Crazy Fucking Rats and Ass-Ended Cadillacs 

I’d been in seclusion for a few months or more in my haphazardly constructed shack in the dump; the stench and vermin were unbearable, keeping most ass-fucks from ever coming around, save for a few asshole scavengers who visited when the time came to cannibalize the dump for anything that would fetch a few dimes. I didn’t feel comfortable with those creepy fucks roaming around at night; so I started shooting off my gun and hanging gruesome voodoo dolls covered in butchered rats; there’d be no quarter in my land of the wretched. The corpses that caught some of my bullets were easy to dispose of, being at the dump already they just sank beneath the bird shit and the top layer of garbage like quicksand.   

I often wondered what was more fucked; a recluse lowered to the status of having to live in a dump, or a recluse choosing to live in a dump and committing homicide to defend it, anyway most people steered clear of my shit kingdom and that was really the point. I needed to write, to bring words together in any discernable context; but I had writers block, or as I referred to it; an ass backwards divine intervention with extreme malice delivered by sodomy, I was convinced that some god or demon had sucked out my creative machinery, most likely through my ass, but I never discounted the possibilities of extraction through other orifices.

Everything I wrote read like it had been shit out of somethings ass or on all accounts an indecipherable abomination to the entire history of writing; I drank the local moonshine which probably wasn’t helping.

The locals called the dump the “Ivory Mountain” and told stories to their children about elephants going there to die. “Jesus Fuck” it was completely white from the years of seagull shit fossilized and covering it like a blanket, and no self-respecting elephant I’ve ever met would come within a mile of this shithole.

The dump was old and never used due to the troublesome fossilized bird shit that had through some process become explosive and in the wretched heat little bursts of fire blew up skyward without warning, which made navigating the terrain close to impossible. This and the fact that the dump was covering an antiquated mine field, left me preferably quite alone and undisturbed. The shack itself was constructed of many strange things but the main super-structure keeping the whole thing standing were four Cadillac’s standing on end; asses dug in the ground, they were like skyscrapers, solid and triumphant like those sculptures on Easter Island, evoking a guardian like nuance. The roof was a big square piece of corrugated green plastic and roared like fuck through the rainy season which lasted eleven months out of the year; my chair and desk were gracefully cannibalized from another abandoned “caddy” using chainsaws and pickaxes, I had the typewriter bolted on the dashboard with a pea green long front seat behind it. The shack was lit with dollar store flamingo lights powered by a haphazardly ill-advised dangerous connection to a few car batteries; the rest of the interior design was made up of coolers I found around the dump stacked up against my Cadillac walls, everything I had was stored inside them, down here monsoon season shared the same seasons as the rainy seasons so the coolers had to be completely fucking water-proof and they had to fucking float in any flood, demonic insurrection of water monsters, or large tectonic movements.   

I smoked the local cheap brand of cigarettes that I believe actually contained some species of animal shit, which gave them a pungent but bold and pleasant aromatic flavor and smell; the local “shine” cost pennies and really fuck-assed your mind due to its hallucinatory effects and one of its more gruesome ingredients being gasoline. The smack habit started not long after I arrived when I realized that I was a recluse living in a dump and the fact that I had orchestrated every bad decision that put me there; there really was no “down” from that point and certainly nothing to propel me upwards, onwards, or out of that fucking dump.

My prescription meds were long gone and the only pharmaceuticals available were the recreational kind; needless to say I was on a hayride to hell with my mental illnesses creeping back in and completely laying rot to any good decision making skills I may have had, I was desperate and my brain was literally eating itself.

The voices in my head had started to wake; luckily, they mostly argued with each other, leaving me out of their existential bullshit, but they were pissing me off all the same, and the smack was doing shit fuck all in that regard. What I needed was P.C.P.; now that would fix me up all right ways. There was a mini little shanty town about a mile from the dump; which I was previously trying avoid, but when that monkey on your back throws you into a choke hold, well, you’ve got to feed the fucker.

I put on my most dapper attire; shit stained Bermuda shorts, my FUCK THE WORLD t-shirt, and my camouflage bucket hat, I had no shoes as they floated away during the last storm, however I didn’t discount the possibility that they were taken by the rats, they’d been gathering in organized groups since I arrived and I suspected that they were conspiring against me, now that would be an earth moving clusterfucking massacre that nobody would walk away from. As it goes for now, I’d added shoes to my shopping list, some bullets would be useful as well, and a few sticks of dynamite, the sensible thing would be to hoard munitions, as I had little experience in vermin warfare. I made out for my grocery run and the voices in my head were beginning to address me; even though I explained that any dialogue would not be advantageous for them or me at this particular time, they never fucking listened, they were self-involved fuck-asses, and it was my goddamn brain that they were ass-fucking, they were squatters at best. Man; did we get into it, by the time I reached the town I was screaming bloody murder and they weren’t making any fucking sense, they were all talking at once, one was suicidal and wept through the whole ordeal, one was screaming at that one, calling him wimp little pussy, and it went on and on and on. 

If I couldn’t get my hands on some P.C.P.; I was going back for a do-it-yourself lobotomy in the dump. I crept up to the main strip that had only one bar and that was it; I noticed that it was also a grocery store, hardware store, lots of fishing and tackle shit, and a whole lot of bad ass, noticeably armed motherfuckers, just hanging around drunk, or on some fucking crazy shit, with their eyes just bugged the fuck out of their sockets; obviously I’d come to the right place.

I found flip flops; cheap rusty bullets and sat down for a beer. I was casing the joint for any salesmen baring the fruits I was in desperate need of; if they were anywhere, they were here, but I wasn’t attracting any business at all, until a waitress took my ear and said, “If you’re lookin, see what’s cookin, dump man”. Jesus fuck man! Was I the talk of the fucking town now? I’ve never seen any of these creeps before, but I guess they’ve been watching me, I wondered what they knew, none of them looked like they could string two words together, fuck, they’d have trouble with one from what I was seeing.

Let’s go check out what’s “cookin”. I discerned from the cryptic words I’d received, that the kitchen was where I could find some bumpable product. Aside from being the most wretched, disease infested, blood-soaked demonic cookery I’ve ever set eyes on; their chef was a giant bunny rabbit, not some guy in a fucking bunny outfit, a goddamn human sized bunny/rabbit/hare thing. In all living fuck; what in goddamn hell was going on? I thought I’d seen some really fucked up shit man, but this was the motherfucking topper on the proverbial cake of shit sideways clusterfucking madness. 

I decided to be really casual about the whole thing; the truth was that if I didn’t get some P.C.P. soon those motherfuckers in my head were going to take over and I’d be completely ass-fucked. I addressed him as “chef”, and he came back with “Hey! Aren’t you the dump guy”, was I wearing a fucking sign on me or something? I came here to be anonymous, not the best fucking show in town, “yeah; I’m the dump guy” I confessed with obvious frustration, “what can I do you for?”, fuck! He was a pretty fucking chipper bunny guy, “I’m in desperate need of some fucking angel dust, and for the love of god, please tell me you’ve got some”.

He motioned for me to follow him out back; and I enthusiastically skipped along after him, stepping through a door marked no exit into a back yard of sorts. It was jam packed fucking full of what some may call a “how to begin a guerrilla war starters kit”; there were two tanks, an Apache helicopter, crates on top of crates of guns, bazookas, ammunition, grenades and land mines. “Jesus fuck dude! You planning for a rainy day?” apparently he was known infamously for being the guy who could get anything for anybody, fucking fast and fucking cheap. “So, what about that P.C.P.?”, “you’ll have to give me a minute” the bunny man strolled over to a hole, dug in the yard behind some crates and dove in, about three minutes later he crawled out with a bag the size of a potato sack and asked how much I wanted. “I’ll take the lot, and by the way, you wouldn’t happen to have any dynamite, would you?”Hee motioned to a crate the size of a couch and said I could take the whole thing as it was apparently hard to unload because of all the new advancements in the mass destruction industries.

He went inside and grabbed a couple beers for us and sparked up a zeppelin sized dube; the shit was some super high grade weed, and after the first haul I was spinning all Disneyland style. He enquired about my curious arrival a few months ago and choice of living arrangements; I explained that I was a writer of sorts and required privacy; not only for creative exploration but also because I was bat-shit fucking crazy and a danger to all those around me, passing over the joint he gave an me a subtle understanding glance.

I asked him about my surprising infamy; as I thought I’d been very careful in my attempts to be generally unnoticed, having no contact with anyone, save for those douche-bag scavengers I’d murdered in the dump a few weeks ago. He explained that this was a very small place; and most of the people here were hiding from the authorities, disgruntled countries, mobsters, aliens, their wives, or husbands or both, most had prices on their heads from ripping off ass-fucks they shouldn’t have. So, everybody knows immediately about any newcomers; in fact, you’d have been fucking butchered within days of your arrival if it wasn’t for your constant screaming and choice of habitat, everyone knew you must be crazy as fuck, and therefor presented no danger. 

We sat and got abominably stoned off the bunny man’s grass; sucking down a few more beers, and bumping P.C.P. It was a good old time; and I really appreciated the pleasure of his conversation, but there was still that proverbial elephant strolling around the yard amongst the tanks and assorted munitions. I was fucking dying to ask him what in all living fuck he was, I had a lot of extremely surreal ideas rolling around my head, but I’d learned not to trust my presumptions because I was cosmically fucking deranged, and most of my ideas led directly into cryptic misadventures that couldn’t be undone.  

Finally, at last the elephant was poked, or acknowledged, or evidenced, or tipped over, however the fucking phrase goes it went. The bunny man brought it out in thanking me for treating him like any other douchebag should be treated; he started out saying I guess you’ve been wondering, and fuck yes, I’d been wondering.

As the story goes; before the munitions business he’d been a scientist of sorts working in the field of dimensional shifting, which was a debunked science at the time and only a few wacko fucks were actually involved in those type of studies. He’d become ostracized from the scientific community; he was defunded and became the punchline of many unoriginal jokes. Faced with bankruptcy and having to move his lab into his basement; depression set in, as well as a very expensive cocaine habit which followed in divorce and the loss of his kids, he continued his work with what little he had, haphazardly defying all health bylaws in storing radioactive materials that were integral to his work. In acquiring some of the more dangerous materials; he was forced to go through some back channels, which forced him to associate with some very shadowy people, and it was one of those shadowy people that offered to help him in his endeavors, but it came with a very concerning ethical dilemma. This guy offered up tons of fucking cash; and a shitload of land to build up a new state of the art laboratory, all he had to do was come up with a genocidal size explosive device that could be detonated with absolutely no sound and no residual evidence. Apparently, he jumped all over it; the funding came in, the lab was built on a giant piece of farmland, far away from any peering eyes, they even brought in some farm animals to complete the disguise.

By this point in the conversation I was pretty ass-fucked on the P.C.P. so the science behind building this device was fucking lost on me; but basically the bunny man found a way to separate the physics of this explosion, in that he could someway move the sound into another dimension when the fucker went off, as far as the evidence goes, he said that the aftermath would be so goddamn radioactive that it would take about a hundred years for anyone to get close enough to take any readings without melting into toxic fucking goo.

He knew he’d hit the nail on the head; but there’d have to be a test, admittedly at this point he’d been doing so much cocaine that his nose cavities were in fast decay, so he did overlook a few details in his calculations, and being the first person to ever open a dimensional rift, details were sort of important. During his research he was being visited by a curious wild rabbit that he’d feed from time to time and eventually adopted as a pet, he said it was good company as cocaine makes one talk a lot of shit a lot of the time, and the rabbit seemed to listen, and from his perspective completely understand everything he was saying.

Finally, the day came for the test and a few of his benefactors rolled on up with gleeful anticipation; the bunny man had cordoned off a circle of about a half mile radius and placed a small container of this gruesome cocktail of inter-dimensional whatever the fuck in the center. They all got behind a makeshift shelter with a big plastic 5inch thick window; the bunny man was holding his little friend at the time so he handed off the detonator to one of the others. 

Apparently, this was the time that the small details manifested into not so small details, the little bit of what the fuck blasted a hole in the ground about five miles deep and incinerated everything within ten miles of the explosion. However; the test was actually successful, given that there was absolutely no sound at all, the shelter was completely gone and so were his benefactors, as well as all life, structures and every fucking thing around him, it seemed to have just vanished, except for him, he spent about an hour looking for his rabbit without success before retreating into a bunker he’d dug out in case of emergencies, this is where he finally realized after looking into a mirror about forty or fifty times, that his not so little cocktail of catastrophes had somehow fused him and his little rabbit together, creating what was sitting beside me: the bunny man. He never figured out what actually happened; like why he and the rabbit fused and survived, “survived” however, in this particular case was a somewhat abstract usage of the word, he’d really fucking shit the bed on the dose of the experimental explosive and now with some of his benefactors “disappeared” he’d have to get the fuck out of dodge before the rest of his benefactors got wind of the clusterfuck that had just occurred, he was unable to collect anything formally on the surface as there really was no surface to speak of, so he grabbed whatever he could from the bunker, which included an ass-fucking amount of uncut cocaine, a few notes and a small amount of the cocktail he’d created. He hitched a ride to the nearest circus; and eventually ended up here. 

I had to compliment the fellow on his reintegration into society; if you could call this fucking snake pit a society, I never asked his name, mostly because I didn’t give a fuck and really wanted to get back to the dump before the rats gained too much ground. I asked what I owed him for the drugs and dynamite; he said I could just take it, probably because I sat there for a fucking hour listening to his bullshit, which he could have summarized down to about a few minutes, in fact I believe I may have slept through some of the more crucial details. Fuck him anyways; I’ve got enough douche- bags inside my head squawking shit about shit-fuck all, and I’ve had enough of bizarre bunny man origin stories for one day. I paid the fucker a decent sum despite his gracious offer; I didn’t want any fuck-asses coming down to the dump asking for favors, so I smiled and went on my merry fucking way.

By the time I got back to the dump I was right fuck assed on P.C.P. The dump was downhill from the town/store thing; and because of the rain I was actually able to ride my supplies all the way, unfortunately, I couldn’t steer or stop, so the crash following the ride turned out to be rather gruesome and painful, and would probably have lasting medical effects. After unloading my booty; I had a good look around at the dump, it looked different in some way, it was hard to see as it was raining shit buckets and blowing like some furious titan fart, but if my eyes weren’t deceiving me, as they usually did, I could make out a fuck-load of very small tower looking things that had sprung up in my absence. Those fucking rats: they’d built watch towers all around my fucking shack, this was obviously a prelude to a full on insurrection, they had eyes on me now and I didn’t fucking like it. As the rain began to calm I could see the motherfuckers on top of these goddamn things, looking at me through tiny little binoculars, where they got hold of the miniature technology I’ve no clue and didn’t give one fuck, all I knew was that my previous paranoia was in fact a realistic first strike troop movement, these seemingly small brained nonconsequential little fuck heads had developed into a comprehensive fully sentient war mongering culture. Even the voices in my head were silenced in a full on conscientious grouped focus on what lay before us; any further movement of those little fucks would put me into an irrevocable situation with no way out.

It was going to be bloody; and massive destruction would ensue, but now was the time, I knew full well that I could do very little to save my life, but I sure as shit wasn’t going to be taken down by a full on rat attack, I was on enough P.C.P. to hospitalize about five elephants, and had enough dynamite to level the whole dump, with that, the fire bursts, and whatever mines were still active under this shit heap, we were all going down in frightful bloody fucking carnage, and no one, rat or human, was going to escape the wrath of the guy living in the dump.                          

Lancelot of the Mart

From the register John watched the girl circling the aisles of the Sunshine Food Mart, biting her thumb as she glanced at him. He figured she was waiting for the line to go down before she approached, but she didn’t have a basket, and in fact she wasn’t carrying anything at all. Did she want to talk? The morning rush began to taper off, as the construction workers, bros, and commuters bought their sandwiches, Red Bulls, and coffees.

He smiled at her a couple of times, to apologize for the short-staffing, and to show her he was harmless. Just a middle-aged guy, medium height, thinning hair, who found himself running a register. Maybe she was looking for condoms or lube, and didn’t want to talk to Jake in the deli. For one thing, Jake was always busy back there, and for another he looked (and, truthfully, was) kind of pervy.

But 9:30 on a Tuesday morning wasn’t usually when girls came in for that stuff. Usually Friday or Saturday afternoon, before their dates showed up to take them to bar hop on Boyle Street. This girl didn’t look like she was going on a date. Quite the opposite. She looked anti-feminine, like she was doing her best to hide any girlish part of her. Baggy sweatpants, too-long hoodie, hair under a cap, no makeup. Maybe she should have worn makeup, because her face was red and puffy, and every few minutes she wiped her eyes with a sleeve.

John decided, a girl in trouble. He wondered, as he almost always did when a young girl came in, about Cassie. He told himself, as he almost always did when he thought about Cassie, that this time he really would get out the email address Melissa had written out for him on that sticky note, and ask her about their daughter.

He finished ringing up Nora Rae, who came in every couple of days to spend her social security on scratch-offs and smokes, and then the front of the store was empty. The girl looked around, took a breath, and bounced to get herself moving. John gave her his warmest you-can-trust-me smile when she walked up.

“Morning, miss, I’m sorry we’ve been busy, what can I do for you?”

She smiled in the way of young girls, who smile automatically to make things ok, but her eyes held nothing but fear. She scrunched her hands in the long sleeves and leaned forward. “Do you guys carry, uh, the, uh, morning after pill?” Her voice was shallow, and husky from the crying, and she flamed crimson in embarrassment.

John’s heart sank. After the last election the state had essentially outlawed abortion, and he’d heard the Planned Parenthood clinic had shut down a few months ago. Sure he knew that girls sometimes needed help and couldn’t get it. He just never thought they would show up at his register and have to ask a wretched old fool like him for something so intimate. He felt helpless and useless, as he always did when Cassie came home in tears. He remembered her look, just like this girl: do something, just please help me!

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” he whispered back. “We don’t carry anything like that. Just the condoms and stuff.”

“Yeah, I figured,” she said. He hoped she wouldn’t start crying in front of him. “Um, what about–” She pulled her phone out of the sleeve and looked at some page she had found. “What about, like, pennyroyal or licorice root? I mean, you’ve got some stuff…” She trailed off, and we both looked at the little display of aspirin and bullshit hangover cures.

John wanted to reach out and touch her hand, but if she was looking for a morning-after pill at least he wasn’t so stupid to think that a man’s touch would help.

“No, no, we’re just a food mart. Half of this stuff is probably blackmarket and expired anyway.” He tried a laugh, and she gave a quick half-smile. “What about the organic market? They’ve got a bunch of stuff in their wellness aisle, or whatever they call it. Maybe you could find something there?”

She seemed to shrink even further into the hoodie. “That’s where my mom works,” she said. “I can’t, I just can’t.” She looked around the little mart, looking for an answer that wasn’t there. A tear slid down her face and she absently wiped it away with the sleeve.

“Maybe your boyfriend can help, maybe he could find what you need in the wellness aisle. Does your mom know him?”

“Oh, she knows him,” the girl said with a sudden fury. “She’s married to him.”

She fled to the front door and parked herself on the yellow metal bench out front. She wrapped her arms around her shins and stared at the cemetery across the road.

John stood there, paralyzed with all the old feelings that came up like an unflushable turd. Useless, stupid, wishy-washy, a failure. He wanted to do something, so he brought out a can of green tea and set it beside her on the bench. She didn’t acknowledge him and he went back inside to keep the register ringing.

He noticed that she had taken off the hoodie, with nothing but a purple sports bra underneath. John didn’t like that. A food mart with two pumps of off-brand gasoline was no place for a slim young girl to be showing herself. Sure enough, around lunchtime a pickup rolled in and two dudes piled out. Each one eyeballed the girl as they walked in and shared a wolfish grin as the doors closed behind them.

They bought chips, jalapeno jerky, dip, and a twelver of Natty Light. As John rang them up the tall one asked, “Yo, you know that tasty bit of sweetmeat out front?” The other snorted.

John flushed, in the spotlight, and he stammered out, “Oh, she’s-” my daughter, just say she’s my daughter “-a friend, she likes to hang out here.”

“A friend, huh, that’s nice.”

John nodded, feeling better, now that he was doing something, helping.

“So, what’s your friend’s name?”

In the face of John’s humiliated silence the tall one smiled scorn, taking a bully’s pleasure in catching out John in his sad little lie. He dropped exactly one penny in the change plate and sauntered outside. 

It was the smaller one, with his blonde hair in a ponytail, who started to chat up the girl. John thought, C’mon guys, she’s only fourteen or fifteen. But they kept smiling and laughing, and pretty soon so was she. When she offered the blonde guy a drink of her tea, Cassie’s face finally pushed John out the door.

“Hey, miss, uh, I can call and get you a ride, anywhere you need, no problem.”

She didn’t meet his gaze, but the tall dude didn’t give her a chance to take the offer.

“Thanks cashier-man, ah, ‘John’, John-boy,” he smirked. “Yeah, no, Maddie says she wants to take a ride with us. We’ll take her to where she needs to go.”

When John didn’t move he stepped forward hard. Youth and arrogance pushed, the familiar bloom of fear pulled, and John was back in the mart.

“Is that true, Maddie, you want to go with them?” he managed, but the door shut in his face.

They all climbed into the truck, with Maddie in the middle. Someone said something and the guys laughed, but Maddie did not. They drove off.

At home, after his shift, John thought she might have looked back at him as they drove away, then decided she hadn’t. Why would she?