Chocolate Soup for the Soul

I was shopping at a boutique called Chocolate Soup, where the clerks were so tight-assed that when they farted it sounded like a piccolo and smelled like lavender lattes. Their faces were pinched and smug. It was obvious they hadn’t taken a dump in weeks and felt entitled to a monument carved in their constipated honor.

Ashka, Nina, and Carlyle, smelling of old money, frat jizz, and useless Elizabethan Poetry BAs, were moored behind the desk, their microbladed eyebrows peaked high, judging everyone against the silk wall of their Hampton summers and Daddy’s trust fund.

I dropped two thousand duckets here last month, but to Ashka and the Piccolo-Farters, I was just a blur in a Faded Glory tee. Maybe it was Brad Pitt’s facial blindness, or maybe my Botox had finally surrendered. I didn’t care. I had a pea-green Trans Am idling in the lot and a case of Mad Dog 20/20 chilling in the trunk. White trash wins the Lotto: I’m so rich that people want to suck my butthole, and so trashy that I don’t give a fuck.

My sister, Sam, was an Army Ranger navigating the strollers with military precision. Lieutenant Mom barked orders: “40% off to the left, BOGO to the right, final clearance in the back.”

My little nugget slept like an angel, her rabbit-fur kitty clutched in her chubby little hands. But my demon-slayer nephew Devon, a 26-month-old serial killer in the making, launched Cheerio rockets and screeched like an M80. He was in a pissy mood because there weren’t any knives or explosives lying around for him to play with.

 Carlyle wandered over, her judgy Whole Foods eyes scrutinizing me like I was a can of expired Vienna sausages. Her voice was a fried electric wire and a jostled orange juice can filled with gravel.  “Can I help you?”

“Unless your tits are leaking milk and you can feed my kid, then no.”

Vocal-fry Girl froze like a dirty diaper in a snowbank. I looked at her pants to make sure she didn’t piss herself. She mumbled something about needing to do some inventory and scurried off. Yeah, you do that, Sweetheart. Take inventory of your crappy attitude and, while you’re at it, have your rich daddy buy you some voice lessons so you don’t sound like such a creaking, croaking, whiny little bitch. Maybe put that Elizabethan poetry degree to good use by scrawling some rhymes in the city park restroom.

I popped a piece of Nicorette gum into my mouth and chomped down. It tasted like a forest fire, a gallon of Lysol, and used tampons—my tastebuds screaming for mercy. God, I missed my smokes, but I knew my kid would miss her mom a lot more if she keeled over dead from lung cancer. I needed to stay around for as long as I could.

Mom waved her hands, her nose wrinkled in a way that suggested she’d just discovered that this snooty store housed weapons of mass destruction. She hollered, “There’s a pile of crap on the floor! And my God, it smells just like roast beef!”

I looked down. Eden was asleep. I pulled her back as Mom continued ranting about the consistency, color, and shape of the poop. She was a car alarm with teeth—incessant, piercing, and making you want to smash a window or shoot out some taillights the second she opened her mouth.

“Keep the wheels out of the sludge!” she barked in her Emergency Broadcast voice. “That’s a steaming pile of hepatitis! Someone call hazmat or OSHA!”

The clerks, who looked like they’d just downed rubbing alcohol shooters and rusty nail chasers, shot daggers at my sister and me. They saw two nasty women with toddlers who had clearly desecrated their gleaming hardwood floors. The pizza swirled in my gut like a stubborn turd that wouldn’t flush. It was the smell—that god-awful aroma of a bovine-and-gravy lunch’s butthole evacuation. I found myself wishing it had been a vegetarian who dropped the deuce; those little rabbit turds of theirs would be a piece of cake to pick up.

The bougie batik dressing room curtain, which likely cost more than my monthly salary, was partially open. Sam was hunkered down in the foxhole with her two-year-old, Ted Bundy Jr. My heart sank. Devon was a mystery pooper, a little shit who once took a mega-dump in the dog’s bowl while my sister praised him for his effort.

I stepped toward the curtain, expecting the stench to knock me flat, prepared for the “my kid did it” confession. But instead, my sister leaned in and whispered, “It wasn’t him. Look at the old man.”

I looked toward the cash register. There stood an elderly couple, perfectly calm, as if they were buying a cashmere sweater and not standing in the middle of a biohazard. He was wearing tan shorts, and there it was: a dark, wet trail of diarrhea mapped down his leg, smeared across the fabric like a signature of his own collapsing dignity.

I looked again and I saw it. His face was a white sheet of paper filled with scribbles, chicken scratch, and random numbers going every which way. My Gramma carried that same confused expression when she was locked up in that hellhole of a nursing home. Poor guy, he looked like a man who had survived two wars only to be defeated by a roast beef sandwich in a place that sold lavender lattes and hated the sight of his filthy shorts and shaking hands.

The Piccolo-Farters were circling him like vultures in stilettos, ready to peck out whatever pride he had left. “Sir, you could have asked to use the bathroom, you know! What were you thinking? You’re disgusting.”

The man shivered, haunted eyes like a rescue dog cringing in a cage. His wife’s face sprung a leak and her shoulders shook. “I’m so sorry. He has Alzheimer’s, but he was having a good day. I thought if I brought him along… he’d be happy. I’ll, I’ll pay for the mess. Please try to understand.”

The trio crossed their arms and scowled. They flashed a row of white marble teeth,  palace columns guarding throats full of lies. They were sharks that had just bitten their own tongue—dead eyes, cold blood, and a mouth full of expensive, serrated bone.

Nina hissed, “Sounds like it’s a ‘you’ problem to me. Keep him locked up and in diapers and never come back here again. And by the way, there’s a mop in the bathroom—clean it up or I’ll report you for elder abuse.”

The other Yas Queens nodded, lips puckered tight, feasting on a meal of arrogance and the flesh of a beating heart ripped from a weaker person’s chest. Ashka squeezed back a giggle.

Oh, hold my beer, darlin’! You ain’t getting away with dissing this poor man. I cleared the rust out of my throat, coughed up some wet cement, and hocked a green, bubbling loogie right on Ashka’s three-thousand-dollar suede boots.

She looked down, her face twisting like she’d just seen a ghost made of bile. The ‘Yas Queens’ were frozen, their pastry puff smiles finally cracking. I didn’t give them time to scream. I leaned in, the taste of Nicorette and victory sharp on my tongue.

“Clean that up? No, Ashka, she’s not gonna do that because I’m buying the floor! See this gold card? That’s ten million dollars of ‘fuck you’ money from a Scratch-Off I bought at a gas station while you were  getting your landing strip waxed smoother than a bowling ball for your sixty-year-old sugar daddy who can’t get it up until your Hooha lawn has been scalped and the clippings are stashed away in a garbage bag so the wifey of forty years doesn’t find out.

All you Yas Queens know how to do is suck dick, bleed your dad’s checking account dry, and treat people like dogshit clinging to the bottom of your shoes. On the outside, I get it, you’re a million bucks. But on the inside, you ain’t nothing but a clearance Dollar General chocolate Easter Bunny, half-melted before you leave the store.

So, here’s the news: You’re fired. All three of you. Consider this your final notice. And don’t you dare look at that man like he’s a ‘problem.’ You think you’re better than him because you smell like overpriced French cologne? Life is nothing but a series of blowouts. It’s a messy, stinking conveyor belt where people clean up your shit and, if you’re lucky, you get to return the favor. Sometimes you’re the one scrubbing the carpet, and sometimes you’re the one needing the towel.

But none of you—with your sparkly teeth and your ‘Yas Queen’ bullshit—have ever lived a real day in your lives. You’ve never stood in a shower and watched the poop flakes swirl down the drain while you washed the dignity back into someone you love. You’ve never hosed a friend’s driveway after an explosive cow-patty episode or scrubbed a friend’s dignity back into a pair of filthy trousers.

You’re terrified of a little roast beef sludge? You aren’t even human yet. Until you’ve crapped yourself and realized the world didn’t end because someone loved you enough to wipe you, you don’t know a damn thing about ‘style.’

So get out in the real world. Get down and dirty. Go lose control of your bowels and roll in it until you find your soul. And once someone cleans you up and you realize you aren’t the center of the universe—then you give me a call. Maybe then I’ll give you your jobs back. But until then? Stay out of the splash zone.”

I looked at them, their faces were red like beets boiled alive. They clutched their designer handbags and their 200-gallon-sized Stanley Cups infused with cucumbers and lime, like I was going to steal them. They performed a collective haughty hair flip and simultaneously shouted, “Fuck you, trailer trash, and the cheap broomstick you rode in on!”

I flipped them the bird and smiled wide. “For a fancy degree, you don’t know shit about grammar—never end a sentence on a preposition. Take that and shove it up your iambic pentameter!”

Meanwhile, my military reinforcements—Mom and Sam—grabbed the bleach, paper towels, trash bags, and wipes from the trunk of my Trans Am, a Costco on wheels. I tossed a bottle of MD 20/20 to the sweet older lady. “You stay right here. We’re going to get your husband cleaned up. Take some big gulps of this stuff; it goes down hard, but comes up easy. It’ll dull the pain of your day.”

We got him cleaned up in a jiffy and wrapped him in Devon’s Winnie the Pooh comforter and sent them on their way, with five crisp one-hundred-dollar bills as a thank you for his service to our country and a show of support that not everybody in the world sucks.

We turned out the lights in Chocolate Soup and piled into the Trans Am. Mom was having a bitch fit. “Why the hell am I always in the back seat? I’m the oldest. I deserve to ride shotgun.”

Instead of saying, “Because you’re safer back there, Mom, and I’m not ready to see you go,” I shouted, “Woman, it’s because you’re a huge pain in my ass!”

Then I spun cookies in the parking lot, kicking up a cloud of dust and mud, Mom and the kids screaming and laughing like maniacs in the back. I shifted the gear and tore out of there like a bat out of Hell.

When we reached cruising altitude, Sam turned off my Mötley Crüe CD and said, “So you bought the store. Good for you.”

I laughed, “Actually, I didn’t. I just wanted to see the look on all their faces when they realized a ‘trailer trash’ loogie costs more than their commission. Besides… I never liked the smell of the place.”

I rolled down the windows, shut off the CD, hands gripping the wheel, and floored it all the way to Walmart. There was no way some skanky hotbox would beat me to a Faded Glory yoga pants sale.

Johnny Boogles and the Gap-Toothed Bitch

Cath lay there frustrated, exasperated, her diddling fingers doing jack shit as her deformed clit played hardball more than ever. Next to her, rolled onto his side with his tiny, flaccid dick resting on his inner thigh, was her husband—or Noodle Dick, as she’d caught some of her co-workers referring to him—fast asleep, farting, snoring and drooling.  

“Okay for some,” she muttered, slamming her fists into the duvet on either side of her. “Noodle Dick.” Cath giggled, but then recalled the cock someone had drawn into her mouth on the photo at the front of her store. Bastards. If I do ever find out who did that . . .

She unclenched her fists and balled them again, scrunching up handfuls of bedclothes. 

“Kinda looks like a rocket ship with sparks, not a squirting prick,” one of her customers had commented, passing her by in the shop foyer, where the offending article stood on a plinth.

The large, crudely sketched appendage had the words HUBBY’S COCK etched up its veiny centre, along with the words—which someone else had clearly added, as the handwriting was different—NOODLE DICK. 

“Take it down!” Cath scolded the morning cleaner. “Now!” she added, stamping her heeled foot. Fucking twit, she thought, giving the staff member a death glare. Her face burned scarlet as she gazed at the added words again. Fuck’s sake. “Get rid. Immediately,” she snapped, clicking her fingers. 

Breathe, Cath thought, relaxing her hands, looking again at her husband of over ten years. Pathetic. A three-pump wonder. 

However, she knew she was being harsh on him, as no man could make her come thanks to her warped clit, which had looked much like a miniature cauliflower ear since birth. Hell, she could only get herself off every now and then, and that was only because she had found that being a total bitch and cunt to her staff, friends and family got her hot. 

Some days, when Cath was a mega-twat, she could orgasm without touching herself; memory alone was enough. On the days and nights she had the urge to stroke her clitty cat, or was struggling to orgasm with hubby, she would think of times she’d embarrassed people. Stepped on them. Talked to them like they were utter shit, knowing they couldn’t do anything. She held the power. She was their God. She could fire them at any time, for anything, and nobody could stop her.

So what’s wrong tonight? she wondered, unable to climax even after slating her husband’s naff performance, thinking his humiliation would serve her purpose. But nope, nothing. Not even a twinge. 

Cath had even conjured some of her favourite berating recollections while hubby had plugged away, such as the dozy baker who worked for her. “The weirdo with a beardo,” she whispered, smiling. One day the big bastard had thought he could cow her down with his size and aggression, but she had soon put that puppy in its place, breaking him in two by wielding her power axe and threatening his job. Since that tussle, the baker bowed to her. Kept his nose clean. 

It’s beautiful, having such a beastly specimen under my power, she thought, thinking that would spark a bolt of pleasure through her pussy. But no, nothing. 

Cath lifted her head off her pillow to stare past her flabby pouch of a belly. “You little bald bastard. Why won’t you work for Mammy?”

Her FUPA flopped back into view and her face twisted into something ugly. She could feel it’s grotesqueness, knowing then that most of her colleagues had seen how obnoxious and horrid she was.

“Watch out, the gap-toothed bitch is coming,” she’d heard someone say once. 

“Seen her teeth? Could park a bike between them!” another had said. 

“A regular werebeaver,” a third mocked. 

“Tits like limes,” a fourth teased. “Itty-bitty, with a zingy-zangy taste.”

The past laughter of her staff echoed in her ears. 

Fuckwits. They’ll all pay soon enough, one at a time. They’re just fucking numbers. 

Well, not all of them. There was Motormouth Miguel, who shit-stirred, caused trouble, spread lies and triggered fear and panic among the ranks. A rat. A danger. MM would spy and go running to Cath with any scrap of news or gossip he could find. My pet, she thought.

Then there was her other general, that faggotty, long streak of piss and rent boy, Tomasino. He was a special case, and once she’d gone through his phone and found photos of him wearing women’s underwear and sticking various objects, like knitting needles, down his urethra, he quicklyforgot about his ambition to replace her as store manager. Watching him quiver and hearing him stutter in her presence set her little cauli-clit to tingling on many an occasion.   

All these thoughts and images had rekindled her sex life over the past few years. But for the past fortnight or so, nothing, no matter how much she tried.

I’ll have to start being extra cunty on Monday, she thought, grinning. But it didn’t look like she was getting any satisfaction tonight.

She turned off the bedside lamp and settled down in the darkness, thinking about the odd, annoying occurrences from the past week. It had started with her coffee tasting slightly bitter and off from Monday, then the weird phone calls at all hours began, and she had got the shits after eating gone-off doughnuts from work, and finally her car had refused to start. Maybe that was why she was having problems coming? Stress?

Karma, a voice at the back of her mind suggested. 

Nah, that bitch knows better than to fuck with me! 

Cath’s mobile vibrated on the nightstand beside the bed and she jumped. A groan stuck in her throat. Not again, she thought, snatching up her phone and answering the call. “Yes?!”

“How about another dad joke?” the caller asked, laughing idiotically. “Or, why don’t I tell you why you were really sick after eating those doughnuts?”

Cath froze. The hair on her arms and at the back of her neck stood on end. Is this freak watching me? Cameras? Phone tap? “Who the fuck are you?”

“I squirted extra special cream into those doughnuts for you. Pew-pew-pew!,” he said, giggling. “You got my ickle, pearly white swimmers slithering around inside your guts, child. Hee-hee-hee!” 

Cath’s stomach flipped. “Is this Greg?” she blurted, thinking maybe it was a role-playing thing, and maybe this would be the catalyst to her finally achieving an orgasm.

“No, it’s not your hairy baker, who thinks he’s the dog’s bollocks.”

Cath sat bolt upright. “Then who are you, you little twat?!”

“Been struggling to come this week? Ha-ha-ha! That’ll teach you, being such a venomous cunt,” he said. “And to think, it was working out so well for you. Had you not pushed your cuntish ways so much the last couple of weeks, I, Johnny Boogles, would not be . . . haunting you.”

“Haunting?”

“Yes. You see, I’m the Cunt Demon, and, when someone has been too much of a cunt to innocent people, then I’m brought in.”

“For what? I’ll call the police!”

Johnny scoffed. “Best of luck with that one. And in answer to your question, well, that’s a simple one. I was brought in to annoy the living shit out of you, for all eternity. To out-cunt the cunt.”

He’s a fucking nutter!“I’ll have you arrested, and I also know people who will—” 

“Who will what, Catherine? Do me over? Scare me off? Again, good luck with that, as I’m a demon. I’m not of flesh and blood, you dumb cu—” 

Cath ended the call. She worked to control her breathing, then muttered, “Fucking fre—”

“You can cancel my calls,” the caller’s voice boomed, “or hang up on me, or not answer at all, but I will always be with you. Forever. Until the sun burns out.”

Cath screamed, her knickers dampening, a dribble of piss trickling down her leg. 

From the darkness came the thing of nightmares, stepping into a shaft of moonbeam that speared through the window and slightly parted curtains. 

A breath hitched in her throat. She pulled back, sinking into her pillows, pulling the duvet up to her chin. “W-what are you?”

“I’m Johnny Boogles, the thing that pissed in your morning coffee every day last week, who squirted hot jizz into your doughnuts, and who’s been constantly ringing you with prank calls and crap dad jokes.”

“You did something to my car too?”

Johnny smiled. “Yes. Sugar does awful things to an engine.” 

Cath looked at the black, floating thing hovering above the foot of her bed. Its body, cloaked in raggedy black clothes that flapped wild as though a tremendous wind howled through the room, looked squashed. Crushed. Ribs jutted out here and there, along with squished organs and flat hands and feet. Johnny’s face and head resembled a mangled pumpkin, his brains oozing out of a smashed skull. 

“Pretty, aren’t I? My beauty is the result of being an absolute tool. It got me killed, in the end, and the gods thought this image befitting of me in the afterlife as I come to do Karma’s work. She’s the real bitch, you know. You’ve got nothin’ on her.”

Cath’s stomach cramped, her eyes lowering to Johnny’s horse-sized cock, which hung from out of a hole in his shredded trousers. It was warty and oozing pus. 

“Oh my fucking God,” she said, turning her head and throwing up on her husband. He didn’t stir. When she was done heaving, she wiped warm bile and chunks from her lips, scowling at him. “How can you sleep though this, you dickhead?”

“Because he’s dead,” Johnny said. 

“Dead?” She turned to look at Johnny, his pendulous dick setting her off again.

“Yep. Karma sent me for him too.” Johnny licked his lips and grinned. “I know you like to dish it out, but I hope you can take it too. Because you’re in for a world of hurt, you gap-toothed bitch,” he said, cackling.

To Reference That Joy Division Song Again

I keep my curtains drawn, lights low, paranoia level high. Those fucking nosy neighbors called the cops on me while I was washing the dishes with the kitchen window open, not yet owning drapes or blinds. They told the cops they saw me break out a “butcher knife” and actually carve my arms into bloody ribbons while giving them “death grins” and other weirdo shit that the cops agreed, after arriving to check things out, seemed ludicrous. I mean, I was wearing a perfectly clean white button-down, home from work. If I’d been using “a butcher knife to carve my arms into bloody ribbons,” like my drugged-out neighbors asserted, my perfect white shirt would look kind of different, you know? Maybe with some reddish stains, maybe actively dripping (or worse) blood staining it or literally soaking through the cloth, confirming their indictment of me rather than showing the cops they were weirdo troublemakers. Obviously.

Except.

Except the cops never asked to look at my actual arms, torso or anywhere else, nor to roll up my sleeves or disrobe so they could ascertain for themselves the truth of what seemed obvious – clean white shirt, no blood, no harm, no foul, right?

Except things were momentarily interesting when the younger cop saw a raised white scar on my left hand and asked about it. We all laughed when I admitted that I’d done some stupid things in college and this had been one of them, that when going through Hell Week near the end of pledging my fraternity, I’d drunkenly lost a stupid dare/bet and was forced to endure two seniors carving the fraternity’s Greek letter symbols into my hand with a knife. Hurt like hell and no one had thought I’d basically be branded for life, but there you are – crazy, officers, right? 

Right.

Though if you actually looked hard at that scar, it’d be tough to make out which Greek letters, which fraternity. Some might look and conclude it was more likely the work of Freddy Kreuger, not drunk frat boys eager to score points. Honestly, I sure couldn’t guess what could be seen in that scar. It was an angry mish mash of cuts, slices and etchings amounting to chaos theory, not really what the power of suggestion would lead others to believe they saw. What and which realities are ever right anyway? I doubt anyone really knows.

I wanted to be left alone and finally was. First, one clueless cop admitted he’d always wondered what kind of weird shit those frat kids did. Laughed when I replied, “Obviously not just those drunken orgies you always see in the movies.

I was glad to see them go when they did because I was kind of surprised and relieved they hadn’t asked me to remove my shirt. If I had, I’d have a whole lot of explaining to do about all of the scars decorating my body – my arms, chest, inner thighs. The tic tac toe game carved into my chest over time with many beautiful tools, most especially my Cold Steel 15” serrated tanto I loved so much, nor the bloody serrated loving courtesy my Benchmade, SOG, Gerber, K-BAR, Kershaw and other beloved blades in my collection.

Yes, hard to explain but harder still, I imagine, the arms wrapped into rapidly dampening rust-colored Ace bandages, and I noticed, with some leakage that would be hard to explain. I mean, WTH, right?

As I ripped the bandages from my arms, you could see scars, scabs, open red and soaking wet cuts oozing blood, leaking blood, in a new development, even gushing blood, but it was the scars, those precious scars that were key to my identity, my very existence, that weren’t tats, weren’t Greek letters, weren’t pentagrams, but just like me, WEREN’T SHIT AND NEVER WERE SUPPOSED TO BE, because chaos theory can rule the mind and body just as legitimately as it seeks to explain other concepts more theoretical than the very real and tangible, if in a micro way, my personal needs, fears, beliefs, coping skills.

I mean no one would believe this shit, right? Who ever heard of a middle-aged man who cuts because foreplay sucks in comparison and he’s addicted to creating and maintaining scars of beauty and significance on his most loved and hated canvas?

Would never happen, right? I mean they’d lock anyone like that up, call him Hannibal or something like that because we’re not dealing with geniuses here, or creatives or artists. Pencil pushing, braindead cogs in the machine who pack heat, who will kill in a heartbeat but would call ME the sick one. My scars bear out my philosophy and my loves and fears. The other peoples’ lack of visible scars doesn’t hide their internal cancerous decay nor their fear of anyone not like them.

I call bullshit on them!

I like it better alone.

I always preferred Dessau’s cover of Joy Division’s “Isolation” to the original. Its industrial aggression that comes screaming out at you more accurately reflects my sense of personal isolation and my feelings than Ian Curtis’s distinctive voice sharing those same lyrics, but for me, the band’s near-synth pop sound that tries to drearily bounce along with the listener in an existential despair really undercuts the rage and bitterness I feel that few are more qualified to express on my behalf than Ministry’s Al Jourgensen, who apparently and fittingly produced the Dessau version. 

Maybe it’s really this simple. Joy Division’s version stood for a very real suicidal ideation as we would all find out. But Dessau’s “Isolation” could be just scar tissue layered on more scar tissue yet though the flesh decays and body weakens, the only suicide to be found is more likely invented by some pervy author seeking a harmony between control and chaos they’ll never attain – but it won’t kill them, their characters or the readers either. Just more scarring in a world of art for art’s sake. And maybe that’s good enough.