WINNER, Winter 2024
The Screw Turn Flash Fiction Competition
BY GERARD J WAGGETT
“Your husband’s blood pressure was over 200 this morning. He really should be in a hospital.” Dr. Jude Saunders was not only violating patient confidentiality, he was doing so in a hotel room with the man’s wife.
Melinda pulled herself into a sitting position. She needed to know, “Can you get in trouble for not admitting him?”
“I suggested it. He refused. Thankfully,” Jude added, “he signed a waiver.”
“Bertie’s making this very easy for us.”
Jude found Melinda’s smile slightly demonic but sexy as hell. Unfortunately, he needed to get back to the office. Patients were waiting for him.
He pulled up his boxer briefs slowly, a reverse striptease for Melinda’s benefit. At age 47, his legs still completed marathons. Melinda’s husband Bertie . . . the man could barely drag his 417 pound body from the parking lot into Jude’s office—and not without resting in the lobby.
A man in such pathetic shape did not deserve a wife with the body of a dancer. A man with such disregard for his health didn’t deserve the second chance he’d been given.
Melinda had cooked up a way to right both those wrongs. She’d been doctoring his favorite foods and passing them off as low fat, low sodium. Her latest concoction: Cain’s mayonnaise seasoned with ground rosemary and honey mustard. The other day, she’d caught her husband eating it with his finger.
“Isn’t there something that can speed things along?” Melinda asked.
“Nothing that couldn’t be detected,” Jude replied.
“Would they really need an autopsy?” Melinda didn’t think so. “The man’s already had one heart attack.”
“It’s not worth the risk. And . . . why the sudden rush?”
“You can’t imagine what sex is like with someone whose body turns your stomach.”
Melinda was wrong about that. Jude’s ex-wife gained a disgusting amount of weight after she quit marathoning.
Melinda informed him, “It’s different when you’re underneath.”
Jude pulled up his zipper and promised her a solution before bedtime.
Bertie walked into the kitchen with his shirt unbuttoned and nothing underneath but himself.
Melinda knew the answer but had to ask, “What did your doctor want?”
“He’s ordering me to lay off sex. He’s afraid it might trigger another heart attack. Do you think I should get a second opinion?” Bertie asked this like he hadn’t already made up his mind.
“You can’t die on me.” Melinda meant that literally. The thought of lying trapped underneath her husband’s dead body—She suddenly couldn’t breathe.
Bertie stroked his hand over hers as he repeated, “Easy. Easy. Focus on something nice. Like dinner.”
Her husband had a knack for talking her through these attacks. She was going to miss that.
“We’re having chicken. I found a way to make it taste fried.” In other words, she was going to fry it. “You want a sandwich to tide you over?”
He did. “Ham and Swiss with your special mayo.”
Melinda suggested, “a bowl on the side for dipping.”
Bertie thanked her with a kiss on the cheek. “You take such good care of me.”
HE LOVED HIS MAMA AND HIS MAYONNAISE.
“That should be engraved on his headstone.”
Jude warned Melinda not to joke like that. “Some people think you watched Bertie die and didn’t call for help.”
“That’s not true,” she said. “I left the room.”
“Never repeat that.”
Melinda didn’t appreciate Jude ordering her around in her own house, in her own bedroom. She kicked one shoe and then its mate into the closet. “Come on,” she said, “we should be celebrating.”
“Here?” Jude couldn’t believe what she was suggesting.
She assured him, “The sheets are brand new.”
Jude hadn’t been thinking about the sheets. “It’s morbid.”
“Isn’t that how you described Bertie’s obesity?” she asked.
Morbid obesity was the clinical definition. Jude had described the man’s body as “repulsive.” He hated the way that his stethoscope sank into the quicksand of breasts the man shouldn’t have had.
Melinda’s breasts were waiting for Jude on the bed. She was lying across the brand new sheets completely naked, not even her wedding ring.
“Slow down,” she told him as he jumped on top of her. “We finally have time. Let’s make this a marathon.”
“What the hell?”
It took a second for Melinda to realize that Jude’s outburst wasn’t directed at her suggestion. It was in response to the intense weight that had suddenly descended upon them.
Jude craned his neck to the right and then to the left. “Can you see what fell on top of me?” he asked.
Melinda couldn’t see anything, but she recognized the weight. For years, she had suffocated underneath her husband’s mounds of fat.
“It’s Bertie.” Her husband had come back to bed.
“It’s not Bertie.” Jude didn’t believe that. What he did believe: This weight would crush them both if he didn’t do something quick.
He flattened his palms against the mattress on either side of Melinda’s shoulders. The man started every morning with one hundred push-ups.
For three blissful seconds, Melinda felt the weight lift off her chest. Unfortunately, as muscular as Jude’s arms were, they could only lift him a few inches. Then they buckled underneath the 417 pounds on his back. The force of his body slamming against Melinda’s cracked three of her ribs.
As soon as she regained her breath, she told Jude, “Try that again. This time I’ll help.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t move.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“I think my neck is broken.”
Melinda would have felt more sympathy for Jude’s injury if she weren’t pinned underneath him. Him and Bertie. All she could manage: “We can’t die like this.”
Jude disagreed. “And I’d rather die here and now than spend the rest of my life paralyzed.”
Melinda, who was not paralyzed, didn’t want to die—not here, not now, and not like this. Unfortunately, Jude’s body and Bertie’s presence were growing heavier and heavier against her chest, squeezing more and more air out of her lungs.
In addition to 11 books of soap opera trivia, Gerard J Waggett has published several crime stories in Mystery Magazine (formerly Mystery Weekly Magazine). The latest was a Sherlock Holmes adventure. In late 2022, his one-act play “Elizabeth” was published in the premiere issue of Dracula Beyond Stoker. Last spring, Archer’s anthology Dark Mirrors included his horror/science fiction hybrid “Operation Rat Poison.”