Tradition and Values

“I can’t understand the kids today. They have no respect for good old-fashioned perversion.”

Engelbert grunted towards his friend, Gerald. Engelbert was busy fucking a pig. It would be a while before he regained enough air to properly engage in conversation.

Mortimer’s was the men’s favorite hangout. It was an exclusive club that catered to the special needs of the well heeled. Gerald and Engelbert had been members ever since their wealth first topped fifty million. That had been many years ago, soon after they had graduated from college and gained access to their trust funds.

Gerald was not as fond of pigs as his friend Engelbert was. Management dressed the pigs up in lingerie and made them wear strings of pearls, but this was not sufficient to stir Gerald to partake. He preferred to take pleasure in watching other men fuck pigs. It satiated him in a way other forms of bestiality did not. It calmed him, this inelegant joining of man and pig. It showed the world in its proper balance, at least to him.

One of the reasons Gerald declined to fuck any of the pigs at Mortimer’s was the tendency of swine to bite. Pigs had to be kept securely muzzled. This eliminated the possibility of deep throating a ham. You could still lick a pig, but it would not have been the same as being able to do both.

After the pig squealed and Engelbert finished, the men hit the showers and steam room. There, they were able to talk freely in between other forms of activity.

“I tried to raise my children right, the old fashioned way, with plenty of beatings and time locked in the closet. I tried to instill in them the same values I was raised with. I failed miserably. Look at them now. My sons cringe if I so much as mention a feather or a vinyl body suit. Where did I go wrong?”

“Hah,” grunted Gerald. “My girls threw out my cat and nine tails when they got into high school. It was a family heirloom!”

“My boys, I hate to say, attend marches for social justice. They go around claiming to love the environment and wanting to save it, too.”

“I have the same problem with my daughters.”

After the steam room they rinsed off and hopped in the pool. Each swam a few laps before double teaming one of the help. The screams were delicious. Only at a place like Mortimer’s, the late lamented Epstein’s island, certain private mansions, and a few palaces could you get away with stuff like that in the present day.

After showering again, they dried off, dressed in suits and ties, and headed to the smoking room. They  found comfortable chairs upholstered in red leather next to each other and sat down. Each fired up a cigar. They relaxed and puffed away.

“I could blame the public schools,” Engelbert said, “But my offspring attended private schools, the same ones that I did.”

“Same here,” said Gerald. “If they had attended public school they’d have turned out much worse.”

The friends put their discussion on hold to watch the evening’s scheduled entertainment. There was a stage in the center of the smoking room. All the wood and red leather chairs faced in that direction. It was not always easy to see the stage through the haze of smoke from cigars, pipes, and hookahs. Exhaust fans went into high gear to improve visibility.

Mortimer’s always had the best and most innovative forms of entertainment. On this night Engelbert and Gerald were to be treated to two shows according to the printed program distributed by the wait staff. The first was the semi-weekly flogging of a random individual. Subjects were said to be lured into a car at a mall or on an out of the way street. The unlucky subject was then transported directly to the club and strapped onto the appropriate equipment before the sedatives wore off. The second item on the program was listed as “Something Special”. 

Engelbert and Gerald watched the flogging with some interest. As floggings went, it was not the best or most entertaining one they had ever seen. Still, it was a lot better than sitting at home watching Netflix.

Gerald found himself missing his cat and nine tails even more.

Gerald sighed.

“What’s the matter?” Asked Engelbert.

“It’s these times we live in. Everything is moving so fast, changing all the time. Too many good things from the past are being lost.”

“Yes,” Engelbert said while flicking an ash from his cigar. “It is getting harder to live the way we used to, the way our ancestors did. It has become so difficult to keep the old traditions alive.”

“Young people, especially young people of our class, don’t know what they are losing. Hell, what we had is almost completely lost for the most part.”

Engelbert reached over from his chair. He patted Gerald on the arm.

“There’s not much we can do about it. We can’t stop things from changing. Besides, not all change is for the worst. For example body modification. My family had a strong tradition of disfigurement, both self inflicted and inflicted on others, servants and employees and the like. We are not really supposed to do it anymore. Too many laws and lawsuits. On the bright side, regular people today pay to have modifications and unnecessary surgery.”

Gerald brushed away Engelbert’s hand which had lingered on his shoulder too long.

“I understand all of what you have said,” Gerald told him. “The old traditions, the old values, are going away in general. The loss of traditions and values held by our class is particular disturbing. I worry about the future of our kind.” He gestured to the room around him. “And the future of a club such as Mortimer’s. Personally, I want someone or something I can blame it all on. I need a scapegoat on which I can take out my anger and frustration. That sort of thing always seems to help. I sleep easier at night knowing I have punished some person, group, or institution for my angst and sense of loss. It does not matter if the chosen scapegoat had nothing to do with it. In some ways if feels better if they had nothing to do with any of the trends that annoy me. Random punishment can instill belief in a higher power. That is a social benefit.”

“You mean a belief in a higher power such as us,” Engelbert smirked.

He grabbed a glass of expensive liquor from a tray born by a servant. Gerald took a glass as well.

“Vengeance is good for the soul,” Engelbert said. “I like the idea of a scapegoat. Especially if the target is selected with some degree of random.”

Gerald prodded, “Who or what should we blame for the decline of our civilization? What or who would be interesting to attack?”

“We discussed public education earlier. What else should be added to the list?”

“There are plenty of candidates in addition to public education to choose from,” said Gerald. “Shall we make a list? We could take turns offering suggestions.” 

“That will be fine,” Engelbert told his friend. “I will let you go first. “

“Drugs,” Gerald announced.

“I would only agree in part,” Engelbert told him. “I use quite a few myself. I wouldn’t want it to become more troublesome to obtain any of the products I have come to enjoy. I would offer up the music today as an alternative scapegoat.”

“Yes, definitely contemporary music,” Gerald agreed.. “Although it does make me sound like my parents and grandparents riling against the music I liked as teenager. I don’t think everything is bad about popular music nowadays. I do like some of the dancing that goes with it. Quite entertaining. I would put forth socialism instead.”

“Definitely,” Engelbert agreed. “Socialism has to be on the list. I would add to that taxes, especially taxes on inheritances and capital gains.”

“No argument there,” said Gerald. “I’ll add Democrats to the list.”

“And Rhinos. To hell with so called moderate Republicans.”

Gerald nodded in agreement. “Let’s put aging hippies on there.”

“Environmental laws.”

“Vegans.”

“Broccoli.”

Gerald sought clarification from his friend, “Why broccoli specifically? Why not all vegetables?”

“I would not go so far,” said Engelbert. “I particularly dislike broccoli, but I do have a fondness for carrots and cucumbers. They have multiple uses besides nibbling on.”

“Fair enough,” said Gerald. “Let’s continue this discussion later. The second show is about to start.”

“Fine by me.”

They sat in silence, puffing their cigars and downing drinks, as they watched the stage being set up for the second performance.

“Oh, look!” said Engelbert, pointing at the stage. “I think it is going to be a ritual killing!”

“Fabulous!” said Gerald. “It has been at least a year since I have seen one of those.”

Engelbert laughed and raised his glass. “To tradition!”

Gerald raised his own glass. He repeated the phrase, “To tradition.”

They clinked their glasses before draining them. Each signaled to the staff to bring another round.

Then both men leaned forward in their chairs to get a better view of the stage.

Murder at the Bakery

Maya trekked the city sidewalk at one o’clock in the morning, glancing at a bakery as she passed it by. Much to her surprise, the lights were on. Maya lived around the corner and visited Flour Power on a regular basis. Like many bakeries, it closed early, so the illuminated interior made her pause.  

Maybe Brian, the owner, was getting an early start to the day. Flour Power opened at six a.m., so it wasn’t out of the question. 

Sure enough, Maya spotted Brian walking to the front door. The sixty-something man pushed through the door with haste, his gray hair disheveled and his brown eyes going wide at the sight of Maya. 

“Maya,” he said. 

“Hey, Brian. Long night? Or just getting an early start?”   

“Uh,” he stuttered. 

“Help me,” a muffled voice cried out. 

Maya glimpsed the bakery, a soft thud against the storefront window causing her to flinch. Her eyes bulged. A cinnamon roll was stuck to the interior of the glass, leaving a trail of icing as it slid down the window. That’s when Maya noticed tiny arms and legs sprouting from the pastry. 

Perhaps a long night of drinking was causing her to hallucinate. Regardless, Maya couldn’t hold her tongue.   

“What the hell?” she said. 

A nervous chuckle escaped Brian’s lips. “Uh, yeah. I can explain that.”

Maya gawked at him. “Can you? Because this isn’t normal.”

Brian opened his mouth to reply, but Maya interrupted. 

“Are those two cookies fornicating?” she said, gradually approaching the window. 

“Damn it,” Brian said. “I told them to behave while I was gone.”

Maya shook her head in disbelief, and Brian sidled up to her. 

“You can’t breathe a word of this to anyone,” Brian pleaded. “I’m going to fix it.”

She turned to him. “Fix it?”

“Yeah. I just need some time.”

“What you need is an exorcist.”

“They’re a little rambunctious. Not evil.”

“Are you kidding? Baked goods have risen from the dead.” She eyed the bakery again, this time her mouth ajar. “That chocolate cake just beheaded two scones with a baguette.”

“It’s the flour,” Brian said. 

Maya pivoted and met Brian’s gaze. “What?”

“I used a new brand of flour. I got a good deal at Cost Nothing.” Brian offered a proud smile, but it quickly faded. “Anyway, that’s when all of this started.”

“Well, apparently you got a raw deal.”

“You have to help me.”

“By doing what?”

“I don’t know. I’m still trying to figure that out. I needed some fresh air to clear my head, though.

Maya took a moment to ponder. “Can you show me the bag of flour? Assuming we can make it through the minefield in there.”

“Yeah. It’s behind the counter.”

He walked to the door and pulled it open, Maya following on his heels. As they neared the counter, Maya felt something prick her ankle. 

“Christ,” she shouted, stopping in her tracks. When she looked down, a piece of apple pie had a fork in hand. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“What?” the pie said. 

“You stabbed my ankle. Put down the damn fork.”

“Or what?”

“I’ll squish you with my size ten shoe, you little—”

“Are you two done?” Brian interrupted. 

Maya raised her foot, briefly massaging her ankle. Then she hobbled toward the counter and stood next to Brian.  

“Here’s the flour,” he said. 

Maya arched an eyebrow as she inspected the bag. “Miracle Flour?”

“That’s the name of it.”

 “And you needed ten pounds of it?”

“I buy in bulk.”

“Have you ever considered going small when trying something new?”

“It’s the smallest size they had.”

Maya huffed and put a hand to the bag, spinning it around so she could read the back of it. “There’s a number you can call if you need assistance.”

Brian pulled a cell phone from the pocket of his pants and punched in the number. 

“Put it on speaker,” Maya said. “I want to hear this.”

Brian tapped the screen, and the phone rang a few times before someone answered. 

“Miracle Flour Hotline,” a woman said. “This is Karen. How can I assist you?”

“Yeah,” Brian said. “I bought some of your flour yesterday, and I have a problem.”

“What kind of problem, sir?”

“A big one.”

“Can you elaborate, sir?”

“Uh.” Brian swallowed. “I’m not sure how to say this.”

“Just spill it, sir.”

“You’re probably not going to believe me.”

“Try me.”

“All of my baked goods are—” Brian pursed his lips, searching for the right words. 

“Animated?” Karen said. 

Brian’s eyes narrowed. “Huh?”

“Are they alive, sir?”

“Yeah. How do you—” He paused. “Wait. You know about this?”

“Of course, sir. That’s why we put a warning on the back of the bag.”

“What warning?”

“Did you mix the flour with water?” Karen asked. 

“Of course.”

“There’s your problem.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You can’t mix it with water. Otherwise, you get some nasty treats.”

“That’s absurd,” Brian barked. “Just about every one of my recipes requires water. It’s a common ingredient in baked goods. What kind of flour doesn’t mix with water?”

“Miracle Flour.”

Brian let out a frustrated breath. 

“Are you still there, sir?” Karen said. 

“Yeah.” He mulled things over. “Will the effects wear off?”

“Yes.”

“How long does it take?”

“Usually the shelf life of the food.”

“You’re talking days. I can’t wait that long. I’ll lose business.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but it’s not our problem. We have the warning on there for a reason. If you have any other issues, please think twice before calling again.”

Maya heard a click, and the call went dead. 

“Son of a—” Brian bit his tongue. 

“So, what now?” Maya asked. 

When Brian didn’t answer, a thought came to mind. 

“Why don’t we just stomp them into pieces?” Maya said. “We can dump them in the trash and be done with it.”

Brian shook his head. “I can’t kill them.”

“They’re going to die anyway.”

“We just want to be eaten and enjoyed,” a blueberry muffin said. It stared at Maya from a nearby display case. “It’s our purpose after all.”

“That’s not a bad idea,” Brian said.

Maya circled the counter and walked to the front door. 

“You can join me,” Brian said. 

Maya stopped and looked over her shoulder. “No thanks. As tempting as it is, I don’t need one of these things bursting out of my chest like a damn Alien movie. Enjoy the feast, Brian.”

Possessed by Fake Nostalgia

I pad into the scene like a rumor with claws, tail flicking in the stale neon. Joe Oroborus snaps his fingers in Kandy Fontaine’s face — a cheap gesture, like a magician who’s forgotten the trick. She startles awake, eyes flickering with leftover static from whatever dimension she’d been wrestling.

“I dreamt I was possessed,” she says. “But they cannot possess me, no.”

I stretch, slow, deliberate. Humans always think possession is dramatic. They never consider the quiet ways something can own you.

Joe leans in. “By whom and what?”

Kandy lights a half‑smoked Camel. The flame reflects in her eyes like a memory trying to reboot.

“Time, memory, angst, a certain… sais quoi. I feel the sudden need for fake nostalgia. I wish I could have a sincere emotion, but they’ve all been hijacked and held for ransom by 90s irony.”

I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen everything before. Cats are archivists of the unspoken. Burroughs used to mutter that time was a virus; I used to curl on his lap and purr like a counter‑spell. Didn’t help. Nothing helps. Time always wins.

Joe watches her like he’s trying to decode a glitch in the film.

“Kandy,” he says, “nostalgia is a trapdoor. You fall through it and land in someone else’s memory.”

She exhales smoke that curls into shapes I recognize — half‑formed ghosts of abandoned feelings. I bat at one with my paw. It dissipates like a bad idea.

“I’m tired,” she says. “Not sleep‑tired. Ontologically tired.”

Joe nods. “That’s the only kind that counts.”

The alley shifts. I feel it first — whiskers twitching. The world re‑skins itself in cheap Godard colors: red, blue, white, but all slightly wrong, like a dream of France filmed in a warehouse in Burbank.

Suddenly they’re running. Not from danger — from meaning.

A mime eating a very small salad blocks their path. A woman carrying a typewriter like a wounded pet limps across the frame. A man reading a newspaper upside‑down shouts something about dialectics.

I trot behind them, amused. Humans panic so beautifully.

The city goes Gibsonian — neon that tastes like metal, puddles reflecting futures that haven’t been invented yet. I lick my paw. It tastes like ozone and regret.

Then we see it.

A motorcycle in the alley. Chrome. Mythic. The kind of machine that remembers every hand that ever touched it.

Kandy approaches like she’s greeting a ghost she used to date.

But the motorcycle begins to shift. Not melt. Not dissolve.

Just… change state.

Chrome → amber. Amber → translucence. Translucence → a honey‑colored solidity.

Joe stares. “Is that—”

“Yes,” Kandy whispers. “It’s turning into dab wax.”

I leap onto the warm surface. It yields slightly under my paws, like a dream that hasn’t decided what it wants to be.

Kathy Acker would’ve loved this. She understood metamorphosis. She understood that machines and bodies and texts all want the same thing: to escape their assigned form.

Kandy crouches beside me.

“Joe,” she says, “this is what happens when myth refuses to stay still.”

“And the small salads?” he asks.

She smiles, tired and luminous.

“They were always garnish.”

I curl up on the wax, purring. The alley hums with the soft electricity of a world glitching toward sincerity. Joe and Kandy stand there, silhouettes in a city that’s forgotten its own plot.

And me? I’m just the cat. I’ve seen it all. I’ll see it again.

Time is a loop. Memory is a trick. Angst is a toy.

Last Weekend

Lana is sucking my cock as if she were paid by the stroke of her tongue, and in fact she is. Four hundred euros for every client she makes come within three minutes. She looks me in the eyes while she works. She is a professional. She killed her husband with a wood axe in 2022, seven blows to the back of the skull while he slept. She told me ten minutes ago, smoking a cigarette on my lap. Now she is sucking my cock. On her right wrist she wears a white bracelet identical to mine.

There are seven of us in this room they call the premium suite. Four men, three women. All wearing the bracelet. All sentenced to death. Cigarette in mouth, cock out, cunt in the air, cocaine on the marble coffee table like powdered sugar on my grandmother’s fritters. The State – don’t ask which one; at that level they all start to look alike – has thought of everything. Four-hundred-dollar Japanese whisky. MDMA in little heart-shaped candies. Poppers in the bathroom dispensers as if they were hotel soap. Marcus, to my right, has just snorted two lines and now Aaliyah is jerking him off while he cries. He cries. She laughs. She is beautiful. Black, nearly two meters tall, with a knife scar under her right breast. She slit her boyfriend’s throat and his lover’s in a Memphis motel in 2023, five cuts each.

“How much do you think they’re paying us?” Marcus asks me, his teeth stained with coke.

“They’re not paying us. The people watching us? They’re paying like maniacs.”

“How much?”

“Manhattan-apartment money. Per head.”

Marcus nods. He was an auditor before he slit his wife’s throat over the toilet because she had discovered he had not been going to the gym for five years and had kept it from him so she would not humiliate him. Courtesy kills more than discourtesy, Marcus explained earlier. He did not take it well.

Lana pulls away, spits into the champagne glass beside her, drinks from another. Her eyes are red. Not from crying. From eight straight hours of coke.

“Not long now,” she whispers. “Room two at eleven.”

“What is room two?”

“The one where they kill you.”

She smiles. Starts sucking again.

“How do you know?”

She pulls away again. “I’ve been here a week. They tell you everything the first night. They want you to know. It helps the performance.” She turns toward one of the cameras in the cornice and makes a little heart with her hands. “You’re on, too, Mister Italian. Say hello.”

I say hello. The camera waves back, I imagine.

“When do you die?”

“Tonight, after you. I’m in the Premium Plus package. The clients bought the encore.”

“Fuck.”

“Whatever. Outside there was only a cell and an injection eight months from now. Here there’s cock, coke, and rich men paying fifty thousand euros to watch me come. I feel like Madonna.”

The bell rings at exactly eleven. It does not growl. It does not scream. Ding ding. Five-star hotel concierge.

A door opens in the wall that had looked blind until then. A man in a gray suit comes out. Fifty or so. He smiles like a dentist. Hands folded.

“Ladies. Gentlemen. The second part of your experience awaits.”

Marcus grabs my wrist. Hard. Says nothing. Aaliyah is still laughing, but it is a different laugh now, the laugh of someone who has started seeing the walls breathe. Lana walks in front of everyone, naked, like a hostess closing a flight.

Room two.

White.

Seven luxury dental recliners. Seven IV bags already waiting. Seven nurses smiling like Lana. The chairs are angled toward a wall of smoked glass. Behind the glass, in the half-dark, silhouettes of seated people. Drinks in hand. A soft round of applause. Not enthusiasm. Purchase confirmation.

I sit down. The nurse strokes my arm. The needle goes in. Lana was right. It does not hurt.

The last thing I see before I go is the reflection of my cock, still half-hard, superimposed on the smoked glass over the face of an old man on the other side, calmly touching himself under the jacket of his five-thousand-euro suit.

***

I wake up.

The package did not include death.

They drug you to the marrow, carry you to room three, open you up – kidneys to Riyadh, liver to Istanbul, heart to an industrialist in Milan who does not want to know the donor’s name – and then they put you back together. Yes. It costs three times as much. The Resurrection package, clients call it, laughing among themselves. Seventy-two hours of presumed death, partial harvesting, organs replaced with gene-edited pig tissue grown in the Netherlands, and then they return you to prison with your white bracelet. All legal. All consensual. You signed, remember?

And now, for the eight months you have left before the real injection, you have to live with a liver that is not yours, two pig kidneys, and a heart that stopped beating the day before it began beating for you.

The first beat of a new heart is not something you forget.

The second is when you understand that even the first one was never really yours.

In my cell, they left me the souvenir. On the nightstand. A little blue velvet box with a white card printed inside: Thank you from the client. Enjoy the rest of your stay. Inside, preserved in formaldehyde, was the little finger of my left hand. I checked it under the neon bulb in the cell. It is mine. The cat scar from 1997 is still there.

The client had paid for it as a trophy. Then he changed his mind.

They returned it to me because he did not want it anymore.

On the back of the card, a QR code. Rate your Concierge experience. Your opinion matters.

I scanned it with the disposable phone they had left me for the eight months I still have.

Three stars out of five.

The pinkie had arrived cold.

Salvation Lies in Baraboo

Chester Chuckles’ size 37 shoes, once shiny and red, were covered in fallout dust as he waddled across the post-apocalyptic wasteland. He finally emerged from his car weeks ago and had been walking ever since. A clown car is a pleasant place to pass an apocalypse if you are well-provisioned. Also, if your car seats 21 clowns, as Chester’s did, it offers ample room to stretch out if you are alone, as Chester was. When finally, he emerged from the lowest depths of the car’s labyrinthine interior to the outside world, all had changed. He found himself alone in a post-apocalyptic hellscape that had once been the beautiful palm tree-lined campus of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Sarasota, Florida.

Also, the paint on his car was scratched.

At first Chester did not know what to do or where to go, but after he sat and thought for a moment, he knew that if there was hope anywhere for a lone clown like him, it lay in Wisconsin. For, tucked away in the quartzite hills of the ancient Baraboo Range from which the great Ringling Brothers sprung to spread the gospel of Circus to the all people, were the Circus World Museum and International Clown Hall of Fame. Surely salvation lay in Baraboo!

Now hundreds of miles into his journey, Chester shuffled through the red-gray dirt and thought about how it had all come to this. In the years before the end (though at the time no one anticipated a real end) there was a something in the air that could not be measured by any barometer or Sunday morning news shows. It was not something simple and nameable like political unrest or climate change, nor anything in the usual catalog of historical forebodings long compiled by historians reviled by those making the history. It was something subtler: a pervasive trembling beneath the irritated skin of ordinary life. Shelves were stocked, the airplanes arrived on time, screens glowed with appetite-inducing advertisements. And the good people of earth moved through their routines as if performing them for an audience they could not see. But though they could not see it for themselves, humanity at large was seized by a quiet dread: they required some proclamation of worth, some signal that their lives were anchored in something sturdier than awards shows and bull markets. Being no longer felt self-evident. It felt provisional, contingent, as though the veneer of the inevitability of experience was peeled back and, to everyone’s horror, there was nothing underneath. The horizon seemed suddenly closer, far too close. A few people gradually sensed that history had begun to slope, that time was leaning forward, that everything was about to tip under its own terrible inertia. But most people simply turned the other way, or at least looked down at their phones. 

The world had become a dark and impenetrable obstacle to the transparent and ephemeral souls that inhabited it. Those afflicted with ontological clarity suffered most acutely. They were not superior in intellect, nor purer in motive, but they were constitutionally unable to perform in the play in which everyone else had memorized their lines. To pause, to ask foundational questions, was to risk exile. They were accused, subtly or overtly, of ingratitude. Depth was recast as morbidity, introspection as self-indulgence. The ultimate accusation was wickedness: that by declining to participate in the communal theater, they endangered the fragile coherence of the whole wide world. 

The machinery of distraction hummed with increasing efficiency, insulating the populace from silence, but the signs of an approaching threshold intensified. The markets fluctuated, the climate destabilized, alliances shifted, but these were symptoms, not causes. Beneath them lay a metaphysical unease: a suspicion that the current being was unsustainable. Still, children were born, couples married, people commuted to work. Continuity was the order of the day. Yet in private journals and late-night conversations, people confessed to a peculiar anticipation. It was not despair, it was the intuition that the present form of things could not endure indefinitely. Toward what end were they marching, moving, slouching, creeping? No one could say what would come. But many felt deep in their marrow, that something fundamental was drawing near—not a spectacle, but a revelation. But it was not revelation. It was rupture more than anything. 

Chester was suddenly torn from his philosophizing by a chortle that ran down his funny bone like ice water. He had been so absorbed in his own thoughts and narrative exposition that he didn’t realize he had nearly run right into another clown. Ordinarily Chester would have been overjoyed to have stumbled upon a fellow clown, but at the appearance of this strange clown he could offer only a hesitant ‘how-do-you-do’ wave. 

The new clown’s greasepaint smile was carved too wide—much too wide—splitting his face into a permanent rictus that showed far too many small, needle-like teeth. His white makeup was cracked over sallow skin, and his eyes, ringed in smeared black, glinted with predatory amusement. A faded patchwork suit, once obviously bright but now stained and frayed, the ruffles stiff with grime, hung from his large but emaciated frame. Blood dripped from his red nose and lips. 

Chester held out his hanky. “You seem to have a nosebleed.”

“What’s your name, pal?” asked the stranger.

“Chester. Chester Chuckles. And to whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

“They call me Gristle Splitgrin.”

“I see. What kind of clown are you?”

“The evil kind.”

Chester Chuckles’ face took on a dour look. “I thought that kind of clown only existed in the movies.”

Gristle shrugged and held out his hands as if to say, ‘And yet here I am.’ “And yet here I am,” he said. “What kind of clown are you?”

“Mostly a happy clown. A grotesque whiteface carpet clown, I suppose, if you were to be being taxonomical about it. What’s your bit?”

“Destruction,” growled Gristle most malevolently.

“You wanna see one of my gags?” asked Chester Chuckles. “It’s a pretty good one.” Gristle didn’t say no, so Chester stretched his arms as high as they would go, then plunged them deep into his suspendered wide hoop pants. There was a loud clanging noise as if a whole workbench of tools came crashing down. Then, his eyes lighting up, Chester exclaimed “I got it!” Gristle leaned in closer and Chester triumphantly yanked a machete from his hoop pants and thrust it into the air where the sunlight glinted on the razor-sharp edge. “Snicker-snack!” he halooed as he swung it wildly before him, slicing one of Gristle’s suspenders on a forehand and the other on the accompanying backhand. Gristle’s pants fell to his ankles. “Shall I tickle your entrails with Johnny Corkscrew?” Chester turned the blade in a deadly imitation of twisting it in a wound that he had planned for the middle of Gristle’s belly. Gristle pulled up his pants and ran for the hills. 

“See ya, friend!” shouted Chester after him. Chuckling merrily, he continued down the path.

***

On a forest path, Chester stumbled upon a mime. 

“Hello, there,” Chester chuckled.

 “Hi!” the mime mimed.

“What’s your name?” asked Chester.

The mime mimed a look of barely hidden judgement of Chester’s powers of intellect.

“How silly of me,” replied Chester, barely registering the insult. “Let me guess.”

The mime mimed a greatly exaggerated rolling of the eyes.

“Let’s see… Is your name Arlec?” 

The mime mimed shaking his head, meaning that his name was not Arlec.

“Is it Aurelio?”

It was not.

“Bellrose? Corvin? Lucern? Lune? Malvo? Marceau? Orrick? Pierre? Theophile? Valentin? Vespertine? Virelai?”

In addition to not being Arlec or Aurelio, the mime’s name was not Bellrose, Corvin, Lucern, Lune, Malvo, Marceau, Orrick, Pierre, Theophile, Valentin, Vespertine, nor was it Virelai.

Chester lifted his cap, then another smaller cap underneath the first cap, and scratched his head. “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…” he pondered. “I supposed I will just have to call you ‘Mr. Quiet’.”

Mr. Quiet mimed sticking his tongue out with disgust. 

“Tell me, Mr. Quiet, how did you get here?”

Mr. Quiet mimed a thermonuclear explosion, hiding in a basement for three weeks, digging himself out from the rubble, being set upon by a pair of radiation-mutated looters, killing one with his bare hands and ripping out the throat of another with his own teeth, then stumbling, terrified, cold, and hungry through the woods in which they now stood.

“I see,” said Chester Chuckes, nodding, smiling, laughing, and crying all at the same time. “Will you come with me Mr. Quiet?”

Mr. Quiet mimed shaking his head again. He mimed the glorious Land of the Mimes, where it was always sunny and everymime had their own invisible box to lie down in.

“That sounds nice,” said Chester Chuckles. “Well, it was nice meeting you.” He put out his hand.

Mr. Quiet clasped Chester’s hand to shake it and jumped as the hand buzzer Chester had concealed in his palm buzzed him.

“Hyuck! Hyuck!” chuckled Chester Chuckles.

Mr. Quiet mimed giving Chester the finger and stomped away toward the Land of Mimes.

***

Chester Chuckles stood on the bank of a great river, wondering how to get across. With great joy, he spotted a rowboat with two oars tied to a tree and made his way down to untie it.

“Hold it clown,” said a familiar voice. “That’s our boat.”

Chester looked up toward the source of the voice and was unsurprised to see Gristle Splitgrin emerging from behind a tree. “Oh – hi, Gristle,” said Chester.

Standing at Gristle’s shoulder was the most physically ravishing female clown Chester Chuckles had ever seen. Her hair was cardinal red, at least three feet across, and bouncy—nearly as bouncy as her breasts, which were stuffed quite precariously into a harlequin-patterned latex bralette. She wore a multicolored rainbow tutu, thigh-high black-and-white striped socks, and ruby stilettos. A very beautiful Gerber Daisy was pinned to her top. Chester leaned in close for a sniff and a surreptitious peek at the soft flesh upon which it was perched it when it squirted right in his eye.

“BWAH-HA-HA-HA!” laughed Gristle.

“Who’s the girl?” asked Chester, wiping his face.

“This is my gun moll, Slaughterbell.”

“What kind of clown is she?”

“The sexy kind.”

“I can see that,” said Chester. He reached into his pants and rummaged around for some time (actually, quite some time—perhaps too long—and even Slaughterbell’s confidently sexy, smug, heavily-painted face began to waiver at how deep and actively Chester’s two clown hands were working inside his oversized pants; she felt suddenly cheapened by the vigorous, drawn out motions of his hands in his pants) and finally pulled out an old-fashioned klaxon horn. “Hold on a second,” he mumble-chuckled as he shook the bouncy balls out of it. “There,” he said, satisfied, and began cranking the klaxon as fast as he could.

“Aaaaahhhooooooooooooooooogggaaaaaaaahhh!” said the horn.

“Enough!” shouted Gristle

Chester sadly let the klaxon wind down. “…oooooogaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh…” it moaned.

“What should I do to him, sweetie?” purred Slaughterbell. 

“Kill him,” growled Gristle. “But in a fun way,” he added.

Slaughterbell slipped two fingers exquisitely manicured in a domino pattern into her cleavage and pulled out an unreasonably large and (presumably) heavy 69-cc chainsaw. With one practiced pull, it roared to life.

“I wonder where she found the gas for that,” wondered Chester to himself. “It’s probably a two-stroke,” he reasoned, “and can run on degraded gas.” Then, aloud: “Wait!”

Slaughterbell paused just long enough for Chester to dive back into his pants and bring out a sawed-off shotgun. “Boom!” he shouted each time he pulled the trigger and sprayed buckshot everywhere. “Boom! Boom! Boom!” 

Gristle and Slaughterbell ran screaming along the riverbank while Chester stepped lightly into the rowboat and began pulling swiftly for the opposite shore.

***

Deep in a wood, Chester Chuckles heard a beautiful sound, like angels singing. He stopped to listen, then followed the sound. It grew louder. He was getting closer, and he ran faster. Turning a corner around a large boulder, he came to a natural amphitheater worn by mother nature into a rock hillside and, arranged within, a boys’ choir. 

“Beat it, clown,” sang the boys. 

“I’m just trying to get to get to Circus World,” explained Chester.

“Sing, damn it!” sang the boys beautifully. “Or this will be your end.” They started into the “Kyrie” from Hayden’s St. Cecilia Mass and drew switchblades from under their brilliant white choir robes.

Chester chuckled nervously and loosened his collar. He pulled a white hanky from his sleeve, then another hanky (red), and another (blue) and another (yellow) and another (green) until he finally wiped his brow with the last one, which was purple. The castratos’ angelic voices soared as they sang a terrifyingly gorgeous descant over the melody and fitted brass knuckles to their small, white, feminine hands.

Chester mumbled “Barnum and Bailey’s Favorite,” but the boys hit back hard with “Carol of the Birds.” Chester tried “Entry of the Gladiators” and the choir countered, seemingly without effort, with “A Birch Tree in the Field Did Stand.” Chester changed tactics and hit them with “Baby Elephant Walk,” but the choir boys were too quick. They executed an adroit key change to G major and launched into the “Benedictus” from Mozart’s Pastoral Mass. Chester could feel the press of their beautiful harmony and sought through his own admittedly small musical catalogue for his big guns. He landed on “Merry Go Round Broken Down” and quickly launched into a rollicking rendition, but the clever boys brought him down with “The Prayer of Francois Villon.” Desperate, Chester tied “Hungarian Rhapsody,” his last best hope, but the boys were ready and the choir struck out at him viciously with Monteverdi’s “Tancredi and Clorinda” madrigal. 

Chester knew he was beaten, but there was one hope. He began humming “The Major General’s Song” as he danced a little two-step and tossed two Mk 2 pineapple grenades into the choir, one for the trebles and one for the altos. Before they could react, he opened his umbrella and huddled under it as the blood and gore rained down upon him. When the bloody shower stopped, Chester peaked out from under the umbrella at the 24 left feet and 24 right feet standing alone where the choir had once threatened him. He chuckled and shook his umbrella and went on his way.

***

About seven miles south of Baraboo, Chester Chuckles picked his way carefully through the Badger Army Ammunition Plant. “How ironic that the last stretch of my journey through this post-apocalyptic world is through an ordinance works where the instruments of our own destruction were created by our own hands,” he said to himself. “I wonder if there’s a thematic reason for that?”

“There isn’t,” sneered a voice with a sneer.

Chester stopped and rolled his eyes. He knew already to whom that sneer belonged.

“Happy to see me?” asked Gristle Splitgrin.

“No,” said Chester, who was always honest, sometimes to a fault. “Not particularly.”

“Well then why are you smiling?”

“I’m always smiling, you assclown. It’s painted on. I’m a happy clown!”

“I don’t particularly care for your tone,” said Gristle. “Boys!” he called. “Let’s teach Chester Chuckles some manners.”

From behind Gristle’s tall but not particularly wide frame fanned a half dozen clown lackeys: two whitefaces, two Augustes, a rodeo clown, and a Pierrot.

“You there,” said Chester, pointing at the Pierrot. “What are you doing here? You’re better than this.”

The Pierrot just shrugged his shoulders. “Le travail est difficile à trouver.”

“Hmm,” replied Chester. “I don’t know what you just said.”

“Lucky for you, you won’t need to speak French in Hell,” laughed Gristle.

“Wouldn’t it be more fitting if they only spoke French in Hell?”

“Shut up!” roared Gristle. “Get him, boys!”

Once again, the clown hands at the end of Chester’s clown arms plunged deeply into Chester’s oversized clown pants. He grunted as he bent down to get a better grip, reaching so deeply that he disappeared into the wide waist of his pants and it appeared now to the savage clownish horde that there was but the lower half of clown left standing before them. 

“Hey!” shouted Gristle. “Come back up here! Stop clowning around down there!”

Chester’s head popped up above his waistband and he smiled. “Just one second, buddy.” He looked at the advancing sextet of murderous clown lackeys: “Can you all hold on for just one more second?”

Chester dove down again, completely disappearing once more into his pants. Then, with triumphant music swelling in the background, a high-explosive anti-tank rocket emerged, followed by the muzzle of an M20 Super Bazooka, then the rest of the bazooka, then Chester’s huge, ecstatic smile, and finally, the rest of Chester. 

“Sorry, boys,” said Chester, taking aim. “At first I thought we clowns were an endangered species—you know, with the apocalypse and everything—but now I see there are just too many bad clowns. Well, goodbye!”

Gristle Splitgrin and his six accomplices blew up in a spectacular display of high-explosive anti-tank technology. Chester Chuckles tossed the bazooka on a pile of unexploded ordinance and walked off to the north on the homestretch.

***

Huffing and puffing, Chester Chuckles pulled himself to the summit of the Devil’s Lake West Bluff and stood, letting his vision sweep the Baraboo Valley that stretched out before him. 

“Shit,” he said.

Directly north, right where Baraboo should have been, right where it had been the last two hundred years, was a huge Baraboo-sized crater. Around its edge, a few buildings and trees that survived the initial blast smoldered. Nowhere to be seen was even the slightest hint of a circus: not a single big-top tent, no circus trains, no elephants, and certainly no clowns.

“Shit,” he said again. Chester sat down to think. “Maybe I could try miming.” That sounded nice.

The Kaiju Queen of the Mean Streets: A Kandy Fontaine Mystery

The streets in West Hollywood had that particular late‑night sheen they get when the neon has been burning longer than a whore’s nightstand cigarette and the air has grown clotted with the residue of too many unfinished, blood-adjacent conversations, and as I padded along the curb — because yes, I am a cat, though not the kind anyone would mistake for ordinary — I could feel the story tightening around me like a coat someone else had worn first, carrying the faint scent of their intentions. I should say this plainly: I am not merely in the story; I am the story, dressed in the sleek, amused body of Burroughs’ shotgun’s cat, which is to say I move with the casual authority of something that knows it could rewrite the entire night with a flick of its tail if it felt the need.

Kandy Fontaine pushed open the door of the convenience store with the kind of weary grace that belongs to people who have outgrown their own silhouettes, leaving them behind like vapor trails in sinister Dutch bars, her trench coat trailing behind her at a 45 degree angle in non-Euclidean memories, and Joe Oroborus, Soft Detective, followed her in with the splotched expression of a man who had misplaced his last good idea somewhere between Sunset and La Brea but was too tired to retrace his steps.

The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead with the nervous energy of a philosophy student who had read too much Sartre and not enough La Fontaine, and the aisles seemed to shift slightly, weave themselves through bad wormholes, as if preparing themselves for a narrative turn they could sense but not yet name.

Kandy paused, sensing something in the air — a subtle rearrangement of the moment, a quiet intake of breath from the universe — and Joe felt it too, though he would never admit it, because soft detectives in this city survive by pretending they don’t notice the metaphysical drafts that blow through the cracks in reality.

I felt it most of all, of course, because stories always know when they are about to change shape. We’re born like that.

The rustle came first, a soft metallic whisper from the alleyway, followed by a flicker of chrome and a shadow that looked like Pirandello’s farts, and then — with the kind of theatrical inevitability that only the truly mythic can pull off — Kathy Acker sprang up from the alley, dressed as the Eiffel Tower’s motorcycle cat, her chrome‑slick fur catching the neon in a way that made her look like a monument that had decided it was tired of being stationary and wanted to try being alive for a while.

The miniature Eiffel Tower perched on her head tilted slightly, as if it too were curious about what would happen next, and her eyes beta-glitched with the mischievous intelligence of someone who knows the rules and ignores them out of principle.

“Kandy,” she said, her voice carrying the faint clatter of a typewriter dreaming of Paris’s asshole’s distant cousin Sam: “you’re late.”

“For what?” Kandy asked, though she already knew the answer in the way people know things they haven’t yet admitted to themselves.

“For your own myth,” Kathy‑Cat replied, stretching with the languid confidence of a creature who has never once apologized for existing.

Before Kandy could respond, the door chimed again, and this time it was Time — badly disguised as Kathy Acker’s motorcycle wearing the Eiffel Tower in drag, a look that might have worked on a different night but here only made Time seem like it was trying too hard to blend in with a city that had long ago stopped believing in subtlety. The chrome still gleamed beneath the cheap metallic paint, the Eiffel Tower wig kept slipping sideways like a landmark with stage fright, and Time — well, Time has never been good at pretending it isn’t Time.

Heisenberg, the clerk with the nametag H. Berg, didn’t bother looking up from stocking gum. “That’s Time,” he said, as if announcing the arrival of a regular customer. “Don’t let the wig fool you.”

Kandy stepped forward, unafraid, because she has always met the universe head‑on, even when it shows up wearing impossible drag not so subtly Susan Sontag.

“Why are you even here?” she asked, her voice steady in the way only someone who has already survived several versions of herself can manage.

Time shifted, the motorcycle frame creaking like a confession, or fart, it had been holding onto for too long.

“To be seen,” it said quietly. “To be something other than inevitable.”

And that — that was the moment the story finally exhaled itself the way a self smoking and self unarchiving French dab wax adjacent Kaiju Queen always do, and revealed its spine, like a greased and nameless asshole because Kandy’s Kaiju Queen transformation was never about spectacle or destruction; it was about recognition, about stepping into the version of herself that had been waiting just outside the frame.

The moon tilted, the air thickened, and Kandy grew — not violently, not monstrously, but with the slow, deliberate inevitability of a truth expanding to fill the space it had been denied, her shadow stretching across the aisles, her scales shimmering like unresolved feelings, her eyes glowing with the soft light of someone who has finally stopped apologizing for her own magnitude.

Time stared up at her, wig slipping, chrome trembling like several monster bugs in a cyclatron smoking acid winged acid. “You see me,” it whispered.

Kandy nodded, her voice low and certain. “I see you because I’ve been you.”

Kathy‑Cat curled around Kandy’s Kaiju ankle, purring like a small motor of rebellion, and Joe let out a long Bataille-infested, Genet infused, ghastly-grommet vapor he hadn’t realized he was holding, while the neon outside flickered with something that might have been respect or might have been relief.

And I — the narrative dressed as Burroughs’ shotgun’s cat — stepped forward, because this was the moment where the story folded back into itself, where the teller became the told, where the myth recognized its own architecture, and I rubbed against Kandy’s enormous neon foot, claiming her the way stories claim their heroes, and the mean streets softened just enough to let the night breathe again.

Roadkill

“No one will ever love me!” Isabel intoned, giving voice to the image of a bright-eyed fat girl smiling at us from a bus-stop advertisement. She puffed out her cheeks and let rip a raspberry. I was drinking a milkshake, and pink goo ejected from my nose. I decided to give my heart to her then. When later we kissed, I learned that hers was the most aggressive tongue I had known.

The last thing we spoke of pertained to baby sex, as in people having sex with babies. She heard an infant had been hospitalized. It gave me the icky shakes—and right before I had to step into the great wide world, full of all those strangers with their secret minds. How many people on that morning bus had been asleep just an hour before, dreaming up some truly unsettling imagery, only to ponder in horror the extent to which they might take responsibility for all that? Then out the door, wearing faces of common decency, into dangerous proximity with other silent nasties.

Would I have said something romantic had I known she would be dead before lunchtime? Certainly, I would not have gone to work. Certainly, I would have stayed home and tickled her, fingers trespassing the boundaries of her granny panties. I would have reminisced and caressed. But if, for whatever reason, I absolutely had to leave… I just don’t know what I would have said. 

Men often die first, worn by years of secretly expending the energy required to repress sadness and rage. I would joke that if and when I died first, I would have her lean in close over my death bed and I would whisper, so tenderly, the word “shart” into her cute little ear.  She would poke me hard in my belly when I said this. She would often poke me in the belly or punch me in the arm. Consequently,  I would cower and yell “domestic violence!” which would prompt further assault. 

“I love you” was said at the beginning and end of every day. It was sprinkled generously throughout. An abyss of love-yous. Sometimes, self-awareness would lead to the most inane of conversations. “I love you. No, I mean I really, love you. I mean it. More than you comprehend. I really, really love you. You are so loved. God it’s frustrating that I can’t explain it to you.” Blandness via repetition. 

“Goodnight. I love you.” 

“Goodbye. I love you.”

Our earliest impressions of one another were constructed via the joyless toil of cleaning up nice. Such theater is tricky. One wants the camouflage to fulfill its function of deceiving the potential mate, yet the intended object of affection must recognize that this image of perfection is maintained at too high a cost of energy and is, ultimately, false. Metabolically, ugliness is more efficient. One hopes to be found out.

The big breakthrough in our getting to know the ugly truths came when she showed me the picture of thirteen-year-old Isabel. What a dweeb. What a complete vacuum of sex appeal. This is no insult. I, too, was a goober at that unfortunate stage in my life. I think we wore the same fuck-me-not glasses. That a thirteen-year-old should lack sex appeal is appropriate. However, retroactive vanity produces bizarre desires. Isabel would love to know that gown-man-I would have let thirteen-year-old her bounce on his leg (yee-haw). What am I to do? Hurt grown-up Isabel’s feelings by refusing her imagined advances?

When she was fourteen, a chatroom stranger requested photographs of her feet. She obliged. She told me this story with a subtly hint of pride. If only she could be longed for as she was by that internet pervert. That was all she wanted. 

Did I adore her feet as did that stranger? Did I know her as well as I could-have-should-have? Did I give her my true self? I hate to think I hid a secret hubby the whole time. A stranger in her bed…. 

Never. I was an honest grotesque, like those who hang about the churches.

Yet neither truth nor love did save her. 

Never more shall Isabell and I bear our uglies. She was crossing to get a pint of ice cream from a 7-11 and was hit by a car. As she died, sprawled upon the pavement as the inconvenienced driver tried to force her to accept his apology. 

The call came when I was at work.

”My wife is dead.” I told my boss. “I need to leave.” 

“Aw no,” said he. “Sorry to hear that. You can go. Just make sure to clock out.” 

Besides having killed my wife, the driver was quite upstanding. He donated to feed hungry children in war-torn countries—he made sure I knew. 

Because Isabel was too busy bleeding out in the street to reassure him that it was obviously just an accident and that he remained new-born innocent, the responsibility fell to me. I pardoned him. Why not? I did not like the man, but it occurred to me that he really was too new-born stupid to be evil. Isabell and I used to make fun of men like him. McDingleberry: a character I would perform for her benefit. I would never have imagined that McDingleberry would be responsible for her death. 

Before McDingleberry was taken away by a cop, I asked if Isabel had shared any final words. He told me that she did but, he couldn’t make them out, as her mouth was full of blood. What he thought he heard made no sense.

The next day, I saw a rat lying in the street with its intestines spilled over the blacktop, gushed open. There was nothing to be said about it, nor anyone to say it to. No way to transform the obscene into its opposite. The eviscerated rat was simply what it was, like a fact. It was ugly. It was honest. It was what it was.

Constrictor

I am dangling a small rat above Sidney, my Ball Python. I have moved him into a separate enclosure to feed. This helps in the taming process. They associate the second enclosure with meal time so they are less likely to bite your hand when you reach in their terrarium to pick them up. The rat is squeaking desperately, flailing for its life while Sidney slithers forward and waits. 

I drop the rat into the box. It scampers around the edges of the enclosure, hugging against the walls for a way out. Sidney is motionless. He patiently watches. When the rat draws near, Sidney lashes out with one strike and has the rat’s head in the clutches of his jaws. Within a split-second Sidney’s body is wrapped around the torso of the rat, squeezing the life out of the creature. For a while the rat doesn’t move. It is struck with fear and lost for breath. One might think it is already dead. And it might as well be. Eventually the rat kicks it’s back legs in desperation. Sidney constricts tighter. 

The rat chokes to death and Sidney begins the process of swallowing the body whole. It can take up to ten minutes for this to happen. Sidney slinks forward and opens his jaws wide. He takes a minute to fit the rats face into his mouth and begins to choke the body down. His neck expands, stretched by the body of the rat. You can see it slide back beneath Sidney’s skin as it goes further and further towards his stomach. Soon all that is left is the pink of the rat’s tail jutting out of Sidney’s mouth like a surrogate tongue. 

I am standing in front of the terrarium watching the heat lamp glow in the dim of my bedroom. It illuminates my face red and casts jagged shadows up the wall behind the enclosure. Sidney curls around my limbs. Slithers across my arms and silently flicks his tongue. I can tell he is very happy. I like to keep people happy. Generally, I consider myself an introvert. But I am outgoing in this way. I think of how Sidney kept the peace within the box until the rat fucked up and drew too close. I relate to it. I respect it. Sydney slides down my shoulder, forearm, and wrist, and slinks under his log where he watches me from the shade. I am imagining him smiling behind his beady eyes. But Sydney has no way to smile.

I am walking down Leavitt Street. Late September in Chicago. I pass the liquor store on 21^st and a voice calls behind me. “Ey brother!” Three old drunks are across the street on a stoop of a condemned building drinking malt liquor out of brown bags. They are ex-gangbangers. Old heads of the neighborhood now wasted away on booze, drugs, and lingering traumas. “Come here brother!” the man in the middle of the group yells to me. “It’s been a long time! I’m glad you’re alive!” 

I approach and bump their fists with mine. The man in the center has two faded blue tear drops tattooed in the wrinkles of his leathery cheeks. His beard is grey and white and scraggly. His eyes are glazed over and look past me. The man to his left is curled up with his knees to his face backed up against the brick wall. He doesn’t look at me but occasionally lifts his head up to drink. He has symbols tattooed and equally faded on the crease between his thumb and pointer finger on his right hand. He grunts along with what we are saying. It is unclear if he is agreeing with or protesting the conversation.

The man to his right is in an oversized hoody soiled with dirt, the hood pulled over his head. His brown eyes are mourning. He looks like he is going to cry. I remember that the last time I saw these men their friend had just been murdered. Shot in the street in the night. The SD’s had shut out all the street lamps on the block and when he came stumbling through the darkness, they gunned him down and escaped into the black. I remember the prayer candles glowing on the corner. The empty bottles and smashed glass. The destitute men drinking and crying sad songs on a half-busted guitar long into the night. I had heard the sound of sirens. The shades of my apartment window were flashing red and blue. Yeah, there used to be four of them. These old drunks. Now three. 

“Be safe out there, papá,” he says to me. “It’s no life to live…” I nod and walk away. The man with his knees to his face appears to have fallen asleep.

I am at Martin’s Bar now. Home away from home. My second enclosure. This is where I eat and drink with my friends. Ernesto is there. My girlfriend, Nadia. And Chuy, too. Modelo is on tap. Hot wings and their bare bones sucked dry of meat fill our plates. The Bears’ game is on television. In the far corner a group of young Mexicans sing Vicente Fernandez songs acapella over the narration of the football game from the speakers. They are drunk, proud, and deeply saddened. 

“Por tu maldiiiiiiiiito amor! No puedo terminar con tantas penas!” They sing.

“He was El Rey,” nods Ernesto. He pulls his glass of Modelo up to his sagging cheeks and pouting lips. On television a Bears linemen sacks Aaron Rogers. The announcer’s excitement is drowned out by off key singing.

“He lived a hard life.” I say.

“So does everyone,” Scoffs Chuy. He looks to Nadia and she laughs.

“All we can do is appreciate the beauty while it lasts.” I look from one to the other.

“To Chente!” says Ernesto. We raise our glasses to toast. The group in the corner cheers with us. The bartender turns off the volume on the television giving way to customers playing classics on the jukebox. They have had their say.

“Por tu maldito amor!” I nudge Nadia. She rolls her eyes and I smile. I think about the sadness of this song. The music is religious to us. I buy my companions another round of beers and shots. They spout fair-weather rhetoric and drunkenly sing while I ponder the religious cult of sour love. The temptation of snakes. The fleetingness of paradise. The forbidden apple’s desire burning behind all of our eyes. I hear the hiss of a serpent but it is just the sputtering of the soda gun pouring a vodka tonic. I look at Nadia, mi novia, and Chuy, my friend. I see the way their eyes meet when they sip from their glasses. I see the way their hands graze when they reach for the plates I have put in front of them. I see their comfort in each other’s smiles and comradery in their laughter. I say nothing to them. I am calm like Sydney presented with a rat. And I know they have been unfaithful.

When their glasses empty I have them refilled. I let them drink on my dime. I keep their pints as full as mine. The beer in my cup has not dipped an inch in two hours. They are too self-involved to notice, indulging in their feast. 

A scrawny white art student type with green hair and black painted fingernails sits a few stools down drinking a Topo Chico Hard Seltzer. Chuy is eyeing them up. He scoffs once more. His eyes are sunken. His skull is heavy. 

“I remember,” he begins to say. “I remember being on the block as a kid. Riding my bike. A gangbanger motherfucker walked into the street and punched me right in the face as I rode by. Knocked me off my bicycle. He got on it and rode away. This neighborhood was something else back then. You couldn’t walk here. White motherfuckers didn’t come through here unless they wanted to lose their life! They move in here now and live in our buildings, drink in our bars, and eat at our spots, but they don’t know what this place was!”

“Back then I seen a dude get shot for a pack a smokes just right across the street!” adds Ernesto.

“These kids don’t know. They don’t know,” Nadia says shaking her head. Chuy rubs his hand on her knee and thinks that I don’t notice.

“Who fucking cares anyway?” I ask.

“Strike a nerve, milkweed?” laughs Chuy.

“Pinche güero!” jokes Ernesto. Nadia rubs her hand on my shoulder and clenches her nails in twice.

“Ey! Bartender! Another round for my friends!” I shout, snapping my fingers at him from down the counter. He shoots me a glare and slaps the bar in front of the woman in which he is having a conversation with and comes over to replenish our pints.

“You’ve hardly touched yours,” he nods to me.

“Please,” I tell him. “My friends are thirsty.”

“You’re too kind to us!” smiles Chuy. I hold my glass up and stare into his eyes.

“I’m getting tired,” Ernesto admits, “I’m too drunk to drive my car home.”

“I’m hardly even buzzing,” I tell him, “I’ll drive you all home then park at my place. I’ll bring your car back in the morning.”

“This is why I love you, Milkweed,” says Ernesto.

“Looks like we have a designated driver,” laughs Chuy.

“Baby, are you sure you’re not too drunk?” asks Nadia, rubbing my shoulder with her free hand.

“I’m sure baby,” I say, “It’s really no problem.”

I drive Ernesto home. He sits in the front. Chuy and Nadia sit in the back. On the way we listen to Molotov rap over rock anthems. I watch Nadia’s facial expressions from the rearview mirror at every stop sign and red light. She laughs as Chuy enthusiastically mouths the words along to the songs and bangs his head. By the time we reach Ernesto’s apartment in Back of the Yards, Ernesto falls out the side door, and self-consciously fumbles to pick himself off the ground, his body overwhelmed with alcohol. 

“Thank you, brother,” he tells me, digging his pockets for his house key. “Goodnight.”

“We’ll wait until you are inside,” I say to him, “You can never be too safe.”

“Not like anyone’s comin’ to rape him or nothin’,” Chuy jokes. Neither me or Nadia laugh. Ernesto is in his apartment. A yellow light turns on behind his blinds. 

I put the car into gear and start driving towards the highway. I flip through my phone and play slower, sadder music. The kind where the singers croon to smoke filled lounges lit by flickering neon lights, holding rocks glasses of Jack Daniels in their hand free of the microphone while a stoic bartender rubs a glass with a pale gray rag, and women with diamond earrings, pearl strings, and men with bow ties sit at circular tables covered with white cloth, enchanted by the haze of jazz age romance. By the time I hit the on ramp, Nadia and Chuy are passed out snoring. The heavy food and alcohol have equally done their jobs.

On the side of the expressway a car is flipped and burning. A miniature inferno. The flames dance like cobras. Black smoke coughs into the cool of the breeze. I can almost feel the heat on my face as I turn my head to keep my eyes on the crash. In the rearview, blue and red apparitions wail, growing brighter with the passing seconds.

Sometimes everything plays out like a dream. High keys of a piano cascade on the stereo and what’s left of the constellations, not brutalized by urban light pollution, shine dirty like blood diamonds in the bastard black of God’s vapid galaxy streaked with gas.

Not much longer and I pull off at 87^th Street and Lake Michigan. Steelworkers Park. I drive down the access road towards the parking lot by the lakeside. The silhouette ruins of the old steel mills stand like rotting tombstones and mausoleums under the orange glow of the autumn moon. I park in front of the bronze statue of a faceless Union steel worker with his arms around his family, fronted with a plaque reading “A Tribute to the Past”. Nadia and Chuy are still in a daze, hardly recognizing where we have driven to.

One thing I know about my friend Ernesto is that he keeps a Smith & Wesson 9mm Luger in his glove compartment at most times. Living in Back of the Yards hasn’t been easy for him. He gets fucked with a lot. Thugs, bangers, dope fiends, petty theft. He likes to have protection. I pull a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of my jacket and slide them on my hands, snapping the ends at the wrist as each fist fits in. I reach for the glove compartment and pull out the 9mm. Then I call back to my two companions, snoring on each other’s shoulders to the smoky reverberations of a saxophone blazing a solo over delicately swinging cymbals and popping snare.

“Wake up guys. We’re here.”

“Wuh…argh…Whuh? We at the lake?” Chuy mutters, stretches, yawns.

“There’s a full moon out,” I tell him. “We’re going for a swim.”

“What the fuck?” grumbles Nadia, opening her side door. “Which beach are we at? You’re fucking funny man. I thought we was going home.”

We are all standing outside Ernesto’s car when I flash the gun. Chuy grunts and charges me and I whip him in the face. He falls back into the dirt holding his bloody cheek. Nadia screams and curses desperately but there is no one around to hear. 

The two snivel in protest as I lead them towards the concrete walk on the lakeside which drops off into the icy waters with no ladder to get back up. “Take off your clothes.” I order them.

“Fuck you!” shouts Nadia, cracking her voice in anger. I put the 9mm up closer to her head. Chuy jukes like he is going to charge me again and I whip the gun towards his face causing him to flinch. He staggers back, and with a feminine bay, trips off the concrete and plunges into the lake. 

“Help! C’mon! Help me!” Chuy treads water in the tide of the lopping waves. His clothes are visibly weighing him down. There is nothing to hold onto. 

“Pinche cobarde!” Nadia weeps. I see through her crocodile tears. She sounds straight out of a telenovela. Like Soraya Montenegro or something.

“Take your clothes off!” I command, shaking the gun at her in my right hand. She does not budge. She is scanning like a rat for a way out of her trap. Chuy sloshes in the water, crying for his mother while the current bobs him down beneath the surface. Mami! Mami! Mam- Oof!

Nadia reacts to this by turning towards him. Without a word I lift my leg and boot her in the back. Her body crumples like a cheap toy. She briefly shrieks and splashes into the lake. 

My heart is racing. I am surging with adrenaline. But I know to be patient. I know this adrenaline is a bodily reaction. I feel like I might explode. I might cry. But I have to meditate in the moment. In real time. Keep a sharp mind. I have to know that things are going to be okay. And as my two old companions asphyxiate in the water, I have to constrict them further. And I have to do it in a focused calm. 

Nadia is a better swimmer than Chuy. She makes it to the edge of the concrete walkway and scratches at the wall, trying to hold herself above the water. I think fast and grab a loose cement chunk scattered on the ground with the trash and empty liquor bottles. She cries out as I drop it down on her. It hits her head and she sinks below the surface and does not come up. I pick up a glass bottle and look for Chuy, but he is long gone. All that is left are the rolling waves and the glow of the moon on what’s left of the decaying steel mills lurking off in the dismal expanse of the industrial park. I sit by the lakeside for another half hour watching the water. I listen to it lap against the concrete and I breathe in and out slowly, to bring my heart beat down. I do my best not to shed any tears.

Life to me is all about control. If you don’t have control then you aren’t truly living. And really, most people don’t have control. They are raised to be the controlled. I was like that once. But I had a burning desire to be alive.

“Ey’ papá! How are you?” the hooded old drunk asks as I pass 21^st and Leavitt. He is drinking Cuervo from the bottle. I have parked Ernesto’s car on a side street. I walk home like I never left the neighborhood.

“It’s cold.” I tell him, “September never gets this cold. My friends, they wanted to swim in the lake. But I said, ‘Nah, you guys can though! You can go together. Me? I’m going home.’”

“They swam in this weather?”

“Nude as a full moon. They’re still swimming there right now.”

“A la verga. Is crazy!”

“Stay warm, brother.”

“Stay warm and stay safe, mijo. Be careful out there. I tell you, always. This life…This life… It’s no life to live, my friend. There is no way…”

I bump his fist and make my way down the block to my apartment building. In the distance I can hear him singing his own wisdom to himself, off key, and mellow, his voice gritty with tequila. Despite the events of the evening, I feel good. I contemplate this good feeling. I step towards home with swagger and confidence. The conversation with the old man has brought my nerves back down with a sense of normalcy, a display of routine. 

I enjoy my relationship with this old man. I see him on the street and we catch up. It is nothing more than that. It doesn’t need to be. In this sense I often appreciate my vague acquaintances more than I appreciate my closest friends. But in this moment, I mostly enjoy the thought that Nadia and Chuy are floating together. They are out in the open. Where they need to be. They bit the hand that fed. Got too close and paid the price. Constricted. Asphyxiated. Shed. There can be nothing more behind my back. I can finally get some sleep.

Some men charm snakes. Some snakes charm men. I think to myself, turning the key to the front door of my building, imagining an old Indian market, a Sapera man in robes, playing the pungi for a dancing cobra rising from the lid of a bamboo basket. Like most of life, it is all a show.

The snakes can’t hear the music, but they’re intimidated by their perception of the instrument. It’s a predator to them. Their dance is a balance of fear and aggression. 

Most men can hear but don’t listen. They see something beautiful, are intimidated, and are unable to understand it. They can’t admit this to themselves, and likewise respond in fear cloaked in an expression of hardness. In this way many men are just like snakes. Many men that I know. They slither around me thinking I can’t hear the music either. It’s best to keep them close. Tame them. Feed them by the hand. Toss them rats to keep them happy.

Sidney is soaking in the pool of water I have placed in his terrarium, next to the wooden log which gives him a dark place to hide. This soaking will help in the process of shedding his skin. He has outgrown his old body. It is time to move onto something new. My bedroom is shadowed with the light of his heat lamp. I too like to lay in the darkness. It gives me a place to reflect. To meditate. To reject the skin of past sins and move onto a better life.

Welcome to Reptilia

An Excerpt from “Double Dicks or Double Down,” a choose-your-own-sex-adventure novel

First glance: Black sand, white surf. Komodo dragons in designer suits—Armani, red lapels.

“Welcome to Reptilia.” The space pod computer spoke in a sexless, spiritless monotone.

I recoiled from the porthole window. Took a breath. Let curiosity out-wrangle my disgust. Allowed myself another peek.

Two-inch talons sheathed in diamond. Maybe glass? They sparkled. Pretty, gaudy, costume jewels. Knock-offs. They curled at the end of scaled fingers, pinning cigars or raking prey or tweaking the strings of strange instruments (some sort of oversized lute, pearl inlaid, maybe bone)

Lizards. Lots of them. Doing what? Gyrating, for a start. Moaning. Singing? And was that dancing? Was it epilepsy? They twerked or did the hula on the beach. They had no grace, but the stars as my witness, they made up for it with effort. The males swung their two-headed genitalia, their double penises famed among the Varanus, the monitor lizards that ruled the third moon.

I felt sick watching them. But that simmered into wonder, eventually boiling into arousal. It was all so gross and stimulating and wrong, which made it right—for me.

The porthole window fogged up with my heavy breathing as I watched the grotesque lizards spasm on the black, volcanic sand. They stood like men, bipedal, bowlegged freaks. Although, leaning back, supported by their strong tails, the dragons were almost tripodal. Others, with  their bellies on the sand, acted like quadrupeds, crawling, writhing, dirtying their fancy blazers while snapping their maws at scurrying crabs, or nothing at all, ghosts or inner demons.

“It’s a mating ritual.” Eliza joined me at the window. She clutched a gun—what else is new? For each unlucky bastard I was forced to kill along the way—believe me, plenty—Eliza had killed seven or eight, maybe ten. Sure, she was quick to kill, a real trigger happy bitch, but I wasn’t complaining. Her killing sprees had saved me more than once.

“Do you plan on shooting them?”

“There’s no charge,” she told me.

“That’s good, cause I’m broke.”

“I mean the power cell,” she corrected me. “Gun’s dead. It’s just a prop.”

“Fan-bloody-tastic.”

She pushed me aside, pressing against the glass. “Look at those lizards go.”

“Gives me the willies,” I told her. “In all the right ways,” I did not add.

Eliza was quick to kill. Me? I was quick to drop my pants, to fuck the next alien in the wide, weird cosmos. By some miracle, I had yet to contract an STD, a stellar transmitted disease.

“The heebie-fucking-jeebies,” Eliza agreed.

Our cheeks touched as we crammed our faces together, crowding the porthole window. We looked down to the black sand below, the incoming tide lapping at the cracked, lizard skin of gold-banded ankles. Gold leaf flaked from scaled arms, expensive snow drifting on a warm, sea breeze. Ceremonial paint chipped to fall into the foaming suds of incoming ocean surf. The gas giant, Leviathan, pulled the freshwater oceans of Reptilia without reservation. The tide came quick and hard. Crabs skittered into the pockmarked burrows in the sand. The dragons tucked away their double penises and ran to the edge of gloomy, jungle terrain.

As the sea advanced, rising to engulf our space pod, the porthole splashed with agitated water, churning white, then calmed to a sedate, tranquil blue. Fish swam past. Cichlids, or something similar. Lizards too. They hunted and they played. They pressed their yellow eyes against the glass and watched two humans watch them.

“Full opacity,” Eliza commanded the computer, and the view faded to black.

In private, in a capsule at the bottom of a freshwater ocean, Eliza and I whittled away the hours until the low tide would return. We ate and slept and fucked. We talked a little. But when we did, it was filler. Mundane stuff. Idle chit-chat. Neither of us asked the real question, what was really on our minds. Neither of us mentioned the word, the nature of our predicament: exile. Neither of us were willing to put to question what we feared to know the answer to: just how badly, exactly, were we fucked?

Story At Midnight

Night had a way of pressing itself into the bones of the cabin, as if the woods themselves were leaning in to listen.

Max Sciller sat in the dim wash of a single lamp, the light trembling against the walls like something afraid to stay. Once, his face had been familiar—measured, calm, the trusted voice of Richmond, Virginia flickering through living rooms at six and eleven. Now, that same face stared back at him in the black mirror of the window—thinner, hollowed, eyes sunk deep as if something inside had been eating him slowly.

He hadn’t left the mountain in months.

Didn’t need to.

Didn’t want to.

The world beyond the trees felt like a fever dream he’d barely survived.

A sound cut through the stillness.

A scream.

Sharp. Human.

Max froze, head tilting, breath caught halfway between doubt and recognition. Then he exhaled slowly, shaking his head.

“No,” he muttered. “Not tonight.”

The doctor had warned him about auditory hallucinations. Stress. Isolation. The mind filling its own void.

Another scream—longer this time, ragged, dragged across the forest like torn cloth.

Max pressed his palms against his temples.

“Not real.”

He said it again, quieter, as if speaking too loudly might make it true.

The woods went still.

Then came the scratching.

At first it was faint, like branches brushing the cabin. Then it grew deliberate. Fingernails on wood. Slow. Curious.

Max stood, heart beginning to stutter.

He moved toward the door, each step hesitant, like walking toward a memory he wasn’t sure he owned.

“Hello?” he called out.

Silence.

Then—breathing.

Not his.

Close.

Right outside.

Max’s throat tightened. His mind raced through explanations—animals, wind, echoes of his own pulse—but none of them held.

The doorknob turned.

Not fully.

Just enough to test.

Max stumbled back.

The door opened.

They slipped in like shadows peeling themselves from the night.

Thin. Filthy. Pale shapes wrapped in rags and animal skins, their faces smeared with something dark that caught the light wrong—too thick to be dirt. Their eyes gleamed with a wet, knowing hunger.

There were too many of them.

They moved without sound, circling him, breathing him in.

Max shook his head violently.

“This isn’t real,” he whispered. “You’re not real.”

One of them laughed—a dry, cracking sound like breaking bone.

“Oh, we’re real,” a voice said.

The leader stepped forward.

He was taller than the rest, his face almost human beneath the grime, though his smile stretched too far, as if it had forgotten its natural limits.

“We’ve been watching you, Max.”

Max’s stomach dropped.

“You know my name.”

“We know everything about you.”

The leader tilted his head, studying him like something fragile and fascinating.

“The man who talks to himself. The man who hears things. The man no one would believe.”

Max’s breath came fast now.

“This is a delusion,” he insisted. “You’re not here.”

The leader smiled wider.

“Then why is she?”

They dragged her forward.

Max’s world shattered.

“Emily?”

His sister’s face was bruised, eyes wide with terror, mouth gagged. Tears carved clean lines down her dirt-streaked cheeks.

“She came looking for you,” the leader said softly. “Such a sweet thing. So worried.”

Max staggered toward her, but the circle tightened.

“No—no, this isn’t—this isn’t happening—”

“Isn’t it?”

The leader stepped closer, lowering his voice.

“We live out here, Max. We survive. We take care of our own.”

He gestured to the others, who watched with quiet anticipation.

“You’ve been alone for so long. No one to understand you. No one to hear what you hear.”

Max’s eyes flicked between them, between Emily, between the door.

“You belong with us.”

Emily shook her head violently, muffled cries spilling from behind the gag.

Max’s hands trembled.

“I’m not like you.”

The leader leaned in, his breath sour and warm.

“You already are.”

Silence stretched.

The woods seemed to hold it in place.

Then the leader placed something in Max’s hand.

A knife.

Cold. Heavy. Real.

Max stared at it.

At Emily.

At the circle closing tighter.

“This isn’t real,” he whispered again, but the words sounded weak now. Fragile.

The leader’s voice slipped into something almost gentle.

“Prove it.”

Max’s breathing slowed.

Something inside him shifted—not snapping, but settling, like a puzzle piece finding its place.

All the doubt. All the noise. The endless questioning.

Gone.

He looked at Emily.

Really looked.

Saw the fear.

The pleading.

The recognition.

Then something colder rose to meet it.

Clarity.

“If this is in my head,” Max said softly, “then none of this matters.”

The leader smiled.

Emily screamed behind the gag as Max stepped forward.

The knife moved quicker than thought.

A single, clean motion.

The sound it made was small.

Too small.

Her body crumpled at his feet.

For a moment, there was only silence.

Then the woods erupted in laughter.

Wild. Exultant. Hungry.

Max stood there, staring down at what he’d done, waiting for it to dissolve—for the illusion to break, for the cabin to return to quiet madness.

But it didn’t.

The blood stayed.

The smell stayed.

The bodies around him stayed.

The leader placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Welcome home, Max.”

Max didn’t answer.

After a long moment, he smiled.

And this time, it stretched just a little too far.