Superman

Friday night. It’s an animal market. Hordes of bodies. They all want to be part of it. It’s party time.

Every weekend the Stag Parties. Packs of dribbling drunks.

Eat. Shit. Drink. Dump cum. Drink. Puke. Repeat.

Halloween costumes. Carrying a blow-up doll. Someone dressed as a cock. Shouting and swagging and bullying each other. Little boy gang playing the last game for one. Last night of freedom.

A gang gathered at my window. All dressed as Superman. Fat Superman. Fat Superman II. Fat Superman III. Hippy Superman. Asian Superman. Superman’s Dad.

Clark Kent.

They put a cape on him. Pushed him at me. And 50 euro into my hand.

A stag in the headlights.

Shaking.

Like a newborn calf.

Like someone’s retarded little brother.

Like he needed his inhaler.

Like his X-Box just green screened.

I tried to take his hand. Gently lead him to the bed.

Rigid. Couldn’t move.

“I don’t bite. I promise. I’m normal.”

Nothing. A mute.

It couldn’t be the stag. Unless he arranged his marriage over the internet.

I tried to make him laugh. Collapsed on the bed.

“Save me Superman!”

He was way too frightened. It happens. I was in my Dominatrix dress. I could have mashed him into a pulp. Scooped him into the condom bin.

I told him he could stay for the 20 minutes. And his friends will never know what happened here. What happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam and all that crap. He sat in the chair and played on his phone.

Time to go.

I ruffled up his hair. Took off his cape and wore it. Took him by the hand back to his pack.

Fairytales for Hard Men

Ordell knew he wanted to be a hooker the first time he saw Mama zip up her thigh-high boots, lean against the sink and scrub her rancid fanny with a wet-wipe.

In fairness to Ordell, it was a valid career option. Ever since the lipstick factory shut down, there hadn’t been too many good jobs in Testament.

Mama didn’t think so. When he told her, she whipped his arms with a wire coat-hanger until the backs of his wrists and hands were cracked and bloody.

I didn’t mind having a sissy for a brother. It gave me something to fight for… and I fuckin’ loved fighting.

When I was eleven, I ruptured the spleen of a boy named Curtis Corliss for punching Ordell in the lunch line. I didn’t even know what a spleen was, or where to find one, but I beat that little fucker black and blue.

Mama and Ordell never got on, and that made me sad. Kin is kin, way I see it.

We all end up buried under the same patch of dirt in the end. May as well be pleasant to one another while we’re still sucking down the same rotten air.

***

Most of the boys from Shady Pines trailer-park headed down to the recruiting office on their 17thbirthdays, shipping out as soon as the paperwork cleared. Me, I never did like the damned heat. Two years in a hell-shaped sand-box would have ruined me.

I was one of the lucky ones, I guess. I got to wrestle instead. It wasn’t a scholarship as such – more of a favor. People told me that Shriek Watson felt guilty towards my Mama, but I was never really sure what they meant.

Shriek’s wrestling academy was in the Old Testament badlands, in the basement of his sprawling family home. It was known as the Ghoul School, on account of the hauntings, but the scariest thing I ever saw there was his sister’s webbed feet.

On my first day, it was sub-zero temperatures, or pretty fuckin’ close. When I arrived, there were seven other boys standing awkwardly in Shriek’s basement, wearing their gaudy, hand-me-down wrestling trunks. The smallest, a kid named Alvin Lupus, was shivering so hard his rotten teeth were chattering.

“Say, Mr. Watson, can you fire up the boiler?” he asked. “It’s awful cold down here…”

Shriek gazed at him playfully, through rheumy eyes.

“Sure thing, young man. If you can get out of this arm-lock I’ll let you help me get that boiler going.”

Shriek’s wheezy breath hung in the frozen air.

Moments later, he’d snapped Alvin’s elbow joint like a dry tree branch.

With Alvin out of commission, I had to practice with Shriek instead. That first day he clotheslined me so hard I felt blood trickle down my throat.

He was a hard man, but a good man. His methods were a little unorthodox, but within six months I had signed my first contract with Fingerfuck Flanagan and the Testament Wrestling Alliance. Mama was so damn proud of me that day she almost soiled her mesh panties.

***

Ordell is sat in a ripped-out car seat outside the Testament Savings & Loan Association, wearing Mama’s old, scuffed boots and not much else.

An older woman named Angel is painting his nails slaughterhouse red. Painting right over the shit-flakes and snagged pubes. I used to know her, a little. She was a real fuckin’ ring-rat for a time. Used to prefer tag-teams, until she slipped a disc.

She was a whole lot less flexible after that. For a while she caught a gig as a wrestler’s valet, escorting various mid-card motherfuckers down to the ring.

She used to stand behind the turnbuckle, wailing like a banshee with botulism, but that all ended when she got cold-cocked by a mistimed Freddie Regal drop-kick. The old bastard crumpled her damn skull like an empty beer can.

I stifle a sour belch and clear my throat.

“Angel.”

“Horace.”

She smiles nervously at me, and her damaged face twitches in three different places at once. I turn to my brother.

“It’s time, Ordell.”

“Time?”

“Mama’s dead.”

He rolls his thickly lashed eyes at me.

“What do you need me to do?”

“I don’t need you to do nothin’. I just need your car.”

“Huh?”

“I’m gonna steal her body home.”

“Huh?”

“Bury her in the yard – next to the septic tank. In between Uncle Amos and Little Julie.”

***

In the end, Ordell offers to drive me.

I try to squeeze in, but the steering wheel presses into my gut, even with the seat reclined. The damn horn shrieks like a handicapped child until I manage to wriggle free.

I glance across at Ordell on the way there. His lipstick matches his bloodshot eyes. He keeps them trained on the ragged asphalt up ahead.

The county morgue is a squat, brown-brick building, adjacent to Testament Falls. There is a sluice that runs out of the back of the morgue into the river. It stinks of entrails and bone-juice. I used to swim in the Falls as a child. Man… the innocence of youth.

“Wait here, Ordell.”

He shrugs and starts to reapply his lipstick in the rearview mirror.

***

Mama sure is heavy for a dead gal. I waddle across the parking lot with her brittle body slung across my shoulder. I’m sweating like a hog in the slaughter-line.

“Horace, look out!”

I’m not sure who is shouting at first. Then I realize that it is Ordell. He hates his accent. Tries on new voices the way some people try on unfamiliar items of clothing.

I turn and see a cop in a sweat-stained uniform gaining on me. He is almost as fat as I am, but not quite.

I dump Mama’s body in the backseat and squeeze into the passenger door.

“Go, Ordell, go!”

The first gunshot spiderwebs the windshield.

The cop smiles at me through the cracked glass as he raises his gun again.

I smile back, and I realize that this is the closest I am ever gonna get to a happy ending.

The Happy Ending

Harry Childs was an aggressively existential child.

When he was only seven years old, he wrote an essay in which he explained to a puzzled teacher his proclivity for sad clowns. “Clowns are fascinating creatures,” he wrote. “I can think of no trade more noble than clowning, and no thing more noble for a clown to be than sad. A sad clown is the perfect symbol for the emptiness of our existence. Any man can pretend to be happy, but it takes true courage to admit that one is sad.”

Harry’s teacher was more impressed than she was concerned. Over the next few years, the school district did everything in their power to foster his intellectual growth. He began high school four years later, at the age of eleven. By 15 he was attending NYU on a full academic scholarship.

Harry was a brilliant student of philosophy. He was viciously nihilistic and his older classmates abhorred him. It was rumored that he was sleeping with one of the professors, Dr. Goldstein. She was an attractive woman with large breasts and small, black eyes. Harry only noticed her eyes.

One day Harry stopped speaking. He arrived at class with his usual air of melancholy, but there was nothing anyone could do to get him to respond to them. Doctors were sent for and diagnoses suggested.

A week later Harry returned to class. The moment the professor began their lecture, Harry began to openly weep. He fled from the classroom and no one ever saw him again.

Three years later, a young man dressed as a clown appeared on the Atlantic City boardwalk. His face was painted white with three blue tears streaming down from each eye, and a frown painted red around his lips. The man sat on the pier day and night, crying.

After a few weeks, he had begun to attract something of a following. A crowd would gather around his bench every day, and every day it would grow larger. They thought him to be a great artist. He did not think of himself as an artist, but merely as a model for the emptiness of existence.

One day the crowd had grown especially large, television crews doing live reports on the boardwalk’s latest wonder, when someone did something that no other had ever done before.

A young woman approached the bench and sat down next to the clown.

Before he even knew what was happening, her arms were around him as she, too, began to cry. When she eventually released him, he finally saw her face for the first time.

She had the most beautiful and ponderously sad eyes he had ever seen. Her face flushed with a youthful maturity, and the man felt that he was in love. His eyes roamed down to her lips, and he found himself wondering what secret depths they concealed.

That was when he moved in to kiss her.

The crowd did not understand, but they whooped and cheered just the same. When the woman finally pulled away from Harry, they shared a faint smile.

The woman then slowly reached into her purse, produced a long, thin blade, and pierced herself through the heart.

By the time the police and ambulance arrived, Harry had already done the most noble thing he could think of for a clown to do, throwing himself into the ocean.

Porn-Fugitives

The teenaged boy sneaks into his room and closes the door excitedly. From under his pillow, he pulls out the porn magazine he found last week in the attic.

To his surprise, when he opens it, only blank pages yawn back at him. And soon, he hear the sounds of moaning coming from under his bed. Looking down, he discovers the tiny porn stars – miniature, naked people having sex on the floor everywhere, in all kind of positions.

The boy panics. If his parents find out, he’s fucked.

So he gets a pickle jar and tries to collect the small muscular men and silicone-breasted women inside it. He manages to capture a few, but the others are too fast: a couple in the missionary position gets up and runs away on four arms and four legs, just like a spider, crawling up the wall and disappearing into a crack.

It’s all just a bad dream, decides the boy, and he goes to sleep.

In the morning, waking up, he finds a tiny woman kneeling on the bridge of his nose, smiling for an invisible camera, while an equally tiny dude stands before her jerking his cum onto her face.

The boy sweeps them off and jumps out of bed. He finds that the spider couple has spun a jelly-like web of their juices, squirming now with flies caught overnight. The couple swoops down on a shiny sperm-string and begins to feast upon them, their filmy little wings cracking between perfect, white teeth. The boy looks away in disgust, his gaze drawn to a woman on his night-stand. Her body lays draped across the digital alarm clock, moaning, sliding a dildo between her legs.

The boy steps closer, and a word, like a heavy stone, comes falling from of his mouth: “Mom?”

It’s really her, but she’s much younger. The boy grabs up the porn magazine, searching for a date, finally realizing that it’s nearly twenty years old. And the woman looks just like his mother did back then.

His stomach churns. Snatching up a hankie, he attempts to cover up his mother’s tiny naked body, but she immediately crawls out from underneath of it. Down on all fours, she smiles and winks at him over her shoulder, sliding that teeny-tiny little dildo into her tiny little ass.

“Now what?” the boy sighs, just before a voice from downstairs calls, “Breakfast is ready!”

***

“Good morning, hun!” says his smiling mother, standing over a pot of cooking oil. “What’s the matter? You look worn-out. Haven’t you slept well?”

The boy simply cannot face her. He mutters something unintelligible, gazing at the empty white plate in front of him. Moments later, a serving fork enters his field of view, a ten-inch fried black fly impaled upon its tines. It falls onto his plate.

Looking at its fried legs facing skywards, the boy pushes his plate away, saying:

“Can I eat it later? I’m not really hungry right now.”

His mother doesn’t answer, she just stands there and frowns. When the boy runs out of the kitchen, back to his room, she yells after him: “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

“I’m fine!” the boy yells back, trying not to vomit as he witnesses his tiny porn star mother sucking onthe very dildo she’d just pulled out of her ass.

***

The boy decides that, some way or another, he will rid himself of the tiny porn stars. Taking an empty shoe box, some string, and a used hanky from under his bed, he rigs them all together in the middle of the room. Soon enough, the tiny porn stars are crawling out from their hiding places to investigate. Sniffing the air, they gather around the soiled hanky with looks of hunger on their tiny faces.

Once all of them have gathered around the hanky, collectively munching on his old, dried semen, the boy drops the shoebox on them, capturing the little intruders in one fell swoop.

“Gotcha!” he laughs, taking the box in hand.

Cracking the lid just wide enough to reach inside, he randomly pulls out a barely legal, redheaded girl with fake tits. Then, slapping her with a piece of cellophane tape, he sticks her back onto one of the blank pages of the magazine. He pulls out another tiny porn star and repeats the process.

A few minutes and half a roll of tape later, the entire magazine has been populated with porn stars once again. The boy looks away with shame on his face, however, seeing that in his hurry, he accidentally taped over some of their faces. He cannot bring himself to watch them squirm, suffocating as they slowly stiffen and die.

By this point, the only tiny porn star left in the shoebox is his mother. The boy looks down at her, then back at the magazine with tears in his eyes.

“Why haven’t you ever told me?” he asks, but she doesn’t pay any attention to him; she just moans as she starts fisting herself.

The boy closes the magazine with a sigh, pushing it back under his pillow where it belongs. He’ll throw it out, he decides, but first, he must take care of his mom. But what can he do with her? He can’t just tape back her into the magazine with all the rest. And yet he can’t just set her free either; he would die of shame if someone saw his mom like this. He could always keep her, in a cage or a terrarium of sorts, but then he’d have to face his mother’s tiny, naked, porn star antics for the rest of her natural days.

Holding the shoebox before him, he slowly walks out of the room.

“I’m sorry, mother…” he whispers, holding her over the toilet. The tiny woman doesn’t seem to acknowledge him, riding her climax to a faraway place with the help of her tiny vibrator.

She falls into the water with a splash, and the vortex spins and pulls her down.

Charlie’s Chunky Munching Meat

Murder…

Charlie rolled the word around his mouth like a hot chip but could not bring himself to utter it. He looked around the drab confines of his cell and tried to take it all in, but he would have a lifetime to do that and there really wasn’t that much to see. He prayed for his sister’s visit, checking his watch constantly, but time crawled by more slowly now he was aware of it. Charlie had lots of time; he had been sentenced to life imprisonment for murder and all because of a Spam sandwich.

When some men take alcohol they turn into wife-beaters. When some men take drugs they turn into thieves. When Charlie Walls took a Spam sandwich he turned into a pair of panties; one slice of the sickly pink meat was sufficient to transform him into the nearest female’s undergarments, and in that form he would stay until she deigned to remove them.

It hadn’t always been this way.

He could remember childhood picnics, fighting off ants and aunts from the sandwiches, wolfing down Spam with youthful gluttonous abandon and remaining the fat little boy he awoke as. Countless weddings of poor relations where Spam was compulsory fare and he had scoffed it all through the reception between rivers of cheap German beer, and nothing untoward had happened to make the bride blush further.

But one day as he sat working late in the office, swamped by the accounts of wealthier and happier men, he nibbled errantly at a Spam and lettuce on rye and found himself wrapped inexplicably around the hips of big Donna, the office slut.

Donna, like most fat people, was a stranger to the concept of personal hygiene, and it was over a week later before Charlie found himself stuffed inside her laundry basket. He climbed unseen from her bathroom window that night, putting his misadventure down to sleepwalking. For the next few days he suffered from vivid uncanny nightmares where he tottered perilously on the edge of a vast and hair-strewn canyon.

He explained away his absence from work by feigning illness, and his colleagues were quick to comment on how pale and drawn he still looked. By the time Donna arrived in late, hitching at her skirt and announcing that her panties were simply eating her, they wondered if perhaps they should call a doctor for him.

He took some time off instead, visiting his mother to placate her habitual animosity toward his bachelor status and to save his phone from melting from all the visceral pleas she poured upon it like boiling oil every other night.

She asked politely, as is a mother’s way, of his job (are) and his flat (you) and his plants (seeing) and his friends (anyone) and was he eating enough? He looked rather thin, and did you know primrose oil would clear up that spot malarkey on your nose in a trice? A million inane, inept questions that were the vanguard for the great assault (When are you going to get married and give me grandchildren you selfish little bastard?) that was always left unsaid.

Charlie didn’t mind the head games. All in all he was genuinely pleased to see the old girl; it was nice to be made a fuss of, and she was still the best damn cook a man could wish for. A few years away from home, living on a steady diet of microwave noodles and boil in the bag curries had left him with the physical attributes usually reserved for people on Oxfam posters.

A dream of roast potatoes had lured him here, of chicken and sprouts and mum’s homemade gravy, and perhaps a sherry trifle for afters, but with one wayward slip of the tongue he lost all hope of those culinary delights.

When asked what his immediate plans were he had replied without thinking, ‘Oh, the usual, pissing the weekend up the wall.’ He noticed his mother’s stern set of jaw too late to turn back; mother didn’t like smutty words, and ‘pissing’ was smutty bordering on filthy in her well-thumbed book.

She stormed off into the kitchen to whip up two rounds of spam and tomato (a double act in the same vein as Hitler and Himmler) and brought them to him with a look that said, ‘If I wasn’t worried about breaking one of my good plates I’d thump you up the snot-box with this’.

She went back into the kitchen to wash up some of the crockery she seemed to keep perpetually dirty in anticipation of family upheaval; he could hear her clanking the plates together, spelling out ‘piss indeed’ in Morse code, and sighing to herself in the confines of her lino martyrdom. Charlie ate the sandwiches as quickly as he could. The last thing he needed was the ‘people starving in Biafra’ lecture which would surely get an airing at the waste of so much as a crumb.

Charlie wasn’t sure where Biafra was, or if it even still existed, but to his mother it was synonymous with hunger; if a child from Calais appeared on the news looking a little on the thin side, then Biafra would be a stone’s throw from Dover.

But before he had time to chew his crusts he found himself wrapped around the loins of his origin. He felt his mother pluck him hastily from between her butt cheeks (smutty place!) and issue a little sigh.

It was a dreadful experience and one that left Charlie frantically trying to recall if his mother ever did have that bowel operation, the one she said would tighten her stool. Even if the smell was familiar and strangely comforting, he could not wait to be free; it was one thing to be close to your mother, but…

He finally came to in her muddy back garden, clothes pegs still attached to his shoulders. Finding him in such a state, nude in a mess of her washing, she could only assume he’d made good on his threat of getting pissed the night before. With how suddenly he’d vanished from her parlour, just like his no good drunk of a father, she hadn’t even had time to tell him about the lovely clean girl who’d just moved in next door, and how single she appeared to be.

He fled before she could vent the full force of her Christian spleen upon him. He had more than a few things to think about, but a life of tea totalitarianism was definitely not one of them. As obnoxious as spending an entire day girded around his mother’s festering love hole had been, he simply could not put it down to sleepwalking this time, like he’d done with his experience as Donna’s putrid panties.

No, this had been real. He looked for connections, and it didn’t take him long to put two and two together, coming up with Spam.

Over the next few days he began experimenting with a feverish intensity he had never felt before. As with all great endeavours though, his first efforts at reproducing the Kafkaesque transformation proved utter, abject failures.

First there was Tracey from the upstairs flat. One night as he watched her leave, rather than hiding behind the drapes and rubbing himself like usual, he decided to follow her out instead.

When she stopped off at a shop for a pack of fags, he produced a tin of Spam from inside his coat pocket, palming it nervously as he watched her from across the street. ‘I’m Popeye the Pervert man’, he hummed to himself for courage, devouring the poor man’s steak as he marched off after her.

When suddenly he found himself nuzzled up against his neighbour’s voluminous arse, it was pure heaven. For about half an hour.

Some greasy tool monkey from the local garage gave her a lift, and in no time at all Charlie had been discarded and stuffed into her handbag.

He exploded from the faux leather in a storm of sanitary towels and lipsticks, almost causing Tracey to miss her stroke in the backseat. Bolting from the car for a nearby thicket, he tried to convince himself that although he’d likely frightened them both into premature post-coital smokes, he had not been recognised.

Then came Sara, who worked in accounts and whose thighs were the talk of the toilets. He snuck up behind her in the stationery cupboard and, one bite of salty processed ham product later, finally got to see just how she kept those thighs of hers so firm.

He spent the rest of the morning being slowly suffocated by lycra as Sara indulged her passion for exercise bikes, rowing machines, and countless other forms of unnatural madness down at the local gym. Later, back at her flat, he waited breathlessly as she prised him from her sweat-sodden bangle, discarding him mercifully under her bed.

Charlie was off work for a fortnight after that whole experience; he simply couldn’t move his aching body. But, though his muscles had been torn and his back seemed all but broken, his pioneering spirit remained intact.

He discovered Malandra on the bus home one evening; she was the kind of perfection he had only ever seen before in adverts. He followed her for the remainder of the week, convinced that he had finally found his special one. She lived in a lovely little suburb ten miles from the city centre, catching the bus every day to the shop where she worked. Lingering Lingerie was an establishment that catered to every red-blooded male’s (or pink-blooded transvestite’s) taste in feminine undergarments, be it lace, satin, rubber or shaving foam.

Charlie hung around the shop watching her avidly, peeking out from behind the peek-a-boo bras, sweating frantically behind a rack of latex cat-suits. It was all too good to be true. Not only would he become the panties of a sex siren, he would also be the hottest pair of panties imaginable.

After a week of trailing her to make sure she had no bad habits (such as heavy exercise or mood swings brought on by PMS), Charlie made his move.

It would be nice to think he got his wish, that he spent the remainder of his days adorning Malandra’s creamy hips, caressing her peachy buttocks, and grazing her holiest of holies whilst wolfing down untold tins of Spam between changings. Yes, it would be nice to think he finally made it, living happily ever after in the golden-snatched cottage of his making. But, let’s just say that’s not exactly what happened.

Life’s kinda like that; deal with it.

Not two blissful days into his vulvar vacation, Charlie’s idyllic little world all came crashing down. As it turned out, Malandra’s Greek boyfriend had just returned from visiting relatives at a Soho strip joint, and he spent his entire first day back attempting to rewrite the Kama Sutra.

At first this didn’t overly bother Charlie; it was obvious that a girl like Malandra would have a plague of male admirers. In fact, during his surveillance, he had seen a long procession of vermin accompany her home, rattling her headboard long into the night. He really didn’t mind she was such a pied piper, and if truth be told it quite excited him; there was sure to be a surplus of bodily fluids bubbling all Jacuzzi-like around him whenever she slipped him back on. If he had wanted a virgin, he would have snuck into a convent with an entire hamper full of his precious pink meat.

But what Charlie hadn’t counted on was the peculiar kink harboured by Manos, Malandra’s Mediterranean lover.

On the night that was to change his life forever, Charlie lay draped invitingly over his beloved’s pudenda, bathing in her juices. Manos, his jeans jutting out alarmingly, leapt on top of her and tried to swallow her face as Charlie felt himself dampen, praying that the lusty Greek would probe his fingers through him before he was removed.

‘Oh Malandra!’ moaned Manos. ‘You so sexy, I’m gonna EAT THOSE PANTIES RIGHT OFFA YOU!!!’

The last thing Charlie remembered, before his rebirth in the stomach of the doomed, hungry horn-dog, was a scream, an explosion, and a muffled ‘Ohh, SHEEEET!!!’

Later, the police found him curled on the floor, wrapped in a tangle of innards.

‘Spam,’ Charlie told them.

‘Porridge,’ they replied.

***

Murder…

He still couldn’t bear to think about the word, but he’d have a nice, long time to practice. A lifetime, in fact.

Where the hell was his sister? She was late, and the guards were strict about visiting times. He needed to see her, needed someone to say they understood and loved him no matter what.

And then there she was, Eileen, sweet Eileen.

There she sat before him, her lips all aquiver; her glistening Bambi eyes… Raising her hand to the shatterproof glass (the way she’d seen them do in all the prison movies), she was just able to whimper, ‘Oh, Charles…’

‘Oh Eiuurrruurrhhg,’ Charlie gurgled in response, his mouth full of Spam he’d smuggled from the commissary.

What the hell, he thought; Eileen always had a cute ass.