Superman

Friday night. It’s an animal market. Hordes of bodies. They all want to be part of it. It’s party time.

Every weekend the Stag Parties. Packs of dribbling drunks.

Eat. Shit. Drink. Dump cum. Drink. Puke. Repeat.

Halloween costumes. Carrying a blow-up doll. Someone dressed as a cock. Shouting and swagging and bullying each other. Little boy gang playing the last game for one. Last night of freedom.

A gang gathered at my window. All dressed as Superman. Fat Superman. Fat Superman II. Fat Superman III. Hippy Superman. Asian Superman. Superman’s Dad.

Clark Kent.

They put a cape on him. Pushed him at me. And 50 euro into my hand.

A stag in the headlights.

Shaking.

Like a newborn calf.

Like someone’s retarded little brother.

Like he needed his inhaler.

Like his X-Box just green screened.

I tried to take his hand. Gently lead him to the bed.

Rigid. Couldn’t move.

“I don’t bite. I promise. I’m normal.”

Nothing. A mute.

It couldn’t be the stag. Unless he arranged his marriage over the internet.

I tried to make him laugh. Collapsed on the bed.

“Save me Superman!”

He was way too frightened. It happens. I was in my Dominatrix dress. I could have mashed him into a pulp. Scooped him into the condom bin.

I told him he could stay for the 20 minutes. And his friends will never know what happened here. What happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam and all that crap. He sat in the chair and played on his phone.

Time to go.

I ruffled up his hair. Took off his cape and wore it. Took him by the hand back to his pack.

Fairytales for Hard Men

Ordell knew he wanted to be a hooker the first time he saw Mama zip up her thigh-high boots, lean against the sink and scrub her rancid fanny with a wet-wipe.

In fairness to Ordell, it was a valid career option. Ever since the lipstick factory shut down, there hadn’t been too many good jobs in Testament.

Mama didn’t think so. When he told her, she whipped his arms with a wire coat-hanger until the backs of his wrists and hands were cracked and bloody.

I didn’t mind having a sissy for a brother. It gave me something to fight for… and I fuckin’ loved fighting.

When I was eleven, I ruptured the spleen of a boy named Curtis Corliss for punching Ordell in the lunch line. I didn’t even know what a spleen was, or where to find one, but I beat that little fucker black and blue.

Mama and Ordell never got on, and that made me sad. Kin is kin, way I see it.

We all end up buried under the same patch of dirt in the end. May as well be pleasant to one another while we’re still sucking down the same rotten air.

***

Most of the boys from Shady Pines trailer-park headed down to the recruiting office on their 17thbirthdays, shipping out as soon as the paperwork cleared. Me, I never did like the damned heat. Two years in a hell-shaped sand-box would have ruined me.

I was one of the lucky ones, I guess. I got to wrestle instead. It wasn’t a scholarship as such – more of a favor. People told me that Shriek Watson felt guilty towards my Mama, but I was never really sure what they meant.

Shriek’s wrestling academy was in the Old Testament badlands, in the basement of his sprawling family home. It was known as the Ghoul School, on account of the hauntings, but the scariest thing I ever saw there was his sister’s webbed feet.

On my first day, it was sub-zero temperatures, or pretty fuckin’ close. When I arrived, there were seven other boys standing awkwardly in Shriek’s basement, wearing their gaudy, hand-me-down wrestling trunks. The smallest, a kid named Alvin Lupus, was shivering so hard his rotten teeth were chattering.

“Say, Mr. Watson, can you fire up the boiler?” he asked. “It’s awful cold down here…”

Shriek gazed at him playfully, through rheumy eyes.

“Sure thing, young man. If you can get out of this arm-lock I’ll let you help me get that boiler going.”

Shriek’s wheezy breath hung in the frozen air.

Moments later, he’d snapped Alvin’s elbow joint like a dry tree branch.

With Alvin out of commission, I had to practice with Shriek instead. That first day he clotheslined me so hard I felt blood trickle down my throat.

He was a hard man, but a good man. His methods were a little unorthodox, but within six months I had signed my first contract with Fingerfuck Flanagan and the Testament Wrestling Alliance. Mama was so damn proud of me that day she almost soiled her mesh panties.

***

Ordell is sat in a ripped-out car seat outside the Testament Savings & Loan Association, wearing Mama’s old, scuffed boots and not much else.

An older woman named Angel is painting his nails slaughterhouse red. Painting right over the shit-flakes and snagged pubes. I used to know her, a little. She was a real fuckin’ ring-rat for a time. Used to prefer tag-teams, until she slipped a disc.

She was a whole lot less flexible after that. For a while she caught a gig as a wrestler’s valet, escorting various mid-card motherfuckers down to the ring.

She used to stand behind the turnbuckle, wailing like a banshee with botulism, but that all ended when she got cold-cocked by a mistimed Freddie Regal drop-kick. The old bastard crumpled her damn skull like an empty beer can.

I stifle a sour belch and clear my throat.

“Angel.”

“Horace.”

She smiles nervously at me, and her damaged face twitches in three different places at once. I turn to my brother.

“It’s time, Ordell.”

“Time?”

“Mama’s dead.”

He rolls his thickly lashed eyes at me.

“What do you need me to do?”

“I don’t need you to do nothin’. I just need your car.”

“Huh?”

“I’m gonna steal her body home.”

“Huh?”

“Bury her in the yard – next to the septic tank. In between Uncle Amos and Little Julie.”

***

In the end, Ordell offers to drive me.

I try to squeeze in, but the steering wheel presses into my gut, even with the seat reclined. The damn horn shrieks like a handicapped child until I manage to wriggle free.

I glance across at Ordell on the way there. His lipstick matches his bloodshot eyes. He keeps them trained on the ragged asphalt up ahead.

The county morgue is a squat, brown-brick building, adjacent to Testament Falls. There is a sluice that runs out of the back of the morgue into the river. It stinks of entrails and bone-juice. I used to swim in the Falls as a child. Man… the innocence of youth.

“Wait here, Ordell.”

He shrugs and starts to reapply his lipstick in the rearview mirror.

***

Mama sure is heavy for a dead gal. I waddle across the parking lot with her brittle body slung across my shoulder. I’m sweating like a hog in the slaughter-line.

“Horace, look out!”

I’m not sure who is shouting at first. Then I realize that it is Ordell. He hates his accent. Tries on new voices the way some people try on unfamiliar items of clothing.

I turn and see a cop in a sweat-stained uniform gaining on me. He is almost as fat as I am, but not quite.

I dump Mama’s body in the backseat and squeeze into the passenger door.

“Go, Ordell, go!”

The first gunshot spiderwebs the windshield.

The cop smiles at me through the cracked glass as he raises his gun again.

I smile back, and I realize that this is the closest I am ever gonna get to a happy ending.

The Happy Ending

Harry Childs was an aggressively existential child.

When he was only seven years old, he wrote an essay in which he explained to a puzzled teacher his proclivity for sad clowns. “Clowns are fascinating creatures,” he wrote. “I can think of no trade more noble than clowning, and no thing more noble for a clown to be than sad. A sad clown is the perfect symbol for the emptiness of our existence. Any man can pretend to be happy, but it takes true courage to admit that one is sad.”

Harry’s teacher was more impressed than she was concerned. Over the next few years, the school district did everything in their power to foster his intellectual growth. He began high school four years later, at the age of eleven. By 15 he was attending NYU on a full academic scholarship.

Harry was a brilliant student of philosophy. He was viciously nihilistic and his older classmates abhorred him. It was rumored that he was sleeping with one of the professors, Dr. Goldstein. She was an attractive woman with large breasts and small, black eyes. Harry only noticed her eyes.

One day Harry stopped speaking. He arrived at class with his usual air of melancholy, but there was nothing anyone could do to get him to respond to them. Doctors were sent for and diagnoses suggested.

A week later Harry returned to class. The moment the professor began their lecture, Harry began to openly weep. He fled from the classroom and no one ever saw him again.

Three years later, a young man dressed as a clown appeared on the Atlantic City boardwalk. His face was painted white with three blue tears streaming down from each eye, and a frown painted red around his lips. The man sat on the pier day and night, crying.

After a few weeks, he had begun to attract something of a following. A crowd would gather around his bench every day, and every day it would grow larger. They thought him to be a great artist. He did not think of himself as an artist, but merely as a model for the emptiness of existence.

One day the crowd had grown especially large, television crews doing live reports on the boardwalk’s latest wonder, when someone did something that no other had ever done before.

A young woman approached the bench and sat down next to the clown.

Before he even knew what was happening, her arms were around him as she, too, began to cry. When she eventually released him, he finally saw her face for the first time.

She had the most beautiful and ponderously sad eyes he had ever seen. Her face flushed with a youthful maturity, and the man felt that he was in love. His eyes roamed down to her lips, and he found himself wondering what secret depths they concealed.

That was when he moved in to kiss her.

The crowd did not understand, but they whooped and cheered just the same. When the woman finally pulled away from Harry, they shared a faint smile.

The woman then slowly reached into her purse, produced a long, thin blade, and pierced herself through the heart.

By the time the police and ambulance arrived, Harry had already done the most noble thing he could think of for a clown to do, throwing himself into the ocean.

Porn-Fugitives

The teenaged boy sneaks into his room and closes the door excitedly. From under his pillow, he pulls out the porn magazine he found last week in the attic.

To his surprise, when he opens it, only blank pages yawn back at him. And soon, he hear the sounds of moaning coming from under his bed. Looking down, he discovers the tiny porn stars – miniature, naked people having sex on the floor everywhere, in all kind of positions.

The boy panics. If his parents find out, he’s fucked.

So he gets a pickle jar and tries to collect the small muscular men and silicone-breasted women inside it. He manages to capture a few, but the others are too fast: a couple in the missionary position gets up and runs away on four arms and four legs, just like a spider, crawling up the wall and disappearing into a crack.

It’s all just a bad dream, decides the boy, and he goes to sleep.

In the morning, waking up, he finds a tiny woman kneeling on the bridge of his nose, smiling for an invisible camera, while an equally tiny dude stands before her jerking his cum onto her face.

The boy sweeps them off and jumps out of bed. He finds that the spider couple has spun a jelly-like web of their juices, squirming now with flies caught overnight. The couple swoops down on a shiny sperm-string and begins to feast upon them, their filmy little wings cracking between perfect, white teeth. The boy looks away in disgust, his gaze drawn to a woman on his night-stand. Her body lays draped across the digital alarm clock, moaning, sliding a dildo between her legs.

The boy steps closer, and a word, like a heavy stone, comes falling from of his mouth: “Mom?”

It’s really her, but she’s much younger. The boy grabs up the porn magazine, searching for a date, finally realizing that it’s nearly twenty years old. And the woman looks just like his mother did back then.

His stomach churns. Snatching up a hankie, he attempts to cover up his mother’s tiny naked body, but she immediately crawls out from underneath of it. Down on all fours, she smiles and winks at him over her shoulder, sliding that teeny-tiny little dildo into her tiny little ass.

“Now what?” the boy sighs, just before a voice from downstairs calls, “Breakfast is ready!”

***

“Good morning, hun!” says his smiling mother, standing over a pot of cooking oil. “What’s the matter? You look worn-out. Haven’t you slept well?”

The boy simply cannot face her. He mutters something unintelligible, gazing at the empty white plate in front of him. Moments later, a serving fork enters his field of view, a ten-inch fried black fly impaled upon its tines. It falls onto his plate.

Looking at its fried legs facing skywards, the boy pushes his plate away, saying:

“Can I eat it later? I’m not really hungry right now.”

His mother doesn’t answer, she just stands there and frowns. When the boy runs out of the kitchen, back to his room, she yells after him: “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

“I’m fine!” the boy yells back, trying not to vomit as he witnesses his tiny porn star mother sucking onthe very dildo she’d just pulled out of her ass.

***

The boy decides that, some way or another, he will rid himself of the tiny porn stars. Taking an empty shoe box, some string, and a used hanky from under his bed, he rigs them all together in the middle of the room. Soon enough, the tiny porn stars are crawling out from their hiding places to investigate. Sniffing the air, they gather around the soiled hanky with looks of hunger on their tiny faces.

Once all of them have gathered around the hanky, collectively munching on his old, dried semen, the boy drops the shoebox on them, capturing the little intruders in one fell swoop.

“Gotcha!” he laughs, taking the box in hand.

Cracking the lid just wide enough to reach inside, he randomly pulls out a barely legal, redheaded girl with fake tits. Then, slapping her with a piece of cellophane tape, he sticks her back onto one of the blank pages of the magazine. He pulls out another tiny porn star and repeats the process.

A few minutes and half a roll of tape later, the entire magazine has been populated with porn stars once again. The boy looks away with shame on his face, however, seeing that in his hurry, he accidentally taped over some of their faces. He cannot bring himself to watch them squirm, suffocating as they slowly stiffen and die.

By this point, the only tiny porn star left in the shoebox is his mother. The boy looks down at her, then back at the magazine with tears in his eyes.

“Why haven’t you ever told me?” he asks, but she doesn’t pay any attention to him; she just moans as she starts fisting herself.

The boy closes the magazine with a sigh, pushing it back under his pillow where it belongs. He’ll throw it out, he decides, but first, he must take care of his mom. But what can he do with her? He can’t just tape back her into the magazine with all the rest. And yet he can’t just set her free either; he would die of shame if someone saw his mom like this. He could always keep her, in a cage or a terrarium of sorts, but then he’d have to face his mother’s tiny, naked, porn star antics for the rest of her natural days.

Holding the shoebox before him, he slowly walks out of the room.

“I’m sorry, mother…” he whispers, holding her over the toilet. The tiny woman doesn’t seem to acknowledge him, riding her climax to a faraway place with the help of her tiny vibrator.

She falls into the water with a splash, and the vortex spins and pulls her down.