Instead of working on the Amtek account, William Morton stares at his wife’s Instagram. She stands near her black folding chair with hands on hips, a living cliché. He grabs his belly in discomfort. William Morton, VP-Sales, finds rolls of fat where there was once a six-pack. In grad school, he’d studied Tae Kwon Do under Allen Steen. Allen Steen! Daily workouts beneath a 1976 photo of Steen vs. Chuck Norris…
Even to himself, he sounds like an old man. Something feels strange in his gut, hollow as hunger but without the gnaw.
“Back in five, kid. Cover my line?”
“You bet, Bill-my-man!”
Look at that kid’s hungry eyes, look how he… no, they
smirk at the small grunt of effort it takes to go vertical.
Cupcake crumbs erupt from a crease in Morton’s trousers and scatter across the desk.
“Fuck.”
It’s a corporate word that elicits no comment from the young vulture in the next cubicle.
Morton closes himself into a stall in the empty men’s room where the vulture won’t follow him, untucks his striped shirt, lifts it to expose his watermelon belly. Where the brown fur should thin into a line, there is a hole. He blinks. It’s a golfball-sized hole, like one would see in a cartoon. Black inside. Dark. It doesn’t hurt. One hand moves toward the hole but stops short of touching it. The hand hovers in the air, a perch for an invisible thought. Morton closes his eyes, dizzy with impossibility. A hole? In his gut? His sternum trembles. He belches.
Although he’s alone, he excuses himself aloud for the wet sound. Polite habit. His throat smacks of the burrito he’d nuked for lunch a couple of hours ago, with an added wash of acid.
And there, inside the stall at the exact level of the hole, amid a splash of wet cupcake: a tiny half-digested splatter of Mexican beef with cheese. Repulsive. Fascinating. The hole in his belly definitely exists.
Nothing else seems to have changed. His bare chest is passable, still barreled like in college, furred thick and brown, though a few white strands ghost through like mealworms ruining the meat. The skin around the edges of the hole is brown, dry and almost cauterized, as if something had emerged, hot and fiery.
He goes as far as pulling up Dr. Katzen’s name in his phone contacts, but then his finger hovers. What would he say? There’s no pain, no. It’s not bleeding. I have no idea how long it’s been there. I can’t bring myself to poke a finger inside.
The time he’d thought he was having a heart attack and it was gas, his wife had hidden her expression like a fourthgrade teacher watching her stupidest student write the wrong answer on the board again.
He tucks his phone away, stares at the food globule creeping down the wall. He can’t just leave it. We are men of action, Henry Parker said at the last team-building event.
I see you in Atlanta next year, Morton. Seattle, even.
Seattle is still open for him;, she keeps saying. Like they live in a rain forest. Meanwhile, her documentaries win awards. The half-digested food inches down the wall.
