Meat Puppet

Flash Fiction by Matthew Ross

It’s hard to hear the sirens over the thunderous pounding of the blood in my ears, but I know they’re out there looking for me. My breath comes ragged as I race past Jackson Square, feet slapping hard against the age-worn brickwork lining Decatur Street. I lost a shoe about a mile back, but that hasn’t slowed me up one bit. Neither has the glut of tourists, drunks, and street people who crowd the Quarter; rather than weave a path around them, I lower my shoulder and bowl over anyone too slow to leap out of my way, like a human bulldozer. My nicest suit has been splattered with the sticky contents of a half-dozen yard-long Grenade drinks, courtesy of the bachelorette party I barreled through outside Central Grocery, and my shoulder’s still throbbing from where I knocked over that fat lady on a Rascal scooter a couple blocks back. Every thudding step sends a shock of pain shooting through my trick knee. Lord knows what kind of filth I’ve been running through—I can feel the sock on my shoeless foot has torn to shreds. I’d gladly trade a year’s salary for just one moment to catch my breath.

My arms pump harder as I accelerate instead. The street forks ahead of me, splitting near some kind of art gallery—"Crescent City Exhibitions," according to the fancy lettering etched into its frosted storefront window. As the gallery draws closer, I wonder which way I’ll veer: left, towards the riverfront? Or right, leading me deeper into the heart of the Quarter? Only my course doesn’t waver. I continue running straight ahead, just like I have been.

When I realize what’s about to happen, I whisper, "Oh no,"—or try to. But no sound escapes from my mouth. I feel my lips stretch into a wide, mocking grin—a grin that grows even broader as I struggle fruitlessly to scream.

In that final moment before impact—that one heartbeat between launching myself into the air and smashing through the center of the plate-glass window—I can’t help but think inanely about how much I loved those old commercials with the Kool Aid Man when I was a kid.

Unlike the Kool Aid Man, I make my leap headfirst, arms stretched out in front of me like Superman, or Tony Stark in his Iron Man suit. Only I’ve got nothing to soften the brutal collision of bare fists against glass, no superpowers to protect me from the thousands of glittering shards that rain down like a hailstorm of razorblades. I’d heard somewhere that your pain receptors shut down when they’re overwhelmed, to spare the mind from having to fully process the sensations its body is experiencing.

Turns out that’s total bull though, like a lot of things I’d heard somewhere. I feel every single piece of glass that bites into me. Every nick, every slice, every cut. Every last one.

I feel it all.

Mentally, I brace for a painful crash to the gallery floor, only to find myself tucking into a neat forward roll, like I’m John Wick or something. Though the muscles in my back scream in protest, I land lightly on my feet. How the hell did it make me do that? Even when I was twenty years younger and forty pounds lighter, I never could have pulled a stunt like that off on my own.

“Oh my lord!”

My head swivels towards a smartly dressed young woman with a nametag on her blazer who’s eyeing me with open-mouthed horror. The warmth trickling down my face and limbs tells me I’m bleeding from about a thousand different places at once. “Are you okay? Somebody call—”

Before she can finish her thought, I snatch a brightly colored ceramic elephant off a nearby pedestal and crack it over her head. As she falls bonelessly to the floor, I pray that I haven’t killed her. That she’ll wake up soon with nothing worse than a concussion and a wild story to tell. But I have no way of checking on her; I’ve already put her in the rearview, and have moved on to blissfully destroying the rest of the gallery’s sculpture collection.

Why the hell is this happening to me? One minute I’m sipping mediocre Pinot and nibbling cubes of gouda at one of those hellacious fundraisers Hannah’s always dragging me to, nodding politely while that pompous idiot of a museum director drones on and on about Babylonian funerary artifacts. Then everybody’s screaming about some priceless piece of horsepucky getting knocked over…and the next thing I know, my body’s not my own anymore and I’m sticking a cheese knife through the director’s eye. What if I’d been looking at Hannah when this thing took me over—would it have gone after her instead? Good Lord…if I…it…we? If anything had happened to her, I’d never be able to live with myself…

Looks like we’re done laying waste to the art gallery. Where’s it taking me now? Riverfront? Fewer people that way, thank God.

I know I should be trying harder to fight it—to scratch and claw and scrabble with every fiber of my being to either wrench control of my body back, or die trying—but what’s the point? Nothing I’ve done has made the slightest bit of difference. I’ve flexed and strained and labored and haven’t so much as twitched a muscle on my own. I’ve screamed my mind hoarse without the tiniest whisper passing my lips. I’m a passenger on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, and there ain’t a damn thing I can do about it.

Whatever happens, this won’t end well for me. I don’t see how it could. Even if this…thing grows tired of me and decides to turn me loose, I’d still be left to pay the fiddler for all the havoc it’s wreaked using my body. Most likely I’ll go down in a hail of gunfire, soon as the cops catch up to us. What then? Will it just leap into the next-closest host it finds and stick its hand up their backside or go back to wherever the hell it came from? Does it even need me alive to keep rampaging around in my body?

That’s a thought—what if it keeps steering my corpse around even after the cops have ventilated me. Even worse, what if death’s not enough to set my soul—or whatever it is that’s still left of me—free? What if they plug me full of more holes than an old screen door and I keep right on ticking, still stuck on a ride I can’t get off of. Forced to watch—no, not just watch, but feel—as it terrorizes folk using my face.

My hands.

My body.

I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to live like that, either. Which would be better? Which would be worse? And is it selfish to hope that there still might be some way out of this for me? Is there any chance it could just…up and leave, as mysteriously as it took me over? I’d do some time, sure—if the cops held their fire long enough to take my surrender—but how long a stretch could it be? Unless that poor girl from the gallery didn’t make it…

I suppose I’ll find out soon, one way or another. It’s not like this can go on forever…

And the sirens keep getting closer.