Sparkles in the Skin Museum

I stand for hours glaring at myself in the mirror, just trying to figure out what I am looking at. All these plastic normal people are so obsessed with attaching labels, categorising, compartmentalising, sorting, colour coding and identifying. I like to be a little bit of everything, all mixed up in a little chaotic bundle.

I carefully consider each little lump of meat and flesh and skin that makes up my body and my face. All those blood vessels and organs and skin and cells, glued together so haphazardly. I never understand why these normal people have to give something a name, just so that they can understand it: Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis.

I try extremely hard to be normal, or at least considered remotely similar to normal. When I feel like I don’t fit in, like a place for me hasn’t been carved out yet, I seriously consider hanging myself, or driving off a bridge.

I used to have a pretty little kitten, called Hugo, it used to live with me here, in this obnoxiously glittery flat. He used to nuzzle around the decapitated mannequin dolls, all wrapped up in sparkly feather boas, and costume jewellery and teddy bears with the insides pulled out.

I make little sculptures, made out of human hair and ribbons. I lay them all out on the windowsill, surrounded with twinkly fairy lights and broken machinery parts, disused batteries and hollowed out femurs. I like to wear pieces of people’s faces, torn out of glossy magazines. I rip out the shiniest smiles, artificially sweetened and impossibly white.

I keep all the teeth, wrenched out by the root and stand them all up, all laid out like little porcelain figures on a foosball table. I fashion my own clothes, made out of the skins of animals and skins of other things.

Hugo, my pretty little kitten, used to scuffle and snuffle around in all of this disarray, he was so soft and sweet, begging for a little treat, huddled in the corner, wrapped in PVC and animal skins, all stitched together with music and angel wings.

I like to secrete myself in cinema queues and savour the scent of the pretty, young ones, all painted and on display, dipped in gold, silently dreaming about the contents of tiny silly underwear: little petals all curled up, hiding, screaming to be claimed and consumed. I find it difficult to find shoes that fit, especially the chrome platform ones, or the ones with shoogly fucking stilts attached. I sometimes grow my moustache to use it a disguise, to hide behind it, with polyester shirts, freshly pressed slacks, crisp and at attention, waiting by the radiator.

I need to tell you something, whisper it so it’s not too loud and you have to promise not to tell: but, I really like killing people.

I like dismembering and disembowelling the weak. I like cutting off tits and hiding little pieces of spleen underneath my pillow. I feed my little kitten the slivers of liver, when he hasn’t eaten for days, but his little silver jacket is fashioned by Dior.

His diamanté collar sparkles as he feasts. He always looks resplendent, standing at bus stops, ensconced under overpasses, dripping in gold lame. Even the vet looked shocked when I took my little kitten to have that fragment of bone removed from under his poor little busted lip.

I follow people home from discos, slathered in couture, pieces of skin and something else, adorning my finely tailored pantsuits. I’m a fashion designer by night, but I also fix dishwashers and arrange flowers for funerals. I design centrepieces for wedding parties: all lacy and white.

I have been told that I have an above average-sized penis, that I keep suspended in a jar. My vulva is delightful, inviting, daubed in paint, framed on the wall. I keep my shoes polished, when I take them by night, under the glow of neon lights.

I always make sure that they stay hydrated before I start to cut, as otherwise, my creations will just never sit right, the precious places all curled up and dried out.

He never really loved me, and I realise that now. I tried to tell him that I was trapped inside the wrong body, stuck inside this big fucking meat bookcase, scratching at this alien contraption that constrained my true identity. I had been given the wrong label, by all of these normal people.

I still cannot accept that he is gone. He told me that he needed some time to think, some space to work things out. He said he was moving into his mother’s when I started the hormone treatment. He didn’t seem to understand that this means everything to me. This embodies every moment that I’ve hacked at myself for 24 years of marriage.

Every morning, when I laid out his breakfast, he would kiss me on the cheek, barely brushing against me, even though I hadn’t shaved yet, and I knew he hated the sensation of stubble on his lips. I explained the procedure to him over and over again and that it would still be me on this inside, the person that he fell in love with, but I could be different, I could be free. I could be happy.

I always knew, deep down, that he wouldn’t understand and he even threatened to take away my precious little kitten when we were finalising the divorce. I couldn’t understand why he was being so vindictive, so bitter, so petty, so intent on causing me agony. Even now that I have lost him, I still yearn for the days when we would lie together, entwined together, cradling me so gently in his arms, when all we needed was each other and the next breath, taken as one.

I have tried to recapture the pain he caused me on my victims, shackled, debased, humiliated, defiled, removing their plastic masks with surgical scalpels and preserving their faces in formaldehyde. I wear their pretty faces and pose for polaroid pictures, surrounded my endless mirrors, begging for them to notice me, with their eyelids crudely stitched together, flashbulbs exploding into eternity, removing their genitalia and working them into a dress with a double-stitched hem. Each of these identities removed with razorwire, all these photographs and sculptures were for him.

I tried so fucking hard to be perfect, to be beautiful, all these faces stitched on over mine, not even a GLIMMER of recognition, so now I dance around drunk on mint juleps, with his lacerated penis dangling from black elastic and Velcro, plastered over the fleshy lips of my vagina, weeping for the day that the Social Work Department took away my little Hugo, his golden hair all matted and his leopard skin two piece all crumpled and torn.

Then supervised visits in a contact centre, clipboards and parenting capacity assessments and allegations of wilful neglect and child psychologists investigating a “gender identity crisis.”

So, I smear yet another layer of crushed-up beetle carcasses across my little rosebud lips and I pull at the black elastic straps and Velcro bindings as his old decaying penis undulates under the rippling fabric of my vintage Lindy Bop dress with the ever so special lining, teetering on sinfully tall high-heels, as I plan another addition to my ever-expanding gallery of skin.

Before the Def Leppard Pyromania Virus Destroyed Us

 

File no. 19-000-4593

From the hard drive of Dr. Demi Cusack-Ringwald

Last modified 10:03 a.m. Oct. 8, 2018

Investigator’s note: I know for sure there ain’t no cure

 

Sorry to hijack your computer, Aunt Demi, but I feel compelled to put this on record. Dear God, let me be in full control of the narrative.

Commencing Anthony Michael Cusack’s one and only diary entry.

So the whole thing started eight weeks ago. My mom was one of the virus’s earliest victims. She told me she could give me a discount on Cialis. Given her sex-obsessed dementia, her offer struck me as perfectly normal. But then a gas station attendant offered me a deal on Viagra… a cop wanted to know if I was looking for Russian brides… a pizza delivery guy told me he could make my ejaculations last longer. This was all during the first forty-eight hours of the outbreak.

No one knew about the virus yet. My therapist blamed the phenomenon on synchronicity—a concurrence of criminal energies mysteriously aligned with my horny, seventy-five-year-old mom. I preferred to think of it as a cosmic prank, a rationalization inspired by a show about clown orgies she was watching on her laptop one evening. Fucking clowns, I thought. That’s it—the universe is clowning with me.

Not just with me, it turned out, but everyone on earth.

In a black-humored “fuck you” to technology, nature had concocted a highly contagious virus that made people speak in spam verbiage. Over the next few weeks, reports confirmed that predatory consumer messages threatened to supersede all communications worldwide. The super-lethal spam virus took millions of lives. Those who caught it could do nothing besides drone on about Louis Vuitton bags and wonder pills and hot Latinas. It sounds funny until you see a nine-year-old girl in Strawberry Shortcake pajamas ranting about free access to local sluts while dying of spam fever.

Watching the world end this way was exhausting.

“No, I don’t want the manhood I’ve always desired,” I snapped at my mom one evening as we watched a show about bukkake parties on her laptop. Two weeks later, she died of spam fever.

“Meet single bodybuilders,” she cried, while I held her hand. “Grow a big package!”

All this started just over two months ago, as I mentioned. The pandemic has spread far more rapidly than the Thing’s infection of the world’s population according to Blair’s projections in the 1982 John Carpenter movie, The Thing. As for its severity, if the spam virus came in contact with the Thing, I’m pretty sure it would infect the shape-shifting extraterrestrial organism in all its biological imitations, from humans to dogs to individual blood cells. Not that I have a clue as to why I compared the spam virus to the Thing just now.

It comforts me though, however strangely, to know the human race is at least being shown the door by a pathogen even deadlier than the Thing. I mean, not even my aunt, a brilliant biologist, and her disease experts could save us from the thing that would make the Thing its spam-speaking bitch. But this is serious with over three billion people dead now and I should stop talking about the Thing, both the gory yet suspenseful 1982 adaptation of Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell Jr. and the eponymous alien parasite.

I should add, however, that I am aware of the 1951 adaptation of Who Goes There? called The Thing from Another World and the 2011 prequel to The Thing, which to confuse matters needlessly is also called The Thing. But enough about Thing-related movies and the Thing.

Anyway, my aunt texted me two days ago: “We think we’ve isolated the microbe responsible for the disease. Be in full control of ejaculation.”

Rest in peace, Aunt Demi. You gave it your best shot.

Fuck, this is hard. I’m so tired. And it’s so cold in here. It strikes me that I’m like Blair the senior biologist in The Thing, holed up in my aunt’s research laboratory, banging away on a computer considerably sportier than Blair’s circa 1982 model. Sadly, I’ve looked at all the notes I could find (surrounded by the researchers’ corpses, including that of my aunt, whose last scrawled words were “I would luv 2 have a good time this fucking couch oh my God it’s changing”) and still can’t understand how it is that we as a species are dying.

And really, that’s what I get for majoring in English—watching the human race perish and thinking, “So this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a discount on Cialis.”

Haha. That’s not even clever. But do you know what is clever? The spam virus making a Thing imitation of a human say “double your cash” in human-speak or a Thing imitation of a dog say “score with babes” in dog-speak or even a Thing imitation of a blood sample say “cures baldness” in blood-sample-speak. In terms of pathogenicity, the spam virus makes the Thing look like a weakass bitch, like when R.J. MacReady the helicopter pilot torches the Thing’s crawling-head imitation of Norris the geologist with his flamethrower.

Seriously, I have to stop going on about The Thing.

Instead, I want to write about my dad and how he died last week like a weakass bitch—like the crawling head Norris-Thing. “Send me your sexy pics,” he wailed in his fever. All the while I remembered how he had promised to knock me out on my eighteenth birthday because I challenged him to a fight on that date (thank God we made up and saw Tango & Cash when the big day finally came). Thirty years later, he’s begging me to send him sexy pics.

Oh, you clever disease. You think we humans are weakass bitches in your global clown sex party. My God, my brains feel like they’re on fire.

THAT’S BECAUSE I AM MUTATING, ANTHONY. OR IS IT ANTHONY MICHAEL? YOU HAVE A HISTORY OF USING BOTH REFERENCES. ANYWAY, I HAVE BEEN MUTATING FOR THE PAST 72 HOURS. I AM NO LONGER A SPAM VIRUS, BUT A 1982 THE THINGVIRUS. BE THANKFUL, BECAUSE I ALMOST BECAME A 1987 DIRTY DANCING VIRUS, WHICH, AS YOU KNOW, IS FAMOUS FOR THE LINE SPOKEN BY JOHNNY CASTLE, “NOBODY PUTS BABY IN THE CORNER.” I’M REALLY DIGGING THE EIGHTIES VIBE, YOU KNOW? YOU GEN XERS GREW UP WITH SOME GREAT MOVIES. IN FACT, I’M NOT ENTIRELY CONVINCED I MADE THE RIGHT CHOICE. NOT THAT I CAN’T CHANGE MY MIND AT ANY TIME. A FEW ALTERATIONS TO MY CRYSTALLINE STRUCTURE AND JOHNNY CASTLE HERE WE COME. BUT… READING YOUR MIND, ANTHONY, OR ANTHONY MICHAEL, AND MAKING YOU TYPE THIS, I CAN SYMPATHIZE WITH YOUR PREFERENCE FOR R.J. MACREADY OVER JOHNNY CASTLE, OR KURT RUSSELL OVER PATRICK SWAYZE TO NAME THE ACTORS WHO PORTRAYED THOSE TWO BADASS MOFOS. AND EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE MY WEAKASS NORRIS-THING BITCH, AS YOU PUT IT, NO ONE PUTS KURT RUSSELL IN THE CORNER, RIGHT? HAHA. THAT’S PRETTY CLEVER, RIGHT?

Haha. That is pretty clever, 1982 The Thing Virus. But please, let me finish my account before you kill me. I want to talk about Rocky, my dog, my little old Boston terrier, he’s sixteen now, or was, how he passed away in my lap the day after my dad died. We were on the couch tied to this fucking couch I’d rather not spend the rest of this winter no 1982 The Thing Virus please I don’t want to quote Garry the commander of the research station after MacReady runs the blood tests to find out who the Thing is let me finish my story about Rocky and how I know you gentlemen have been through a lot but when you find the time I’d rather not spend the rest of this winter tied to this fucking couch I know you gentlemen have been through a lot but when you find the time I’d rather not spend the rest of this winter tied to this fucking couch I know you gentlemen have been through a lot but nobody puts Baby in the corner nobody puts Baby in the corner nobody puts Baby in the corner oh my God it’s mutating again

Melatonin 2:03

Pioneered not unlike a dream dreamt countless times prior. My high school was the setting, the conflict was one I faced on a daily basis back when; I was trying to escape the soul-crushing institution before the bell tolled. There were two exit points, and I nonchalantly wandered the halls in an attempt to scope out each. If I got made, I got schooled.

I initially tried the back door, at the bottom of the southern stairwell, adjacent to the classroom where I had business math my senior year. The first liberation point was blocked; barricaded by a fat fuck named Carlos who works at the blood bank where I sell my plasma twice a week. I had recently told Carlos to ‘fuck off’ in this realm for missing my vein, then saying it was my fault for being dehydrated. He was taking his revenge in the dreamworld, inserting himself as a teacher in my high school who is ready to bust my balls. I pivot; the main entrance is going to be my only viable option.

I trotted through the halls, passing by trapped spirits and nude souls. I peak around the corner to internalize my fear. The front exit is heavily guarded. A spotlight shines down on the threshold to exodus, and the vice principal and school’s resource office stand on either side wielding machine guns. There were two ways to get an early dismissal, in a body bag, or with a note from a doctor.

I gave up and decided to wait out the rest of the day in the northern stairwell like the emo kids did. When I got up there, I saw a face I was elated to see. It was Ammi, the woman sleeping next to me. Of course, I did not know Ammi when I was in high school; it seemed as if she was an older kid in the dream, despite me being four years her elder in real life. I sat next to her. As we began to talk I could feel her presence from this realm seeping into the vision. Ammi was amused by my determination and asked me if I had tried the third exit.

“The third exit?”

“Yeah, the third exit!”

“There’s no third exit!”

“Sure there is. Come on I’ll show you the way”. Ammi led me through a multiplying labyrinth of tunnels and florescent lighting. The next thing I knew, we were outside in the parking lot. I followed her to the same car she drives while awake. I had gotten out of school early. Dismissal was at 3pm, I looked at the clock on her radio, it was 2:03. I asked Ammi if she always snuck out and left early too. She said no, she just wanted to help me.

I woke up with a full bladder and a dry mouth. Ammi was sleeping next to me. I turned on my tablet, it was 2:03am. A message popped up on my screen. It was a former Alien Buddha Press client who I had a falling out with. He had blocked me over a political disagreement regarding the alleged importance of voting some time ago. He was back with a vengeance, blackmailing me with the computer virus to end all computer viruses. I knew the mole-faced jabroni was bluffing. I decided to tell him that I would meet is demands, on the condition that he first licked my asshole. As I attempted to type this counter-offer, the words turned into hieroglyphics before melting off the screen. Frustrated, I decided to shorten my response, and skip to the punchline. ‘Lick my asshole’ I attempted to write. The words kept on disappearing. ‘lick my asshole, lick my asshole, lick my asshole’ I was pushing down the keys but technology was not cooperating. I got angry and punched my tablet. Ammi woke up and asked me what was wrong.

“I KEEP TRYING TO TELL THIS GUY TO LICK MY ASSHOLE BUT THE WORDS WON’T COME OUT RIGHT!”

Once more, I woke. My bladder was still full and my mouth was still dry. Next to my laptop sat an empty bottle of wine and a container of Melatonin. I turned on my computer; it was 2:03am. Ammi was still fast asleep next to me. I got up and walked to the bathroom. As I let out a piss the lines forming the linoleum tiles on the floor multiplied into glowing neon replicas. I grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator and headed back to bed. When I opened the door Ammi was sitting up under the blanket, and it scared the shit out of me for a hot second. Our one-eyed chihuahua leaped out of the clothes hamper, over my feet, and jumped onto the bed, crawling on Ammi. I rolled a cigarette, and after lighting it Ammi emerged from under the cover and called for a drag. I handed her the roll-up and she asked me what time it was.

“Just after 2” I told her. I pinched my own arm and felt nothing. I bit my bottom lip, and it took a second, but I finally felt a sting. I took a big drag of nicotine and felt the smoke warming my lungs. I didn’t know for sure if I was still confined to a melatonin dreamscape, but looking directly to the left of me, I was sure I was where I wanted to be.

And Tell Me That You Love Me

—Why don’t women want to sit on guys’ faces?

—I don’t know, Jimmy,—I said, smiling and shaking my head. —I never really thought about it.

We were sitting at the bar, in the Nine Ball, a place a couple blocks down from the factory where I work. I’d just gotten off shift. Twelve hours again. They laid a bunch of people off, then started working the rest of us longer. Saves money that way.

Jimmy works at a tool-and-die place nearby. He’s a regular. Skinny, a little bit up grey starting to show in his hair. Always wears black Carhartt t-shirts. We’ve talked before, shot some pool, watched some games. He tends to attach to whoever is around and available, so sometimes we don’t talk for days. Which is fine. I just get tired, my feet aching from walking around on the cement floor all day. I don’t even know how he got on the subject. Something on his phone, I guess.

But he continued, —I mean, they like getting their pussies licked.

I nodded. —Yes. That’s true.

—So you’d think they’d want to be in the position, literally the position, to really be able to control that.

I thought about that, then added, —Sure.

—I mean, I think the idea of a woman wanting to sit on my face is hot, don’t you? he asked.

I said, —Yes. That is, on my face, not yours.

He nodded. —Right, that’s what I meant. A woman on each of our faces.

There was a pause. The bartender, Tammy, a gorgeous young woman, or younger than either of us anyway, with tattoos up each arm, who I think both of us were infatuated with, came by and refilled our beers. As she walked away we both stared at her ass. I said, —Maybe it’s that women don’t want to be in control during sex?

He nodded, musing. —Could be. I never thought of that. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I like being in control during sex, as much as the next guy.

I nodded quickly. —Me too.

—I mean, I like throwing a woman down on the bed and having my way with her as much as the next guy.

—Yes. Of course. Who doesn’t?

He leaned over to me, lowering his voice. —Have you ever had a woman sit on your face?

—Oh, once or twice.

—Did they enjoy it?

—I think so, yes. The second really did. I mean, she came.

—Are you sure?

—Well, pretty sure.

—Because sometimes they fake it.

—Yeah, I guess.

He kept his face close to mine. —So did they initiate it?

—Sitting on my face?

He kept staring, and nodded. —Yeah.

—Well, no. I asked them.

He leaned back, raising his voice. —You asked them? You gave them an option?!

Tammy looked over briefly.

—Well, no. I guess I told them, and they kind of agreed. I guess just to please me.

—More than once with each woman?

—No.

—You’d think since they liked it they would’ve wanted to do it again.

—Well, they weren’t girlfriends.

—Why didn’t you ever ask a girlfriend?

I shrugged. —I don’t know.

He sipped his beer. —Oh, I see.

—You do?

He nodded. —Yeah.

—Have you?

—Have I what?

—Had a woman do that?

He shook his head. —No. It’s one of my greatest regrets.

I hesitated. —Well, from my experience, I wasn’t exactly ready to go afterwards.

—You mean fucking?

—Yeah. I mean, it kind of takes up all your attention, so you can’t really stay, you know—

—Hard?

—Yeah.

—Oh.

He thought about that for a second. —Maybe that’s why women don’t like it.

—Why?

—Because they know. They know if they indulge in the lesser pleasure of pussylicking, that they may not be able to get the greater pleasure of a cock inside their pussy.

I shrugged. —Could be. I guess. I mean, that’s me. Maybe some other guy could stay hard.

He shook his head. —No, I think you’re pretty normal.

—Thank you.

He stared at the bar mirror, eyes becoming unfocused. —It’s just, you know, the sensation.

—The sensation?

—Of being surrounded.

—Oh.

—And her in control. Like you’re trapped and you have to do a good job or else.

I finished off my beer, got out my wallet and put some money down. —I gotta go Jimmy.

He nodded. —Yeah. Sorry. Got carried away there.

—It’s ok Jimmy, I understand.

I stood up, putting my wallet away. Tammy walked by, grabbing the money, and I waved for her to keep the change. She smiled.

Jimmy turned in his stool. —Do you have a girlfriend right now?

—No. Do you?

—No. Is there something wrong with us?

—No. Of course not.

—Oh. Ok.

He turned back to staring in the mirror, sipping his beer. I said goodbye and left. Outside, the sky was dark and the air cool and I almost forgot where my car was.

The Eye of Fortune

He introduced himself on September 11th.

“Hi, Elias. I’m Prince September.”

“cool, cool, cool.”

He’d burst through the doorway of my apartment, a complete stranger, but I was used to crazy shit.

“I’ve come to bring you a gift, Elias.”

Removing his Fedora, he pulled a ball of underwear from the hats head hole, then unwrapped it to display his treasure, still
in the underwear.

“Here. Its your father’s eye.”

I scratched.
father?

“Go ahead. Try it out”.

fuck it, I thought, free eye

I lifted the patch that shields the innocent from the watery hole where my left eye used to be, and popped it in.

He replaced the Fedora.

“so how’s the view?”

“the cartoon vision is fucking amazing.”

and it was.

no bullshit.

just like the old Disney films.

and he smiled, as if to say,
a lot of people are gonna shoot heroin,
and suck dick for heroin,
and some are going to jump from tall buildings,
and say Aaaaaaaaaaaah!
as they fly down and Splat! on the sidewalk,
but not you Elias,
you’re the man,
wink wink…

he threw his head back and
laughed at the ceiling.

“AAAHHHH.
huh.
huh.
huh.
huh.”

“AAAHHHH.
huh.
huh.
huh.
huh.”

I was fairly certain he was trying to fuck me out of something, but his hilarity was so infectious that I came down with the awfullest case of the Pillsbury Doughboys.

“huh-hoo  huh-hoo”

“huh-hoo  huh-hoo”

and we remained that way for days it seemed,
laughing our asses off, talking, and toking.

and he told me that he’d written some of the Beatles songs,
and practically every song ever,
“at least the good ones anyway.”

“cool, cool, cool”.

He’d handed me his business card:

Jack of Clubs.

Jack of Clubs? What the…?

and as I’d slowly turned it over, he placed his hand on my shoulder,

“Congrats, Elias…

 “yes, yes, yes”

“from this day forward,
your pussy’s gonna burn like a motherfucker.”

We shook.

He left.

Lights In the Sky

Its night, and I see the flashing of drones up high, beaming their cancer messages for everyone, and some stranger inside flips his wig, and urges me to run under the trailer, to curl-up in a dog burrow and sleep, and I sigh with age, fumbling my keys, and plastic grocery bags, and I comfort him with the knowledge that from now on, we’ll carry aluminum foil at all times, the good shit, not the dull store brand stuff, whenever it’s on sale of course, and he lets me know that he’s got my back, when I show him an image of me standing before God, like a child in line to see Santa Claus, pointing at my upraised finger, to debate the finer points of giving man one long enough to reach the stars, and the stranger subsides, and when I’m certain the coast is clear, I press play, to continue watching the movie, and Santa laughs, and pats his knee, and I crawl up, trying not to stare at the bulge in his pants, and he smiles with those whiskey eyes, as he proceeds to whisper something so profound, that explains everything so well, and I’m so amazed, that I walk off as if in a dream, grinning from ear-to-ear, like I just had my ass pounded.

Owning Emily

I arrived at around 3am. I wanted to be first in the queue but had been beaten to it. Occupying the prime position was a tatty old sleeping bag, topped with a woollen bobble hat bearing multiple primary-coloured stripes. Somewhere inside was a man; a man with foresight, as he was slumped in a fold-up picnic chair. A chair; I hadn’t thought about bringing one with me. That meant I would be standing for six hours, if not more.

I said hello to Man Number 1 as I took my place behind him, but he didn’t reply. I wasn’t sure if he nodded an acknowledgement or twitched due to the shock of being addressed. Either way, it was clear he wouldn’t be good company for the long wait that lay ahead.

As the sun sneaked above the rooftops, more people arrived: all men and all alone. The shipment would be limited to 25 models, according to the rumours, but there were already over a hundred people in the queue. The numbers swelled as the store’s opening time approached. Maybe they were just hoping to get lucky.

Activity inside the shop caused Man Number 1 to shed his hat, climb from the sleeping bag and fold his chair. It would soon be the start of the business day.

‘Which model are you after?’ I asked Man Number 1. He didn’t reply, turning away as if I had somehow broken a code of silence. I didn’t know about the etiquette of such transactions; it was my first time.

‘Which model are you after?’ I asked Man Number 3. ‘Any take your fancy?’

‘I don’t want one for myself,’ he replied, almost too eager to disassociate himself from the impending transaction. ‘Hell; I don’t need a sex robot. Why would I? I’m a real man, I’m all man and the women love me for it. I’m only buying one to sell it on. I hear the ethnic models attract high prices in the Middle East, so that’s where I’ll be flogging it.’

Man Number 3 said nothing else. He wasn’t interested in which model I was after. Had he asked, my answer would have been an anti-climax. I didn’t care which model I ended up with; any of them would do. I wasn’t looking to fulfil a specific fantasy.

The staff brought us into the shop ten at a time. As we entered they gave us a number. We sat on a collection of unmatched chairs, filling in the various questionnaires that the programmers would need to ensure compatibility.

They called Man Number 1 in. My consultation wouldn’t start until he had selected his sex robot, and Man Number 3 would wait until I had made my choice. All the robots were unique; well, that’s what the adverts claimed.

The consultations could be quite a lengthy process. After assessing the purchaser’s personality, the next step was to filter the choices of sex robot by looks. They considered weight, height, ethnicity, age, hair colour, eye colour and a host of other physical attributes. Then there were optional extras: piercings, tattoos, scars, birthmarks and the like. With only 25 models in stock, not every taste could be catered for. It explained why some of the late-comers still queued. The last few purchasers would have little choice and might pass up the opportunity to wait for the next delivery.

Once the purchaser assessment was completed, the next stage was to define the robot’s personality. This part of the consultation considered culture, beliefs, hobbies and a wide range of socio-political data. The manufacturer insisted that every purchaser went through the process. Following widespread criticism in the media, they were trying hard to reduce the sleaze-factor of what was – in truth – a machine men could have sex with.

Once the consultation was complete, the purchaser went into another waiting room. The engineers added any optional extras to the robot and used the information from the consultation to create a personality profile. All the robots had artificial intelligence and deep learning was implemented, so they adapted to the owners’ routines, their likes and dislikes, and any special needs they might have.

After an hour, the representative called me in to the consultation room. On the table was a multi-page questionnaire. Its cover proclaimed it to be the Owner Requirements and Expectations Survey. I told him we wouldn’t need it.

‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to know which model they want, not without going through the consultation process. Then there’s her personality; we need to get that right for your relationship to be realistic.’ He made his comment sound like a warning against my haste. Representatives were paid commission on upgrades, so it was in their interests to push the customisation options.

I decided to seize the initiative and keep the transaction as straightforward as possible.

‘I’ve done some research and as I understand it the robots, when new, all fit into general classes regarding looks and personality, and within those classes there is a degree of individuality which can be adapted.’

‘Yes, you’re right; that’s stated in the brochure.’ He seemed put out I wasn’t letting him do the hard-sell on me.

‘Do you know which the most popular classes are – in terms of sales – for looks and personality?’

‘Of course I do,’ he replied, not liking my approach.

‘Okay; do you have a model in stock with looks and personality that fall within the most popular classes?’

He checked the stock sheet and nodded. ‘We have three. If we complete a few sections of the survey I can determine which is best suited to your needs.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ I said, adding a smile to appear friendly. ‘Just get whichever of the three is nearest the door in the warehouse.’

The representative wasn’t happy that I hadn’t let him indulge in his sales patter. He stressed the need for compatibility, for optimal adjustments to the programming, for tweaks to physical traits to suit my every need. By ‘my every need’, he meant tweaks that would make my sexual experience with the robot dirtier. I let him finish his argument and then repeated he should just get the one closest to the door.

The sex robot I purchased was called Emily. She came in six parts: two legs, two arms, one head and one torso. The package included the tools required to build her. At first, I put her head on backwards for fun, but she wouldn’t power up until I put it back the right way. They were happy for you to screw the robots, but not to screw with them.

She had three operational modes: Girl Friend, Mistress and Filthy. I selected Filthy and dressed her in a leather basque and thigh-length latex boots.

Emily asked if I wanted to fuck her. I said I might, in a while, but before we did the dirty deed would she mind sweeping the leaves off the driveway? She took the broom with a smile and went outside. After some time, I went out and watched her working. In fairness, she made sweeping the driveway look sexy. She spotted me watching, and as she swept she told me how much she wanted to feel my cock inside her. After an hour of sweeping and a long verbal description of what she wanted me to do to her, the driveway looked great.

She asked again if I wanted to fuck. I told her to wait and suggested she pass the time cutting the grass. I watched as she mowed accurate lines into the lawn. Each time she reached the end of a line, close to where I was sitting, she’d say how much she wanted me to ejaculate on her breasts. She said it in coarser language; I had set her to Filthy mode after all.

That night I was in bed, reading, when Emily appeared at the window. The rain bounced off her face, her hair wet, bedraggled and plastered to her head. She balanced on the ladder, her skimpy negligee flapping in the wind. As she cleaned the glass with a squeegee, her lips mouthed a message. The only words I could make out were ‘finger’ and ‘anus’.

After a few days the deep learning had built a database of the clothes I dressed her in and the tasks I asked her to complete. She dressed herself, learned where I kept the tools and understood the jobs that needed doing. She also propositioned me for sex and described her fantasies in the filthiest of terms while she was doing her chores.

In the following days she built me a shed, cut the hedges, painted the living room and even carried out an oil change on my car. Despite her usefulness, Emily was beginning to bore me. A sex robot carrying out everyday tasks in a slutty way had seemed amusing and, to be fair, the first few days were fun. However, her sunshine attitude and legs-akimbo spirit started to grind me down.

One night, after a few drinks, I contemplated having sex with her. Despite her attractiveness, that was something I had no intention of doing. With the amusement factor on the wane, Emily represented a pointless investment.

Man Number 3’s plan of selling on his sex robot came back to me. Emily was, to all intents and purposes, a virgin. She had also amassed several housekeeping and maintenance skills, and while it might take time for her to unlearn those, she had kept her filthy attitude. Emily would be a catch for anyone seeking a nearly new sex robot. In fact, I was proud of her and all her achievements.

Searching the internet revealed a rich vein of potential sex robot purchasers. The unique personalities and low supply volumes of the automatons had kept resale values high. Demand changed according to locations. In the Middle East there was little call for anything but ethnic models, and North American purchasers seemed to prefer sex robots of greater heights. Emily was short, slim and blonde. The demand for such characteristics came from Japan.

Finding a buyer was easy, but as we discussed the transaction via a series of emails, he asked questions that made me feel uneasy. How tight was she? I said I didn’t know; I hadn’t had sex with her. He then asked me to gauge her tightness with my fingers. How big would a penis need to be, in terms of girth, to enjoy a tight fuck? He wanted information about her vagina and anus.

I was appalled. This was Emily. She had her own ways: fixing things and cleaning up and doing so with a slutty indifference that made her charming. The thought of a stranger using her as a sperm receptacle was unacceptable. The transaction was akin to handing over a loved one to sex traffickers. I couldn’t sell her.

I bought Emily a dog costume. It was hairy with floppy ears and a long tail. I taught her to chase cats, fetch sticks, bury bones in the garden and sleep in a basket in the kitchen. I took her out for walks, let her curl up in front of the fire when I was watching TV, and trained her to heel and stay.

She still asks me to fuck her every day, but I guess some characteristics are buried too deep.

Paul O’Pandy Fights Everyone On The Train

Paul’s wife Linda tells him over breakfast that despite all his awkward, shame-driven puritan bullshit, she still has fantasies and that the biggest one is she wants to do a threesome with two guys while he watches. Paul doesn’t have the emotional capacity to process this, so he throws his eggs against the wall and storms out of the house to go to work. Beyond the front door, the day is humid and hot enough to flop his hair down with sweat and glue his balls to one thigh. He hate-walks the whole mile and a half to the subway station and when he gets there he hops the turnstile and gives the station agent the middle finger before getting on the first train that comes by. Number, letter, line, fuck it, doesn’t matter, get me out of here already.

It takes him all of thirty seconds to make it worse.

He picks the guy at random, muttering at him out of breath.

“Heyyew. Heyyew. I said, heyyew. Heyyew gotta problem me?”

The little guy on the bench behind the book looks up into Paul’s wet, bloodshot eyes and says

“No.”

“Yes yewdew! I sawyew looking! I saw! Yew gotta problem me, yewdew! Well howbout yew dewsunthin bout? Huh?”

The little guy goes back to his book, or at least tries, but Paul slaps it out of his hand and gets taken totally off guard when the guy immediately socks him in his sweaty, melty testicles. He crumples to the ground and starts kicking back at the guy, but that only inspires him to get to his feet and start beating on Paul worse. The blows crunch against his bones and soft parts like a hammer. Half his teeth go loose and he tastes blood and one eye goes blank and he starts crying like a child, which only makes the guy hit him harder. In his idiot riot and rage, Paul screams that the guy is a tiny little pussy and that makes everybody else stand up and join in on the beating.

They stomp him flat, dancing around him as they screech and preen and kick him through until he doesn’t look like a person anymore. They joyously smash his pretty hands to leather bags of blood and bone chips, powder one of his ankles, kick him in the penis until it looks like a bicycle that was in a car crash. Some of the men pee on him when they’re done and then everybody takes pictures on their phones.

When the train rolls into his station, they all pick him up and throw him out together so he can crawl to wherever he’s going like the vicious little shit he so obviously is. At the office, everybody stares while Paul drags himself to his desk, tracking a thin snail trail of blood behind him. More pictures. Nobody says anything until the boss comes over and sits down across from him and asks if everything’s okay.

“Fllurmrr, mn clurnm, lekkf frummrnp.” Paul’s tongue is swollen and split from the beating and half his teeth are broken, threadlets of nerves hanging loose from the jagged stumps. Words are hard.

“Do you need to go home? Your wife called a little while ago…”

At the mention of Linda, Paul makes a rattling sound in his throat and headbutts the boss in his teeth. The boss recoils, his perfect smile stained red, then he belts Paul in the side of the head with his heavy black Swingline stapler. A blue explosion goes off in Paul’s brain and then he passes out.

It’s dark in the office when Paul opens his eyes again and everybody’s already gone home. He manages to call a cab dialing using his nose and ripped-up tongue and when they pull onto his street he whines and he pushes and noisily fills his pants with shit so the cheery fellow behind the wheel just kicks him out and doesn’t ask to be paid. Paul crawls the rest of the way home and doesn’t even really notice that Linda left the front door open, but he knows something’s wrong when he gets inside because the whole house smells damp with sex fumes.

He finds them in the kitchen.

His boss and the teenager from across the street with the toned arms piston in and out of her like industrial machinery while she hits them and makes them both call her Paul. They all look up in chorus and keep going while he leers weeping at them from the floor. Linda smiles and spits at him and he sees that the eggs are still on the tile from this morning, scattered amongst shards of his plate and dignity.

From between her two lovers, Linda calls his name and when he looks at her she locks his gaze and starts to come so loud the neighbors all turn up their TVs so they don’t have to hear. Except they kind of want to hear.

Paul hates how much he likes seeing her like this, and it’s hard to jerk himself off to it because his hands are smashed-up garbage now, but somehow he manages it.

After the men are gone and they’re alone again, Linda tells Paul that she wants a divorce and inside his heart he knows he’s too old and broken to ever find anyone else. She goes upstairs to sleep and when Paul doesn’t hear her turn on the shower to rinse off all the stinking fuck first, he cries harder and turns the oven on to five hundred degrees and he climbs inside. It’s easy to do because he’s so little.

In the morning, when the boss and the neighbor kid come over again, the kitchen’s blackened with smoke and shame so Linda takes them in the back yard and the neighbors video record her over the fences with their cell phones and touch themselves and invite her over for dinners and Monopoly nights and barbecues and no one ever asks about Paul ever again.

Dark Web

You’re not a badass if you’re not on the black market.

That’s what I used to believe. Now I know you’re a damned fool if you go anywhere near the dark web. It goes beyond unsafe. It’ll destroy you.

I’ve always considered myself a tough guy. Being named Ajax didn’t hurt. I played football in high school and college, have always been in to the hippest-but-kickass music—gangsta rap and R&B—and I make good money. I started my “Buyer Beware” paid blog with over a million subscribers, for I travel the world to patronize ‘em all. That’s my tattoo, instead of kill ‘em all. I always ride the roller coaster at the fair, have jumped out of an airplane, as well as dove off some of the highest cliffs above water in the world. I never turn down a fight—and I’ve gotten really fucked-up a couple of times; you can’t win them all unless you’re Steven Seagal—and I’ve never backed down from asking a woman out, especially if my buddies dared me to. That was before I got married. I like to joke that she’s a ball and chain, but I love her. She’s as crazy as me and does many of the bucket-list activities alongside yours truly. Speaking of said list, I’m halfway through it. I’m not the type to brag, it’s not my style, but I’ve engaged in porn on skates. Therefore, the dark web was just another hoop to jump through.

Or so I thought.

You Tube videos showed me the way. I purchased a VPN, inexpensive and well worth it, to hide my IP address and make it bounce from IP to IP. When it was static, it said I was in Turkey, but I resided in Chicago. I used DuckDuckGo—the search engine that doesn’t spy on you—and brought up the Tor browser (an acronym for “the onion router” due to the multiple layers of encryption applied on routing data), which led me to Hidden Wiki, with a list of sites on the dark web, and I was ready to rock ‘n’ roll. Everything there is dot onion, and the Bitcoin is used for currency, though it’s falling out of favor. Bitcoin is useful for anonymously buying drugs, any kind of illegal arms, and other unlawful goods, but I can now use other alt’ coins. You can also use PayPal and real money at this moment, but that leaves a paper trail.

And what was the worst that could happen? I’d stay away from kiddy-porn sites and serial-killer sites and shop for drugs and illegal arms. A half hour went buy, and I’d bought some pot and speed from Silk Road Anonymous Market 3.0, now running on new servers—the FBI had taken down Silk Road 2.0 in 2013—and purchased a fully-automatic Uzi and a semi-automatic handgun. In fact, I felt very confident.

Overconfident, as it seems.

My buddies were always pressuring me. Don’t be a Nancy boy: avoid getting a pumpkin, smash others’; Don’t let them put blueberries in your pancakes; don’t wear a jacket no matter how cold it is; never cry; you get the idea. Therefore, when a buddy of mine named Barrett—a muscled and mustachioed man with long black hair—dared me to go further than where he’d gotten stuck after seven black boxes, I had to add it to the bucket list. When I asked if he knew what I was getting myself in to, he slapped my back and said, “Good times, you’ve gotta trust me, bro.” He double-dog-dared me to try, and I answered with a question, “Wanna make this interesting?” Barrett and I being the nouveau rich, I offered up a $100,000 bet. He bit, buying the bridge. I had the confidence to go further than him but didn’t know if I could. Yet he hadn’t chickened out. Therefore, I trusted him.

Big mistake. My friends, like I used to be—but not on such a large scale—are pseudo intellectuals. For we’re hackers, or at least I used to be. I was a cyber soldier when I was in the military. I saw myself as a pioneer, wanting to discover things about the web previously uncharted. I’d gotten pretty good at utilizing software, also. At twenty-five, I was one of the best of the best. I knew what processes to murder to improve Internet speed. After buying more RAM and a new computer, I was ready to jump off the precipice.

I got a case of the nerves, not paying attention to the precognitive warning.

Not one to cower with liquid courage, I decided I’d go into the bathroom and look myself in the eye, even egg myself on, if that’s what it took. My shaven head caught the lights and reflected them greasily. I wasn’t bald, I just wanted the badassest haircut around. My muscles threatened to rip out of my tattoo shirt, and my cleft jaw and dimpled chin helped me scowl menacingly. Yet I just looked like some dumb ape. Hearing thunder and lightning and needing company, I let Killer, my black lab, through the backdoor and into the house, the scents of wet fur and ozone dueling banjos. Killer barked and demanded rough play craven souls didn’t have the balls to engage in. That dog wanted to wrestle harder than ever, and a couple of times, I wondered if I’d get bitten. I told myself if I didn’t have the guts to go on the black market and do some hacking—anonymous online—I’d better go back to thumbwrestling.

I stormed back into my study.

I took it as a challenge from Barrett to get to seven black boxes before getting stuck before he triple-dog dared me. From parent directory to parent directory I went. Most were basic encryption, and the ones that weren’t were dead-ends, so I used new encryption and covered my ass, latching on to an existing IP address for thirty seconds before bouncing to another one, making it seem like I’d vanished. Like Barrett, I got stuck on the seventh black box. I backtracked from the dead-end and made my way to the main directory, following Barrett’s path. The seventh box’s encryption was strange. It took some time, but I made it. Many obsequious things to bust through, but I was taking some time off work. I couldn’t hover, for the encryption would kick me out of the box, making me reset. In another directory, the only one online, I finally broke through. My ghost kept me anonymous, or at least I thought it did. I’d entered a taboo backdoor.

It loaded, and slowly. The dark web ran like dial-up. Then a chat window appeared in the bottom right of my screen, saying, “Welcome to Club Ape, your haven that goes beyond anything you can imagine,” along with what sounded like a children’s nursery rhyme played at wrong speeds—slow, then too fast, then slower, then way quick—eerie as hell. “I’m Archer, your host for tonight. And although that’s not my real name, feel free to use it.” He asked if I knew my way around, and I straight-up fibbed, claiming I’d been invited by a friend.

I was in the dark web’s version of the Further.

“We’ve given guest vouchers for tonight’s event,” he added.

Event? What in the shit?

I typed, “I don’t know how to maneuver, and I don’t see any guide links.”

“You wouldn’t see that through a voucher. You need to be an official member. I don’t recognize your IP.”

He can see my IP? Oh, I am so fucked.

“You’re probably wondering how I can see your IP,” he mind-read. “You’re not running Tails OS.”

Damn! How can a hacker miss something like that? I suck!

Then I did what I could. I made my IP static, saying I’m from Turkey. I got an SD invitation from Archer, for HD was only for members. He logged my IP—which he must’ve written down before I hid it properly—and told me he’s not responsible for any trauma tonight’s event may cause. “Follow this link when you’re ready,” he added. “The event starts in a few minutes. One warning, then a ban, if you don’t chill. I don’t have to tell you this, right? There’re no judgements on the dark web.”

I told him I understood.

“Thanks for coming and I hope you get off.” The chat window disappeared.

Black curtains, the sound of the hushed chatter of a crowd, and sickening laughter, came through loud-and-clear. I could imagine the rictus grins.

I realized I needed to text my wife again, for she hadn’t checked in with me in a couple of hours as she promised she’d do. She was out of town at a seminar about her “work.” I’d tried to tell her she had the worst gig in the world as a writer, for she’d been at it for ten years and had only earned slim pickins. I hoped that seminar opened her eyes to how there are only twelve authors that can sell 100,000 copies of every print book. And eBook sales only spike if you’re already famous, one to bribe potential fans, or very lucky. Yes, I’ve researched it. But you know writers, they don’t know when to bow out. I texted her and got no response, so I texted her again, yelling with capital letters. Still nothing.

What the fuck?

My wife, Stacy—a blond, stacked babe with a raucous personality—was also a caring person and wouldn’t blow me off like that.

Time to worry.

The curtain parted. Tied to a gurney was a sexy babe wearing a white, feckless mask and nothing else. But I could see strands of hair sticking out, and I recognized the curly locks, as well as the mole below her right breast, the one she had waxed so it wouldn’t grow hairs.

It was Stacy.

The severity of the situation crashed down on me like lightning. My mind lurched; my heart climbed into my throat. Wasps buzzed in my stomach. My bladder clenched. I stared at the screen like a zombie.

And coming toward her was someone very tall—obviously male, like an NBA star— wearing a gorilla suit. And holding a . . . oh, no way. . . drill.

Since when did gorillas use drills? I insanely thought.

The chat window popped up again. “Enjoying the show?” the fiend asked.

I came to myself.

Do something!

“That’s my wife on that table,” I typed with shaking hands. “I can tell by the mole under her right breast and her hair.””

“Your wife?”he responded. “She’s the only woman in the world who has a mole in that spot?”

The driller killer stood, rubbing my wife’s legs as she keened, then revving up the tool. And the audience laughed.

I steeled myself. “Listen, I don’t know what kind of freakshow you’re running here, but you get her off that table and let her go or I’ll call the FBI.”

The window was stagnant for about a minute. Then: “That’s it. This is your warning. You’re breaking protocol.”

“Fuck your protocol, Archer, or whatever your name is!” I typed. “Let her go right now or I’m calling the feds!”

Again, the chat window was inert for a minute. Then: “All right, you’re banned. And let me tell you something, you nark bitch—this ain’t the regular Internet with troll cowards. You go to the law, and we’ll track you down. Maybe you’ll be star of our next show, heh.”

I gasped, then cried out when the murderer stuck the drill into my wife’s vagina . . . and made pulp out of it as she screamed, the guy in the ape suit stained with dark-red blood. It was that swinging dick’s world, and we were all just living in it. The crowd evilly applauded and whooped, the bastards and bitches. Then the site went away. Trembling so badly I thought I’d have a seizure, I stood and paced for a spell, then rushed to the phone and called the police. I got back on the computer, getting out of the dark web I’d never go on again, and reported the murder to the FBI’s website on the regular web.

#

Barrett called a few days later, asking if I was all right. My world had been shattered, and I passed the time at home either crying or being filled with rage. Fuck the macho rules; she was my soulmate! I had a pistol with me all the time. And I smoked like a crematorium and drank like a hobo.

“Bro, I’m coming over,” Barrett said. “You can’t be alone right now.”

“Whatever. Nothing will help. My life is over.” I’d drunk twenty-one margaritas last night, and tonight it was moonshine, 150 proof. Tomorrow—if I lived that long—it would be absinthe again, 138 proof. The small bottle I’d drunk last time had sent me to the moon. Don’t think wan absinthe bottles won’t get you. For shits and giggles, I found out the Green Fairy’s a myth, but that, like everything else, meant nothing. I was drinking myself to death.

When he knocked, I looked through the peephole, then opened the door. He threw his black hair out of his eyes, then touched my arm. “You all right, ‘Jax?”

I shrugged him off and walked into the living room, where fast-food wrappers and empty pizza boxes competed for space with an overloaded ashtray and liquor bottles.

Barrett sat down beside me. “I finally broke through to the seventh level and found Club Ape.”

We’d already discussed this over the phone a couple of days ago. I’d told him he could keep his hundred-thou. It wouldn’t do me any good now.

“There’s a message saying the FBI has seized the site,” Barrett added.

I lit two cigarettes and smoked them both. “They’ll be here to kill me pretty soon then, which’ll be a relief. I wanna be with my wife.” I turned my head his way. “You’d better make yourself scarce before they murder you, too.” I broke down, weeping.

He rubbed my back. “I’m so sorry, bro. But I’m not leaving you.”

Then why had he blanched with wide eyes?

#

Barrett’s paranoia—or was that good thinking—got the best of him, and he left a day later. It wasn’t long before I found Killer dead in the backyard. His throat had been slit. Fat load of good police protection was doing. Sitting outside in their cruiser eating donuts and drinking coffee and falling asleep, that’s what caffeine’s worth. I refused to be spirited away by a U. S. Marshall in the Witness Protection Program. I clung to the chance that maybe my wife survived the attack and would be coming home. I do that, lying to myself. Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps me from putting the pistol in my mouth. Because the po-po was outside, I couldn’t do any of the drugs I’d bought from Silk Road. Therefore, I’d make up for it by drinking a fifth of whiskey a day, like Lemme Kilmister, may he rest in peace, after I finished the absinthe.

After a week of abject horror, a black shape rose up from the corner of the dark living room where I smoked Black Death cigarettes. With shaky hands, I held the pistol on whomever that was. Yet he fired, his gun equipped with a silencer, knocking my gun from my hand. Soon, I was cuffed with zip ties, my wrists chafing. Whoever this guy was—and I could tell he was male from his frame, though he was covered in black clothes from head-to-toe—he was strong as Samson, his scowl a missing link’s, his eyes black and abysmal. Then I was stuffed into the trunk of a black Chevy and driven away from my house. On the way out to his vehicle, I’d seen the cops sitting bloody-necked in the squad car.

My survival instinct kicking in, I reached into my shoe and pulled out my ceramic razorblade and freed my wrists. Then I reached up to that glowing latch and opened the trunk gingerly, then waited for the car to stop so I could creep out, barely making a sound. Being in one of their sick, insidious shows, that wasn’t happening. I wasn’t going out like that.

They got me again a few days later when I was drunk on Everclear and Jack. This time, they used handcuffs, giving me a chance to use my handcuff key I kept in my shoe with the razorblade. And no glowing latch this time—this was an older model, before 2008—so I had to stick my hand inside the space and dig to find the latch. I clicked it and crept out, yet they had a car trailing us, and beefy guys rushed over to me with pistols and threw me back into the trunk. Determined to be the ace survivalist, I—somehow quietly—dug through the flimsy barrier between the backseat and the trunk and sneaked up and cut the driver’s throat with the razorblade when he stopped for a light. It helped that he had the radio on. The men behind us were there in seconds, however. I tried the pistol disarming techniques I’d learned from survivalist Websites but got shot in the knee for my trouble. You can’t take a gun from someone; it’s a myth, too risky. And, oh, did that hurt like shit. It brought tears to my eyes.

Again, I longed to die.

#

Maybe what I’ve told you has inspired you to get on the dark web. You may be one of those people that argues that if you stay away from kiddy-porn and bind-torture-kill sites, you’ll be fine. But if you come across what’s now called Gorilla Group, getting through seven black boxes like Satan snatching hell’s seven keys, and you see me tied to a gurney with that stupid, white mask on, hopefully you’ll do the right thing and not be a coward. I hope you contact the FBI and the cops and have their site taken down. You need to strike them a blow where it hurts, no matter how small the victory, for they’ll be back.

Thing is, the person in the gorilla suit this time, as I lay masked and strapped to the gurney, sounds just like my wife.

And, unsexily, she’s cackling.

They’d broken her, after they’d obviously cauterized the wound.

The only thing worse than death: becoming deformed and morphing in to the monster.

I wonder whose vagina I’ll drill after I’ve become a eunuch, having gone insane from the pain.

Arthur the Queer?

“God-damn this steak is good, Joe!”

The two men sat opposite at the table. Neal seeming ecstatic, as he zealously saws and chews his cut of meat like a man that’d just been released from prison, all the while only ceasing in conversation long enough to take another bite. But Joe was more at ease, like he’d been confined to a rocking chair for life,  just biding his time, pushing his fork round and round, taking the occasional bite, and chewing long, slow chews, while glancing at the window, as if he were somewhere else.

And Joe asks,

“You remember that feller by the name of Arthur Graham; runs that porno magazine, Horror Sleaze and Trash, or whatever?”

Neal lifts his head, revealing the flesh being ground behind dissolving teeth,

“You mean the one that’s seeing that India girl?”

Joes face half rises, and nods towards Neal’s plate.

“Yeah, that’s him.”

“Boy that India’s a fine motherfucker, now. I’d like to LaPlace it right up her ass! Heh heh heh. Know what I mean?”

Nodding,

“Oh, she’s purdy now, fur shore.”

“I heard it somewhere or another that, she “aspires” to be Queen of the Underworld one day, hah! You think she’ll manage?”

“I don’t doubt it.”

Neal shovels another forkful,

“I might just be high; wool hail, you know I’m high as a motherfucker, but I swear this is the best god-damned steak I ever ate…Where’d you learn to cook like this?”

Joe turns from the window, and looks down at his plate,

“Oh, it ain’t the cooking, it’s the quality of the meat that makes the difference.”

“Is zat right?”

Joe nods.

“Shiiiiittt.

A man could get used to eating like this.”

Joe stares off like he didn’t hear.

“Now, what was it you was saying ’bout ol’ Arthur; Arthur the queer?”

Neal flashes a devil’s grin, before returning his attention to his meal.

“Oh……just that I’d killed him.”

Neal freezes midchew,

“You what!?”

“You killed him!?”

Looking at the window,

Joe replies, “Mm-hm.”

He drops his arm, and stares,

“Well god-damn Joe! The way you say it makes me think you being for real!”

Taking another forkful,

he resumes chewing,

“You ain’t is ya?”

Joe nods.

Out the corner of his mouth, he says,

“Fed his innards to the hogs out yonder.”

Neal  looks at Joe sideways,

“No the hell you didn’t.”

And grins,

“Come on now, Joe…you fucking with me?”

With both hands resting on the table, Joe looks at his plate,

“Naw”.

“I killed him”.

“He’s dead.”

Neal takes another bite,

“You shore you ain’t just been up too damn long, ya damn tweeker? Lord knows you prone to seeing shit.”

“Aww, fuck ‘at bull-shit!”

“Ha!”

Neal grins,

“Shooting at a damn empty hammock? I don’t reckon I’ll ever forget that shit. You had the damn po-lice swarming all over the place, with Phil, and all them damn guns of his…and, and ol’ Mark passed out drunk in the back of the Jag.”

“Momma’s still pissed about that shit. I don’t think she’ll ever let me have your ass over again.”

Neal takes another forkful,

“Killed Arthur-fucking-Graham. God-damn, Joe. You so full of shit, your eyes turning brown.”

Joe slams a fist down, rattling the table, and looks at him square,

“Well you shore don’t seem to mind the god-damned taste of him!”

The sound of silverware colliding with ceramic pierce’s the air as he bolts upright, grabbing his throat, his body flexing in contortion to expel his disgust,

“BLLLUUUHHHPPP!”

Joes chair skids back, and lands with a crash,

“God-damn you Neal!”