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Determined to end the poodle’s dominion over his life, Freddy leapt from his bed, wincing as the needles in his asshole dug in deeper. He carefully bandaged his fingers; wrapping each torn appendage with pieces of toilet paper, not noticing that they were just as quickly bleeding through the makeshift Band-Aids. No more poison, no more guns, no more knives. Freddy would make sure the thing did not survive. He would burn it to death!

Freddy opened the door to his bedroom and walked out into the hallway, cursing aloud as he stepped directly into the wet, green and brown feces that covered every floor surface in the house.

“Fucking dog.” He growled to himself.

He had to cover his face with a bath towel as the horrible, rancid pork smell of the half-dead, diseased dog, mixed with the smell of feces and roared up his nostrils, down his throat and into his stomach where it caused a tidal wave of bile and stomach acid. Freddy paused for a second as he fought to keep the wave from rising up his throat. Once his stomach was settled, he cautiously negotiated the obstacle course of dog shit and made his way to the kitchen where he knew the terrible creature would be.

“Hi Mom.” Freddy said and dutifully bent over to plant a kiss on her withered cheek. The movement disturbed the legion of flies that had been planting eggs in her eye-sockets and feeding on the cocktail of bodily fluids evacuating her body. Her hair was moving, alive with maggots and still more flies. Her entire body was vibrating, seething with activity as dozens of carrion eating parasites were busily eating away at her flesh, taking her down to the bone.

Freddy yelled and kicked at the dog when he noticed that it had chewed off another of his mother’s feet, taking most of the flesh from her one remaining shin as well. The dog yelped and retreated, dragging yards of bluish purple intestines with it from where Freddy had tried to disembowel it last year. As it barked, its brain flopped back and forth, threatening to spill from its exposed brainpan. Freddy had taken a few swings at it with a baseball bat sometime around Christmas. Its matted and filthy white fur was dotted with red from all the bullet holes Freddy had put into it over the years, and the hilt of a carving knife still protruded from its throat from Freddy’s recent attempt to saw the thing’s head off.

The hideously grotesque canine growled at him and backed away as he approached, limping and tripping over its intestines and leaking blood and bile all over the linoleum floor, adding to the mess already left by the piles of excrement from both the dog and Freddy’s dead mother. Freddy could still remember the flood of urine and...and shit that had released from his Mom’s bowels when he shot her as she tried to protect that damned poodle.

“He’s been in the family forever! You can’t kill it!”

“I know it’s been here forever and don’t you think there’s something wrong about that? The damned thing won’t die! Just look.” He pointed the .357 Smith and Wesson revolver at the over-sized mutant poodle and his mother bent down to shield the thing. The bullet entered somewhere around mid-back and exited her solar plexus in an explosion of gore. She sat at the table, smoking one of those cheap generic cigarettes that smelled like charcoal and berating him for being a failure as a son as she bled to death. He listened to her vituperative tirade, each venomous word barely squeezing out between wheezing, whistling breaths from her ruptured lungs as they filled with blood and she slowly drowned. Her last words were something like:

“You pathetic waste of life! You should’ve been a stain on your daddy’s sheets! And don’t you dare hurt my dog!”

Immediately, Freddy had increased his efforts to kill the thing. The canine abomination was now feeding off the only thing in the house that had ever loved it.

“Ungrateful son-of-a-bitch! And she tried to protect you!” Freddy yelled.

The dog sat and began licking its ass in response.

There was a can of lighter fluid in the pantry and Freddy bent to retrieve it. The dog began to howl and bark before succumbing to a horrific fit of coughing. It scrambled to the back door and scratched at the cheap aluminum, trying to claw right through it to freedom. It could sense that Freddy was up to something.

Freddy had the lighter fluid, the automatic log lighter and a devilish gleam in his eyes. He backed the dog into the corner and began dousing it with the accelerant.

“Don’t do it, Freddy. You’ll be sorry. I’ll make you skin your own penis with a cheese grater tomorrow if you fuck with me!”

Freddy was used to the threats. He didn’t care what the dog said. This would be its last day on earth. Freddy threw the match. He turned to get the fire extinguisher from under the sink as the dog began to howl and scream in indescribable agony. There was definitely something odd about the dog. Normal canines didn’t scream or talk for that matter or live after they’d been stabbed, shot, bludgeoned, and disemboweled.

The dog was trying to bite at the flames. It’s teeth were bared in a threatening snarl as it attacked the immediate source of its pain. The fire rapidly crawled up its back, shearing through the mangy tufts of hair as it began to consume the dog’s living tissue. The little fat still clinging to the dog’s emaciated body added fuel to the fire and furthered the progress of the flames. The poodle’s flesh was starting to bubble and run like frying lard. Both of its eyes were sizzling in their sockets like sunny-side-up eggs. They exploded with an audible pop.

Freddy sprayed the dog with the fire extinguisher as soon as it stopped moving. He had to spray the walls as well as the fire had begun to spread up the drywall. Freddy cried out in joy as the blackened canine skeleton slumped to the floor. He negotiated his way through the festering piles of feces, back out of the kitchen, down the hall, and into his bedroom, pausing only to silence the wailing smoke alarms with a few whacks from his baseball bat. The house was now eerily quiet without the horrible coughing and hoarse barks. The only sound was the hum of flies on his mother’s body, audible even through his closed bedroom door. Strangely enough, he found the sound soothing. It was like mom was humming him to sleep with some out of tune lullaby. Freddy laid down on his bed and felt years of pressure suddenly drop from his mind. The demon was dead. He fell into a deep contented sleep and dreamt of being a baby in his mother’s arms, trying to remember what the milk from her mammoth breasts had tasted like.

When Freddy finally awakened hours later, it was to the same hoarse barking and wet, tubercular, phlegm-congested coughing that had greeted him every morning of his life. His left ear dripped with snot and saliva from where the wet nose of a thousand year old demon, the same one who had told David Berkowitz to take a .44 caliber pistol to couples on the streets of New York, had whispered in his ear as he slept. The ratty carpet had a trail of paw prints in black ash that led from his locked bedroom door to the edge of his bed. The damned thing had picked his lock again! Freddy cursed loudly as he reached for the cheese grater and began shredding the foreskin from his penis. He wasn’t sure why he was doing it, but he had nothing better to do.

Rosie patiently dusted the bookshelves; removing each book and wiping it down with an electrostatic rag and then replacing it precisely where it had been. She removed each knick-knack one at a time from the mantle and wiped it free of dust. Then she ran the feather duster over the smooth surface of the oak mantle before spraying it with furniture wax and buffing it to a high gloss.

“Filthy!” she hissed in disgust.

She wiped down the television and stereo system with the rag, spraying window cleaner on the screen and wiping it until her reflection shone through. She then threw the rag into the trashcan and grabbed another, repeating her frantic wiping on every piece of furniture, every knick-knack, and every trinket in the room. Everywhere she looked there was grime and scum, tops of the baseboards, beneath the stove and refrigerator, underneath the couch and between its cushions. She ran the vacuum slowly over the carpet until she was sure all the dust and dander was gone. Then she poured water and cleaning fluid into the steam cleaner and retraced her path over the carpet until it looked as if it had just come from the showroom floor. She poured three capfuls of ammonia into a bucket of water and lowered her mop down into it. Then she began furiously mopping the floors, walls, and ceiling. When she was done the house shined like a show model.

Rosie appraised her work with admiration. Satisfied over her accomplishment she went upstairs and stripped off all of her clothing, dumping them into the washing machine along with a capful of laundry detergent. She looked her body over, sniffed her hands and armpits and wrinkled up her nose.

“Filthy!” she declared with undisguised revulsion.

She sprinted to the shower and began furiously scrubbing at her flesh, using various soaps and bath gels before grabbing the bottle of bleach and dumping it over her head, wincing in anticipation of the burn. Various cuts and abrasions sang out in agony as the bleach seared her flesh and she scrubbed herself raw. When she finally stepped from the shower, she smelled as fresh as new linen.

She dressed in fresh clothes and went out onto the porch to watch as the garbage man struggled to heft her two trashcans into the trash truck. She winced when he dropped one of the cans and piece after piece of her drunken adulterous husband tumbled out onto the sidewalk. Blood flooded from the upturned receptacle and stained the sidewalk crimson as first his head, eyes still wide in surprise, mouth open as if still trying to lie his way out of it, then his legs, arms and finally his bloated torso splattered onto the street behind the garbage truck. Blood rolled up onto the driveway in a wave as blood, organs, and intestines came boiling out of the tremendous gash bisecting the corpse’s stomach and chest. Last, the gore-streaked weed whacker, the pruning shears, and the meat cleaver slid out of the garbage can on a slick trail of blood and viscera.

The two garbage men were shocked but managed to avoid throwing up and further soiling the blood-soaked street. They cautiously approached the second trashcan. The braver of the two stretched out his foot and kicked the can over, leaping back as the woman came sliding out leaving her skin and much of her flesh crumpled up at the bottom of the can. They both lost all pretense of bravery when the woman whose breasts, ass, and vagina had been removed, carved out so that the white of ribs and pelvic bone gleamed through where her sexual organs had been, turned eyes wide with terror towards them and began to scream. They hopped back into their truck and peeled out of the cul de sac, leaving the bloody mess behind.

“Filthy!” Rosie shrieked, her voice trembling with the force of judgement, tears beginning to well up in her eyes. She turned and went back into the house to collect her cleaning supplies.

Tina looked in the mirror and felt her stomach roil with revulsion. She looked at her reflection and saw billowy rolls of adipose tissue dripping from each bloated appendage. She saw her own hideously distended torso enclustered with grotesque lumps of bulging fat and felt sickened. She didn’t know how Hank could make love to this horrible corpulent cow; why anyone would want to. Her pudgy cheeks were so swollen that she could barely see her own squinty, piggish eyes. The image she saw staring back at her looked as if she’d been stung by a dozen bees, or like she had eaten bad seafood and was having an allergic reaction. Tina wanted to cry. She was getting fatter everyday.

Yesterday, she spent two-and-a-half hours on the treadmill. She had it in its highest gear and was turning red from both the exertion and the certainty that the people on the stationary bikes in back of her were laughing at the ripples she knew must be going through her massive ass. After the treadmill she’d gone to the weight-room for an hour, then to the sauna for forty-five minutes, and then ten-minutes in the bathroom regurgitating breakfast into the toilet bowl. Still, the image she saw in the mirror was no thinner.