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Decomposition with Interest

Anxiety or a Transaction?

By Vinn!Published 3 years ago 8 min read
1

I have a strange relationship with Psychopomps.

There’s Thanatos, who everyone’s forced to know. He’s the plain old grim reaper on your Styrofoam Halloween decorations you see at the bargain store on clearance. Then there’s lesser known Charon, the stygian boatman to the underworld. But the unlikely one everyone seems to overlook (and yet, refuses so stubbornly to forget me) is Hermes, the Greek god of wealth. It’s strange how someone whose identity is formed almost entirely around coin would find joy in taking life, but I guess he takes the whole “thief” title pretty seriously- he’s the god of that all the same. It’s his fault money and death mix like salt in a vat of hot water.

I shouldn’t have gone to the bank today.

I could have prevented the couple hours that came after, and not even setting $21.38 (which are safe numbers, along with 12, 25, 30, and 44) as my automatic savings withdrawal almost two decades prior was going to fix my actions. I should have known better, but what was I to do? The landlord was going to blow a gasket if I e-transferred the rent again this month, and none of my bank’s ABM’s were working, because of course they weren’t- this was in the books.

“It… looks like you have another savings account here, Sir. Let’s, uh,” she slurred, fingers typing something unintelligible at lightspeed. “See how much is in it?”

I suddenly couldn’t feel my toes.

“No, no thank you, that’s okay! Just hand my card and cash over please, If I don’t get my rent paid in the next half hour I won’t have an apartment to pay rent on,” I stammer, shaky twigs for fingers held out in want.

“20,000 dollars, here or there,” she crooned, ignoring me, chapped lips taunting me with a five digit number.

I shook my head. “No. You’re mistaken. Card, please.”

“The number is here in front of me, honey. Do something nice with it. Got any family members? A student? Could come in useful.”

I coughed. “Yeah. An 18 year old daughter.”

“Lovely! You’ve got all this money in this account and you completely forgot about it. It’s like a gift from your past self. How do you forget something like that?”

Forget isn’t the word I would use.

The year before my daughter Chrysa was born I had come to marry my wife, Poppy. As a flower blooms to make more, so did she, creating a bud that donned hair as bright and fiery as hers. Their stems wrapped tightly around my fingers as I gave to their every whim, enamored just to have them grow next to me. You only witness true beauty once in a lifetime, and somehow I had the privilege of loving such beauty alongside raising it. A family of Poppies and Chrysanthemums.

Poppy had taken my anxiety driven quirks in stride: the tapping, the ruminating, the before bed rituals. As I washed my face and brushed my teeth next to her in the early hours of each night, I wondered how I could ever be so lucky as to find someone warm enough to think I was cute as I’d twist the doorknob twice, step in then out, then head under the covers.

Until she convinced me to seek medical help for OCD.

Maybe I do have OCD, but just wanted to keep everyone safe. If refusing to take the fast route to work or plugging and unplugging everything twice was going to make sure my family didn’t get sick, what was the big deal? I thought that was a common goal shared between the both of us, but she wasn’t having it.

Soon I was on every medication in existence and I was as nauseous as she was with a tiny person inside of her. Other than throwing up and sloshing cherry scented disinfectant into the toilet bowl every other morning, not a whole lot in my life changed because of the little plastic tablets. It wasn’t long before I had cut them out of my life in favor of the worry- one of those was working better than the other, and it wasn’t the expensive one left uncovered by my insurance plan. Ceasing my prescription allowed us leeway to start a savings account for Chrysa’s future endeavors, whatever those were to be. Putting in an automatic 20 or so bucks that we didn’t exactly have every week meant that maybe one day our debt would be her gain.

The first increment, however, didn’t come from my own account. It came from a classic black journal I assumed was gifted to her by the In-laws at her shower, a stack of crisp bills stuck within the bindings of the cover. I thought the gift strange at the time, but everything has a motive.

So when Poppy started declining, I knew what the culprit was.

“We had sushi the day before”, she groaned, damp face cloth draped over her flush forehead. “You can’t trust anything from a grocery store deli, they’ll put anything on the shelves if it doesn’t get wasted.”

“Honey, you need to see a doctor. Let’s go to emergency, this could hurt the baby.”

“I don’t need to see a doctor because some uncooked fish isn’t agreeing with me, Rej.”

“...What if it isn’t food poisoning?”

“You’re just catastrophizing again.”

I mean, sure, correlation doesn’t equal causation, but the look of the notebook dropped without a card into the pits of a paper gift bag had carved an itch into my brain I wasn’t willing to scratch.

“I am not!” I stressed, tension stinging my clenched fingertips. “I am not catastrophizing! Do you really think your mother would give you that as a baby shower gift?!”

Her irises shot momentarily to the right as if to make sure I didn’t notice. “Yeah, why not? What does that have to-”

“Poppy, You wouldn’t be able to sift through all the stuff she’s given you over the past nine months if you were going to be paid an hourly wage to do it! She gave you a Birchwood bassinet she commissioned for you personally as a surprise, and she couldn’t even keep her lips shut long enough to properly keep it a secret. She had no reason to keep this one a secret. She didn’t even put her name on it. Poppy,” I scrambled into Chrysa’s room, throwing bags and tissue paper into the pastel wasteland on the floor. After finally locating the notebook, no later did I shove it under her reddening nose. “This isn’t your mother’s writing.”

The notebook resting against her bloated belly was her own personal Medusa; her face stone towards the flimsy yellow note for longer than I’ll comfortably admit.

And then, quietly, she spoke.

“So, What? What is it then?”

I blinked, but that’s never been a sufficient answer.

“What is it then? Tell me. Tell me,” she begged, her shaking hands pulling my wrists. “Tell me who put it here! Tell me who gave me this notebook so I could get some deadly virus that’ll kill us all off! Is that what you think? Is that what this is?!”

“Poppy, I-”

“Yes it is! This is what it always is! It’s never anything rational, you have to go to extremes with everything! I’m sick and tired of going out of my way for things that just aren’t there, Rejjie!” Her voice was raw behind the tears I heard break behind her eyes, knuckles white around my bruising arm.

“You’re not well, Rej,” she shrugged, her shoulders like titans succumbing to the sky. “I don’t know what to say anymore. You don’t listen to me, you obviously aren’t retaining anything from the therapist you’re sucking us dry for, you gave up your meds when you barely tried… do you have any interest in trying anymore?”

“So much. So much, just,” I sighed, my breath hot. Desperation wasn’t a language I could afford to speak fluently anymore, after three trimesters and however many more months of our relationship. “Trust me. Trust me, please?”

Mouth pressed into a silent line as if to consider my plea if even for a moment, she grabs the wad of cash and heads to the kitchen and down the stairwell.

“Then you won’t complain when I bring this to the bank.”

I didn’t, truthfully, as much as I wanted to. I wasn’t in the position to.

I did, however, complain when a doctor walked into our room to inform us of what a diagnosis of parental Listeriosis could do- and did- to our first born daughter.

Poppy didn’t complain when I expressed my discomfort with putting the newly freed money towards funeral expenses, either. Nobody would be touching that bad omen with a five mile pole, so “forget” isn’t the word I would use regarding the existence of the money that slowly accumulated over the course of what should have been my daughter's life- I would sooner use “avoid”.

Frankly, I didn’t think the outcome would be anywhere near 20,000 dollars, but I assume that’s just a dent in the pocket of a God in exchange for my kid.

I shouldn’t have gone to the bank today, but I did. I got my rent paid if anything, and a bonus is that I can finally put the money towards something productive!

Hermes will be pleased to know he scored a wife as beautiful as mine, and while it can’t bring Chrysa back, putting his money towards Poppy’s casket seems like the appropriate ending for the both of us.

I have a strange relationship with Psychopomps.

I think we can come to some sort of agreement.

fiction
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About the Creator

Vinn!

My name is Vinn, I'm a trans guy, I'm a student, and sometimes words fall out of me.

I write about things I've experienced in journal form! I enjoy social justice and digital art, and I currently navigate the world with OCD.

I'm 20!

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