow bolder and more defined throughout the afternoon. And, when Scarlett rises from her desk to leave in the late evening, she is certain that the now deep brown stain on the ceiling between her and the exit is leaking dark droplets onto the pale grey carpeting.

She takes the long way around, breathes deep when she steps out into the uncontaminated night.

(Short pause)

When at last Scarlett returns to the cramped apartment she shares with her boyfriend, Alan, she is utterly exhausted. He is sitting on the couch when she enters, watching television. He glances at her as she slumps down with a long, weary sigh beside him, and asks her what they’re doing for dinner tonight.

She swallows the sharp response that dances upon her tongue. Alan hasn’t had to work overtime, has been coming home three hours before her every night this week. His family lives in town, so he never has to make a long drive to see them, which seems unfair to her since he isn’t as close to his family as she is to hers anyway. And for some reason, he can never seem to feed himself, and certainly never thinks to have dinner ready for her when she comes home after an ungodly-long shift.

She shrugs and asks why they don’t just get takeout from the Chinese place down the street. Alan wrinkles his nose slightly, says he had Chinese for lunch, says they should get pizza instead. Once more, Scarlett refrains from lashing out, from asking why he even bothered posing it as a question if he’d already settled on an answer.

When it arrives, she barely eats any, drinks a little too much merlot instead, then leaves Alan to stuff himself while she indulges in a hot, bubbly bath. By the time she emerges, skin pinked and shiny and tingling pleasantly, her time for sleep has already grown too short.

She goes to bed, and Alan, after mumbling something about how he never gets to see her anymore, turns off the light and follows her to bed without washing the dishes. As she lies there, trying to sleep, she keeps thinking she is catching a hint of that now-familiar odor from the office. And every time she tries to shrug it off, to explain it away, and fall into the sleep her body so desperately needs, it becomes a little stronger.

With a groan of exasperation, she finally vents her annoyance and asks Alan why he couldn’t just wash up before bed.

He is silent for a moment, and then asks whether she is talking about the dishes, or saying he smells. Scarlett realizes she doesn’t know, so she says she meant both. Alan says, with audible inauthenticity, that he’s sorry and that he’ll take care of it tomorrow. And that, she knows, means he will forget tomorrow.

His hand slides under the covers, up under her shirt. She tells him to stop, that she’s tired, she’s not in the mood, and that whatever that stink is in the apartment, it’s making her sick.

He stops, sniffs at the air, says he smells nothing. And somewhere, deep down, Scarlett knows she never expected him too. No matter how she tries to tell herself that it’s residual contamination in her airways, or a neurotic fixation, she knows that whatever corruption has seeped into her life has followed her home.

Alan’s hand returns, and she lets him do as he likes. It is brief, routine, and unsatisfying – he spares no thought for what she might want or enjoy, remains focused fully on his own desire. And as he pants above her, flooding her face with hot, garlicky breath, she wonders what she ever saw in this man with whom she shares her space, her time.

A rank smell rises to her nostrils after Alan rolls off of her, begins to snore gently beside her, but this is a smell she has known before. And a random fact floats in the darkness of her mind, one she likely gleaned from falling down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. She is thinking of putrescine, one of the chemical compounds that gives dead, putrefying flesh its unmistakable smell, and of how it is naturally also present in semen.

And as she reflects on this, this strange infusion of death and decay even into the act of procreation, she silently mouths the words, The rot is setting in.

Then, sleep finally takes her.

(Short pause)

By morning, the stench is so strong that she gags when she opens the bedroom door and the fetid air washes over her. Alan is in the bathroom, brushing his teeth, and he gives her a sidelong look of alarm as she heaves over the toilet.

She asks him again if he cannot smell it, how he could miss it.

He asks her if she’s okay, if maybe she shouldn’t give her therapist a call.

Straightening, Scarlett pushes him aside, washes her face at the sink and brushes her own teeth. She does not speak to him the rest of the morning, even when she sees those radiating patterns of dark, moist corruption upon the walls and ceiling. She almost thinks she can see them pulsating slightly, almost feels she can hear a wet throbbing if she listens closely enough, but she refuses to lose any more time to it. She readies herself for work and leaves the apartment, drives toward the office, thinking that maybe she should call her therapist after all and still being angry with Alan for suggesting it.

When she reaches the office, she can see the rippling of riotous, rotten brown through the wide windows of the building, even before she steps out of her car. She slumps in the car seat until her forehead is resting on the steering wheel, and cries loudly for a few minutes. Afterward, she digs out tissues and a small makeup kit from her purse, sets to work correcting and obscuring the effects of her outburst in the small mirror of the driver-side sun visor.

Gareth parks beside her, waves and grins at her as he walks toward the office building. She returns the gesture, feeling hollow, as unreal as the face she has painted over her wan, weary, tear-swollen features.

(Short pause)

Her coworkers remain blind to what has now wholly overtaken their office, and she knows better than to even inquire. Or at least, all of them but Milo. The knowing smile he gives her as they cross paths on her way to the breakroom that morning makes her suddenly stop and begin to shiver very violently, until Evelyn sees her and asks in sharp alarm if she is alright.

Scarlett musters a weak smile and says that she’s just chilled, continues into the breakroom and fills her cup with coffee. When she looks down into its rich, brown, swirling contents, she realizes there is no way she can drink it. Even if it is not gone vile like everything else, the color makes her think of the pulsing hearts of the ulcerous, rotten masses that grow wider and deeper each day.

Later that day, Gareth announces that, due to the workload, they will all regrettably be required to log an extra four hours over the weekend. There are groans from around the department, and Gareth says that he understands it’s disappointing, but that the extra hours will be mandatory.

Then he dons a cheap Santa’s hat, and, grinning cheerfully, adds that they will still have their planned office party this afternoon.

Scarlett goes back to work, her brain feeling smoky and choked with suppressed anger. She almost asks why they don’t just skip the office party so that they can all spend the holidays with their loved ones… almost. Instead, she sits and types in a brutal staccato, taking out her frustration on her undeserving keyboard.

Her family lives all the way across the state from Omaha, near the panhandle – more than a five-hour drive in even the best of weather. And the forecast is calling for sleet this weekend, turning to heavy snowfall later.

A few hours later, they gather around long pale tables in the middle of the office, laden with candy and punch and specialty-flavored coffee. Gareth begins to sing Jingle Bells with the incorrect words, heedless of the somber mood among the other employees as they mull around the tables.

None of them notice what is dripping precipitously from the ceiling, pooling darkly upon the table and staining the red, white, and green-frosted cupcakes. When Evelyn picks up one of the nauseously saturated treats and pops it in her mouth, Scarlett turns away and forces down the bile rising in her throat.

(Short pause)

When noon comes that Saturday, and she is finally able to leave the dim office, she is surprised to find that she still feels that light and electric sensation flow rapturously through her body, the one that is both elation and relaxation, that tells her she is free and the near future is bright with possibility. It remains in her as she gets into her car and rolls onto the interstate, leaving the city behind her. It is the same feeling she felt over holidays and spring breaks and at the beginning of summer, when she was in college, in high school, as a child.

She cannot believe it has returned. And she will not let the knowledge that she will only get a single full day to spend with her family before she must make the long drive back ruin her excitement.

But when she thinks of Alan, refusing to come home with her for the third year in a row despite having no interest in spending Christmas with his own parents, her mood does darken somewhat. And when she turns on the heater against the hungry chill of late December, and that hot, all-too-familiar fetor spills out of the vents, it vanishes altogether.

No matter how she turns up the commercial Christmas pop or swelling choral music on the radio, no matter how she tells herself that she is being neurotic and imagining things, the cloying foulness in her nostrils grow thicker and thicker. Before she is halfway to her parent’s home, she has to pull onto a sideroad and vomit into a ditch full of yellow weeds.

When, a few moments later, her cell phone rings and her mother asks her how she is doing, she lies and says she is fine, that she will be home in only a few more hours.

As she puts her phone away and stands, wiping at her mouth, her gaze sweeps over the field of cropped cornstalks that sprawls before her. And what she sees there, dark and rank and rippling with evil fecundity, reaching out with creeping, insidious tendrils toward every horizon, makes her retch once more.

(Short pause)

By the time she reaches the remote county of her early life, the sky is already darkening, and she drives directly toward her grandfather’s house, where the family is gathering for the evening’s festivities.

She knows she will not be able to eat. Though her nose is now desensitized to what still must be issuing from the climate control vents, the nausea lingers, just above her stomach. But she has brought three bottles of mid-priced merlot, her personal favorite. She is sure that some of her aunts and definitely her drunken Uncle Steve will partake, as well.

When she walks through the front door, the house is warm and pleasantly lit. Smells of good country cooking fill the house, and she breathes deeply of it, relishing the unexpected relief of wholesome air. Her grandfather, sitting at the head of the table in the large dining room, is telling a story about his wild and distant youth in Wyoming, drawing sounds of mirth from all the seated listeners. The stringy old man, straight-backed and clear-eyed despite his age, is an expert storyteller in the vanishing style of the American frontier: his delivery utterly deadpan and artfully understated, no matter how outrageous or absurd the tale may be.

There is a loud cry of welcome when she walks into the dining room, many hugs and jokes passed back and forth. Her parents’ faces are so brightened by her arrival that Scarlett feels guilty for not having visited sooner.

As she takes an empty seat beside her Aunt Pat, the scrawny older woman asks her pointedly where her boyfriend is, why no one has gotten to meet him yet.

She reluctantly explains that he couldn’t make it this year, that he had other plans. Pat bemoans the fact that he never seems able to join them, in a tone that makes it very clear she doubts Alan’s very existence.

Her mood souring once more, Scarlett opens one of the bottles of merlot, pours herself a very full glass, and drinks deeply. And beneath the ruddy must of the fermented grape, there is another scent, one that curls and clutches in her very core and makes her vision swim. Steve also pours himself a generous portion and takes a long, noisy sip, then moves into the living room and turns on the television. As a news segment begins, he loudly complains about the younger generations and how they want too much, how they are destroying America. A loud argument erupts around the table while her grandfather stands and moves outside to smoke his age-darkened cherrywood pipe.

The rot’s setting in, Scarlett murmurs, swirling her wine and wondering if drinking it will somehow damage her, corrupt her, make her body deform with the rot too. Then she smiles at herself, realizing that it is far too late to worry about avoiding infection, and drains her glass. She repeats the words as she pours a second glassful, and no one seems to hear her.

When she looks up, she thinks there is a subtle change in the lighting. There seem to be new shadows cast upon the faces of her family, faces well-known and dear, but then she realizes that they do not move like shadows, recognizes the patches of discoloration. She laughs mirthlessly, drains her glass, drinks now from the bottle.

There is no point in fighting it, she thinks. It’s already taken hold.

She pulls out her phone and dials.

(Short pause)

Alan is sitting down to a takeout burger, the television blaring loudly before him. All evening, he has been debating internally whether or not to re-download Tinder, wondering whether thinking about it makes him a bad person.

No, he tells himself. Scarlett has been drifting away, has shut him out, and that’s not his fault. The sex hasn’t been good for even longer. A man deserves a little comfort from time to time, he thinks.

Just as his thumb hovers over the download button, the screen lights up with an incoming call from Scarlett. Guilt bubbles like hot oil in his gut, and he reluctantly answers it.

Hi, babe, he says. How’s things with the fam?

There is a lot of background noise from her end, and the sound coming through has a strangely liquid quality. Scarlett doesn’t answer him at once, and he’s about to speak again when her voice, faint and oddly parsed, burbles through.

He doesn’t understand the question for a moment, and when his brain does process it, he frowns in confusion. But before he can utter his answer, he goes still, and sniffs at the air, wrinkles his nose in disgust.

Something wet and dark drips onto his cooling cheeseburger from overhead.

(Unsettling music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, editing, and musical arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]