Borderlands 4 Read online

  She kissed it. Felt its warmth. With her mouth. Her tongue. Warm. Soft. Smooth. Slightly damp. Like she was. Like she had always been. From long ago. Like she would always be. Just like this. It felt like her. Tasted like she would taste. She remembered. Remembered.

  They sang. With each other. Into each other. It was warmth. Complete security. She loved it. Complete. She wanted so much. Its one need. Her desire. Her return. She pushed within it for leverage. Climbed up on a kitchen chair. Needing it. Wanting herself. Her memory. Wanting her return. Her one desire. And entered it.

  Head first. So warm. All the way inside. So deep. All of her. So loving. Her return.

  At last.

  It was her. Pure sound. Constant. Continuous. Pure warmth. Comfort.

  She was where she wanted to be. Within herself. She sang the sound. Her song. The same. Constant. Everywhere the same. This was her. What she was. This constant warmth. Continuous sound. Pure comfort. This was her. She would stay.

  Here.

  Within. Always. Inside. From long ago. Long ago.

  Dead Leaves

  By James C. Dobbs

  James C. Dobbs was really born in 1937 in a log cabin in Kentucky with no electricity or plumbing. His first eight years of education were at a one room mountain school. He’s worked as a social worker, long-haul trucker, and professional gambler. He’s written a book on gambling strategy and several articles for Win magazine. He now lives in Baltimore with his wife Dusty and assorted animals. He likes bluegrass music, nude beaches, and red wine.

  Curious as to what brought the buzzard so close to the ground, the two boys detoured from the path to the pond and waded through a field of weeds to the fence row at the edge of the pasture. They soon smelled and then saw close up what had attracted the buzzard … a week dead possum, stiff and grinning, lying near the base of a large white oak. The older boy poked the carcass with a stick. This alarmed a host of maggots and several crawled out a hole in the possum’s side and others crawled out its mouth. Several large green flies reluctantly gave up their feeding and buzzed about. He almost threw up but got control.

  “Let’s get goin’,” he said, “this thing stinks.”

  But the memory of the possum stayed with him for days … how the side next to the ground had stiffened, gravity pulling it to fit the contour of the ground on which it lay, blending back into the earth. How dead it had been.

  PRE-EMBALMING PROCEDURES

  (From The Embalmer’s Handbook)

  A. Protective Gear/Clothing for the Embalmer

  B. Preliminary Procedures

  1. Remove articles of clothing

  2. Position body squarely on the table.

  3. Elevate head by placing it on a head rest (Make sure the head rest will not interfere with fluid distribution or blood drainage.)

  4. Spray body and external orifices with a reliable disinfectant (e.g., Phenol or fumeless cavity fluid).

  5. * mouth

  * nose

  * pubic areas

  6. Nose and mouth

  * wash with soap and water

  * insert hose into nostrils and mouth and flush and rinse with running water

  7. Clean fingernails.

  John Meaks followed the contour line of the hill, shaded from the Fall sun by the canopy of oak and ash and poplar, the brown carpet of dry, dead leaves making the way slippery on the steep parts of the hill and he steadied himself with the dead branch he was using for a walking stick. Dead leaves, he thought, smiling inwardly at the irony as he slipped again and almost fell, his foot plowing a two foot long furrow, down the steep slope, the unexpected movement sending pain shooting through his body. It was the memory of these leaves that had brought him here. He sat down beside the furrow to allow the pain to subside, picking up a few dry and brittle leaves from the top layer. Digging down further he noticed how they started to lose their individuality, to become moist as they continued the metamorphosis from leaf to earth.

  Higher up the hill he heard the bark of a gray squirrel and through the high canopy of hardwoods he caught a glimpse of the dipping flight of a wood hen, its cackle trailing it from one hill across the hollow to an adjacent hill. A pileated woodpecker to the ornithologist but in these Kentucky hills it was known only as a wood hen.

  The raucousness of a gathering of crows in the distance, the buzz of the early fall insects, the angle of the slant of the sun’s rays through the trees, the earthy smell of the woods … hundreds of sights and smells and sounds triggered a myriad of memories from the time when these hills had been his daily playground. A great sadness welled up and for a few minutes he sat motionless, his brain numbed by the overload of memories.

  Putrefaction at 70 degrees F

  (if body exposed to air for 1-3 days):

  * Eyeballs are flattened

  * Greenish discoloration over abdominal area

  * Postmortem stain

  * Dehydrated lips and eyelids

  But all the experiences that had created those memories led inexorably to the awful finality of his now. This was the last day of his life. The stub-nose .38 in his pocket would see to that. Death is my servant, he thought. He must always come when I call. His servant would deliver him from the pain and sickness of cancer and the chemicals and radiation that were its feeble enemies. Soon he would meld with the leaves and the earth. But he still had to get to the spot and his strength was fading fast. If he lost consciousness or simply got too weak to go any further his body would be filled with embalming fluid instead of allowed to gently reunite with the mother earth.

  The turkey vulture (catures aura) is common from Canada to South America. It feeds almost exclusively on carrion. It has excellent eyesight and a highly developed sense of smell.

  The words of an old song came to him …

  The shells in the ocean; will be my death bed;

  The fish in deep water; swim over my head.

  Additional Preliminary Procedures for Head Post

  (Skull has been opened and examined by medical examiner)

  1. Clean forehead

  2. Open cranial incision (Remove sutures made by medical examiner’s office.)

  3. Remove calvarium

  4. Remove brain and place in visceral bucket

  5. Immerse brain with cavity fluid (1-3 bottles)

  6. Cover visceral bucket

  7. Ligate/clamp any vessels that were cut by the

  ME during arterial injection of the head

  8. Clamp off:

  *2 vertebrals

  *2 internal carotids (found in the sella turcica-center at the base of the cranium)

  9. Force 2 closed hemostats into the external carotids

  The black vulture (coragyps atratus) is also common from Canada to South America and also feeds mostly on carrion. It has been know to kill weak and dying prey and it also likes to eat the feces of the carrion. It has no highly developed sense of smell and finds it meals exclusively by using its excellent eyesight to find carrion lying in the open or by observing the behavior of other scavengers.

  He had considered the ocean as the final resting place for his sick body, and when she got the note that’s where she would think he had gone. But the ocean wasn’t his first choice. Although he loved the ocean and had spent many happy days sailing its surface and strolling its shores, the deep recesses where his body might end up were foreign to him. He preferred to know at least the common names of the creatures his death would nourish.

  The opossum is the only North American marsupial. It is a nocturnal scavenger and will eat almost anything. It is particularly fond of persimmons, grubworms, and carrion.

  Any time a body has been laying in the woods for over 24 hours you can bet the maggots will be hatching soon. We start by spraying this Phenol in the mouth, nose, and pubic areas.

  He held a single dry oak leaf, feeling how the smoothness of the top contrasted with the slight roughness of the bottom. He turned it over. The bottom looked like the earth’s terrain carved by a r
iver and it’s tributaries as seen from 35,000 feet.

  Next we wash the body with this disinfectant soap. Stick the hose in each nostril and flush it thoroughly. Now the mouth.

  This fellow, he said to himself, probably fell in October. Last spring and summer were its halcyon days … a small bud materializing on a high branch, growing each day, weeks of sunshine and rain and wind and darkness … doing its part to absorb the sun, to energize the tree, to shade the earth and to join forces with the branches and trunk and roots and other leaves to help cleanse the atmosphere. And now to have its death nourish the earth. Soon he would join forces with the leaves. Together they would feed the earth and the earth’s creatures.

  A number of insects, primarily beetles and flies, have a life cycle that includes the laying of eggs on dead or dying animals. The larva hatch and burrow into the body and feed there as what we commonly call maggots until the next stage of their metamorphosis.

  Gunshot wounds to the head are a challenge to our profession. We want this guy to lie in his open coffin and look like he died in his sleep.

  He picked a damp leaf from further down the strata. A relic of summer before last. What part of my strut and fret act was I doing while this fellow was doing its thing? He replayed mental tapes of that summer … finally making a success of the business he had struggled with for five years, finally rid of that gut gnawing feeling of not quite being able to afford the life style he was living, of feeling dependent on his wife’s income for vacations and cars.

  The black vulture is more aggressive than the turkey vulture and will usually drive the turkey vulture away from the feast. The turkey vulture, thanks to its highly developed sense of smell, usually arrives first, however, managing to get in a meal before the black vulture arrives.

  It had been a wonderful, heady summer. He worked long hours but evenings and weekends they spent together, dining at their favorite restaurants and taking trips to New York and Montreal and the beaches. In late September, when this now dull fellow was donning its fiery coat, they spent two wonderful weeks in Paris and the French Riviera.

  They had retraced the steps of Hemingway and partook of the Movable Feast. They visited the graves of Piaf and Morrison and sat for hours at the outdoor cafes. He had thought, as they strolled the beach at St. Tropez that he would live out the remainder of his years like that.

  Both the turkey vulture and black vulture are bald about the head and neck. This allows them to stick their head deep inside decaying carcasses without becoming infected, even when the animal died of disease or is highly decomposed. What germs attach themselves to the bare head and neck are soon killed as the head and neck dry out during flight and by exposure to sunlight.

  Over the Atlantic, on their way home, she brought up the subject of children. Some survival of the species urges buried deep in her female cerebellum began to manifest themselves. She had no children. His were grown and he wanted no more. Overpopulation, he said, was the root of all the environmental problems. Keep adding a million people to the face of the earth every five days like we’re doing now and eventually the earth must scream out in pain.

  But he didn’t adamantly refuse to consider it. He wanted her to be happy but deep down he felt that children meant the end of his happy times with her. They discussed adoption. He stated bluntly that he felt they had the perfect life and hoping to improve it by introducing a child was like shooting a bullet into an alarm clock, hoping it would improve the mechanism. She let the matter drop but he sensed the resentment.

  Anger and resentment lingered on both sides. The matter of moving to a nicer house was debated … she wanted to, he didn’t. That winter he wanted to take a weeks vacation on the Caribbean. She wanted to go to Hawaii for two weeks. They each got on a position and he finally booked a trip to the Caribbean for himself and spent a lonely five days gambling and reading.

  They stopped talking about the business. He hired an assistant who gradually assumed her former duties. He immersed himself in the work and it became more prosperous. They got annoyed with each other over small things. He missed the old days and he hoped she did too, but missing them was to admit they were gone.

  They were civil and occasionally they had sex but the romance was gone. The more and more infrequent good times and sex seemed to be something they did, not for their own sake, but something each knew they had to have at least a minimum of to justify staying together. They were both at that stage where neither had the energy for any major change like divorce. They joined a few million other couples … staying together for convenience but looking outside the relationship for whatever satisfaction could be found. It was to this unhappy home that cancer came.

  Vultures, like many birds, are equipped with a crop, an expandable pouch in the chest, allowing them to store food after they have eaten their fill. Days later, when food may be scarce, they can expunge the food from the crop and eat. They also feed their nesting young in this manner.

  The prognosis was bad; he had refused to admit it was worth seeing a doctor until the cancer had metastased throughout his body. Once he understood the situation he resigned himself to a fairly imminent death. He never planned to live forever and started thinking about how to make his final few months as painless as possible.

  He busied himself getting his affairs in order. He put the business up for sale. He checked on his life insurance policies and updated his will and tried to look at the situation with the rationality he had always prided himself on. But his impending death clouded his days and encroached often into his dreams.

  Where would he be when he breathed his last. In a hospital bed, comatose with pain killing drugs? Would his relatives be gathered around? Where would he be buried … at the family cemetery in Kentucky with his parents and cousins and grandparents? None of these options seemed very acceptable. He had been in charge of his own life, he wanted to stay in charge until the end. He began giving a lot of thought to the orchestration of his death.

  She did not accept the inevitability as easily. The love buried by resentment and disappointment quickly resurfaced. She read everything available on the nature of his sickness and the current theories on treatment. He went to two specialists at her insistence. He began radiation and chemotherapy. Buying time to hope for a miracle.

  Soon, however, he knew the fight was not for him. He could endure the inpatient and outpatient treatments and lose his hair and be nauseous but for what? Another year or so of treatments? No thank you he told himself and he told her. He would finish the series of treatments but that would be it. She said she understood. He didn’t notice the strange way she looked at him.

  A few days later she came to him and asked if they could talk. Her face showed worry and fear and determination and something else he couldn’t quite grasp. They sat on the couch and she took his hand. His eyes searched her face for some clue as to what she was going to say but she stared at the floor as she spoke. The words came very hard, forced out by her resolve, “I want you to have your vasectomy reversed. I want to get pregnant.”

  He stared at her, stunned, as his mind fought to put things into perspective. Her eyes slowly left the floor and met his. He saw the hurt and the embarrassment, as if she felt she had asked a drowning man for a drink of water. He saw the pain and knew she still loved him and that his pain was her pain. But beyond all these things he saw something else, something very large and demanding, something he knew he could never understand.

  His impending death had made him more aware of the finiteness of life and how rudimentary birth and death were to all species but he had been thinking mostly about the death side of it. Suddenly he was slapped with the realization that she was looking beyond his death, she needed something from him now, something physical, something primal. What he thought of as himself, his body, his intellect, his personality, would soon be gone. She wanted him right now for none of these things. She wanted his sperm inside her to fertilize her eggs. She didn’t give a shit about his personality.
r />   He got up from the couch, walked across the room and turned and looked at her. With a poker player’s instinct, he wanted to be able to read her body language as well as her eyes.

  Her body communicated such a singlemindness of purpose that he almost felt he could see a monstrous aura hovering around her, a shimmering green being with arms held up prayerlike in a posturing position, dictating the course of action that she must take. “He is a source of the sperm that you must have,” it was telling her, “you must get it at any cost.”

  A chill went through him and as it subsided he was overcome with a terrible loneliness. Suddenly he felt no closeness to Laura, she was a beast as he was a beast. They had met randomly in the jungle and temporarily used each other for self preservation motives. The feeling stayed with him and intensified until not even the beasts described the feeling. It was colder than that, beasts breathed out warm vapors and blood ran through their veins. He and Laura were not two beasts, not reptiles or strange slippery creatures from the ocean’s depths, not even slimy mud dwellers. For a moment he saw only electrical charges and force fields and the cold physics of the universe. He and Laura were nothing but two charges with an attraction for one another, an attraction whose roots went to the essence of the survival of their carbon-based life form. The aura was some manifestation of the forces that orchestrated the attraction.

  He had the sudden sensation of faintness, falling into a terrible abyss and a horrible sense of isolation. He held his head and staggered to keep his balance.

  Laura was quickly beside him, holding his arm, helping him to the couch. Overcome with emotion, she started crying, putting her arms around him, holding him tightly.