Iron Fist

The club’s neon sign buzzed and flickered like a dying insect, casting sickly purple shadows across Joe Oroborus’s face as he watched Kandy Fontaine saunter through the entrance of Club Euphoria. Her leather jacket caught the light, transforming ordinary street grime into a constellation of sin. Behind her, Princess Cherrypop’s flame-red hair created a bloody halo that seemed to pulse in time with the industrial music bleeding through the walls.

Joe’s cybernetic hand twitched, sending sparks of pain up his arm where flesh met metal. The implant had been acting strange lately, picking up phantom frequencies, whispering things in the dead of night. Sometimes he caught himself having conversations with it, his organic fingers tracing the chrome joints while the artificial ones spelled out messages in a sign language he never learned.

Kandy noticed the spasms, her FBI-trained eyes missing nothing. “Your tech’s got the jitters again,” she said, sliding onto the barstool beside him. “Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten that upgrade from that back-alley clinic.”

Princess Cherrypop leaned against the bar, her alabaster skin almost translucent under the strobing lights. “The one run by that doctor who disappeared after the incident with the flesh cubes?”

The music shifted, became something darker, more visceral. Joe’s artificial hand clenched involuntarily, crushing his glass. Blood and bourbon mingled with shattered crystal, but he couldn’t feel the cuts. The hand was moving on its own now, fingers dancing across the bar top in precise geometric patterns. Princess Cherrypop’s eyes widened as she recognized the symbols. “Those are the same markings we found carved into the walls of the quantum computing lab after the massacre.”

Kandy pulled her service weapon, but kept it low, hidden beneath the bar. The other patrons seemed oblivious to the horror unfolding, their bodies swaying to the rhythm while reality began to crack around the edges. Joe’s mechanical fingers were leaving trails of light in the air now, tear-tracks in the fabric of space-time.

“It’s not an upgrade malfunction,” Joe managed through gritted teeth. “Something came through when they installed the new neural interface with cybernegative twisties. Something old. Eldritch, even. Something that’s been waiting in the spaces between binary code.” 

His artificial hand lunged for Kandy’s throat with terrible purpose, but Princess Cherrypop was faster. She slammed a crystalline vial onto the bar, and the air filled with ozone and the smell of burning circuit boards.

The hand froze mid-strike, trembling. Shapes began to emerge from the chrome surface, faces screaming in silicon agony, bodies twisted into impossible Möbius strips of flesh and metal. The entity that had been riding Joe’s circuits revealed itself, a thing of angles and edges that hurt the mind to look upon.

“Now!” Cherrypop screamed.

Kandy moved with the fluid grace of a killer, her gun spitting sanctified code-bullets programmed by techno-priests. The things living in Joe’s artificial hand shrieked in frequencies that shattered every screen in the club. Reality buckled as the entity tried to maintain its hold on our dimension, but the holy algorithms were stronger.

In the end, Joe’s mechanical hand lay smoking on the bar, inert but finally clean. The club’s patrons continued dancing, their minds automatically editing out anything that didn’t fit their comfortable version of reality. Kandy holstered her weapon while Princess Cherrypop swept the dead hand into her purse like it was nothing more unusual than a compact mirror.

“You’ll need a new one,” Kandy said, lighting a cigarette. “I know a guy. No demons, guaranteed. Just good old-fashioned chrome and steel.” Joe nodded, cradling his cybernetic arm. The music had returned to its regular rhythm, but underneath he could still hear echoes of that other frequency, that digital death-jazz that played in the spaces between ones and zeros. 

He ordered another drink, knowing he’d need it for what came next. After all, something had opened that door between worlds, and it wasn’t the kind of door that stayed closed for long.

Parable

Betty lives in the apartments across from Hackley Park, where yesterday a seven-year-old kid found a loaded gun. It turns out the kid found the gun last week, buried it and then came back to show it to his friends. One of the kid’s friends told their parents who told the police. The park is surrounded by yellow crime scene tape. I see people looking up as if the gun fell from the sky like evil manna.

It’s hot in this apartment, the TV is on the religious channel which makes everything hotter. A preacher with white teeth is speaking about the parable of the treasure in the field. 

“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure in a field, which a man found and hid again,” he said.

I live in my mother’s house with my wife. My wife is not happy about it, she said she is chained to the wall of life. We only have one car, and every time I get home, my wife wants to look at houses. We can’t afford a house, we have zero revenue, we have no means. 

The last time we looked at a house my wife caught me stealing a book from the house we were viewing: “Short Stories of O. Henry.” She was in a panic. 

“How can I steal something that already belongs to me?” I said. 

“Huh?”

“All books are mine, the same way some guys think all women were made for them to have sex with, all books were made for me to read.” 

I told my wife I was done looking at houses until she gets a job. She spit at me like a prisoner being led back to her cell. 

My wife is afraid to leave our bedroom whenever I leave the house. She locks herself in our bedroom and doesn’t come out except to use the restroom. She’s the one who wanted to get married, she inflicted this on herself. 

We’re preparing to cut each other’s throat, after only five months of marriage. I gave up everything to marry her. She made her happiness my slave and now it’s my fault she’s unhappy.

“You should see me with other women,” I said. “I make them laugh. I make them happy. I can make any woman happy except you.”

“You do make me happy,” she said. “We need our own space.” 

Every day, my mom and my wife fight over who gets to make me coffee. They both worship me like gold they hide from each other. 

Betty’s TV is still on the religious channel. A preacher with even whiter teeth is talking about the tent of Achan. This channel is counterfeiting religion. 

I try to turn the channel and Betty yells at me. 

“I need God in my life,” she said. “I’m not embarrassed about it.” 

“The advantages we gain over our enemies are not truly our own, but belong to God,” the preacher said. 

“Amen,” Betty said.

Betty and I work at the supermarket together. She works in the deli, in fact she’s heir to the whole department. She’s next in line for deli manager. (We’re famous for our deli.) I work in the meat department. 

Betty’s daughter left Betty a note saying she had to leave for a few days “and please don’t try to find me.” She took Betty’s car. So, I’ve been giving Betty a ride to and from work all week. This is the first time Betty has invited me inside her apartment. 

Betty and I do little things for each other at the store, like holding doors open and taking our breaks together. We even punched each other’s timecard. I even sold her steaks priced as hamburger. I even took time off from work and went to her divorce hearing with her. 

Betty sits me in a kitchen chair and gives me a haircut. Leave me some hair, I said. At the end of the haircut, she rakes her fingers through my hair a few times like I’m a Zen Garden. Before I get up, I look up at her. She’s standing behind me looking down at me. She lets her hair fall on my face. That drives me wild. Betty’s hair is her prized possession. 

Then Betty gets dressed twice, two different outfits like a fashion show.

“Do you like this dress?” Betty said. She said it’s her daughter’s dress, but that she looks better in the dress than her daughter. I’ve never met Betty’s daughter, but she must be around my age (I’m twenty-two). That would put Betty around forty. 

Betty asks if I will unbutton the back of her dress. I tell her I’m going to unbutton everything she asks me to. 

“Never mind,” she said. 

Betty and I roll a bag of weed into joints. Our hands are busy, like dung beetles rolling balls of dung. We light a joint and smoke (the blur is on my brain once we smoke). 

“I have a funny story to tell you,” I said. 

I told Betty about my dream. I had a dream I was a sign artist at the grocery store. 

“I had created all these clever signs for the meat department: John Steinbeck Likes Turkey Necks; Ezra Pound Prefers Ground Round; William Blake Chooses Ball Tip Steak; Stephen King Eats Our Chicken Wings; Charles Dickens Likes Fresh Roasting Chickens; Edgar Allen Poe Enjoys Our Escargot; Nietzsche Eats Our Sushi. Then as I was looking at all these clever signs, I had an epiphany. I came up with a new sonnet form, the butcher’s sonnet. This sonnet was going to change things, going to change everything. That’s when I woke up.”

Betty looked worried. 

“Do you have any food?” I ask. 

I felt like I hadn’t eaten in two days. I found five carrots in the refrigerator. I also found a brown banana. The banana makes my stomach feel queasy, so I go into the bathroom. Betty has a wooden toilet seat. I didn’t get sick. In fact, I kissed myself in the mirror. 

 We left the apartment for a stroll. We’re holding hands, whatever that means. 

Betty is a holy beauty. Betty’s eyes look like church windows filled with sunshine. 

“Now it’s my turn to say something,” I said. “I love you.”

“You have no right to say that to me,” Betty said. But she likes me saying it. 

A fat boy puts both hands above his eyes and stares at Betty like he’s looking into a bakery window. 

We toss one dollar and eighty-seven cents into the hat of a homeless man sitting on the curb. 

We pass the Nims Community Garden, and I stare at the gazing ball. There are people pulling weeds, perverting nature.  

We walk past The Women’s Club, where I’m told they’re trying to rid the city of all phallic symbols. 

I’m a lucky man. Every man we pass on the sidewalk wants to be me, wants to be beside Betty.

“What would you do if you looked up at the sky right now and it said, ‘Will you marry me, Betty?’”

“A message from God? I guess I’d become a nun.”

We duck into city hall, where they have a full-scale model of the city. I pretend I’m bigger than the city. I pretend one hundred cities can fit within me. 

We go into Dreamer’s Bar which used to be called Flip’s Friendly Lounge. Dreamer’s is as dark as a coal mine.

I see someone I know. I didn’t want them to see me but of course they did. Even with the name change this place is still friendly. It’s this double-jointed Christian that’s seven feet tall and has hips like a woman. He lifts me off the ground in an embrace. 

“I never thought I would see you here,” I said. 

“You mean because I’m a Jesus freak? I’m celebrating beating cancer.” He said he had had skin cancer. He said he found out because dogs wouldn’t stop barking at him.

“I’m cancer free. How is your brother?”

“He’s great, he’s married and has three kids,” I said. He listens to me talk about my brother like he’s trying to crack a safe. He used to follow my brother everywhere. He even followed my brother into the seminary. He even tried to dress like my brother. 

“Did you hear about the gun in the park?” he said. 

I nodded. “Hey, this is Betty. Show her your stuff.”  

He bent the fingers of both hands back to his wrist. Then he laced his fingers behind his back and lifted his arms over his head. 

“That’s odd,” Betty said.  

Betty sees one of her most loyal customers. 

“I almost didn’t recognize you without your hairnet,” he said. “I never thought of you as having hair, especially not hair like Venus.” He shakes my hand with a violent grip. He has a suitcase with him. He said he needs to get out of town for a while.

“Where are you going to get your deli ham from?” Betty said. 

“Did you know when the Titanic sank there was seven thousand pounds of ham on board?” this loyal customer said. He’s serious. “Don’t you ever cut that hair,” he said. He’s even more serious. 

We had a few drinks. I drink mine like I’m drinking Betty’s desire for me. 

“It feels so good to be divorced,” Betty said. 

“I’m never getting married,” I said. 

“Now you’re talking like a man,” she said. 

Then we walked back to Betty’s apartment.

“I’m not going to have sex with you,” Betty said. 

We walk down Clay Avenue through a little jungle the city calls a Monet Garden. You can hear frogs croaking “watch us go.” 

We walked past a library I know by heart, where I stole The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and Cujo when I was a kid.  

We walked past the synagogue where the Rabbi looks at Betty’s hair and plucks his beard with envy. 

I can hear Betty’s TV from the hallway. This time a female preacher is preaching. She’s talking about Abraham and Sarah. “He talks and laughs as if he had no wife, he hid his wife. One good man in one thousand I have not found,” she said.

Betty’s daughter is home.

“Behold this fool! Is he spending the night?” she said. 

“No,” I said. 

“How long have you been sleeping with my mom?”

“I’m not—I haven’t.” 

“She just got divorced, man!”

“Do you have to be so hostile? Leave him alone,” Betty said. “He’s been giving me a ride to work since someone took my car.” 

“You two smell like dope. So, this is the guy setting my mom’s crotch on fire? Are you my new daddy?”

Betty asks me if I want a drink.

“He doesn’t want a drink. You know what he wants. He wants us to drink. He wants to get us both drunk and fuck us.”

Betty gives me a helpless look. She can’t control her daughter. 

“I’m sorry,” Betty said. “See you tomorrow?”

I nod.

“Looks like no tail for you.”

I nod again. 

I take a step toward the door and turn back to see Betty without her hair, her hair is a wig and is in her daughter’s hands! Without the wig, Betty has just enough hair to cover her scalp. Her daughter sees the horror in my face and smiles. Then she holds the wig high and makes Indian war whoops with her hand over her mouth. 

I go home. It’s two am. The house is asleep. 

I get naked and climb into bed. I push my wife’s cotton panties to the side and have sex with her. My wife takes sedatives (along with numerous other pills), so she doesn’t wake up right away. She’s frightened for just one second. Her eyebrows stretch up like fast-food arches, like she’s afraid for her life, but then she knows it’s me, the man of her dreams. 

I’m making love, not having sex. I’m making love to my life, not my wife. She comes to life beneath me. It’s my life coming to life. 

She pushes against me. I hear the cave woman inside her moaning primitive passwords, she’s trying to slow me down. 

I yank my wife’s hair to make sure it’s real. She slaps me. 

“Motherfucker that hurts!” she said. 

When it’s over I’m neat, I move her panties back to the exact position they were in to begin with, like a painting over a safe.

I go outside where I piss in the rosebushes. I look at the stars like I’m looking at an old photo. I light a cigarette to reward myself. I look at the house to see where I live. I’m going to break my wife’s heart tomorrow and drink my mom’s coffee (they both make terrible coffee). 

Mom doesn’t want cigarette butts in her yard, so before I put my cigarette out on the ground, I make a divot with my heel. I bury the cigarette beneath the sod. I get down on my haunches like I’m planting a new crop, a terrible new seed. I even pat the earth like we’re good friends.

Reinhardt the Soldier

The Thai waitress he had met at the restaurant was small and tight, and it did hurt her initially to adjust to his cock. He was gentle, helping her get used to his length, girth and glass-breaking hardness, but soon primitive fuck lust overwhelmed him and he forced his way in. Reinhardt could almost feel her body swell like a rubber raft getting pumped with air. A strange sound erupted out of her throat, between scream and laughter, as if she reacted to conflicting states of desire. 

Reinhardt wondered if she had rape fantasies, which he had happily helped a few of his male and female clients to fulfill. Of course, everyone denied they harboured such feelings. Never debating the point, he just fucked the way his clients paid him to, regardless of the fantasy. He charged both according to time and scenario. She moaned and cried both yes and no in one syllable, then clung to him, her legs scarcely able to wrap around his broad back as the masterful cock plunged and thrust until it was ready to unload ropes of alpha spunk, so much that it seeped out. 

He didn’t wear a condom; he was disease free and had no anxieties about the cunt he was now fucking. She was clean and, she had assured him, it was okay because; she was on the pill. Not that he gave a shit about any pregnancy. Her womb, her problem. He had no paternal desires or fantasies.

Over the past two days, stopping for delivery pizza and toilet breaks, he had fucked her, not quite to death but close to it. He had lapped and eaten her cunt until his jaw got sore and he became bored. She was limited in her experience, unable to deepthroat, and prone to whimpering and going limp like an exhausted doll. He didn’t even attempt breaking into her ass, nor did she wish to lick his. 

Business now demanded his attention, and he had appointments to make up for lost custom. He paid for a cab to drive her home. She insisted on giving him her phone number. Once she left, he tore it up. Already he had forgotten her name. Taking a shower and dressing in a soldier’s uniform according to the wishes of the clients he was seeing this evening, Reinhardt fondled his dick, feeling it get hard over the cash he’d be earning later in his role as the couple’s demanding and merciless bull.

***

Reinhardt entered the kitchen through the garage door and, as instructed by text, she was on her hands and knees, completely naked. Without removing his leather bomber jacket or army boots, he simply knelt behind her, unzipped and plunged his hard cock into her wet cunt, labial lips already swollen and glistening from the fingering he had ordered her to do before he arrived. He grabbed a fistful of her hair, and leaning over her back he fucked, not saying a word. He wrapped an arm around her neck and pushed her flat on the floor and still fucked her from behind. He told the husband to sit on a kitchen chair in front of her and watch her face, her eyes, and listen to her moaning as she got fucked by a soldier, rape-fucked by a soldier, the realization of her fantasy played out when her husband, who could not satisfy her, was forced to watch.

While boning her, Reinhardt ordered her to tell her husband what she was: “I’m your fuckmeat. I’m your private cunt, your pussy pet, I want your cock, I want you to fuck me, yes, fuck, fuck your little slut bitch slave, fuck me like a slut.” Reinhardt fucked her while still fully clothed and booted, except he had pulled his fatigues down below his knees, and the piece of married fuckmeat was naked on the floor panting and moaning, all the while her eyes blazing directly at her husband, although Reinhardt didn’t think she was in a full state of consciousness. The husband’s own cock was getting hard and he also wanted to fuck her face, but dared not move without his bull soldier’s permission. His own fantasy involved getting fucked and beaten by a soldier, maybe two. Reinhardt thought he could arrange that scenario with a buddy and charge a few hundred euros extra.

Reinhardt suddenly pulled out and dug into her cunt with the fingers of his right hand, pushing them all in, and slowly fist-fucked her until she cried for mercy, and tears of pain-pleasure spurted out her eyes, her mouth wide open. He withdrew his soaking hand and made her lick her juices off his fist. Then he rolled over on the floor and told her to suck his dick, still hard and glistening wet from her cunt gushing all over it, and she buried her head in his groin, slurping and moaning, her body writhing. The husband wanted so badly to fuck her but wasn’t allowed to. Reinhardt pushed her away and ordered her to straddle him, one leg on either side of his waist, her knees resting on his open bomber jacket, his hands digging into her thighs, as she lowered herself on his huge dick, her eyes glazed open, bucking up and down as she jiggled and wiggled on his cock. The husband was still wearing his clothes, his cock hard as all fuck and straining under his pants. He asked: please, Sir, may I fuck her, too?

But Reinhardt didn’t at that time give permission. Only to watch and do what he was told.

Her fantasy, her craving, was to be treated like a bitch slave, to submit to an alpha soldier and fulfill her masochistic fantasies, she trusted Reinhardt because he was safe, discreet, and knew how to realize her deepest darkest desires. And she had read and believed the glowing reports of satisfied clients on his personal website. She wanted a brutal edge to it all, wanted her bull to pummel and fuck her into submission and to come to the hard thrusting of a soldier’s big cock. He wondered if deep down she had a thing for Nazi cock and wondered for a moment if he should have dressed as a Sturmfuhrer. His big cock, thicker than her wrist and long enough to push into the depth of her womb and unload rich, life-giving German seed. Yeah, next time he’ll fuck dressed in a Nazi uniform. 

Later, after giving her a rest, while he stood against the counter, drinking a beer he got from the fridge, and staring at both husband and wife until he was ready, Reinhardt boned her against the kitchen table (her back was on the table, her legs around his waist, his fatigues down to his ankles and piled over his military boots. She moaned and screamed as he gave the bitch one last shove and pulled out, his cock squirting out a shower of man juice all over her husband’s face and shirt. The husband gasped and stuck out his tongue, trying to capture droplets of bull cum. 

Reinhardt exploded spunk and wanted to fuck again, an effect middle-aged married women often had on him. His cum shot out in powerful streams. Especially if they were rich dissatisfied bitches hankering after a real man and craved some rough action. The wife and husband would do anything Reinhardt wanted; he understood that. Look at the guy gathering spunk on his fingers and licking them off. This first session gave him all the info he needed about how far he could go with them. 

Reinhardt stirred, his cock still resting on the vaginal lips soaked with cum. He wiped himself with a tea towel covered with a picture of Prince William and Kate. “Don’t forget to put this in the laundry.” He rubbed it against her husband’s. Then he lifted her off the counter and sat her over his lap on a chair, so close to the husband that he could see his cock hard beneath his pants, and slap his face without moving from his position, if he wanted to. Not yet. Not too much too soon. The wife’s head hung towards the floor, her fine ass ready for use.

“What she wants is what the cunt gets,” Reinhardt had explained to the husband when they had met at the restaurant a while back, Reinhardt having answered the husband’s online ad for a bull to fulfill his wife’s fantasies, and his, and to fuck his wife while he watched. A rough kind of no-nonsense soldier preferred, they both desired. They didn’t want romance.

“She wants rough play, and she gets it. I never do what a cunt doesn’t want. But I can make them want what they didn’t even know they wanted, if you get my meaning.” 

And the husband had also said something about serving, eventually, when he got used to the idea. Reinhardt knew the husband would crawl, beg, and lick his soldier’s boots before getting slapped around and fucked by a man in military uniform, Nazi or not. The hard dick in the husband’s pants and the animal sounds he was making as he watched his wife gave Reinhardt all the information he needed. One day the husband would suck him dry in front of the wife, and become his obedient, cock sucking cuckold, and pay handsomely for the privilege, but first things first. And, of course, the beating the cuck craved at the hands of a soldier. There was money to be made here.

“Now this little cunt wants the slap of a hand on her ass. So, I oblige.”

And he began slapping her ass hard in the kitchen, four stinging reddening smacks. She moaned aloud. “It’s interesting, really, how slapping a firm ass makes the pussy get wetter and wetter until my bitch cunt is moaning and begging for a fuck. Sure, the hand gets a little sore, but what a beauty those red cheeks are, and how easily the fingers slip in her cunt. The good part about spanking is that it lubricates the vagina so my hand can slide in and out easily without causing pain, but she sure feels my fist fucking her. See?”

And he inserted all five fingers in her widening cunt, in and out, staring at the husband all along.

“It’s a pleasure to fist fuck a pussy and hear all that deep breathing and panting and moaning and feel her body buck up to the wrist deep inside her cunt.”

She was begging him to stop in a voice thick with lust, which meant she was begging for more. Reinhardt pulled the hand out, raised it to show the husband how wet it was. He put his hand in front of the husband’s mouth and allowed him to lick her juices off the fingers, practically gobbling as if inflamed by the taste of her bull. His bull, too. Then Reinhardt returned his attention to his wife and probed her pussy with his fingers and said that it belonged to him, just like her mouth belonged to him, and she was his property, all of her, her cunt and ass and mouth were his personal property. All her holes would be used by his bull cock.

“Aren’t they, bitch?”

He made her nod her head in agreement. Ecstasy burned in her eyes, the glow of her body from intense satisfaction and release. 

“See, she likes it, Just the way you want and need it, too, don’t you? 

And he was speaking directly to the husband, who panted on the kitchen chair, so close to Reinhardt that he could smell the odour of fuck sweat and see a stream of cum still leaking out of his wife’s cunt.

“Aah …mmm…I mean yes, yes…”

“Yes, what, cocksucker?”

And Reinhardt slapped the husband’s face, who, face blazing, whimpered.

“Yes, Sir, oh yes, please, Kommandant, fuck me.”

Decrypting the Wizard

The wizard arrived Tuesday with the new tide.

That is to say, something floated in: a medley of zigzags and straight lines, vaguely coffin-shaped.

Until the object could be properly identified, it was placed in a storage facility. There it was held for weeks. When fresh objects deposited themselves on the beach, the wizard was pushed further and further back into the storeroom behind town hall, there gathering dust. Because newer objects had more form and definition, the clerks were much quicker to begin the work of cataloging them. They trundled in boxes on hand carts filled with tackles and bright lures, the odd bottle with a message nobody could decipher (these bottles were arranged around the wizard), hand bones, toe bones and a whole assortment of reeking, waterlogged shoes.

This was a simple fishing village. Nobody had ever seen a wizard, at least that they were aware of. If asked to describe such a being, most of the inhabitants would shake their head and hold up a net, as if to indicate that time not spent fishing was time that could never be recouped. They had neither the inclination nor the background knowledge to verify if, in fact, the thing in the storeroom was capable of sorcery. Its apparent lack of gills notwithstanding.

Months after the wizard arrived, a new mayor was elected in the village. He had been educated in the big city, and found his fellow villagers’ lack of intellectual curiosity appalling.

The new mayor demanded an inventory of all unusual phenomena. The villagers muttered about his nerve, the sheer gall of it. “Sancho Tortillo used to be one of us,” was a line repeated in the cantina and elsewhere, in the middle of passionate lovemaking, in church—like a ritual chant—and even in the cemetery where generations of villagers were buried and new villagers created. They took their women over crypts, and the cries of passion echoed long into the night. Drops of comingled love juice splashed upon the crypts and oozed down through cracks in the stone to where the bodies lay. On occasion, a body long past dust revived, and melancholy dust-wraiths cut unexpectedly dashing figures as they danced their way through town.

The villagers held to tradition like a long-decayed funeral wreath.

Until Sancho took a wrecking ball to the old ways.

When the dust cleared, the mayor had their undivided attention. They stood knee-deep in the rubble, men, women and children, waiting for him to speak.

“I know how many of you feel,” he began.  “You’re asking, what happened to Sancho? We saw him grow up, a little boy who loved fish—the smell, the taste, fried, boiled, steamed, you name it, he would eat it. Later he developed a taste for wine with his fish. And, frankly, got pretty deep into the wine, at the expense of his better judgment. But I’m not here to make excuses for myself—the drunken rages, and the pyromania—or justify my parents’ decision to send me off to school. I studied Management, and Philosophy, and because of these two disciplines, I understood—the wine was for drunken oblivion, the vida loca; whereas the fish was for life. And fire was for cooking. Fish.

“I want the same thing you all do. And I’m sorry about the wrecking ball. But the thing is, changes are coming to our little village. You can’t help but see that the ocean is no longer clean. It’s rank, defiled. Sometimes it glows at night. That zesty iodine smell, the salty tonic winds, smell more like burning garbage. So yes, I did take radical initiative and send an iron sphere through the church, straight down the aisles. I did mash the old graveyard into marble angel bits and ancestral grue. But I did it for a reason. I did it…”

“Excuse me,” said Tortalini Masschechi, one of the most revered of village elders. “Pardon the hoary wisdom—I am an old man, and to the brisk forward motion of the big city I prefer a quiet snack of fish, my young mistress Chantale and the long, lapping waves of the ocean you say is tainted. My nose is not your nose, and perhaps you sniff of the future. But tell me truly, was it absolutely necessary to destroy what it took centuries to create, on a whim? We’re listening to you, Little Sancho. Tell us something our simple brains can grasp.”

Sancho grimaced, and his eyes grew dark and terrible.

“Little Sancho is dead!”

Cries of shock and disbelief came from the crowd. The Widow Panchito fainted dead away. Babies screamed.

“If you had shown any interest whatsoever in matters outside of your back yard, you wouldn’t have just shoved the zigzag coffin thingie into the back storeroom. You would have wondered, analyzed, acquired outside expertise. Now, it is far too late. The wizards are arriving on all the shores of the planet, and when forced to decrypt themselves, they become exceedingly wroth. Yes, you once called me Little Sancho, because I was small and knew nothing of the world. But then I escaped. I went away, and my mind was transformed. I studied with magicians, sorcerers, knowers of the occult. And I became…” Sancho paused, trembling…flames crackled over his body, scorched his clothes and blackened his skin. A tall conical hat rose directly from his skull. His new flesh was made of sterner stuff than that which is bequeathed to mere mortals. He grasped a long rod in one hand and unrolled a parchment with another. On the parchment was a map of interlocking grid lines that pulsed in the darkness that now consumed the village, the crowd and the wizard formerly known as Sanchito.

While some might adduce a moral that fits this little fable of mine, I myself cannot.

Last Chance Romance

Ike tried to get Bernie to stop fucking the corpse. His shouts had no effect. He wound up wrestling his buddy off of the body.

“What’s wrong with you? You don’t have protection.”

“With what I’ve got, it doesn’t matter,” Bernie answered. “Doc said I’ll be dead in less than a year. “

Both men were in their mid-twenties. They had been friends since high school.  They had been on crew together back then. In college they had been too busy partying and chasing skirts to try out for any sports.

“You trying to speed up the clock?” Ike said. “Look, it’s been a long time since I have seen a woman, living or dead, with all her parts, but I ain’t going bat shit like you are man.  Self-discipline. Remember what Doc taught us.”

“We make our choices,” Bernie said. “Might be months before we see another woman, living or dead, like you said. Might even be a year. Considering my situation, I’ll take what I can get.”

“You’re a sick man”

“I know,” Bernie said. He grinned with teeth clenched. It was a strange grin, possibly full of irony, maybe full of anger, maybe both and more. 

“I am not likely to get better,” Bernie said, trying to shake loose of his friend’s grip.  “Let me go.”

“You want to rape that corpse some more?” said Ike. His eyes were wide. Nostrils flared. It was not so much anger as disgust and disappointment.

“Yeah. I need to get back to business.  I’ve got nothing better to do. Not likely to get better opportunities either.”

Ike relaxed his grip. Bernie remounted the corpse. 

Ike turned his back. He didn’t want to watch. 

The sound of Ike going at it with his dead hook-up became too much for him. He decided to take a walk. 

Bernie’s grandmother had offered the boys a hundred bucks to clean out the basement of her house in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. It was an old building dating back to before the Revolution. It required a lot of upkeep. Bernie’s grandmother had not been able to afford to pay for repairs anymore. No one else in the family wanted to take over the deed and be responsible for the taxes and constant maintenance. The decision had been made to prep the place for sale. 

While they were filling trash bags the two friends found a section of wall in the basement was hollow.  

“Probably where they hid runaways before the Civil War.” Bernie’s grandmother had told them. “ Family legend has it that the house was a stop on the Underground Railway.”

“They should turn the house into a museum,” Ike had told her.

“Too many houses like it around here,” she had said. “Can’t all be museums. Plenty of houses that were turned into museums around here in the past were turned back into private residences or torn down for new construction. There is not enough money in history. Not around here. We have too much history. Too much crime as well.”

The boys opened up the wall to see what was behind it. They found more than a hiding place. A tunnel went out towards the street. There it ended. Blocked by a wall of bricks.

“Must have been closed off when they put in water pipes and sewers,”  Bernie had postulated.

That was when IT happened. The unthinkable that had never really been unthinkable.  War is never impossible, and in war, every and any weapon can be used. 

Ike kept walking until he could no longer hear what was happening behind the burned out gas station. He paused for a while, then went on, not sure he was far enough away for his stomach.  When he felt safe, he stopped.

Ike looked around his world.  It was not the world he had been born into.

No clouds. No birds. Only gray clouds of smoke. 

The ground was no better. Not a blade of grass. Not a single insect.

Ike thought the only thoughts he could. They were not nice thoughts. He didn’t like that. It was better not to think. Better to be half dazed. 

Or maybe dead.

Doc has been the last sane person they had met, unless you counted the dead. 

The dead seemed to have it all together, until they fell apart.   

Occasionally there were maggots or tiny worms, parasites maybe, on the bodies they had come across. Ike took that as a good sign. Something would survive. Maybe a hidden seed would sprout somewhere. Maybe he would find it, something green growing in the dust. 

“Struggle on,” Doc had told them. “The strong and the lucky might have a chance. Even having the right genes, good health, and good luck might not be enough. We need to be smart. Practical. See the opportunities.”

Doc claimed to have been a real MD, before the end so to speak. Ike and Bernie found him near what had once been the University of Pennsylvania.

“I practiced medicine some,” Doc had told them. “Did research in a lab on the side. Tried to solve medical mysteries. Help make a better world and all that. What a waste.”

The three of them had traveled together for a few weeks.  They searched buildings that had already been gone through by other scavengers. Water and food were the top priorities. If they found anything else that could help them keep living, they took that as well. Ike and Barry built up a collection of tools that could double as weapons. Not everyone they had met had been friendly. Doc kept notes about where other potentially useful things were found, such as books on medicine and science,

Ike thought Doc was maybe forty or so. Looked like he had always kept fit. He seemed a good guy. In many ways he was. 

Doc had examined Ike and Bernie, checking them for all kinds of ailments. He patched them up best he could where patching was needed, and shared all the advice he had on how to survive.

It was Doc who had diagnosed what was wrong with Bernie. Part of it, maybe all of it, was due to radiation. Cancer is never great to have however you come by it.

One night Doc scampered away while Ike and Bernie were sleeping.  Doc took most of their accumulated supplies with him, including most of the water and food. It had taken Ike and Bernie months of scrounging to obtain everything they had. Now it was gone.

Survival.

What a nasty way to live.

Ike decided he had been away long enough for Bernie to have concluded his business. He started to walk back to where Bernie was. 

Broken concrete pillars were all that remained of an interstate highway. Fractured bricks lay among dots of glass and melted auto tires. Scavengers had already carried off everything metal in that area.  He wondered if they had lived long enough to do anything with all that metal. Had they made anything? Had they bartered it?  Where? With whom?

South, Ike thought. Or west. Maybe more had survived in Maryland or Chester County or elsewhere far from cities. 

When Ike got to where he had left Bernie, his buddy had finished and was wiping himself clean with a rag. The rag was filthy. It was caked with a bit of everything and anything. 

Bernie carried that rag everywhere with him. Rags were hard to come by. Rags had uses. Ike also had one.

“Next time we find a puddle we’ll have to wash up,” Ike said. “Bodies first. Then clothes, etc.”

“After we fill our water bottles,” said Bernie. “That is top priority.”

“Yes, of course.  After we fill our water bottles. “

Bernie gestured towards the corpse. “You want sloppy seconds?”

Survival. Struggle on.

Ike contemplated reality.  It was not a peaceful form of meditation. It brought him no tranquility. 

Ike looked at the corpse. She might have once been a good looking woman. That may have been wishful thinking. Now it was hard to tell what she had looked like really. At least you could tell she had been a woman. A woman without rot set in.

He wondered if anyone had gotten to the body before Bernie. Ike doubted it. He needed to feel a little optimism. That helps you survive, being optimistic. Doc had taught them that. 

But another part of his mind whispered to Ike, “This is it. Don’t pretend that you will make it much longer.”

He could not deny that he had needs.

He wrestled with his morals, what was left of what he had learned from his parents and in school. He wrestled. He fought hard against the reality he saw everywhere. In the end, morals lost. 

“Sure,” Ike said. “What the hell.”

Afterwards, they headed south.

A Night in the Life

Hank puts the book he is reading down and walks the few feet to his kitchen sideboard where he pours himself a large, a really large, glass of the cheapest wine any supermarket in this town by the edge of the sea has to offer.  In this town, hell in this life, that is all he has ever been able to afford, the cheapest anything… the cheapest wine, the cheapest room, hell it’s just been a cheap kinda life and certainly shows no sign of changing since he’d passed his half-century a few years before.  He takes a drink before walking the few feet over to his window, his world is so small almost everywhere he likes going is generally just a few feet away, and peers out.  Down below is an alleyway and that is the place Hank has grown almost obsessed by since he moved into this tiny one-room deal a few months previously.  A tiny one-room deal in an ever-growing list of one-room deals he’d experienced in this town before either eviction or just pure simple need to escape came a calling.  

The few months have seen Hank read a lot of books and drink a lot of wine and generally try and live his best life but somehow it was always that place just four floors beneath his window that always somehow managed to drag him in, somehow always managed to grab his attention.

Tonight he spies beautiful sultry Tatiana entertaining a mark as best she can in the condom and needle festooned hole she calls her work-place and all of a sudden he feels a pang of jealousy.  The lucky scumbag who’s enjoying himself with that super-fine piece of hotness is surely, Hank thinks, as he desperately tries to get a better view, one of the luckiest sons-of-bitches on the face of the whole god-damn planet right now as he hears her moans reach his open window.  

Hank reaches for his glass and drains a big long measure before moving back to his chair, the solitary chair in his room, where he’ll sit.  He’ll contemplate Tatiana and all her wondrous assets and skills, at least those he can imagine, and he’ll roll a smoke but just as he places the newly rolled smoke in his mouth a loud wailing sound emanates through the floorboards from one of the rooms downstairs.  The sound of a woman crying fills his room and as he sits there he knows there is only one thing he can do; he leans over and switches on the radio and suddenly the magnificently heroic sounds of Bruckner’s Third come to save him from the torture of having to listen to someone else’s misery.  Hell, he’s got enough of his own to deal with let alone having to endure anyone else’s!

He smokes his smoke and as it nears its end he drains his wine, another bottle gone in his ongoing lifelong war with reality, and as he gets back to his feet he moves first for another bottle before spying another view of the wondrous Tatiana in all her wild animalness going at it hard and heavy down below.  Hank doesn’t care if its the same guy, a new guy, hell all he knows is it ain’t him down there and that’s enough to make him almost want to start wailing his own sadness but right now he knows there is drinking to be done.  He picks up the fresh new bottle and pours it in large, really large, and gets straight into it and soon, he knows, it will be time to call an end to the insanity of his life for another day.  A day, like so many before, when even the idea of going out there, where the other people live their lives, simply fills him with revulsion at their pathetic existences, their pathetic so-called lives which show no sign of life at all.

‘Working the 9-5, the damn mortgage and car and family and pet, all it does is keep you a prisoner of the system you fools! What a ridiculous existence!’ he thinks as the sun blinks on the horizon and Hank knows it is almost time.  He returns from the toilet down the hall, drains the remnants of his wine in one fell swoop and as he climbs into his single bed he knows the squares are just beginning another of their damnable days.  One of those damnable days when they’ll work hard, in that searing heat, all to make a rich guy somehow even richer whilst, well, they’ll earn just about enough to keep them coming back.   It’s always just about enough for their pathetic lives, enough for their insane desires of cars and children and houses and total abject boredom as far as Hank can tell.  A life, an existence even, that is so far removed from the lives he encounters on those rare adventures out of his room or on those pages of everyday madness he so keenly reads he can barely understand let alone comprehend anyone wanting to live that way.  As he rolls the final smoke of his night he pulls his current book off his bedside cabinet; a collection of short stories from some degenerate across the pond, and as he turns to the back cover he takes in the author photo and the mad smiling face staring back at him is sure of someone who has lived, and as he lay in his pit he sparks his smoke alive and reads the back-cover blurb again.

‘A genius of the streets,’ one of the critic raves as Hank smokes all the way down to the roach before stubbing it out and after laying the book down he almost immediately falls to sleep, dreaming, as he has almost every damn day since he’d been priced out, of the mad swirling metropolis only sixty short miles up the road.  That seething hate-filled metropolis that had once been home but which now felt a lifetime away from his ramshackle room in this dilapidated madhouse by the sea he’d called many things but never ‘home’; it has never been that to him and it surely couldn’t now ever be, not in this lifetime almost certainly.

As the masses began to pour onto the streets later, escaping their retail and office-bound nightmares, Hank finally pulls himself out of his pit of a bed and is immediately back into his routine; the routine that has come to rule his life.  He wakes and immediately switches on his radio.  His room fills with the sound of Gustav Mahler and almost instantly the kettle is boiling as he prepares his first mug of tea, his first caffeinated hit, of the day.  The first of many and the perfect accompaniment to the ubiquitous smoke which he rolls and pops in his mouth as he allows the mug to cool.  Sparking it to life he begins to think of what needs doing that day, there is never much but, today, Hank knows, with his wine supply running dangerously low, he must somehow navigate his way to the damn supermarket down in the marina.  Only a twenty minute walk for sure but through some of the most crime-ridden and notoriously mad streets this town has to offer and Hank knows he, as usual, ain’t going to be able to do it on an empty stomach.  As the tea runs to its end he busies himself with preparations for a fry-up of epic proportions.  A fry-up and a large, a really large, glass of vin rouge he knows will help.

The fry-up sure does fills his stomach, one of the first things he learned upon leaving home was to never go food shopping whilst hungry, and he knows that once he’s rolled the ubiquitous smoke for the walk he’ll be ready to hit the street and sure enough moments later he is locking his room and is heading on down the stairs.  As he approaches the front door of the block of flats he spies Tatiana rocking up to her nightly show and as he pushes the door open he can hear a few voices call out.

“Hey lover,” a rather hopeful older blonde, around Hank’s own half-century, suggests as he walks past her and off into the night.  

‘So far, so good,’ Hank thinks as he, at last, hits the promenade but spying a few randoms, possible wreck-heads, lolling towards him, he steps over to the curb and with his head down just keeps on going remembering past run-ins with chancers like them.  The few random occasions when they had mistakenly taken him as being one of them, one of those derelict junkies who’d lost everything and somehow never seemed to care.

“Hey mate can you spare me some change?” a young guy in his early 20s asks him from within the confines of a sleeping bag but Hank, knowing he never has any spare anything, just walks on by.

“Hey mate,” another voice asks as he approaches the ramp that leads down into the marina, “can you spare me some change?” they ask and as Hank looks up he spies a 40-something guy dressed in a winter coat fit for the Arctic Circle and with his feet clad in a pair of trainers Hank would spend on a weeks’ rent on his feet.  As he always does Hank just walks on by knowing the place he is going could, although he certainly hopes isn’t, be even worse.  Walking down to the car-park that dominates the outside of the massive store Hank spies a few randoms, a few up to no good and as he walks he can feel a couple of sets of eyes piercing his back with a fury to suggest it ain’t going to be an easy homeward journey.

Finally walking in the main entrance Hank spies a lone security guard sitting in his little cubicle; he looks as if he would rather be anywhere else in the world right now than here and just that second Hank sees a gang of rogue drunks walking out carrying boxes of beer he knows exactly why.  A huge display just by the front door now standing empty and Hank knows exactly what has just gone down and as he walks in he spies several faces from down his end of town, it appears, helping themselves to whatever takes their fancy too.  Hank has always, for some reason, held himself higher than your average down-and-outer or your usual drink or drug casualty, and as he goes about his business, he knows he must never let himself get that low.

The shop done, the wine supply secured, he heads on back out there and the second he spies someone clearly making eyes at his bagful of wine bottles he knows he’s got to be quick, he needs to get off the street as soon as possible and despite the mild distraction of Tatiana on his corner, that is exactly what he does.  Twenty minutes later Hank is back in his room and the wine is flowing and everything, at last, seems back to normal or at least as normal as this life will ever get.  The crying woman from downstairs returns to haunt him as those with nothing in their lives beyond their work turn to their beds but as Tatiana goes at some lucky scumbag’s meat Hank knows he’ll somehow get on through.  He switches his radio on and as Ligeti’s non-harmonic sounds fill his room he rolls a smoke and reaches for his glass of wine and as he lifts his book off the bedside cupboard he knows that, right now, he wouldn’t live his life any other way.