Last Chance Romance

Ike tried to get Bernie to stop fucking the corpse. His shouts had no effect. He wound up wrestling his buddy off of the body.

“What’s wrong with you? You don’t have protection.”

“With what I’ve got, it doesn’t matter,” Bernie answered. “Doc said I’ll be dead in less than a year. “

Both men were in their mid-twenties. They had been friends since high school.  They had been on crew together back then. In college they had been too busy partying and chasing skirts to try out for any sports.

“You trying to speed up the clock?” Ike said. “Look, it’s been a long time since I have seen a woman, living or dead, with all her parts, but I ain’t going bat shit like you are man.  Self-discipline. Remember what Doc taught us.”

“We make our choices,” Bernie said. “Might be months before we see another woman, living or dead, like you said. Might even be a year. Considering my situation, I’ll take what I can get.”

“You’re a sick man”

“I know,” Bernie said. He grinned with teeth clenched. It was a strange grin, possibly full of irony, maybe full of anger, maybe both and more. 

“I am not likely to get better,” Bernie said, trying to shake loose of his friend’s grip.  “Let me go.”

“You want to rape that corpse some more?” said Ike. His eyes were wide. Nostrils flared. It was not so much anger as disgust and disappointment.

“Yeah. I need to get back to business.  I’ve got nothing better to do. Not likely to get better opportunities either.”

Ike relaxed his grip. Bernie remounted the corpse. 

Ike turned his back. He didn’t want to watch. 

The sound of Ike going at it with his dead hook-up became too much for him. He decided to take a walk. 

Bernie’s grandmother had offered the boys a hundred bucks to clean out the basement of her house in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. It was an old building dating back to before the Revolution. It required a lot of upkeep. Bernie’s grandmother had not been able to afford to pay for repairs anymore. No one else in the family wanted to take over the deed and be responsible for the taxes and constant maintenance. The decision had been made to prep the place for sale. 

While they were filling trash bags the two friends found a section of wall in the basement was hollow.  

“Probably where they hid runaways before the Civil War.” Bernie’s grandmother had told them. “ Family legend has it that the house was a stop on the Underground Railway.”

“They should turn the house into a museum,” Ike had told her.

“Too many houses like it around here,” she had said. “Can’t all be museums. Plenty of houses that were turned into museums around here in the past were turned back into private residences or torn down for new construction. There is not enough money in history. Not around here. We have too much history. Too much crime as well.”

The boys opened up the wall to see what was behind it. They found more than a hiding place. A tunnel went out towards the street. There it ended. Blocked by a wall of bricks.

“Must have been closed off when they put in water pipes and sewers,”  Bernie had postulated.

That was when IT happened. The unthinkable that had never really been unthinkable.  War is never impossible, and in war, every and any weapon can be used. 

Ike kept walking until he could no longer hear what was happening behind the burned out gas station. He paused for a while, then went on, not sure he was far enough away for his stomach.  When he felt safe, he stopped.

Ike looked around his world.  It was not the world he had been born into.

No clouds. No birds. Only gray clouds of smoke. 

The ground was no better. Not a blade of grass. Not a single insect.

Ike thought the only thoughts he could. They were not nice thoughts. He didn’t like that. It was better not to think. Better to be half dazed. 

Or maybe dead.

Doc has been the last sane person they had met, unless you counted the dead. 

The dead seemed to have it all together, until they fell apart.   

Occasionally there were maggots or tiny worms, parasites maybe, on the bodies they had come across. Ike took that as a good sign. Something would survive. Maybe a hidden seed would sprout somewhere. Maybe he would find it, something green growing in the dust. 

“Struggle on,” Doc had told them. “The strong and the lucky might have a chance. Even having the right genes, good health, and good luck might not be enough. We need to be smart. Practical. See the opportunities.”

Doc claimed to have been a real MD, before the end so to speak. Ike and Bernie found him near what had once been the University of Pennsylvania.

“I practiced medicine some,” Doc had told them. “Did research in a lab on the side. Tried to solve medical mysteries. Help make a better world and all that. What a waste.”

The three of them had traveled together for a few weeks.  They searched buildings that had already been gone through by other scavengers. Water and food were the top priorities. If they found anything else that could help them keep living, they took that as well. Ike and Barry built up a collection of tools that could double as weapons. Not everyone they had met had been friendly. Doc kept notes about where other potentially useful things were found, such as books on medicine and science,

Ike thought Doc was maybe forty or so. Looked like he had always kept fit. He seemed a good guy. In many ways he was. 

Doc had examined Ike and Bernie, checking them for all kinds of ailments. He patched them up best he could where patching was needed, and shared all the advice he had on how to survive.

It was Doc who had diagnosed what was wrong with Bernie. Part of it, maybe all of it, was due to radiation. Cancer is never great to have however you come by it.

One night Doc scampered away while Ike and Bernie were sleeping.  Doc took most of their accumulated supplies with him, including most of the water and food. It had taken Ike and Bernie months of scrounging to obtain everything they had. Now it was gone.

Survival.

What a nasty way to live.

Ike decided he had been away long enough for Bernie to have concluded his business. He started to walk back to where Bernie was. 

Broken concrete pillars were all that remained of an interstate highway. Fractured bricks lay among dots of glass and melted auto tires. Scavengers had already carried off everything metal in that area.  He wondered if they had lived long enough to do anything with all that metal. Had they made anything? Had they bartered it?  Where? With whom?

South, Ike thought. Or west. Maybe more had survived in Maryland or Chester County or elsewhere far from cities. 

When Ike got to where he had left Bernie, his buddy had finished and was wiping himself clean with a rag. The rag was filthy. It was caked with a bit of everything and anything. 

Bernie carried that rag everywhere with him. Rags were hard to come by. Rags had uses. Ike also had one.

“Next time we find a puddle we’ll have to wash up,” Ike said. “Bodies first. Then clothes, etc.”

“After we fill our water bottles,” said Bernie. “That is top priority.”

“Yes, of course.  After we fill our water bottles. “

Bernie gestured towards the corpse. “You want sloppy seconds?”

Survival. Struggle on.

Ike contemplated reality.  It was not a peaceful form of meditation. It brought him no tranquility. 

Ike looked at the corpse. She might have once been a good looking woman. That may have been wishful thinking. Now it was hard to tell what she had looked like really. At least you could tell she had been a woman. A woman without rot set in.

He wondered if anyone had gotten to the body before Bernie. Ike doubted it. He needed to feel a little optimism. That helps you survive, being optimistic. Doc had taught them that. 

But another part of his mind whispered to Ike, “This is it. Don’t pretend that you will make it much longer.”

He could not deny that he had needs.

He wrestled with his morals, what was left of what he had learned from his parents and in school. He wrestled. He fought hard against the reality he saw everywhere. In the end, morals lost. 

“Sure,” Ike said. “What the hell.”

Afterwards, they headed south.

A Night in the Life

Hank puts the book he is reading down and walks the few feet to his kitchen sideboard where he pours himself a large, a really large, glass of the cheapest wine any supermarket in this town by the edge of the sea has to offer.  In this town, hell in this life, that is all he has ever been able to afford, the cheapest anything… the cheapest wine, the cheapest room, hell it’s just been a cheap kinda life and certainly shows no sign of changing since he’d passed his half-century a few years before.  He takes a drink before walking the few feet over to his window, his world is so small almost everywhere he likes going is generally just a few feet away, and peers out.  Down below is an alleyway and that is the place Hank has grown almost obsessed by since he moved into this tiny one-room deal a few months previously.  A tiny one-room deal in an ever-growing list of one-room deals he’d experienced in this town before either eviction or just pure simple need to escape came a calling.  

The few months have seen Hank read a lot of books and drink a lot of wine and generally try and live his best life but somehow it was always that place just four floors beneath his window that always somehow managed to drag him in, somehow always managed to grab his attention.

Tonight he spies beautiful sultry Tatiana entertaining a mark as best she can in the condom and needle festooned hole she calls her work-place and all of a sudden he feels a pang of jealousy.  The lucky scumbag who’s enjoying himself with that super-fine piece of hotness is surely, Hank thinks, as he desperately tries to get a better view, one of the luckiest sons-of-bitches on the face of the whole god-damn planet right now as he hears her moans reach his open window.  

Hank reaches for his glass and drains a big long measure before moving back to his chair, the solitary chair in his room, where he’ll sit.  He’ll contemplate Tatiana and all her wondrous assets and skills, at least those he can imagine, and he’ll roll a smoke but just as he places the newly rolled smoke in his mouth a loud wailing sound emanates through the floorboards from one of the rooms downstairs.  The sound of a woman crying fills his room and as he sits there he knows there is only one thing he can do; he leans over and switches on the radio and suddenly the magnificently heroic sounds of Bruckner’s Third come to save him from the torture of having to listen to someone else’s misery.  Hell, he’s got enough of his own to deal with let alone having to endure anyone else’s!

He smokes his smoke and as it nears its end he drains his wine, another bottle gone in his ongoing lifelong war with reality, and as he gets back to his feet he moves first for another bottle before spying another view of the wondrous Tatiana in all her wild animalness going at it hard and heavy down below.  Hank doesn’t care if its the same guy, a new guy, hell all he knows is it ain’t him down there and that’s enough to make him almost want to start wailing his own sadness but right now he knows there is drinking to be done.  He picks up the fresh new bottle and pours it in large, really large, and gets straight into it and soon, he knows, it will be time to call an end to the insanity of his life for another day.  A day, like so many before, when even the idea of going out there, where the other people live their lives, simply fills him with revulsion at their pathetic existences, their pathetic so-called lives which show no sign of life at all.

‘Working the 9-5, the damn mortgage and car and family and pet, all it does is keep you a prisoner of the system you fools! What a ridiculous existence!’ he thinks as the sun blinks on the horizon and Hank knows it is almost time.  He returns from the toilet down the hall, drains the remnants of his wine in one fell swoop and as he climbs into his single bed he knows the squares are just beginning another of their damnable days.  One of those damnable days when they’ll work hard, in that searing heat, all to make a rich guy somehow even richer whilst, well, they’ll earn just about enough to keep them coming back.   It’s always just about enough for their pathetic lives, enough for their insane desires of cars and children and houses and total abject boredom as far as Hank can tell.  A life, an existence even, that is so far removed from the lives he encounters on those rare adventures out of his room or on those pages of everyday madness he so keenly reads he can barely understand let alone comprehend anyone wanting to live that way.  As he rolls the final smoke of his night he pulls his current book off his bedside cabinet; a collection of short stories from some degenerate across the pond, and as he turns to the back cover he takes in the author photo and the mad smiling face staring back at him is sure of someone who has lived, and as he lay in his pit he sparks his smoke alive and reads the back-cover blurb again.

‘A genius of the streets,’ one of the critic raves as Hank smokes all the way down to the roach before stubbing it out and after laying the book down he almost immediately falls to sleep, dreaming, as he has almost every damn day since he’d been priced out, of the mad swirling metropolis only sixty short miles up the road.  That seething hate-filled metropolis that had once been home but which now felt a lifetime away from his ramshackle room in this dilapidated madhouse by the sea he’d called many things but never ‘home’; it has never been that to him and it surely couldn’t now ever be, not in this lifetime almost certainly.

As the masses began to pour onto the streets later, escaping their retail and office-bound nightmares, Hank finally pulls himself out of his pit of a bed and is immediately back into his routine; the routine that has come to rule his life.  He wakes and immediately switches on his radio.  His room fills with the sound of Gustav Mahler and almost instantly the kettle is boiling as he prepares his first mug of tea, his first caffeinated hit, of the day.  The first of many and the perfect accompaniment to the ubiquitous smoke which he rolls and pops in his mouth as he allows the mug to cool.  Sparking it to life he begins to think of what needs doing that day, there is never much but, today, Hank knows, with his wine supply running dangerously low, he must somehow navigate his way to the damn supermarket down in the marina.  Only a twenty minute walk for sure but through some of the most crime-ridden and notoriously mad streets this town has to offer and Hank knows he, as usual, ain’t going to be able to do it on an empty stomach.  As the tea runs to its end he busies himself with preparations for a fry-up of epic proportions.  A fry-up and a large, a really large, glass of vin rouge he knows will help.

The fry-up sure does fills his stomach, one of the first things he learned upon leaving home was to never go food shopping whilst hungry, and he knows that once he’s rolled the ubiquitous smoke for the walk he’ll be ready to hit the street and sure enough moments later he is locking his room and is heading on down the stairs.  As he approaches the front door of the block of flats he spies Tatiana rocking up to her nightly show and as he pushes the door open he can hear a few voices call out.

“Hey lover,” a rather hopeful older blonde, around Hank’s own half-century, suggests as he walks past her and off into the night.  

‘So far, so good,’ Hank thinks as he, at last, hits the promenade but spying a few randoms, possible wreck-heads, lolling towards him, he steps over to the curb and with his head down just keeps on going remembering past run-ins with chancers like them.  The few random occasions when they had mistakenly taken him as being one of them, one of those derelict junkies who’d lost everything and somehow never seemed to care.

“Hey mate can you spare me some change?” a young guy in his early 20s asks him from within the confines of a sleeping bag but Hank, knowing he never has any spare anything, just walks on by.

“Hey mate,” another voice asks as he approaches the ramp that leads down into the marina, “can you spare me some change?” they ask and as Hank looks up he spies a 40-something guy dressed in a winter coat fit for the Arctic Circle and with his feet clad in a pair of trainers Hank would spend on a weeks’ rent on his feet.  As he always does Hank just walks on by knowing the place he is going could, although he certainly hopes isn’t, be even worse.  Walking down to the car-park that dominates the outside of the massive store Hank spies a few randoms, a few up to no good and as he walks he can feel a couple of sets of eyes piercing his back with a fury to suggest it ain’t going to be an easy homeward journey.

Finally walking in the main entrance Hank spies a lone security guard sitting in his little cubicle; he looks as if he would rather be anywhere else in the world right now than here and just that second Hank sees a gang of rogue drunks walking out carrying boxes of beer he knows exactly why.  A huge display just by the front door now standing empty and Hank knows exactly what has just gone down and as he walks in he spies several faces from down his end of town, it appears, helping themselves to whatever takes their fancy too.  Hank has always, for some reason, held himself higher than your average down-and-outer or your usual drink or drug casualty, and as he goes about his business, he knows he must never let himself get that low.

The shop done, the wine supply secured, he heads on back out there and the second he spies someone clearly making eyes at his bagful of wine bottles he knows he’s got to be quick, he needs to get off the street as soon as possible and despite the mild distraction of Tatiana on his corner, that is exactly what he does.  Twenty minutes later Hank is back in his room and the wine is flowing and everything, at last, seems back to normal or at least as normal as this life will ever get.  The crying woman from downstairs returns to haunt him as those with nothing in their lives beyond their work turn to their beds but as Tatiana goes at some lucky scumbag’s meat Hank knows he’ll somehow get on through.  He switches his radio on and as Ligeti’s non-harmonic sounds fill his room he rolls a smoke and reaches for his glass of wine and as he lifts his book off the bedside cupboard he knows that, right now, he wouldn’t live his life any other way.

The Giraffe That Jumped Over the Moon

Dr. Danny Quick used the last of his Jimi Hendrix stamps to mail off his manuscript to California. Maybe Jimi would bring his screenplay good luck, who knows. Or at least drench it in acid sunshine vibes and ripple it toward a psychedelic future already folded into vast ocean-front properties of all time. 

Either way, it was Ernest Hemingway’s birthday. Santiago, the Cuban fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, never gave up. 

How he felt sometimes about his writing. Never give up. Or always. Life of suicide. 

Did Hemingway actually give up? Did Thompson? Did Brautigan? Or did they just need to catch up on some sleep?

Maybe a change of scenery. Live on the moon. All these rich people flying into outer space. All it took was greed, power, and money. Big money. 

Dr. Quick had degrees in astrophysics, mechanical engineering, and paleontology. He spoke four languages fluently, had lived in many different countries growing up and as an adult. He could fix anything and he was in excellent physical condition from Tai Chi and martial arts.

The meteorite ALH84001 from Mars was discovered with fossils of diatoms. Required further investigation. Dr. Quick was intrigued. Rumors in the scientific community that ancient giraffe fossils had been discovered on the moon. 

Quick had been studying the gaping theory in Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species claiming that a horse-like animal converted into a giraffe due to the need to eat from higher tree branches. The Okapi was the ancestor and migrated to feed.

Paleontologists were split into many distinct groups on the theories about the Sivatherius fossils being from giraffes with a trunk like an elephant. Some scientists believed the giraffe came from a Samotherium from the late Miocene era or 14.6 million years ago. 

Dr. Quick had participated in isotope fractionation tests for fossils. Some thought the origins of life could be buried in lava flows on the moon. If a lunar regolith were conducted and organic molecules remained intact, there would be no reason fossils should not be found on the moon. 

Quick had studied the knowledge of the Babylonians, the Nubians, and the Chinese about dark matter and dark energy. His vast computer-like mind held information about gamma ray bursts, cosmic microwave radiation, the Magellanic Cloud, and the Andromeda Galaxy. Quick had flown airplanes, jets, and helicopters for many years. He had worked for NASA and had almost gone to space; he was overqualified if anything. He was just waiting for the next mission.

Dr. Quick arrived in Antarctica to aid in the examination of ALH84001, the Martian meteorite. Temperatures there could reach -129 Fahrenheit, it was 98% ice. It was the coldest, driest, windiest, highest average elevation continent on Earth and still considered a desert. There were no permanent residents. 

The research facility was in an old whaling building on Deception Island. There were glaciers, an active volcano, chinstrap penguins, and fossilized plants. 

The tests conducted there were inconclusive, therefore not considered successful. 

Quick’s next journey would take him to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia to continue his study of the ancestors of the giraffe. He had been there before and had many friends, Mongols, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs. 

Quick believed that the Aepycamelus or giraffe camel of the Gobi was the ancestor he sought, but he required scientific proof. 

The theory that the giraffe came from the Brachiosaurus did not seem realistic to him. 

In Australia he had a message from NASA, a new discovery. With the Keplar Space Telescope, they discovered an Earth-like planet: Keplar 452-b. It revolved around a sun much like ours. NASA wanted Quick to report to the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas as soon as possible. 

Quick notified his crew and they were soon on their way. Quick communicated with NASA in flight, the International Space Center was now fully staffed with six crew members from Japan, Russia, and the United States. 

The success of this mission made the moon mission more viable and important. The moon launch was now being moved forward due to the discovery of Keplar 452-b. 

The settlement was planned for one of three places: the Imbrium, Nectaris, or Serenitatis basins. That would be determined upon a closer inspection of the moon’s surface. 

On Quick’s last visit to the Johnson Space Center, he and a team of experts designed the geodesic dome for six months’ habitation on the moon. It would be an icosahedron lattice shell on the surface of a sphere. 

Dr. Quick suggested they use a Buckminster Fuller design of continuous tension and discontinuous compression. With hardly any modifications, two of the six spaceships could be cannibalized into the material necessary for the construction of the dome. The remaining four ships could be fitted to carry the extra twelve crew members back to Earth once the mission was completed. 

Some Washington politicians did not want to fund exploration or the possibility that a space colony could be established on the moon. Others wanted to send unmanned spacecraft to Pluto and Mars, which would do nothing to alleviate overpopulation. 

NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. had leaked it to the press that they had received two donated telescopes that were superior in every way to the Hubble Space Telescope, and they were being kept in storage. Quick suggested they take them both to the moon and place them temporarily or permanently to investigate and research the galaxy.

Blast-off was scheduled from Japan, Russia, China, the United States, England, and France. The thirty-six astronauts chosen were highly educated in diverse scientific ways. 

Dr. Quick was chosen second in command of the Americans. 

Just before the launch, Quick heard that his science fiction adventure manuscript was being made into a big budget movie. 

The six moon landings were all perfect touchdowns. 

The Americans and Japanese moved in with the Russians and French. They lived in the four-space craft remaining until the dome was finished. 

Living in the dome was a luxury compared to spacecraft life. Once Quick got situated, he set up the two telescopes they had brought along. 

While anchoring the base of the telescope, he found some unusual rock formations. He carried them back to the dome, and upon further examination, he knew they were fossilized giraffe bones. Quick had been seeking these fossils all over Earth and now finding them on the moon was a most shocking discovery. He thought about his dream and about the script he had written that was now going to be a movie. 

The alien giraffes, Glorft and Guzal, looked down at the moon dome from their invisible cloaked spaceship. They spoke to each other telepathically.

“Should we let our human-looking son, Qetazq, know for sure about us?” 

“I think not, he could probably manage it, especially since you’ve been sending him dreams. But the rest of Earth is not ready for our advanced technology.” He paused. “Or intelligence.” 

Puke Graveyard

Fog rolled in from the river, enshrouding the graves of the cemetery. The place had grown dilapidated with the new owners, part of a one-stop shop mortician/funeral director/plots franchise that cut corners on the local level as they ratcheted up prices on caskets, wax, makeup and hired mourners. Tombstones tilted at crazy angles, fresh-dug mounds stood abandoned, grass grew tall among the crypts, and empty soda bottles, crushed beer cans, cigarette butts and candy wrappers lay everywhere. 

The Tamarin’s Folly Paranormal Meet-Up group had assembled at the cemetery at 10:30 pm to livestream podcast a Q & A session with the deceased, an idea the group’s founder and leader, self-described Retro-Goth Sandy Etchison, thought up during a coke binge with her lover, Magister Rawhead Hexx, lead singer of a mediocre British black metal band called 777.

The group’s treasurer and resident accountant Ross Seymour picked up the Maglite which he had set down next to the Spirit Box on top of the podcast rig, flicked it on and aimed its strong beam into the fog. “It feels like we’ve crossed a line, and I don’t mean just breaking and entering this time.” 

He stepped carefully around a fallen headstone. “I’ve got bad feelings about this is all I’m saying.”

Sandy rolled her eyes, one green and one a robot silver contact, a nod to Marilyn Manson. “Your bad feelings are bad news, ‘Ross the Boss.’ And you’re wrong. This isn’t about corpse desecration or any dumbass shit like that, so don’t start up again preaching to me about what would Jesus do…and if we raise the dead, that’s exactly what Jesus would do. This is purely for science. Well, that, and a bit of fun besides.” 

She set the Spirit Box down on the foldout table that held the podcast mixer box. “For the first time ever, we are going to livestream conversations with the dead. Connect with disembodied souls. Q&A with the departed.‘Who knows what secrets they might have to share?’ Or some bullshit like that.”

Ross shook his head in irritation. 

“That’s not what you told me before. Ever since I joined the Paranormal Meet-Up, we’ve been up and down these crazy-ass roads. So many shocking sojourns. We’ve crashed funerals and terrified grieving loved ones. We’ve burst in on working morticians, video-bombed autopsies, just so you could get your ‘documentary footage.’ You keep repeating ‘there are no limits’ like Clive Barker was, I don’t know, the Pope. But you’ve gone quite beyond that.”

“Beyond? What do you mean? Those are legit enterprises. And don’t say you didn’t enjoy the mortician shenanigans. That pretty stiff with the big tits. Admit it, you got wood.”

Ross frowned and shook his head, too mad to speak.

“Well I think Clive was right, I mean back in the day at least, he was better than the Pope. Absolutely Splatterpunk rules. No limits. No mercy. No remorse.”

“But surely you would draw the line at, say, graphic sexual violence against children and animals….right?”

Sandy blinked rapidly three times. 

“Right?”

“I guess. Shit, I don’t know. Never say never. I think that sometimes there is a place for graphic sexual violence against every fucking thing. If it’s fuckable, you cram its holes with cream and keep on going. If you run out of holes, you make new ones.” She lifted her eyebrows. “Don’t judge, dude. You of all people are hardly in the position to hold the moral high ground.”

Ross sputtered with indignation. “B-but that’s MONSTROUS.”

Sandy snorted. “Dude, I’m just KIDDING! Wait, you seriously thought I would go down that road? I may be depraved, but I’m not that…well…ya know some of these little bearzy weresies are hella cute. Wouldn’t mind…” She made an obscene gesture.

Ross threw his hands up. “It’s utterly unconscionable what you’ve made me do. I don’t know why I’m still here.” 

“I don’t know,” said Sandy. “Why are you still here?”

“Death isn’t something to be exploited for views or clout or whatever. It’s a somber thing. Sacred even. And what’s even up with the party favors and the alcohol?”

Randall and Ross’s eyes met. Randall had his own history with Sandy. They’d recently broken up, and now Sandy was with the British metal vocalist. He was only there because she was so technically inept the podcast would implode if left entirely in her hands.

“The fuck is your problem, dude?” Sandy rolled her fingers through her choppy 80s punk rock-styled candy pink hair. “I mean yeah, we did bring a twelve-pack, some doobage, some ice, mushies, what-evs. We can do both. We will do it all, man. Hard work is thirsty work. And it’s not like the ghosts are going to complain.”

“That’s not the fucking point.”

“That is all of the points,” Sandy said, shrugging her shoulders. “Seriously, muh dude, you need to stop with the passive-aggressive bullshit. You never help, you’re always late, you always complain, we’re all still wondering what happened to those funds we earmarked for the Operation Live Organ Harvest podcast…as our treasurer, you must have at least some idea..and now…just look at you. Look at you. You’re fucking pathetic. Go home. No, before you go, I actually have a suggestion.”

“What is it?”

“I got a coupon for razors. You know those 100 razor pack jobbers? I’ll even throw in a couple of bucks. Now what you do, if you really want to do the thing right, remember…”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this. You’re literally Lucifer in the flesh. Toying with me. You’re like something out of the Marquis De Sade. You’re wicked, beyond simply immoral.”

“Ahem, excuse me, but you’re not allowing me to finish my sentence.”

“What did you want to say? What could you possibly have to say to me at this point?” Ross’s voice was beginning to crack. 

“Remember, it’s across the street, not down the block.” She mimed sliding a razor horizontally across her wrist. “You slice the radial artery, bleed out. Take some blood thinners, lie in warm bath. Get the job done, George.”

Ross gasped. Sandy turned her back on him.

“Wow, just wow,” said Ross, a catch in his voice. A single tear slid down his cheek. “This is what you say to someone you know has clinical depression and CPTSD? Have you no shame? I can’t believe you’re still accusing me of embezzlement. I told you it was an accounting error. We never had those funds in the first place. I went over the books in granular detail.”

Sandy’s middle finger shot up. “Whatever, dude. In the words of the immortal Nancy Downs, ‘Punk rock, let’s go.’”

Randall Spaulding, a burly muscular cameraman sporting a throwback mullet, checked the light, then his watch. “Enough drama-lama already guys. We’re going live in 15 minutes, right Sandy?” 

Bill Martini, the group’s slightly pudgy podcast scriptwriter and planner, swept his fingers through his long, wavy reddish-blond hair and brought up the document he’d created for the cemetery livestream on his phone. “We-” he started to say before Sandy cut him off.

“Right, I just want to go over a few things. We can make it half an hour, 45 minutes. It’s not like anybody’s going anywhere. Particularly them.” She glanced around at the tombs, paused and then filled the uncomfortable silence with a bray of laughter at her own wit.

“So everybody knows how the Spirit Box works? It’s like a radio, is in fact a radio, but one that’s continuously scanning. It also records EVP, electronic voice phenomena. What we’re listening for and looking for is the white noise. That’s the channel they communicate through. 

“They being the dead people,” she added after a pause. 

Nobody spoke.

She turned on the machine. The inset window scrolled through channels. At first  nothing, then a burst of static. Scattered words from a broadcast. A scrap of music, “Psycho Circus” by Kiss.

“It needs to warm up,” she said. “Establish a baseline, like that.”

“‘We’re in the Psy…’” The Spirit Box squawked. Sonic squiggles. Dead air.  Then a loud crackling noise, followed by a low, barely audible male voice.

“Hel-”

Silence again. 

“What was that?” asked Bobby Lansdale, who was working sound for the podcast. The jock of the crew, he was a former high school fullback and now devoted most of his time to studying audio engineering at the local JC. “Who’s there?”

“Hell…”

Crackle of static. 

Much louder: “Hell is here.”

“Holy shit, I do not like the sound of that,” said Bobby. “Not at all.”

Sandy plucked a clove cigarette from a fresh pack and fired it up. “Personally I think it’s very fucking cool,” she said, exhaling with a tubercular cough. 

Bill’s phone buzzed. “Hold on, I just got an alert…Fuck!!!”

“What happened?”

“There’s been some kind of toxic waste leak over at Romero Chemical, across the river.  And it’s got into the water. It’s gotten into the fog…”

“Oh come on,” said Sandy. “Next you’re gonna say the toxic waste will bring the dead to life. No, I say that shit is silly. We need to calm down and regroup here.”

“I’m dead serious,” said Bill. “And look, you can see the fog is changing color…”

“Maybe we need to shut this down right now,” said Bobby. “I don’t mean because cemetery and, I don’t know, maybe zombies? I mean we could get sick. Seriously sick.”

“We could legit die,” pouted Ross.

“Oh for fuck’s sakes, stop being a bunch of pussies. Do you not see the golden opportunity Satan just presented to us on a silver platter?” 

Sandy giggled, cleared her throat of phlegm, spat a yellow wad on the ground and took another drag at the clove. “We’re at ground zero for a potential reanimation scenario, we’ve got the equipment, we can livestream this shit, party with the dead like it’s 1985 all over again. Hell, party till we puke. Hey, can we get some tuneage up in this bish?”

“You’re insane,” said Ross. “No moral compass whatsoever.”

“Fuck off and die.”

The fog intensified. Sandy whipped out her phone, scrolled through her saved jams. “Her Ghost in the Fog” by Cradle of Filth blared out into the night through the Bluetooth speakers they’d set up for the podcast. 

“The Moon, she hangs like a cruel portrait,” screeched Dani Filth. “Soft winds whisper the bidding of trees, as this tragedy starts with a shattered glass heart.”

“Now that’s what I’m talking about,” she said, throwing up the metal horns and wiggling her ass. “Shattered glass heart, motherfuckers! That’s some dark poetry right there. That’s art, baby! Did you know Dani holds two Master’s degrees in English Literature? He’s a modern-day Byron.”

“He’s a modern day Bozo the Clown,” said Ross. “Seriously though, let’s go home. Which way is the van?”

“No idea, Shaggy. I mean, you’re not going home anyway. None of us are. Oh c’mon, stop sulking.” She pushed her fingers against his lips, “C’mon guv, give us a smile then,” she said, mimicking her boyfriend’s bad imitation of a Victorian era Cockney whore. 

Ross plucked her fingers from his face and pushed her hand away.

“Ok fine, be that way. Sandy bent down, ripped open the case of beers and chugged one down. “It’s time to par–tay” she hollered. “Whoot!!!”

“You’re not right,” said Ross. He picked up the Maglite again and headed off blindly into the fog.

“Fuck yeah I’m not right,” said Sandy. “I’m a wrong one, innit. Go on, take your whiny embezzling ass outta here.”

A few seconds later, she made a face and spit out her beer. “Fuuuck. There’s something wrong with this brew. It tastes like shit.” She wiped her face with the back of her hand. “Roach spray or something.”

Suddenly Sandy’s fingers started to twitch. She began to spasm violently. Spittle formed on her lips and a line of thin acid green drool rolled down her cheek. She dropped the beer and held her stomach tight. “You guys might want to…step back a bit, I feel like L-l-inda Blair over here.”

“We’re co–” squawked the Spirit Box.

“What did you say?” asked Bobby. “Is this a direct communication from the dead?”

“We’re not…d-doing the p-podcast any more, fuck’s sakes…” said Sandy. “I am not feeling well!!!” she yowled.

Randall lifted the camera. “I say we film it,” he said. “I say we go live.”

“Oh my fucking God, what’s hap-pening to me,” said Sandy. One side of her mouth sagged as more foam bubbled from her lips and dripped down across her cheeks. She bent over and sprayed one of the older, cracked headstones. Chunky green slime slid down the final resting place of one Umberto Fulci, dead 50 years. She heaved, groaned and unleashed on Fulci once again.

“We’re coming up” squawked the Spirit Box, as did Sandy’s lunch. 

Randall stabbed the “record” button on the podcast rig. Youtube viewers watched Sandy spew in extreme close-up, like a slobbering barfzarro version of The Blair Witch Project. Her body shook with uncontrollable violent tremors, her head shaking from side to side. 

“Neuro toxins from the waste,” said Randall thoughtfully. “Psycho toxins, to be specific. I think maybe that’s what’s happening here. There was an environmental impact study on it a few years ago…it’s been steadily seeping into the groundwater…but that got shut down by Romero Chemical with a quickness. Sandy’s got a bad reaction.”

“Y-ya-ya think?” said Sandy, swatting at Randall like a cat. Randall dodged her clumsy blows.

“The toxins are everywhere. In the air, in the fog, in the water, in the ground, in the corpses. We are seriously fucked.” He paused. “Imma catch this all on video though. If we survive this thing, which is highly unlikely due to the unfolding critical situation, we’ll be totes internet famous. If we don’t, we’ll be totes internet famous too.”

Bobby placed a microphone on the ground, connecting it to the portable sound rig. He stumbled over the wires.

“Ser–” sputtered the Spirit Box. “Fucked,” a deeper voice growled, cutting in.

A yellow-green foam crested on top of the growing pool of Sandy’s upchuck, as a fissure in the earth cracked open. A skeletal hand with flaking vomit-slimed, blackened skin shot forth from the fissure and grabbed Randall by the ankle. Youtube viewers saw the camera lurch crazily.

“Oh my fucking God, zombies!” he screamed. 

The zombie reared up out of the ground, eyes dank maggot-laden pits, face mostly eaten away, and advanced on Randall, who vainly attempted to keep filming. He stepped back and caught his heel on one of the fallen tombstones. Staggering, he tried to right himself, but fell backwards onto the grass.

More zombies began to claw their way out of the earth. Shambolic steps propelled them forward as the toxin-laden fog rolled in. They grabbed hold of Randall and began to rend him limb from limb. Blood from his slashed severed carotid jetted onto Sandy’s spew. His arms and legs spasmed until finally he lay still.

Sandy’s eyes clouded. She staggered, walking blindly through the fog, arms thrust in front of her. 

“Bill, pick up the camera,” came a voice from the fog. 

The Maglite’s beam cut through, revealing Ross’s face. He was holding a paper bag in his other hand. He set the Maglite down.

Bill hesitated.

“I said, pick up the fucking camera!”

Ross pulled a .45 from the paper bag.

“Dude, oh no,” said Bill. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Ultimate mash-up. R. Budd Dwyer meets Christine Chubbock meets Return of the Living Dead meets my revenge against a hateful hipster bitch. This will make internet history. They’ll call me the Andy Warhol of true gore. A fucking visionary. You gotta keep filming, man.”

With trembling hands, Bill picked up the camera.

“Good boy. Now where was I. This is Ross Seymour livestreaming to you from the site of the zombie massacre at Carver’s Folly Cemetery. This moment will never be repeated. What we are witnessing is the reanimation of the dead via toxic waste spill at Romero Chemical. The waste has leaked into the river, it’s gotten into the fog. Bill, I want you to turn the camera on that lying cunt. Keep your hands steady, man.”

“Wh-what?”

The zombies advanced towards them. The Youtube feed bobbed up and down as Bill tried to keep away from the walking dead and continue to film.

“Turn the camera on the perfidious whore. The Jezebel. The little snake.”

“But she’s sick! We’re all sick from the t-t-tox–” The zombies grabbed his legs and Bill went down, cut off mid-sentence as he smashed his head against a tombstone. 

The camera rolled out of his hands. The zombies continued to bash Bill’s head against the marble until his skull cracked open. His eyeballs rolled out on their optic cords, smacking against the tomb as they ripped free from his brain. Blood splashed against the stone and dripped down over the name and dates. The zombies shoved brains into their ravenous rotting mouths, drooling and gibbering.

“Bobby, pick up the camera. We need continuous coverage. May I remind you this is live. The whole-ass internet is watching.”

“Oh my fucking God dude you are crazier than Sandy. We need to get to the van and get away from the zombies. We’re all going to die.”

“Yes, we’re all going to die one way or another. The question is, how? Do we do it righteously, artistically, memorably, with clout? Will our deaths reside forever on the dark web as a shining example of Splatterpunk for real? I say yes. I say fuck yes. Where’s the bitch?”

Sandy suddenly rose up from behind a tomb, yellow-green foam flecking her lips and dribbling down her nerve-damaged face. Her lower lip skewed sideways as she opened her mouth wide and projectile-vomited toward the zombies eating Bill’s brains. The glowing vomit mixed with the blood, slime and brain goo on the ground, forming little mounds–in the hills, something shitty. 

The zombies began to jitter and shake more violently as the psycho toxins from the waste ate into what was left of their nervous systems. Then they too vomited, spraying the ground with luminous chunks.

As the zombies retched and spewed, the rainbow-yawned mass rippled and moved. 

Then it moved again. 

Pieces of the putrid sick began to wriggle like worms, separating from the mass, as the toxic waste infused it with an awful vigor. Incorporating Bill’s eyes, one of the chunks-worms lifted up from the ground and twisted around like a detective assessing a crime scene. 

“Look at that!” Bobby burst out. “The vom is alive! And it’s got Bill’s eyes!”

“Yes, yes,” said Ross. “It’s alive, it’s alive, Colin Clive, etc. It’s a vom-zom. Film the cunt first though. Film our Auntie Crust Superstar.”

Bobby trained the camera on Sandy, who advanced towards the lens. “Okay, now what?”

“This is what,” said Ross. He pointed and aimed, a dead shot at her forehead.

“What the fuck, man…what are you doing? She’s not dead. She’s not dead, dude!!!”

“She is now,” his tone of voice eerily calm. He pulled the trigger and the top of Sandy’s head exploded into a cloud of pink mist. 

“Oh Jesus…” Bobby sobbed, struggling to keep Sandy in the shot.

Blood drooled down her cheek, mingling with vomit flecks that resembled lumps of oatmeal stirred with egg yolk. Pieces of brain, skull bits and a shredded mass of hair rained down to rest among the shards of malt liquor bottles and used condoms littering the overgrown grass between the graves.

Bobby bent over and began to blow chunks, bringing the camera down as he did. 

“Mercy killing,” said Ross. “Coup de grace. Bitch was bad news. But where was I? Dude, you gotta keep it together. Continuity, remember? Get that camera up. Up up up like a hot chick just peeled down to her bustier and thong underwear for your white ass.”

“I-I-I…”

“Y-y-you are going to focus the camera on me now,” said Ross mockingly. “Ready?”

Bobby raised the camera again and pointed it at Ross as directed.

“And now for the first time, a murder-suicide slash zombie massacre, captured in a podcast livestream. We’ve got the murder part out of the way and the zombie massacre is in progress, now for the suicide. Ahem. One moment please.” Kicking away zombies with his Doc Martens, he opened his mouth and closed it on the .45. 

Ross fired, blowing out the back of his head. Blood geysered into the air. He staggered in a circle like a drunk mosher, twitching and jerking, before collapsing against a tombstone and slip-sliding down to the ground. The gun slipped from between his fingers.

After a few moments Sandy rose to her feet and advanced on Ross’s fresh corpse. She knelt and dug into his skull, scooping out his glistening brains, then began to roll the brains between her fingers like dough, bringing it to her lips. She licked them, drool running down her cheeks, before cramming her mouth with his sloppy gray matter. 

Bobby set the camera down on the table with the podcast rig and the Spirit Box and made a dash for the .45. 

Sandy dropped her feast and began to shamble rapidly towards Bobby. He picked up the gun, aimed at Sandy and squeezed the trigger. The rest of her skull exploded in a spray of blood and brain sludge.

As the other zombies moved in towards him, Bobby examined the gun,  turned it over, pointed it experimentally at the ravening dead, then pressed it to his right temple. 

“Well, here goes nothing,” he said with a crazed grin. And fired.

The zombies feasted on the fallen bodies, alternately eating and vomiting like undead bulimics. 

The growing pools of vomit fused together. The vomit began to form human shapes, golems of irradiated emesis, as the resting camera recorded the birth of the cruel–unholy creations never seen before.

Legs formed, then torsos which sprouted arms. Necks jutted up and grew heads. Entire organ systems threaded themselves together from chunks, replicating stomachs, nervous systems, brains, adding to the exquisitely depraved corpus. 

The vom-zombies in turn bent to the earth, sipping at the font of the sloppy muck that formed them, regurgitating spew unto the seventh generation and then some, as that vomit rose and made bodies of its own ad infinitem.

The corpse-zombies attacked their new-minted brethren, and the slamdance macabre morphed into a vomit-worm ouroboros machine. Corpse-zombies fed on their abjected vomitous selves, while the vom-dead devoured pieces of the chunky matrix that spawned them.

Vom-zombies fucked corpse-zombies, giving rise to hideous irradiated hybrids that burst out of rotten wombs only to be devoured in their turn. 

At last all were subsumed into one indistinguishable, slimy shuddering mass, images of nightmare fuel for viral viewers now numbering in the thousands.

The podcast was tagged as the ultimate gore mixtape, downloaded and shared in the death hag community. Edited versions were mixed into random TikTok videos for a surprise burst of splattery goodness. 

By the time Youtube took it offline three hours later, the podcast had been uploaded to the dark web in six different cuts. Ross was hailed as an artistic genius–as one commenter dubbed him, “the Andy Warhol of true gore.”

Bring Me the Head of Hunter S. Thompson

Reynaldo, the World’s Smallest Circus Bear, knew by a hair’s-breadth presentiment whenever she was about to ring him up. There was a certain warm, giddiness-inducin pulse on the other side of the call that signified one name and one name only: Gaga.

“Caught in a bear romance” blared from his circus-bear customized smartphone, with subliminals meant to curdle brains of eavesdropping FBI agents through the use of a sophisticated encryption system Reynaldo himself had conceived with the help of the LucasFilm people. 

“Rey Rey here,” he said. Only Gaga was privileged to employ the sole nickname he allowed anyone to use. They’d had each other’s back for many years, and their friendship had even survived the whirlwind courtship and devastating breakup on the Spanish island of Ibiza, only a few hundred yards from the site of Nico’s death in a Bizarro bicycling accident.

“You miss her too, huh,” Gaga had said, her words trailing off.

“To be honest, I never really knew her,” said the bear wistfully. He was speaking partially of Nico, of course, but he could have been talking about himself. The whole thing had gone by in a blur, on an alternate timeline. Reynaldo once researched bear lifespans and found to his astonishment that his had somehow expanded 30 years past the demise of 99.9% of bears–except, of course, for the fabled ‘Bear Methusaleh’ of lore and legend–and the fact that he had actually known the deep-voiced Teutonic actress/singer/vampire pussybat during his undergraduate years at Brown (Bear) U. was something he simply accepted the way he accepted the fact that he could juggle chainsaws while negotiating a unicycle over a sometimes Nietzschean abyss. 

He wasn’t about to swap out this timeline for another that, however more ‘normal,’ and lacking in danger, was sheer Snoozeville. Reynaldo wasn’t a risk-averse bear; in fact it was precisely that sterner stuff of which his particular flesh was heir that led to his longtime interstectine departmental war. 

The Company had employed Gaga off and on since her debut, after they groomed her as a Julliard student, the same way they’d done Conan O’ Brien and countless others. She was flattered that the spooks believed the Germanottas were on the data dotta as far as having certain interspecies psychic mindlink skills, which was how she first encountered Reynaldo. 

“I just got the call,” Germanotta said. The tension in her voice was poignant to Reynaldo, who’d known her in happier, simpler times and climes where/when the two cavorted like primal woman and bear, he sporting an enormous red chub, her nude except for her LED-enhanced mirror shades. 

“Steadman?”

“Y-yes. And he sounded…”

“He sounded in a bad way. I know.”

“You always know, Reynaldo!” She sounded like a petulant Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

“Because a smol bear is an ordained magus in Thee Order Ov Unholy Flesh.”

“Well so am I, but my esp powers aren’t quite as developed as yours,” Stephanie said after a thoughtful pause. Or she had nodded off thinking of Nico and the lovely French language.

“If Nico hadn’t been an Amazon style Germanic blonde femme fatale, she would have reminded me of a young boy,” was what Reynaldo decidedly did not say. “Anyway the Russians want to derail this precise conversation, and where the Russians are, MK-Ultra can’t be far behind.”

“Just fuck that Zander creep,” said Gaga. “He kept calling me, wanted to interview me for that stupid magazine of his. So I consulted with Willem Dafoe. Willem told me to charge him. Now Zander’s gotten a second mortgage so he can get a loan to pay me for the interview, and I fucking told his dumb ass…”

“Gaga, focus, dammit. Look into my eyes and see who I am.”

“Lucifer, obvs, but ok, I see what you’re saying. Yes, Steadman was in a panic. Some Russian gazillionaire had Thompson’s head stolen. Again.”

“Dammit to hell,” burst out Reynaldo. “And I had a golf date with Bull Clownton. Hold on, I need to tell my secretary.” Reynaldo terminated the call, then texted an message to a well-worn address.

Ten Hours Later, FBI Field Office, Detroit, Michigan 

Special Agent Lance Johnson had folded himself into several idiotic shapes examining the security footage. What sort of game was that bear or bearlike individual playing now? Everybody knew that Hunter Stockton Thompson had had himself…or the particulate matters of pure gonzo fiction that remained…shot out of a duo-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button. There was no whole head to have brought in a diplomatic pouch to a Russian gobsmackillionaire anyway. But he suspected that half the time Reynaldo and his pal Germanotta were up to metafictional shenans. At least, that’s what his instincts told him. Of course, his instincts were mostly wrong as shit.

“Let’s scramble some breakfast choppers aaaaand…” Johnson was on the nod again, drool-drilling himself into epic widescreen dreams of motorboating Nico like a madman while she slurred the words to “All Tomorrow’s Parties” in his ear as she transformed into a genetically modified vampire pussy bat.

Reynaldo, the World’s Smolest Circus Bear, fortified compound, Taos, New Mexico 

“So what did you discover?” asked Reynaldo after an eternity.

“I think Hunter’s brain is fucking with us,” she said, snort-laughing. 

“I would tend to agree,” said Reynaldo. “He’s good at that. I think that’s why we got along so well. Simpler, purer, less complicated times. Oh Gaga…”

“Oh, bear…the unbearable hotness of your being a smol circus beast who exploits himself for hard cash…”

“I’ve performed before royalty and reeking New Orleans gutterpunks alike,” said Reynaldo, his smol, furry body suddenly shaking with sobs as he realized that his youth would never return. “Hunter knew exactly what was about to happen to our world after 9/11, which was why…”

“Why he had himself cloned by German doctors,” said Germanotta, completing Reynaldo’s sentence.

“I miss the fuck out of Nico,” said Reynaldo. “Yes, she was an asshole, but she was OUR asshole, you know? She cared about nothing but her dripping black candles and turning her skin all butter n’ creamy soft from soaking in the dark tub all day…wrinkled as she was, she was our bitch.”

“I’m a free bitch, baby,” said Gaga. “And I choose domination by my favorite circus bear.”

“The world’s smolest,” said Reynaldo with a grin.

“Indeed, love, you make me weak in the knees.” Her phone buzzed. “Sorry, I need to take this,” she said. 

“Hello, Beyonce? What’s shackalackeling, baby? I’m here with Smol Bear…oh, you got the call from Steadman too? Yeah, I agree, he needs to get out more. Hunter S. Thompson is dead. Long live Hunter S. Thompson, his clones, his brains, Nico Pussybat in her various incarnations…”

From somewhere in the far distance they heard the sound of a harmonium and a wet, queefy sound approximating a Germanic accent in bubblin’ tones. 

“Thees song was Jeeem Morrison’s favorite song…eet’s called ‘Thee Ent.'”

THEE ENT

Meat the Messiah: s01e06 – The One with Tyler Durden

bukowski and elvis are in a bar, drinking turpentine. there is no laughter or small talk. there is only the sound of liquid swallows, the occasional belch, and the slow ooze of a languid jukebox.

the phone rings like a fire alarm and startles a few people who are alert enough to react.

bartender: hank? hank bukowski?

bukowski: what.

bartender: phone.

bukowski: fine.

he puts the phone to his ear.

tyler durden: hank. i need to tell you the story of the wafflehouse at the end of the world.

bukowski: make it quick.

tyler durden: the waffle house was empty save for ross from friends, margaret (the waitress), and demetri (the cook). ross sat at their old booth, on this last day of earth. margaret approached, ‘haven’t seen you in years.’ ross said that it was too painful to come back here. ‘can i get you some coffee?’ ross heard gunshots off in the distance. no sirens. monica walked in, 67 years old, dressed like hitler. she walked over and sat across from ross. ross said, ‘i thought you would ditch the getup for the last day.’ monica said, ‘this is who i am now.’ he said, ‘but we’re jewish! is this some sort of commentary on how wealthy jews disproportionately support the genocide in gaza?’ she frowned, ‘no… he likes it when i’m hitler.’ then it was ross’s turn to frown, ‘oh you had to bring him up. that’s just great.’ ‘ross, you need to get over it.’ the waitress came back for their orders. ross said, ‘i’m not hungry anymore,’ and left. ‘don’t ruin the last day, ross!’ she shouted after him to no avail. rachel/hitler looked at the waitress, who didn’t seem to care she was dressed as hitler. ‘can i ask you something? why did you come into work today?’

‘waffle house never closes.’

bulowski: i’ve heard that one before, asshole!

he hangs up the phone.

***commercial break***

in yellow font the title text reads 50 romantic classics, while schmaltzy orchestrations play and song titles scroll up the screen, with vasseline-smeared footage of sunsets and a happy couple walking along an idyllic beach in the background.

the most romantic music you have ever heard, sure to rekindle any romance. fall in love all over again with 50 romantic classics. glide across the room with her, dancing on a river of silk. you are still the most beautiful people of your high school class, some 40 years later. sure she’s fucking the gardener and you inflict your hatred of women onto your employees, particularly your secretary, who has endured your leering and gropes and dismissals for years. she lives alone in an efficiency apartment with one cat. she would prefer a dog, but she couldn’t maintain a dog with the hours you make her work. edna is her name and you call her eddy, despite the fact that she despises that nickname and hasn’t told you that for fear of reprisal. she had dreams of moving to the big city and meeting meet another lesbian to spend her life with, but you never paid her enough to save up. in two years she will die of an aneurysm and you will not go to her funeral. but none of that matters with 50 romantic classics. you’ll feel the divorce papers melt away with this carefully curated selection of only the most romantic songs. 

***

the smoke at the bar hangs low. ever since the death of the wind machine, the smog doesn’t seem to go anywhere. elvis and bukowski drink in silence. the bar phone splits the silence again.

bartender: hello? …is there an elvis here?

elvis costello: which one?

bartender: presley

elvis: yeah man.

tyler durden: pov: you’re staring down the length of the limo’s interior. you look over at your studio-mandated wife and finish your watered down scotch. you know you’ve never brought her to climax and you see the flashbulbs through the tinted window. it’s showtime and you both put on your public faces. the door opens a flood of light hits your eye. you accept it with grace. your every move is hypnosis, well practiced and gilded. you step on the red carpet to a storm of bulbs. you smile and your teeth shine back like high beams on a country road. you take your wife’s hand, knowing your hands are clammy. you can feel her slightly recoil from your touch, but not in way that’s visible, because she’s a pro and you’re a pro, and you go out there and turn on the charm.

interviewer: in this fast paced modern world, how do you stay so fit?

you: i eat healthy and have lots of sex with this hottie right here.

interviewer: who are you wearing?

you: kmart tuxedos.

(everyone laughs because kmart is for poor people.)

interviewer: when are you and your wife going to be in a movie together?

you: there’s something in the works. stay tuned. think eyes wide shut but sexy.

you move inside and watch the movie you’re in and it’s awful. just agonizing slop. you don’t care. you already got paid. you’re the biggest actor in hollywood and this will make a billion at the box office easy. the limo drops your wife off at her house before dropping you off at your house. you don’t have the energy for after parties tonight. waiting behind the bush is the ceo of kmart and he smashes you in the face with a morning star spiked mace, then runs off into the night. half your jaw is gone and you lay in your driveway breathing bloody foam–no one around to help. before you pass out, you let out this plaintive prayer:

dear lord,

what is the weekend? everybody’s so mean.

elvis: i don’t get the point of this.

***commercial break***

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***

at the bar, the smoke is so thick, there’s 3 foot visibility. bukowski’s on his 11th whiskey; elvis on his 9th.

bukowski: if that asshole calls again, i’m gonna kick his ass.

elvis: i think he’d like that.

the phone rings again. the bartender answers. he says this call is for everyone at the bar and puts it on speakerphone.

tyler durden: marty shambles, author of MEAT THE MESSIAH, is fabulously wealthy from all of his book sales, and lives in beverly hills. we sat down with him in his palatial home to talk about his work, his life, and what the heck makes him tick.

rolling stone: your book has been described as a self-indulgent heap of filth. what do you say to these detractors?

marty shambles (field dressing a dear in his drawing room, pauses to show his coffee mug that reads world’s best author): you think amazon would sell that to anybody?

rs: right wingers hate you because they say you’re woke. left wingers hate you because they think you’re a racist.

ms (posing for a portrait with regal stature): no matter who hates me, i support the immortal science of marxism-leninism.

rs: what about mao?

ms: who?

rs: what’s your next book?

ms (mixing himself a cocktail of morphine and dextromethorphan): i’m thinking a sequel to the great gatsby where gatsby’s manor is haunted by all the ghosts of the booming 20s. gatsby has huge ghost parties every night, hoping daisy will return.

rs: that sounds awful.

ms (girating to a spicy latin rhythm): thanks.

bukowski: you son of a bitch! i will end you!!!

credits roll.

***

Marty Shambles

Marty Shambles

Marty Shambles

Marty Shambles

Marty Shambles

Marty Shambles

Pussypower Reloaded: A Fucked-Up Fairy Tale

Princess Cherrypop idly pet her pussy by the side of the River of Sparkling Goodness, fantasizing about the day a charming, handsome prince would appear before her, offering to chastly marry her and. carry her to his palace where extremely vanilla proceedings would take place and little to none of the “kink,” except for perhaps a mild spanking. 

“Oh Twatzapooner,” she cried, youthful tears spilling down her cheeks,” my heart yearns for him. When will he hear my pleas, and manifest my desire?”

But answer came there none. Instead, an eyebird came and began to peck at the berries of a Broomjumb tree that went up and up almost beyond the visible, with its top plunged through a labial fold in the clouds…which vaguely reminded her of something.

“Twatzapooner will never hear you, I can assure you, my pretty,” boomed a dark, oily and evil voice within her head. It seemed to expand and expand, the pressure awful and enormous, and every word like a knife stabbing her brain. Cherrypop screamed. 

“What do you WANT with me, Nair? I’ve never troubled you in the slightest!!! Why must you be so CRUEL to me, you heatless…words that rhyme with other words disallowed me by decree of my father, King Hubert Longwood XII, King of Euphoria?”

The Baroness Cuntingham, Queen of Nair, then laughed, and the laugh was hideous, and the knives redoubled with stabbing frenzy, and the Princess Cherrypop wished for death.

She wished to be felled on the spot by the ax of a stray woodsman, specifically, the pain was so bad.

Suddenly she heard the voice of the goddess Twatzapooner herself inside her head, masking Nair’s.

“My dear Princess Cherrypop, do not fear, my child. I will requite your faith in me. Do but use the pussypower I have invested in the maternal line of the royal lineage of the Kingdom of Euphoria from time immemorial. Remember, that is the power that Baroness Cuttingham, Queen of Nair, wishes to take from you, by force if necessary.”

“I know it well, dear Twatzapooner…I know her plans too well!” cried the princess. “She has sent many a gremlin with cutting tools to excise my precious pussy; she has sent bands of awful mutated beasts to drag me off into the woods. She has bound me and stopped me my mouth with plugs of rubber–a sensation not unpleasurable, which didst cause me pussysquirt. But what she wishes, I cannot provide.”

“I cannot provide this either, child,” said Twatzapooner, manifesting beside the princess beside the River. She was wearing a puffy pink dress that followed the divine camel lips, a crown inset with diamonds, a pink leather bustier and a d-ring, and long pink leather gloves. “I am bound by the same laws as thee, and all the other creatures within my domain. For it is well said that even the gods cannot subvene where law exists. 

“It pains me much that the only means I have available to rescue you from your plight–the stabbing of the dreaded Raven’s Claw weapon wielded by Nair, by Cuntingham, is to indeed summon the aid of the woodsman, Rudolpho.” She waved her wand and instantly by her side appeared the woodsman, Rudolpho.

Unfortunately, Rudolpho was of a beastly and brutish cast and understood little, including the skill by which better woodsmen kept their axe blades sharp af. As a consequence, when the goddess Twatzapooner bid him swipe off the princess’s head, it was not in a single smooth motion, but in a ghastly series of whacks that caused her head to sag partially off at the neck. The feeling of the dull ax blade at her neck caused the princess great pain, which, coupled with the stabbing sensations caused by the magical weapon the Raven’s Claw, made things far worse for her.

“Merciful Twatzapooner,” cried the princess, “i am in utter agony the likes of which this young body cannot long endure.” So saying, the princess sagged down, her eyes rolling up towards the back of her head, exposing the whites. Gussets of blood foamed from her neck and spilled from between her lips. She placed her palms together once in supplication, then closed her eyes forever.

Cuntingham screamed. “Twatzapooner, whatever happened to our agreement. the Wednesday Friday Henne Accord?”

“My dear cunting Cuntingham, you must have been at the jubjub juice, because thou makest less than no sense. Why, knowing that my powers are vastly superior to yours insofar as I created you and can snuff you with a thought, do you wish to incur my wrath?”

“Oh piss off, Twatzapooner,” cried Nair. “I”m the new power in Euphoria, and have been for a lon–“

The words had scarce exited her peeling, sore-encrusted lips when a pain of awful dimensions suddenly stabbed deep within her head. 

“How do you like the Raven’s Claw within thine own skull?” chortled Twatzapooner.

“I fucking HATE it,” roared Cuntingham. “Stop these shenanigans immediately! I’m warning you for the…”

But this time the words were stifled immediately. The flesh of her lips sealed in on itself with lightning speed, effectively gagging her. Her throat felt swollen, as though she were choking endlessly and would never be able to eject the foreign object now permanently embedded in her throat. The agony of the Raven’s Claw renewed itself over and over and over, as, beside her, the Princess Cherrypop’s soul left her body and ascended to a heaven as rapturously beautiful and pain-free as the body she had abandoned was full of torture and pain.

Then Nair felt something kick her in the chest like a mule. She tried to clutch at her chest, but the woodsman had returned from the tree he had been hiding behind, shitting himself in terror as he watched the goddesses’ wrath unfurl. With the seat of his britches stained, dripping and smelly from an awful load, his ax-wielding grip was forced to raise the blade against Nair this time. He whacked and he whacked and he whacked, opening up huge bloody wounds in her chest. 

“I wish I could die like that bitch Cherrypop,” thought Nair. 

“WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?” roared Twatzapooner.

“I said…I WISH I COULD JUST…”

With another wave of her want, Twatzapooner silenced Nair’s inner voice. 

It was the worst feeling imaginable. Nair was now twice muted, in pain that rose to a level she had never once experienced in her life. She was beset within and without with excruciating torment, yet due to Twatzapooner’s power she remained terribly conscious, locked within her own head.

“You keep forgetting that the Wednesday Friday Bwak Bwak Bwak Accord was purely a figment of your cuntish imagination,” said Twatzapooner with a girlish giggle. “Now you will spend eternity…or until I release you for good behavior, which you will never be able to achieve due to the state I’ve placed you in…suffering all the hellish cruelties of heaven over and over and over again. Truly it was once said that we are here to hurt each other, and even a goddess must play by the rules ordained since time began. Sucks to be you.”

And with those words, Twatzapooner joined Cherrypop in heaven which was like Euphoria only transcendental and sublime. Twatzapooner gave the Princess the option of returning to Earth in her own form, which she accepted, and within seconds she found herself tumbled once more to the side of her beloved cat, Mimsywroth, who meowed in welcome of her mistress.

From very far away, Cherrypop thought she could hear the sounds of a cuntish Queen screaming. “But then again,” she said to herself, “it’s probably the wind.”

THEES EES THEE ENT

Masquerade

In the hotel bar, he ordered another drink and noticed the woman staring at him.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘You’re him, aren’t you?’

His smile flashed. ‘Only you can answer that,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’m Ethan Latrine. But keep schtum. Don’t fancy getting mobbed tonight.’

‘I knew it.’ She slid her stool closer. ‘What brings you here?’

‘Shooting some scenes. Want a drink?’

‘Vodka tonic,’ she said.

He summoned the bartender. ‘Vodka tonic for the handsome lady. Put it on my tab.’

The bartender nodded. ‘Right away, Mister Latrine.’

‘So,’ he said. ‘What brings you here?’

‘Some boring tech conference,’ she said.

The bartender served the drinks.

‘What’s Vivien Duvet like?’ She took a sip.

He scratched his cleft chin. ‘Total diva. Terrible kisser.’

‘And you’re an expert?’

‘These lips are legendary.’

‘Prove it,’ she said, sliding her foot up his leg.

He grinned. ‘Let’s finish these and go to my room.’

‘I shouldn’t. I’m—’

‘It’s fine.’ He stood to leave. ‘I understand.’

She grabbed his arm. ‘Wait.’ She paused for thought. ‘Okay.’

They drained their drinks and headed down a narrow corridor. At its end stood a dishevelled brown door without a number. He opened it. ‘Ladies first,’ he said.

The room was tiny, cramped with a single bed that sagged in the middle.

‘You’re staying here?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Method actor. My next role’s a hotel housekeeper.’

‘Interesting.’

He sat on the bed and placed his hands on her thighs.

She unbuttoned her blouse, revealing the curves of her breasts, etched with purple stretch marks.

‘Do you think I’m beautiful?’

‘Stunning.’

She lifted her skirt and climbed on top of him. Moments later, his cowboy boots kicked the air as he climaxed with a high-pitched groan.

He lit a cigarette as she perched on the edge of the bed and sobbed into her hands.

‘Was it that bad?’ He blew a smoke ring.

She looked at him. ‘No, it was amazing,’ she said. ‘It’s my life. I wish someone could take me away from it.’

He sat up and took her hand. ‘You’ve got to leave. I’m late for a meeting with Stephen Sodenberg. But give me your number, and I’ll call you.’

‘Promise?’

‘On my mother’s life.’

She kissed him, gave the number, and left.

He cleaned himself with hand sanitiser and returned to the bar.

‘Cerveza, por favor,’ he said, drumming with his fingers.

The bartender smirked. ‘That was quick.’

‘Not my finest hour.’

‘How was she?’

‘Let’s say she won’t be landing any modelling contracts.’

‘You’re a naughty man, Terrence,’ the bartender said. ‘I thought you never shit where you eat? She might stick around.’

‘Two weeks off starting tomorrow,’ Terrence said, raising his beer. ‘By the time I’m back, she’ll be long gone.’

Days later Terrence found himself at a run-down bar far from the city, his body aching from the previous night’s indulgence.

‘One moment,’ the bartender said and gave him a double glance. ‘My God, it’s you.’

His smile flashed. ‘Only you can answer that,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’m Ethan Latrine. But keep schtum. I don’t fancy getting mobbed tonight.’

‘Sign this for me?’ she said, sliding him a napkin.

He pulled out his pen. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Amber.’

‘To Amber, with pleasure. Ethan Latrine.’

She leaned in, her boozy breath mixing with her pungent perfume. ‘I loved you in that serial killer movie.’

‘A Sophisticated British Psycho,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ she whispered into his ear. ‘I fantasise about you a lot.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ He pulled her close and lifted her shirt, revealing her tiny breasts and a Caesarean scar that curved across her toned stomach.

‘Is this a dream?’ she said, biting his neck.

He reached up her skirt and massaged her clitoris. ‘Tell me what you want,’ he said.

She pulled away. ‘Let me freshen up.’

Terrence pressed his fingers to his nose. ‘Smells fresh to me.’

‘Ten minutes. Meet me outside by the bins,’ she said.

She locked the main door and headed out the back. He tucked his erection into his waistband and watched the clock.

Ten minutes later, he stepped into the alley.

Amber leaned over the bin. ‘Come and get me,’ she said.

Terrence felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned to face a human-sized magpie wearing a football shirt. ‘No autographs, friend.’

‘I’m not your friend, anus,’ the mascot said before punching him unconscious.

Terrence woke, tied to a chair in a room littered with garbage. The rancid smell of stale takeaway food mingled with the sweaty air.

‘He’s awake,’ Amber called.

The man in the mascot outfit rushed into the room. ‘About time. Listen up. We’re ransoming you. Play along, and it’ll go as smooth as butter. You namby-pamby actors have insurance coming out of your arse. It’s a victimless crime. And I owe a substantial debt to some dangerous people. Sub… stantial.’

‘You’ve made a big mistake,’ Terrence said.

In a frenzy, the man grabbed his throat. ‘Don’t threaten me, Latrine.’

‘I’m not Ethan Latrine.’

Amber held up a poster of A Sophisticated British Psycho beside his face. ‘Donald, what if he’s telling the truth?’

‘Never trust a damn actor, stupid. They lie for a living.’ Donald loosened his grip.

Terrence’s head sagged forward. ‘Imbeciles,’ he muttered.

‘No, we caught you,’ Amber said.

‘Caught me? Am I some great marlin to you? Speaking of fish, I bet you didn’t tell your boyfriend about our foreplay at the bar. Smell my fingers, Donald. Go on—’

‘I’m his sister, sicko,’ Amber said.

Donald paced the room. ‘Oh, you fingered my sister. I wanted to be professional, but you leave me no choice.’ A sick laugh escaped from his beak. ‘I know what to do with you.’

He left and returned holding bolt cutters. Without hesitation, he snipped off his thumb. Terrence’s delayed reaction erupted into a high-pitched wail.

‘Shut that slag up,’ Donald said.

Amber plucked a stale sock from the clutter and stuffed it into Terrence’s mouth.

‘I’ve got an errand to run,’ Donald said. ‘But I’ll be back. You even look at my sister, I’ll snip off your pork sword and feed it to you.’

Amber picked up a long screwdriver. ‘He won’t try anything.’

Donald rubbed his hands together. ‘This time tomorrow, we’ll be millionaires.’

He left, and Amber shut the door.

Searing pain throbbed in Terrence’s hand as he stared at the ceiling. Of all the bars… How did I end up here? he thought. All the lies, the cons, the women, the shortcuts. God, I should’ve stayed in culinary school.

‘Finally, we’re alone,’ she said. ‘I read in Tinseltown Tattle that you like it rough.’ She ripped his shirt open and yanked his chest hair.

Terrence clenched his jaw and tried to speak.

‘Something to say?’ Amber removed the sock from his mouth.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘I’m not Ethan Latrine.’

She crouched to meet his eyes. Her lips quivered. ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’ she whispered. ‘Donald says I’m stupid. Maybe I am. But not about this.’ She unzipped his trousers and held the screwdriver’s tip to his urethral opening. ‘For every lie, I’ll slide an inch inside.’

‘Wait, okay. I admit it. Let me go. I’ll give you the life you’ve always dreamed of. Don’t you want to be famous?’

‘Don’t mess with my head.’

‘Amber, I can take you far away from here.’

‘Donald says no man’s good enough for me.’ She glanced at the door. ‘But I don’t want to die here alone with him.’

‘Then let’s run away to India together.’

Amber’s eyes lit up. ‘Like in Gone with Love?’

‘Exactly. You’re Marlene, and I’m Winston.’

‘I love that movie,’ she said, waving the screwdriver around. ‘You have enraptured me, heart and soul, and I love, I love, I love you.’

‘Amber, I need you to save me.’

She pressed her nose to his. ‘You and me. Always,’ she said.

Donald barged into the room. ‘Get away from him. You don’t know where he’s been.’ He handed her a video camera. ‘Set this up, stupid.’

Amber screamed and drove the screwdriver into Donald’s temple. He collapsed into a seizure, thrashing in the garbage. She grabbed a cricket bat and hit him across the head, sending a sickening crack through the room.

Terrence stared, frozen in disbelief.

As Amber mashed Donald’s skull, she imagined herself in a glamorous dress, walking the red carpet with Ethan, flashes going off, perfume adverts, and her face on gossip magazine covers.

Terrence shut his eyes, but rhythmic, wet thuds echoed in his ears.

Panting, Amber dropped the bat and pressed play on the dusty CD player. God Only Knows by David Bowie crackled through the speakers.

‘We’ll dance to this at our wedding,’ she said.

Terrence stared at the brain matter on his knee.

Amber, her eyes full of delirium, climbed onto his lap. She caressed his face, leaving behind a streak of crimson. ‘I saved you,’ she said. ‘Our love… it’ll be like a movie.’

***

This and more from Steven Bruce below:

Meat the Messiah: s01e05 – Nevermind the Bullocks

the procession of war dead pulls into the closest emergency room so hulk hogan can get his dick checked.

receptionist: we have a 5 hour wait.

hulk: but i’m famous.

receptionist: oh. well why didn’t you say so? the famous line is about 5 minutes. james woods is in there right now. his vaginachest has a yeast infection.

hulk: are you supposed to tell me that?

receptionist: i can say whatever i want about famous people. that’s the trade-off.

the door opens and james woods comes out wearing a trenchcoat.

woods: thanks, doc. let’s work on that bedside manner, okay? okay. You’re beautiful… hulk hogan, i’m a big fan. we should do lunch sometime. oh this vaginachest? yeah i did this movie in 80s, videodrome, and for one scene i have a vagina in my chest. that’s not a special effect. cronenberg said i needed to go full method on it. so i did. and it’s kept me out of the big leagues since then… that and the vast liberal conspiracy to undermine people of liberty, like myself…

receptionist: the doctor will see you now, hulk.

woods: seriously, hulk, let’s do lunch.

hulk steps through the door to find a blank, white, unnecessarily long hallway.

receptionist: it’s at the end of the hallway.

hulk: thanks brother!

receptionist: i’m a woman.

hulk: i know.

***commercial break***

the last woman on earth goes to a toxic river and washes her hair with herbal essences shampoo, which gives her multiple orgasms.

***

hulk walks down the long, bleachburn white hallway. he hears women snickering, but he can’t see anyone. the sound of footsteps behind him, but nothing’s there. he comes to the end of the hall and walks through the door.

hugh laurie is there in a white coat, with a stethoscope around his neck.

laurie: why does it smell like rotten sausage in here?

hulk: that’s my dangle brother!

laurie: danglebrother? what’s a danglebrother?

hulk: my dick was bit by a bat and now it’s rotting brother!

laurie: dangle… oh i get it now… let’s see this offending member.

hulk removes his spandex to reveal a truly gross dong. i mean puss and maggots, the whole 9. 

laurie: wow dude. that’s disgusting.

one of the dick maggots looks up at them. he speaks in a gravely new york accent.

maggot: do you mind? i’m trying to eat here.

***commercial break***

a grizzled old fuck sits in a chair and smokes a cigarette. he drinks a monster energy. ‘hi, i’m marty shambles, author of MEAT THE MESSIAH, a delightful little romp into the world of american ideology; a delusional mix of humor, horror, and media commentary that’s sure to make you go, what the heck? in this fast paced digital world, it’s hard to get away from the bustle of modern life. books are known to reduce stress and expand the mind. so go to your local bookstore and demand they carry MEAT THE MESSIAH.’ 

***

the maggots do a ragtime chorus performance on the rotting dick. one maggot turns to hugh laurie.

maggot: we’re all big fans, mr. laurie.

laurie: any dick maggot of hulk hogan’s is a dick maggot of mine. call me hugh.

hulk: how’s it look, doc?

laurie: i’m not a doctor, but it looks like we need to cut your dick off.

hulk: can i get a second opinion?

laurie: sure. hey ben! come get a load of this!

benedict cumberbatch comes in from a hidden doorway in the wall.

ben: what’s up?

laurie (gesturing toward the dead dick): what do you think?

ben: ugh, gross! cut that thing off. it fucking stinks!

laurie: well there ya go. gotta cut your dick off. looks like it hasn’t spread to the head, so we could reattach that to the base and you could have a raging half-incher.

hulk: and if i don’t?

laurie: it will spread to the rest of your body and kill you in spectacularly painful and disgusting ways.

hulk: oh brother…

hulk looks at the camera like ‘what am i gonna do?’

freeze frame and credits roll.

***

Marty Shambles

Marty Shambles

Marty Shambles

Marty Shambles

Marty Shambles

Marty Shambles

I Wanna Be Your Dog

How Earl Jackson came to have Cole Hanson’s testicles in his hands wasn’t about passion, as so often is the case. Because rarely does lovemaking involve garrotting your partner’s nuts with baling wire. No, this was about a dog. 

Earl found himself living alone in his mother’s house. That came to pass because of the cancer that took root in her throat and mouth.

“I dipped since I was nine-and-half and ain’t nothing bad ever happened to me,” she repeated like a mantra up until the malignancy spirited away her voice. The entirety of her would follow three months later.

The downtown bungalow was more than a century old, livable but in need of repair. Regrettably, his pay at a local auto parts store was so abysmal that it would have been criminal in most European countries. So instead, the house decayed around him, further fueling his depression.

The malaise that cast over Earl’s spirit fed off his anima and grew similarly to the way the webs of fungal rot did across the floor joists beneath his feet. That was until one night when he saw something lying on the road. 

When Earl first caught a glimpse of it, he couldn’t help but think it looked like a large brown bean. However, beans don’t move on their own.

Further inspection revealed it to be a puppy -far too young to be away from its mother.

Earl took the helpless creature home and bottle-fed it. He would grow up into a pitbull named Remy.

***

Four years passed, and whatever cosmic alchemy holds the human species to the canine took hold with a firm grip. However, all things are temporal, even the love between a man and his dog.

***

Where the pair lived could crassly be called a ‘high crime area’. Though, Earl had never been the victim of it. This was especially true with the sharp ears and even sharper teeth of Remy sleeping at the foot of his bed each night.

The thing is, laws don’t matter when the criminals wear badges.

***

Earl Jackson’s doors were breached at four in the morning. Remy alerted him immediately.

He nudged the door open and exited the bedroom ahead of Earl, who had lifted an old machete from underneath his bed before following.

Just as he reached the bedroom door, Earl heard a rifle resound in his hallway followed by a sickening yelp. He rushed to the aid of his best friend without consideration for his own safety. 

There, just inside the front door, Earl was confronted with the outline of a man dressed in tactical armor, his face covered by a mask. He was pointing a semi-automatic rifle down at Remy who writhed and squalled on the floor in throes of immense pain. 

Remy’s back legs were paralyzed from a single round that had severed the dog’s spine. 

The home invader fired a round at Earl.  He missed his center mass and hit him in the right leg. This shattered his femur which left Earl incapacitated. 

Then two more shots rang out, followed by squeals and howling as the masked man had cruelly shot off both of Remy’s front paws. 

“I reckon he won’t be squeaking around on one of those stupid dog wheelchairs,” a gruff voice said laughing from behind the mask. “You should have restrained your dog, you stupid motherfucker.”

Earl said nothing, in shock but still aware.

“Oh, I see them angry eyes glaring at me. But ain’t shit can be done to stop me now, boy,” the man said as he placed the muzzle of his rifle against Remy’s convulsing skull and pulled the trigger.

A moment later another voice from behind the goon in the doorway shouted, “Goddamn it, Hanson! You stupid, fuck up son of a bitch. This was your raid.”

“Mr. Wilkerson is in custody. What else is there?”

“Mr. Wilkerson is white! That’s what!” the second man shouted, pointing down at Earl’s dark brown complexion. “I don’t even need to look at his driver’s license to know you got the wrong goddamn house!”

Both ignored Earl Jackson’s severe injury and continued their discussion.

“He sicced his dog on me and was armed with a machete. You know how they are,” Hanson said flippantly.

“The lot of them,” the second officer agreed, chuckling. “I reckon we’ve let him wiggle and jiggle across the bloody floor long enough. Might as well call an ambulance. If he dies, it means even more paperwork.”

***

When Earl woke, he was handcuffed to a hospital bed. It was overkill considering he had a full cast on his right leg and tubes running out of him.

The television had been left on an obscure cable network that was showing reruns of an equestrian competition. Though he’d never been interested in horses, Earl found himself transfixed. 

Time tarried on. The handcuffs eventually came off and the officer who’d been stationed at Earl’s door went away. Now it was a parade of lawyers and the acolytes who helped them suck meat from the bone when those acting on the government’s behalf did naughty shit.

The civil proceedings dragged on far beyond Earl’s acquittal and recovery. His coworkers joked about how he was already a rich man, but never believed it. Until one day he was, compliments of the city’s insurance policy.

In the interim, Officer Hanson was demoted. But, three months later he was repromoted to his former rank with a pat on the back and wink of an eye.

With the money, Earl Jackson bought a large farm east of town. There, he had a house built, and an indoor equestrian complex constructed. He opened it up as a training and competition space, often free of charge. 

***

Despite now being a vindicated pillar of the community, Earl had a grave secret. Buried underneath the well-appointed arena was a bunker. Inside was a singular resident, retired officer Hanson.

The same officer whose bass boat’s steering cable he nearly cut in two one Friday evening last summer. The next morning, Hanson pulled his trailered craft out and headed for the lake. Earl wasn’t far behind him, hauling his own vessel. Following from a distance, Earl watched as the cable snapped. This sent Hanson’s outboard flailing back and forth, which eventually caused the boat to capsize violently. Afterward, he scooped the retired officer’s body from the dark water. Following an extensive search, Hanson was presumed dead.

Upon arrival at his new subterranean home, Hanson was concussed and in and out of consciousness. Once awakened, he found himself naked, bathed in the kind of darkness that can only be found beneath the Earth’s surface.

Earl stood down the hallway of the underground complex and listened to the man who tortured his dog to death embody fear through screams.

“Oh Jesus, oh God, no! I was a good Christian, God!” Hanson exclaimed, who believed himself to be in hell. What other explanation could there be? 

After three days, he became weak from thirst and put up no fight when Earl Jackson entered the room.

Awake again, Hanson found himself, strapped to a thick board, limbs spread out like starfish. An IV was in his left arm, supplying life-sustaining fluids. 

It took Hanson a moment for his eyes to adjust when the lights were turned on. He could see the outline of a man standing in front of him. 

“Do you remember me?” Earl Jackson asked. 

“No,” he replied shaking. 

“Strange. I’ve spent years thinking about you,” Earl said as he looped baling wire around the base of Hanson’s testicles. He twisted it like a noose using a short piece of round wood cut from an old broom handle. Hanson winced at the sharp pain encircling his shriveled, gray man-pouch.

Earl kept saline bags and antibiotics flowing. He tightened the baling wire a little bit more each day. Over time, Hansons’s testicles turned purple and began to bleed. Eventually, the skin between his scrotum and body died. When his balls finally dropped to the floor below, they landed in a rancid collection of his piss and shit.

“You thought any more about who I am?” Earl asked the day Hanson became a eunuch.

“I killed your dog.”

“Yes. But now I have you to replace him. And, you’re already fixed,” Earl said, cackling.

On his way out, Earl extinguished the lights, eliciting infant-like cries from the belated castrato.

***

The next time the lights came on, Earl carried a black, pump action shotgun loaded to double-aught buckshot.

“No, no, no!” Hanson screamed.

“Don’t worry, you’re long from dead. I’m liable to keep you around for the rest of your natural life. Beforehand, however, I want to make some structural changes.”

Without warning, Earl Jackson shot Hanson’s left foot and ankle point-blank, which created a twisted menagerie of bone, tendon, and flesh.

“That’s the pain Remy felt,” he whispered into Hanson’s ear. 

One month later, Earl did the same to his right foot. Another month, a kneecap, then the next. Finally, both hands. 

Each wound healed into mangled forms – bones fusing to bones they shouldn’t have in a desperate attempt to become whole again. This left Hanson to walk on all fours. 

The day Hanson spit in Earl’s face, he pulled his tongue out of his mouth with a pair of needle nose pliers and permanently mangled it with the hot blue flame of a butane torch. 

After healing, Hanson became extremely docile. So much, so that when Earl began tattooing his naked body, he didn’t even move.

Earl’s work was based on old photos of Remy. Slowly, he tattooed Hanson’s entire body with the same patterns as his deceased canine friend. It took more than a year, but eventually, the retired officer’s entire body was covered.

***

Today was the fifth anniversary of Retired Officer Hanson’s boating accident. Earl Jackson visited the boat ramp and watched his widow lay a memorial reef as she stood beside her new husband, who just happened to be the second officer on the scene the night Remy was murdered. 

Afterward, Earl headed down into the bunker. 

Hanson no longer tried to speak. Instead, every time Earl entered, he rolled over and showed him his naked tummy. Earl patted him then hooked a leash to his collar. The same one Remy wore.

The arena above was empty. And for the first time, Earl took Hanson, on all fours,  upstairs. 

He led him around on the soft dirt. As before with Remy, Earl Jackson would tell this mute companion his innermost thoughts and feelings with more assurance than one could a priest. 

As he did, Hanson reached out with his mind, knowing he should be able to recall something, but couldn’t. What emerged from that blankness was a singular desire, to be a good boy.