Bone Appetit

Jerone cut through another thick clump of vines with his machete. The going was slow and hard with the group of botanists only managing to move no more than ten miles a day. Their goal was to discover new species of plants, document them and collect samples. The area of the Amazon that they had selected was one of the least explored parts of the country.

His thoughts wandered off to the day before he had left home. He had boasted to his wife, Tanya, that by the end of the trip, there could well be a plant named after him. “Fame at last,” he declared. His wife just rolled her eyes and continued packing the last of his clothes. If she left it up to him, he’d arrive in Africa with a rucksack full of nothing more than odd socks and ski apparel.

The humidity was really starting to get to him. He stopped at the edge of a small stream and cupped a handful of cool water into his mouth. The local guides that they had hired went into an immediate panic. One gave him a hard slap on the back causing him to spit out the fluid. Another opened his canteen and made Jerone rinse his mouth out before he was ordered to spit that out as well. They stared uneasily at each other, muttered something in their local tongue and slowly continued their journey.

He awoke in the middle of the night and sat bolt-upright in his tent. The fizzing sensation in his mouth was akin to him having eaten an entire box of Alka-Seltzer. He put a finger in quickly to try and ascertain where the discomfort from coming from and pulled it back out twice as fast. The agony that he felt as he touched his teeth was mind-numbing.

Over the course of the next few days, the pain intensified. He woke up one morning choking. He leant forward and gagged. Three teeth shot from his mouth onto his sleeping bag. He picked one up and looked at it in shock. He couldn’t believe that it was one of his own, it was in such a bad state of decay, chipped and rough all over. 

The following day the rest of the team arranged to have Jerone flown home. Whatever was ailing him needed proper medical attention, and fast. An infection caught in that part of the world would only worsen quickly due to the moist, hot environment.

Tanya sat in the consultation room as three doctors tried to explain the situation. Jerone had been placed in isolation for the three days since he had returned to the States. They took blood, bone, and tissue samples, circulated them to the top labs in the country and were now waiting for the results. Before leaving the hospital, she approached Jerone’s bed and, through the plastic curtain looked down lovingly at her husband. His face looked sunken as if it was a balloon slowly losing air. His eyes bulged from his sockets. She cried as she turned to leave.

Tanya visited every day for the next week witnessing his quick deterioration in real-time. Each hour he looked visibly worse.

One morning, at about 3am she was awoken by the ringing of the telephone. She knew who would be on the other end of the line before even picking it up.

She arrived at the hospital by cab and made her way to the isolation ward. Once there, she was met by a large group of medical staff. It appeared that his body, more specifically his bones were being eaten away from within, she was told. They tried to dissuade her from seeing her husband but she was determined to be with him at the end so she could say goodbye.

Looking at what remained of Jerone, Tanya collapsed in shock. What remained of her husband was nothing more than an empty sack of a human. With his bones almost entirely gone he was more akin to a puddle of blancmange than a person. It was as if with a zipper added, one might be able to wear him as a flesh suit.

The doctors explained that it seemed the ribs had been the last to be affected. When they finally were gone the weight of his flesh, muscle and skin would push down on his lungs and heart which would cause death. Unfortunately for Jerone, he was awake and aware of what was happening. The drugs that they had been using to put him into a chemically induced coma no longer seemed to work. His eyes darted about as he looked around the hospital room through the loose slits of skin which were once his eyelids. His face was very thin and contorted. Apart from his rib cage, he was almost flat, as if he’d been run over by a steamroller. He made gurgling sounds as he fought for breath as his mouth and throat collapsed in upon itself. The shape and contours of his brain were clearly visible beneath the skin of his head as there was no longer a skull to hide its form.

Within the next few hours, Jerone fought for every precious breath but inevitably died.

About three weeks after the funeral Tanya sat at the kitchen table drinking her coffee and read the morning paper. The service had been beautiful and was attended by so many friends, family, colleagues, and those who were just curious about the strange manner surrounding Jerone’s death. He had to be cremated due to medical concerns for the local area. The thought of that made her even sadder. They had promised that they would be buried alongside each other when their time came.

As she continued reading, she was drawn to a piece about a viral outbreak near their local airport. The symptoms were identical to that of her husband’s, and she knew it was the same affliction as they mentioned the small waterborne, wormlike creature responsible. She had already been advised that Jerone had succumbed to a calcium-eating organism that he had come into contact with in the Amazon, but now they had given it a name. She read it aloud ‘Jeronius Parasiticus’. She wondered whether her husband would have been proud of his new fame even though it wasn’t for having an exotic plant named after him.

∼ Ian Sputnik

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