Hoarder (12 page)

Chapter Fifteen

Dani was a strong girl. She was used to the rough realities of life, and while she might not like the bad things, she could deal with them. Reality wasn’t always nice or fair, but it was reliable. The person that she saw in the bedroom stretched her idea of reality past the acceptance point. That uncertainty made her feel like she was walking through a nightmare, where reality was lost and monsters lurked. That’s what Dani thought she was looking at. A monster.

Panic flooded Dani’s system fast, and she had to fight it off in order to keep control and not do something she might regret. Like scream. She was a tough girl in life, but in her nightmares she ran and screamed from the scaries, like any young girl would.

The trashy talk show that provided a constant stream of shouting broke through Dani’s panic, and she seized on it. This monster was a person, like she often saw on a different kind of reality show that she watched on other, more educational channels (or so they purported of their sensational programming). Shows like
The Guy With the 125 Pound Scrotum
. Or
The Man Who Lost His Face To A Monkey
. Or
The Woman With Six Uteruses On the Outside
, that had been a particularly memorable episode. If she could just remember that this monst… this
person
in front of her was just like the unfortunates on those shock ailment shows, she could deal with it.

Sitting on a giant sofa with an abnormally wide seat (perhaps it was a sofa bed, she couldn’t tell) against a mold-covered wall was the second hoarder, who appeared as genderless as its voice. Dani safely assumed this person was a hoarder, since this room was as much of a garbage dump as the rest of the house. This hoarder’s thin and stringy brown hair was long, unkempt, and gummed together with food. There was some squiggly chin and mole hair on its face, but not enough to signify gender.

What made this hoarder so grotesque was its sheer size. Dani wondered if there was a size category beyond morbidly obese. This hoarder had to be one thousand pounds, and then Dani thought that might be a gross underestimate. Too large for clothes, this hoarder had only a torn, food and human waste stained sheet covering its lap. The exposed legs ended in thick trunks, the toes and feet likely long lost to diabetic amputation.

What disturbed Dani the most was the hoarder’s face, mainly because it was so hard to locate. The head blended into the body in a way that was more slug than human. The hoarder’s tiny, beady eyes were barely visible in the folds of facial flesh, and they were looking right at Dani. The nose was just not visible from across the room. The hoarder’s mouth was nearly indiscernible among the many folds, but one of those folds was turned up at each end. Dani thought this hoarder just might be grinning.

Dani grinned back and had to suppress a mad laugh. She felt like she was looking at a close relative of Jabba the Hut. What she felt was no longer fear, it was disgust. She also felt disgust at herself, in the event this person could not help its obese condition. She thought it possible that she was interacting with a thousand pound tumor. She should feel pity for it.

“I thought I heard voices! Is Missy throwing another party?” the hoarder asked excitedly. Dani knew this hoarder liked a party, she could tell by the way it was wiggling its wide fingers. Even the fingers had folds of fat, which wiggled as well.

“Yes,” Dani replied. So be it, let this be a party. A party was better than a crisis.

Dani stepped closer to the hoarder, closing the proximity primarily so they could lower their voices. This hoarder’s booming voice might draw Missy, whose party Dani had not been formally invited to.

“What’s your name, pretty girl?” it blubbered in lieu of language.

“Sally,” Dani lied, “What’s yours?”

“Tickles! My name is Tickles Honey Boo-Boo!”

Dani could not tell if the hoarder was being genuine or not with the name, but it didn’t matter. Tickles Honey Boo-Boo it was, or Tickles for short. Dani found it appropriate that Tickles’ name in no way tipped her off to its gender.

Tickles lived up to its name, tickling its exposed, jiggling breasts, another non-gender signifier due to Tickles’ size. The nipples were not the size of pepperonis; they were more the size of mini-pizzas.

“You got a video camera?” Tickles asked.

In her initial shock, Dani had forgotten that she was filming with her handheld camera. She thought that her footage might make for a great freak of the week reality show, the kind she was guilty of enjoying. She might have to change the title, though.
Tickles Honey Boo-Boo
might incur a lawsuit.

“Yeah,” Dani admitted. It was too late to hide the camera now.

“Oh goodie-goodie! I always told Missy I’m gonna be on TV! I could have my own show! Am I TV material or what?”

Or what!
Dani thought but did not say. Dani looked at the tawdry television program and back at Tickles, who was posing and puckering like a spoiled beauty queen. Tickles had its own unique version of a duck face, but it looked less like a duck and more like a seal. Dani considered a title for their show.
The Person Swallowed By Their Skin
might be a good one.

“You sure are,” Dani agreed, to Tickles’ delight.

Tickles picked a peeled cube of butter out of a metal bucket on the sofa. Dani saw about a dozen more peeled cubes inside the pail. Tickles’ cube was dipped into a bag of sugar leaning against the bucket. The confection made curly-cues through the air on its way into Tickles’ mouth. Half of the cube was devoured in one drooling bite.

Dani tried to hide her revulsion at Tickles’ messy eating, but it wasn’t really possible. The image of a blob of flesh eating a cube of butter almost slipped her back into nightmare territory. She focused on her camera and folded out the flip screen. Somehow it was easier to accept the image through a digital filter, and it gave her a job to focus on. She was a documentarian.

As Dani advanced closer, she zoomed in on Tickles’ eating. The flip screen was filled with the image of fleshy folds opening wide with butter stretching between them, and butter coating considerably rotten teeth.

Dani no longer felt pity for this person. This was not the victim of a runaway tumor or ailment. Its overgrown state was the result of its insatiable appetites, gluttony with extra butter on top. Dani felt justified in her disgust.

Tickles dipped the second half of the butter cube into the bag of sugar, swirling it around to get all sides covered. The cube spilled sugar as it was pulled out of the bag. Tickles looked at the cube, drooling butter, and in a surprising display of generosity, held the confection out to Dani.

“Want some of my sweet stick?”

“No, thanks.”

Tickles squealed and appeared overjoyed that she had declined, and the remaining sweet stick did a flying corkscrew into its maw.

As Tickles ate, oblivious to Dani, she moved the zoom over its massive body, at folds of flesh messy with food, fuzz, and even –
Oh God!
– cobwebs. The sea of skin was spotted with sores and crawling with cockroaches. Tickles didn’t appear to notice the roaches, or just didn’t care. Perhaps Tickles didn’t even feel them. Circulation and numbness had to be part of Tickles’ many problems. She also noticed that where Tickles’ trunk legs ended, the skin was course and peeling in dry patches, another symptom of bad circulation and neglect.

Seeing Tickles in such bliss, Dani wondered why she had been called into the room, and risked revealing herself, in the first place.

“You were calling for help.”

“I need help! I dropped my remote, and I can’t find it!”

Dani could not believe she had been so easily deceived into this trivial rescue. Her disgust toward this hoarder was growing. Tickles seemed like the perfect roommate for Missy. They were equally greedy and gross.

Dani looked below Tickles’ trunk legs, and lying on top of a carpet of fast food refuse was the missing remote control. It was the oversize kind with big buttons usually used by the elderly or the sight impaired.

“It’s right at your…”
don’t say feet!
“It’s right below you,” Dani corrected herself.

“I can’t reach it,” Tickles said in the most annoying, whiny voice Dani had ever heard, where the final two letter word was drawn out like it was a dozen letters long.

Tickles, to its credit, did try to reach forward, but only its arms and stub legs had any real movement. Tickles’ massive blob of a body could not move forward off of the rotted sofa fabric.

Dani was having a dark realization concerning Tickles’ immobility, and she zoomed in closer with her camera to investigate her suspicion. She cringed as she viewed the details through her flip screen.

Tickles was not just sitting on the sofa; Tickles had absorbed the sofa. Wherever Tickles’ skin met the upholstery, they were fused together by a natural glue of hair and excrement, pressed into each other by so much weight and time. Only Tickles’ arms and trunk legs remained mobile. Even its neck and the back of its head were fused to its seat. Tickles could barely move its head out of the forward position, which explained why the television was directly opposite the sofa on an even sight line.

As Tickles tried to lean forward, flesh and fabric pulled together as one. The bond looked strong, and it wasn’t clear to Dani whether the skin or sofa would tear first.

Dani found herself past the point of fearing Tickles. This person was not going to chase or harm her. Revolting, for sure, but Dani felt that Tickles was more pathetic than anything else. What kind of life was living in one room, in one spot, immobilized in a cocoon of your own waste? A pathetic life was what it was. What bewildered her most was that this being seemed to live in a state of constant elation and delusional TV land make-believe. Tickles’ mind mimicked the rest of it; it was a useless pile of dumb jelly.

As uniquely grotesque as the sight was, Dani knew that Tickles was not alone in its condition. She remembered a similar story on one of those freaky reality shows she enjoyed so much, one titled
The Man Who Grew Into His Bed
. A massive man had melded with his mattress, through a new skin of hair and shit, and they had to break down a wall to get him out, and when they tried to pull the man off of the bed, he had… Dani banished the shock ending of that episode. What she was dealing with now was bad enough.

The ruined sheet covering Tickles’ lap was jostled loose by its reaching hands, and it slid over its left trunk and piled beside the remote. Fully exposed, Tickles’ gender remained elusive. The folds of flesh hid any genitals. It giggled at its nakedness, but Dani did not giggle back. Tickles was actually flirting, making goo-goo eyes and wiggling to accentuate its countless curves. “Oo, oo,” Tickles cooed.

Tickles gave up the struggle to reach the remote. The effort had exhausted and pained it. Sweat ran down its grimacing…
face?
It was all grimace.

“I can’t. Can you get it for me please, sweetie-pie? I need to turn this up.”

Dani scanned the walls for windows. The only visible window was directly above the sofa that Tickles was fused to. She couldn’t believe that she hadn’t noticed it before. The window was completely covered, as they all were, this one with newspapers that appeared to be glued over each other.

A disturbing detail above the window caught Dani’s attention. Over the black mold were wide streaks of a viscous brown and gray substance, running down from the ceiling all the way to the window. Dani knew it wasn’t a fungus. It was bat guano, and evidence that those winged pests held high residence inside Missy’s house. The attic above them could no longer hold the weight of the waste. She could even smell the guano, an all-new offensive reek. The word
RABIES!
flashed in her mind, and she worried for Keith and the hand injury he had received yesterday. Rabies could conceivably be rampant within the house. It might explain Missy’s sores and insanity. Could a human survive with rabies long term? The rabies issue brought up another anxiety. If the disease were rampant within the house, how many of the rescues would have to be put down?

Dani knew what she had to do. So what if she got a bit of rabid bat guano in her hair? Dani looked down from the window and into Tickles’ deep-set eyes. “Sure, I’ll get it for you,” she replied.

Tickles excitedly looked from the TV to Dani to the TV again. Dani slowly approached Tickles, surprised that she had lost its attention already to the tawdry rerun. She needed to use that to her advantage.

“They gonna reveal the baby daddy!” Tickles announced. Dani shared none of Tickles’ enthusiasm, not that Tickles noticed.

Dani squatted to grab the remote, which was covered in food and boogers. She did not hesitate to touch it. Her plan required it, and she’d touched worse things in this house already. One of Tickles’ trunk legs darted at her, brushing against her face. The cracked skin felt like sandpaper against her cheek, and she hoped it didn’t contain a fungus that would make her face corrode in the same manner. Dani pushed away with the remote, Tickles’ trunks waving at her. Tickles laughed (at least Dani assumed that the sputtering wheeze it made was a laugh) until it saw the remote in her hands.

“Here! Give it to me!” Tickles demanded.