Pink plastic singing electric
showtunes from Thailand.
There was an article
in the UFO rags
about fentanyl candy from China.
Fat queer whore house America
lit up like the fourth of July,
and was first in line
with all its blood-splotched dollars.
In the summer of 2024, I started hearing stories about hikers falling deathly ill after visiting Havasu Falls. Some even had to be airlifted out. The headlines were twisted with concern, bordering on alarmed.
Then one morning, my spouse, who was reading the news in bed, announced, “It was Norovirus.” I felt something leave my body.
I was transported back to the winter of ’23. One night I went to bed feeling slightly off. I wouldn’t have even described myself as feeling sick. It was early and I fell asleep immediately.
I awoke at the witching hour. I was still not fully conscious but registered that something was wrong. My intestines were making gurgling sounds that were so loud I was afraid I’d wake my spouse.
I slipped out of bed and hurried to the guest bathroom. What did some deep part of me know, even half asleep, that what was about to happen should not desecrate the sacred spaces I shared with my spouse? Maybe the thing that drives a sick animal to find a hidden place in which to die. It was pure instinct.
The guest bathroom was a few yards from my bed. I was feeling queasy when my feet hit the floor. By the time I reached the bathroom door, I was entirely gripped by nausea. And I mean gripped. It was like the wrathful hand of God was squeezing my body like a tube of toothpaste. The intensity of it brought me to my knees. Before I hit the ground, I was projectile vomiting. It wasn’t like the days of my youth, or my drinking days, or any other days for that matter. Not only did I have no control over my body, I felt like I was being tossed around by an orca or caught up in a landslide. I was helpless.
For a short second, I considered praying for my life. But before I could formulate the words, the force of the vomiting opened the floodgates on the other end. You know how sometimes you hear an idiom, and you realize you didn’t really understand it until you saw the original context? Like, maybe you never understood the word, “flighty” until you kept chickens? That is how I now feel about the word “floodgates”.
I think I was holding onto the bowl, but I may have subconsciously inserted that detail later to give myself some human dignity. I was a living fountain. In some grotesque way, it was strangely beautiful in its symmetry. I do remember wearing long flannel pajama bottoms, green and navy-blue checks. I remember because I had no time to remove them. I also remember being stumped about how to handle the situation, had I been able to move. It didn’t matter anyway; I couldn’t stop vomiting to turn around and sit on the toilet. I think I may have also been crying involuntarily. I remember thinking, in an out-of-body kind of way, how someday this would be funny.
I am sure this whole disaster only lasted a few minutes, although in the way of these things it felt much, much longer. Eventually there was nothing left inside my empty shell of a body, and the fountain slowed and stopped. I remained as I had fallen, half draped over the bowl, one leg stretched out behind me and the other twisted under my body, like some sad version of the “running man” yoga pose. I finally tried to move but I slipped. I asked myself whether it was funny yet. It was not.
I heard a quiet knock on the door. My spouse gently asked whether I needed help. “No!” I cried. “Don’t come in!” Maybe I added, “please,” I don’t know. We had only been married three years then. They could not see me like that. Maybe God even had to turn away, you’re on your own with this one, man, sorry.
I think I vomited once more, weakly. Then, shaking and feeble, I disrobed where I stood and climbed into the shower. Cleanup was strangely easy, given that I felt that I had crossed into Hell and returned, diminished and sorry.
Norovirus changed me. I understand now that whatever I think about my pretty little brain, I am merely a two-ended tube of fluid, with pretensions.
Later, I told my little sister about what happened, and how I had been at such a loss in the moment. “You hold the trash can, and sit on the toilet,” she explained. I will never forget her wisdom.
My thoughts and prayers lingered with the hikers for days. I imagined the heat, the lack of running water, the long hike out. I bet some couples went there, newly in love. Could romance survive such conditions? True love? I could only hope that in the end everything came out alright.
The bar was ugly
and she was ugly
and I was ugly,
at least in mood.
Made you wonder where
the beauty ever went?
Not with her gaggle of
gorgon friends,
I can tell you that.
Or that creepy comb-over bartender
with roofies for hands.
The walls were ugly
and the floors were worse.
No one was getting laid,
and if they were,
the sex was ugly, too.
Words hide, words
move through walls and fly out
into distant minds. Words
hide the truth, or burn
through pages and paint walls
with fire-shadows.
They grant and they steal,
or stay up all night
wondering what shape to form.
They raze cities and
raise the dead—They come apart
like pollen spores, or follow us
into our dreams. Words define themselves
with other words, and mean nothing
without them. They limit the brain,
but ask deep questions.
They bring us through grief and betrayals
with cold comfort.
From a pile of rubble
they build other worlds. They name us
and gather in and at
our wake. They exonerate
or execute. Words come home to us
so we can put them in
the right order, but after this
they don’t think of us. We need them
and we need them to leave
so we can sit at last in peace
and age with the silence.
the Dimes Square girls are at it again
reading Lunch Poems 2 over lunches amuse-bouche,
the sky like a mango flavored Juul, Manhattan at noon
is a wet brain and when I finally heal from the trauma
of a happy childhood I find every pussy at the corner of Canal
and Orchard to be a Beaux-Arts shrine
to acronyms and floating signifiers. Here is one hand
of the Red Scare. And here is another
trembling with the psychic power that Kunst
is the German world for “art.”
O to be young, to navigate you
like an open manhole on Second Avenue,
you fucked with breakneck inventiveness
aesthetic and artifice,
we shot the dawn like Burroughs
missing badly, because you hated Burroughs
preferred Ferlinghetti, and besides
that was the same night Nikki went toe-to-toe
with Death’s six serpent sons,
and Hans got busted doing coke in the Swan Room
and Thom didn’t have a clue about the Sally Fowler Rat Pack
our love was doomed time and time thereafter
a decade late and a trust fund short,
your desire to be desired so fleeting I couldn’t keep up.
horror, adj. inspiring or creating loathing, aversion, etc.
sleaze, adj. contemptibly low, mean, or disreputable
trash, n. literary or artistic material of poor or inferior quality
Welcome to HSTQ: Spring 2024, the curated collection from Horror, Sleaze and Trash!
Featuring poetry by William Taylor Jr., Brian Rosenberger, Vandana Kumar, Ronan Barbour, John Tustin, Alan Catlin, Daniel S. Irwin, Ryan Quinn Flanagan, Suzanne Kelsey, Bradford Middleton, Puma Perl, Noel Negele, J.J. Campbell, Mistress Renee, Casey Renee Kiser, Sean Meggeson, M.P. Powers, and Todd Cirillo.
Between a man and a dog?
None, except a man will only get
on his all fours when he’s drunk
or he’s looking for his keys,
a dog will piss anywhere
there is an upright object,
a man will use a urinal
or a toilet bowl even
if he misses and sprays
all over the place,
a dog will bark thanks if you
feed him the tiniest morsel
but a man will rate the meal
and be on his way,
a dog will not budge
if he’s on his last legs,
and must be carried shamelessly,
a man will soldier on
till he falls on his face.
So here’s to the nobility in both.
“You never take me anywhere.”
Viva had called to complain. About our relationship, her job, her life. The telephone only made her voice screechier, but she was right. The only place we ever went, together, was a motel located roughly between our legal residences.
We’d put in a lot of miles on the place’s mattresses. Fond memories, for me. Not enough, for Viva.
“So, where do you wanna go?”
“Oh, so I gotta think of everything? Use your imagination, lover boy. You’ve got an imagination, don’t you?”
“Sure. Sure I do. See you next Thursday.”
Thursday was our day to get together at the motel, usually. That’s why I liked Thursdays so much.
But now there was a problem. First, I had to imagine a female-pleasing place to take Viva. Then, there was transportation. I no longer own a vehicle, and my driver’s license was rescinded over an incident with alcohol involved, in which no one was harmed. So I traveled to our motel by bicycle. Viva didn’t know that, though.
“Listen,” I said, when Thursday morning rolled around. “I got car trouble. You’ll have to come pick me up.”
She wasn’t pleased. Women like Viva want to be driven around. “Where you taking me?”
She expected a romantic French restaurant, or the glittering casinos of Atlantic city. But the plan was, nude beach.
Those two words go together so well. Like two people, if life ever decided to run smoothly. A concept followed by three words almost as euphonious: no payment required. There were two possible outcomes. Either Viva would be charmed by a back-to-nature date, and would outdo her sexual self. Or, I’d never see her again.
There was a third possibility. There always is. Viva’s husband, according to her a jealous and violent man, would decide he needed an over-all suntan on the same day, and kill us both.
“It’s a surprise,” I said.
I used to go to the nude beach a lot, in the winter, back in the years when there really was such a thing, with a nude girl who called herself Karma. She never cut her hair, or shaved, or used soap. The best part of her was the smell. Dressed in crummy arctic parkas, we’d ride our bikes out to the shore, dump the old clunkers on the dunes, hug each other in tight for a sweaty endless kiss, then strip and hit the ice-cold, cement-hard waves on the run.
Then we’d fuck like dogs to keep from freezing to death.
The wind rustled the seagrass atop the sandhills and blew Karma’s human perfume away with the years.
Viva was the opposite of Karma, also in that she grew even sexier as she aged.
Last time I saw Karma, her tits flopped against her knees as she pushed a stroller, with nothing in it. She didn’t look up when our paths crossed, again. I didn’t look back. It’s never a good idea.
Viva’s boob-job was a blazing success. Encouraged, enthused, she went in for all those other rejuvenating operations that female performers in the adult entertainment industry now find indispensable. She’d proudly display the results.
“Doesn’t it look paler? I mean, like almost white?”
“Yeah, Viva. Like it snowed, down there.”
She kept a hand-mirror in her purse for self-admiration tours, from every possible angle. Viva played tricks with the light, in our motel room. She could’ve been an artist, if she’d been born in Paris, instead of NJ.
She also had a surprise in store. There was a dog in the car with her. Not some little poodle or chihuahua, either. More like an assault mastiff with mean look in its eyes.
“What’s with the mutt?”
“Oh my husband got Satan for me. Says I gotta take him along when I go out on jobs. For protection.”
The beast snarled at the unknown character as he circled the vehicle and got in. His low growl turned into a plaintive whine when his Mistress bestowed a toilet-flush swirling kiss upon him.
Viva shifted into Drive. “So, where we going?”
“Keep her headed East, and under 35.”
The rest of NJ was out to lunch. Dainty breezes, green treeses, buzz of beeses, even the monster in back stuck its snout out the window to take in its dose of summer.
Viva yodeled along with Bruce Springsteen on the radio.
“Hey wait a minute,” she said, when a sign revealed our destination. “Are you really taking me to the nude beach?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Sheesh. And I got all dressed up.”
“You look great, Viva.”
“I coulda stripped outta my Giorgio Armani bikini, if you’d told me. And I’m gonna get sunburn on my tits and ass.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll be your shadow.”
“Oh lover lover. My husband’d never think of this.”
Did she mean, taking his wife to a nude beach? Or looking for her there. Was Satan equipped with a tracking device? When Viva turned off the road, I risked getting a hand bitten off to check his collar.
There were no cars parked in the lot. But that meant Viva’s pink hot rod would stand out all the more if her husband decided to check nude beaches for proof of his wife’s infidelity.
“Park in the shade. Don’t want Satan to roast to death while we have fun.”
“You think I’d leave Satan in the car? What kinda creep are you?”
Satan sat on the sand like a sphinx, watched us frolic. The water was clear and cold, the waves gentle. We got out and sat down to dry off on the sand. When Viva assumed the position, Satan trotted over to hump. First my leg and ass, then his mistress’, when she got on top.
Satan barked a warning when I kicked him. “Try that again and I’ll rip out your throat.”
“This ain’t working,” I said, limply.
“Not for me, neither. I got sand in my asscrack. You didn’t even bring a towel. Let’s go back to the car.”
Defeated, I was about to put my jeans back on.
Satan gloated, prematurely.
“What’re you doing?” Viva said. “This is a nude beach, mister. Dintcha read the sign? I meant, let’s go back to the car and finish what we started.”
Satan went insane when we shut the doors on his snout. He barked and howled, bit the windows, only calmed down when his mistresss got back out. When we humped against the fender, he joined in again.
“Let’s get up on the roof,” I said. “Dogs don’t climb.”
“If he scratches the paint job, I’ll murder you before my husband murders me.”
The scheme worked. The shade protected Viva’s ass from 3rd degree burns. A friendly zephyr said, go go go!
Satan knew when he was licked. He paced around the car. His mistress took up the howl where he’d left off.
“Don’t stop,” she said. “Don’t you dare stop.”
But eventually I had to at least think about it.
The life within me wanted out.
Viva felt it, too. The car below strained against its emergency brake.
“Do it in me,” she moaned. “I want a baby. My husband’s sterile, on top of everything.”
What nonsense. Maybe her plan would’ve worked, twenty years before. But even if the miracle occurred, how was she gonna explain it to her violent, jealous, infertile husband? Had she made secret plans for our future together? No point taking chances. I pulled out.
The load flew across the sky like an opalescent UFO.
Viva watched it go. “Nooooo!”
Satan caught the glob with a snap of his foaming jaws, and swallowed it down.
Gregor Pneumsa sighed, his snap brim fedora not sitting so jauntily on his head, his stained tan trenchcoat less than stylish beneath the razor steel sky. So many times he had thought his luck would improve, only to find himself ceaselessly plunged once more into agonies. His nightmares were an orgy of mechanical insects, droid hives teeming with unquiet life like the ghosts of memory. The meat suit sat unquietly on his bones. He wanted out.
Once had been, now all was ashes. He lay curled up in the fetal position against the sewer grate, shaking and spasming with sobs. He wasn’t even excited about scoring the Nova, so depressed was he by the constant psychic battery and death threats that befell all disabled in Mercury City, a leaden sheet of sadness crushing his chest.
A Reality Cop in a black funeral mask came striding up to him and pressed a bug zapper to his chest. “Wakey wakey, drop your steaky,” came the mechanoid voice.
Pneumsa had dealt with their kind before. Also known as the Nightmare Squad and Agents of Brasilia, Inc., they were dedicated to the detection and persecution of all Gregors past, passing and to come. Their bead on Gregors was quite remarkable considering the fact that the Nightmare Squad harbored many of Pneumsa’s kind.
“Didn’t I see you at the Lodge meeting,” said Pneumsa, halfway asleep and in his dreams sunk into the hot pink sex of a Gregorina.
“This is a public sidewalk,” growled the cop. “Get a move on, and do it now or I’ll break out my Fucking Gun.”
“I suppose you will at that,” said Pneumsa. He grunted as he shakily rose to a standing position.
“You holding?” asked the cop.
“N-no man, I’m clean.”
“The fuck you are. Hey, isn’t that a book of New York Times crossword puzzles you’ve got in that carry bag of yours?”
“No, that’s not at all true.”
“You’re holding for sure. Wordle freak, Scrabble jones, the whole nine. Why don’t we take a little trip down to the station?”
“Why are you doing this to me?” said Pneumsa plaintively. “Aren’t you a Gregor yourself?”
“Not as such,” said the Gregor cop enigmatically. “I mean yes and no. We try to keep our side of the street clean. Unlike some.”
“I’m not sure exactly what you’re on about,” said Pneumsa.
“Neither am I,” said the cop. “Obscurity and enigma protocols must be followed to the letter. Thin grey line between…”
“Don’t you mean thin blue line?”
“It’s very grey inside the hive mind of Brasilia, Inc,” said the cop after some reflection. Then “you’re kind of a sad and poignant character, aren’t you? Honestly I’m less and less inclined to want to bust you. Of course a little favor from you might seal the deal.” The cop coughed and spat something evil into his handkerchief.
Without a word, Pneumsa unzipped the carry bag, feeling with the shaking fingers of a word virus junkie for the medicinal goods. They emerged clutching a tiny but potent vial of tangerine flake Strobe, which he slipped into the cop’s outstretched palm.
“Thank you kindly,” said the cop. “Well, I don’t see any further need to detain you. You might want to check out Motel Infernale.”
“What’s that?”
“Motel that sits in a pocket dimension of timespace. Good for recovering Word addicts such as yourself.”
A better mood began to slide through Pneumsa’s bloodstream like a rainbow shot. He thanked the cop and headed on down Demolition Boulevard, doing his best to ignore the lurking mutants.
***
“The Brazilian sent me,” Pneumsa told the slouched and glowering proprietor of Motel Infernale.
The proprietor wore an identical snap brim fedora and trenchcoat to Pneumsa. His eyes were hidden behind bug shades.
“The Brazilian, eh? Reality Cop or Todencorps?”
Pneumsa was beginning to feel the onset of word withdrawal. Desperate for a hit, he attempted a bit of witty banter.
“It was a she, actually. Just had a Brazilian.” He paused, unable to discern any reaction from the proprietor. He realized his non sequitur, felt foolish.
“Cronenbergian landing strip,” Pneumsa added with a leer.
The proprietor tossed Pneumsa a mangled key. “Just don’t OD on me,” he said. “Last time we had a shady character such as yourself in here, we had to scrape their steaming, luminous guts off the ceiling. Hot with the Word Virus.” He shuddered at the memory. “Also, no clown hookers.”
Now it was Pneumsa’s turn to shudder. He had no idea what he had been thinking when he hired Cotton Candy Omega, who was not only a clown whore but a Death Clown. She’d nearly devoured his heart as well as his cock.
“It’s down the hall, on the right,” said the proprietor.
***
Gregor Pneumsa placed the carry bag on the scuffed puke green carpet, unzipped, found a half pack of Lucky Strikes, flicked his Baphomet Zippo on a cig and inhaled greedily. He then placed the cigarette in a Houston Oilers ashtray which had obviously been left by a guest (who carries around ashtrays, he asked himself, they must be ghouls).
He pulled out the green balloon of Nova, a cotton swab, a spoon and a fresh works. He then placed a bump of the Nova on the spoon, flamed his Zippo beneath it until it sizzled. He tied off, crooked his arm and placed a cotton swab on top of the Nova. Finally, he drew the medication into the syringe, grunted, vein doused and finally sank the shot.
As soon as the Nova hit, Pneumsa knew he’d made a huge mistake. The words hit him so hard his skeleton shook. Entire encyclopedias uploaded themselves into his bloodstream. Intricate glosses, appendices, unabridged medical journal archives.
He stumbled, head swimming, as Sumerian alphabets danced in his mind. He was unable to resist the lure of the Hittites, Abyssiniand, Anthropods and Oregonites. He walked like an Egyptian sideways to the grimdark toilet with peeling wall paper from a pornographic funeral parlor. His entire body torqued. A thin line of green foam dripped down his jaw.
“Is this the end of Gregor Pneumsa?” he asked the very silent walls. But answer came there none.
He sank to his knees in the cramped porno toilet. Spasms wracked his body. Cellular ripples of pulp friction scraped nerve bundles together.
He began to vibrate, expanding and contracting. The Word had become Unflesh, as he saw with pain and wonder that his skin had taken on a neon pink complexion, fitzing and sparking as he grew bigger and smaller alternatively.
He saw once again the realm of the mechanoid insects to which he would never belong. His head became encased in stale, suffocating clouds all shaped like Easter Island statues. He flopped down on the floor, tears streaming down his cheeks.
Then Pneumsa simply exploded, spattering the walls and ceiling with luminous green, mostly Latinate words pureed from his organ meats.
***
One morning after unquiet dreams, Gregor Pneumsa found himself transformed on his battered, pee soaked mattress at the Motel L’Infernale into a mechanoid insect with aspirations towards law enforcement. He knew that he would never again inhabit his flesh body, which was splashed all over the porno toilet.
A hammering came to the door. Reality Police, or Nightmare Squad, or Agents of Brasilia, Inc. There, naturally, to renege on their corrupt promise and begin the process of flaying his metal form into strips that they could then boil down, his consciousness excruciatingly intact, for that next-level high they craved so desperately.
Pneumsa smiled one last time as he realized the utter horrors, the dark powers of language, the curses and imprecations that would swarm their brains forevermore, as his own ghost, the body as haunted, lived rent free in their heads.
It’s been pissing dirty rain for nine fucking days, the dump’s become a shit swamp and Jack’s rabbit suit (his only psychologically grounding safe space) has gone wretched with mold and bed bugs. Jack saw what he thought was a shark circling the shack earlier. I’d be a lot more concerned if the dump’s location wasn’t land locked and Jack wasn’t tripping balls on his homemade L.S.D. that never quite seems to wear off.
I was down at ground level, doing some recon where the water was as high as my neck. I don’t know if it was my general state of paranoia or a factual observance of the paranormal, but the precarious architecture of the dump seemed to come to life and was viciously moving under its own destructive motivations, cutting off exits and threatening the integrity of the load bearing hodgepodge of engine parts, refrigerators and other metal things keeping the shack from coming down on our fucking heads.
Jack was standing in the doorway of the shack completely losing his shit, shrieking, and screaming about the army of rats ascending out of the dangerous toxic shit water. The little bastards were ripping each other apart, clawing their way towards strategic positions in an obvious attempt to launch a full-blown blitzkrieg siege to sack the shack. Jack and his flight don’t fight lack of testicular survival instincts could go fuck themselves, the seemingly tailor-made rat problem that I was facing was a hell of a lot more disconcerting, as a platoon of notably clever and industrious vermin chose not to experience the suicidal plight of the violent mass exodus. They simply found little floaty things that they didn’t have to kill for. Unfortunately, this sudden conscientious capacity for abstract thought did not flow over into having the foresight to haul any food rations onboard the little floaty things.
Before long I could feel their beady little eye’s staring right at my bodyless head sticking out of the cess-pool landscape. I would never have believed it, but I swear, as the dump as my witness, those rats could paddle. I screamed like a burning banshee up to Jack who was without any notable success applying the great art of whimpering to the ever-increasing clusterfucked rat insurrection.
“Stop fucking around Jack, I’m going to need a surgically precise artillery barrage down here immediately, and if the word “precise” gets itself fucked in translation, just don’t blow my fucking head off”.
“Artillery? Are you fucking kidding? I’m up to my knees in rat apocalypse”.
“Jesus fuck Jack, I’ve got a navel fleet that would dwarf D-Day heading straight for my head. For Christ’s sake find the fucking hand-grenades”.
“You mean those metal pineapples?”
“How in fuck do you manage to go stupid in the middle of every crisis? Yes, the fucking metal pineapples”.
Luckily, stupid didn’t affect his aim or response time. It took just one metal pineapple and a soaring shit load of rat guts to persuade the rest of the fleet to paddle their way the fuck out of Dodge.
With my head still attached and safely removed from the menu I now had to risk it all by diving into the allegedly shark infested cosmic slop to retrieve our propane tanks.
Due to the unpredictable nature of our environment and lack of funds, Jack and I had to figure out how to build makeshift weapons from whatever we could find in the dump. The propane tanks fueled a completely unmanageable and ill-advised flamethrower which was basically a leaf blower wrapped in duct tape attached to a hose that attached to the propane tank. If you don’t have duct tape in the dump; You Die.
Just before my descent into the abyss I observed Jack changing his tactics from wishing the rats away into negotiating with hand signals.
It took a while to learn how to vomit and hold my breath at the same time but luckily my search was a short one. Three full tanks of propane sunken into the shit mud of their watery tomb. It was time to grab the proverbial Bat-Belt and get these fucking things up to the shack. Jack, in all his drug fueled buffoonery, was going to have say fuck off to the non existing I in team and summon up his shit so we could save our asses from the impending doom that was growing larger every minute.
“Jack, I need you to focus.”
Jack’s response came in the form of an unintelligible layering of torturous agonizing screams, answering not to me, but reacting to the unsettling discovery that the rats had broken through Jack’s only line of defence, his pants. Out of all the weird fuckery I’ve seen, nothing prepared me for the monstrous cast iron pan that was about to wack our morning into another dimension of shit. However, the brunt of this reckoning would fall upon Jack alone, “Thank Fuck”.
(“The experience of being violently ass-fucked by crazed desperate rats fighting for their lives caused a fundamental change of Jack’s inner being and twisted his mortal coil into a fucking pretzel. It was something that he would never get over and would never speak of again.”)
“Jack, you fuck, get the ropes and the climbing shit, we’ve got to haul these tanks up soon or we’ll lose the shack and dominance over the dump.”
“I’ve got rats in my ass.”
“Yeah, well, everybody’s got to deal with rats in their ass at some point in their lives.”
“It’s not a fucking metaphor, you asshole.”
“Look Jack, if you don’t pull your shit together their going start running a train in your ass and any other accommodating orifices they can get to. “So, for fuck’s sake and yours, will you just throw down the goddamn ropes before I really get pissed.”
Despite his macabre disability Jack managed to get to the ropes and tossed them down. I tied the ropes to one of the propane tanks and started to look for a way back up to the shack.
My first attempt to raise myself out of the demonic pool was laughably unsuccessful as I underestimated the viscous sucking power of the vortex impeding my release. Nevertheless, as an established veteran dump climber I was able to break free of my liquid captor and began ascending. I’m not sure if I fell victim to some hypnotic suggestion brought upon by a strange voodoo parasite that piggy-backed on Jack’s earlier report of the shark sighting, or just the blender full of brains occupying my skull, but just as my feet left the water, I spotted a large dark shape moving away from where I emerged.
“There’s no sharks in the dump.” “There’s no sharks in the dump.” “There’s no sharks in the dump.” I repeated this desperate mantra as I fought, chucked, smashed, bit and shrieked my way through the onslaught of vermin competing for position and rule over Jack’s ass.
The inside of the shack looked like it’d been bear fucked by an ape, caused not by our intruders but by Jack’s panic attack in response to our intruders. Pissed off and spitting out gobs of dump shit, I rushed in like an angry god, punching and kicking my way through the whole fucking misadventure. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be of any help to Jack’s unthinkable plight until I dragged up the tank and assembled our wrath of god answer to the unrelenting Putsch. Hauling that piece of shit tank was a true test of both my impatience and lack of upper body strength but somehow the desperation in the air was so prevalent that it initiated an overwhelming release of super strength and fear of death that made the tank seem as light as a dead rat.
Once I had the tank in the shack, I went about assembling our contraption. I hooked up the tank to the leaf blower which took a bit of time due to the distracting gyrations and death throes that were now in command of Jack’s ass. I was powerless to stop looking at what I still believe to be the most wretchedly disturbing coming together of two species that I could ever imagine and never be able to unsee.
“KAMOTHERFUCKINGBOOM!” Spoke the leaf blower after ignition. I was holding the goddamn “Death Star” in my hands, and it was fucking hungry. One thing about rats when you get to know them is that as much as they fear drowning, burning alive tops all survival instincts to flee. It was quite a macabre sight to see rats perform a fiery lemming impersonation and jump to their deaths. They looked like little computer-generated asteroids breaching the earths atmosphere and descending into an ocean of fuck.
The shack was cleared of most of the vermin but that was just the advertising and coming attractions, the main feature was still to come, and I couldn’t very well shove the mouth of the dragon up Jack’s ass. I hadn’t a clue how many had packed themselves into his rabbit hole and even the most minor of surgeries we’d performed here resulted in having to perform major ones, and as many times I’ve tried to kill Jack he was still my closest friend.
“For Christ’s sake you fuck, don’t just stand there like an asshole, figure something out before they run the gauntlet and devour me from the inside out.”
I was frozen, empty of all mental resources. “Who the hell has ever had to deal with this kind of fuckery?” To be honest, I weighed in Jack’s chances of survival, and it didn’t look good. I knew Jack wasn’t coming back from this without an extremely wide collection of mental and physical disabilities. However, he’d already acquired a lot of those disabilities through previous misadventures, and he’d been doing just fine. So, in acknowledgement of Jack’s history of defeating the wretched vengeance of chance, a light bulb fell on my head, and I started to feel something that had been lost on me until that moment, the detestable feeling of sympathy for another human being, which I didn’t like one bit.
All of a sudden, I was possessed by the soul of an avenging saint and made a B-line towards the medicine cabinet, or rather, the triple locked, booby trapped, titanium, recreational drug storage container that also served as Jack’s bed which was fucking wide open. “FUCK YEAH!”
I began violently rummaging through what represented the most wretched collection of recreational and experimental drugs ever to come together without exploding.
“One vac-packed bag of weed, two vac-packed bags of weed, one bucket P.C.P., one copy of Moby Dick still soaking in L.S.D., one unidentified corpse?…….Shit Jack, keep your fucking moldy bug-ridden bunny suit away from the drugs. Here we go, Laxatives.”
“Okay Jack, we’re going to head these fuckers off at the pass.” Jack’s diet was a heretical atrocity but, in this context, it could prove to be an internal biohazard hellscape, a massive attack delivery of the wretched movements of his organic tectonic plates that could put out enough pressure on the abominable contents in his stomach to blow out an explosive literal shit show tsunami.
“Jack, you’re going to have to summon up all the rabbit balls you can and suck these down if you want to go on living with a functional rectum”.
“What the fuck are those things?”
“They’re your deliverance, your antidote, your last stand, and your last fucking chance to clear the highway that used to be your ass. So, take the fucking pills or I’ll burn you alive.”
Jack new deep down that his days, hours, and minutes no longer belonged to him, so, after his whimpers and squirrely bitch tirade had come to an end, he began chewing up the handfuls of laxatives that I was shoveling into his mouth. After ingestion, all we could do was wait for what ever dastardly response our haphazardly orchestrated plan would reveal. However, I still had the “Death Star” in the ready in case I needed to euthanize the poor son of a bitch.
There was a rumble, then a rumbling, then a few squeals and shrieks and what I thought was a prayer. The shack shook and Jack’s demonically possessed eyes evidenced the inevitable coming of forces beyond our understanding. The sky’s blackened and the wind ceased to blow. There was every indication that we’d seriously fucked up and had mistakenly summoned an extremely pissed off titanic dump demon. In the doorway I noticed a peculiar gathering of rats, but they didn’t reveal any hostile intensions, in fact, what I thought I saw were sentiments of concern and eager expectation. “JESUS FUCK”. These rats must have come to pray and mourn for their anally incarcerated comrades that were lodged up Jack’s ass. Possibly, for the first time in recorded history, I was bearing witness to the dawn of an unprecedented, good faith parley between rats and men. Nevertheless, I was pissed off, tired and most importantly, I’m a bad man. I couldn’t give one fuck about anything aside from defending myself against whatever colossal damnation that was moments away from delivering anal Armageddon. So, despite their peaceful intentions, the rats left on fire, leaving their brethren to their own cruel and unimaginable fate.
Jack had begun to look a lot less human and a lot more like he was wearing his rabbit suit inside out. An ominous feeling began running up my spine as if to warn me that this ordeal had transcended far beyond the confines of our universally insignificant lives. With an enormous thundering from above, flocks of ravens and crows were soaring into the dump, perched high, waiting, watching in silence as if to respect the last moments before collecting Jack’s soul, but, as it turns out, the fist belonging to whatever powers that govern this shit-scape, was wrapped tight around all the exits that could leak even a small portion of Jack’s inner self.
Jack’s ass was devastatingly dilated, and the sounds of ghostly howling echoes morphed into a rancid mass of misty stink. With a screaming shriek that reminisced the horrid tales of the gods and monsters that lay in wait under the beds of sinners, Jack’s ass exploded.
It was like some alien woodchipper turned up to eleven, there was shit coming out that never should have been in there; nuts and bolt projectiles, a lot of fake fur from his bunny suit, a pen, a few questionably posed naked anime figures, and most wretchedly unbelievable, an unopen can of tuna. “Fuck Me”. I cleared out of the line of fire just before a massive burst of rats, rat parts, parts of Jack undistinguishable from the rat parts, spewed out, followed by the largest flying river of shit ever to wallpaper a shack.
Within moments of Jack’s deliverance, the wind picked up and banished the dark ominous skies, brushing away the clouds. The rain abruptly stopped, and the sun was finally shining on the rancid bird shit that blanketed the dump. The ravens and crows went on to claim their next corpse, and the shit-water levels began to drop, and Jack? Jack was just hungry, seemingly unaware of the horrifying P.T.S.D. that would soon settle deep into the recesses of denial, eventually resurfacing in the form of I.B.S.
Surviving in this awesome never-ending vastness of horrors which is my life, isn’t unlike the trials and cruelty of the Serengeti. The bloody battles and precarious balance favour those with the biggest teeth and nothing to lose. As the rains come to an end, and the shit-water level dissipates, new life is sprung, surfacing along with corpses in various degrees of decomposition, previously wedged inside the incarcerating bosom of dump wrath that lies deep beneath the expansive shit show terra firma that keeps us on top of the food chain.
Once we were convinced that this grandiose escapade of wretched fuckery had come to an end, and the size of Jack’s ass began to return to its natural state, we took drugs. A great sense of relief followed Jack and I up to the flybridge on top of the shack that afternoon. The sun was shining through the ever-present gases and shit particles that made up the dumps custom made atmosphere, as Jack and I sipped on some very deserved cold beers that helped wash down the copious amounts of painkillers and muscle relaxants required to carry our beaten bodies away from the onset of total atrophy.
“Hey Jack?”
Jack expelled an impatient sigh of contempt, which took a lot less of an effort than the appropriate response, “Fuck off”.
“Do you remember what you said earlier this morning before the shit show really got going? You said that you saw a shark circling the shack.”
“Look, I fucking get it, there’re no sharks in the dump. Throw me a fucking bone man, I’ve had a pretty fucked up day and I’m in no mood to sit here and be assaulted by your incompetent back-alley psychoanalysis.”
“Actually Jack, I saw something too.”
“You fuck.”
“Look, don’t start getting all pleased with yourself, all I saw was an ambiguous dark shape, it’s just another mental misunderstanding in a long list of inaccurate sightings. The opaque viscosity in the air along with our questionably insatiable hunger for pharmaceuticals fucks with our perceptions. You need to ask yourself, how in living fuck could a shark get its ass in here? Parachute? Beamed down from the Enterprise? What Jack? What makes you think it wasn’t just a log or a tire? I’d even accept a Godzilla tadpole over a fucking shark.”
“You, you fucking fuck. You’re always so quick on the draw with your embarrassingly retarded attempts to send off the beauty of the boldly bizarre to be castrated after a quick spin through the deflavorizer.”
“That’s not a word or a thing Jack.”
“It will be after you wake up tomorrow to find your spleen on the floor and some foreign device inserted into the vacancy, all stapled up, and oozing with infection. So, this is when you put a cock in it, and listen.”
“I bloody well quote; Choreographer Eliot Feld said that artists who are very lucky and talented are capable, like fabled alchemists, of changing “base metals into gold.” In this metaphoric sense, common experience is the base metal, while art is the gold. For this reason, Feld explains, to talk about what you have created is to turn gold back into base metal. “You don’t really explain your art by talking about it. What you do, unfortunately, is explain it away.
(Quote from Eliot Feld, found in “The Language of Vision”, book by Jamake Highwater.)
“You’re so fucking blinded and brainwashed by your accumulated static interpretations of reality and its so-called paradigms, and rules of nature that you believe everything in this shithole can be explained away. The governing forces that rule the ruthless ebbs and flows that make up our catastrophically fucked eco-system cannot be described by atrophied imagination or deductive reasoning, the dumps existence, like art itself, is solely based in the experiential. This place can’t be measured or mapped, and despite your calculable observations our world here is flat with a perimeter looking over a precipice that most likely opens to countless stranger and ineffable worlds. You need to wake up and realize that this place is driven by the barks and bites of a massive conjuring gone horribly wrong, it’s a discarded last place loser in the long line of submissions, competing to build a brand-new purgatory that was so offensive that it even made the devil wretch.”
Jack and I continued to force our blasphemous inaccurate interpretations of how to use a dictionary, down each others’ throats for most of the afternoon. As maliciously vicious these back-and-forth auditory beat downs between Jack and I were, they provided a cerebral sanctuary, the only constant amongst the random, unpredictable thrashings of the reckonings that befall upon our tenuous mortal coils and building our resolve to stand steadfastly under ill advised conditions, and rage against the relentless fury of the sieging forces that bring with them a new wretched, top of the line terror, and an unimaginably unimaginable and completely unmanageable ill-conceived lobotomizing fuck-show.
The dump is host to many beasts, some that rush in with fire and knives, some, existing only in our minds, perhaps created by the fear and desperation that is so prevalent inside the mortal shells of all life that walks or scurries around this shithole.
We have a beast that snakes through the gutters and trenches of our kingdom, moving silently unnoticed, until its eventual fruition reveals its true intensions, to deliver an ungodly kind of spiritual brain-fucking so devastating that it crashes through anything cerebrally beneficial. This beast comes when its prey is at their weakest, sauntering safely without fear. Guised in the forged fashion of all hell’s creations, this one, we refer to as; “The Devil’s Dick.”
Horror Sleaze Trash 