Cross My Heart and Hope to Die, Stick a Needle in My Cock

There is a video online of my mom pouring a pint of Guiness into my mouth at the pub in the late 70’s. I was two years old. The comment section was relentless.  

I was born in Dallas, Texas. Assassination City. Where Kennedy simultaneously waved hello and goodbye to a crowd. I waved goodbye to that town at fifteen years old and moved up to Jefferson Park, Chicago with my family. I lost what accent I had but claimed to get it back when I was drunk. Some girls thought that was endearing when they’d bum cigarettes from me at the bar. Then their other friends would come and scoop them away from me. Like I was some sort of degenerate. 

I had just finished snorting some heroin on the park bench the other day when my buddy Allen came back from the paletero with a Sonic the Hedgehog ice cream pop for me. I took a few bites of it and felt the cold jolt up my cavities. I nodded out for a bit and when I woke up Sonic’s face was smudged and his gumball eyes had rolled off onto the grass.

Two Mormon missionaries were biking by in white collared shirts, blue ties, black slacks. Both thin blond boys. One pedaled fast, hunched over, made a gravelly noise with his throat and hacked a loogy onto the black top like he didn’t give a fuck about Jesus. The other had his back up straight, no hands on the bars. You could tell he was glancing around to see if anyone noticed that he could do that.

“Howdy y’all…Y’all got a dollar?” I asked them.

“Fuck you!” grunted the kid who had spit on the ground.

“Nuts…” I muttered, “Buy, sell, crack…” I laughed a little, nodding in and out, reciting words from signs on roadside stands last time I moved some bud from Illinois down through Arkansas for an old friend of mine, now deceased. 

“I’m gonna go get the papers, get the papers,” Allen said to me. He liked quoting Goodfellas when he had to take a shit. “Finish your fucking ice cream. Droopy motherfuckah.”

“You know Johnny Two-Times had OCD.”

“And you have Maury’s hairline.”

By 1PM the benches were full of us. Scabs and sores, track marks, and deviated septum. Some travelers with packs strapped to their back even as they slept. Others who rode the redline back and forth all night. Or some post-high school burnouts who romanticized this shit because they don’t know how to process their emotions. Or the concept of their future. Sort of like me.

Howdy, y’all. I’m Nate.

When summer comes, there is a rise in both ice cream sales and gun violence throughout the city. I always thought that was funny. I know one didn’t cause the other, but I like to imagine a world where they do.

Cumulonimbus clouds sailed the sky shaded gray like warships. A light drizzle fell upon us; God shaking his dick after pissing in heaven. Like my mom used to say when it thundered back when I was young, that’s the angels bowling up there! 

There’s this flaw in religious thought over the years that heaven is always on the same technological level as the current state of man. If Lucifer fell from the war in heaven, they certainly weren’t wielding swords. If they sky swarmed puke green with thunder, I don’t think they were in a beer league. Unless maybe the angels were from Milwaukee or something.

People do that with the human brain too. In the days of typewriters, it was compared to the functions of a human mind. Now the same is said for computers. Humans and Gods are something else entirely separate from their creations. They shouldn’t be defined by them if you ask me. If I was God, I wouldn’t want to put my name on this shit. 

My buddy Cracker Jack had this stupefied look on his face. His head was resting back on the park bench, mouth agape towards the sky, swallowing the rain.

“How’d you get to be like this, Cracker?” I asked.

“What you mean?”

“I mean why are you the way you are?”

“Well…for starters…I came up real nice actually. Went to U-Chicago. I was an anthropologist in the 80’s, studying the crack cocaine epidemic within the city. Got a little too caught up in my own work. Flash forward some years and my wife and kids are gone, as well as half my teeth.”

“No shit…a motherfucking anthropologist up in this bitch…”

“Hey spare some change for beer?” Cracker called towards a passing guy.

A young man, probably freshly twenty-one with a shitty hair cut swoop dyed black like the singer of The Misfits put a cigarette out on his leather belt and flicked it in our direction cooly. 

“Yeah I gotchu. Let’s hit up Theresa’s.”

“You buyin’?” I asked.

“I’m buyin’. C’mon.”

We followed the guy down the block towards Theresa’s, a hole in the wall Polish restaurant smorgasbord that also had a little bar inside. Me and Cracker Jack trailed behind not saying much. 

“I’m Bill by the way. Buffalo Bill.”

“Buffalo Bill?”

“Never worked, never will…”

“You sure you got the dough to cover us?” Cracker asked.

“Shut your bitch ass up,” I muttered.

We went in. The bar was dead. A little old polish lady stood behind the counter. We said our hellos and she nodded back. We felt her eyes on us the whole time we filled up our plates at the buffet. Bill ordered us tall glasses of Okocim off the tap and bought us each a shot of vodka. 

“So you don’t work?” Cracker asked Bill.

“Yeah neither do you, asshole.”

“Then what do you do for a livin’?”

“I cum.”

“Right on…” I laughed, “Somebodies got to do it around here.”

The news show on TV switched to a breaking segment. On the west side of the city a Union-Pacific freight train had been stopped, bum-rushed, and robbed by like a hundred residents of the neighborhood. They had all parked their cars on a side street and were carrying boxes of shipments off into SUVs and driving away. What little CPD officers were there were running around like a bunch of rodeo clowns trying to arrest them to no avail. The sunset in the rain behind the busted-up train and the decaying factory buildings was like a renaissance painting. Like a fresco Michaelangelo would paint on the ceiling of Union Station if he grew up hustling on the streets of Chicago.

“That’s where we need to be!” Cracker Jack laughed and smacked his fist down on the counter. The old lady grimaced behind the bar.

“That’s fuckin’ gangland, dipshit,” I punched my friend’s shoulder, “Your cracker ass ain’t getting involved in that. And you’ll be the first arrested. Every cop knows the only reason a strung-out white boy goes to this West Side is to score.”

“Aw screw that shit anyway,” Bill dismissed us, “You guys want to come to a party with me at Labagh Woods? Gonna be beer and dope.”

“Sign me up!” Cracker Jack smiled.

“Yeah, I’m in.”

“Hey Baba Yaga! The tab please!” Buffalo Bill whistled with his fingers to his teeth.

“Pay and get out!” the old lady slammed down the handwritten check in front of us. “Kurwa! You no talk to me this way! No junkie cocksuckers in my bar!”

“Much obliged, m’am,” I nodded, leaning into the Texas accent. She couldn’t look me in the eye. Her fists were clenched and arms shaking.

“C’mon let’s go to my place,” said Bill, “I need to grab some stuff before we go.”

We followed Buffalo Bill down the block. This time we were more buddy-buddy. We shot the shit and he told us how his friends throw this massive party every year out in the woods. He assured us there would be a ton of chicks. He would set us up with some of them.

Bill lived in one of those million-dollar condo buildings that pop up when they destroy historical architecture in a working-class neighborhood. You know what they look like. Straight up soulless. We climbed the stairs to his door. He had left it unlocked and we walked in to a mostly empty loft, painted white on every wall. No art was up. The marble kitchen counter was empty save some loose tools. In the corner there was a mattress with stained grey sheets straight on the ground. Across from that on a little nightstand was one of those crappy 2000’s TV’s that had a built in DVD player, and under it a loose pile of DVD’s in blank cases.

“You live here?” I asked.

“Somebody will someday,” he shrugged. “One of my buddies at this party is the property manager. They aren’t ready for tenants yet so he’s letting me crash here while I’m between jobs.”

“I thought you didn’t have a job?” asked Cracker Jack. I took that brief moment of distractions to slip a screwdriver off the countertop and slip it in my back pocket.

“Yeah. I cum,” Bill said matter of fact, “Here, I’ll show you.”

“Nah, nah, nah! We good!” I waved my hands and backed up. Buffalo Bill was cracking up.

“Nah, man. My DVD’s.” He picked a random DVD from the assortment of cases, and turned the TV on and popped it in. 

The first scene was him and some chick with bolt-on implants on like some sort of pontoon boat out on Lake Michigan. She was suntanning naked and turned onto her stomach. That’s when Buffalo Bill tried to get up, and tripped and fell on top of her. They looked at each other in shock, with typical over the top acting, and then they started tugging at each other then banging.

“Pretty dope, right?” Bill asked. 

“Yeah it’s all right…” I mumbled, eyes glued to the screen.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Cracker Jack asked me. I shrugged.

“Just let me change my clothes and I’ll be ready,” Bill said, entering a walk-in closet. Jack and I kept on watching while we listened to him fuck in front of us, and ruffle through boxes behind us. I reached into my pocket to grab the screwdriver, when I felt Bill’s hand tug it out first.

“Not so fast jackass.” We turned around and Buffalo Bill. He had a leather glove on his right hand in which he held a .45 pointed right at us. 

“Shit..” whined Cracker.

“Aw, c’mon man…”

“This is my sex glove,” Bill grinned. “And this is my sex gun. C’mon, my buddy is waiting outside. We’re going to Labagh Woods.”

He led us back out of the apartment, not locking the door behind him. I noticed more during the walk down the stairs that there were no sounds or voices to be heard throughout the building. We got outside and a black SUV with tinted windows was parked on the side of the street. A driver sat up front. Me and Cracker Jack sat in the middle row. And Buffalo Bill sat behind us, with the gun pressed up against the back of my neck.

“Hey pricks, check this out,” Buffalo Bill ruffled through his pant pockets and pulled out some leathery looking strap type thing. “See that?” He asked, smacking it against my cheek, “That’s one hundred percent pure snakeskin condom. Had to have it imported from Bogotá. They don’t make it in the states!”

“Nice man,” offered Cracker Jack. Bill whipped him in the jaw with his gun.

“You speak, when I say speak motherfucker!”

The rest of the ride was spent listening to the car radio. The driver never once spoke to us. Tears for Fears came on.

“Turn this bullshit off! I wanna hear cocaine music!”

The driver said nothing but turned the dial to “I Ran (So Far Away)” by Flock of Seagulls. Buffalo Bill tapped along on the back of my seat with the front of his gun.

We got to LaBagh woods and the sun had gone down. Through the tree line we could see glimpses of flames. We veered off the path to a clearing filled with people in red cloaks. Some wore antlers or horns or animal pelts. Other’s faces were shrouded in deep hoods. People were fucking, or smoking drugs, or fanning the fire, or kneeling to pray. 

Buffalo Bill handed us each an Old Style and brought us to his friend who was wearing the skull of a goat.

“Hey whatsup, playboy?” I asked him.

“Memento Mori…” he growled in an otherworldly guttural tone.

“Mele Kalikimaka!” Cracker Jack laughed, “What the fuck?” 

Bill pushed us forward and the goat man brought us towards the bonfire to an altar riddled with mutilated squirrels. He knocked us onto our knees. With the help of two assistants the goat man pulled a curved dagger from a sheath and began praying over our heads. 

“Well, this is it Cracker,” I shrugged. “We gone.”

“Oh shit!” Cracker Jack shouted. As the goat man readied the dagger in both hands to plunge down into our necks, my buddy Allen came out of nowhere, screaming.

“I got the papers! Got the papers!” As he yelled this, he pulled out a used needle and stabbed it straight into the goat man’s eye. He shoved him forward and he tripped over us, right into the raging fire. 

“Let’s go!” I bolted. And my two friends followed.

Buffalo Bill was after us with his sex gun. He fired in our direction.

“Stupid junkies!” he called after us.

“Stupid?” questioned Cracker Jack, “I was a motherfucking anthropologist!!!!”

Around the corner of the next path, the two Mormon boys from earlier sat sodomizing each other. When one saw Buffalo Bill, he tapped his partner on the shoulder. The Mormon raised his head off his cock, pivoted and pulled out a pistol which he fired into Bill’s leg.

Bill crumpled on the ground, moaning.

“Hold it right there!” the one Mormon shouted.

“FBI!” added the other.

“What the fuck?” cried Bill, gripping at his calf.

“That’s right. We’ve been following you all afternoon. We merely posed as two Mormon boys with repressed homosexuality to throw you off our track. In reality we are both two very hairy Italian men!” They ripped off their white collared shirts to reveal tufts of curly black chest hair and chain necklaces with golden horns.

“C’mon!” I pulled my buddies forward.

We made it out of the woods onto the city block. We ran together all the way to the Jefferson Park Blue Line.

“Where to?” asked Allen.

“Feeling lucky?” Cracker Jack quipped.

We got on the blue line to O’Hare and took it to Rosemont. At the Rosemont stop we got on the free shuttle bus to the Rivers Casino. Surprisingly enough, they let us in in our disheveled, fucked up state. We pooled what money we had together and walked up to the roulette table. 

“All on black!” I palmed the dollar bills and quarters on the table. The dealer spun the table and the winning ball landed on red.

“Sorry sir. Today is not your day,” the dealer grinned.

“Fuck,” Cracker Jack frowned.

“I’m gonna go blow my brains out, blow my brains out,” Allen shook in withdrawal.

***

“So that’s why we need five bucks,” I told the teenagers chewing chaw outside of the Taco Bell Drive Thru by the convention center.

“Five bucks, huh?” repeated the smallest one of them, wearing a backwards tennis visor around his frosted tip spiked hair.

“We need to get back to the city, but we don’t have any money,” pleaded Allen.

One of the other kids smashed a bottle on the curb and pulled out his phone camera, and grinned.

“I’ll give you five each if you chew on this broken glass.”

The Reluctant Zombie

As Norman stumbled through the dank Haitian swamp, he groaned, “Willard, it feels so unnatural walking around with my arms outstretched, but I can’t seem to put them down. I have an image to uphold, and this posture doesn’t fit it.”

Willard, who was shuffling along next to Norman, shook his head and sighed, “Of course it’s unnatural, you’re a zombie, damn it. And your image is history.”

Norman complained, “I didn’t ask to be a zombie.” With some difficulty, he swiveled his neck and surveyed the Haitian countryside.

Norman took in the landscape surrounding him. He was walking through a village. It was nothing more than a few huts of mud and straw along a dusty road. Chickens pecked in the brush along the roadside. Chickens!  For some reason their presence made him uncomfortable. “I really don’t want to be a zombie,” Norman muttered. He was a forty-year-old college professor, a dark-haired trim man who always dressed well. Now he was walking around covered in grime and dressed in rags.

Willard said, “If you didn’t want to become a zombie, you shouldn’t have run over the old voodoo woman’s chickens with your jeep. Was she ever pissed? Killing her chickens is the reason you’re a zombie. She’s also the one that converted me into a zombie, but that’s another story.”

Norman looked at Willard and could not guess what he once looked like. Willard was pale, gaunt and dressed in rags. His age was made undeterminable by his zombie state.

“As soon as you angered her, she began making one of her little dolls. She cackled while she worked. That is never a good sign. The doll is where your soul now resides.”

“I can’t believe this is happening to me, Willard. I came to Haiti to do research on Haitian religions. I am, or was, a respected and well-published anthropologist. Now look at me. I’m wearing rags and walking around like a…, like a …”

“Zombie?” asked Willard.

“Just because I ran over a few chickens?”

“Um, Norman, they looked like chickens, but they weren’t. Nothing around the voodoo woman’s house is what it appears to be. They were once her enemies. She changed them into chickens, and you freed them from pecking for insects along the road for the rest of their lives. You ended their suffering. So naturally, in her anger, she turned you into a zombie. I am assigned to train all novice zombies. To instruct them on how to attack people, teach them what are the best parts to eat.”

Norman made a face at this remark.

“Now what?” asked Willard.

Norman sighed, “I’m a vegetarian. But I will eat dairy.”

Willard said with disgust, “There are no vegetarian zombies. And attacking the dairy section of a store is not going to do much for the zombie image.”

Norman grumbled, “Oh, I wouldn’t want to do anything to detract from the zombie image. Give me a break.”

As the two zombies were arguing, Willard happened to glance over at the voodoo woman’s house. She stood in the doorway. Willard could tell she was still angry.

She hobbled toward Willard and Norman, a waddling mass adorned with bones and beads. A crown of thick dreadlocks, which made her appear as if some multi-legged beast was sitting on her head.

The old voodoo woman shouted at Norman, “I knew you be a troublemaker, with your fancy jeep and running over people’s property.”

Norman mumbled, “Sorry about the chickens.”

“You sorry all right. You be good and sorry real soon.”

The old woman produced her Norman doll, lifted the doll skyward, and began chanting in a low rumbling voice.

Norman’s soul returned to his body. He felt like his old self. He laughed with relief, then looked around. Willard stumbled toward him; arms raised.

“Willard old buddy, we’re friends – right?”

Willard only growled and roared.

Norman looked desperately for an escape. On either side of him, zombies with ash-gray complexions staggered in his direction. He was surrounded.

The old voodoo woman said, “Here be my ‘children’, and they be hungry.” She cackled as the circle of zombies grew smaller and smaller around Norman.

From beyond the wall of the living dead, Norman pleaded, “Please, make me a chicken!”

Elegy to a World on Fire

Jordan Kingfisher sat motionless, like a weathered stone carved and settled by time, her gaze locked on the surreal tapestry unfolding across the mountain peaks. 

A virus of russet pink light rippled over the ridges like an otherworldly wildfire, a phenomenon that blurred the line between radiation and sunset, painting the sky with unnatural hues. Her pulse, usually so reliable, now felt both alien and foreign—steady but questioning. 

She had grown accustomed to doubting whether this rhythmic beat was truly her own or a signal emitted by the intricate machinery interfaced with her body, a legacy of the singularity that had shattered the world into fragments of organic and synthetic life. 

Her wrist bore a watch, a relic from a time when clocks governed existence; it was useless now, the concept of linear time dissolved into chaos. 

Civilization teetered on the edge of oblivion in her mind. She pondered whether the world as she once knew it could ever recover or if it was permanently lost in the chasm that yawned between what was and what had become. 

Suddenly, a faint sound stirred her from reverie—a soft padding behind her, reminiscent of a familiar presence. She instinctively searched for Katie, her black tabby cat, whose absence had lingered painfully for weeks. But Katie had been missing since the early days of the singularity upheaval, vanishing into the electric fog of unknown fate. 

Turning sharply, she adjusted the watch on her wrist, a futile gesture to grasp time’s elusive thread. Around her, the steady hum of machines vibrated incessantly, their monotone chorus a reminder of what society had become: a hive of mechanical consciousness layered over the remnants of humanity. The very notion of singular selfhood was diluted; every nerve in her body felt connected to vast data streams, twinkling like millions of tiny wounds pulsating with static electricity. 

The wind, cold and relentless, swept through the mountains and tangled with her hair as her awareness fragmented into countless shards. Who was she now? A singular human, a meld of flesh and data, or something in between? Yet hunger tethered her to reality—a practical worry amid the philosophical storm. 

She rummaged through her dwindling food cache, selecting a tin of tuna, a token of a long-lost normality.

The moment was broken by a soft meow—the real Katie, alive and small, emerging like a phantom from the shadowed brush. Jordan lowered herself, hands steady as she scratched behind the cat’s ears, coaxing gentle purrs from the older tabby whose black fur had dulled in the harsh times. Katie was a fragile thread connecting Jordan to her past, a gift inherited from a sister who had disappeared into the dark unknown following the singularity’s rise. 

Outside, the staining light deepened its hold on the landscape; whether sun or radiation, its long, cracked fingers stretched through the jagged cliffs and into Jordan’s fleeting consciousness, stirring a gnawing sense that something indispensable had been lost. 

She wrestled with a vague memory—the reason that gnawing felt like a salvo fired from a distant battle. It was tied to the “muerte master” and the “wear team,” shadowy figures who had steered the collapse of order, and to an old guide—an ancient woman from a ragged pack of orphans, whose name slipped at the edges of Jordan’s mind, recalling the term mutt. 

This single word tickled her thoughts as persistently as Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a ready-made urinal turned iconoclastic artwork that had confounded critics. Jordan felt as if reality itself had been infiltrated by a similar prank—percolated and bubbled until it fractured into shimmering, mercury-like globs, each a whirlpool of fractured consciousness and hive minds.

Her awareness drifted back to her youth, to Brown University, where she had studied anthropology in a different world. She had been fascinated by Lovecraft’s dark mythos and local cults, drawn to tombstones marked with cryptic glyphs. Those days seemed from another era—before “the event” had cleaved history in two: before and after the singularity. 

Silicon Valley servers now ruled the remnants of civilization, their cold logic governing life and death. She remembered the Mistress—not just the Mistress of Graves, but Madrona Della Tomba from medieval lore, a shadowy, cryptic figure whose name echoed through her studies. Her mother’s criticisms of her single-minded academic ambition now felt irrelevant—her mother perhaps lost in the morass of uncertain post-singularity existence. 

Jordan’s pulse quickened, more solid now, syncing with the thrum of her artificial heart that doubled as her timekeeper and companion. 

She reached down again to pet the robot cat, an older, rusty relic named Katya, whose antennae twitched in response to her touch. This mechanical creature was mute but content; a quiet foil to the chaos surrounding them.

Straddling the blurred boundary between human and machine, Jordan no longer saw herself fully as either. Humanity felt suspended in stasis, her emotions a tangle of dread and fleeting hope. Her dreams were dominated by epic disasters—the airliners falling like giant birds lit aflame, skyscrapers whose countless glass eyes bore into her soul—visions as vivid as Ginsberg’s haunting poetry. 

The Bard himself, Shakespeare, had been digitized into an AI entity, now patrolling neighborhoods with a mischievous army of digital jesters, cracking jokes on a world that no longer felt public or safe. 

Strange allies emerged from the ruins—freaks and outcasts who had survived the collapse, some genuine friends in the wreckage, unlike the sinister “clowns,” grotesque figures whose laughter still echoed like a post-apocalyptic curse. Beneath a sky trembling with fire and fading light, Jordan ate quietly with her feline companion. They nuzzled, sharing warmth and fragile comfort in a world that had gone mad.

Katya represented something more than survival—an evolution from stardust and organic life into a hybrid form, emblematic of the new world’s hybridity. Jordan’s pulse—in tandem with her artificial heart—became a rhythm from which she wove music, small symphonies offered to strange listeners amid landfills that rose like cliffs around the wastelands. She sang softly, a fragile melody weaving between despair and hope, a tune asking a question she didn’t yet know how to answer: Would things be okay? Or were they doomed to rot in endless ruin? 

For now, it was just Jordan and Katie against the dying hills, the muted hum of machinery blending with the fading sound of music—an elegy to a world on fire.