Isaac Offski

Für Elise

When I wanted to I couldn’t 
I hung a rope inna closet like the Kung Fu guy
I turned onna oven but the element just got too damn hot
scorched my neck
Syvia P had more guts than me

When I had to, when I needed to
wasn’t no high enuf bridge
wasn’t no deep enough hole
wasn’t no snake-bit carny tent

Before my sis got took
she used to practice Für Elise
onna Casio ToneBank
I shoulda done it back then, maybe 
I wouldn’t a lost her forever
that way-

to some de Sade wannabe
driving a white deadbeat van
to the DMZ
to the UAE

say I had a wish, into a fucking tree

Jeff Weddle

There’s a War on, You Know

There are armies all around 
and they are searching 
for you. 
They wish to kill you 
and your family, 
after first raping your wife, 
your children. 
Everyone will be tortured, of course. 
They will slaughter your pets for food,
burn your books, 
shit on great works of art. 
They don’t give a fuck. 
There are soldiers in the shadows 
and in plain sight. 
Each one has it in for you, personally, 
though you could be anyone. 
They want your mind, 
if they can get it. 
Obedience and true belief 
can buy you time. 
You might get used to it 
and fall in love with the terror. 
Feel free to do nothing, of course. 
That is your right. 
Feel free to watch television 
and cook hamburgers in your yard. 
The armies are often slow 
and might not even get to you 
before cancer or heart attack. 
Grab a beer or master a weapon. 
It’s up to you. 
Talk it over with your loved ones.
Make the bargains your soul can bear.

Maria Barnes

I Could Not Exist

I could not exist even though the night 
was peering through the window.
The sky was glass, and if it broke,
those tender organs blooming in the dark
would not exist. The snow covered the buildings,
and I was on the verge of effervescent dreams,
which illuminated every pore of the sky.
But I kept repeating …
I could not exist, could not exist …

Nathan Bas

Zerotica

Zeros hit my cock
ring and I bulge
feel all faint too
sweaty my heart skips

Pixelated tips and piss
ran dry on Wall
Street burning for hits 
I’m rope tied up

Someone echoes dark light
licks lips flips switch
moaning into no thing 
locks key endless repeat

Mechanical buzzing
whirring ding light up
going in out gasp
bank big no asphyxia

Daniel de Culla

What I Saw In the Rabbit Pen

In Torregalindo, Burgos
With a half-ruined castle
There lived an honest family
With two daughters
Both young and of marriageable age
Who looked after the chickens
The pigs and the rabbits
As was necessary.
They sold the animals
Not long after they were born
To the people of the village and other places
Cheaper than in the shops.
One day, a friend of my brother-in-law
Who was courting the youngest daughter
Encouraged me to go visit them
Because he wanted to buy a rabbit
Since her mother was asking for one
As a whim being newly pregnant.
We went to their beautiful village house
We greeted her parents and daughters
And the youngest took us to the rabbit hutch
And just as we were about to pick up the most prized rabbit
She bent down and showed us her privates
For she wasn’t wearing panties.
My friend, since she was his girlfriend
didn’t even flinch
Didn’t say a word.
But I was stunned
Because I’d never seen such a thing.
Since the few times I’d had sex
I did it in the dark, not knowing if it was white or black
Or what the creature looked like.
But the worst part was—what cruelty!
When the young woman grabbed the rabbit by the neck
So it couldn’t breathe or scream
Not before hanging it by its hind legs
On a crossbar in the hutch.
And, alive as it was
With a kitchen knife she gouged out its eyes
Because she says that way the rabbit bleeds better
And stays more tender for cookig.
-Take this rabbit, the tenderest one in the hutch
the girlfriend told him. 
You’ll pay me when I come to your house
To say hello to my future mother-in-law.
And when they go to sleep
I’ll make you a delicious dinner with mine’s.
When we left the village
He very happy, and me  very hurt
Because of the death his girlfriend had inflicted on the rabbit
As we walked towards the next village
Moradillo de Roa, five kilometers away
I kept telling him:
-Be careful, friend, when you have sex with her
Because when you’re in the sweetest part of orgasm
Begging for her sweetest kisses
She’ll gouge your eyes out
While you’re biting her lips, shouting:
-I don’t want a rabbit for the wedding anymore!

William Taylor Jr.

Another Fucking Poem about Drinking at Vesuvio

for Hugh Blanton

The North Beach poets sit at the bar 
and drink at all hours
in their funny hats and coats,
as if there were nothing else in the world
that ever needed doing.

The Anarchist girl sits alone at a table 
drinking dark beer and reading a book
about the rise of techno fascism.

And me, I’m forever on the run 
from death and her henchmen, 
with a glass of wine at my favorite 
table in the back corner of the balcony.

I tear my little poems from the jagged 
teeth of the dark the best I can,

as the pretty girls in Kerouac Alley
sit at little round tables smoking
cigarettes and drinking beer.

I gaze down upon them 
and pretend I am in Paris.

I’ve never been to Paris
and It’s looking like I might 
not ever make it, 
even though I’d like to.

Some people do things like go to Paris
and others muddle through life
one moment to the next

and I figure that’s just the way
it is and there’s no sense in getting
upset.

There’s still some poetry to be mined here
despite what the years have taken.

I lean back and bask in the feel of it,
thinking of all those suckers in Paris
who will never get the chance.

Donna Dallas

Walking Girl

Transients in the yellow pickup 
barrel down the rickety road along the bay 
hoot like desperate cowboys
the bay is a desolate cemetery at sundown 
she enjoys their hollers and whistles
as she walks over the dead thing
that could have been a seagull 
but is mangled now beyond recognition 
she shares a familiar sentiment 
with the dead thing and its ravaged feathers 
forming a trail to nowhere 
that she follows obediently
at dusk 
while those boys hoot away
her shorts
clipped enough to bare 
her ass cheeks 
as she strolls along the devils run 
at dusk 
for no real reason 
if just to hear them call her name

Mario Senzale

Consumption II

I’d spend all day at Les Mills, building my ass into pure thickness from endless squats and deadlifts. I’d post on Grindr around noon, when the lunch crowd was horny and desperate, 

‘Cake at Les. Steam room. Now.’

They’d show up within minutes. Personal trainers between clients, married guys sneaking away from Midtown offices, finance bros still in their suits. I’d lead them to the steam room, bend over on the tiled bench, and let them feast. Always the same routine. They’d drop to their knees, grab my cheeks, and bury their faces in. For months, it was normal stuff. Moaning, grabbing, the usual. Five minutes max, they’d leave satisfied, and I’d hit the weights. 

Then something changed. 

Bruce first. He pressed his face in and couldn’t pull away. At first I thought he was just really into it, but then he started making these muffled sounds, trying to lift his head but somehow stuck to my ass like glue. I tried pushing him away, grabbing his shoulders and shoving, but it was as if he were being pulled deeper. Then, I felt it. More than a tongue. Like my body was expanding from the inside. 

His struggles got weaker, more distant, his whole form seemed to compress and slide inside. I looked over my shoulder and watched in horror as his feet lifted off the ground, his entire body fading into me like I was swallowing him whole. The sensation was indescribable. Incredible. Then I realized what just happened. My ass ate Bruce. And it was still hungry. As fuck.

Every hookup became feeding time. Locker rooms, steam rooms, showers. Anywhere I went, the hunger followed. My ass started changing. Getting bigger and rounder with every guy that disappeared inside. My shorts got tighter, my bench press weaker, as if I was carrying all these dudes around. So I started hitting the weights harder. Told myself I could work it off. But the thicker it got, the stronger its pull. Guys followed it around the floor like zombies, eyes glazed, walking closer without knowing why. They were hungry for my ass, and my ass was starving.

Every workout drew fresh meat. Crowds gathered around when I squatted, pretending to check it out while fighting the urge to drop down and bury their faces in it. Derek lasted maybe thirty seconds before he got sucked in, his protein shake spilling everywhere as his whole body got swallowed. The Russian guy just plunged inside, Olympic-style. Dozens of dudes got swallowed. That’s when Brad started noticing. 

“Where the fuck is everyone?” he asked, looking around the empty weight floor. Bruce wasn’t at his usual 6 AM slot. Derek’s locker stayed empty. Way fewer dudes than normal. 

Brad kept walking the floor, confused why our regulars just weren’t showing up anymore. And I just couldn’t tell him the truth. He would never understand. My ass eats men whole.

True Behaver

Folks Have Their Ways

They were at a very private event way out in the country at the old Hudson family farm that Lori and Jeff had inherited after her mother died last spring. This was the first Summer Sunday annual family get together without anyone from the older generation present. The recently deceased Mama Lou had ruled over them as a matriarch who laid down the rules and enforced them with her thick wooden paddle or thin hickory switch, regardless of age or excuses. Skinny-dipping as the ultimate rebellion against her old rules and antiquated punishments had begun when Lori and her sister Ruby and little brother Asa had been kids. Mama Lou could not see us at the lake from her house, nor could anyone see it from the road or home.

Mama Lou and Daddy Dale had been farmers who ruled their little farm as aristocrats, and their children and grandchildren were subject to a lifetime of old-fashioned discipline. Daddy Dale’s big palms hurt as bad as Mama Lou’s paddle and switch. Daddy Dale had passed two years before, and Mama Lou had become even more of a disciplinarian. As harsh as her judgements and punishments became, her kids and grandchildren submitted because they sensed it was her way of dealing with grief and their way of physically showing respect. They never discussed family matters outside the family but among themselves it was a source of pride how strict their family was, and they felt they securely belonged to a resilient, decent family they must never disgrace. When it was a family members only affair they did not care what others thought was normal, they followed Hudson ways. 

As a surprising example of this Lori, Ruby and Asa had inducted their children into the annual skinny dip picnic early on. They were secret nudists in a small, conservative rural area and there were fourteen family members and five spouses at this year’s get together. Many of their asses bore the elongated thin scars left from the bare-bottom switchings, and the wider scars that came from blisters raised by the impact of the paddle. Lori and Ruby were sitting in lawn chairs after lunch watching the swimmers when Lori observed that their brother and their male children all had perfectly straight penises unlike the male there, the in-law-spouses present. Lori speculated that the clue to the answer was that the males with straight penises had scars on their asses and the ones with curvatures had smooth buttocks. 

Mama Lou had been a stickler when it came to sexual morality and she demanded obedience and scourged any deviance she caught, so there was extraordinarily little. The prohibition on masturbation had been openly discussed, and she had been known to check on the boys when they might least expect her to pop in. Locked doors were forbidden, and closed doors were cause for a suspicion that had to be tested by an unexpected visit. Although premarital sex was out of the question, one of the quirks of the family was that nudity was acceptable. So given that fact, bare-bottom discipline of adults did not seem particularly shocking to them.

As the family gathered before departing that afternoon Ruby presented her older sister Lori with a box wrapped in shiny red paper and tied with a big red bow, a box the size of one that might hold a large bouquet of roses. Lori looked surprised at this unexpected action at the annual family skinny-dip picnic which had not included any giving of gifts before. All watched as Lori fixed her eyes on the box and tore off the paper and opened the lid. She laughed as she gripped her mom’s old paddle and held it up over her head then waved it in a salute to her family. They lined up single file and as each approached Lori they bowed and bent down until they could grip as close to the ankles as possible and brace for a single stinging paddle swing before exiting toward their cars and clothes. 

One of the younger generation in-laws, a twenty-year-old named Cassie, bent over despite recent lacerations from a switching that were still healing on her buttocks. The family always showed respect when an in-law accepted corporal punishment from a spouse, and Lori gave her a light tap of the paddle to spare her sorely healing welts and there was spontaneous clapping from those waiting in the line. Lori felt good being matriarch and the family was happy about it too. Lori thought she could maintain the family’s ways but with an update now and then, like the day’s skinny-dip which had been a spanking success for the whole family.

Billy Mitch

No Reins For a Pig Man

It wasn’t enough for Marge to be told that she was the most irresistible catch at Renview – a venue for villainous vagrants with dead mothers and fathers and no chance at redemption. It wasn’t enough for Marge to want to leave – not because of how last time she gave one of those foul fucking freaks a private dance in the neon room, that his hands squeezed a bit too hard. He pleaded that it wasn’t intentional, but they all came to Marge. She made it easy for them and they made it easy for her to afford the lifestyle on Ridgebank, east of that festering shit-hole greasing her up with their desperate stench and scars.

Marge was tough enough to handle her own. She knew how to cut the blood out of someone if they became too ill-mannered. She’d carve them up good – just like the lousy Louie who put a gun to her head and told her not to scream. Louie the loser had broken into her 1976 Pink Pinto and was waiting in the backseat after her saturday-night shift. Marge and the cold chrome and a set of hairy knuckles wedging their way to tighten around her throat. To anyone other than Marge it would be scary, but she just let his clutch grow until his black-clouded skull was beside her cheek and the knife she carried between her breasts found the deepest pocket home inside his right eye. Gouged it down into his brain – the Little, lousy loser Louie fell dead in that backseat.

It wasn’t enough for Marge. She wanted to do it again. The killing. The gouging. She wanted to feel their flaccid meat monkeys curled between her bloody fingers. She wanted the power it gave her. That unadulterated rage of redemption. She wanted to clean out Renview of the vermin. She wanted to be the wolf in sheep’s clothing with her teeth on their veins. Marge knew it would be enough then. She would finally believe them when they told her she was beautiful. That raw confessional where through pain nothing is a lie – and the way Gary the gooner caught his prick between the pavement and her pointed stiletto. It was Gary who confessed his love for her faster than the others. Marge didn’t care. She wanted their blood, their control and their wet tears.

Change the channel and we are no longer looking at Marge, but a large, middle-aged man by the name of Bill Busby hunched over, thumbing through the static-hissing channels on an old box television. The narrator’s voice drones low and muffled with MARGE IN CHARGE in bright bold letters, plastered on the screen. Bill chuckles because of how absurd it is. His sloppy obesity matches the rest of the room. Uncleaned and fetched in trash – a four-hundred pound pig man who only wished he had a shot at becoming one of those that Marge would murder. If she was real, he’d go out and find her in that fictitious venue at Renview. If he had a gun, maybe he’d load it with a bullet. Maybe he’d pull out his prick and let Marge turn it flat. He’d let her.

Maybe he’d find the actress who played her. Susie Reins – the mega star with twelve Oscars and a gold star on the Hollywood walk of fame. Maybe he would go get her autograph at the Zolopoloza Film Festival in Keiser Springs and beg her to cut out his blood. Or maybe, just maybe he’d do all those things to her.

Bill and his broken frontal lobe. That trigger on the brain that had stopped ticking when Bill was still trapped inside his mother’s sticky wet womb – a pig baby squealing for nothing because Bill didn’t feel nothing. Nothing that you and I feel. The pig man with a stone heart and five fat knuckles squeezed the balled up paper magazine with Marge’s face, wrinkled, torn and stained on the cover. The great Susie Reins – the girl with dick blood beneath her heels and dead skin under her fingernails. The girl of Bill, the pig man’s dreams smiling back at him through folded paper and ink. Bill squeezed tighter the way Marge was squeezed around the throat in episode twelve. He closed his swollen pink eyelids tight and with a half open lip moaned the fantasy of being the one doing it to her. Harder and harder until his eyelids weren’t the only part of him swollen. The greasy, gasping, gooning pig man and his busted frontal lobe slouched limp like the dead masked man in Marge’s backseat.

The television static scattered white light across Bill’s pink fat flesh – the glossy sagging portrait of distorted scum laid there to be washed in the projected glow of Marge, wrist deep inside a man – his heart in her hands on the second episode of season four. The one called, No love for a Lousy Louie. Bill knew the episode word for word but the way he recited it altered its genre to a horror show. Slurring sounds stuck behind the fat of Bill’s lips. A pig man’s performance, done through squeals and snorts. He imagined having a golden star like Marge – like Susie and her perfect life up in the Hills. He imagined what it would be like to sleep in her bed, wear her clothes, and bathe in her bathtub. He imagined if it all would fix his broken brain, and that Susie Reins would fall in love with him the way that he loves her. The princess and the pig man. A sore sight it would be for all to see. Bill squinted through his pair of eye holes that drooped the way Marge’s floppy breasts flapped while she rode the dead corpse of John Duke – a B-grade actor with cowboy boots and a bullet wound to the head.

That episode was called, No Horses for Dead Cowboys – the finale to the seventh season.

Pig man Bill and his broken brain would take the bus from Turven Street to the southside of the Hills where they filmed Marge In Charge. The entire seven seasons cheaply shot there grossed enough to transform it into a strip mall that bustled with tourism. Home to the fanatics hoping to have a shot at being shot by the marvelous Marge – those unlucky lousy Louies just like Bill. They all looked the same. A stereotypical sickness that littered the set of Renview. The pig man and the parlor for private dances. Lookalike actresses in the same cut off shorts like Marge. The same hair color and make up as Marge. They were clones – mimics and imposters, and Bill could feel the broken switch in his skull begin to tingle. A dead root that twitched then went dead again. He thought about the loaded gun stuffed inside the rolling slab of pubic fat. He thought about that dead cowboy. He pondered on if any of those other Louies thought the same, or if he might be the only one. The only one brave or dumb enough to reenact it all – until his head was full of bloody holes and his monkey meat mashed smooth. Or the other way around with a wannabe Marge losing color inside five fat knuckles of a left hand. He wondered if he could do it the way they did it in the pictures – all cut into frame. A revival to make that broken link inside his fat head breathe life for the first time.

The other Louies wore all matching sour-sweat-stained shirts with Marge’s faded printed face. Fanatics just like Bill to meet a masked Marge with teeth not as straight and eyes not as green – haunted holograms that played pretend. But they were convincing enough to attract a crowd of those like Bill. Those stinking up the place with their rancid, greasy filth – or that is at least what pig man Bill did when he wandered north through the crowd of lookie-louies jonesin to take a bite from one of those marge mirages with leaking makeup. The wannabes that Bill wanted to ward off even if they made his brain buzz.

“Take one.” A hyperactive hologram with golden curls and a faded mustache appeared, flagging up one of those infamous shirts. All maniacs wore it for Marge but Bill didn’t have enough scratch to buy it. Grunting the way a pig man grunts, he shoved down the mimic until that white shirt became soiled and Marge’s face tore apart on the gravel with a hole Bill could stick his fat fist in. The wannabe lost their golden scalp and their skirt flew up enough to expose thick curls of black hair – an imposter that the others in the crowd glared at.

They pointed and screamed with disdain that the mustache-having, wig-wearing Marge was nothing more than a fraud and that caused more of a scene than Bill did. But it caused the crowd to thin and that is when he saw a pair of Louies that didn’t quite look like Louies, but they wore the same cult-like attire, and waved at Bill the way one does if they want your attention. Bill grimaced and grunted the way a pig man would grunt, and heaved his waddling weight close enough.

“Say fella, you look to be big enough.” The left one spoke – He was a scrawny, horse-shoe balding man with a map clasped in his palms and glared at him the way that crowd glared, but with more desperation than anger. “We need a big guy like yourself to do this.” The other man to his right starred up into the ball of a bright sun as if he was afraid to make eye contact with Bill – the curse of the pig man. Bill just grunted. “We need someone to be the lookout.” The ill-weighted Louie rattled on. Baffled Bill agreed in the way one would agree if they were mute – with a nod. There would normally be no room for a pig man, but those Louies had a spot picked out for him in the back of their 1976 pink pinto. The exact same car as Marge. When Bill sat in that backseat he could only think of Marge and feel that warm chrome that had become slippery from his pubic sweat. The one that was balding drove, while the sun-watching Louie sat next to him, still glaring out into that sweltering yellow heat. The car veered upwards higher and higher than Bill had ever been in those winding hills. Higher and deeper into those Hollywood homesteads that Bill had only ever seen on his old busted box television – but without the white wave of static.

“It’s around here somewhere.” Louie number one muttered, squinting his beady eyes through the windshield at a set of castle-like mansions – tall and glamorous. “There!” Louie number two finally barked, and rammed his stumpy arm out towards the largest of them all. A mesmerizing residence with stained glass cut straight from a movie picture. “Marge livin’ large!” Louie number one cackled. Bill could feel that little wilted worm at the front of his brain wiggle. That flinch of feeling that was ever fleeting, it would be awakened for good if only he could have a squeeze of Marge – the great Susie Reins. “Here’s the deal, big guy, we’re gonna get in there and you’re gonna sit here and keep watch.” Louie number one ordered. “If you see or hear anything… you honk the horn twice but long and slow…just so we know…got it?” Louie leaned in close enough with beady black eyeballs, and a frowning mouth with white spit stuck in the corners. Bill didn’t speak, because a pig man does not speak and he certainly does not get intimidated by a couple of lousy Louies, especially with a dead ball of ground beef inside his skull.

“Do you understand me?” The first Louie continued but angrier. Bill just nodded the way a good pig man would nod, because he knew that when those two Louies left he would follow behind to find his own way inside that castle in the hills. It was like episode twelve, season two, Marge and the Masked Monkeys. The one where Marge gets kidnapped by a gang of masked Louies and forced to eat their hot pudding – but instead she chewed out their blood. Bill would enjoy that more than a stiletto – maybe even more than a bullet hole or a knife to the throat – to have his pink tail gnawed off by the white jaw of a blood-thristy Susie Reigns. All that hot breath and sharp pain. The fantasy made the deep cuts of glass from the downstairs window seem to not hurt as much when he climbed inside.

A pig man’s paradise. A promiseland for all those like Bill with stiff monkey meat and broken brains – or just Bill alone, because those other two lousy, loser Louie’s stomped around upstairs and it made a racket.

Broken objects and squeaky sneakers and low raspy whispers that hummed through the lavender painted walls and ceilings. It would be enough to get caught. Captured by the teeth of a blood thirsty Marge – but that’s if there was a thing as the real Marge. Bill had begun to believe that the Marge on his old busted box television was just a mirage like all those wannabes at Renview with their false faces and hairy legs. That she wasn’t real at all and would be cowering in the corner of a closet, screaming while thrashing a butter knife into the air.

The imposter. The marvelous marge, a mimic to break a pig man’s pink heart. But the way that ball of brilliant orange light cut through the stained glass – that simmering heated knot of fire Louie-the-second marveled at, seemed real enough – therefore Marge had to be the same. She just had to, and that is what Bill came to believe there inside that living space of high art and odd portraits, sculptures alike, and monkey masks – the same ones those Lousy Louies wore in episode twelve, tugging on their uncut bananas just before the blood came crashing down like a tsunami. The red tide of revenge and Marge would be the victorious queen of carnage – sucking it all up the way a leech sucks – powerful-like with puckered lips and rolling eyes.

Bill stole the fat and hairy one with big ears that stunk of expired latex, and stretched it over his fat pig head. He even beat his chest and grunted the way a monkey does before it kills with those big hairy paws that clutched the warm weight of loaded chrome. It shined with pubic grease beneath that ripe orange sun as Bill aimed it for the first time at himself through an overgrown mirror. The pig man in a playpen with unregistered metal between his fingers. He thought he might kill those two Louies that bumped around above with it. Rid them of marvelous Marge’s mansion so that he could have her all to himself when that rotten knot in his head awakes to do what it has never done – to make him feel more than just a pig man. More than a monkey-masked maniac with blood lust ready to lay down those two Louies with smoking gunfire – to win a competition for the only love he had ever known. And he would do it, with his mad monkey cap stuffed with salty fur. He’d make them go away for good.

Only a pig man like Bill could have his blood cut out by Marge, not those loser Louies. Bill pulled back the hammer on the pistol – wedged his finger down hard on it until it clicked, then met the faded outline of two bleeding louies at the bottom of the stairs. One shot straight through the cheek and another through the groin with dick blood beneath him like Marge and her sharp stiletto. Bill was a shitty shot but it worked. Both limp Louies were crumpled over one another with pieces of Marge’s undergarments squeezed tight in their knuckles. Bill grunted the way a pig man would grunt with the monkey mask stretched funny over his fat face – warped, with the snout pushed too far from the center, but it didn’t matter because Bill could now do all those things he desired to do with Marge’s magnificent wardrobe full of iconic lace and leather that fit like that monkey mask – bundled and torn when Bill stretched his fat pig skin through it. A grotesque gorilla soaked in the white foam of a four foot lion-clawed tub – that squeaked like Louie’s wet sneakers. The robust ape in pink skin no longer stunk the way a pig would stink, instead he bore the same scent as Marge – the succulent Susie Reins whose shrill, shrieking scream could be heard below where the two dead Louies’ were. Bill bolted upright to drip across the bathroom – the damp pistol still held tight inside his fat fingers. He could feel that tingle again at the front of his thick skull, and it lasted a bit longer with his eyes bulging out through that monkey mask that only suffocated.

Susie Reins, the superstar, starlet, sex-symbol saw Bill peeping through that bathroom door and ran screaming while the cross-dressing ape chased her. The ravenous fear and hyperactive thrill chilled both their bones as they played cat and mouse around that mansion up in the hills – but bill was all wet and couldn’t keep his slippery pink pig meat from falling and cracking his broken brain hard enough to fracture the earth, and it rumbled the way an earthquake would rumble to bring forth the end of the world – or perhaps awaken something dead like the wilted root, Bill kept inside his head. As he laid their belly down with the torn leather exposing all that skin poking out, and his blood that began to run, it was obvious to a mortified Susie Reins, who didn’t look anything at all like the marge he knew. Anything at all like the girl of his dreams – anything but an illusion that only broke a pig man’s pink heart.

Bill grunted and snorted through that hemorrhaging monkey mask, reaching with a quivering hand for the pistol next to Susie’s feet. The pistol with one bullet left inside. The pistol he planned to kill her with if she was anything other than the Marge he knew and loved. The Marge dressed in leather. The Marge with a taste for blood. The Marge who ruled Renview. And perhaps she was what Bill imagined afterall, as she held that slick loaded pistol up to that bulbous broken brain of a pig man and pulled the trigger.