Undead Fairyland

The Bad Fairies snatched Darrow’s boy. Murdock gave the order. It was a rainy Thursday. Charlie stopped at the Pump & Munch for a cruller and caffeine. He placed the travel mug on the roof of his Prius. The Bad Fairies grabbed him as he fumbled for his fob. The AMC Gremlin came out of nowhere. It was one of those enchanted Gremlins with the mana transmission and Eye of Sauron mural spray-painted on the hood—blasting Casey Kasem’s countdown from February 23, 1978.

The Bad Fairies were packing AK-Le Guins. They blew a wormhole in the cage of the propane tank exchange, releasing a level-12 Gaseous Form. Charlie disappeared in the blink of an eye. Eyewitnesses say they saw a ripple in the mist. Some felt pressure in their ears. Others lost the fillings in their teeth. Time and space were distorted. Toads fell on a woman pumping gas. A FedEx driver lost his vowels. The Prius folded in upon itself until it was the size of a brownie turd. Charlie’s travel mug raptured. His pumpkin spice latte turned to cinders, and his body was teleported to the Clearcut Forest. His spirit was too pure to pass through the anti-matter sphincter, though, and got left behind. (For three weeks, Charlie’s life force haunted the Pump & Munch parking lot, searching for a new host. His soul finally landed in a bottle of premium wiper fluid and spent the next 2 years cleaning bug splatter off the window of a 1985 Honda Civic.)

The Bad Fairies were spawned from the corpses of condemned prisoners, reanimated after execution. Murdock raised them out of pauper’s graves. He was the only one who could control the evil hoard. Murdock had the charisma and the enchanted Hammond organ. When Murdock played “Muskrat Love,” it sent the damned into a frenzy. It was Darrow who kept the clown car contained. Darrow was a button man, MI666’s number one fixer. He’s the one they called to seal up unauthorized breaches into Undead Fairyland.

Darrow built a career out of making enemies—and Murdock was his archenemy. Theirs was a tale of sorrow and betrayal that can only be sung in a lost language. The two had history and old scores to settle—although, when they were first recruited, Darrow and Murdock were just one circle jerk short of a legendary bromance. In high school, they were co-captains of the math team, and both correctly answered all 17 secret, coded questions on the SAT. They trained together in “The Dungeon,” MI666’s wet work division. (This was before Murdock found Oberon’s anklet in the lost Nazi bunker and envisioned a more diabolical manifest destiny for himself.)

Charlie’s kidnapping was the predictable next step in an escalating grudge match. Murdock had snipped off Darrow’s vestigial tail when they’d dueled inside the Recalcitrant Hedge Maze, and, in return, Darrow had killed Tabitha, Murdock’s wicked stepsister wife. Not that Tabitha didn’t deserve to die an epically painful death. She’d been experimenting on innocent gnome fetuses in the rubble that had once been MIT. There she mixed her stinky protoplasmic potions in ogre skull cauldrons, trying to regenerate her shredded wings, ravaged in the Epcot Eugenics Wars. Tabitha spent her days bathing gnomic stem cells in unfiltered moon juice and dreaming of creating a master race. Darrow felt no remorse liquidating Tabitha. She’d tortured millions of fey folk in her frantic quest for power. She’d built Death Camp Narnia and was single-handedly responsible for the pixie genocide. 

Darrow wasn’t a psychopath. He was a lab rat who’d been MacGyvered into a sophisticated death machine, programmed to shape Middle Earth as MI666 saw fit. Darrow’s amygdala was reconditioned by Dungeon headshrinkers. “Empathy,” “shame,” and “regret” were only words found in a dictionary of travel phrases for a fantasy kingdom Darrow never longed to visit. Darrow felt nothing for his victims, those magical creatures whose photographs were delivered to him in manilla envelopes that smelled of bog and sulfur.

It’s hard to believe that a monster like Darrow had a part in creating a gem like Charlie. The kid worked for Habitat for Humanity for fuck’s sake. He was a social justice lawyer and a loving husband. And he was with child—early in his first trimester—carrying the fetus of the three couples he promised to honor and obey. The critter growing inside Charlie’s womb housed the best strands of six genetic blueprints, mingled together on top of an Amazon Basics HarmonyBed. The entire cul-de-sac had thrown a block party and gathered around the maypole to watch the brewing via Nest. They held hands and sang show tunes from Hamilton VII as a Tesla angel-bot prepared the impregnation broth. No, Charlie didn’t deserve to pay for his father’s sins, but Darrow cast a long shadow, and Charlie had the misfortune to be born his father’s son. 

Murdock had no intention of ransoming Charlie. After a mock trial for crimes against the altered state, Murdock executed Charlie in the Clearcut Forest and streamed a live feed on demonic TMZ. When, months later, Charlie’s severed head arrived via messenger tortoise, duct-taped to the shell, Darrow immediately called his HR rep on his “Hello, Kitty” burner phone. He was sorry to bother her in the middle of the night with personal business, but he needed to take bereavement leave and didn’t know how to code it on his timesheet. MI666’s payroll portal was hidden on the dark and stormy web, and Darrow kept fat fingering the IP address and getting redirected to panda snuff sites.

Darrow understood that this emotional disconnect from his son’s murder was freakish, even for him. Truth be told, he tried to grieve for Charlie, but the sadness never came. Darrow missed his son, of course, but the feeling was understated. His sensation of loss was situated somewhere between watching the last episode of Cheers and having to throw out a favorite pair of slippers because they smelled like cheese. Darrow suspected that his compassion’s missing chunks were submerged deep beneath the boggy swamp that was once his soul, but he could never coax them to the surface. In the days before Charlie’s virtual celebration of life inside the Fortnite meditation chapel, Darrow practiced crying. He watched Love Story over and over and afterward stood at the mirror in his bathroom, trying to mimic the sad face of Ryan O’Neal.

And what of Jukes, Charlie’s mother? Darrow hadn’t seen her since the night they’d conceived their son—and she’d witnessed Darrow smothering a paparazzi troll with a Little Mermaid-themed shower curtain. Jukes spent much of her time off-grid, trying to avoid Darrow and his violent multiverse—but the slipstream assassin continued to monitor the activities of his old flame like an upskirt security cockroach on the floor of a Target dressing room. Still, over the years, Darrow had only gathered the courage to call Jukes once, on the anniversary of their one and only venereal conjugation. Darrow was doing gin shots and cleaning his favorite Luger when the bittersweet burn of Jenever in his throat and musky scent of gun oil on the printless tips of his fingers triggered an unanticipated wave of nostalgia. Darrow dialed his satellite phone, intending to pour his heart out to his old flame. However, when he heard the terror in Jukes’ voice, Darrow lost his nerve and hung up without reciting the erotic haiku cycle he’d composed for her.

Jukes was married to that Wood Elf, the architect with the eyepatch. Darrow called him “the Pirate.” Jukes and the Pirate lived in Switzerland now. Charlie visited them during the holidays, and Darrow had a photograph of Charlie and the Pirate skiing. He’d pulled it off the Pirate’s blog with the endlessly ponderous posts about growing his own heirloom hops and designing passive solar houses in the Alps. Darrow kept the picture in a shoebox in his storage unit—the one in Nebraska that MI666 didn’t know about—along with some childhood toys, trophies of his kills, and his dead mother’s nightgown. Darrow visited the storage unit once a year to reconnect with his past. His mother had smelled of Vicks Vapor Rub and cigarettes, and Darrow sealed her nightgown in plastic to preserve the scent. Darrow had a virologist friend working in the Dungeon’s cryogenics division. She hooked him up with an argon preservation system that didn’t cost Darrow a literal arm and a leg.

Jukes and Darrow met in Copenhagen in the summer of 1982. Jukes, a rising starlet, was there to film a cop show. Darrow was moonlighting for the Alchemical IRA. They bumped into each other at a gallery on Jægersborggade. Darrow had just planted a metaphysical car bomb in an Orange Wizard’s Hummer and needed to hide in plain sight. Jukes, who was being stalked by paparazzi trolls, hoped to get lost in a crowd.

The exhibit was an interactive installation of famous literary suicides. According to the interpretive signage hanging on the wall, the artist wanted to “implicate the viewer in melancholy.” There was a Hemingway-blowing-off-his-face-with-a-shotgun display and a diorama of Sylvia Plath with her head in the oven. Darrow and Juke’s meet-cute was in front of a hyperrealistic sculpture of Virginia Woolf, her overcoat pockets ladened with stones, and about to walk into a plexiglass river glued to the floor. Gallery patrons were encouraged to empty Woolf’s pockets to save her life, and as a result, there was a makeshift cairn of rocks piled around the feet of the sculpture with notes from visitors sticking out like, “We miss you, Virginia!” and “The Waves rules!”

The two mismatched strangers soon discovered they shared both an intense hatred of pretentious conceptual art and a gallows sense of humor. Together, Darrow and Jukes loaded stones back into Virginia Woolf’s pockets and ate sushi off the Yukio Mishima seppuku sculpture. Darrow recited pi to 200 places, and Jukes told her best abusive stepfather jokes, laughing in an unpracticed way that convinced Darrow she hadn’t been this happy in a very long time. Neither of them had an inkling that, in two decades, they’d be grieving the death of a son they were yet to make.

At first, Darrow didn’t realize who Jukes was—even though her face was plastered on most of the busses in Copenhagen, looking fierce as Detective Inspector Proust of Interpol’s Memory Crime Division. When Darrow finally made the connection, he understood that he’d seriously overachieved. For her part, Jukes knew she knew Darrow was a well-chewed wad of sugarless gum in a gutter, hardly worth bending over to rescue, but she longed for one last anonymous fling before her career spiraled out of control. 

Darrow gave Jukes a backdoor tour of the city and kept aggressive autograph hounds at bay. They broke into Tivoli Gardens after hours and played hide and seek on the carousel. Juke shared essential details about her life. Why was she called “Jukes”? Because she was conceived against the jukebox in the Shire’s third-best titty bar. Darrow couldn’t be honest about what he did for a living, so he related the experiences of “Bob,” one of his cover identities, a quirky but lovable forensic accountant from Idaho, Alaska, who was in Denmark to track down some financial discrepancies at a food additive company. Darrow was hardboiled; his alias was undercooked. 

They found a midnight showing of Sophie’s Choice. They held hands in the dark and stayed through the credits, and Jukes wept, and Darrow just sat there, not really understanding what all the fuss was about. When Jukes recovered, they walked the streets for hours. She contemplated big ideas and the future and the possibility of hope, and Darrow feigned interest as best he could. Jukes spoke about her film career and how she wanted to direct eventually. Darrow, presenting as “Bob,” his threadbare but comfy cover-identity, could almost imagine an alternate, practically human future for himself. Early in the morning, they bought coffee and pastry, sat by the canal, and watched the sunrise. Then Darrow walked Jukes back to her hotel. She invited him up to her room to make sure everything was safe and secure, and Darrow ended up spending the night.

Jukes was staying in the Hans Christian Anderson Suite. She and Darrow made tenacious, greedy love atop the Princess and the Pea canopy bed. Together they caught the midnight train to Georgia. Darrow shot the sheriff (but did not shoot the deputy), and Jukes came in through the bathroom window. Afterward, they wrapped themselves in Emperor’s New Clothes bathrobes, raided the Thumbelina minibar, and fell asleep in each other’s arms—one like a coiled serpent fruitlessly spooning the spiraling smoke of a smoldering funeral pyre—and the other like an economy body bag cuddling the decomposing remains of a vulnerable adult.

Darrow got up in the middle of the night to take a leak and discovered a paparazzi troll crouching behind the Ugly Duckling bidet. It was there to snap pictures of Jukes in flagrante that it could peddle to the anti-matter tabloids. The troll tried to make a run for it, but Darrow grabbed the fiend by its lichen-encrusted, forked phallus, and cursed it in High Ogre. Darrow’s fluency in the sacred tongue of its people caught the troll off guard—and the frequency of that living dead language, larded with infanticidal imagery and unholy diphthongs, made coroners across the city giggle and caused atomic clocks to skip a beat. When the troll saw Darrow’s chainsaw-wielding-Mother-Goose tramp stamp—the emblem of the Storybook Assassin’s Guild—it began to cry out for the festering gestational proboscis that had shat it into existence.

Jukes heard the commotion and wandered in on Darrow. He stood there naked except for his Snow Queen slippers, smothering the troll with the Little Mermaid-themed shower curtain. Darrow smiled at Jukes, embarrassed but oddly proud, like a little boy whose mother just caught him torturing a family pet. Jukes ran and never looked back. 

As for Darrow, he was surprised to discover that as the years passed, he couldn’t seem to get Jukes out of his mind. The recollection of their time together in Copenhagen continued to haunt him almost as much as his memory of that morning he walked in on his mother soaking in the bathtub and chatted with her about the previous night’s Partridge Family episode for hours before he realized she’d overdosed on pills and grain alcohol. Darrow tried to quench the unfamiliar pang of loneliness in his gut by catching all of Jukes’ films—at the art house down the street, in foreign cities in the rain. After a kill, Darrow surfed for clips of her on YouTube. It was a ritual cleansing for him, along with eating chicken pot pie and having sexual congress with furries in abandoned zoological gardens. Darrow liked to nap with one of Jukes’ films playing in the background. That made him feel safe and cared for, like when he watched those slow TV episodes from Norway, the train journeys into the Arctic Circle that went on and on.

A decade passed before Darrow discovered that he and Jukes had conceived a child. Darrow was enjoying a post-coital blooming onion at a sports bar in Melbourne, with a web developer in a vixen raccoon fursuit, when he looked up at the flat-screen TV and saw Jukes in the middle of a press conference. She was in Australia to direct a sequel to Wim Wender’s Until the End of the World. Sitting next to Jukes was ten-year-old Charlie, who was the spitting image of his old man. Darrow went through back channels to acquire a strand of the boy’s hair and then asked one of the Dungeon dweebs to run a full heredity panel. Darrow’s paternity was indisputable.

Charlie quickly became an unanticipated complication to Darrow’s already precarious life-work balance. MI666 considered children an unacceptable liability for field agents since offspring exposed its already at-risk operatives to the additional likelihood of coercion and manipulation by their numerous mythological adversaries. If Darrow’s employers discovered that he had a son, they would immediately dispatch a crew of cleaner locusts to sanitize the situation by devouring every last trace of Charlie’s existence. To keep Charlie safe, Darrow decided long ago that he would never attempt to make contact with him—although he did once tempt fate by sending the boy an unsigned Devils Tower postcard from Wyoming while on a freelance mission to steal a stuffed Jackalope from a diorama at the Yellowstone National Park interpretive center for the Smithsonian Underground.

Child support was never an issue, as Jukes, by that time, was signing multi-million dollar movie deals. Darrow learned to be satisfied with staying informed of Charlie’s life—but uninvolved. Through his AV buddies at MI666, Darrow had access to technology that could track a single louse hiding in the pubic hair of a dead orc decomposing in a dumpster in the back of a Blockbuster in Mordor. So Darrow was content to watch his son grow from a safe distance, via hidden cameras, social media, and hacked cell phone and computer accounts. Of course, Murdock’s kidnapping and subsequent execution of Charlie changed that best-laid plan.

There was one emotion that MI666 allowed Darrow, and continued to stoke in him through hypnotic nocturnal suggestion and pharmaceutical cocktails, which was a craving for vengeance. Revenge was a prime motivator for secret agents, experienced specifically by Darrow as an intense sexual hunger with notes of heartache and an aftertaste of cold eel aspic (a flavor and texture so revolting that, under normal circumstance, you’d discreetly spit the glutenous fishy wad into your napkin after gagging on it—although I know from personal experience that when the congealed jelly of retribution is warmed with the freshly splattered rheum of a nemesis you’ve just tortured, as payback for a transgression you’ve waited thirty years to redress, the cold nauseating glue wondrously transforms into the sweetest dish you’ve ever tasted. You finish every last bite with a smile on your face.)

To honor Charlie’s memory, Darrow decided he would kill Murdock, slice off his wings, and, using a particular set of skills he’d acquired over a very long career, make a commemorative mobile out of them. Like a tomcat bringing his mistress a dead mouse, Darrow would present Jukes with his trophy, hoping that the sacred offering might mend their estrangement and trigger in his one true love fond memories of that lost Danish weekend so many blue moons ago. 

And so Darrow put his affairs in order and went hunting. Off the books. Without a handler. Without MI666 logistical support or cool gizmos provided by the Dungeon’s research and development team. For his vendetta, Darrow relied on his own wits and a few trusted assets in the field: a manic pixie dream girl hacker in Budapest who supplies blueprints of Murdock’s remote island lair; a down-on-his-luck whiskey priest in Paris selling hand-crafted ammunition dipped in the tears of baby unicorns—lethal for Bad Fairies; a retired thief with early-onset Alzheimers, indebted to the Ukrainian mob over gambling debts, and looking for one last big score but can’t remember why he broke into the vault; a lovable rogue bard who, as a day job, plays the tambourine in a Monkees cover band, and basically serves as eye candy for the team until he falls on a live grenade and dies knowing his sacrifice is for a greater cause; conjoined twins, one a white druid serial killer and the other an African-American FBI ranger profiler, whose cat-and-mouse, Iago/Othello story arc gives the otherwise hackneyed plot a quasi-Shakespearean feel; a quirky centaur call girl with a heart of gold—and a photographic memory—who forges Darrow’s travel papers; and an Italian punk chick halfling with daddy issues who grew up in a Formula 1 racing family, and who, or order to see over the steering wheel, drives the getaway car sitting on a stack of ratty D&D manuals.

Darrow spent seven years tracking down the Bad Fairy King. His quest took him to the four corners of the globe. After defeating numerous minor bosses (including Stephen Hawking Ninja, Bigfoot Mime, and Mr. Rogers’ Evil Twin), Darrow faced his son’s killer in the secret catacombs beneath the Library of Congress where Ben Franklin’s grimoires are shelved. Darrow slew Murdock thrice, just as the prophecy directed, each time using a weapon forged from a different base elemental—fire, earth, wind—waiting precisely seven Babylonian lunary cycles between the kills. Murdock knew that Darrow would be employing water for the fourth and final attempt, so he stayed away from oceans, lakes, and streams. But Darrow snuck into Murdock’s man cave and poisoned his Slush Puppy machine with a blue raspberry liquid hydrogen chaser. Murdock suffered instant brain freeze, and his head shattered into a zillion bosons. The Bad Fairy King was no more.

Darrow used an 18-inch stainless steel, Anthony Bourdain-branded, cheese wire from his mother’s hermetically-sealed cookware set to cut off Murdock’s wings. He returned to the safe house and hung his trophies in the shower stall to dry, squishing the spiders, earwigs, and ticks living symbiotically in the seemingly infinite folds of the appendages with his boot as they dropped onto the ceramic floor tile, trying to escape. After curing the wings with a blow dryer and his proprietary small-batch embalming rub, Darrow began to sketch plans for a holy diptych on the membranous canvas. He was inspired to paint scenes of Charlie’s life in the lobes of the organs. The left hemisphere would depict episodes from Charlie’s past, and the right would illuminate the future milestones that Murdock had erased, celebrations and joy that were never to be. 

As he contemplated his grand project, Darrow felt, he suspected, as Michelangelo had when staring at the bare ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. For decades, the hit-man had been promising himself that he would return to the artistic practice that he’d abandoned long ago. When he was just starting out in the profession, Darrow routinely crafted with body parts harvested from his prey. He recalled the day he wandered into a Marcel Duchamp retrospective in Berlin and was later inspired to glue a mark’s ear to a telephone, his two eyeballs to a pair of binoculars, and his tongue to a giant peppermint lollipop. Over the years, Darrow had made a human hair Mona Lisa, a footstool out of actual feet, and a wide assortment of tooth jewelry. He was pleasantly surprised to find himself, at his age, called once more to the sacred creative space.

Darrow went to Michaels. He bought paints and brushes. He bought a glue gun, ink pads, and glitter jumbo shakers—and wispy pine sprays, stamp kits, and stencils, pipe cleaners, designer fur, and origami paper, assorted googly eyes with lashes, and a leather-punch, and sequins. Then he holed up in his room and binged on Bob Ross for three days straight. He huffed some Mod Podge to get his imaginative juices flowing. And then Darrow got to work.

No Goddam Androids

Stenciled in black letters on the frosted glass of my office door was “Adam Murky/Investigations.” 

Scrawled on a sheet of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven taped below was a footnote, “No Goddam Androids.”

Not that it made a difference.

The door opened and wowie zowie. It’s a dame, all curves and shoulder-length blond hair, who sauntered into my seedy office. I swept the nearly completed jigsaw puzzle to the floor and settled back.

She nestled her haunches in the chair across from my desk and dabbed her eyes with a tissue. “It’s my husband. I think he’s—”

“Are you human?”

“What does this look like, glycol?” she shot back, offering the damp wad.

“So you think he’s seeing another woman?”

She looked puzzled. “Not at all. He went out for a pack of cigarettes week before last and never came back.”

“Was there anything unusual in his manner?” I asked. “His mood or disposition—anything different?”

Forefinger to chin, she closed her eyes. ‘Yes, there was,” she said. “It just occurred to me. He doesn’t smoke.”

Now I had her. 

“Duh, cigarettes were banned by the Global Warming Reform Act enacted by President Thunberg more than a decade ago,” I snarled.

I stepped around the desk. “Okay, lady, you’re going to stand for an inspection. There’s no second way.”

I yanked her to her feet, ripped her bodice and grabbed her left boob. A twist to the right and it swung open like a bank safe.

Her blubbering stopped. “Press star nine to reset,” she recited in a monotone. “Press star nine to reset….”

I entered a different code, swung her boob closed and pushed her back in the chair.

Her eyes took a moment to refocus. Then she looked at me, bewildered. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Fix your bra, honey, you’re hanging out.”

She scanned my squalid office as she made the adjustments. “Is this where I pay my gas and electric?”

“If only, baby,” I said, sliding the credit card reader across the desk. “Twelve hundred smackeroos and we’ll get those triple pane windows on order. Only a down payment, of course.”

She inserted her card and tapped in a code. “When can I expect delivery?”

“It’s on the way,” I said, and stood up. “Just like you. Don’t let the door hit that shapely ass on the way out.”

She stood in the doorway, started to say something, thought better of it, and sauntered down the hall.

Fucking androids. It’s a helluva way to make a living, but someone has to do it.

John D Robinson is a UK based writer and painter. He has published several chapbooks of poetry and three full collections. ‘The Dirty Sacrifice & Other Stories’ is his first full collection of short stories.

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If It’s Not Saint Laurent Leather

When I saw him in his Lululemon Athletics, drinking a bud light, and standing in a Juul cloud at the end of the bar, I decided it meant that living and lazy could live happily ever after: we ended up with a Peloton, two Peterbald cats, and a greenhouse full of Hart’s-tongue ferns.

When I left, I took the Peloton. 

After that, I decided it would be much easier to live my life in dreams: as long as my mind stayed firm I could say things like, “We’ll always have Paris” and “My tastes are very singular.” My lovers would always know what that meant and every morning we could fly to the Grancaffè Quadri in Venice for brunch.

That plan burned out quickly: I knew I could only dream for so long until my Hulu and Amazon Prime were canceled and Siri taken away because my love-dreams couldn’t pay the bills.

I fought that truth for a bit, but I got it together.

I even met my new neighbor in the Whole Foods parking lot. He was in Gucci and his cart was full of Bud Light seltzer. I decided that meant flash and sweet could be the mix that lived happily ever after.

The next day he introduced me to his new, no-one-knows-what-breed-it-is, rescue dog. I went on walks with them. He and I would indulge in the centuries-old custom of ice cream in the park on a bench near a fountain. 

And, once again, that thing started to slink its way back into my life. Don’t call it by its name I kept telling myself, not yet. 

So, I gave it some time, but finally said its name, and he cried, “I was waiting for this, but I wanted you to say it first.”

Our decision was Eastside or Westside. He decided Eastside because it was closer to the park. 

To celebrate our first year his friends and family gathered around his enviable RH dining room table ready to enjoy his version of Chef Alexis Gauthier’s Vegan Foie Gras and Beetroot Terrine, even though none of us were vegan. 

Before we ate he decided there should be candlelight, and there was Owen Drew. 

During the meal he decided there should be music: there was a cello, a violin, and Beethoven’s Duet in C Major.

And then, the next morning, over Presco Mamassos, I decided to say goodbye and thought: from now on it will be sunlit brunches at Grancaffè and moonlit strolls through the Bois de Vincennes in Paris, and all my lovers will be in Saint Laurent Leather and drinking Mitchter’s Bourbon.

Pictures of Lela

They finally found Lela at the cemetery. Her body at least. They’d been searching for her ever since she disappeared three days before. It took the police three whole days to find her and they didn’t even find her. A couple of doom-laden teenage girls discovered her. They were hanging around the graveyard taking pictures of antique tombstones, dressed in black, smoking thin cigarettes and they came upon Lela. They weren’t expecting to find dead people on top of the ground.

They looked at the body for several stunned, silent minutes and then began to greedily take pictures. They both posed with the corpse.

“Okay, look up at me. Big smile.”

“She’s starting to smell.”

“Hey, if she’s gone all rigor mortis maybe we can pose her. Like a Barbie.”

“I don’t really want to touch her.”

“Yeah, me either.”

And then they came to their senses and called the cops. They had seen stories on the news about Lela, the latest missing blond chick, and figured they’d gain local fame for finding her.

Poor Lela had a clear plastic bag over her head but when they completed the autopsy they learned that she’d died as a result of too much fentanyl. The plastic bag suggested foul play but wasn’t the cause of death. A precaution maybe? Overkill? They also found traces of semen in her deceased vagina.

The two teens, Cassie and Maggie, were questioned but they had airtight alibis. They were both working at Max’s Candle Stand when Lela met her fate and had the timecards to prove it. Besides, they couldn’t have been responsible because semen. They were dismissed as suspects. Cassie and Maggie were relieved of course, but thrilled to have been briefly suspected of murder. They both felt the experience gave them some kind of morbid credibility. Of course they were pissed that the cops had confiscated their beautiful pictures of Lela. They got a stern lecture and were told they were lucky that the police decided not to charge them with tampering with evidence.

“Homicide is not a laughing matter,” they were told.

They both had to restrain themselves from rolling their eyes.

Lela had died at the tender age of twenty-four. She had lived with her grandparents and worked as a physical therapist. Her grandfather, Roscoe (62) was also questioned as a person of interest because he had a history of violence and access to fentanyl (he had cancer in his knees and used fentanyl patches for pain) but since he was bound to a wheelchair, he was quickly omitted as a suspect.

“You got me all wrong, fellas, I ain’t violent. I just used to get drunk and beat my wife. Because of my bad legs I can’t even do that no more.”

“Domestic abuse is not a laughing matter,” he was told.

Eventually, they determined that Lela had committed suicide, choosing the cemetery as some kind of black ironic statement. Those who knew Lela were shocked and puzzled:

“She was an upbeat, people-person.”

“She was so cheerful and could light up a room. A real people-person.”

“She was a people-person. Nobody ever saw an anguished side of her.”

“It’s tragic whenever you lose a people-person.”

There was a tiny local radio station (WZIP) in town and the morning DJ, who went by the moniker of Lizard P. (nee William Zecker) was notorious around town as a womanizer and heavy drug user. He bragged about his sordid exploits on the air. He was the little town’s own shock-jock/morning-zoo type celebrity. He was fifty-two years old and wore a brown, curly wig and gold medallions.

Acting on a hunch, police sampled his DNA. When the results returned from the lab, they found it matched the semen from the crime scene. They brought him in for questioning:

“Yeah, we had sex together. But it was totally sensual.”

“I’ve never even seen fentanyl let alone kill somebody with it.”

“You guys want me to confess to something I didn’t even do! At least accuse me of something I did do! That I could understand!”

Eventually they had to release him due to lack of evidence. He went on the air, called the cops “pigs” and threatened a lawsuit. Most of the folks who listened to his show thought he was guilty and his ratings plummeted.

Eventually, Lela’s death was officially ruled a suicide and the case was closed.

Zeke Vorte (38) lived one town over, in Headly. He lived alone, enjoyed sports and opioids, and got away with murder. Again.

***

From Everything Dissolves

The Swinging Bikers

Geezer wanted my wife, I wanted his. So there was no problem, except our wives weren’t interested.

Wait, that came out wrong. Our wives were interested in sex, but not swapping.

They didn’t give any reasons when we asked why not.

We routinely got nude and had sex in front of each other. We even got married together. But whenever we suggested mixing things up a bit, the ladies acted like we’d hurt their feelings.

Geezer and I discussed the situation at Mother’s, a roadhouse.

“We either find some new old ladies,” I said. “Or sneak out with some looser ones.”

“Forget that. Lurleen once saw me glance at another woman, and I didn’t care for the look in her eye. Foolin’ around leads to lawyers, and lawyers lead to the loss of our hogs in the divorce battle. We have to convince the girls that swapping’s cool.”

“How?”

“Maybe I have the answer.”

“Far out. What is it?”

“DMT.”

“C’mon. That’s like vitamin D, for those two.”

“The Satan’s Scamps bro who sold it to me said it’s special stuff. He did mention there might possibly be side-effects.”

“We’ll worry about side-effects afterwards.”

***

Next evening, we rode up Crested Skull Hill. We entered the cave that made the left eye-socket and threw down our stuff.

A full moon shone on spent condoms, empty bottles and roaches from parties past.

“Big treat tonight,” Geezer said, as he smoothed out an old blanket on the cave floor.

“Whatcha talkin’ about, Geezer?” My wife Babette sounded suspicious.

“It’s uh, hard to explain.” he said.

Lurleen, Geezer’s wife, said, firmly, “No needles.”

“Calm down,” Geezer said. “This is a special occasion.”

“Oh yeah?” Babette sounded even more suspicious. “What special occasion is that?”

“The anniversary of when I realized Lurleen was the only one for me.”

“Is that true, honey?” Moonlight glinted off a tear in Lurleen’s eye.

“Naturally, my love.”

“Aw, ain’t that sweet,” Babette said, unconvincingly.

The pop of beer bottles seemd to reassure her. Clink, clank, clunk, we drunk to true love, and then the ladies took their pills.

Geezer and I must’ve stared.

“Hey! What’s going on?” Babette said. “How come you guys aren’t…”

The stuff kicked in fast. Babette licked her chops and lunged for Geezer. He giggled as my wife tore down his pants.

Lurleen fell to her knees. I felt like crying.

Life was different. The world had changed. Heaven was real.

Spent, I hugged Lurleen tight. “That was great,” I said.

“You aren’t done yet, clown.”

“Huh?”

“I need more.” Her voice was deep, hoarse. Purple searchlights shot from her eyes.

“Gimme a minute to recover. Let’s smoke a joint or something.”

Lurleen punched me in the face, hard, twice.

She shone her lavender eye-beams across the cave floor. “Hey Babs, has my hubby got anything left?”

Geezer had his mouth full. He was playing for time.

“Are you joking?” My wife pushed him away.

“In that case, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Let’s go.”

“But girls,” Geezer sounded meek. “Just a…”

Babette smacked him. His head spun. He fell down and lay still.

“Get the keys to their bikes,” Babette said.

“You can’t handle that heavy old hog. Please…”

The world went black. Life was painful. The ladies riffled through our leathers, then a pair of motorcycles rode off into the night.

***

Geezer helped me up after what seemed like a long, long time. He was shaking, bad.  “Can you believe it?”

“I was there, wasn’t I?”

“Well, we got what we wanted, didn’t we?”

“Right. Now how’re we gonna get home?”

”Walk, I guess.”

***

Two Death Jesters gave us a lift on the main road. Riding behind some greasy slob gave me a new perspective on Babette’s existence. I resolved to be a better man, and buy her her own bike.

The guy shouted over the wind. “You guys headed to the gang bang?”

“What gang bang?”

“At Mother’s. Couple chicks gone completely crazy.”

“Oh. Far out.”

There were many bikes parked out in front of Mother’s, and more headed in from all directions. Whoops and hollers split the air. My ‘48 Knucklehead was crashed into a garbage dumpster. Geezer’s Indian was ploughed into a car parked out front.

We pushed our way inside. Bikers swarmed like a cloud of leather flies around our wives, who were having the time of their lives. There was nothing to do but wait in line and watch.

“Uh, look man, that’s my old lady there,” I said to the dude ahead. “Mind if I cut in front of you?”

“No way, bro.”

Geezer tapped my shoulder. “That stuff has to wear off sometime.”

As soon as it was our turn, it did.

“Help! Rape! Somebody call the cops!”

The guy behind us said, “Oh yeah, I’m a cop.”

The guy standing next to him said, “Me too.”

Everyone else scattered. The cops clobbered us with their billy clubs, and snapped on the cuffs. A paddy wagon came. Tires squealed, sirens wailed.

Did our wives press charges? You bet your ass they did, bro.

HAMMER AND TALON

My head was pounding like pistons from a giant antiquated machine; gears grinding, metal on metal. I was sitting on the shitter attempting to exhume whatever ill-advised mass I had consumed the night before. I was all cramped up from the exertion, and I just couldn’t launch this unwanted guest out of me and into the bowl. I was trapped; bent over in the fetal position, experiencing the most horrific of torchers, I kept squeezing and my guts kept cramping. Then the moment finally came when I could feel this titan move its way towards the exit; I could feel its massive girth, and I knew I didn’t possess an adequately sized orifice that this monstrosity would require, FUCK! 

The crowning was the worst; I was sure that it was splitting my goddamn ass apart, the pain was unbearable and I screamed at the top of my lungs “KILL ME NOW GODDAMN IT”, and in that moment feeling like I was shitting shards of glass, I did want to die. Release came shortly after as this creature of doom gained momentum from its weight and came blasting out with the velocity of a fucking rocket; it splashed down into the bowl causing a tsunami in its wake, soaking my ass and everything within a two foot radius around the bowl. 

I fell off the throne onto the dirty wet floor with a feeling of relief that I never thought possible; I think I could have slept right there if it wasn’t for the hammers still vibrating in my skull, yes, the ebbs and flows of last night’s debauchery began to evidence themselves once again after that demon shit finally left me. I had to take a look before flushing; had to see this abominable ass-splitting freak of nature that had almost destroyed me. FUCK ME! I’d never seen such a dark ominous mass of evil ever before; what in all living fuck did I consume? Aside from the insane viscous mash of processed shit, there was evidence of things one could not fully transform through the miles of highways of the human intestine; there were indiscernible pieces of fucking metal and plastic, half dissolved cigarette butts, there was even a fucking memory stick, fully intact, and little square black buttons from some keyboard, JESUS FUCK! What the fuck happened last night? Did I eat a fucking computer? I had to lay there covered in shit-water and writhing in pain; any move would bring on a dizziness that would start up a perpetual retching that could go on for hours, and I couldn’t fucking handle any more wretched fuckery or I’d surely die right then and there. 

So I laid there, cold and wet, holding my knees to my chest, head pounding with blood and shit still seeping out of my ass, a perfect time for reflection, a perfect time to assess my lifestyle and the misadventures that evolved from it, but there wasn’t anything new; I’d been living on this insane edge for far too long now, there was no change in my future. If there was, it would have happened already. I was too old to change; the damage was done, I couldn’t leave the world of the weird, my good decision-making skills dissipated into smoke and flames long ago. There was no straightening up and fighting back the demons still inside; boredom and legalities stunk like fuck to me, I wanted the paranormal, the dark voodoo fuckery type magic, I wanted to walk with the dead, wanted to fuck the dead, wanted to see how far I could take my mental illness, see how bat-shit crazy I could get. I wanted to feel a raven’s talon as it sunk into my shoulder, ripping my flesh with a frozen sense of fiery pain. I wanted to pull the night shift on the Rivers Styx; give the boatman a break, and maybe learn something nautical for a change. 

Failed Aesthetic

Dave was asleep on the studio floor in a nest of soiled porn mags and empty lager cans. His face lay drooling into the polystyrene box of a half eaten kebab.

His brain was yet unaware of the hangover awaiting it caused from a heavy night of absinthe and 7up cocktails. 

A sickly smell emanated from one of the corners of the studio where a pile of vomit had been lazily mopped up with someone’s still life studies.

The door of the studio creaked open.

It was Mike. The only other person Dave shared a studio with. 

There had been others but they had soon requested a transfer on the grounds of 

the duos intolerable ‘loutish’ behaviour.

They were quite the double act having already earned a reputation as enfant terribles and it was only the second week of term. 

Mike and Dave had decided in the pub one evening to become artists. Not because of a sudden flash of inspiration or a desire for self-expression but because of a post they had just seen online.

It concerned a female artist who knitted jumpers for child refugees from wool she had stuck up her vagina beforehand. Some of the jumpers were even embellished with splatters of menstrual blood.

Of course these jumpers were not given to the refugee children. 

The piece was intended as more of a catalyst for debate as opposed to a direct aid donation. No, the jumpers were in fact brought by art collectors for several thousands pounds a piece. 

“Seven grand for a jumper smeared with fanny blood!” Mike exclaimed over his pint of lager. “It would take me half a year to make that!”

The next day they got a book on contemporary art from the library and proceeded to laugh their way through the entire thing.

Colourful dots, unmade beds and childish scribbles. It was without a doubt the greatest con of the 21^st century, and they wanted in. 

Though they didn’t have an academic qualification between them they managed to get into the prestigious Slagg School of Art by merit of  a promising portfolio alone. 

Dave submitted a film entitled I like England and England Likes Me. It consisted of filming himself for three days while he laid about on his couch smoking weed, eating kebabs, and wanking whilst in the company of a Staffordshire bull terrier.

It was a directly inspired by Joseph Beuy’s 1974 performance I Like America and America Likes Me, although the Beuy’s original had far less wanking in it.

The tutors viewing the work considered it a highly sophisticated and ironic comment on the original. Though they couldn’t quite agree on what exactly the comment was, it was no doubt something very clever to do with Beuy’s penchant for self-mythologising and its modern equivalent seen in the creation of idealised avataristic selves on social media.

Mike went for the minimalist angle. By taking a series of photographs of piles of breeze blocks on a building site he had been labouring on during the summer. 

The tutors were sceptical at first, but then someone suggested the photos must be in reference to Carl Andre’s 1966 work Equivalent VIII, whose controversial acquisition by the Tate in the 1970’s had provoked nationwide ridicule and had brought into question the very value of modern art itself.

One of the faculty suggested that by reverting the positioning of the work from the white walled gallery space of the original to the more proletariat setting of the common building site he was creating a tension between two discourses, an encounter which subverted both of them. 

Their admission into the Slagg School of Art was also helped by the fact that they were both working class and hadregional accents. This alone fulfilled the art schools diversity quota for that year.

Now that they had successfully blagged their way into art school they planned to spend the next three years pissing their grants up the wall while banging their way through an endless line of eager and willing art fanny.

“Oi” Mike shouted

Dave opened a bleary eye to see Mike standing above him armed with a water pistol.

He squirted it into his face. Dave sat up sputtering, there was a foul but familiar taste.

“Bastard!” he shouted. It was unmistakably piss. 

Dave jumped up and swung for him but he deftly dodged the clumsy swipe and gave Dave another squirt in the face before dashing out of the room.

He ran down the stairwell and into the one of the 3^rd years studios on the ground floor.

Dave was close behind.

As he swung the door open Mike was lying in wait firing another shot of warm piss straight into his eyes.

Dave charged blindly at him tackling him to the ground, they fell back knocking over an easel and landed in a mess of oil paint and turpentine.

There was a scream. 

“What are you doing! You’re behaving like hooligans! This is an artists studio not one of your common building sites!”

It was Genevieve. A notoriously stuck up 3^rd year. Her shrill upper-class voice cutting through the air.

They stood up, red faced from their scolding and helped to righten her easel.

She screamed again. A tube of red oil paint had burst and had leaked paint all over the surface of the canvas.

“My painting! You’ve ruined it!” 

Dave hurriedly fumbled with a rag trying to wipe off the paint but only proceeded to smear red across the entire thing. 

She burst into tears.

Dave and Mike looked helplessly at each other. 

She sat back on her stool. Staring in horror at the ruined canvas.

“I’ve been working on that thing for weeks!” she said “I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had a decent shagging in ages, not that I ever get one. My boyfriend may be 9^th in the line to the throne but he’s hung like a sea horse and can’t seem to get that harder than an over cooked baby carrot”

She dried her eyes and looked up at them.

“Maybe I could do with something a bit…rougher” she said her eyes falling on the large bulge in Mikes joggers.

They looked at one another.

Genevieve may have been an up stuck up toff but she was also a quality piece of art gash with a cracking set of knockers!

“You two can make it up to me by taking it in turns to eat out my cunt”

Mike jumped to work and within seconds had whipped down her jodhpurs and had her toff art twat in his mouth.

Dave’s large hands fumbled clumsily with the tiny buttons of her paint smeared smock.  She grew impatient and ripped it open for him revealing her large milky white breasts. Taking one in his hand he suckled at the pink nipple, taking it between his teeth and nibbling at it. She moaned as Mike lapped eagerly at her cunt while Dave gnawed away on her tits.

After a few minutes they swapped places, Mike manning the nipples as Dave got to work on her slit.

He reached onto her desk and pulled down a handful of bushes. He worked the thick handle of a palette knife into her pussy while he rubbed her clit with the soft hairs of a Winsor & Newton No. 7 sable, which was also good for fine line work in watercolours and acrylics.

He juicy twat was now so wet it was dripping onto the paint splattered studio floor where it had begun to form a puddle.

“I want some of that filthy oik cock!” she said after several orgasms. She pushed them off and on her knees. Unzipping them in turn and pulling out their meat. 

Mikes penis was long and thin, pale white with a shiny red helmet in contrast Dave’s was short but thick, dark brown and crowned with a purple helm. They nodded in approval at what each of them were packing.

She gave them each a quick blow job before bending over the stool. She grabbed Mikes buttocks and pulled him towards her. She licked his balls while she worked his shaft with her hand. 

Dave went behind. Gobbing on her twat and getting it ready for a pounding.

“Yeah, give me that filthy common cock! You proletarian piece of shit!” she said looking back at him.

She was so tight it took him a while to slide it in. The tip of his helmet stretched open her beef curtains before it slowlyentered her depths.

She gasped as she felt her shores widen.

“Call me a whore!” she demanded.

“Whore!” he said

“No, no, with a dropped h!”

“’ore” he repeated slamming it up her 

“Talk dirty to me, tell me something…common!”

He thought for a moment.

“I sometimes dip oven chips into hummus”

She wailed like a banshee as she orgasmed.

“More…more” she pleaded.

“I mix absinthe with seven up…”

She came again, even harder.

“I pronounce the German artist and influential member of the Bauhaus School Paul Klee’s second name Klee instead of Klay”

Her pussy tightened gripping his rod as she shot off several simultaneous orgasms at once. Warm art slag cum trickled down her legs, like the clear juices from when a roast chicken is safely cooked.

She now took Mikes cock into her mouth. Working the entire shaft down her oesophagus as expertly as a sword swallower. 

As he fucked her mouth he squirted the piss filled water pistol into her face. 

“Fub my arf!” she said gagging on the cock thrusting in and out of her mouth.

Dave pulled his cock out of her wet twat, his purple helmet glistening with pussy juice. Spreading open her pale ass cheeks he looked down at her tight little arsehole. 

He tried to stuff his helmet into the hole but it wouldn’t go. He was far too big and she was way too tight. His guess was that she had never had anything up there before. Or if she had it had been so insignificant that it hadn’t loosened it up for anyone else. All the girls Dave had ever arse banged from back home had had gaping purple sphincters from years of taking it up the shitter from an early age.

He looked around and finding a bottle of linseed oil he poured some on her tiny hole while he oiled up his shaft.

Grabbing her shoulders he forced himself in.

She let out a shriek and surging forwards she eclipsed the entirety of Mikes long dong down her throat so his balls were squashed against her chin. She gagged and pulled back to avoid suffocating, leaving a string of slimey mucus trailing from her mouth to his nut sack.

As she retreated back she impaled herself onto Dave’s thick cock forcing it half way up her guts which pushed her forwards again onto the cock rammed halfway down her gullet. She slid between these two extremes, being stretched and gagged at either end.

She really was caught between a rock and a hard place!

Dave looked at her painting. He tried to make out what was underneath the smear of red.

“So, what’s your work about?” he asked.

“The failed aesthetic in painting” she said taking the cock into her cheek so she could speak.

“So, deliberately shit painting?” 

“mm hmm” she mumbled her mouth full of sausage once again. 

“That’s really clever” he said “I wish I’d thought of that”

She mumbled a few words which the lamen wouldn’t of been able to decipher. Luckily Dave was an expert in translating gagging-on-cock into English. He took the words to mean: “Get back to work!”

He returned his attention to the job at hand and the vice like sphincter gripping his cock.

Her anus was the tightest thing he’d ever been inside. It was so tight he imagined himself pulling out to see his knob transformed into solid diamond by the extreme pressure of her sphincter. 

He wondered how much that would sell for.

Damien Hirst’s 2007 diamond encrusted skull sculpture For the Love of God had sold for $100, 000, 000. 

Imagine all the lager, porn mags and kebabs I could buy with that! He thought to himself.

The idea of a priceless shit smeared diamond phallus was enough to send him into orgasm.

“Shit, I’m going to cum!”

“Do it on my painting!” Genevieve screamed.

He pulled out just in time, the tip of his cock smeared in steamy hot shit.

He emptied his balls all over the painting and then scraping the shit from his cock he applied it to the canvas with a palette knife. 

After a few more violent thrusts Mike also pulled out and made his contribution to the work. 

For good measure he also squirted the remainder of the piss onto the canvas.

The dark umber hues of the excrement complimented the lighter tones of the almost lemon yellow urine. While the semen had mixed in with the red oil paint to create a subtle range of mid toned pinks.

They stood with their arms around each other looking admiringly at the canvas.

“Wow” said Mike who wasn’t much of an admirer of that abstract painting bollocks but this one he really dug.

“It’s…wonderful!” Genevieve agreed.

At the graduation show that year, a famous wife beating art collector acquired the work for several thousand pounds.

A few days later Dave and Mike found a gift wrapped bottle of vintage Pernod Et Fils absinthe in their studio. 

The promptly downed the bottle in pint glasses with 7up and went into town where they banged a couple of local fisherman’s wives under the jetty.

A Premature Romance

I stopped, took a breath and jumped into the deep end of the pool. The water was lukewarm, like a bath that had been run and forgotten about. Reflections of moonlight glittered on the water’s surface. The night, the house, the car in the driveway, everything was familiar. Everything aside from the woman.

The woman was unique even from other women I had known and thought unique before. Over dinner it had come out that she illustrated children’s books, owned an antique shop and had lived for two years in Peru. Also, she had grown up on a dairy farm and knew all the different chores. She boasted she could run such a farm singlehandedly. Not literally of course. It was understood she would need both her hands.

Now she swam over to where I was treading water. I was beginning to breath in quick, gasping breaths but made an effort not to show it. She came smiling. Though she wore no lipstick her lips were almost unnaturally red and her teeth perfectly white, making her smile resemble a diamond set in rubies. Had she done commercials for Aquafresh, the result would have sold millions on the product.

We looked at each other close up. Her eyelashes were longer and darker above her left eye. I preferred the right, which was naked and honest. She noticed, I’m guessing, how my clear blue eyes gave her a feeling of calm and clarity. We reached out and touched fingertips. The kiss came and we slipped under, finishing it off below the reflected moonlight. When we came up for air she reached down into my trunks. I immediately spilled at least a twin’s worth of baby batter into the water.

***

Sitting poolside, we were reclining in Adirondack chairs. The night air was cool and we had our towels draped over our shoulders. Her name was Andrea. It seemed to me that I had once known a girl of the same name, but I couldn’t recall from where. It wasn’t unlikely that in all my forty years I had come across another “Andrea.” It wasn’t like a “Marisole” or a “Zariah” or something.

“The moon is big,” Andrea said. Her tone was intimate. It sounded as if she were confiding in me some beautiful secret from her childhood.

I looked at the moon and found it was indeed “big.” It was low too. It hung just above the roof of the large hotel on the other side of town.

“The moon is low,” I said, trying to maintain the intimate tone of her comment a moment before. It was my turn to confide in her.

“What else is it?” Andrea asked. She spoke to me as if we were already familiar partners. I was somewhat remiss that I could think of nothing else to comment on. Her question hung in the air like the moon itself.

“It’s made of cheese,” I said finally with false solemnity.

She rose slowly but purposefully, came over to my chair, and straddled me. As soon as her rump landed in my lap, I immediately splooged a few more skeets into my already skeet-spoiled bathing suit.

“Aw,” she said. She kissed me on the forehead and traced my jawline with her fingertips and said, “I love your dimpled chin.”

***

I offered and Andrea agreed to stay the night. We made popcorn and watched a movie. It was one of those old “creature features” that you wind up just cracking jokes about and laughing at all the way through. The monster from this one was basically a miniature Godzilla that lived in the woods of Tennessee, and a wannabe Elvis-type was in town to investigate. Whenever the creature made a sudden appearance Andrea would simulate fear and curl up against me on the couch in mock horror. For my part I’d put my arm around her and say soothing things as if to calm her. It was a funny schtick for awhile.

Towards the end of the movie we were both a little drowsy and tipsy from wine, and I was nodding off somewhat. At one point I woke up to feel Andrea undoing the drawstring of my sweatpants. The credits were rolling on the TV that hung on the wall, and yet the plot continued to thicken. The female lead freed the one-eyed monster. And just as she was about to give it a little kiss to break the curse of the 3-month dry spell, it spat right up her nose.

***

In the morning I heard it when Andrea quietly pushed her feet onto the hardwood floor. I could hear her footfall as she made her way to the bathroom. I wanted to get another glimpse of her naked body as she came back to bed but at the same time I didn’t want to wake up just yet. A peak at the clock told me it was 6:56. It felt like it was at least an hour too early to wake up. When I heard the toilet flush I pulled the blanket up past my eyes.

Andrea quietly and deftly got in bed and sidled up alongside me. Her body was cold but I resisted my instinct to roll away. Her arm stretched over my shoulder and slowly rubbed my chest. Then her hand moved down over my abdomen and I came to see what she had in mind. It was the best sort of wakeup call. It was probably the only sort I won’t hit the snooze button on. Just before it was about to begin, it was all over. My polyester sheets were a mess with a puddle of more of my bonkjuice.

***

There was no going back to bed now. It was 6:58 and it was too late to pretend I was asleep. Andrea went to the kitchen. She made no comment about my little problem. She hadn’t the night before either. I was surprised at how much I liked her. She seemed genuinely kind and generous.

In the kitchen she seemed to know where I kept everything. She was thirty-eight so I guessed she had been in a hundred similar kitchens before. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Silverware was in the drawer, glasses were in the cabinet and the trashcan was under the sink. My design scheme wasn’t a Rubik’s Cube.

As she went about her work she wore her bottoms but graciously left her top off. It felt like a small gift she was giving me. I watched her intently through the open French doors as if she were some kind of wildlife. She came back into the bedroom smiling at me with her Aquafresh smile.

“I need a shirt,” she said. “The bacon grease is jumping out at my chest.”

I pointed to a drawer. I was not yet ready to be jovial or verbose and said only, “There.” She opened the drawer, picked a shirt out and pulled it on. It was a gray Polo shirt. It was one of my nicer shirts but it didn’t matter. I could afford more.

The savory smells coming from the kitchen were not an ordinary occurrence. Rarely did I do anything more than boil a pot of water. Andrea had eggs, bacon and French toast cooking all at once. She danced to and fro in front of the stove with a spatula like a Motown singer up on stage. My Polo shirt hung well below her ass but her smooth, tan legs were on display. More and more Andrea was proving her complete perfection. I took a moment to marvel at my luck at having met her. With a view of her shapely legs and pretty feet, I reached down and fondled my joystick, immediately adding to the gobs of wang sputum in my bed.

***

The breakfast Andrea prepared was delicious and bountiful, and gave us the energy for the early afternoon hike we took. I had taken another woman up the same hill before but every time she had opened her mouth it was to whine about the pain in her feet or the sweat that was forming on her brow. Andrea uttered not a word of complaint. She even seemed to be in better shape and more enthusiastic than I was. When we reached the summit we stopped and looked down on our sprawling town. I was wheezing but she was perfectly fine.

“I bet you take all your girlfriends up here,” Andrea said with a grin.

“Yeah but none of them handled it half as well as you.”

“It’s such a clear sky today. There are no clouds at all. It’s really terrific.”

“Yeah but where’s the moon?”

“It’s so low that only people in China can see it.”

I thought about this for a moment. I’d never had a good grasp about how the Earth spun and how the moon revolved. She was joking of course.

“Have you ever been?” she asked.

“To China? No, I haven’t. Have you?”

“No, but I desperately want to go. China is at the top of my list. I want to get lost in the throngs of people, hearing no one speaking any English at all. And I’ll go to the Forbidden City to take pictures. There is tons of stuff to see. I have it all mapped out in my mind.” She seemed halfway gone just talking about it.

On the hike back down the sandy path she went on to describe the whole fantasy trip to me. China had never appealed to me before but she made it sound great. I would have gladly accompanied her there that very day if plane tickets and time off were somehow magically produced. I found this was yet another side of her to be smitten with. She was an adventurer. This spoke to the quiet voice in me that wanted to do and see exciting things.

After we got back to my place we made love in the shower. Or, that is to say, she began to wash my Borat and I made a romance explosion, leaving her fingers all sticky. As before she didn’t seem to mind at all, patting me on the bottom as if I had just sunk a free throw.

***

After two days I called Andrea. The call went straight to voicemail. “Hello, you’ve reached Andrea’s voicemail. Please leave a brief message. Ciao.” Her tone was casual yet professional—perfect for what was called for. Right down to the smallest detail I hadn’t yet found a single thing I didn’t like about her. I was beginning to get excited about a relationship with a shelf life.

I noted the time (2:47pm) and began to wait for Andrea to return my call. She seemed the type of person to return calls quickly but I tried not to be impatient. I sorted my mail, I checked the chemicals in the pool, I scrubbed the tub, I sorted the junk drawer—anything to keep me distracted.

She called at 4:02pm. I answered the phone by the end of the first ring.

“Ciao,” I said.

“What are we doing tonight?”

Straight and to the point—always refreshing. As we discussed our plans I heard in her voice all the things I would hope to hear in a woman I was seeing. There was fondness, there was sincerity, there was eagerness, there was joviality, there was camaraderie, and, of course, there was sex.

“What are you wearing?” I asked.

She laughed but then she told me. Slowly. I knew it was unlikely she was actually wearing a black negligee with garters and everything, but I still made with the gentlemen’s relish in my Levi’s.

***

Andrea and I went to a sushi restaurant that was owned and operated by Chinese immigrants. I had never been before but Andrea assured me it was good. The host said the Japanese words for greeting but then carried on in broken English. Later, when I heard the staff talking amongst themselves by the restroom, they were speaking another language entirely. Evidently it was a trilingual workplace. A golden framed portrait of Bruce Lee hung on the wall.

Andrea ate her sushi dry with no soy sauce or wasabi. She deftly moved her chopsticks from plate to mouth as if she had been using them all her life. I was much less capable. More than once I dropped my morsel just before reaching my open mouth. Andrea chuckled and gave me some pointers. After awhile we discussed our plans for dessert.

“Shall we go to your place or mine?”

Again, Andrea was very direct. I hoped she would keep it up.

“Which would you prefer?”

“Yours,” she said readily. “I feel like another moonlit dip in the pool.”

“Okay, let’s do that.”

“Lucky for you I forgot my suit.”

***

We started up in the pool, groped our way into the bedroom and dropped down on the mattress still dripping wet. She was high energy and, once I made an adjustment, it was very welcome. We were just like a couple of rabbits. She was nimble and attentive and I was more stimulated than I’d ever been. After we got our suits off I, of course, fizzled out in seconds, losing my hot brogurt deposit on her stomach just as I was about to bury the weasel.

“I’m sorry that keeps happening,” I said.

“I don’t mind,” Andrea said, sighing and rolling onto her side. “I don’t even really like sex. Or at least, it’s not that important. I like the idea of it much more than the act itself.”

What she said sort of made me think. I propped myself up on my elbow and looked at her. I guess I’d never really considered the idea of sex before. The more I thought about it, the more I found that I actually agreed with her. Sex wasn’t that important. Even for people without my little problem, it was all over so quickly.

This was a startling realization. I wondered why it’d never occurred to me before.

The Shit to Lose Weight Diet: Its Decline and Fall

Every trend has a beginning, although it’s not always easy to trace. 

Take the Hula Hoop craze. 

Eleven-year-old Suzanne Miller of Alexandria, Virginia, blew off flute practice and was experimenting with an abandoned barrel stay in front of her house. She was spotted by Marvin J. Truland as he drove to his job at a plastics supply company, where he appropriated some decorative, half-inch plastic tubing, and made appropriate adjustments. 

The rest is history.

Yet the recent, nationwide obsession with defecation had its start in a less innocent way. 

The Maritime Journal, the premier magazine of the shipping trade, had commissioned an article on the dead weight tonnage reduction of a supertanker–and the subsequent efficiencies that resulted–after a makeover in a Dubai shipyard. 

Boring stuff, unless you’re in the business of transporting oil. But the editor, whose name is lost to history, made a fatal error when posting the article online. Instead of “Ship to Lose Weight,” the title came out (you can see this coming) “Shit to Lose Weight.” 

Like the Hula Hoop, the rest is history.

How could this happen? Wouldn’t a person reading the accompanying article about structural changes to a million-gallon oil tanker realize it was an innocent typo, rue the pathetic state of copyediting, laugh and move on? 

As any media expert will tell you, fewer than two percent of readers (“readers”) get beyond the headline, never venturing to the small squiggly marks neatly arranged in columns that fill the space between the pictures.

The article, or rather the headline, went viral. 

Within days, an entrepreneurial freelance writer, Udo Boltz of White Plains, New York, published an ebook on Amazon, “Shit to Lose Weight: The Eat-Whatever-and-How-Much-You-Want Diet That Really Works!”

Momentum started to build. Boltz, now fabulously rich from his instant bestseller, made appearances on the morning network news shows. Taking a crap was coming out of the closet as millions of viewers contemplated the new diet, all of them wondering why they hadn’t thought of it first.

“It’s really simple,” Boltz explained to Oprah. “It’s just a matter of speeding up the process between your lips and your anus, and really letting go.” On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he said asshole.

Soon, shit was on everyone’s lips. 

Major follow-up trends included a move to outhouses after indoor plumbing and the convenience of six bathrooms in your typical suburban McMansion was perceived as outré. Portland, Oregon, led the pack, as outhouses began popping up in leafy yards and along streets, especially those designated as bicycle routes.

The outhouse craze moved down the coast to San Francisco and L.A., then leapfrogged across the country to Atlanta, D.C., the Big Apple, and even Boston, where solar arrays dwarfed the crappers hidden under a frenzy of light-seeking panels. 

Like most trends, it skipped over the Midwest, leaving Chicagoans puzzling, as usual, as to why they were left out.

Outhouses evolved into status symbols, and ranged from the rustic (paneled in wood recovered from abandoned Vermont barns, but still with de rigueur features like heated seats, air conditioning, flat screen monitors and WiFi) to the ultramodern (clad in sleek, gunmetal gray titanium sheathing, solar-paneled and voice-activated).

As the country began to shit itself to svelteness, sub-trends proliferated. Toilet paper tanked as back-to-earthers embraced techniques and tools used by earlier generations—for example, damp forest floor fauna, except now it had to be imported from Ecuadorean rainforests. 

Sticks with charred ends made an unexpected comeback. Online debates raged over the advantages of oak versus maple, with softwoods like pine and cedar dismissed as only suitable for children and the elderly.

Competitive shitting wasn’t far behind, with elaborately wired outhouses utilizing integrated cameras, digital scales and space-age digital aroma analyzers to determine whether your morning effort could be a winning entry. 

Weight and length, for sure, could snag your turd’s immortality (and a first prize!). But other factors, like firmness, color, texture and funkiness were all included as competitors posted their results online. Points were accrued based on thumbs up/thumbs down votes from a nation of intrigued shitters. 

The culminating event was the annual finals held in (where else?) Baltimore, Maryland, where champion defecators gorged and produced results on live television (also available streaming).

With the growing realization that everyone shits (and it’s okay!), efforts to establish a top tier of human defecators reached fruition: an obsession with celebrity shit. 

A new wing to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, enshrined the preserved turds (the process a closely guarded secret) of the rich and famous. The honor roll included the discharges of Hilary Clinton, Paris Hilton, the aforementioned Oprah, and Jeff Bezos. 

The infamous weren’t forgotten, with their own wing offering the preserved eliminations of Jeffrey Epstein, Mark David Chapman and Vladimir Putin on loving display, like those of the famous, in tinted glass enclosures bathed in sodium vapor lighting.

Alas, like all trends eventually must, the shit-to-lose weight fad lost momentum. Then, the coup de grace came when a rival trend, the urination diet, gripped the nation. 

Its genesis? A bored Google censor bot, just for fun, pushed a literary website to the top of all its search results. 

Within days, everyone wanted to piss wine into an ocean of alcoholics.