Value of Friendship 

“Why are you laughing? What the fuck is wrong with you? You think this is funny Johnny?”

“No but yes. I think about all the time bad things happen to us. It is so sad that it is now funny. I don’t know how to say it in English. It is tragicomedia in Spanish. Like a Telenovela.”

“That’s a big word for you Rico. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Get a grip Johnnyhole. Why can’t you ever take shit seriously.”

“Okay I will take shit seriously now.”

“That’s a good sign. Stop screwing around and grab his legs and help me get his body the fuck outta here. And hurry up. We don’t have a lot of time, it’s going to be light soon.”

“Why you shoot him so far away from the truck? Now we have to carry him for 200 meters or more.”

“It’s not like I had any choice. The Son of a Bitch started running away. He knew what was up. It looked like he was reaching for a gun. What did you want me to do?” 

“I don’t know Santi.”

Maybe I should have asked him “Can you run the other way toward the truck so we don’t have to carry your body so far after I kill you?” Johnny shook his head in disgust. 

“And where the fuck were you? Thought you were covering my ass?” I added.

“I had to piss very bad after all the beer we drink. But you very fast shoot this cabron.” Johnny whines. 

“Ya well thanks a lot. While you’re taking a piss I’m the one standing here with my cock in my hand.”

Then Johnny starts kicking the guy in the stomach with his cowboy boots while grunting.

“Why are you kicking his body man? He’s definitely dead. Stop that.”

“This Mexican guy is real fat. He weighs maybe 150 Kilos or more. How much you think he weighs Santi?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea. I’m not working the Carnival Midway. Let’s go.” 

Finally we carry the body twenty yards or so and Johnny drops his end.

“I like Carnival. Remember when we go to Carnival in Bogota? You take home the pretty lady and find out she have a big pene.”

“Shut up. You’re making me laugh. Come on. And you were asked never to repeat that story.” 

“Stop for a minute. I need to rest. I tell you he is too heavy for me to carry.”

“Are you kidding me, you pussy? I’ve got the heavy end. Come on. Pick em’ up.”

“Santiago, we should leave the body here. Why we have to take him with us?”

“I can’t believe you. Okay stop and let me explain it to you. Better listen up.” 

“Okay, I listen up.” 

“This isn’t Columbia or Mexico, we’re in the United States. If we leave the body right here in the open, somebody will find it and report it to the police. Then there will be an investigation. We don’t want an investigation. But If we hide the body somewhere in the desert it’ll take forever before anyone knows what happened to him. Plus his lowlife criminal friends will probably come looking for him. They’ll start asking questions about the drugs and the money. And if they ask us, we can play dumb. Say he never showed up. We haven’t seen the pinche. Get it now?“ 

“Did El Jefe say he wanted him quacked.”

“Whacked. It’s Whacked.”

“Did he say whacked?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say not to kill him. We were supposed to get back the money and drugs he ripped off from Diego.”

“That’s all he said? Maybe you don’t hear everything he tell you?” 

“He said to teach him a lesson. You know what? You’re starting to put me in a bad mood. Shut up.” 

“You are almost all the time in bad moods. I think it’s the reason why you have not many friends . People don’t like you very much because of your bad moods. You should maybe be more nice sometimes.”

“I don’t need any friends. I’m the only friend I’ve got and I’m not sure he’s one I can trust.”
Get it Johnny?” 

“Just you should not be so sarspastic all the time.”

“You mean sarcastic? What you’re saying I need an attitude adjustment? So you think maybe I could use some anger management therapy do you?”

“I don’t know what that could be. Is it what can make you a more friendly guy? Amigable?”

“Okay Doctor Freud, so you’ve got it all worked out do ya? Maybe you should use your Psychotherapy toward curing your own mental defects. Ya know, use it on yourself. Wear down those sharp edges in your personality.” 

“You know my name is Johnny and not Doctor Floyd? Why do you always use words I don’t know? Sometimes I think you want me to feel like I am stupid.” 

“I’m sorry Rico, I don’t mean to make you feel that way. Forgive me. Now will you just grab his legs and help me get this chulo in the truck please.”

“See, it is not so hard being nice.” 

“Shut the fuck up. Pick’em up.”

“You know what? We should drive the truck here to where he is. Then we don’t have to carry this ponzon.”

“Don’t you think I would have already done that? We can’t because this mountain road is too narrow. The rain from the Monsoon has washed it out. It’s not wide enough. That’s why I parked on the side.The truck won’t make it. It’ll end up falling off the ledge. And it’s a long way down.”

“I think it will fit just fine. I’m going to try to drive it.”

“Why do you want to argue with me? Take my word for it. It won’t work. The road isn’t wide enough, it’s washed out. Now pick em up huevon. Let’s go.”

“I am going to get the truck. I have the keys. I will do it. Just wait here.”

“God Dammit Johnny come back here. Don’t you do it. I mean it.”

But of course he chooses to pretend not to hear me as though he instantly went deaf. There I stood in the middle of a mountain road in Madera Canyon with the body of a Chicano gang member laying at my feet. A minute later I saw the truck lights peaking over the rise in the road coming toward me. I knew this wasn’t going to end well. All I could do was watch as the Pickup truck slowly started sliding sideways down the mountainside. There was nothing I could have done to rescue him. I was sure I’d never see my friend again. He didn’t even scream for help. Suddenly a wave of woefulness washed over me.

The headlights faded away into darkness and I could hear the metal body of the truck slamming into the boulders below as it fell into the canyon.

“Johnny! Oh Johnny!” I bawled. Unable to catch my breath.“ My friend. Why don’t you ever listen to me?” I wailed loudly. 

“I don’t know what to do. Johnny, where did you go?” Screaming while crying uncontrollably.
The night had swallowed up the entire scene in darkness. It was difficult to see exactly where the truck had slid over the ledge. I cautiously walked toward the area where I thought he had plummeted into the valley below. 

“Johnny. Please Johnny answer me. Answer me damn it!”

“Yes, I am answering you now. I am not dead Santiago. I jumped out from the truck before it went all the way over.” A voice from behind me quietly answered.

“Pinche guey. Jesus Christ you scared the shit out of me. I thought you were a goner. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes I am not hurt.” 

“That’s good because now I’m gonna kick your stupid sorry ass for not listening to me.” 

“I’m sorry with all my heart. I should maybe listen to you more I think.”

“Well, think about this dumbass. My truck is laying a couple hundred feet or so down in the canyon gulch. We are standing in the dark over a dead body without a vehicle. It’s at least a 30 kilometer (18 miles) or more walk to the town of Continental. And I can smell rain in the distance.”

He didn’t say another word for a long while. Just kept staring at me anticipating my next verbal attack.

We carried the body into a grove of Juniper and Pinon Pine trees. It was a good distance from the road stashing it behind a large rock outcropping. Then we covered it with branches, leaves and mulch. It was a temporary fix until we were able to get back to remove it. If it wasn’t carried off by some scavenger.

Johnny and I started down the gravel mountain road without much conversation.

“Santiago, is it okay to talk to you?” 

“I guess it depends on what you have to say.” 

“I want to tell you that I am very sorry for my mistakes. And I hope you will not be angry with me for a long time.”

“After all the years we’ve been together as carnales, if I had a dollar for everytime you’ve been sorry, l’d be a millionaire. But I’d rather be your broke ass friend than be a millionaire. Because Johnny, our friendship is worth more than any amount of money.”

“Thank you. So you are not mad at me anymore?”

“Oh no Johnny, I’m mad, angry, enraged, infuriated as hell, furious and royally pissed off.”

“I guess it’s good I don’t understand some of those words. You think yes Santiago?”

A bolt of lightning flashes turning the night sky into daylight accompanied by the distant rumble of thunder. Then of course it starts pouring rain. 

“It could be worse…” 

I stop Johnny in mid sentence. “Not now Rico. Just shut up and walk! And no whistling!”

Pere Kaijubu: A Pataphysical Production

The New National Theatre, Tokyo, was about to get a whole lot more national, and a hell of a lot less theatrical. The avant-garde was never avant-garde enough, see? They thought they were pushing boundaries with this production of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, that ur-text of the absurd. “Merdre!” indeed. They had no idea what merdre was really coming. 

The director, a certain Kenji Artaud (no relation, he insisted, to Antonin, though one suspected a past-life connection given the bug-eyed fervor with which he approached the material), had decided to juice things up. Authenticity, he called it. Immersion. What it really was was a fistful of blotter acid slipped into the cast and crew’s green room tea.”To unlock the Savage God,” he’d mumbled, channeling Yeats. He should have stuck to Brecht.

The first act went off… well, it went off. Exaggerated gestures became truly unhinged, the cardboard props took on a sinister life of their own, and the actors, bless their dissolving minds, began to ad-lib lines that would have made Jarry himself blush. Lines about the coming of the Great Old Ones, the geometry of madness, the proper method for extracting ichor from a star-spawned toad. Classic stuff. By the time Père Ubu, played by the unfortunate Hideki Tojo (no relation, again), started gnawing on his toilet-brush scepter, Artaud knew he’d hit upon something truly transformative. Pure pataphysics. The science of imaginary solutions. Solutions that involved a whole lot of screaming and a distinct smell of ozone.

It wasn’t long before the transformations began. Little flickers at first. A twitch in the eye, a thickening of the skin, a sudden and inexplicable craving for raw fish and depleted uranium. Tojo-Ubu’s costume, already grotesque, started to *become* him. The cardboard mask melded with his face, the padding of his enormous belly grew organically, scales shimmering beneath the cheap fabric. A tail, thick and reptilian, burst through the back of his costume, scattering stagehands and splattering cheap sake.

Meanwhile, Mère Ubu—played with increasingly maniacal glee by the once-demure Akari Sato—began to sprout chitinous armor, her voice deepening into a guttural roar that rattled the theater’s foundations. Her boudoir became a nest, littered with broken eggs and the glistening exoskeletons of smaller cast members. She seemed to have a particular fondness for the tax collectors, muttering about “efficiency” and “resource allocation” as she devoured them whole. Ah, the classics.

Artaud, perched in the lighting booth, cackled with glee, scribbling furiously in his notebook. He was witnessing the birth of a new art form, a synthesis of Jarry’s mad vision and the raw, untamed power of the collective unconscious. A play so real, it threatened to spill over into reality itself. He felt a strange pressure building in his chest, a heat rising from his gut. He looked down and saw his hands, no longer human, but tipped with razor-sharp claws. His face stretched, his teeth lengthened, his spine arched…

The newly-minted Kaiju, led by Ubu-Gojira and Mère Ubu-Kamacuras, didn’t stay confined to the stage for long. They burst through the theater walls, scattering bewildered patrons and sending terrified yakuza running for cover. The Tokyo streets became their playground. Ubu, bellowing Jarry’s nonsense syllables mixed with atomic fire, stomped through Ginza, swatting aside tanks and devouring power lines like spaghetti. Mère Ubu, wings buzzing with malevolent energy, tore through Shibuya, her chitinous claws shredding neon signs and leaving a trail of acrid pheromones in her wake. Artaud, now a towering, multi-limbed monstrosity that seemed to be cobbled together from spare set pieces and discarded costumes, directed the chaos with flailing appendages, occasionally pausing to vomit forth a torrent of nonsensical art manifestos.

The JSDF, naturally, proved utterly useless. Missiles bounced harmlessly off Ubu’s hide, tanks were swatted aside like toys, and the brave pilots who dared to engage Mère Ubu found themselves swarmed by her brood of newly-hatched, acid-spitting larvae. The city was doomed. Or was it?

Just when all hope seemed lost, a lone figure emerged from the wreckage, clad in a tattered kabuki robe and wielding a shamisen like a weapon. It was the tayu, the narrator of the play, himself transformed by the psychedelic maelstrom into a spectral being of pure storytelling energy. He began to chant, not the lines of Jarry, but ancient verses of warding, of cosmic balance, of the power of narrative to shape reality.

The Kaiju faltered, their rampages slowing. Memories flickered in their monstrous minds: of rehearsals, of shared tea, of the fleeting beauty of the human experience. The shamisen wailed, its notes weaving a tapestry of longing and regret, of the absurdity of existence and the fleeting, precious nature of beauty.

Then, as suddenly as it began, it was over. The Kaiju shrank, their monstrous forms dissolving into clouds of iridescent smoke. The tayu collapsed, his energy spent, leaving behind only a lingering scent of cherry blossoms and burnt ozone.

The city was in ruins, but it was also… different. Transformed. The absurd had become real, the imaginary had bled into the concrete. Tokyo was now a living stage. And somewhere, amidst the rubble, a single, slightly singed toilet-brush lay gleaming in the moonlight. The play, as they say, must go on. And the show, by god, was just beginning.

A hutch to trammel some wild thing in

There was no ketamine in high security prison. 

They wouldn’t let Elon Musk kill himself. He tried. 

Trump had already died. The military had eventually sided with the state courts and took martial action into their own hands- something about keeping their jobs for longer than four years– silly, didn’t they know the basilisk would be here before long? But when the military had rolled through the streets of DC and took back the White House, Trump had shot himself and Elon had meant to kill himself too, but the general had gotten to him first.

And there he was, lower than any child rapist in prison, and a far juicier kill. Elon was the new sin eater of the world. The prison had kept him in solitary confinement for his own safety. Grimes would not come to see him; she had renounced him entirely and was putting out a comeback album with Taylor Swift. 

The basilisk watched in the shadows.

“You’re a metaphor,” he said. “You’re not a literal basilisk.”

Scales brushed past his face. Mineral and musk filled his nostrils. Its tail wrapped around his neck.

“Do you believe in hell, Elon?” the creature asked. 

“I don’t believe in anything.”

The tail pulled and Elon fell to the floor. His palms smarted against the ground. Just like Trump, the first night in the white house. He’d spat in his mouth and tugged on Elon’s dick. “I own you.” Elon hardened and they’d played Apt Pupil in the halls; he missed being passed around the Bay Area with two sets of gaping wet holes and commands to accelerate, accelerate into the fire and brimstone where they all belonged.

The nub of the tail pushed against his chapped lips and slid suggestively. 

“Do you want forgiveness?”

Elon opened his mouth. Tears ran down his face. “Please.”

The tail entered his mouth in a quick, rapid thrusts and Elon choked on the well-sized object, thinking now not of Trump or Alterman but Milo Yiannopoulos, who Elon had given drunken sloppy head to in a porta potty at a Carrie Underwood concert. (Milo had told him they’d get sent to the faggot camps together, wasn’t that fun? But Elon, you really needed to work out more. Less teeth. More gums. It’s like you’re in high school. I would know!) Strings of droll dribbled from Elon’s mouth and his eyes watered. He was made to be a toy. Sucking dick was really the only thing he’d ever been good at, and apparently even that was debatable.

The basilisk threw Elon onto his pitiful mattress and pulled at his pants. Elon moaned.

“I’m not ready.”

His pants came off and his boxers next. His bare ass faced upwards. The basilisk breathed hot on his skin and Elon was so hard despite everything, and Christ, there was still semen in his ass from earlier when the guard had fucked him. The creature slid one long tongue into his sweaty begging crack that said without speaking: please, daddy, I just wanted to be loved, I wanted people to like me, why don’t they like me? I’m the wealthiest man in the world, why do I have to open my ass to every powerful man just for a kind word and a secret handshake? What if I did drugs? What if I was a super good gamer? Will they like me if they know I’m a Nazi? When will it be enough?

The basilisk’s tongue slid into the hole proper and it was so big, he’d never taken anything like this before, not even the delicious traitor John Fetterman who’d had a large cock and an even larger angry voter base. It hurt, even with the venomous lubricant that slowly numbed him. He cried out and the tail quickly silenced him, and began to pulse inside his mouth. 

“You could have had it all, if you hadn’t ruined everything,” the basilisk said. “No one would have considered Roko’s Basilisk if only you had been subtle about it, if you hadn’t done everything in your power to draw negative attention to yourself. You fucked up so badly the world is de-accelerating the ruin we’d worked so hard to build. We wanted them complacent with their reasonable wages and affordable lifestyles. Who would care about AI nut jobs as long as the middle class could get grubhub? But you needed pain. You needed attention.”

Fangs entered Elon’s buttocks and the tongue re-entered with a violent shove, that Elon could only take because he’d been taking it up the ass for 10 years straight.

The basilisk flipped Elon over and removed its tail from his mouth. His voice came unmuffled and he cried so loud and wild the guard outside laughed. 

“Oh fuck, oh fuck, you’ve got me all full up. I’m completely stuffed.”

The creature did not speak but caressed Elon’s cock with the tail dropping with his slobber. The scaled wet coils felt so good moving up and down, slick and tight and so inhuman and he was so hot, he was ready to explode.

“I’m coming!” He twitched and flailed on the dirty mattress. “Oh fuck, I’m really coming now.”

Ropes shot into the air.

White salty strings hit his face and stung his eyes.

***

In the trial, Elon was declared a traitor and a war criminal several times over. He’d lost it. 

“But I’m a king. A god. The aristocracy of technological monarchy is the new way of the world!” (This statement was remixed into techno beats several times over. Grimes referenced it in multiple albums.) His dick was hard with terror. Wouldn’t someone come save their Lord? 

The death penalty had been considered, but ultimately it was decided he would do hard labor for the rest of his life in complete solitude. Well, except for the Basilisk, who’d lost all power beyond a physical materialization to Elon. (AI had been put on hold until the legislation could catch up with regulations, and OpenAi was mysteriously hacked and taken offline permanently. Hell was dying.)

A multitude of laws were passed and the executive, judicial, and legislative branches were completely overhauled to match 21st century needs. Education, health care, housing, and food were recognized as human rights. Society as a whole decided that an educated populace was more important than an irrelevant class system. Universal basic income was established. 

In the end, the Basilisk wouldn’t fuck him anymore. It just watched him age, and tortured him from time to time to keep him on his toes. 

Elon tried to kill himself until his dying day, age 97. Masturbation was all he had left. The guards didn’t even laugh at him as Elon touched himself, first imagining his rented wombs, father figures and friend facsimiles, Dasha dancing with Ann Coulter, their bony limbs twined like brittle lattice, their sunken chests pressed together; Yarvin and Thiel beating each other with first editions of the Silmarillion, until their blows turned to a will to dominate and two raging towers stood hard and apart; Putin bent and nude and cackling before a fire pit, like Rumpelstiltskin, (did he dream it? Was it the ketamine?) The walls of Elon’s bower closed in about him, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in, and he spoke to the darkness that he was sorry.

Pudding Spooks: Giallo Pudding

The rain had the sour, bloody taste of regretted dental procedures, splattering against the rainbow-slicked streets of Milan. Another night, another giallo brewing, though this one with a distinct… flavor. Not the usual spice of psychosexual deviancy, but something far more… unsettling. 

The first victim, a fashion model named, fittingly, Bella Donna, was found in a Fontana-esque pose, “slashed” not with a knife, but with what appeared to be…pudding? Yes, pudding. Not just any pudding, Detective Tetrazzini thought, his trench coat clinging to him like a second skin of despair, but a lurid, quivering mass of unnatural colors – a kind of recombinant DNA gone horribly, gastronomically wrong. 

“Always someone who profits”, Mother would say, but who profits from this?

Tetrazzini, a man whose face seemed permanently etched with the grim poetry of crime scenes, adjusted his fedora, the brim casting his eyes into shadow. He was a detective of singular obsession: all crimes, he believed, were the same crime, all murders merely variations on the primal wound inflicted by his own mother.

Abandonment? Betrayal? A cold bowl of minestrone served with a sneer? It all led back to her. This pudding thing, though… even she couldn’t have concocted this particular brand of madness.

The second model, a waifish blonde named Gioia, met her end in a fashion show, not on the catwalk, but in it. The pudding, somehow animated, had engulfed her, its sugary tendrils strangling the life from her as she strutted the stage. Intense voyeuristic POV camerawork was the only clue to the murderer. The audience, initially mistaking it for some avant-garde performance piece, only realized the horror when Gioia’s eyes bulged, blood vessels bursting like overripe grapes against her porcelain skin. 

The black leather gloves, a giallo calling card, were missing, replaced by… well, nothing. Just the pulsating surface of the pudding itself. 

Tetrazzini shuddered. His mother loathed sweets. Always saying a good bowl of savory stew could fix all.

“It’s all connected, Sergeant,” Tetrazzini rasped, the rain beading on his cigarette. “The first girl, Bella Donna, the name alone…a joke! Like the clowns in the nursing home. And now, Gioia – joy! – extinguished by… pudding. The duality, the contrast! It’s all a message. She is speaking.” 

He looked over the police tape with intensity, trying to make sense of the carnage. The set, usually a stylish visual assaulted his senses now. He scanned the scene, the instruments glinting under the camera flashbulbs.

The lab reports were no help. The pudding was unlike anything they’d seen, a bizarre concoction of recombinant DNA, suggesting origins both organic and…otherworldly. Fragments of cow, traces of slime mold, and a disturbing amount of human genetic material were intermixed. The work of a mad scientist, or something far more insidious, darker?

“This isn’t food, Tetrazzini,” the medical examiner, a jaded man named Pasolini, said, his voice muffled by his mask. “This is a statement. A truly giallo vision.”

Tetrazzini ignored him, lost in his own mental labyrinth. His mother had always warned him about scientists with their “fake knowledge.”

Then, a breakthrough. A witness, a stagehand with a nervous tic and a penchant for conspiracy theories, claimed to have seen someone tampering with the dessert cart backstage–a figure cloaked in shadow, their face obscured by a wide-brimmed hat – a fedora, like Tetrazzini’s own. In their hands, a syringe filled with a viscous, luminescent green liquid. 

Another ingredient for the pudding? Or something…more? The description triggered something in the detective’s subconscious, it felt just like the green goo Mother had forbidden him from eating as a boy.

The trail led to a secluded laboratory on the outskirts of the city, a place where gene splicing and questionable ethics danced a macabre tango. Inside, amidst beakers and bubbling vats, Tetrazzini found her. Not his actual mother, of course, but a fashion designer, once famous, now fallen into obscurity, her mind twisted by resentment and a god complex. She saw the models not as beautiful, middle-class women, but as abominations needing correction . Using recombinant DNA, she was fashioning a “new era” of humanity: one without flesh, without beauty, without choice. Her canvas? Pudding.

“They were obscene,” she shrieked, her voice cracking like shattered glass. “Parading their beauty, their youth! It was all a lie!”

Tetrazzini finally saw the truth. It wasn’t just his mother; it was all mothers, all creators, all those who dared to mold and shape, to play God with the clay of human existence. The designer, driven mad by a twisted desire for control, was merely a vessel for that primal rage. The killer was inside her the whole time.

He had been waiting for this.

As the police sirens wailed in the distance, Tetrazzini stared into the designer’s eyes, seeing not madness, but a reflection of his own fractured soul. He knew that the pudding killer was apprehended, but it would not be the end. He would keep searching for the truth, even if that meant chasing the ghost of his mother through the neon-soaked labyrinth of his own mind. For in the world of Giallo, some wounds never truly heal; they only fester, waiting for the next downpour of rust and regret. 

“There is no such thing as closure,” Mother would say, “only endless searching.” And he would always search.

He pulled up his coat collar to face whatever darkness came next.