Clara’s slacking off, Marjorie thought. Clara, the home health aide, had parked her Acura in the driveway near Grammy’s old Cadillac. It had to be a hard job keeping things fresh-smelling and clean for an incontinent eighty-two-year-old with dementia.

Still, this odor was a bit strong.

Marjorie pressed the doorbell and heard the chime go off inside the apartment, followed by a loud sucking sound like feet being pulled out of mud. Or a wet fart.

Glub glub glub.

Marjorie leaned close to the door and called out, “Grammy? Clara?”

More moist sucking sounds.

Marjorie looked at her own vehicle, a Ford Fusion parked beside Clara’s Acura. Her husband Glen was in the driver’s seat, smoking a cigar and listening to music. Cigars were always his excuse not to come in when Marjorie checked on her grandmother —until the very last moments of the visit, that was. “She won’t remember anything anyway,” he always said, which was technically true. These days Grammy’s short-term memory dribbled away like water through a colander.

Glen wasn’t looking her way. Tapping at his phone, probably texting the girlfriend Marjorie wasn’t supposed to know about. She still hung onto the dream of domestic bliss, hoping Glen’s fling was one of those things that would fizzle when the novelty wore off.

Just like our marriage.

Marjorie pressed the doorbell a second time, and when she heard the sucking noises once again, tried the doorknob. It was unlocked. She pushed the door open and the full brunt of the odor hit her. It was more than the usual piss and shit aromas, an outcome of Grammy’s incontinence. This was a bouquet of putrescence, with swarms of buzzing house flies darkening the air and maggots vying for space on every surface.

Marjorie gagged, covered her mouth, and entered.

Her first step inside was as slippery as ice. She stood in a puddle of transparent red goo with tiny pieces of what looked like meat and bone suspended in it. The ooze formed an inch-thick ocean of slime across the entryway floor. It continued into the next room, turning the rug into a field of jelly crisscrossed with drag marks indicating the passage of something heavy.

Looking deeper into the fly-riddled living room, Marjorie could see by the flickering television that Grammy’s favorite chair was missing from its usual place. These days she spent all her time sitting in it and watching Bonanza reruns that were always new to her no matter how many times she saw them, stewing in her fully loaded adult diapers. There was a joke among the family members that when Grammy died the chair would need to be disposed of by a nuclear bomb.

The floor where the chair had rested all these years was coated in slime and marked only by indentations on the carpet. The chair itself was nowhere to be seen. Through the red tint of meat clots in the goo was a noticeable faded rectangular spot on the underlying matrix of the rug, lighter than its surroundings. A spot that light had not touched.

Until recently.

Who the hell took the damn chair? Marjorie wondered. Maybe Clara finally convinced Grammy to get rid of it.

Grammy’s wheeled tray sat nearby. A coagulated bowl of cereal and milk covered in flies and maggots rested next to an overturned glass of orange juice whose spilled contents had dried to a paste.

It had been there a while.

Glub glub glub.

The suction noises came from one of the other rooms. They formed a gargling voice, as if Grammy were speaking through a mouthful of water.

At least, it sounded like it could be Grammy.

Marjorie pulled up the neckline of her shirt to cover her mouth and nose, and went farther into the apartment. She treaded carefully through the slime, dispersing clouds of flies, maggots popping beneath her feet like pus-filled zits.

“Grammy, are you in here?” Marjorie called out through the fabric.

Gurgle gurgle. A sound like a virulent blast of diarrhea.

Maybe Grammy was in the bathroom. Marjorie slip-stepped down a short hall and peeked into the open bathroom door. More of the slime, maggots, and flies. The empty bathtub, toilet, and sink stood like monuments above the goo-smeared floor. The air smelled like week-old roadkill.

“Grammy?”

An answer came from somewhere nearby. At the end of the hall was a storage room, its door closed. To the right, Grammy’s bedroom. That door stood open, and sunlight shone through the windows and fanned out over the slimy rug in the hall. A light flickered as something crossed the room between the window and the hall —a shadow there one second, gone the next.

Marjorie looked into the bedroom. The card tables holding all of Grammy’s stuff were overturned, years of worthless magazines and knickknacks spilled over into the slime. The bed was the only item untouched. It was raised like a rectangular altar above the mess, the blankets stained by urine and god-knew what other liquids.

A clump of bone and entrails lay upon the blankets, a giant meatball in the center of a circle of coagulated purple blood. An elderly man’s face looked out from the mess. Marjorie thought she recognized him —one of Grammy’s neighbors in the senior complex. He wore a final expression of terror and pain, his eyes rolled up into his head so only the whites were showing.

Glub glub glub.

Marjorie turned toward the sound, barely making sense of the scene before her. Grammy’s chair was shuffling toward her. It had turned gelatinous, like the goo on the floor. The leather was wet and veiny, pulsing as if it had an inner heartbeat. A blob of material rested in its center, vaguely human in shape —as if that human and the clothes it wore had melted and were on the verge of fusing with the chair.

No, not on the verge of fusion…

The chair and its occupant were one.

Grammy’s dissolving form reclined on the chair, submerged within a blob of transparent protoplasm streaked with red and blue veins. When she opened her mouth, another gurgle came out.

Marjorie thought she heard her name in that sound, cold and empty of emotion.

Ropes of material extended around the base of the chair. Grammy’s innards stretched into tentacles that ended in snapping mouths, wriggling and burrowing into the coating of gel on the floor, vomiting up the meat-clot-goo that covered almost everything.

Held high above the back of the chair by a loop of intestine was a mangled torso being nibbled on by shorter tendrils taking dainty and crescent-shaped bites of flesh from it. The head was still attached and pitched to the side, long, gray hair dangling like a waterfall, strips of skin peeling off the face, eyeballs drooping from their sockets like overripe grapes.

Clara.

Marjorie stood like a deer in headlights as the chair dragged itself toward her. Then her survival instinct kicked in and she ran from the bedroom and slammed the door behind her.

“Whoo-eee!”

Glen had come in and was standing at the end of the hall in a swarm of flies, waving one hand before his face as if that would make the smell go away. “Lillian, did you drop dead in here or what?” He cocked his head to the side, having noticed the missing chair. “Somebody finally burn that thing?”

Glen smiled at Marjorie as she struggled past him.

“Did she drop dead?” he asked.

Marjorie guessed Grammy had at some point in the last week done just that. Died right on that piss and shit-saturated La-Z-Boy recliner watching Bonanza like she always did. And because Grammy didn’t believe in air conditioning, her body had begun to decompose in the heat, swelling and liquescing as she became a living part of her favorite piece of furniture.

This new form of life was banging against the closed bedroom door, calling for Marjorie with a liquid gargle, so much like a drowning person’s last plea for help.

At first Marjorie wanted to warn Glen about it, but as he came down the hall muttering with disgust she thought of how he was cheating on her and a calm determination took over.

“No, Glen. She’s not dead. But maybe you can go in there and move something for her. It’s too heavy for Clara.”

Glen heard the banging and said, “Nothing ever changes, Lillian. Everyone’s gotta cater to your demands.”

Marjorie had a side view as he turned the knob. When the door swung violently open and hit the chair, Glen’s eyes widened. “Lillian, this is—”

He was cut off by a swarm of flies seeking the moisture of his tongue and throat. They struck his teeth with dry clicking sounds and he gagged without dropping his eyes from the horror before him. Pale pink and shit-covered loops of intestine lashed out, securing his ankles and wrists and circling his neck.

Glen mewled and tried to kick backward as the Grammy chair wobbled out from the doorway and into the hall. It pulled Glen face first into the gelatinous remnants of Marjorie’s grandmother, which parted lengthwise and sucked Glen in up to his shoulders. He entered Grammy’s maw with a slurp, his screams muffled and body thrashing. The intestinal strands tore through his clothes and took bites from his skin in quick jabs, throwing blood, muscle tissue, and fabric into the air. One of the strands plunged through the back of his shorts. It burrowed into his asshole and emerged from his stomach, the mouth at its tip coated in a paste of half-digested chili. Another sheared off his cock, and Marjorie’s terror was overpowered by her triumph.

You won’t be fucking that slut from the deli anymore, she thought as more and more of Glen disappeared into the Grammy chair. Clara’s skull, still held high over the back of the recliner, watched it all with empty eye sockets.

“And you thought Grandma didn’t like you,” Marjorie said.

Glen stopped moving. In a single motion, the rest of him was sucked out of view. With a flatulent burp, the chair expelled his sweat-soaked sandals. They struck the wall and slid down onto the gooey rug.

The Grammy chair turned to face Marjorie. It bounced gently from one leg to the other, tendrils of intestine waving and shooting out excited jets of meat paste. The chair produced a string of sounds that might have been a sentence, something Marjorie could have deciphered on a conscious level if her mind was not so busy trying to process what she had just witnessed.

Sub-consciously she understood the meaning. It was woven into the sounds like a subliminal message.

I love you. You’re free now.

The chair turned around and hobbled back to the bedroom.

Marjorie left the apartment, making sure to lock the front door behind her.

She got into the car, which still smelled of Glen’s last cigar. She wasn’t going to miss that shit.

No body, no crime, she thought as she drove away.

About the Author:
Eddie Spohn is a resident of Long Island, New York. It is a place famous for its beaches, iced tea, and serial killers. Maybe it’s something in the water. Eddie paints houses by day and writes stories at night. He is not a member of the Irish mob, so painting houses means what it sounds like —not code for being a hitman. Please do not email him with lucrative offers to help you be rid of a pesky spouse, unless that entails painting your bedroom a color said pesky spouse will hate enough to move out of the house. (Pictured: The author’s co-writer, Furby the Cat, proofreading The Grammy Chair.)

---