BY GREG DYBEC
Dr. Dorso died on Thursday, November 13th. His landlord called the police on Tuesday night, November 23rd, complaining of a smell and a dark liquid soaking through the ceiling of the apartment below his. Marty called me Wednesday morning, saying the Good Doctor had died and the cops wanted one more person to identify the body. The Good Doctor had no family. No patients either.
The apartment stunk something foreign. Marty laughed when he saw me, crusty eyed and sweating. “It is not a good look for him,” he whispered as I entered, nodding my head to the cops.
Dr. Dorso’s corpse was in a sitting position on his olive green recliner. His white shirt soaked brown to the collar and his skin melting away into some curdled milk oblivion. I covered my mouth with my sleeve and looked back at Marty, who was chatting with two officers near the doorway.
I moved to the front of the chair, trying to remember the good doctor’s face as it once was, when he was capable of some things, and would smoke long gray cigarettes in Brooklyn and smile at the all the young girls trekking home from school. The world’s as slow as you want it to be, he’d say, blowing kisses on the street corner.
I circled behind the recliner and found myself face to face with a herd of elephants, dipping their heads and running in the hot sun. “Why the hell is the T.V. on?” I shouted toward the doorway. One cop shrugged. Another told me it was on when they found him.
Blue lights from the set showered the Good Doctor and me; it’s fuzzy warmth as real as anything as we watched the herd prance mighty steps through Africa. I turned to the doorway and told the cops that it wasn’t the Good Doctor in the chair. The glow from the television bubbled and dimmed behind me. Marty asked what the hell was wrong with me. I told him the Doctor was out there, and too endangered to die.
***
Greg Dybec is the Founding Editor of Fix it Broken, an online fiction magazine with a fashionable twist. He has work published in >kill author, Metazen, Fractured West and others.
A-Minor 