by Matt Kendrick
Trevor arrived on a Wednesday. He sidled in while I was sleeping and next morning he was there, squatting inside me. He was just like any other squatter. Unwanted. Unwashed. A stench to him like rotting turnips mixed with manure. I tried to evict him. I sought professional advice. One time I wrote him a letter but he just sent it back with a scrawl across the middle that read “ha ha ha!” Another time he’d scurried off to wherever squatters go to on a Thursday evening at precisely nine o’clock and I clamped my mouth shut, pinched my nose, clenched my buttocks, tried to hold myself like that for the rest of the night, determined he wouldn’t get back in. But the next day, Trevor had returned and he’d furnished my insides with mouldy furniture, bogey-coloured wallpaper, weird distorted landscapes by Dalí, Picasso and Munch. Trevor smokes. Sometimes he stubs out his cigarettes on the alveoli inside my lungs. About three months after he started squatting, he set up a micro-brewery in my gut where he ferments beer the colour of an unwanted thought. He never takes the bins out, just throw his food scraps in darkened corners where they fester and rot. He never cleans, never dusts, never does the washing up. He never showers. He pees in the bath tub. On Saturday evenings eight until late, he invites all his mates for drug-fuelled raves. Boom box dialled up high. The thud of the bass. When Trevor first moved in, he was as thin as the tendril from a spider plant. But now he is fat like a kiwano melon. He has the spikes to match. He has three heads and seven arms, stubby fingers that poke and prod. On Sunday mornings, sometimes Tuesday afternoons and sometimes Friday in the night, out comes his power drill or his chainsaw or his sledgehammer, and he hacks and whacks until my insides feel decidedly not right. They’ve not felt right for years. Ever since Trevor arrived on a Wednesday and refused to move back out.
*Trevor is the name I’ve given to my chronic illness which even after six years remains stubbornly undiagnosed. This piece is part of a wider essay called “Two-thousand-two-hundred-and-thirty-one Days Under the Weather”
Matt Kendrick is a writer, editor and teacher based in the East Midlands, UK. His work has been featured in various journals and anthologies including Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, Cheap Pop, Craft Literary, Fractured Lit, Ghost Parachute, and the Wigleaf Top 50.
Website: www.mattkendrick.co.uk | BlueSky: @mattkendrick.bsky.social | Twitter: @MkenWrites
Emerge Literary Journal 