Gooner’s Brood

Lucas shuffled to the end of his rusty parallel bars, his legs sore, and settled into his wheelchair. He rolled himself along the carpet, forming deep ruts that made forward motion harder as the wheels sank deeper. Eventually, he reached the computer.

A stab of disgusted passed through his body, but it wasn’t enough to stop him.

He pulled his sweatpants down, groped around the floor for his recently washed tube sock. Then he set it over his erect penis, where it rested like an obscene tea cozy.Quickly he put his right hand on the mouse and pulled up the bookmarked page for “Pregnant White Trash Sluts.” There were thumbnails for all the girls, each with a still image gallery and a link to a video library available only after signing up for a membership.  

There was Pam, wearing a red nightie frilled with black lacework, sitting on the edge of a waterbed covered in a leopard print comforter. Her freckles stood out against her pale, sallow skin, and the droop of her dark eyes gave her a drug-dazed look. It shamed him to admit it even to himself, but her appearance turned him on, some form of fentanyl (or meth) chic.

Then there was Tammie, wearing a red, white, and blue bikini, emerging from an aboveground pool limned with seaweed-green scum, her plump belly swollen and water-slicked. Her bright blond hair was up in tight pigtails that only added to the barely-legal effect given by her shiny braces.   

His erection grew stronger so that the sock danced, the shame and self-loathing moving over him now in tidal waves. 

From somewhere upstairs came a sound, the metallic slap of the mailman dropping letters through the front door’s brass slot.

Lucas jolted upright in the wheelchair, so that his spine burnt and nettles pinpricked his otherwise numb legs. He took deep breaths—one after another—just like the shrink in rehab had taught him. Eventually the rhythm of his breathing calmed him and he returned his attention to the screen.

There was Deb, his favorite. 

She stood naked, with her belly swollen and ripe, as perfectly globular as a Rand McNally globe, sneering at the men watching from the darkness of the internet.  

Die, she seemed to broadcast to Lucas with her hard, dark stare. Die, she said, to all the men in the world, including the one who’d taken the photo and the one who’d knocked her up. 

Lucas’s penis seized in the sock, spasming, the pleasure intensified by the coarse cotton rubbing against the organ’s sensitive skin. 

Suddenly he felt a tug from his groin, different from the muscular contraction of orgasm. He looked down, at an image impossible to process. 

It was the size of a doll, red with blackish markings on its skin, like tandoori chicken left too long in a clay oven. Phallic coils of leathery hair snaked from the top of its shrunken head, the mane sprouting wildly and shining like tiny tangled whip thongs. 

It braced itself between his legs, its little claws digging into the tender, pale flesh of his thighs. Its movements were subtle, more of breathing than anything else, but there could be no mistake. This was not a statue; it was either alive or some strange remote-controlled toy. 

The thought hit him—mortifying—that the thing might house a webcam, that someone was seeing him here: in his wheelchair, with a sock on his penis.

The creature snarled, baring sharp white teeth that shined like polished ivory. Embarrassment gave way to fear and Lucas was only too aware of how close its rodentlike teeth were to his unprotected genitals. 

In one swift motion the thing yanked the sock from the top of his penis, and tied its end into a knot. Then it draped the sock over its shoulder, looking like a hobo with a bindle, long-accustomed to its weight and treasuring the contents.

Lucas found his voice, used it to scream, reaching a near glass-shattering pitch.  

The creature hopped down from his pallid thighs, then skittered quickly away, taking the stairs, ignoring the wheelchair lift. 

There was the sound of its sharp-nailed feet mincing over hardwood, followed by a metallic shink as it slid through the mail slot, out onto the street.

Lucas looked around the room, down at his penis, now cold and exposed, weeping a last couple drops of semen from the bluish lips of the head.

 It hadn’t been real. It had been a hallucination, brought on by the car crash, compounded by the months he’d spent holed up here in the dark.

Time to take a break from the computer.

He moved to touch the mouse with his sweating hand, x-ed out the window displaying Pregnant White Trash Sluts. Then he depressed the power button, holding it down until Deb disappeared, replaced by an unlighted screen, its glass reflecting the pathetic tableau of him, alone in the basement. 

***

At last, the initial shock of seeing that evil idol wore off enough for him to move again. His first act was to take a long-overdue shower, then change into clean clothes. He next planned to break down the stack of greasy cardboard pizza boxes and take them to the dumpster.

He was halfway through the task when the doorbell rang. The wiring was somewhat faulty, and what started as a traditional dingdong tapered off into a wheeze, like strains from a dying music box.   

“Coming,” Lucas said, and wiped the oily cheese residue onto his pantlegs. He cursed under his breath once, remembering only after his fingers touched his legs that he’d just changed clothes.

He walked to the door, gripped the cold brass knob with a greasy hand, and put his eye to the keyhole. The fisheye glass revealed the impossible: an attractive woman on his threshold. She had deep brown eyes and dark brown hair, done in tight cornrows that vividly showed the whiteness of her scalp. Usually cornrows didn’t work on white girls. This time, however, they did, highlighting her hard-edged beauty. 

Lucas snapped the bolt and pulled the chain down. The woman drew back, holding her arms crossed over her front so that the pale mounds of her prodigious breasts bulged from her pink velour top.

She caught him looking, zipped her top up, and scowled. “Still horny, huh?” She shook her head. 

“Huh?” he asked, dumbly. Then it hit him. “Deb from Pregnant White Trash S—”

She slapped him in the face, hard.

 A white flash went off behind his eyes, and then she was in the apartment with him. She closed the door behind her and shifted the strap of her brown leather purse from one arm to the other.

Lucas watched her, rubbing his stinging jaw.

Still scowling, the young woman looked from the couch to his chair. “Which one of these two pieces of furniture has less of your nut on it?”

“Neither,” he said, the word out of his mouth before he could form a thought, or make a protest. “I mean, I use a sock.”

Her sneer curved into a smile, and she flashed him a gap-toothed grin. The gap, like the cornrows, was something that didn’t always work on a female face, but did on hers. “I know you use a sock,” she said, taking her place on the edge of the couch. “I’ve got it.”

She set her purse on top of the glass coffee table covered in a film of soda pop stains. Cleaning the table was going to be his next move after he finished folding the pizza boxes. 

“I mean,” she said, digging in her purse, “he’s got it.”

“Who?” Lucas asked. 

She pulled something out of her purse. It was a little doll, a tchotchke that looked to be carved from ebon wood and stained with some natural dark red dye. He had hair like pronged penises, though they were made of raffia fiber rather than living leather. And the teeth which had so terrified Lucas now looked to be made from sharpened bamboo slivers rather than polished ivory.

“You recognize him?” She tapped the little fetish, grinning.

“I thought it was a dream.” Lucas, without thinking, took his place on the soft recliner, settling into the deep impression he’d left there sitting and staring at nothing.

“My name isn’t Deb,” she said. “It’s Shoshana. I just took that name for the website.”

“Okay…Shoshana.” 

“And you should be ashamed of yourself. You think me and other girls want to be put in that position when we do those videos? Our backs are against the wall when we finally say ‘yes.’ We’re not your fantasy. We’re flesh and blood women with responsibilities, kids with deadbeat dads who aren’t in the picture anymore. We have addictions, issues. And you prey on us. Now I’m going to prey on you.” She stroked the tapering phallic coils bursting from the totem’s little wooden head, then her eyes drifted toward Lucas’s lap.  

Lucas looked down where she stared. The erection formerly contained by his underwear had slipped free of his boxers, presenting a more obvious puptent near the fly.

“Ugh,” she said, swallowing as if to keep the coursing bile from becoming upchuck.  “I’m glad I’m not a man. It must be hell to think with your dicks. The guys at Cheetah’s are pathetic. Doing relay races to the ATM for one more table dance.”

Lucas pointed at the little man on the table. “Sounds like you don’t need him to prey on men.” 

She tilted her head, looking at Lucas rather than through him for the first time. “Cheetah’s is a dump. Bunch of dollar generals in there waving around singles and barking orders.” She teased the little toy’s hair, working each strand individually like a stylist. “And sure this is about the money, but more than that, it’s about revenge on all you perverts, making you claim some responsibility, watching you squirm.”  

She looked back down at the little carved totem. “I got it from this crazy goth girl at work.” She petted the gorgon-headed toy it as if it were a lapdog needful of constant doting.  “This cool ass wiccan chick. She said it could bring me good fortune. I didn’t believe her.” She shook her head, as if regretting her previous lack of faith. “I even forgot all about it, til she slit her wrists a couple months back and we had to clean out her locker. And then I found it, and remembered what she told me. I tried it, and whaddya know, it worked.” 

She picked the doll up, set it back in her purse. Then she stood, breathing a sigh of relief now that she was almost free of this apartment’s musky confines. “Come on.” She slung her leather purse strap over her shoulder again. 

“Where are you going?” he asked, watching her but not moving.

“We’re going,” she said, opening the front door. “To see your son.” 

***

Lucas stabbed the ground with his crutches, limping down the apartment corridor, trailing Shoshana by several paces. 

“Slow down,” he said.

 “I’ve already petitioned Hamilton County Jobs and Family Services, Child Support Division to get some of your bloodwork from the hospital just to confirm the kid is yours. That’s if you want to deny paternity when they come knocking on your door.”

He didn’t say anything, just continued working the crutches to catch up, panting and sweating now. This was the most exercise he’d had in weeks.

“I’m guessing you’re double-dipping with social security disability, too, aren’t you?” She reached the door and pulled it open. Cold, crisp morning air entered the hallway, freezing the sweat on his body, making him shiver. 

“How much of that half-million do you still have?” she asked.

“Shh!” he hissed, moving so fast now that his armpits screamed with pain from the recoil of his crutches. “Keep it down! I don’t want anyone knowing I have money.”

“Too late.” She was smirking, but at least held the door open for him.

He walked out into the daylight with her, squinting against the sun, blinded by its disinfecting glow. 

Her heels clacked against the sidewalk as she moved. She was wearing tight designer jeans with the label name stitched in gemstones on the seat of the pants. As she walked, her apple-shaped bottom switched left and right with a throbbing, musical rhythm.

Lucas cinched the crutches beneath his right armpit, and hopped after Shoshana on one leg until he came up alongside her.

“Where’s the kid?”

“I left him in the park.” She pointed across the street, at the small green island enclosed by concrete curbing and shrouded with oak trees. A sandbox and rusty jungle gym were its only kid-friendly accoutrements. 

“You just left him there?!”

“He’s not like other kids,” she said, as if that explained, or excused it.

“What about…” Lucas trailed off, tried again. “What about the kid you were pregnant with on the Pregnant White—”

“Say the website’s whole name out loud again and I’ll slap seven shades of shit out of you.” 

There was a beep then, as the little red man on the crosswalk sign turned white. 

“Hop, gooner,” she said, walking ahead of him, her high, bluejeaned booty still making music through its motion.

“What’s a gooner?”  

Morning traffic was light, only a dandelion-yellow VW Bug and a rusted blue Ford pickup truck stopped at the intersection.

 “A gooner,” she said, voice slightly muffled by the wind, “is loser who’s hopelessly addicted to porn and doesn’t even feel bad about it.” 

“I feel bad about it. I haven’t even looked at porn for weeks.” 

“I guess what happened with me taught you a lesson.”

“That’s part of it,” Lucas said. 

They had made it across the street. Near the base of a tree’s mossy trunk, in the middle of the park, stood a small boy. 

***

Lucas stopped, unable to move forward. Even at this distance the boy looked hideously white, pale as if exsanguinated of blood and filled with embalming fluid. There was a liquidous bulge to his skin, like a water balloon filled to bursting, which only furthered the impression of him being brimful of formaldehyde.

“I put foundation on its face,” Shoshana said. “It looked too weird without it.”

“It?” Lucas crutched his way a little closer, stabbing the grass still slick with morning dew. “That’s our son.”

“I miscarried my son, and my worthless wannabe rockstar boyfriend dipped while I was going through contractions at the hospital.” She pointed at the child, still unmoving and impossibly pale beneath the tree. “That over there is something the homunculus conjured after I said the words asking for great fortune, and added my blood to your sperm.”

Lucas gagged. 

“My menstrual blood,” she added, in the hopes that his misogynist’s disgust caused him to throw up. 

When he had recovered, he looked back over at the boy standing by the tree. 

“Go say hello to your son. Hop to it, gooner.”

He crutched the final stretch of the way toward the boy without protesting the slur. He didn’t care about her anymore. There was only the strange child before him.

“Hey,” Lucas said, softly, approaching as if he were nearing an oft-abused feral cat.

The wind picked up, tousling the strands of the boy’s blonde hair, fine as cornsilk. 

The foundation Shoshana had applied made the child at least halfway presentable when viewed from a distance. Up this close, a blue webwork of pulsing veins visibly striated beneath the skin, squirming like worms, giving the boy the impression of not being sickly, but alien. 

The eyes were spaced too far apart and had no focus. Even worse, they didn’t blink, and the sclera were bloodshot, limned with a red compliment to go with the blue webwork of veins undulating beneath the skin. 

Lucas cleared his throat, spoke. “My name is Lucas Milton.”

The boy’s unblinking eyes roved toward Lucas, staring blanky. 

Lucas held a smile on his face, feeling awkward, but not quite awkward enough to cease smiling.

The boy opened his mouth, the lips full and dark purple, swollen as if bruised after a fight. His teeth were sharp and small like those of a baby shark, serrated like a saw’s, as if he had teethed himself on a whetstone.

The voice came then, not quite forming words, but bearing sounds on wet bubbles. Then there was a low animal moan, a keening of something young and sensitive with its foot caught in a sharp-jawed trap. 

“Daddy?” It widened its pale, noodlelike arms, also wormed with blue veins, waiting for Lucas to accept its limpid embrace.

Lucas tried to go forward to hug it. Couldn’t. He turned around. Shoshana was still several feet away, leaning on a wooden bench’s back. 

“I can’t,” Lucas said, eyes tearing, beseeching and broken. He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Shoshanna. I just can’t.”

She switched her purse from one arm to the other. “It took me a month to learn to say those words Bry wrote down. I had to go online and look up Sanskrit pronunciations. I blew a linguist in the champagne room so he wouldn’t charge me for the phonetic translation. You can make a little effort here.”

“DADDY!” 

The thing started quickly toward him, its arms fully extended, unblinking eyes wide, hungering for its father’s attention.

“No.” Lucas hefted his right crutch, swung and caught the thing on the side of its head. The veins erupted beneath the skin, filling the subcutaneous space between soft endoskeleton and softer flesh with warm blood, finally lending it a touch of color.

It fell down, landing in a soft pile of brown mulch. 

“You hit your son!”

“He’s not my son!” Lucas’s shout resounded through the park like a rifle shot, silencing the bolder birds in the trees and sending the more timid ones flying skyward. 

“DADDY!” The boy rolled over onto his belly, got up to his knees. He regained his feet and resumed walking toward Lucas, as if he had no memory of his previous rejection at his father’s hands. 

Blood flowed fast and freely from his ears as if from a faucet on full bore, a strange cranial stigmata.

Lucas backed up, hopping awkwardly, dancing on one foot while flailing with the right crutch. “Get away! Get back!”

“DADDY!!!!”

There was a questioning, wounded lilt in its single word, as if it felt abandoned, much as Lucas and his mother had been abandoned by his father. But Lucas had to be imagining it. There was no variation in its vocal cadence, any more than there was variance in the unblinking fixity of its dead stare.

Regardless of how it said the word, if it said itone more time, he would be forced—

“DADDY!!!”

Lucas swung the crutch again, and again connected with the thing’s head. 

Only this time the head exploded in a shower of dark blood that flew upward in a bursting fountain before descending in a warm, red rain. The blood splashed Shoshana, hitting her full in the face, staining her eyes and putting the taste of menses fluid and sperm on her lips. 

“You motherfucker!” she shouted, dabbing at her stained face with her fingertips. “I’ll get you for this!”

Lucas hopped away on one leg, his remaining crutch squeaking pitifully as he worked it hard on the dewy sod, back in the direction of his apartment building.   

Home, where everything made more sense. 

“I’ve got your other crutch, gooner!”

The sounds of his gusty hyperventilation echoed, louder in his ears than her screams. Louder still, though, was the memory of the single word the boy had learned, said probably without understanding its meaning, or what memories it recalled for Lucas.

DADDY!

***

After getting home, he slammed the front door, bolted it, and fixed the chain. He pulled the curtains down and closed the slatted Venetian blinds, and used a screwdriver to disable the doorbell. Then he turned out all the lights and sat in the living room, in darkness and silence, amid the detritus of stacked pizza boxes thick with coagulated cheese.

He had no plans except to make his sleep dreamless, which he accomplished by downing cherry-flavored Nyquil until the room began to spin, then finally somersault.

When he awoke, still dizzy—now sick—he had long, scrofulous stubble on his chin and a neckbeard rough as Brillo pad. 

He didn’t have time to wonder how long he had been out. 

There was the thunk of pebbles hitting the balcony’s glass door, one after another, in methodical succession, as if whoever was throwing them did it to keep time.

He stood, donned his mildewy bathrobe, and walked to the balcony door. He slid the glass door aside and walked outside, looked down.

Shoshanna stood on the grass, wearing a powder blue Adidas sweatsuit with white vertical piping up the arms and legs. The crown of the sweatsuit’s hood was up but dented so she looked like some beguine in a weird holy order. Someone or something stood directly behind her, but because it was hidden by her form he couldn’t see it. 

Still, he could guess what it was, who it was.

“You could have tried the door,” he said. “You might break a window this way.”

“Broken window’s the least of your problems. Besides, I tried the doorbell.”

Through the haze of sleep he had some foggy half-memory of having disabled the doorbell. “You could have knocked.”

“I did that, too. I thought you might have been dead. I decided to come back one last time, and it paid off.” She pointed up at him, the evidence of her persistence. “Nice to see you again, baby killer.”

“Baby killer!?” He moved to the edge of the balcony, gripped the cold iron railing. “You’re the one who called it an ‘it’!” He was suddenly conscious of how ridiculous he sounded, how ridiculous he looked in his bathrobe.

“That’s what you call us when we have abortions, right? Of your babies. What do you call a guy who beats his own son to death with a crutch?”

There was no way of answering a question that insanely rhetorical, but he was preparing to try anyway, when she turned from him.

As she turned, her blue beguine’s cowl fell, exposing her headful of tautly pulled cornrows. “Someone’s here to see you.”

Lucas looked down toward it, him, whatever, the conflicting knot of emotions tied too tightly within him to separate one from the other. He was relieved to discover he wasn’t a murderer—“baby killer”—equally disheartened to discover he hadn’t killed it. 

Him. 

Whatever. 

Lucas placed his hands over his face. He cupped his eyes as if he were a baby lacking object permanence, who only needed to hide from a sight to make it disappear. But when he lowered his palms and looked again, mother and son were still standing there, looking up at him. 

“Here,” Shoshana said, softly. She took the child’s hand in hers, showing a maternal warmth she lacked the other day in the park, a warmth of which he hadn’t thought her capable.

The pale-faced boy wore a fitted Cincinnati Reds hat, new and with an unbent bill, the white on the “C” still as impossibly bright as the first toothpaste from a fresh tube. The hat gave the face enough shadow to soften the unblinking gaze and blue veins crawling beneath the translucent skin.  

He almost looked human, real. 

Shoshana held his hand loosely, playing with each of the fingers one at a time. “He reconstituted about an hour after you busted him like a water balloon.” She patted the boy on his narrow shoulder, as if to test the sturdiness of this, his second incarnation. “I can remake him as fast as you can break him.”

“I couldn’t bring myself to ‘break him’ again if I wanted to…” And he did want to. Or at least a part of him did. 

“If I come to your door, you going to open up for us?” 

“No,” Lucas said, and sighed. “I’ll come down to you.”

“Good,” she said, “because he wants to go the park. Don’t you, Lucas Junior?”

Lucas watched as the boy touched the front of his jacket. Its green parachute silk made him look more like a tiny militiaman than a little leaguer. The boy moved his fragile fingers—white as bone China—over the jacket’s silver zipper, separating the teeth with one quick zip. He reached inside, and when the hand emerged, it was sheathed in a Wilson’s genuine leather baseball mitt. The glove glowed with a fresh coat of liniment, as badly in need of breaking in as the hat. 

Shoshanna (who’d apparently thought of everything) pulled a white baseball from the right pocket of her sweatsuit jacket. She held it by the poppy-red seams, as if ready to pitch a forkball.

“Play catch with us, Daddy!” 

Lucas averted his eyes so Junior wouldn’t see the tears. When he trusted himself to speak again, he shouted, using the practiced tone of a father barking encouraging words to his son standing on the baseball diamond. It was a voice and they were words he had always wanted to hear his own father shouting. 

“Coming, son!” 

Alternative to Plowing

My wife Judith and I nestled in our bed at the end of a laboriously fruitful day of toiling in the field. Despite her modest age of 23 years old, she could still find the energy to arouse me in the most youthful of ways. We were always sure to keep quiet during our recreation as to not awaken our children or the neighbors of Plymouth Rock. I could sense she was feeling rather frisky when she whispered in my ear with the mousy voice I desired, “I want to make you squirm Jedediah.” Her words were provocative as if she were tempting the Lord above with flirtatious hymnals. Admittedly, I was exhausted from the day, however, my body presented itself for the occasion. My little Jedediah stood shrouded by the blanket that we shared in our straw bed as if to praise the heavens above. Judith’s calloused hand traced their way down my tanned and rigid abdominal muscles as she sought to introduce herself to my flesh.

We have recently initiated a cruel trick on the Lord by having relations without the intent of procreating. The scandalous act committed, the sin in the eyes of God, seemingly introduced passion beyond our mandatory commitments that came with the covenant of marriage. Once, on an occasion before this, I conducted the promiscuous act, and as I arrived toward completion, I exited Judith and jizzed in her Puritan blonde hair. Standing over her as a leader in the community and in the bedroom, we exalted glory for the deed. My seed eventually washed away from her curls due to the typical sweat and elements endured over the course of a few physically active days of work. We would giggle at each other over dinner with our little secret. It seemed as if tonight was destined to be a repeat of our extra-marital conduct.

Judith caressed my neck and whispered passionate praise as if I were the Messiah. “Oh Jedediah,” she said, “I want to taste your fruit and milk you as if you were one of the dairy cows outside.” I was electric. Her boldness always froze me, but I eventually found the strength to contribute. “Judith, do you take me to be your lawfully wedded boy toy?” To which she nodded approvingly. She paused with her strokes as she had a defined eureka moment. I opened my eyes slowly and met hers glowing wide with excitement. I had not seen her filled with this much enthusiasm since we boarded the Mayflower. Instead of moving her hands below the sheet, she descended entirely into the cottoned abyss that was our bed. Confused, I asked “What the heck do you think you are doing?” She hummed along in attraction to my cursing as she mischievously smiled and drifted into the dark realm. We descended into hedonism together.

At first, I was unsure what I felt. I pondered which lips she was using for my penetration. I stared at the wood beamed ceiling of our cottage as the ecstasy and confusion overtook my body. It felt wet but not as wet as typical intercourse. I concluded she must be using her mouth by the uninterrupted sounds of slurping and swallowing that were emitted from the sheet tent she was operating in. I was twice over a Pilgrim in a strange land. This must be a sin. There is no way this was normal, but then again, as animalistic as it felt, I had never seen a farm animal do what Judith was doing. I peeped down at the sheet to strengthen my imagination of what she might be attempting. My theory was confirmed as I could make out a fabric sphere bob vertically by candlelight. “Who is this devil in our bed? Do I tell our preacher about this? Should I beg for forgiveness?” All these thoughts stirred as she labored away in the late hours of the night. My back was arched and my legs tingled as if they were losing circulation. “Am I experiencing heavenly comfort or is this a measure of devotion I am not physically prepared for?”

The climax came after what felt like a fortnight. I was impressed that I was still riddled with a boner despite my neuroses. As I felt the familiar release build to the point of externalization, I reached down and tapped Judith on the top of her head. Her hair was damp with condensation and the entire under sheet was elevated with body heat. I shot my ropes into her mouth. I could not imagine the sensation she must have felt as she gulped and gasped at my relief. After enough time passed, she crawled back up my body, shamefully avoiding my eyes and asked, “Dear Jedediah, did you not enjoy my gift?”

I sat with the question momentarily before responding, “Why I do believe that might be the highest form of pleasure to be found on Earth!”

Judith finally made eye contact with me and confidently said, “I do not understand then, you laid dormant and became mute. Not even a smile upon my return to your side. I worry you have become ashamed of my heathen activities.”

Wanting to smooth over any insecurities she may have held, I told her, “Judith, I love you baby. I will eat the forbidden fruit with you any day.”

“Good. We are stuck together, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” She teased.

I watched her roll over to extinguish the candle that illuminated our quarters. “Judith, I hope you forgive me for not kissing you goodnight. Your mouth just had my seed in it. I hope you understand.”

She giggled and told me, “All is forgiven.”

For the remainder of the night, I stared deeply toward the heavens while my deeply slumbering wife lay beside me. My torment was brought on by the affliction this possessed creature drug into our marital life. I could not get passed the guilt of sin we had committed. I had been led astray by lust. Even if she was my wife, this was Sodom and Gomorrah level treason against Thee. I am at odds with God or my Family. Earth was temporary, Heaven was forever I decided. In the morning I will report her to the Plymouth Rock authorities to be hanged on grounds that she is a witch conducting the devil’s work. Till death do we part, dear Judith. 

Duet

The violins were dueling. 

Soaring to great heights before plunging back to earth in a magnificent swirl of notes and patterns, each vying for his attention. Truly a glorious duet. 

Felix Chapuys felt the old familiar stirring in his chest, not unlike those early days of marital bliss when he was young and invincible and full of boundless optimism. As it was, music had been his only solace since his young bride and unborn child had been mercilessly snuffed out by a runaway conveyance in the thoroughfare, some twenty years before. 

It was a fate that still filled him with anger and disgust at his creator. A being so callous as to rip away Felix’s own heart while also filling his soul with sublime music. God was a horribly cruel master, indeed.

Chapuys twisted the simple gold band he still wore on his left hand around and around as the strings rose together into glorious climax, ripping him to pieces all over again. The violins seemed to know all the secrets of his heart, the confusion of his broken mind. They filled Chapuys with an intense and mournful longing, the past melding seamlessly into the present as the concerto played on and on.

A final, deep unison note pierced the air before slowly, exquisitely fading away. Silent tears fell in tracks down his face, as they always did at the concerto’s conclusion. Chapuys took a moment to savor that first, blissful moment of quiet as the last tone dissipated, returning the room to its usual, colorless state. 

Felix knew if he could, he would play the music in an endless loop, winding the battered old phonograph again and again until his arm gave out from sheer exhaustion. The concerto had to be earned. 

It demanded to be admired and cherished by someone who was deserving in every way; an eager student who would follow its divine instruction. Chapuys worked tirelessly to be worthy, pushing himself to the very edge in order to live within the music and pass on this knowledge. Inspired, he vowed to do it this very night.

With a determined sigh, Felix Chapuys caressed the skull a final time before gently returning it to its rightful place among the others. Turning away from his masterpiece, he smiled at a job well done.

Felix could feel a kindred spirit, a strange presence watching him from a great distance, already learning. Satisfied, he checked to make sure his blade was sufficiently sharp, before straightening his cravat and making himself ready for the long night ahead. 

***

Lucas backed away from the exhibit as the song ended. 

It was old people music, but Lucas didn’t mind. He may be two months away from his tenth birthday, but his mom always said he had an “old soul,” whatever that meant. The figure’s movements were so lifelike, he swore it smiled at him. It was eerie watching it methodically stroke the plastic skull as the music got louder and louder. The whole thing gave Lucas the creeps and a strange feeling of excitement at the same time. 

The man was one of those animatronic thingies. Lucas could hear the clicks and whirls as it sat dancing around in its chair but the face is what really got to him. It was lined and expressive, different emotions playing out across a wax-like surface. Curiosity getting the better of him, Lucas went over to the large plaque directly beneath the exhibit and began to read.

“Felix H. Chapuys, 1842-1902, was a notorious American serial killer in the late nineteenth century. He is credited for killing at least thirty women over a span of  two decades. It is said that he was driven by intense anger at the tragic loss of his young wife, Julia, who was run over by a Hansom Cab in the early 1880s. Julia was seven months pregnant. Chapuys was a great lover of the arts and music, carving up his victims while listening to his favorite musical selections on a hand-cranked phonograph. On the night he was caught, a “Concerto for 2 Violins in A minor, Op. 3, No. 8” by Vivaldi, had just finished playing as he was surprised by local authorities. The skulls of his many victims were carefully cleaned and stacked in the bedroom, the body of his latest mark still laid out upon a table, awaiting further dissection. He’d already boiled the skin from her head as they kicked the door in and shot him dead, thus ending his reign of terror.” 

Lucas turned his gaze to the headless mannequin lying on the table, goose flesh breaking out all over his body. They really were going for a realistic effect here. Bright red pieces glistened under the lights, fake gore and offal spilling over onto the floor. He could hear the display gearing up for another go as the crank on the old-fashioned music box began to spin. Unable to tear himself away, he hesitated. It was well past lunchtime and his mother would be looking for him.

He risked a final look back, feeling the whirs of the strange technology humming in anticipation, and saw a random tear fall down the killer’s face. A fresh jolt of fear sent him running away from the waxed figure and his crazy, hypnotic music. The opening notes of the concerto rang out once again through the “Hall of Killers” as Lucas desperately searched for the exit. 

A stray thought popped into his head as he hurried past the displays of Jack the Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, H.H. Holmes and John Wayne Gacy. It came out of nowhere, in a deep, fervent voice that wasn’t his own. This single, relentless thought would return to Lucas many times in the years to come, taunting him, driving him, igniting his imagination. A lonely, almost ten-year-old boy desperately searching for meaning who found a sudden, inexplicable appreciation for classical music. 

As Lucas burst through Wax Museum doors, he had no idea what any of this meant, but it would all make perfect sense to him in due time. The world would also come to know it, walking past Chapuys to where Lucas’ own likeness would one day stand, the maestro and student entwined forever in blood-drenched infamy. Truly a glorious duet.

The violins were dueling.

Psychoneuroses, Part 4

It was tough improvisational shit he’d sold to Aleister; it was shamanic: coming on strong. Even flea-ridden mongrels like Aleister weren’t guaranteed to handle deep funk action like this gear. Piggy peered into Aleister’s mince pies for reassurance. The bitch seemed cool. Joyfully, Pigsty drifted away; a trackless spore in a hot, humid dusk. Meanwhile, Cecil continued to push his luck, displaying a barbaric propinquity toward taking the piss. Using grotty rhetoric, the pawky manner in which he mockingly depicted community values threw a shitty spanner into the central mechanism of society’s psychical economy; devaluing core theories at the very heart of its exchange rate. Self-proclaimed Royalty; do me a favour! Cecil was simply out for what he could lay his grubby paws on. He couldn’t give a tuppeny-toss about all the fools deluded enough to idolise him. In bygone days, human behaviour mirrored unimpeachable elders, folk trusted digestible rules, and felt safe under the protection of pedagogical politicians hoving flinty principles like Thomas More, or James Ramsay MacDonald; gentlemen of integrity, sinew and fibre, who stood or fell on ancient fundamentals. Ab immemorabili, more martial, but equally legendary leaders flourished: Thor and Odin, brass-balled hairy guys who led from the front; demigods, content, nay eager, to share, even their dying energies, with a beloved natural environment. From those vanished golden-ages onwards, subsequent hero-less governments had been as corrupt as Narnia in winter. Aleister’s revelatory thinking swayed toward regicide, because organically (apart from that soggy-knickered Granny-shagging stuff) Fagan was spot on: any demagogue, quasi-prophet, or tin-pot opportunist seeking to subordinate our painstakingly patch-worked communities had to be dissuaded in the most brutal fashion- lest we poor people suffer. To be ill-governed under heavy manners is to be inspected, spied upon, directed, law driven, regulated, preached at, controlled, censored, and/or bummed by creatures that have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so. 

For example, The Queen of England safeguards sovereignty for a cadet branch of the haunted house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha; landed gentry poncing off successive populations of the British Isles like a bejewelled tapeworm since 1840. Her Majesty possesses arbitrary powers of pleasure over star-struck subjects, and takes the preposterous title of Supreme Governor on Earth of the Church of England. How mad’s that? Because structurally, amid the white-hot foundry of Christ’s notional Kingdom, there is no private property, no operationally leased airspace above buildings, or on rooftops, capped with newfangled mobile phone aerials; no pride and precedence, absolutely no commercialised motive, and no reward save love. Ah, love. Today schoolchildren are groomed from the age of four; force-fed fairytales daily, stuffed full of ornamental gibberish, and unwise additions, dreamed up by the unintelligently devout, concocting a miasma which paraphrases the lifecycle of a mysterious first-century Palestinian Jew: stuff and nonsense that kiddies must fit onto the same mental map as the lifecycle of a hungry caterpillar (to which, oddly, it bears a striking resemblance). A diabolical cult of the individual surrounds Queen Elizabeth (whose face as designed by Arnold Machin, appears on all legal currency and postage stamps); leeching it large in magnificent palaces with stunning gardens, she’s amassed a vast private fortune, becoming in fact, the richest witch in the world. What on God’s green earth does Fagan see in her? Her every public relations action, no matter how banal, is lauded by a crass, fawning, sycophantic media; dark forces choreograph accompanying, pro-royalist demon-strations. Lurking behind Blighty’s stylised figurehead, a voracious clique of parasitic castrators rule a decerebrated majority, who scribble the traditional mark of inutile illiteracy by one of three names twice a decade (although some unlucky blighters from outside the portcullis, beyond the motte-and-bailey, are procured by palace security chiefs for the dubious privilege of being humped by princes, whilst sky-high on drugs). 

“And now you children of my father’s flock, the stochastic moment arrives to realise the implicatures and insurmountable powers of conviction.” Cecil trumpeted forth mesmerising messages: “…there can be no life without injustice, no living creature can live and thrive without destroying another existing organism. Behavioural battles between one’s instinctual reflexes and conditioned roles, brings painful confusion upon one’s soul! Please yourself people, groove as you feel, follow your nature, let’s all remain real. Come! Gather now; conceive infinity as it actually is.”

Slyly Cecil produced his spellbinding lantern (a theatrical prop billed as a ‘sovereign cognitive apparatus’ over promotional posters dotted around the West End) and proceeded with a phantasmagorical exhibition of suggestive images; projections fraught with terrified mini-mammals, punctuated at intervals by uglier scenes where he performed bestial deeds on an array of plastic inflatables. This cynosure of spectator heed revealed hedgehogs and multicoloured shrews, pulling processional carriages under the yoke of fantastical homorphous creatures (bipedal figures that bore antlers or pointy things akin to mountain goats). All manner of inventive pictures were grotesquely distorted, conjuring up kaleidoscopic sequences of emotional and spiritual depravity, eating into and becoming ever more pressing upon the mindset of an audience agog. Tension grew, lewd ladies cried out in ecstasy, for stark was Cecil’s power. Gross manifestations emanating from CCG’s ingenious implement of lurid exposure formed a veneered pictorial mimicry of humanity, laced with vermin, smut, scatology; painting an eerie irreligious triptych, echoing mediæval exemplars of Judgment Day. Alternative cabaret disguised excavations into evils. Serving no teleological purpose, lionising deceit, and betrayal; highlighting people’s worst traits, Cecil triggered anxieties, disinterring a primordial adversarial fear of ‘others’. FOMO spread across vast ranging horizons. Thatcher’s atavism had won; employing rubrici branded: what’s in it for me? His contemporaries were no longer willing to curb sensory whims and fancies. En masse shunning personal responsibility, compromise and sobriety; wholeheartedly subscribing to brain-worms, sleight of hand, and cheap tricks that Cecil used to corner TGI Friday’s kippered meat market. Afternoon bled into evening; febrile scuffles broke out amongst rebarbative white niggers in the foyer. Aleister espied Piggy’s sudoriferous armpits milling amidst the best of them; late arrivals, as incompetent as they were brutal: an irruption of non-thinking easily divisible boot boys, disaccustomed to harmonious mingling at an after-office-hours soirée. A transitive section of stage-struck punters crowding the auditorium were, by contrast, smitten by Cecil’s spectacle to the point of sensualism. Aleister could feel a collective craving to edge closer to Cecil’s enthralling contraption. Cecil had turned them on big time. He’d spit roasted the lot of them by talking dirty. Now they were ready to bend over and retake it where the sun doesn’t shine. Aleister guessed that promises of requited lust were genuinely scarce fodder for most heavily taxed, hard-working citizens, and now, thanks to Cecil’s adept salesmanship, easy virtue had become a big issue of the upmost primary significance. The gloating horny figure of Curious Cecil Gruff (who jarringly reminded him of his absentee father) pandered to illicit desires, playing upon biblical guilt’s and weaknesses; beseeching volunteers to feast upon the pabulum of his wicked craft. Only a soupçon of sanity survived; it belonged to venerable Aleister, would-be guardian of an adamantine anus, thus not a man to die of ignorance. 

Proper leaders, heterodox ones who care about citizens, set the correct tone, they regulate an equitable agenda -called meritocracy- there’s no inheritance, and the right people are elevated as a direct result of their worth to society from a pool of stakeholders, not just to-the-manor-born usurpers. Direct democracies draw people together: promoting mutual respect, forbearance, and shared faith; not knobbing domesticated animals, or abusing feeble folk in the way Cecil encouraged. His ghastly vision was no better than some dreadful divorced, single, or separated shag-fest, where a winner-takes-all in a cold, friendless, windswept coliseum of malice, mistrust and paedophilia. Deciphering the nuclear consequences of undiluted iniquities free-flowing through this pantomime’s rudderless, ale-house intelligence, Aleister corroborated his heart for battle by swigging the dregs of his pint. Picking up Piggy’s abandoned shillelagh, Aleister tried to get at CCG ‘of the many gross improprieties’ but was hindered in his quest by profane powers. The fluctuating phalange of punters, seduced into chaotic tumult, prevented Aleister from marching unto war. An obsequious horde serried together in anticipation of Cecile’s grand slam finale: a human wave of pheromones, wafting sweat, semen, vaginal secretions, breast milk and urine; women bared their mammaries, whilst grown men chewed on leather belts and tapered cork butt-plugs. “Seekers of saliva hear me well, and duly obey my command! Bend your knees in supplication to erotic plasticity, shaped and finely tuned by the true might of passion” yelled Cecil during his rhapsodical rodomontade “…now hold hands and circle me, o relinquishers of the stoical void.”

Aleister wished to scream aloud in his eagerness to halt Cecil in his cloven tracks, yet was lost for words as an ominous shadow menacingly upstaged any notion of gaining attention. A teeny maelstrom of pastel hues appeared, pullulating into a racy nimbus over Cecil’s brightly painted, carnival style headdress, spraying out across the mosh pit like an expansive roman candle; showering mere mortals with star-spangled fairy cum. As the dust settled, an awesome three-dimensional monstrosity superimposed itself onto Cecil’s spot on the thrust stage, endowing momentary invisibility upon tonight’s barnstorming artiste: this gossamer Luciferian countenance, with an erect filamentous appendage sprouting from its brow, totally stole the show. “What does he do for an encore? Shag minors!” Fagan’s gravelly voice startled Aleister, conveying the impetus required to aim a well-deserved haymaker at Cecil, striking his target so hard that Piggy’s knotty walking stick snapped in twain. Before one could utter ‘hocus-pocus’, the garishly tinted bounder vanished in an acrid puff of smoke. Accusatively, a stranger demanded: “What the fuck are you doing, you nutter?” Bunches of bug-eyed Muppets stared daggers at him; they may have purchased council houses, but none had the Aristotle to confront Aleister mano a mano. In panic they pointed at him with large foam fingers. Poltroon bastards the lot of them, yet their consensus was remorseless. Aleister just couldn’t get a grip on what was occurring. He was so out of synch with the picture, it wasn’t funny. Was he the guilty party? Is that why spars blanked him? Fagan had seemed contrite, and other acquaintances had given him short-shrift. Someone could’ve warned him if he was edging off the rails & out-of-fashion. Now, who would visit him in clink- young Conservatives? Not a chance. Aleister could no longer handle this level of peer group rejection. At his feet lay CCG, at last bloody well mute; sprawled across the stage in fancy dress, shards of his technicolour Woolworth’s porch lantern scattered across the deck. A resident ship of fools was about to up anchor and mutiny, so he needed to scarper. He swivelled swiftly, nutted some character on the schnozzle, then was on his toes out into Leicester Square (the pungent stench of refuse contorted his expression); it was full of mad dogs with ticks, stretching muscles in his lower jaw as he roared back at them. He howled ripe obscenities, growling like a giant wolf from some Norse saga stuck in his head since the infants. His stature increased until all else appeared to shatter in his wake. As he raced through the green, hundreds of pigeons took flight in unison as if they were all tiny rockets; ICBMs, part of a first strike initiative aimed at destroying our planet. Blindly happy, in the depths of their ignorance, the population deserved mutually assured destruction: liars and cheats every last jack. Look! There’s the Devil. Where? There. How do you know? Listen my friend, the light from that bulb up there in the white asbestos Artex ceiling hit the Devil, and bounced off onto my retina; quantities of microscopic sensory things miraculously tingled in my mind. It was them telling my brain cells, no? What? You’re imagining things; you’re rather gonzo aren’t you? Am I bollox. 

Sprinting through Coventry Street and beyond into Haymarket, Aleister visualised that resistance was pure futility. A Route Master 12 fast approached, its number symbolising cosmic order; he braced himself to sacrifice the prospect of a virtuous life, to the mirage of a high-minded death. The omnibus hit him so hard it felt as if a fireball had exploded inside his hairless chest; he could hardly breathe. A massive bout of haemoptysis started to fill the airways of both lungs. Coughing, Aleister slowly drowned in his own blood. Energy dissipated from his being, his peripheral vision occluded; other senses seemed to operate autonomously, all of their own accord. As the world revolved around him, up above he noticed Fagan’s drunken face leering down. “Life ain’t fair Aleister, not for you or me leastways. Sadly, the likes of us see, across this big bad globe, we’re suffered: solely to be exploited. Even my mate Trestle-table the filth was fucked over. They dropped him like a hot potato when they discovered he was bent. Truth is- he was disposable see? His corruptible tendencies had gone undetected during routine security screenings, then, right on cue, the OB terminated his career: after twenty-nine frigging years! Oh well, every guttersnipe knows that manmade hierarchies are about princes and whipping boys, winners and losers, punishments or rewards. Still, you done good son. You realised we can’t let insolent twats like Cecil Gruff take liberties, and that he had it coming. I’d have done the same matey; only you beat me to it. Those yuppie wankers lapped it up like powdered pussies. As if Cecil was the greyhound’s undercarriage or some kind of fucking Sumerian deity. And the English working classes, this lost generation of uncivilised souls, socially engineered straight out of barbarism and direct into decadence, fought amongst them-selves as usual. Fuck ‘em. Still you got him; the means justify the ends OK. Now stay calm mate, I’ve brought a tasty reward; in recognition of your fortitude. Nothing styptic I’m afraid.” After chortling and wobbling a bit, Fagan gradually genuflected; holding tightly onto Aleister’s hand. With due care and attention, he produced a small wet pink object from his torn hip pocket. “Ere me now, I extracted Cecil’s sesquipedalian tongue. I’d have tampered with his greasy orifice had the opportunity knocked, but you know, been there done that.” 

This tribute, delivered in a final act of innocent albeit demented compassion, soothed Aleister; as death engulfed him, his last selfless wish was that his lifetime on magna mater’s terrestrial sphere, hadn’t been spent entirely in vain. And if a repository for his immaterial soul had indeed been preordained, he hoped that his crushed body would at least, as a rite of passage, be reincorporated into the cycle of life as sustenance for stray dogs, urban badgers, jackals, and foraging swine, if not fed to eagles, birds of the heavens or fishes in the deep blue sea. Regrettably, he feared his cadaver would be clinically dismembered. Selected organs would be legitimately employed by scientists involved in pathological research, others reaped purely for profit; sold abroad illegally, by un-Hippocratic medical practitioners trading corpus components. Boiled in water that’s been saturated with numerous herbs containing tannins, black-market shrunken scrotums thus preserved, are proudly worn as amulets by handmaidens of Hanbi, going about their murky duties. Deconsecrating screaming infants, innocent babes in arms, wrenched from impoverished families; torturing impuissant souls dredged from the substratum of an intercontinental social pyramid, to harvest adrenaline glands for adrenochrome, at the behest of an ancient and illuminated order of orgiastic priests. This is wisdom.

***

Psychoneuroses, Part 1