George Gad Economou

memories of a shooting gallery

you know we’re surrounded, right? look at it this way. famine, plagues, diseases, natural disasters. they’ve all been explained in theories, in books, by smart people. they don’t exist because they’ve been explained. we live in a trouble-free society, up until a smart dude from the future writes about the problems that plague us and we learn about them if we’re not dead and the whole things starts all over again, more problems eradicated because we know what causes them and fuck them, man. starvation is caused by hungry multinational corporations taking advantage of people living in poor countries that were harvested and abused by imperialistic colonizing nations that needed cheap labor force. it’s been fucking explained, we don’t need to bother, we have the explanation and the solution. theoretically. who gives a fuck about reality. it doesn’t matter, does it?

Stephan had entered one of his oh so many motherfucking soliloquies and all we could do was listen because we were too damn high on something to punch him out. he blabbered on and on about the evils of explaining, like it was something he could control, or something we were responsible for. none of us cared. in our high, he was highly amusing.

when the tanks fired the first shots, no one moved. missiles razed down buildings and thousands of corpses littered the streets, praying for someone to bury them before the unholy monsters violated their righteousness. no one moved, because the flames leaped high, burning god’s throne and god didn’t stir a muscle; why would he, after all, like he gives a damn. we stared at corpses being raped by hungry mongrels and we knew we were next and we refused to act. 

Aphrodite brought some sanity in the beginning. the med student, the one that tried to save us from the purge of the drug. I remember she came to me with a practiced speech about junk and its consequences. I listened, because her breasts were two magnificent, firm melons begging to be eaten and her legs long and thin, just the way I like them, yet I’d never quit dope because I needed the numbness. life sucked enough the way it was, I couldn’t go back to sobriety, I tried it for a few weeks and it fucking sucked hairy horse balls. the med student with the good intentions became an addict and we shot from the same needle. we fucked too; we didn’t care about prolonging our lives, we had absolutely nothing to live for.

Stephan had grown up in the suburbs, loving family, many friends. prom king too, if I recall correctly, and had been accepted to the ivy leagues. he never went. he wanted to visit other places, see other people, feel other things. he did. in africa, somewhere in the jungles, he tasted some drugs, then he found opium. finally, meth, the baddest bitch alive, got a hold of him; never let go. I cook his ice, so he won’t slice my throat in the dead of the night, like he did to Nick and Piper. I’m safe, because I’m not an agent of the invading aliens that want to turn earth into an amusement park.

from where we sat we couldn’t see the flesh-eating bugs, but they were there, or so we were told by the screaming deadmen shambling around with their noses or ears or eyes missing and they trotted away; we stayed. it was the flesh that kept our souls trapped, perhaps losing our skin would liberate us. nothing happened, the homicidal bugs never came for us. we were too rotten, they said, we had nothing nutritious to offer. we made peace with them and helped them find more victims.

it was easy to find more people; in every church, in every school, in every 7/11, there was one, or twenty, longing for salvation. we offered it, abundantly. we were there, all the fucking time, hidden in a needle, at the tip of a dirty glass pipe. we couldn’t hide but we were tough to find. here it was, the moment of truth, when the priest had a taste. a man of the cloth converted in seconds. ever since, only three-headed demons visited his dreams and the screams, oh the wails breaking the dead of the night were ghoulish. he’d work up a sweat, shoot, then go back to sleep. till one night I grew tired of his shrieks and cut his tongue. next morning, he preached to us using sign language. he lost his hands the same afternoon. finally, he lost his cock. he was still alive, but would gawk into nothingness with his gouged eyes and would smile his toothless smile every five damn minutes. till someone got tired of him, I can’t remember who, and shot him in the head. even the remnants of his brain decorating the dirty wall smiled and preached. we had to clean up the mess and we did because we couldn’t live near anything that reminded us of the greener field we had rejected when the first angel abandoned heaven, thus commencing the story of the world.

we wrote the books too, the stories retold countless of times, in countless of versions. we were the first, the ones who said let there be light, and we never thought of the consequences. how can gods be so reckless? it’s easy, power comes with responsibilities but our minds were numb and we didn’t know. 

Stephan blathered on again, another nonsensical monologue until someone finally shot him in the head. his destroyed cranium kept on talking and we stomped it until there was nothing but splatter on the floor and on the walls. we never cleaned it up. the bugs got it for us. we just stayed, idle. 

the needle was hot when it entered the vein and cold when it came out. the mind was always numb. the dragons dancing in the living room were real but could not breathe fire ‘cause they were too tired to do so. all they wanted was to dance and they did, they performed the charleston for us and we laughed and applauded. then they died, on the spot, when snipers took them out. 

we were once again spared. we begged for death, quick or slow didn’t matter, but nothing happened. we saw it all, the destruction of everything, the explosion of the universe, and what else have you, yet we remained. Stephan couldn’t preach, the dragons weren’t there to dance for our amusement, and when Aphrodite took her clothes off and posed as the ancient goddess she was, we all raped her, and she enjoyed it more than she should and we lost our hardons because her moans were of ecstasy.

the bullets came through the window and the door and the men in black barged in. PARTY’S OVER MOTHERFUCKERS!!!! they bawled and started shooting blindly. we sat still, hoping for the bullet that would spell salvation. never came for me. the others were dead, I was alive. Aphrodite lay on the floor, naked, covered in cum, begging for more. the men in black did her a favor and fucked her in front of me.

I wasn’t naked. I never raped. I just shot. they were done. and dead. the men in black became nothing more than shadows with no substance. she guffawed. she got up, got dressed, kissed me. it was just us…it felt right.

we shot again. what happened? we asked each other, then cackled.

it wasn’t over. it’s never over. 

another needle heated.

nothing else made sense. only the returning dragons that did a waltz for us, then we killed them, cooked them, ate them. 

finally, we danced the tango, with needles hanging from our arms.