Into The Black Maw: Confessions Of A Death Custodian – “The Blood-Spattered Bride”

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Sleep had me by the throat — deep, wet sleep. The kind where time isn’t real and your bones don’t belong to you. Where the body becomes a misplaced rumor.

I was deep under — slogging through the sludge of the REM zone, shoulder to shoulder with my pet demons, gnashing their teeth and laughing in tongues. Those filthy, loyal things. Made from the most lamentable parts of me. We danced in the bogwater between lucid black dreams, drunk on whatever psychic bile ferments when the soul’s off the clock.

We were fucking around in some shared mental junkyard when my work phone’s ringtone ripped through the haze like a boxcutter across supple flesh. A sharp, electronic scream that flayed the moment open, yanking me through a tunnel of glass and static back into the meat of the world. Like being born backwards.

Not a sound, but a wound.

I tore out of sleep mid-convulsion, my heart drumming war songs against my ribs like it had tasted blood in a dream. Mid-through the second ring and I already had the damn phone flipped open, I didn’t need to see the screen. I didn't need to see anything. There was only one voice at the end of that maelstrom.

Me: I’m up.

Dispatcher: Got one ten minutes out.. Address incoming by email.

Me: Copy. On my way…

Click

The prick had already hung up before my last word finished bleeding out. They always vanish quickly, like they’re scared they’ll catch what I have if they linger. No good mornings, good byes, or “how did you sleep fucko?”. Just the coordinates of some new sorrow, then silence.

I sat there in the dark — observing the static flicker behind my eyelids like bad reception. I usually had a solid hour and a half, sometimes more if I had to slither across county lines. But not this time. This one was close.

I could’ve stood under hot water ’til my skin peeled, maybe brewed something scalding and watched the steam snake up like a methed-out ghost. But fuck it — I wanted to get there, burn through this, and be done. A shower could wait and coffee was a joke. This felt like a quick pull, a drive-by reaping. There’s nothing like flat-fee body dragging baby. The dead don’t haggle and the system didn’t care how warm the body was or how long it took to bag it.

I pushed off the sagging couch I’d been haunting all week like a vagrant ghost. This festering piece of fruit I called a bed. The springs groaned like they knew the truth — that I wasn’t getting better, but just barely getting by.

The house around me was silent — thick with the hush of people still dreaming. Lavender diffusers, soft linens, sweet sleep. Good people, mostly. They deserved better than a shade like me prowling their quiet. But I needed somewhere to fester. Somewhere to pretend I could actually pass for human.

Still, that ringtone haunted the silence. Loud. Ugly. Too alive and feral to be skulking through this place. I should’ve buried it weeks ago.

Before it started calling things worse than me.