The Wilted Hipster

The last fat bitch I fucked made me cum after thirty minutes of slippery penetration. That’s what I like about fat women; you can truly enjoy yourself instead of busting a sticky load within two minutes. Sexy women just make me cum too quick, and I’m out for longevity.

Her name was Mandy and her colossal panties smelt like Chinese food. When life becomes redundant, I often take solace in the scent of her panties. Usually, afterwards I order wu-tang chicken as I bitch and rant on my blog. The food is never delivered on time.

I’ve been running my blog for two years now with barely any interaction whatsoever. People on the web just don’t give a fuck about what I have to say. I never would’ve thought that people worldwide could be as callous and pretentious as they appear to be. To tell you the truth, I’m kinda inspired by it.

My phone rarely rings, but when it does it’s either a bill collector from a third world country going by the moniker of John when their English is atrocious, or it’s my girlfriend Gina. I better answer that.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Vito. I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for hours now. What the fuck?”

“Sorry, Gina. I’ve been busy on my blog, and waiting for Chinese food. It still hasn’t arrived.”

“Oh, that’s great. Obsessing over your stupid blog instead of sticking your dick in my poor lonely pussy… There is no reason someone as sexy as me should have to resort to masturbation.”

“Look Gina, I’m gonna have to call you back. The Chinese food finally arrived, and I’m starving. Don’t worry, my eager cock will be there soon.”

“It better be. I’m all hot and worked up over here. I want you inside me. I miss you. I love you.”

“I love you too, honey. I’ll see you soon.”

If she only knew I fucked fat bitches on the side. Wow. That would be devastating. It might even drive her to suicide. What a dick thing to do. Cheat on your super sexy girlfriend with fat bitches. I should feel ashamed, but all I feel is hunger. I’m gonna go vigorous on this wu-tang chicken.

Gina’s small apartment is located in the nicer part of town, in Dormont. The cheap beer flows like the Allegheny river, the town drunks are all cordial, and most of the residents wanna fuck my sexy girlfriend.

Jesus Christ… I enjoy fucking fat bitches.

Here we go again. Another predictable night.

I knock twice on the door, and Gina answers it wearing nothing but my old Manic Mike And The Mood Stabilizers T-shirt. She must be excited to see me. Her rock hard nipples are damn near piercing through the T-shirt.

“Vito! Come on in, grab a class of Chianti. Take your clothes off, spend time with me…”

I’m treated like a king with a giant platinum scepter for a penis. I don’t deserve this treatment, but I kindly oblige. If it wasn’t so fucking predictable, I’d probably be content. Every day seems like a rerun.

Even the whole fat bitches thing is staring to get old.

My ice-cold Chianti isn’t going to be cold for long. I didn’t even have time to drink more than a sip before Gina slid my average-size penis down her throat.

She’s slurping away and making a pig out of herself, just like she always does, all the while with a twinkle in her eye. I’m fondling her perky C-cups and thinking how lucky I am to have such a hot, determined fuck tool by my side. I throw her sexy ass on the bed and slip it in, doggy style. Three minutes later I bust my load on her pretty little face.

I tell her I love her, then focus on my blog as she sleeps. Her snoring problem gotta go.

Still no action on my blog.

Well, ain’t that predictable. Bunch of antisocial media motherfuckers! All these dorky fucking assholes can fuck off! I’ve wasted years on this blog with no fucking benefits! I’m shutting this fucker down. This blog and redundant lifestyle are finished! It’s over!

In the morning I go to Marrotti’s Coffee to get my fix. This seems like a good place to relax. A good place to ponder the possibilities, and hopefully a good place to empty my asshole.

“Hi, I’d like a triple shot of espresso with a side of seltzer water, please.”

The hipster nerd with his red glasses and his pointy beard says, in a condescending manner, “You sure about the seltzer water? People never order that with espresso in this shop. Most bona fide bean enthusiasts relish in the aftertaste of espresso.”

“Well personally, I could give a fuck about what your other customers are enthusiastic about. I didn’t come here to engage in contentious conversation over fucking coffee, bro. I came here to figure some things out, and take a healthy shit.”

“I’m sorry sir, but we don’t permit people who chase their espresso with seltzer water to shit on the premises.”

“You fucking hipster piece of shit! Go and get me the goddamn manager, right now!”

“I am the manager, seltzer boy.”

And that’s all it took for me to feel alive again. A new life experience. I’ve never hit a man with glasses, but once I finally did, it felt better than any of the times I fucked fat bitches or any of the times I shot cum in Gina’s pretty little face.

This belligerent hipster fuck went flying into the espresso machine. He whimpered like the little bitch he truly was. Those stupid fucking red glasses were broke into pieces, and the pieces of my life were put back together.

Miraculously, I avoided jail. Maybe that fucking hipster had it coming. People around here are sick their shit. The whole demeanor of a hipster is that of a contemptuous know-it-all asshole. It’s a free country, do what you want, just don’t do it around me. And shave that ridiculous beard.

I told the story to Gina, who offered me her asshole for the first time as a celebratory gift. Her untouched, bleached-out asshole is finally mine! Something new! Can’t be mad about that. We stunk up the bedroom and she shit out my seed as I created a new blog called ‘The Wilted Hipster.’

It’s doing great. I’m finally getting the recognition I deserve.

Fine Diamonds Gentlemen’s Club (366 Parsecs From the Sturgeon-Clements Galaxy) In the Year of Our Lord 2033

I watched Ruby gyrate on stage, her ass swinging like a pair of churchbells. Long, high-heeled legs carried her from the pole to the half-dozen mooks huddled before her, shimmying in one of six pre-programmed routines. Heavy rock music smothered the whirring of rotors in her hips, her neck.

In red neon she looked bathed in blood.

The mooks whistled and hooted, tossing dollar bills at Ruby’s feet—old habits died hardest in titty bars—but otherwise behaved themselves. Until they grabbed her or stuffed money into her bald box I left them alone.

I went back to my poem.

“Hank! Are you even paying attention? Jesus, do something!”

Ruby had unhooked her bra, flung it behind the stage, and continued reaching to unhook it again. The mooks found it hilarious, whooping each time her tits strained upward.

Sometimes the girls’ circuits got stuck in a loop and it’s no big deal. Ruby, though, had shredded the MetaFlesh between her shoulder blades; it hung in flaps, revealing the steel column of her spine.

I dropped my pencil, uttering a curse, and shambled to her.

This was why a lot of clubs had switched to holochicks.

I looked like an asshole, dragging my bulk onstage. The mooks taunted me accordingly. One of them told me to shake it, baby, and threw a dollar. I pocketed it.

Heath didn’t like it when I worked on girls in the open—spoils the illusion, he said, like the illusion wasn’t the goddamn point—but Ruby had torn herself up good, and he hatedspending money on repairs.

Heath’s the owner of Fine Diamonds. He’s a cocksucker.

Ruby was an easy fix. I tinkered with a few knobs under the plate on her back and she resumed grinding and humping like she was supposed to. The tear in her flesh needed patched but could wait.

When I returned to the bar Joe had an earful for me.

“The fuck do we pay you for, Hank, to write your little love notes? Keep that barstool from getting cold?”

Joe managed the place. Most nights he sat with his buddies from the Satan’s Pilgrims. Joe used to ride with the Pilgrims until his ticker acted up; a couple of his boys remained on hand for security. I called them Motherfucker #1 and Motherfucker #2. Not to their face.

“Sorry, Joe.”

“Go grab another case of Yuengling, Shakespeare, Nikki’s almost out.”

The beer was heavy and carrying it hurt my back; I’m not a young man anymore. I plunged bottles two at a time into the ice chest, thinking how good one would feel sliding down my throat.

“He’s only putting on a show for his biker pals, you know.”

Nikki looked sympathetic. She was real but had enough piercings to be practically half-metal. She used to dance before Heath brought in the robots, still had the legs and ass to show for it.

“Yeah, I know.”

She slipped a Yuengling into my palm.

“On the house, writer man.”

“You’re a good gal, Nikki. Why don’t we sneak back to the VIP room? I’ll give you the ol’ blue-veined behemoth.”

“Maybe when you’re rich and famous, Hank.”

Fine Diamonds had some nice scenery—Sapphire, Emerald, Jewel, they were some well put-together robots—but Nikki was the best thing about the job, blueballs notwithstanding. On the worst nights I could watch those legs—real skin, not that MetaFlesh horseshit—or her too-short skirt filled out just right.

I’d written at least twenty poems about her, published most of them. She had no idea.

The poem I’d been working on had turned to vapor in my absence. I tried summoning the next line, that beautiful next line, but it was gone.

Fuck. I sucked my Yuengling and brooded.

I’d expected working in a titty bar would be fun and Christ, had I been wrong. When it was dead, time moved so slowly not even writing could curb the ennui. Busy nights, you got to watch other people enjoy themselves, scrambled to restock the bar or prevent the clientele from damaging the merchandise (whether she’s flesh or steel, some men just loved seeing a woman broken by their hand). And the VIP room? Jesus.

The job made sure I had booze and books, gave me a tiny room above the Korean market, and was about all I had left in me to do. God help me, some nights I wished I was back in the post office.

The egg timer at Joe’s elbow chimed.

“Hank, go tell Sapphire her fifteen’s up.”

The VIP room—little more than a glorified closet—occupied a dark corridor in back of the club. Thumping bass from the DigiJuke drowned out most incidental noise, as intended.

I rapped my knuckles on the door. “Time’s up, Sapphire. Let’s go.”

I gave it half a minute. Some guys aren’t finished when the timer goes off. Usually I cracked the door—not enough to embarrass anyone, but to deliver the message fifteen minutes meant fifteen minutes.

The doorknob didn’t move.

“Who the fuck told you it was okay to lock this door?”

I pounded hard, like a cop.

“Sonofabitch, if I gotta break down this door—”

The knob clicked, turned. The door creaked open a hair. Pissed off, I kicked it the rest of the way.

Some scrawny college-looking prick yanked his pants over a pair of bony hips, still wearing the rubber he’d just shot into. Behind him, on the cracked vinyl loveseat, Sapphire sat in re-dress mode.

“Goddamn, Grandpa, I just wanted some privacy.”

“Think that sign doesn’t apply to you? Next time I’ll bend you over the bar, stick a beer bottle up your ass. We’ll talk privacy then.”

He scurried off. At least the prick used a rubber. Lots of guys don’t, even though it’s club policy.

I gave the loveseat a once-over, raised the cushions with my foot and scanned for wadded tissues, condom wrappers, anything left behind in the throes of passion. Once I knew no one would plop into a stranger’s love juice I sprayed some deodorizer (the air reeked of fucksweat) and corralled Sapphire into the dressing room.

There I rinsed out Sapphire’s mouth, cunt, and asshole, again grateful that the college twerp had bagged it. Then I swabbed her down with a disinfectant cloth, careful to get into her navel, behind her ears, her cleavage. Places where men liked to drool.

This part I didn’t mind so much. Sapphire was built fair-skinned and willowy, even had a small patch of cinnamon-colored pubic hair I thought was real sexy.

I sent her into the club. Ruby passed us on her way to the VIP room. With her stood a pudgy fella that I’d seen sitting alone by the stage.

“Half an hour,” Ruby said.

I sat at the bar and waited for something to happen. The night was winding down—a couple of mooks would want a turn in back, asking twenty minutes before closing time, the bastards. I’d never left this shithole on time.

One of these days my luck had to change. The writing would finally bring in some real money, at least enough I could afford to quit.

The music thumped on.

When the egg timer dinged I headed to the VIP room. Knocked.

“Come on, does every sonofabitch need an engraved invitation to move their ass—”

I threw open the door.

“Aw shit. Shit. Joe! HEY, JOE!”

Pudgy Fella sprawled on the loveseat, vacant eyes stuck toward the ceiling. His mouth locked in the O he’d tried screaming through over the DigiJuke. Blood spilled over the cushions, pooling on the floor.

Ruby crouched in the blood, head bobbing over his groin in slow, pre-programmed rhythm. She’d gnawed the cock that had been in her mouth to gristle.

“Jesus-fuck, Hank, what happened?”

Joe stood behind me, flanked by Motherfuckers #1 and #2. He looked pale.

“Hank, watch the door. Anyone shows up, tell them we closed early.”

“Right.”

“He come in with somebody?”

“No. And he’s wearing a wedding band. Probably didn’t tell anyone he was coming.”

“Good, that’s real good. We’ll take care of it from here, Hank.”

I didn’t argue. I took Joe’s spot at the bar, watched the door like I was told. Prayed this wouldn’t be the night Heath showed up to count the till.

Nikki asked if I’d seen a ghost.

“Wish I had. Gimme a belt of Wild Turkey, will you? Extenuating circumstances.”

Joe came back not too long after. The color returned to his cheeks. The Motherfuckers were nowhere to be seen.

“We got it under control, Hank. My boys are taking care of the mess.”

“All right.”

“You’re a team player, ain’t you, Hank? You’re not gonna fuck us on this?”

Joe smiled, but I knew a threat when I heard one. I was about to learn just how much he minded having me around.

“I think it’s time we talked promotion, Hank. Got you invested in the business.”

“Christ, no! I can’t stand it here as it is!”
“That’s because you’re not part of the team. You’d have our back, we have yours.”

He grinned again, his eyes spelling it out. The Motherfuckers could handle two stiffs as easily as one.

“Okay, so let’s talk benefits.”

“What’d you have in mind?”

I told him.

“Absolutely not. Heath would hang my balls on his mantle.”

“I’ll bring her back, of course. C’mon, Joe, I thought you trusted me.”

Joe lit a cigarette. “Fine. But you know which one you’re getting, right?”

***

After we closed, Joe escorted me and Nikki to the parking lot. The girls had been hung in the dressing room on their charging hooks, except for Ruby. I’d cleaned her up and put her in street clothes, walked her to my car.

“Have fun,” Nikki said. “Don’t fall in love.”

“I won’t.”

Joe said, “See you tomorrow, Hank.”

Maybe he hoped Ruby would malfunction again, make me a problem he wouldn’t have to worry about. Maybe I hoped the same thing.

I laid Ruby in the backseat and pulled out. Above us the night sky yawned wide, infinite, gleaming with a million stars.

Glocksucker

I haven’t had an orgasm since puberty, an ejaculation that nearly killed me. I’ve been careful ever since, and going to the bar with Erica isn’t smart. But when she discovers my little secret and asks me out for a drink, the tattoos of featureless red birds spiraling up her arms and out into the uncaged atmosphere, I can’t decline.

Erica has tanglewood eyes and more ear piercings than I can count without sweeping her chestnut hair out of the way. Her lowcut shirt shows skin beneath her belly button and clings tight to her breasts, which are harnessed in a bra that jostles them about every time she moves. Blue jeans grip her ass like greedy hands.

The bar she chooses, a shithole named Shotgunners, is humid and spongy, with empty shot glasses scattered everywhere like spent shells on a battlefield. The crowd around the bar looms a dozen people thick, so a hundred-dollar bill ensures the bombshell waitress keeps our glasses full while we stake claim to the only vacant table (wet and sticky from spilt drinks).

We drink while bobbing-and-weaving through small talk. She licks her lips and watches my mouth move when I say things. Laughs at all my jokes, places her hand on my forearm when doing so.

“You really named your dick ‘the Alamo’?” She asks, lighting a fresh cigarette before putting the old one out, its bittermint menthol smell swallowing both of us. She takes her smoke like a deep kiss.

“Yep, because you’ll always remember it, hehe.” Even I can’t believe the dangerous, drunken pick up lines I’m weaving.

“Oh, I’m sure,” she mocks.

We drink more. She says her roommate is named Kiko Magellan, which is bullshit—no one is named Kiko Magellan.

At some point an urban beat bounces through the speakers,decelerating life’s natural vibrations. Everyone moves in slow motion, the skin on their faces slinking towards the ground like molten cheese. I hold my breath and count the stars inside my eyelids until the world resumes its average pace.

“Oh—Ilovethis song. Wanna dance?” Erica asks, flushing the rest of her bloody mary down her throat. Without waiting for an answer, she floats out of her chair and moves towards a herd of dancers. I follow her onto a hardwood dancefloor that’s scarred from high heel warfare.

She reaches back and interlocks her fingers behind my neck, shoulder blades against my chest. She strokes my earlobe, bites her lip, touches her face. My fingers slip across her stomach, smooth like top shelf scotch.

She arches her back, pressing her ass into my crotch.

Rolling thrusts against my dick.

Grinding. Twisting.

Her skin reminds me of honey. Her hair is all beachy waves and caramel highlights and giddy pheromones. I breathe it in.

My blood-enflamed penis makes its presence known. I think of naked George Washington with a mouthful of miniature politicians squirming between his teeth; wigless and hogtied to a stick, spit-roasting inside a microwave oven. Orgasmic fluids slow and coagulate, bulging and backlogging at the tip of my dick—a fire hose at the pinch point in an old timey cartoon.

“I’m not sure about this,” I warn, but Erica either can’t hear me or doesn’t care. She rubs her hand against my erection inside my khakis. She bites her lower lip and looks achingly into my eyes. I kiss her, and she bites mylower lip when I try to pull away.

Her apartment is within drunken stumbling distance of the bar.

Sloppy, feral sex. She squeals as I thrust in and out, taking handfuls of her ass and spreading the cheeks apart to get just a little deeper. She arches her back to get herself as far up and out there as possible. Balls slap against her clit as she drips with syrupy satisfaction. I cram my unwashed thumb into her butthole, its acceptance tight and suctioning.

She gasps something about it being “so, so dirty”.

Everything smells like cadmium and other heavy metals.

She slips a vibrator up her ass, alongside my thumb as I plunge away at her from behind. I watch in the mirror as her dangling breasts sway and jolt in every direction—tidal waves that grow from butt-cheek-ripples created by my jackhammering pelvis.

I jerk her head back by a fistful of her hair. Spank her ass until it welts. Squeeze her tit as hard as I can. Choke her from behind. Call her a slut. She screams for me to fuck her. Harder.

The pressure. Builds. Then erupts. In blood, and cum.

And bullets.

9mm slugs spray everywhere like killer rain, ripping open the end of my penis in a pleasureful, painful, pitiful sensation. Tearing through her uterus, lungs, throat, and detonating out the top of her head, leaving a mushy stump where her scalp used to be. Hot shell casings burn flesh as they splay out of me and ricochet off the wall, the mattress, Kiko Magellan’s exposed erection in the corner chair. Bullets, smoke, the smell of gunpowder.

Relief, sweet euphoric relief.

Her body crumples to the bed, tanglewood eyes still open.

Blood and dead bird tattoos and cum and bullet-holes and shell casings everywhere.

***

“There’s no way you’re a virgin…virgins don’t fuck that good,” Erica says, lying jumbled in her sheets without any fucking left in her, sharing a minty cigarette with Kiko. Her words suck me back into the current dimension, the one without blood and black powder residue.

My slut slayer did its job, like always. It’s time to go writhe in guilt and grief and regret until the urge to hunt again becomes unbearable. I get dressed and leave without saying a word.

The Wasteland Motel

Bo was unhappy. He should have been grateful to be a member of one of the last few clusters of humanity that’d survived the apocalypse, but whoop-de-doo, he wasn’t.

He decided one Wednesday morning that he wanted more from life. He didn’t like tending the goats: brushing them, feeding them slop, shovelling their shit. 32 years of that was enough. He put in his two week notice with Todd, the goat boss, deciding to try his luck in the wasteland beyond the rusted steel walls of the camp instead.

Not surprisingly, when he said to Todd, “I’m putting in my two weeks notice,” Todd replied, baffled, “You’re what?”

“I read about it in an old book Crazy Charlie gave me, when I was a kid…”

Charlie had been a lunatic, a total drain on the camp, but somehow he’d managed to teach Bo how to read before he died. So that was nice.

Bo said it again, “Two weeks notice.”

No one had ever quit a job post apocalyptically.

This troubled many of the people in the camp. Especially Mort and Linda, who talked rather harshly about Bo to whoever would listen. “He better not think he can waltz over here and get a job with us and our chickens…”

“If he can’t handle goats, he certainly can’t handle chickens.”

“Or the eggs.”

“Or the pecking…”

They all agreed, no one was hiring Bo. But Bo didn’t come around to ask anyone for a job. No, for his last two weeks in camp, he just went about his business, conserving his water and rations, and sharpening a spoon into a small dagger as defense against the unknown dangers beyond the camp’s towering walls.

After his last shift with the goats, he said goodbye to everyone. They’d all gathered around in a loose circle, regarding him nervously. Directly behind Bo was the ramshackle gate marking the forbidden perimeter. Nothing came in. Nothing went out.

“Where you going?” Clara asked.

“Into the Wasteland,” Bo said offhandedly.

The crowd gasped in unison.

Clara opened her mouth to say something but her mother kicked her shin, prompting her to remain silent.

“Dave, open ‘er up,” said the mayor in resignation, motioning to the lone guard on duty. “Let the kid go…”

As unfathomable as it now seemed, really they’d all seen this coming. Bo had always been a strange dreamer, and his dreams tended to prompt two very distinct reactions from others in the camp. Most of them were afraid of people who dreamt, inviting disaster as it often did. The rest of them didn’t fear him at all; he just made them feel guilty about not following their own dreams themselves.

“The Nukies are still out there. S’all I’ll say, boy,” a shrivelled-up old woman said to him. She was blind and could barely walk.

“Nukies, jeez,” the mayor remarked. “It’s been a long time since anyone mentioned them…”

“Maybe there’s werewolves out there too,” Bo said, hoping to lighten the mood.

Nobody said anything in response. It was awkward.

But it’d been so many years, people didn’t know what to believe about the outside world anymore. The camp offered safety, but safety from what? No one really knew, but Bo intended to find out.

Bo shook everyone’s hand as the door was pried open for the first time in a generation. Before walking out into the blowing sands, he turned and said to his campmates, “I hope to see you all again soon.”

“Don’t forget the secret knock,” the mayor reminded him.

“Shave and a haircut, two bits,” Bo replied.

And with that, he walked out into the wasteland.

His destination was supposedly just a short walk across the dunes, maybe half a mile or so, just long enough for him to contemplate what Charlie had told him all those years ago along the way.

“Reason you suck at shovelling goat shit’s cos your family used to own a motel right up the road…”

“A what..?”

“A motel,” the old man repeated, “fer vay-cay-shun-ing. Quite the famous place, if I remember correctly. Why, folks used to come from miles arou…”

Charlie had abruptly stopped talking then. Before Bo could even ask him what either a motel or a vay-cay-shun was, the old man freaking died, right there in front of him.

To make matters worse, it turned out no one else in the camp was any help explaining the terms to him either. “All Greek to me,” Mort had joked.

Bo decided to drop the subject after Charlie was buried in the ground, but for many years after, his curiosity remained.

Cresting the final dune between him and his birthright, Bo gazed down upon the trail of crumbled asphalt lying just on its other side. Following the highway north, it wasn’t long before he caught sight of a severely dilapidated building in the distance. A large, faded sign remained standing out front, its bright red letters having long ago faded to the lightest of pinks.

It read simply, “MOTEL”, just like Charlie said it would.

Bo crouched behind a rock and waited, staking out the hills for any sign of life. He hadn’t seen much since leaving for the motel, but he wasn’t about to get ambushed in all his excitement to get there.

Once he felt certain the coast was clear, Bo came out from his hiding place, took a deep breath, and bravely marched forward.

He stayed there all alone that night, a little lonely and just a tad bit frightened. He occupied himself by straightening up the place, which looked like it had survived a nuclear war. Digging around in old piles of papers, sorting thorough various debris, it wasn’t long before he discovered some brochures that gave him a pretty good idea of what a motel was supposed to be.

He was stunned, gazing at the old photos of a time before he was born, when people actually traveled freely, occasionally coming in from the road to rest, relax, put their feet up and enjoy a nice, ice-cold beverage.

Wow, imagine that? An ice-cold beverage…

A week later, when Bo returned to the camp and announced his new motel, they all just laughed at him. He explained to them in detail what a vacation was. They all just laughed even harder.

“A wasteland vacation!” cried Linda, Mort’s wife, clutching at her belly as she doubled over with laughter.

“No wonder you didn’t want to shovel my goat’s shit,” Todd the goat boss said, “you’re a comedian, not a goat tender!”

Bo had been hoping for a warmer reception, but he resolved to win his former campmates over eventually. He traded some goods discovered in the rubble for some much-needed supplies, returning over the dunes to his new home that night.

Sometime the next morning, his first guest arrived. Turned out Clara didn’t like living in the camp anymore either. She traded some sex action to Bo in exchange for room and board at his motel.

He set her up in a room around back. “Sorry about the giant concrete hole in the ground,” he said. “When my funds get fluffier, I’ll have it filled in. For now, just be careful around the edge.”

Clara looked down into the concrete hole and frowned.

With Clara having taken up residence there, a few men from the camp came to visit the Wasteland Motel as well. Turned out the other prudes back at camp just couldn’t turn as good of a trick as she could.

Business wasn’t great for Bo, but it was good enough for now. He filled the vending machine with long-expired orange sodas he found in an old storage room.

“I can add the continental breakfast soon, if business keeps improving,” he said.

One day, Bo found a set of keys. He had no idea what they were meant to unlock. He showed them to Clara. She had no idea, either. Bo regarded the keys curiously for a while before hanging them up on the wall behind the front desk.

A few days later, the camp mayor paid a surprise visit to the Wasteland Motel. He came on his ancient, sputtering dune buggy in a swirling haze of sand and noise.

Bo took the mayor all around the grounds, showing off the motel and all its amenities with pride. The mayor just laughed at first.

“Place is a dump!” he said.

That was before Clara invited him into a room. When he came out, he wasn’t laughing anymore.

“I’m still not sure of this place,” he said, buttoning his pants as he prepared to leave in his dune buggy.

The next day, he came back with Linda. He rented a room, fucked her in it. Then Linda came and sat around in Bo’s office afterwards. They shared a can of beef stew while the mayor went into the room with Clara once again.

That day Bo finally discovered what the keys were for.

There was a hatch around back, next to the big concrete hole in the ground. Bo unlocked the hatch and went down into the darkness. He was scared for his life but just had to find out what was down there.

What he found was stacks and stacks of white plastic bags. Inside the bags were chlorine pellets. He didn’t know what chlorine was or what it was used for, but he figured it out rather quickly from the writing on the bags.

The concrete hole in the ground was supposed to be a swimming pool. How nice…

There was something else down there, too. Something like 4,000 pounds of red string. In crates. This too puzzled him, for some time afterwards, until the day he found the plaque beneath a large pile of rubble out front.

“THE WORLD’S BIGGEST BALL OF STRING”, it read.

What a turn of events. No one was laughing at Bo anymore.

Eventually, the motel became a very popular place for all the people from the camp. They came there to get away as time and work allowed, and they always brought goods to trade in return for their stay.

On the one-year anniversary of its reopening, Bo decided to throw a big party at the motel and he invited the whole entire camp, free of charge. They all came over the dunes and celebrated together. It was a very happy day indeed.

How foolish they felt as they all milled about, joking, laughing, and drinking by the pool that night. It felt good to swim in the cool, clear water, far away from camp.

They spoke about the odd curiosity of “The World’s Biggest Ball of String” and what it must have meant to travellers from times past, back when the road outside still went somewhere. But that was the other thing.

“The road could go somewhere, couldn’t it?” Mort said.

“I suppose…” The mayor was forced to admit, floating on his back in the pool.

The people began to smile, considering the possibility. The thought of the world opening back up to them, when it had seemed so lost and destroyed and closed off for such a long time before.

Bo looked up at the stars and lost himself in reverie. He felt great pride for having left the camp, re-staking their claim on the outside world, when everyone else had been so fearful and close minded. For the first time in his or anyone else’s recollection, they felt hopeful, unworried as tribe.

Certainly no one was worried about the silent, shadowy forms closing in on them.

Deformed. Scab-faced. Hairless humanoid mutations. Armed with cinderblock clubs, repurposed car parts, and sharpened, ax-like stop signs, let’s just say they were far less concerned with “The World’s Biggest Ball of String” than they were with the pool of floating meat there before them.

Reclining peacefully in her pool chair, the old blind woman whispered, “told you so…”

Hump Day

Suckin’ my unlit Winston, I swerved the Buick longside the curb, on the corner of Grape and Vine. And fought to squelch a yawn. Twelve-hour-grinds three days straight dancin’ the graveyard shift, and my weary old ass shoulda been crashed, in my otherwise empty studio.

But Slim Grady owed me money. Accordin’ to his ex, Slim had slunk off like a skunk five nights earlier—to shack up with some ho out here in the Red Light zone.

I almost stepped in dog shit climbin’ out the Buick. While the dank, rank air that greeted me smelled like Godzilla’s ass. Graffiti choked the chipped brick buildings—all the doors and first-floor windows barred with metal gates. Shards of broken glass—in every color of a Skittles rainbow crunched beneath my boots: the gutter strewn with cans … needles, bottles, bloated condoms—and chunks of rotting puke. Not a single red light anywhere. Looked like a cockroach zone to me.

If his ex was right, and she wasn’t slingin’ bull to protect her man, Slim lived half-way down this block on my side of the walk. This time in the mornin’, most of the human roaches had holed themselves away, and wouldn’t scurry out till nightfall. But closing in on Grady’s squat, I spied a piece of tail, leanin’ against a shit-box Civic, idlin’ at the curb. New to the streets for sure; she still had all her curves. Since drugs had yet to waste her … smooth coffee skin still gleamed as sweet as melted caramel. And jeans not yoga pants: bonus points for me. By the time I reached them, the Civic sputtered off.

“Can you bloody believe that?”

“Believe bloody what exactly?”

“Guy wanted me to blow him for a measly twenty bucks. What is he fucking nuts? I gotta get me thirty for the likes a that.”

“Well, today’s already Wednesday, doll. Dude’s probably low on cash. Most folks don’t get paid till Friday rolls around again.”

“Hell, you’re probably right. But if he wanted me to blow him, he shoulda thought a that before blowin’ all his cash.”

She amped her smile a thousand watts: “How ‘bout you, baby? You got any money?”

Greed filled her drug-starved eyes when I reached inside my pocket—

Her mood sinkin’ like the Titanic when I flashed a badge instead. “I get paid on Fridays, too, doll.”

Gotta give her credit. She rebounded like Dennis Rodman in his NBA prime—ampin’ that smile brighter than all the marquee lights in my little corner of China Town. “Why didn’t you say so, baby. Five-O’s always free.”

I cupped her elbow in my palm, steered her toward the Buick. Kept her pressed against my side: in case she thought of boltin’. My boots and her silver stilettos grindin’ those Skittle rainbows.

“Best news I’ve heard all week, doll. Let’s get this Hump Day party started. We can launch with fucky-sucky.”

I bought that badge in a fucking dollar store. Best money I’ve ever spent.

Bring Me the Head of F.W. Murnau

Anton Shreck peered through the sliding glass door that led to the patio and the outdoor heated pool, checking on the girls.

They were well-secured and squirming, and their sounds of muffled protest pleased him. He supposed on reflection that their frogties and pimp goggles were a bit over the top, but the visual gave him a hard-on and focused his powers.

Soon the juices would trickle together into the steaming blue soup, the girls tumbling into the mix in a fleshy fireworks display of sizzle, crackle and pop. And then…

He smiled, and the universe seemed to smile with him. Then it frowned, studied the situation, did some quick calculations and smiled again. Alternatively, the black acid had begun to kick in, because the moon was dripping gore that slid down the white tile matrix surrounding the pool, crawled up naked thighs and planted its crimson fingers inside the girls, one by one.

A scent of iodine and sulphuric acid bloomed in the night air. The stars were in alignment, the lines of transgression had been cross-hatched into the mother of all sigils, and the patient work of long hours in the basement lab was finally yielding fruit.

Shreck closed the door and entered the den. Much was left to be done before the ceremony proper could commence.

Specifically, he now had to face what was left of the head of German Expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau. After its removal from the family plot in Stahnsdorf, the head’s bumpy ride to a mansion in the Hollywood Hills had been the stuff of splatter-driven screwball comedy. Sometime actress and full-time clown whore Missy Crampton had smuggled the head between her thighs, passing off the odd crotch-bulge to TSA agents as a cancerous growth. “I don’t really like to talk about it,” she said later in a press conference.

While obviously Crampton’s flatter-than-flat belly had suffered no metastatic drama, the withering glare she gave the TSA agents focused media attention on the treatment they’d accorded the waif-like starlet, famed for her roles in such films as Ivanna Fock andHeadbanger Grrrrlz. The agents were handcuffed and taken to the same cramped room in the LAX terminal where they themselves had interrogated countless passengers. They were then brutally worked over by drag queen whores and turned over to a succession of stressed-out dock workers from Long Beach.

The actress played a central role in the ceremony, the most important role of her career. Because of her close proximity to the head while in transit, Crampton’s legendary thighs had “soaked up death jizz,” according to Shreck’s narcissistic cabal, led by a floating doppelganger of occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger.

It was this very same “death jizz” that Shreck hoped would reanimate Murnau’s head once it had been grafted onto the Philip K. Dick robot.

There was a long story there as well, but Shreck had no time for such folderol. He raised his left hand—nightmare shrapnel—and a winch squealed on the roof, plunging Murnau’s head through the lurid colors of the skylight in a hybridized homage to Frankenstein and Suspiria. A black leather bondage harness held the moldering head in place as it descended, raining its desiccated skin flakes to the floor, gleaming white bathroom tile that sloped upwards to create a ramp down which slid esoteric skater-bois who had wandered in at the last possible second.

“Attention, ahem.” Shreck cleared his throat and spat a fat wad of phlegm oton his hermaphroditic henchthing, Wendy. “On my instructions, the pool girls will be rendered and the Murnau-Dickbot graft shall commence.”

“But what if there are complications?” mewled Wendy, in a voice that closely resembled Peter Lorre’s. “Remember the last time we…”

“Silence, bitch!”

“I love your dominance,” simpered Wendy, crawling off to its corner to watch and masturbate itself into a puddle of ambiguous fluids.

Shreck blew Wendy a kiss.

The body of the Philip K. Dick robot was lashed to an antique electric chair.

“And a one and a two…”

Murnau’s head continued its journey from the skylight until it sat squarely on the shoulders of Robo-Dick.

Outside, Missy Crampton was the first to hit the water, a boiling broth that instantly sent thousands of watts through her nubile ass. Her flesh bubbled and blackened.

“I’ll get you, Mister Shreck,” she screamed, “And your troglodyte bearcub, too!”

A surge of electricity spiked, and the mansion was plunged in darkness, intermittently rippled with strobes of oversaturated red and blue light that played over the final fusion of German Expressionism with proto-Cyberpunk.

But something had gone horribly, terribly wrong.

No sooner had the knit taken, cubic inches of synthetic nerve bundling joined with dead organic matter than the head began to swivel, accelerating speed until it tore from Robo-Dick’s body and flew through the air. Skeletal jaws hurled the curse Crampton had secreted within Murnau’s head—her terrible revenge against Shreck’s duplicity.

A bolt of blue flame blasted forth from Murnau’s mouth, cocooning Shreck’s body in fire. He thrashed about and clawed at his melting features, calling out for help that never came. Reduced to a junk heap of bone and metal, Shreck crumpled to the ground and lay there, wafts of white ash slowly rising from his mangled form.

Shreck’s cabal, composed mainly of bored necrophiles, dabblers in the occult arts, and dropouts from UCLA film school, regarded the scene with detachment and began their exodus from the mansion.

“Shit is weak,” said one of the dropouts. “I liked it better when it was Andy Warhol’s head and Burroughs’ body.”

“That was pretty cool,” said a skater-boi.

Desultory bro-bumps were exchanged.

“Hey, what was that noise?”

“What happened?”

They looked back, startled, as a procession of waterlogged actresses, charred beyond recognition, came pouring out of the pool. Their eyes blank discs, their intention homicidal.

“Time for some hipsters to die the death!” roared Crampton. “Let’s get ‘em, girls!”

Superman

Friday night. It’s an animal market. Hordes of bodies. They all want to be part of it. It’s party time.

Every weekend the Stag Parties. Packs of dribbling drunks.

Eat. Shit. Drink. Dump cum. Drink. Puke. Repeat.

Halloween costumes. Carrying a blow-up doll. Someone dressed as a cock. Shouting and swagging and bullying each other. Little boy gang playing the last game for one. Last night of freedom.

A gang gathered at my window. All dressed as Superman. Fat Superman. Fat Superman II. Fat Superman III. Hippy Superman. Asian Superman. Superman’s Dad.

Clark Kent.

They put a cape on him. Pushed him at me. And 50 euro into my hand.

A stag in the headlights.

Shaking.

Like a newborn calf.

Like someone’s retarded little brother.

Like he needed his inhaler.

Like his X-Box just green screened.

I tried to take his hand. Gently lead him to the bed.

Rigid. Couldn’t move.

“I don’t bite. I promise. I’m normal.”

Nothing. A mute.

It couldn’t be the stag. Unless he arranged his marriage over the internet.

I tried to make him laugh. Collapsed on the bed.

“Save me Superman!”

He was way too frightened. It happens. I was in my Dominatrix dress. I could have mashed him into a pulp. Scooped him into the condom bin.

I told him he could stay for the 20 minutes. And his friends will never know what happened here. What happens in Amsterdam stays in Amsterdam and all that crap. He sat in the chair and played on his phone.

Time to go.

I ruffled up his hair. Took off his cape and wore it. Took him by the hand back to his pack.

Fairytales for Hard Men

Ordell knew he wanted to be a hooker the first time he saw Mama zip up her thigh-high boots, lean against the sink and scrub her rancid fanny with a wet-wipe.

In fairness to Ordell, it was a valid career option. Ever since the lipstick factory shut down, there hadn’t been too many good jobs in Testament.

Mama didn’t think so. When he told her, she whipped his arms with a wire coat-hanger until the backs of his wrists and hands were cracked and bloody.

I didn’t mind having a sissy for a brother. It gave me something to fight for… and I fuckin’ loved fighting.

When I was eleven, I ruptured the spleen of a boy named Curtis Corliss for punching Ordell in the lunch line. I didn’t even know what a spleen was, or where to find one, but I beat that little fucker black and blue.

Mama and Ordell never got on, and that made me sad. Kin is kin, way I see it.

We all end up buried under the same patch of dirt in the end. May as well be pleasant to one another while we’re still sucking down the same rotten air.

***

Most of the boys from Shady Pines trailer-park headed down to the recruiting office on their 17thbirthdays, shipping out as soon as the paperwork cleared. Me, I never did like the damned heat. Two years in a hell-shaped sand-box would have ruined me.

I was one of the lucky ones, I guess. I got to wrestle instead. It wasn’t a scholarship as such – more of a favor. People told me that Shriek Watson felt guilty towards my Mama, but I was never really sure what they meant.

Shriek’s wrestling academy was in the Old Testament badlands, in the basement of his sprawling family home. It was known as the Ghoul School, on account of the hauntings, but the scariest thing I ever saw there was his sister’s webbed feet.

On my first day, it was sub-zero temperatures, or pretty fuckin’ close. When I arrived, there were seven other boys standing awkwardly in Shriek’s basement, wearing their gaudy, hand-me-down wrestling trunks. The smallest, a kid named Alvin Lupus, was shivering so hard his rotten teeth were chattering.

“Say, Mr. Watson, can you fire up the boiler?” he asked. “It’s awful cold down here…”

Shriek gazed at him playfully, through rheumy eyes.

“Sure thing, young man. If you can get out of this arm-lock I’ll let you help me get that boiler going.”

Shriek’s wheezy breath hung in the frozen air.

Moments later, he’d snapped Alvin’s elbow joint like a dry tree branch.

With Alvin out of commission, I had to practice with Shriek instead. That first day he clotheslined me so hard I felt blood trickle down my throat.

He was a hard man, but a good man. His methods were a little unorthodox, but within six months I had signed my first contract with Fingerfuck Flanagan and the Testament Wrestling Alliance. Mama was so damn proud of me that day she almost soiled her mesh panties.

***

Ordell is sat in a ripped-out car seat outside the Testament Savings & Loan Association, wearing Mama’s old, scuffed boots and not much else.

An older woman named Angel is painting his nails slaughterhouse red. Painting right over the shit-flakes and snagged pubes. I used to know her, a little. She was a real fuckin’ ring-rat for a time. Used to prefer tag-teams, until she slipped a disc.

She was a whole lot less flexible after that. For a while she caught a gig as a wrestler’s valet, escorting various mid-card motherfuckers down to the ring.

She used to stand behind the turnbuckle, wailing like a banshee with botulism, but that all ended when she got cold-cocked by a mistimed Freddie Regal drop-kick. The old bastard crumpled her damn skull like an empty beer can.

I stifle a sour belch and clear my throat.

“Angel.”

“Horace.”

She smiles nervously at me, and her damaged face twitches in three different places at once. I turn to my brother.

“It’s time, Ordell.”

“Time?”

“Mama’s dead.”

He rolls his thickly lashed eyes at me.

“What do you need me to do?”

“I don’t need you to do nothin’. I just need your car.”

“Huh?”

“I’m gonna steal her body home.”

“Huh?”

“Bury her in the yard – next to the septic tank. In between Uncle Amos and Little Julie.”

***

In the end, Ordell offers to drive me.

I try to squeeze in, but the steering wheel presses into my gut, even with the seat reclined. The damn horn shrieks like a handicapped child until I manage to wriggle free.

I glance across at Ordell on the way there. His lipstick matches his bloodshot eyes. He keeps them trained on the ragged asphalt up ahead.

The county morgue is a squat, brown-brick building, adjacent to Testament Falls. There is a sluice that runs out of the back of the morgue into the river. It stinks of entrails and bone-juice. I used to swim in the Falls as a child. Man… the innocence of youth.

“Wait here, Ordell.”

He shrugs and starts to reapply his lipstick in the rearview mirror.

***

Mama sure is heavy for a dead gal. I waddle across the parking lot with her brittle body slung across my shoulder. I’m sweating like a hog in the slaughter-line.

“Horace, look out!”

I’m not sure who is shouting at first. Then I realize that it is Ordell. He hates his accent. Tries on new voices the way some people try on unfamiliar items of clothing.

I turn and see a cop in a sweat-stained uniform gaining on me. He is almost as fat as I am, but not quite.

I dump Mama’s body in the backseat and squeeze into the passenger door.

“Go, Ordell, go!”

The first gunshot spiderwebs the windshield.

The cop smiles at me through the cracked glass as he raises his gun again.

I smile back, and I realize that this is the closest I am ever gonna get to a happy ending.

The Happy Ending

Harry Childs was an aggressively existential child.

When he was only seven years old, he wrote an essay in which he explained to a puzzled teacher his proclivity for sad clowns. “Clowns are fascinating creatures,” he wrote. “I can think of no trade more noble than clowning, and no thing more noble for a clown to be than sad. A sad clown is the perfect symbol for the emptiness of our existence. Any man can pretend to be happy, but it takes true courage to admit that one is sad.”

Harry’s teacher was more impressed than she was concerned. Over the next few years, the school district did everything in their power to foster his intellectual growth. He began high school four years later, at the age of eleven. By 15 he was attending NYU on a full academic scholarship.

Harry was a brilliant student of philosophy. He was viciously nihilistic and his older classmates abhorred him. It was rumored that he was sleeping with one of the professors, Dr. Goldstein. She was an attractive woman with large breasts and small, black eyes. Harry only noticed her eyes.

One day Harry stopped speaking. He arrived at class with his usual air of melancholy, but there was nothing anyone could do to get him to respond to them. Doctors were sent for and diagnoses suggested.

A week later Harry returned to class. The moment the professor began their lecture, Harry began to openly weep. He fled from the classroom and no one ever saw him again.

Three years later, a young man dressed as a clown appeared on the Atlantic City boardwalk. His face was painted white with three blue tears streaming down from each eye, and a frown painted red around his lips. The man sat on the pier day and night, crying.

After a few weeks, he had begun to attract something of a following. A crowd would gather around his bench every day, and every day it would grow larger. They thought him to be a great artist. He did not think of himself as an artist, but merely as a model for the emptiness of existence.

One day the crowd had grown especially large, television crews doing live reports on the boardwalk’s latest wonder, when someone did something that no other had ever done before.

A young woman approached the bench and sat down next to the clown.

Before he even knew what was happening, her arms were around him as she, too, began to cry. When she eventually released him, he finally saw her face for the first time.

She had the most beautiful and ponderously sad eyes he had ever seen. Her face flushed with a youthful maturity, and the man felt that he was in love. His eyes roamed down to her lips, and he found himself wondering what secret depths they concealed.

That was when he moved in to kiss her.

The crowd did not understand, but they whooped and cheered just the same. When the woman finally pulled away from Harry, they shared a faint smile.

The woman then slowly reached into her purse, produced a long, thin blade, and pierced herself through the heart.

By the time the police and ambulance arrived, Harry had already done the most noble thing he could think of for a clown to do, throwing himself into the ocean.

Porn-Fugitives

The teenaged boy sneaks into his room and closes the door excitedly. From under his pillow, he pulls out the porn magazine he found last week in the attic.

To his surprise, when he opens it, only blank pages yawn back at him. And soon, he hear the sounds of moaning coming from under his bed. Looking down, he discovers the tiny porn stars – miniature, naked people having sex on the floor everywhere, in all kind of positions.

The boy panics. If his parents find out, he’s fucked.

So he gets a pickle jar and tries to collect the small muscular men and silicone-breasted women inside it. He manages to capture a few, but the others are too fast: a couple in the missionary position gets up and runs away on four arms and four legs, just like a spider, crawling up the wall and disappearing into a crack.

It’s all just a bad dream, decides the boy, and he goes to sleep.

In the morning, waking up, he finds a tiny woman kneeling on the bridge of his nose, smiling for an invisible camera, while an equally tiny dude stands before her jerking his cum onto her face.

The boy sweeps them off and jumps out of bed. He finds that the spider couple has spun a jelly-like web of their juices, squirming now with flies caught overnight. The couple swoops down on a shiny sperm-string and begins to feast upon them, their filmy little wings cracking between perfect, white teeth. The boy looks away in disgust, his gaze drawn to a woman on his night-stand. Her body lays draped across the digital alarm clock, moaning, sliding a dildo between her legs.

The boy steps closer, and a word, like a heavy stone, comes falling from of his mouth: “Mom?”

It’s really her, but she’s much younger. The boy grabs up the porn magazine, searching for a date, finally realizing that it’s nearly twenty years old. And the woman looks just like his mother did back then.

His stomach churns. Snatching up a hankie, he attempts to cover up his mother’s tiny naked body, but she immediately crawls out from underneath of it. Down on all fours, she smiles and winks at him over her shoulder, sliding that teeny-tiny little dildo into her tiny little ass.

“Now what?” the boy sighs, just before a voice from downstairs calls, “Breakfast is ready!”

***

“Good morning, hun!” says his smiling mother, standing over a pot of cooking oil. “What’s the matter? You look worn-out. Haven’t you slept well?”

The boy simply cannot face her. He mutters something unintelligible, gazing at the empty white plate in front of him. Moments later, a serving fork enters his field of view, a ten-inch fried black fly impaled upon its tines. It falls onto his plate.

Looking at its fried legs facing skywards, the boy pushes his plate away, saying:

“Can I eat it later? I’m not really hungry right now.”

His mother doesn’t answer, she just stands there and frowns. When the boy runs out of the kitchen, back to his room, she yells after him: “What’s wrong? Are you sick?”

“I’m fine!” the boy yells back, trying not to vomit as he witnesses his tiny porn star mother sucking onthe very dildo she’d just pulled out of her ass.

***

The boy decides that, some way or another, he will rid himself of the tiny porn stars. Taking an empty shoe box, some string, and a used hanky from under his bed, he rigs them all together in the middle of the room. Soon enough, the tiny porn stars are crawling out from their hiding places to investigate. Sniffing the air, they gather around the soiled hanky with looks of hunger on their tiny faces.

Once all of them have gathered around the hanky, collectively munching on his old, dried semen, the boy drops the shoebox on them, capturing the little intruders in one fell swoop.

“Gotcha!” he laughs, taking the box in hand.

Cracking the lid just wide enough to reach inside, he randomly pulls out a barely legal, redheaded girl with fake tits. Then, slapping her with a piece of cellophane tape, he sticks her back onto one of the blank pages of the magazine. He pulls out another tiny porn star and repeats the process.

A few minutes and half a roll of tape later, the entire magazine has been populated with porn stars once again. The boy looks away with shame on his face, however, seeing that in his hurry, he accidentally taped over some of their faces. He cannot bring himself to watch them squirm, suffocating as they slowly stiffen and die.

By this point, the only tiny porn star left in the shoebox is his mother. The boy looks down at her, then back at the magazine with tears in his eyes.

“Why haven’t you ever told me?” he asks, but she doesn’t pay any attention to him; she just moans as she starts fisting herself.

The boy closes the magazine with a sigh, pushing it back under his pillow where it belongs. He’ll throw it out, he decides, but first, he must take care of his mom. But what can he do with her? He can’t just tape back her into the magazine with all the rest. And yet he can’t just set her free either; he would die of shame if someone saw his mom like this. He could always keep her, in a cage or a terrarium of sorts, but then he’d have to face his mother’s tiny, naked, porn star antics for the rest of her natural days.

Holding the shoebox before him, he slowly walks out of the room.

“I’m sorry, mother…” he whispers, holding her over the toilet. The tiny woman doesn’t seem to acknowledge him, riding her climax to a faraway place with the help of her tiny vibrator.

She falls into the water with a splash, and the vortex spins and pulls her down.