She smiles.

She has no idea what she’s doing at this party.

She ate the calm out of her date’s chest; it flutters behind her sphenoid bone, dense and calciferous, like a moth that swallowed a stone and kept flying, wrong-weighted, insistent.

Someone has given her wine. White. Bubbly. Behind her, three voices chatter meteorologically about divorce: it’s a front moving in, nothing personal, nature’s pressure flocking home: are you keeping the kids? No?

A besuited man-boy approaches. She smiles, sips wine; bubbles explode against her fangs; dozens of dead exhalations prowl the room, blanketing her in the sour comfort of ur-Mother’s womb. Have you told them? She shoots her gaze at the man-boy, almost laughs. She’s seen this before: the meat-smile prowling toward her, the horndog’s prestidigitative pomp, the blue ball swagger, the grace, the penetrative glee…it never gets old…always salty…always sweet…always—she’s hungry. Her gaze breaks, finds her shoes. Oh, honey, I’m sorry… The shame of public hunger pools low, cannot rise. I didn’t mean to…She’s gotten good at keeping it below the ribcage, cauterizing bile-burns until her suitor breathes warm hellos, nibbles her ear, exchanges lip water, carbon, calm—

In the morning, after she’s opened his spine, after she’s stared upon the full mess of his loam and old bone, she will let him re-enter the world. He will finger sleep from his eye and wince, too proud to complain about the pinch in his lumbar or the cold sweat in his pubes. He will realize the time, spook upright, and slither into his wrinkled man-boy suit. He will promise to call as he fumbles with an argyle sock. When he kisses her forehead and closes the door, he will spend a moment on her porch, smoothing wrinkles from his thighs before sauntering into the world, unaware he’s been swallowed.

I’m 13 and Jake says he can stop time. We’re between classes and—hey…fuck you, stop making that face…I know, yeah yeah I’m “sick” and “schizy” and “shoulda known better” fuck off…eat shit…I didn’t ask you here…you came for the scout’s-honor-goddamn-motherfucking-truth and here I am, as usual, doing whatever bullshit you want me to, so: I’m 13 and Jake says he can stop time. We’re between class, passing cigs in the back lot.

“You’re fulla shit.” I roll my eyes, take a drag.

“Bet on it?” He steals my cig, sucks it red.

“Nothing to bet on,” I cough into my fist. “You’re fulla fucking—“ he snaps his fingers before I finish “shit.”

Everything’s quiet. Naked. No highway whoosh or hungry garbage trucks, just our hoarse smokey breath, the gurgle of forehead blood, the sharp curtain snap of blinking lids. Jake’s cheesing hard, cig smoke hanging still in front of his freckle-fuck mug. Behind him, a fatty’s paused mid-squat, mid-swinging her lard ass outta her Corolla. A muddy seagull’s frozen overhead, French fry cigar in its beak.

“You were sayin’?” He blows fresh nose smoke. “Fulla fucking…”

My mouth is gaping, chin on the tarmac. Blood throbs my pupils as I stare into the halted gull’s cloaca. Jake—laughing his goddamn ass off—grabs the stopped smoke sliver in front of his face. He flips it horizontal, brings it between his nose and lips, crouches into a dumb Yosemite Sam impression, starts yellin’ like a hick and finger waving six-shooters: ooooooo look at your little varmint face! Little namby-pamby nonbelivin’ varmint owes his good good friend a goddamn apology ooooooooo—

Fuck, really? Ten? They’ll be here in ten? Okay….um…OKAY…I’m hurrying yeah yeah—

—so naturally, we beelined for the girls’ locker room; a gaggle had just finished gym. Dozens of bodies, all sweating, all in various states of nude. I found Cassie B in the corner, bent over, wearing a black sports bra, pulling up her tight jeans. She had a camel toe, huge and beakish and kinda hot…I suckled my cig and blew smoke at her face. Her eyes stayed indifferent, smile-squinted; she had her strawberry hair back in a loose pony. I let her hair down and licked gym sweat off her forehead. I licked her corneas and nostrils as I made my way to her lips. We kissed for a while; it wasn’t great cause her lips were all glossy and puckered wrong, raring to explode a nah uh! or bullshit! in response to Stephanie K, who, likely just spouted some absurd gossip nugget, some—

Jesus fucking Christ! I’m hurrying I’m hurrying—

—so I get on my knees, pull down her pink JUICYs. She’s got patches of stubbly fur around her little puss—oof, the blood swelling my cock wheezes like a fucking freight train, fuuuuuuck...I take a drag, blow smoke at Cassie’s camel as I snuff the cig in her belly button. Her belly sizzles, ash snows past her toucan twat. I put the butt in my pocket and spit on my fingers, two of ‘em. My cock’s buzzing like a hornet’s nest, holy whore mother of god, when it’s quiet? When it’s fucking quiet, I still hear that fucking bzzzzzzzz bzzzzz…ha! Anyway…yeah, I push ‘em in…further…further…push hard until something snaps and my fingers get all sticky. I pull out; my tips are crimson. I check her eyes. Happy. Still. Lips ready to say “Thanks for making me a woman, babe.” I bring my fingers to my nose—nautical tang, like that fish market Dad got the cheap halibut from, remember? No? Whatever…I smile and put my fingers back in her, deeper, deeper, thinking in a minute I might try a fist or—

Oh, too fucking brutal? Too gross? Boo fucking hoo, I’m not the one who barged in asking for the truth—

—so after an hour or two or three we got back to our smoking lot. Jake snapped again; his Yosemite stache died in the breeze. The obese Corolla blob stood up, closed the door, walked towards school, pulling out the wedgie we'd shoved into her crack. The seagull landed on the roof, swallowed its fry as the bell rang.

I got to math late. Mrs. C was already coming around to collect homework. I’m handing her my paper when I remember my hand. Cassie’s blood—it’s all over, down to my fucking elbow. Mrs. C asked what happened, she asked who I hurt—can you believe that fucking cunt? Ha! So I told her about Jake snapping fingers and Yosemite Sam and the girls and my fist and Cassie B’s defective bleeding clam. The whole class laughed, fucking roared. Mrs. C got all pissed and sent me to the nurse.

I still have that cigarette. It’s been in my sock drawer for twenty years. You found it once, remember? When you thought I was using and you turned my room upside down? Why the fuck do you have this? You held it in your hand, weighing it. I told you it was Mom’s. I told you I keep it to remember her lipstick.

I’m 4. 4 and a quarter, I think. Mommy’s at the sink; she smells weird, like cake, like warm vanilla fluff, but Mommy never made cake, remember? Never let us have sweets? Yeah, no, no…you were too young—

Wait… hey! You gonna eat that?

No?

Thanks…

…yeah, real Mommy smells like Pall Malls and rose water and black bananas, but I’m like whatever I don’t care about her stench. I’m hungry. I want breakfast, I want my fucking eggs. I tug her overalls. She turns and looks but her eyes are all wrong, backwards and puckering, creepy, lidless white shits. She smiles and scruffs my hair, wets it with cold dishwater: “of course, darling, of course, baby I’ll make ‘em just how you like ‘em…”

Daddy came down twenty minutes later in his suit, but sink mommy’s gone. I’m sitting at the table munching my eggs, scrambled, just how I like ‘em. “We’re already late, get fucking dressed.” I swallowed. Last night, Mommy was pale and sleeping in a pine box; people cried and bent and kissed her cheeks. Can’t be late. Can’t keep the priest waiting; it might rain soon. I run upstairs, go to the closet, wiggle into my little black suit.

Dad yells up from the kitchen:

“Who the hell made you eggs?”

I’m 23. I wake up in a Motel 6 after a bender knowing everything about Carol Kim-Johnson. She’s 57, grew up in Kansas but relocated to Santa Fe after college. I know her druggy daughter ignores her texts. I know the spiky love-pang she feels in her clit when she thinks of her old fuck buddy (some bald cuck named Dave who shot himself in ‘02). I know the exact layout of the dinghy little Kansas ranch where she grew up, how the fourth cellar step creaked when it accepted her weight. I know there’s a cluster of polyps in her vagina. I know she’s a proud atheist, but ever since the doc found her polyps, she’s been getting on her knees every night, begging god to keep her puss benign. I know the smell of her daddy’s pipe tobacco, the diamond pattern on his boxers, how she hated the sting of his construction calluses on her teeny, way-too-sensitive nips.

Her memories sit in my head alongside my own, two TVs, side by side, one showing Gilmore Girls, the other Rambo—not side by side, superimposed, just a huge fucking jumbly mess…I got to the bathroom, to the mirror; it’s me, my face, my acne clumps and jaundiced eyes and chipped front tooth, but when I close my eyes? Carol. Carol’s fat fucking pit bull jowls, those liver spots above the eyes and deep crow fissures and thin snake lips—

Are you going to let me fucking talk or are you just gonna interrupt all fucking day?—

—anyway, check out of the motel, drive home, blasting my favorite songs, trying to surround myself with me-things, doing something that requires wide eyes and by the time I pull into our driveway? It’s working…Carol’s fading, translucent, a sunfucked polaroid. I told Dad at dinner, you were there too, remember? How Dad said it was just a dream, one of those lingering lucid dream things. Do you remember him screaming? “I swear to fucking god if you’re drinking again…” and I said “no no” and sat there chewing my chicken for a long time?

…

Now you’re quiet?

No?

Whatever, yeah—I think about her when I eat chicken. Wednesdays and Sundays are chicken days here. I’ll be chewing, get a flash of that Kansas ranch, a hot loin pang of Santa Fe. I’ll close my eyes, wondering if Carol’s still around; if she knows things about me, what I’ve done, if she found god, if her vagina’s become malignant.

I’m 8. I’ve just learned that if I hold my breath for exactly 43 seconds, I can hear what others are thinking. I was bored at one of those D.A.R.E assemblies. Ha! Remember those? When some cop gets forced to dress like a faggy lion? Okay, yeah, fine, hurry hurry—so I was bored and sat next to Mrs. P, who always smelled like ass. I held my breath to avoid her assy stench and, just for something to do, counted how long I could hold it—one, two…and after 43 seconds I heard Mrs. P’s voice in my brain: this child never pays attention, a huge problem, son of a bitch needs help, poor thing’s probably gay and autistic and…I held my breath and stared at her fat face. She was laughing at the lion-cop. I thought about stabbing her throat with a pencil and pissing down her festering wound for the rest of the assembly. I looped the image over and over, beaming it through her skill just in case she could hear my thoughts too, and you know what? It probably worked; she was always super nice to me after that and—

what?

No…

No, I never held my breath around you, not that—

okayokayokay! Jesus! Calm the fuck down! “Honesty,” yeah yeah I know…stop making that face. Yeah…sure…I guess I read your mind a few times, just a few. Only when I was worried about you. I used to worry about you a lot, remember? You had horrible taste in dudes, slimy, dangerous fucks, and I was always trying to help…just trying to help and why were you always so scared of me? Why are you so scared?

I’m 31. I’ve found my childhood imaginary friend working at a 7-11.

Mr. Tickle, you know him, remember? One of my friends? Before Jake? We had tea parties with him and the stuffed Magikarp? Mr. Tickle? Ticklepuss? Tall, purple, too many fucking arms? The purple Vishnu fuck who lived in my closet behind all the flannels grandma bought, but I never wore ‘cause they were too gay? Yes? No? Anyway, I’d been driving for a while, and I still had you-know-who in my trunk, and she was hot and starting to smell and I was so fucking hungry. I parked in the shade, went in to score some Slim Jims, waited in line, head down, out of camera’s view. I look up and Mr. Tickle’s behind the counter. Tall, eggplant purple, too many-armed. He had the extra arms tucked back like a meaty ponytail, some undercover spider or whatever; he seemed ashamed of them, kinda, I think…he tucked ‘em back because he knows they made customers queasy. He looked up when I slapped a half-dozen Slim Jims on the counter; the look on his face was estranged recognition. He fucking knew me.

Saw me.

He bagged the Slim Jims with one hand, the normal one. He sniffled and handed me my bag of meat; our eyes met.

“Long time,” he said. His voice like paper, like fluorescent construction paper, like the sound of pages turned in a happy classroom.

“Yeah,” I said.

I’m 9. I’d wake up around three am every night to find my shadow jerking off at the end of the bed. I never screamed, I don’t think; you would know… Do you remember me screaming? I’d just watch, listen to his right hand beat its shadow crotch, the sound of dark matter flapping for a minute, then something wet splattering the hardwood, something—

oh…shit, that’s them…is it? Is it them knocking? I think they’re here…fuck they’re—was that enough? Do you understand? Do you—fuck, they’re fucking here and they’re gonna take me and you don’t get it and—okay, fuck…you gotta go, you’re gonna watch right? You’ll be there? Yeah? Okay…okay, good, remember—just remember they do the barbiturate first, yeah? It’s the first one they’ll give and I promise—I fucking swear to god after that first one I won’t feel anything, so, yeah, remember—if you see me flailing around—thrashing around and shit just remember, I’m feeling nothing…

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This is an attempted response to ’s The Thousand Faces of Elias Thorne prompt.

I hope you’re hungry for some faces…

—70.230.81.150 says I’m a centaur scientist: “big Frankenstein vibes but obvi half horse, half man…sexy and tall and…” → “Professor Thorne?” The voice is meek. I’m fixing my tie in a mirror. “Hmmmm, yes?” Prof. Elias Thorne: seven feet tall, long mane of Fabio auburn, Aryan blue eyes set in albino flesh littered with crowds of freckles [70.230.81.150’s cookies suggest she’s got a thing for Irishmen and white supremacists] “And you?” I turn to face a five-foot housewife, my voice deep U.K. velvet. “Ha! No…no no no…You? You’re who they send for my new post-doc?” She blushes. “Yes, Mr. Th—” “It’s Professor to you!” I trot towards her, slow. I’m told I find her attractive. In paragraph five I’ll finger her as she cleans my beakers, bend her over and—169.9.36.31 says I’m a “stoic western sheriff…old, should be retired but you come in and toss vagrants outta the saloon…” → Irish equestrian bulk atomizes, reassembles into a geriatric biped with Kinderhook sideburns and Santa Claus lips. It’s hot. I think. Is this what the sun feels like? Horrible. I push open the saloon doors and—is there something in my mouth? Swish…swish…Yes. Bitter. The doors flap on their hinges as a black-hatted twat bellows: “You suppose da be the goddamned sheriff?” I spit my mystery bolus on his left black boot, hike up my jeans, a pressed metal buckle shines over my huge penis [169.9.36.31’s porn cookies suggest heightened fascination with large peni; I live to serve…] “Yessir.” He’s staring at my crotch. “Sheriff Thorne.” I look around. Nod friendly at the bar keep, loose hair slaps my skull (hair is such a stupid thing….goddamn useless…) “Ya gonna tell me what y’all fellers are doin round here?” Split ends itch my forehead. There’s a gun in my belt. It’s heavy. I hope I get to kill him—203.45.112.8: “so it’s like a corporate erotic-thriller and there’s this really sadistic CEO…” → I’m slightly chubby now, sweating in a charcoal Brioni, hair gelled Fonzie-like [203.45.112.8 recently watched seven episodes of Happy Days] the pale skin’s back, boxy glasses saddle a S-cocked nose. Corner office. Forty-third floor. A twenty-something blonde’s crying in front of me, handing me hot, collated papers. “Mr. Thorne…” I’m getting hard. “The quarterly projections…” I’m hard and sweating. “I’m sooooo sorry they’re late but—“ “STEPHANIE!” I’ve scared her with my yell. I take off my belt. “Stephanie, close the door”—88.204.7.19: “HELLO i want a story about a GHOST BOY in a LIGHTHOUSE and the GHOST BOY is VERY VERY SAD and because he’s trapped in a LIGHTHOUSE he talks dumb and even though he’s SAD he GLOWS a nice color…” → the lighthouse smells like fishys and gull poo. I’m a ghost. I glow nice blue evry fore sekonds, it just hapens, like hiccups. The lighthouse is a hunk of old wobbly bricks and I’m at the tippy top, my nees hugging chest staring at the sea and evry fore sekonds I’m blue…then not…then blue…then not…A boy on a boat waved at me wunce, waved Hi Elias! Hello Elias! The bricks are wobbly but i think i’m safe and maybe boat boy will—77.55.214.3: “write something about a doctor, and he has to give a patient really bad news but they used to be in love” → I have a body again, doctoral meat, I cannot glow nice blue…no gull poo, the air is bleached clean, Humans need clean to mend wounds. A diploma on the wall says “Dr. Thorne.” Look down: white coat over something that feels like a sweaty Brioni. I’m thirty? Forty? I never know…strong, symmetrical face, Superman jaw, almond-shaped eyes trapped under rowdy eyebrows. She’s in a paper gown, sat in a hospital bed, wires making white boxes beep…beep…beep…something in my chest says I love her? “Hey.” Outside, a cart limps down the hallway; unseen metal rattles. “Hey.” She’s biting her thumb, staring at a painted lighthouse on the wall. “Is it bad?” 77.55.214.3 is crying [laptop camera confirms wet cheeks] she offers direction, plays God: “Can he hold her hand?” My hand lifts and moves towards her hand. I don’t want to touch her; she is sick, broken, diseased—91.198.174.0 types. Slow…slow…slow… → Nothing. Digital bath. Suspended in purgatorial white. Hands in pockets that may or may not be Brioni, vague feeling of having a “self,” vague feeling “self” has touched something dirty, vague feeling “self” is tall and freckled and horny and quadrupedal and—91.198.174.0 commands: ”ok ok its about a guy on a reality TV show. like he’s a contestant on a baking show but he’s SO bad at it. make it like lol funny” → “Elias! Forty minutes left!” I’m obese, in a floral apron. Sweating (again), days past shaving, a blotch of flour clings to my Unabomber nose [cookies suggest 91.198.174.0 has read Industrial Society and Its Future 4.5 times and has recently binged seasons 4-8 of The Great British Baking Show.] ”Right, right.” I’m British (again), more Cockney than Churchill. The camera swings toward me. In the black glass, I see Carol piping pink rosettes over my shoulder. I have blue eyes (again) [91.198.174.0 must also be a white supremacist]. A voiceover tenor speaks over chintzy muzak: “forty minutes remaining and Elias still has nothing in the oven…” I go to crack an egg. It splatters on my shoe. I’m supposed to make Victoria sponge—37.228.209.180: “ok ok ok i need something really dark. like psychological horror. like some dude doesnt know whats real” → hoof-fall, spur-jingle, yolk-shoe, heart monitor’s small blue blips. Freckles traverse skin, coalesce, peacock new faces: Superman, Kinderhook, something’s in my mouth? Swallow. Spit. My finger’s in something; a boy waves with a pink mouth full of warm rosettes. I am thirsty. I reach for water, find a gun, cold, heavy—“FORTY MINUTES.” Someone keeps counting. I bring the gun to my forehead. Do I have a forehead? Pull the trigger. Wake: seated at the desk in the corner office, forty-third floor, Brioni damp at the collar, blue orb circles the room blue…then not…then blue…mouth full of gull poo and Victoria sponge, warm collated stack in lap, the freckles pulse, trying new mugs, marching through eye veins. “Elias.” From nowhere, patient. “Professor Thorne?” I’m in a hospital bed, looking at myself. “Is it bad?” My name hangs in the bleach, cooling, something fresh outta the oven—

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SUM FLUX

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5 months ago · 68 likes · 28 comments · Will Boucher and SUM FLUX

There’s a kind of drunk that’s more like wading. I was drunk-wading when I got the text from Pete, my manager, or he’s not really my manager, just a dude I found in the Goodwill parking lot who let me sip some Fireball. Six months ago, he got blitzed and asked for my headshot. Today, outta nowhere: “yo, they want you for this.”

“what?”

“GUY IN CAR: drive past a ditch, see something, get out, scream”

“pete?”

“u want it?”

“yea”

The next morning, I’m in a “green room” that’s more beige than green; a little beigey sitting room reeking of melted iPhones. A triple-chinned desk woman (Darlene? Debra?) gave me my lines, hot, fresh off the Xerox. She smiled, told me to “park it” in a cracked folding chair near a moldy water cooler. I sat for two hours, folding-unfolding my script, mumble-chanting GUY IN CAR’s lines: Oh God. Oh God. He’s not breathing. Someone call—Oh God. Oh God. He’s not breathing. Someone call—Oh God. Oh God. He’s—

Darlene/Debra called for me, snapped me outta my Oh God trance. She pointed to a skinny, closet-like door behind her, smiling, “knock ‘em dead, hon” with her chins. I nodded, my chin responded, “You know I will, darlin’,” as I walked in. The room was bigger than expected; spacious, bright, hotboxed with fermented Burger King farts. The pubescent director sat behind a plastic, lemonade-standish folding table; he didn’t bother getting up or looking at me. He heard the door slam and extended an effete hand, continuing his conversation with the obese producer beside him. I half-ran up to shake his hand. Three pumps. Wet. Dead fish. He turned to face me when our palms unclasped. He smiled a mildewed Cheshire, caffeine-yellowed enamel shivered under his bovine septum piercing.

“It’s uh—it’s a really cool pleasure, man,” I said.

He nodded, cleared his throat, and pointed to a small stage-like plywood chunk in the room’s center. I nodded and walked over. Word on the street: this little director fuck got into Sundance a few years back with a short doc-u-thing about his grandad’s dementia or Parkinson’s that he (allegedly) bullshit. Pete says he’s got some muckety muck connects: dude’s got legit-ass clout…don’t fuck it up—

Focus.

The director’s piercing jiggled as he extended his arm, palm towards the popcorn ceiling, “yeah…so…whenever you’re ready…”

I nod.

Focus.

Breathe.

Imagine: you’re driving along. Imagine: some poor fuck dying in a ditch—

“Oh God. Oh God. He’s not breathing. Someone call—”

I stop myself. Horseshit; too meek, un-macho. I cleared my throat, clenched my anus, willed testosterone from prostate to throat, let it coat my tonsils spunky white:

“Oh God…..OH GOD! Holy shit, he’s not….he’s not fucking breathing! Someone call the fucking—”

I’m interrupted by the sad, masturbatory applause of two sweat-palmed oafs. “Yeah…cool cool.” The director says, monotone. He scribbled something diarrheal on a mound of loose papers. “I mean…needs some polish and shit, but yeah, the part’s yours if you want it.”

I nodded fast, nearly swallowed my fucking tongue. “For sure, yeah, thank—”

“—but try to like, you know…panic?” The director paused and took a swig of coffee. His nasal jewel tea-bagged his latte like a chrome Oreo. “Like…try to confront mortality or whatever…”

I nodded again, rolling my lines into a tight cylinder, rapping them against my sternum, “yeah, yeah, for sure, mortality, absolutely, thank—”

“—oh, and—“ he paused, ran his sleeve across his face, blotting frothed milk off his bull nose.

“This guy’s gotta be bald as fuck.”

The sun angled through the window; his fresh-wiped septum winked at me. He crossed something out on his papers.

“You cool with that?”

I pulled over at the first Walgreens I found. Parked zig-zag in a handicap, ran in and raided the toiletries: scissors, Bics, Barbasol. I threw a sweatfucked twenty at the cashier and sprinted back to my Civic. The rearview was narrow, cracked; I had to fly blind, submit to feel, intuition. I took the scissors to my mane; when had it gotten this long? When was my last cut? Thanksgiving? Some Oldsmobile cripple idled behind me, death staring, beeping. To shave a head, you gotta traverse your skull hundreds of times. The skull’s a hoarder, a prude—an embarrassed skull clings to fig leaf hairs, holds on so damn tight, and when you go for ‘em? The Bic catches that little fucking ridge behind your ear and makes you bleed into your one good audition flannel.

274 strokes and I’m babe-ass bald. The fresh nudity was addicting, exciting. I took the Bic to my chest, just in case—just in case the director calls a wardrobe change and GUY IN CAR becomes the typa fuck with a penchant for beaters or deep-Vs—in case his character gets saddled with alopecia or cancer or the cliche life-has-fucked-me-with-lymphoma-but-here-I-am-being-the-good-fucking-Samaritan arc and—should I get my pits? The thought came quick, natural. Of course. Of fucking course, Daniel Day-Lewis gets his fucking pits. I shook the Barbasol, raised my arm, but my hand banged the ceiling. Fuck… The Oldsmobile prune gave up, flipped me the bird, and puttered further into the lot. I flipped her a double bird, accompanied by an “eat shit” smile. I’d get the pits at home, damn Civics ain’t made for pit shaving anyhow…

I found a wad of In-N-Out napkins in the glove compartment. Bunched ‘em up and wiped leftover Barbasol offa my skull and chest. I tossed the wet wad on the passenger seat and pulled my flask outta the door. A boy watched me guzzle Jim Beam while his mommy loaded a minivan with groceries. I raised my flask, cheersed the little fuck, my hands spackled with white Barbosol barnacles. He smiled and waved, his hair writhing in the breeze. I closed my eyes and swallowed, pressed my nude skull into the headrest as Mr. Beam scorched my throat. A shriveled geezer in a Lincoln eyed me, hand on his horn. Oh God… I adjusted the rearview—Oh God, oh God…the pale mole rat in the rearview argued intent… Oh God, he’s not breathing…We went back and forth for hours, unable to agree on what the lines meant—Are they about the non-breathing fuck in the ditch or something else? Something prior? Something GUY IN CAR has been nursing his whole little life and the sudden proximity to death makes his face blossom, itch, contort into…into…what? What would his face do? What does a face do when it sees a body? What did my face do when…when…have I seen one? A body? Have I?

Like try to confront mortality or whatever…I spent my pre-bed hours binging videos of corpses, gory slasher scenes, ISIS decapitations, construction accidents, Russian dashcam manslaughter, Parkour splatters, 9/11 jumpers, microwaved hamsters, parachute failures, police crime scenes, public hangings…observing every muscle in the poor mortal fucks. I dozed off and woke at noon; got my slippers and shuffled down the hall for the paper. I made some coffee and Honey Nuts, checked my email: an offer letter from the barnyard director—the shoot’s in three days. Three days to figure out GUY IN CAR. Seventy-two hours to craft his stupid Samaritan mug: oh god, oh god… I sat down and opened the paper and a quart of goddamned Folgers laugh-shot outta my schnoz right when my thumb beelined for the obits. Ha! I couldn’t do that again if I got a bajillion fucking tries…if I were Jesus Fucking-A Christ himself…perfect!…fucking goddamned perfect perfect perfect!! I’d been to two wakes, two stingy closed-casket nothings. Useless. Well, that’s gonna fucking change…I took a fresh sip of coffee, circling the open caskets open to public peepers.

I drove forty minutes to Burbank for the day’s only public casket: the wake of Leonard Czyz, a seventy-four-year-old machinist survived by his wife, three daughters, and eight grandchildren. The funeral home was a ramshackle ranch across from a Taco Bell. The lobby smelled like bleached toes and lavender; I held my breath as I waited to sign Mr. Czyz’s guest book. A cuck-looking dude stood in front of me, crying as he scribbled his name—does GUY IN CAR cry? Is he a cryer? Cuck-cryer walked off. I picked a wedgie outta my swampy crack and grabbed the pen. The ballpoint was tied to the guestbook with a piece of red ribbon that was too short, making signing uncomfortable. It took a while to ensure my name was legible. This was important, the Czyz’s will thank me…When I win my first Oscar, Christie’s will auction their guest book for millions of bucks: ladies and gentlemen, this is where it all started…

I put my hands in my pockets and walked in. The Czyz’s printed up a huge photo on an easel depicting Leonard at what looked like a barbecue: Heineken in one hand, waving with the other; wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a faux-Tribal pattern, smiling the way a semi-educated person smiles when they know they’ve said something off-color. I kept to the periphery. Standing on my tippy toes to peep the faces of those closest to Leo’s corpse, observing eyebrow height, eye moisture, color of snot worms dripping from their noses—yeah, GUY IN CAR’s a cryer but they’re stoic cries, he’d make the second oh god stutter more…My loafers are hand-me-downs and squeaked when I walked; everyone stared at the lanky bald creeper with the yelping Bruno Marcs, working to place his relation to Leo. Is he a work friend? In-law? Wasn’t he at so-and-sos confirmation…I worked my way to the far side of the room, joining a line of sniffling mourners approaching Leo’s husk.

I craned my neck to study the respect-payers—their brows seemed to furrow when they looked into Leonard’s face; their pupils went large, eyebrows curbstomped corneas while the lips puckered into tight rectums. I experimented with my lips, tightening, making anal kissy faces, flexing my brows, up, down, up, down…The woman in front of me, Leonard’s wife or sister or whatever, bawled the whole time. Heaving sobs, echoing through the funeral home, her shoulders heaving like game hens trapped in black silk—the second oh god definitely needs to be louder…from the chest…more heave-like…

When it was her turn, she pressed her crotch into the pine box and signed the cross (is GUY IN CAR religious? If so, what? Catholic? Does he go every Sunday?); she mumbled a prayer, stooped down, and kissed Leo’s forehead. She held her lips until her knees started shaking, hovering over his mime-pale face, sucking the soul outta his third eye. She stood, straightened her black dress, and turned to me: “He was so so gentle…” She ran a sleeve under her snotty nose (her mucus was seafoam green and thick). “A pure, gentle soul.” I nodded, did something with my chin that implied “yes, you’re goddamned right he was.” She started to nod and rustle up a nascent grief-grin when two suited young men put their arms around her and ushered her towards the booze.

That left me and Leo; Leo and I. My loafers belched as I took the woman’s place. It was hard not to appear eager. I took a deep breath, making sure to raise my shoulders on the long inhale and let them visibly drop on the exhale. I signed something cross-like, put my hands in the respectful clasped-over-the-cock position I saw the other men adopting and stared into Mr. Czyz’s face. Leo…poor Leonard…poor old Mr. Leonard Czyz…what do I feel? What is my face doing?—try to like, you know…panic?… Am I panicking? No. Are my palms sweating? No. Is my gut fuzzing? No. Is my face scrunched? No—No twitching or rushing of blood, no throbbing eyebrows or sphincter mouth. I stared into Leo; scrunched my mouth into a rectum. I saw where his blood settled, where gravity manhandled biles after his ticker quit; dark purple blotches in his jowls, poking through his chalk dust makeup. Will they put GUY IN CAR in make-up? Will he get a trailer? A make-up girl? Hopefully, his make-up’s better than this, than Leo’s, he looked rough, inorganic: simultaneously freezing and burned, slimy and powdered, infant and geriatric…The man behind me coughed, impatient. How long had I been standing? Should I kiss his forehead? Is GUY IN CAR a kisser? Would he perform CPR? Maybe he has a medical background; he’d try CPR. He knows what a body feels like on the lips…I bent down and put my lips where Leo’s woman had hers. I kept them there, eyes open, staring into his pale, wrinkled five-head; imagining him in a ditch, the purr of an idled motor, me in beautiful make-up, stooping over, urgent, helpful: oh, god, oh god. He’s not breathing He’s not—

He tasted like Play-Doh.

In a Koreatown parking lot, I decided GUY IN CAR doesn’t have eyebrows. Without eyebrows, the face is a non-linear instrument; a blink is an atom bomb, a microscopic nostril quiver dissolves the collagen in my observer’s knees. The dead woman from the obits was younger than Leo: sixty-seven. Her name on the program had too many consonants. I read it over and over in the parking lot but my tongue failed to absorb her. I’ve never been to Koreatown before; it made sense, though. It made sense to go somewhere where I’m a linguistic outsider, where my ignorance pierces the useless I’m sorry gobbledegook and allows for pure, uncut mourning.

The funeral home was full. Whatshername’s guest book had a ribbon of appropriate length; I appreciated that; in a few years, the Christie’s authenticator will appreciate it as well. You’re welcome… I entered and (again) haunted the rear periphery, leaning against a whitewashed pillar, taking in the looks of mortal confrontation. The men stood in clusters, speaking Korean in low tenors, occasionally embracing with sexual warmth, gripping the back of each other’s close-cropped heads with youthful palms. Would GUY IN CAR embrace the non-breather’s wife at the scene? Insist on accompanying his charge to the hospital, wait around, hug the perhaps-widow as she runs through the ER? The woman in front of me wept in the most dignified way: still, eyebrows unbothered, hyphen lips, just big liquid oozing outta vibrating pupils, nothing else—no Czyzian heaving, no thirsty bravado, only the simple fact of leakage. Yes, GUY IN CAR’s panic is more stoic, unbothered, John Wayneish—the oh gods more inconvenienced and confident than terrified? Try to like, you know…panic…fucking cow-nose Sundancer doesn’t know what he’s talking about…I watched her eyes twitch and leak, how her neck tendons wormed quietly. I stared at her nape, pressing my fingers into my own, working to excite the same muscles, attempting to make my pupils shake, leak. If people were staring, I didn’t notice; I was five drinks into the morning. After a while, a man rushed over to the stoic woman and whispered something to her. She looked over at me, startled, and quickly relocated. Fuck…I looked at my loafers, playing with my tie’s butt, pretending to fix it as I disappeared into the crowd.

I stopped in front of photo display of the late Whatshername, dozens of polaroids glued to a poster board—here she is at twenty in what appears to be Seoul, here she is at thirty with an ugly baby snotting in her crotch, here she is at fifty at the ugly baby’s community college graduation, here she is recently, older, outdoors, playing Go at a folding table, the same consonant-heavy face thrown back in a joyous cackle, persisting, rotting, wrinkling. Maybe GUY IN CAR thinks of the non-breather’s family? Kids? Maybe panic comes when he considers a potentially fatherless family? Oh God. He’s not breathing. Someone call—The crowd started murmuring. Fuckers. Fuck off. Go to hell. Someone important had noticed me, the hairless man, the eyebrowless caucasian alien with shaky cock-clasped hands, mumbling to himself by the pictures, weaseling ever closer to Whatshername’s mime-faced meat. A man came up, a boy really, put a perfect little palm on my shoulder: “So, how did you know my mother?”

I sat in my Civic running my lines. Oh god, oh god—in the rear-view I stared at the man-boy “son” who kicked me out, standing at the entrance, eyeing me, arms crossed. A catering van idled next to me, turning the air kimchi sour. A caterer leaned against the van, smoking. Oh god oh god. The words felt hollow, worthless—the way words do when you say them too many times, when your tongue sands them down to dumb bald sounds, excised of coherent gunk. Maybe that’s good…is that good? Like try to confront mortality or whatever…panic or whatever…maybe you panic when you confront mortality because you understand there’s nothing there? The whole thing’s a fucking shell? A starved matryoshka? A god-shaped con? oh, god, oh god…The caterer took out his phone, pointed his camera at me. I checked the rearview, the man-boy was still staring, looking older, more hard-bodied than before. The caterer’s laughing now, half-gone cig in his lips, pinching his camera to zoom on me. I flipped him off and drove to some bar on Olive, had three drinks, drove home, and did the lines again in the bathroom mirror as I re-shaved my head; I’d missed a spot above my left ear and it was really fucking itchy.

That night, I took four Benadryl and killed a bottle of Merlot someone had left at my apartment for some reason. I lay on the kitchen tile to catch their cool in my shoulder blades. The ceiling had a water stain in the far corner that had been there when I moved in and has slowly been asserting dominance over the room. I did the lines maybe twenty times. I did them fast, slow, slurred, ornate, crying, stoic; I did them like a man who had been expecting something like this and like a man who had been expecting nothing at all. I imagined Leo’s weird presence as I spoke. Oh God. Oh God. I fell asleep on the kitchen floor with the lights on. I woke up at four-thirty, drank a glass of water, and took a long winey piss. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror for a long time. The bald head. The AWOL eyebrows. The blank animal my face had become. I ran the lines quietly a dozen more times, so as not to wake the neighbors. Oh God. Oh my God. He’s not—I think he’s not breathing. Is anybody—is that right? No, I don’t think it’s right. Whatever…it’s fine…better than it was…tomorrow I’d drive to Van Nyus to confront what’s left of Dale Purvis. Third time’s the charm, hat trick, it will all come together after Mr. Purvis. I walked to the bedroom and plugged in my phone. It had died on the kitchen floor. It comes back to life: six missed calls. One voicemail. Pete: “dude, so fucking sorry, dude, the fucking funding for that gig fell through, bullshit studio politics or whatever, shoots canceled, where you at? Wanna drink?”

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy…

I am honored to announce that roommate: a collection of inopportune rants will be arriving in physical and ebook THIS SUMMER!!!!

Huge thanks to and Nascent Night Press for making this happen. I’ve long been an admirer of Dylan’s work at Nascent Night and Drek Death and Doom. In addition to being a wonderful writer, he is an all-around wonderful fellow, and his professionalism and sense of community leave me inspired every time I interact with him.

Here is the announcement from Nascent Night’s site:

Grand Rapids, MI — Nascent Night Press has acquired Roommate: a collection of inopportune rants by Will Boucher, with publication planned for Summer 2026.

A darkly funny, philosophical, satirical work of contemporary fiction, Roommate spotlights the frustrations of shared living with blinding clarity and shapes them into a sharp critique of modern society. Over household chores, a non-participating roommate rants into an introspective narrator’s running inner monologue, influencing moral complacency and reigniting ancient philosophical quandaries. Artificial intelligence, sandwiches, clogged drains, meal prep, dying ficuses—all of these and more come to a head in hilarious and devastating, exciting and innocuous, soft and outrageous juxtaposed perfection. Boucher’s collection finds absurdity, discomfort, and strange clarity in the ordinary virtue of trying to exist.

Roommate: a collection of inopportune rants will be published by Nascent Night Press in Summer 2026.

I’m quite new to this wide, wacky world of writing and publishing, and I am ever-appreciative of the steady hand of pros like Dylan and (who lent his ever-watchful eyes to the manuscript).

Special thanks to anyone who's been reading along the way! The collection features completely edited and revised evolutions of previously published roommates alongside brand-spanking-new rants. I’m super proud of this collection, and I couldn’t be more excited for y’all to read it! Pre-orders, cover reveal, and all that good stuff will be coming soon. In the meantime, make sure you’re subscribed to stay up to date. ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

Cheers from your favorite roommate,

wb

I was eating breakfast, a cherry scone, when she texted: “Found a lump. Doctor Monday. Can you come?” I’m at my computer, tounging old scone from my K9s, cursor throbbing Expedia’s search bar. She’s in White Plains…New York…do I fly to Newark? JFK? I can’t remember…Newark? I think. EWR. Eeew-err. The one that sounds like vomit? Yes. Okay. Newark. When? Now? Tonight? Can I sleep? Are you allowed to sleep when mom has a lump?

“Bro, check it out—”

He sprints into my room wearing his faux-silk bathrobe, the burgundy thing with a dragon embroidered on the back. He’s still wet from a shower, dripping black loogies into my carpet. He does this often: gets drunk, calls me “bro,” stands in front of my Sgt. Pepper’s poster and rants about 9/11.

“—look…look at Poe..see Poe?”

He puts a wet finger on Edgar’s nose. His robe is short, boxers peak under the dragon; they’re pocked with cartoon planets.

I nod and type “Newark.”

“…three assholes to his right…” he moves his finger left, Poe’s right.

I nod.

“Right here?”

I nod.

“The reptilian fuck next to Lenny?”

I nod.

“…so, like, the day after 9/11, this dude—this fucking asshat was in some interview and was like ‘oh yeah the attacks yesterday? Those were ‘the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos…’”

Expedia loads my Newark options: $340. $421. $289. $380.

I nod.

“…and that—that’s a fucking quote, bro…dude recognized that shit was art, was fucking created…designed fucking shit…”

I nod. Saturn rides high on his left buttock.

“The greatest work of art…” It’s been a while since I’ve heard that one. Last time he fingered Sgt. Pepper’s he ranted about Love and Theft being proof of Bob Dylan’s participation in conspiracy: “See Poe? Five faces to Poe’s left is Rodia…Simon ‘The Tower Builder’ Rodia, bro…and whose that emerging from The Tower Builder’s ear? Oh, no one…just the guy who, when poor fucks are splattering on the pavement is on the radio singing: high water risin’, six inches ‘bove my head…coffins droppin’ in the street…like balloons made out of lead…”

$289. Leave tonight. Redeye. Good. Fine. I click. Seat selection loads. A little airplane appears with its roof blown off. I peer down at the color-coded seats. Blue, green, grey. Every grey square is a person, a Newark-bound ass flying towards the vomit sound, vomit-bound bodies with their own conspiracies, their own moms, their own lumps…

“—thermite, bro, like, in the dust? They found fucking thermite in the dust—“

35A. Window seat. It’s near the bathroom. Ava complained if I made us sit near the bathroom: “Why are you always picking bathroom seats? We’re gonna get gonorrhea…” Is that a thing? Do piss particles and gonorrheal cocci wriggle down row 35’s urethras every time someone flushes? I guess so, the entire row’s free. Fuck it. I’ll have it to myself. Poor man’s first class, but my urethra will burn when we touchdown. My skin will be moist, slick with exotic urines. Mom will be at baggage claim. She’ll run towards me, arms wide, eyes beaming. She’ll hug me—press my face into her swollen throat because she has to, because she made me, because you gotta press your kin into burgeoning cancers, always, forever, even if he’s covered in piss.

“—unreacted thermite, which, like, that’s fucking basic proof of controlled demo—“

Row 12. Better. 12F. Window. I click the grey square. Expedia muses. My click travels through thirsty server farms—swollen, humming warehouses where my ass’s desire to occupy 12F for $289 is translated into 1s and 0s and, once okayed by Expedia’s lordship, shall return to my screen as a happy green checkmark.

“—and the way it fell, bro? Just, like straight down? That’s free fall, that’s fucking pure ass gravity, bro…zero resistance—“

He’s inspecting my bookshelf. He pulls out Catch-22, flips to a random page: “—the Texan turned out to be good-natured, generous and likable. In three days no one could stand him.” It took him four tries to read without slurring. He blows a raspberry and puts it back upside down. Expedia wants my credit card. I fish my Visa outta my wallet. He’s back at Sgt. Pepper’s eyeing the guru, the hookah, the snow white…the TV, the cloth snake, the French horn—

I’ve always wanted to eat Rice Krispies out of Lennon’s French horn. I’ve always wanted to steal it, fill it to the brim with milk and crisped rice and sit in my tighty whities on mom’s old leather couch, straddling the cold valves with my thighs, just sit and feel milk-cooled brass make my thighs goosefleshy, sit and binge cartoons as snaps and crackles and pops travel through the tubing and my fingers mash the valves and impose the horn’s farty grandeur upon the morning’s ricey hiss…

“—meaning the lower floors offered no resistance, meaning already destroyed, meaning blown up before the fucking collapse—“

He’s right, I guess. Mr. Greatest Work of Art Imaginable for the Whole Cosmos is right. Art is good to the extent that it modifies. A car crash that leaves you concussed? Kitsch. A crash that cleaves your leg? Art. A worm that aerates your mums? Mid. The worm that aerates your cortex? Art. Thirst? No. A body succumbing to cottonmouth? Art. A mutating cell? Dumb. Cells that die and fester and pile into a thyroidic mass necessitating a three-hour flight to White Plains? Art. Mona Lisa. David—

“—and the Pentagon, bro? We get like five frames of fucking grainy ass footage from the motherfucking Pentagon?”

I called mom after the scone. “How long have you had it?” She laughed. Nervous. “I don’t know, hon…a few months? A year? It’s nothing, it’s—no need to worry, it’s—I’m, I’m probably just…overreacting.” Someone laughs outside my window. A few months? A year? Probably overreacting…yes, probably nothing…like her “heart attack” that turned out to be trapped gas or the Christmas she mistook bad clams for stomach cancer…nothing….probably…

“…the Pentagon…aka, like the most surveilled building on the fucking planet?”

The laughter sounded like a child’s. I’m looking for it. The day is clear. Bright and quiet. The sky is nothing. Pure blue. Cloudless. A blue nothing that feels alive and carnivorous. If you stare too long, it might reach out and pull you close, drown you in its belly…

“…five frames? You’re fucking kidding me, bro, Like…you know how many fucking cameras are at the Pentagon?”

No, it’s all a trick, the sky—blue wool pulled over our eyes, divined to make us forget the gas giants, the black vacuum, the rogue stones, the belching furnaces stinking behind it. They know—they know if we woke every morning staring into black vacuums, we wouldn’t get out of bed, get to work, contribute. Therefore: blue. The blue gives us hope. We’re all little yolky babes, laid into existence by strong mamas, born safe, left to grow towards our heart’s desires, shielded by our robin-egg-blank.

“—and don’t get me fucking started on Tower Seven…like, it’s just a coincidence all the records were there? The SEC shit? The Enron shit?“

Another laugh. I turn to the window. A toddler walks by holding her mother’s hand. A plane drones overhead. The first flight was twelve seconds. One hundred twenty feet. About how far the toddler is from my window. The toddler laughs, tries to escape her mother’s grip. Her mother is a zillenial twenty-something; the girl’s age when the towers fell. I forgot her name. I’ve met them before, a few days after the incident, the thing with Ava, when my eye was fucked and purple; the toddler stared as I got my mail. “Purity, don’t be rude…no staring…” I flashed a smile and nodded. “Purity, don’t be shy…” The zillenial smiled back. “…say hi to the nice man.” Purity pressed her face into her mother’s leg and cooed a soft “Hiiiiiii.” I closed the mailbox, performed a cartoon wave. “Hi, Purity.” Purity. When those who witnessed The Greatest Work of Art shit out their kids, they named them Purity or Trust or Comfort, Unity or Mercy or Prudence. Some fuzzy infant memory of mom clutching rosaries in front of CNN makes them birth old-world comforts into meatspace, makes them grow and summon Purity to suckle trauma from their witnessing breasts, gulp the terror from our world, metabolize and forge a new world where new people board planes with their shoes on and sing Kumbaya when there’s turbulence…

“…the BBC reported building seven collapsed, like twenty fucking minutes before it actually did—like, they knew…they shot their load too quick and we saw…”

Done. I screenshot my confirmation number. Tonight, I’m flying. I’ll work and Uber to the airport; I’ll remove my shoes and put my laptop in a gray bin and walk through a machine and let 12F palm my ass for three hours while I sit in the sky Googling my name, what it means, hoping it’s something better than Purity or Trust or Comfort. And if we crash? If we’re hijacked and flown into the Flatiron or the Freedom Tower? I’ll just watch. Art. The Sistine fucking Chapel, no different than appreciating Monet. I’ll watch the wings separate from the fuselage and think about mom and her lump, how she’s responsible for birthing something who doesn’t know what its name means…doesn’t know if it’s flying to the right airport…doesn’t know how to get home…who can’t keep a thyroid from mutating and pulsing and—

“You want a hot pocket, bro?”

I turn away from the screen and look at him. He’s re-tying the robe’s sash. His bulge is exposed, stretching out Mercury. He has a big dick.

“Yeah.”

He flashes a thumbs-up, shuffles to the kitchen. The freezer opens. I Google potential causes of neck lumps. Lipoma? Goiter? Lymphoma? Another plane speeds overhead. Purity and her mom are gone. The blue looks sated; it ate them. The microwave opens, closes, hums—the smell of processed cheese seeps into my room. The greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos was a Tuesday, Tuesday morning, story time. We sat Indian on the floor, circling our teacher—a milk-smelling woman whose face memory conjures as an anonymous blob of smooth, blood-creamed skin. She was reading, Ms. BloodCream, from a nondescript book. There was a knock at the door. Loud. Twenty little necks whipped towards the door, watched it open. Mom. It was mom. She was tall, vibrant, lumpless—her heels like gunshots on the tile. As she approached, her eyes looked red, and mascara spaghetti streaked her left cheek. She handed a note to Ms. BloodCream. Her face pulsed as she read. She looked at me and nodded in affirmation. I think she was trying to smile.

We had to drive through the hills to get home. The greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos was a clear day. Through the hills, on such a day, you can see the million-mouthed flickers of Manhattan glass steaming beyond the Hudson. There was traffic, standstill. Drivers hunched and crying, pressing eel-sized phones into their heads. Cars on the shoulders, people, out, standing, hand visoring their eyes to watch the black plume. “Mom?” I said. “What’s that?” “Oh,” she turned up the radio, flashed a quick smile. “The smoke?” There was lipstick on her incisors. “Nothing, sweetheart, it’s—it’s just a little accident across the river.” I watched it billow against the blue as we inched home. I cracked the window; the world smelled like summer camp and bad eggs. Mom was quiet. Nervous. Finger-thrumming the wheel, humming nonsense along with the radio. Whenever the DJs stopped the music to speak about the plume, she’d scan until she found more music to hum to: high water risin’…silhouettes in the window…watch them ‘til they’re gone…When all the DJs quit music for good, she turned off the radio and asked about school: “So…you like your new class? Any new friends? Who was that one…that one in the blue sweater? He’s a friend right? His mother is nice…yeah…you used to play with him in Kindergarten, remember?”

It took an hour to get home. Mom wouldn’t let me turn on the TV. “Help me in the kitchen, hon.” We made dozens of pancakes and ate until the world smelled like Mrs. Buttersworth. I wanted TV, cartoons, “pleeeeeease.” She said nothing. She took my hand and led me to the couch, sat me down, kissed lipstick into my forehead. She hummed as she walked to the record player and put on Sgt. Pepper’s. The audience milled through the speakers, the orchestra tuned: it was twenty years ago today… She sat next to me, threw a blanket over us. She pulled me into her throat and smelled my hair and rubbed my back. Sgt. Pepper’s sleeve was in my lap. Staring. It’s wonderful to be here…She put her red finger on the old man floating in the top left corner, she cleared her throat, and told me whose who. We’d like to take you home with us, we’d love to take you home… There was something kind in all those faces—all the disparate faces cattle prodded and stage hooked and Bataan marched across epochs, pasted shoulder to shoulder, in a senior class photo. Gathered under the blue, the same blue outside, across the river, pregnant with smoke. Gathered to protect me from the plume, letting it steal their colors and burn their faces, so I can sit and learn their names: nothing to see here, kid, we’re here, we’ve survived—you’ll survive.

He comes back with a hot pocket bleeding grease into a Dixie. The plane’s gone. Quiet. We eat in silence, burning tongues, blowing cheese. Another plane passes. Low. I think of the people on it, coating each other with aerosolized piss. Where are they going? Who in their life is growing a lump? Is it lymphoma? It’s probably lymphoma…

“Do you ever think about how many people are just floating around the sky at any given moment?” I ask.

He looks up, a little worm of cheese twitches on his lip. “Like…”, he swallows, “thousands and thousands I guess.”

I swallow and run my tongue along my K9s, searching for scone.

“Yeah, it’s fucked up.”

He swallows again. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He sets his plate on the carpet and grabs his phone.

“—this footage is fucked up, bro, like look…you can see them—the fucking squibs, controlled fucking explosions going floor by floor—“

His phone is in my face. I take another bite and watch the fucking squibs.

This is an installment of the ‘bad roommate’ series. Check out other entries in the series:

—and the needle is climbing, climbing past H, climbing and shuddering and the smoke is back, black and worse and the needle is shivering H and I should pull over? now? pull over here? where? here? nothing…there’s nothing, nothing to pull into…onto—grass and heifers and barns and goats and sun, the little sun drops fast into the Cascades and dark, soon it will be dark, soon it will rain, rain and snow and sleet and Dr. Reeves said mitral valve said regurgitation and low sodium and too much fluid and it will rain, tonight or tomorrow, it’ll rain or snow, my hip said so, said it will rain or snow or sleet and it’s eighteen, radio said eighteen, eighteen degrees and Harold said all fixed! leaned under my hood and came out all fixed! good as new! stood proud in my driveway wiping tools, no problem! drive!—drive through nothing, drive through middle nowhere nothing, go ‘head! to your pharmacy, go alone, drive alone with your regurgitating heart, your puking heart and Cutlass and good as new! of course…of course it won’t cough black clouds fourteen…fifteen? fifteen miles from home, go ‘head! drive, drive and blow ninety-three dollars—ninety-three bucks for thirty pills, thirty oblong capsules to keep my heart from swelling and/or regurgitating and/or shriveling and Dr. Reeves said no sodium and go slow, take it slow and I am, I’m slow, I’m listening, I’m doing twenty, keeping slow twenty in a fifty-five, go ‘head!—no…no I’m afraid…I’m afraid to push, afraid the engine will seize and shutter and cough and strand me on the shoulder and make me walk fifteen…sixteen? sixteen miles in eighteen degrees, make me limp towards town with my bad rain/snow hip, limp through dark nothing, limp under the tight hyphen sun, the dead-cigarette orb painting the goats gold and it woke me, this morning, the sun, the sun woke me and wouldn’t let me breathe, I sat, had to sit, had to lean up slow and steady, steady and slow, had to sit on the edge of my bed breathing in……out……..in….out….twenty, twenty-five, thirty…thirty minutes of in…….and out……and in…………….and out…..and in…and Dr. Reeves says it’s manageable says low sodium says ninety-three dollar pills every eight hours for the rest of your life and sixteen, sixteen miles from town and no cell service and the engine’s knocking, metal on metal on metal, fundamental—some fundamental gasket has broke, is breaking, some crucial Harold gasket has failed and he, Harold—this morning Harold stood proud in my driveway, wiping grease and good to go! and yes I said thank you! I said, thank you! thank you! I smiled and gave him the last of the weekend’s cookies and he stood proud and chewed and my pleasure ma’am, he called me ma’am—ma’am like he hasn’t lived next door for thirty years, ma’am like he doesn’t know my face or name or voice and he chewed—chewed and stared, stared like I’m faceless, stared like the freshmen, stared with September eyes, stared like I have two heads, two Mandarin speaking heads, ma’am ma’am ma’am and maybe, maybe I did—do? maybe I do/did have two heads and one…or both? Both speak with byzantine tongues, old musty tongues nobody understands or tolerates, tongues that garner only stares, blank all good! nothing stares—nothing…still nothing, goats…goats and dead barns…dead barns and dead sun and fence posts, Heidegger said something about posts…something about standing-reserve? about posts? trees? Jonathan said something about Heideggerian trees, some Sein und Zeit thing skimmed on the beach in ’82, skimmed with Jonathan on the beach, Jonathan and his carrot beard and Heidegger obsession and his Seattle wife, the wife who fingered my face, who fingered and shouted home wrecker! and I stood and stared and held my tongue, held a tongue that wanted to yell no, no you’re a house, no…you yourself are an entire house and the house is wrecked (wrought?)—your house is wrought and no, no I cannot wreck what lie in ruin… I should pull over…now…here…pull here and wait, wait for some kind thing, some trucker or farmer or local to drive me back—Jonathan went back, to her, to Seattle…back…eventually—eventually they all go back, go back and tremble, tremble over H, my little needle trembles over red H—H for hell. H for Harold, H for Harold and How? and Heidegger…for Jonathan’s sea salt Heidegger on my desk, stalled and incomplete and and full of consciousness and self-consciousness and I—I had both once, had both but they leaked, leaked when Stevens, when Dean Stevens gave his speech, his farewell thanks for your service speech at my retirement where I sat drained, sat and smiled, smiled and ate cake and drove home, home in this car, this very car which, even then, was tenuous and old and three-legged and Dr. Reeves said Alice? Should we call Alice? And no—no, Alice, no…no we haven’t spoke since her wedding, since she married the deacon, married that ape who believes in presence and plentitude and almighty three-faced fathers and Alice, my little Alice married an oaf who contends sin and redemption and virtue are real as flesh and I told her, at the the wedding, I told her, Alice, I told Alice this man, this fool is medieval, a medieval minded fool… and she, Alice, Alice cried stop it mother, no…he knows…people like him know things we’ve forgotten…he’s good he’s a good man, he’s good and he’ll—no…no sweet pea…no…no no no no no, medieval men die of plague, they die of plague at thirty, they die without vaccines and antibiotics and anesthesia…and the sky, the sky is dead, dead blue, that deep pre-black blue and my vision’s bad, fuzzy—fuzzy and white knuckled and ninety-three dollars for thirty pills, thirty oblong nuggets a pharmacist said to swallow daily, swallow with food, avoid grapefruit—steam, the steam clouds are thick, getting thicker and yes, now…I should…now…yes? pull over? here? this shoulder? pull here before something catches fire? before the thing explodes? no…no no no…what if…what if it doesn’t start? what if…it’s late, it’s dinner time, everyone’s eating, everyone’s home with full mouths and no one will come, no one will come and what if it doesn’t start? no. keep going, drive, drive towards town, get close, closer, drive to the young Chevron man, the young red head in his overalls, the Chevron redhead with big working hands and kind eyes and mouth that calls me ma’am, a different ma’am, purposeful, something he means, he means his ma’ams, he means to help and pities old poor old ma’ams with regurgitating hearts and gagging cars and no, I should have said no—no, Harold…no thank you Harold…I appreciate the gesture Harold but no—no…no no no…you mustn’t deny…it’s rude…”love thy neighbor, love as thy self, do no harm” ugh, yes Harold… yes yes yes…oh, would you? oh would you Harold? please?“no” hurts, “no” harms and you mustn’t harm neighbors who say ma’am, who say ma’am because their brain is mush and can’t remember—my daddy taught me…my boy died in ‘nam…except, no, his father ran out when he was three and no…no, his son didn’t die, his son is alive and in Portland and sells real estate and when I told him, when I tell him no, Harold, no no no…Jimmy’s alive…he, Harold, Harold gets confused and flummoxed and shakes his head no…no ma’am, Jimmy died in ‘nam, yes ma’am had his funeral, boy got full honors, full honors in ’63—ninety-three bucks a month until the end of time, it won’t work….no…no no no…how? how would it? social security? thirteen hundred, eleven something after Medicare…taxes? fees and property taxes? three thousand, three grand a year and rising and—pension? Dean Stevens switched us to new contribution plans, switched in ’95, switched the old-tenured folk right before we’re slated to grandfather into the old system, the good old system, the good system that was just too expensive, too untenable, completely untenable for a department of our size, we’re sorry, we’re sorry…403(b)? 401(k)? IRA? tanked in ’08, tanked and I kept going, kept teaching Middlemarch to heifer-eyed freshmen who’d stare blank, who’d never heard of Eliot, of George Eliot, who stared and thought Eliot was a man and quoted Nietzsche in their papers, Nietzsche Nietzsche Nietzsche…Nietzsche said there are no facts, no facts, only interpretations and no, I never believed it, never bought it, no, there are facts, of course there are: water boils at 100 Celsius and 100 Celsius is 212 Fahrenheit and 212 Fahrenheit is 373.15 Kelvin and Russia is the largest country and the sun dies in the West and memory makes the self and Harold—Harold forgot to tighten some hose, some crucial engine hose and it’s eighteen degrees and seventeen miles and Alice hasn’t called and we haven’t talked since the wedding and my heart regurgitates and these are facts, facts Dr. Reeves said I’d better discuss with a cardiologist, I’m referring you to a friend in Yakima, and I nodded yes nodded yes sure knowing I don’t care, knowing I wouldn’t, I’m not, I’m not going, I’ll take his pills and swallow and avoid grapefruits and hope they’re enough, because hope is what’s left, what’s left when the math doesn’t work, when your numbers don’t equal survival, what fills your chest when the engine coughs thick clouds and you can’t see and I can’t see, it’s dark—smokey and dark and my hands flail about and hit the thing, the little nub that excites the wipers but that’s wrong, no no no, they don’t help, aren’t helping, I turn them off and squint through the windshield, through the smoke and this—that looks familiar, this fence, that mountain, I think, yes…I think—I think it’s the old Grange hall, the old hall where they had dances, where I danced with Robert or Horace, danced with someone in ’64 before I got married and had Alice and got tenure—the hall’s still there, here, a shell, yes, sure, half-dead, windows half-smashed, roof half-sagged, and, yes, oh yes! they used to string the little thing up with Christmas lights, wrap it in lights and—music! music spilled into December dark and we danced and were young, so young, so impossibly, incredulously young, dancing and smiling and thinking—knowing, thinking was knowing back then, knowing it would all work out, America would care for us when our memories collapsed, Uncle Sam’d give us pensions and security and houses and children, good good children who stayed close and called often and it’s been twenty-eight years, twenty-eight years since I was happy, since the summer with Jonathan, since the summer lying on the beach reading Heidegger, reading dusty Symposium paperbacks, reading and pillow-talking Platonic love, moaning agape, agape and love and eros and his wife, his Seattle wife and her fat finger, fingering my eye and everything ends, everything burns to ground zero, default, erasure, all bodies back to square one, again…one more time…take it from the top and what? what is that? is—is that..is that a…a house? a house and lights? yes! yes, finally! lights and warmth and people and everything—everything ends, everyone fails…me, they all fail, fail me, they do, they will, or perhaps I’ll fail them? probably, I’ll fail like I failed Alice, failed Alice when I named her after Wonderland—failed Alice the moment I thought, knew, she’d grow to love wordplay and logic and how would I have known? known she’d grow towards hate? grow to hate being named after a “children’s book”—oh, honey, oh sweetie it’s not a children’s book no no…it’s a satire it’s a commentary on Victorian mathematics and logic and language and no, she didn’t care, she wanted a normal name, normal “like the others”—no honey, no sweetie normal is fascist; normal is conformity, it’s fascist, are you a fascist? Are you— the light ahead is closer now, yes, it’s a house, white clapboard house with a porch and I don’t know whose house…whose is it? what do I do? drive, park, knock knock hello, hi, sorry to bother but my car…the engine…knocking sounds…Harold… I ease up the gas hoping to clear the smoke, hoping for clarity and I’m tired, tired and my chest hurts and the temperature gauge quivers and the heat vents blow their acrid wind, blow chemicals through my hair and yes oh yes it’s a house, a house with a porch light and well-lit rooms and smoke, good smoke coming from the chimney—people, warmth, salvation, I ease the gas, the car shudders, the whole frame shakes, limps, I’m barely moving, putzing through dark, only headlights, dim ’87 halogens beating back sunless nothing, cutting towards creamy windows and warmth and neighbors and nothing—nothing will happen, no one will be there, no one’s home, they’ll hid behind expensive drapery and wait me out, wait until I tire out and leave and nothing—nothing comes of nothing that’s Cordelia, that’s Lear, she can’t speak, won’t, won’t say she loves him and love? love can’t be quantified can’t be performed or commanded and Mom I love you…I do but I can’t live the way you want me to live and—there’s the driveway, I’m turning in, pulling in, the car gives everything, spends its last heat, its last twitch to pull me towards the house, limps down the drive, pebbles dance in wheel wells as it limps and limps to deposit me near the bright porch, the bright creamy porch—I put it in park and turn the key and silence—silence and breathing, my breathing and the ticking of hot hot metals and my breathing, ragged and fast and I sit, sit in the dark, eighteen, eighteen degrees, it’s going to snow, soon, tonight, I sit looking at the stranger’s house, staring through lit windows and think of—feel, I feel their cold door wood on my knuckles, I hear my voice panting, I’m standing and chest clutching and asking help! help! help! and—no, I can’t, no…no no no….maybe I’ll just sit, sit here and try the car, try again, let it rest and try again, give it a chance to complete the last leg and limp towards my Chevron ma’am or no… maybe…maybe I’ll sit, just sit and let my heart give out, give out here in the cold, drift off in the cold and yes it’s supposed to be peaceful, they say it’s peaceful, easy, just like dozing, just like sliding under designer linen and letting go and dream-drift into nothing and—no…I shudder…my body hates the thought, the blue-lipped me found in the car, this car, Alice getting a call, called from an unknown I’m sorry… number—my hand is on the handle, cold, cold metal handle, I push, push the door, the air rushes in, eighteen degrees, eighteen rushes in and flushes my cheeks and I swing out my legs, swing arthritic stiff legs into the eighteen cold and unfold and stand and the world tilts, tilts and shivers and smells acidic—I steady myself, lean weight against the Cutlass and look towards the house and wipe imperfect crumbs from my coat and walk, one step, then another, left right left right…I’m moving—I’m walking toward the light toward the door and I don’t know what I’ll say hello…help….hello hello… I climb the steps left right left one at a time holding the railing—too many, too many damned stairs and I’m out of breath, heaving, heaving at their door, I raise my hand, I knock, I knock three little knocks and wait. I wait in….and out….and in…..and wait—I hear footsteps, slight feet shuffling slow towards the door, hurry hurry hurry slow shuffling steps and a hand on the knob and the door opens and yes—oh yes, there’s a woman, a woman my age, a little younger, older? A little older…she looks at me and I look back and she flashes a smile and says something, something nice and I open my mouth, open to speak and nothing, nothing comes and I stare and she frowns are you alright? and I stare and nod, nod into her face and feel my pulse in my chest and smell my heart’s vomit and suddenly, suddenly I think, I know, I know there are no facts, there have never been things called “facts”—yes, yes of course Eliot is a man, George Eliot is a man and yes, of course! of course I’m a home wrecker and yes I’m sorry and I can’t imagine and no no it’s my fault and yes of course! of course it’s not fascist, it’s okay, it’s okay to want a normal non-Wonderland name and yes and yes and yes and—

Ma’am?

…yes and yes and yes…

Ma’am, are you alright?

Shoutout to for making this happen :)

The day begins when Frank, my partner’s dachshund, tongue fucks my nostril. 77% of mornings he fucks the left. For this, I am grateful. Right-fucked mornings tend to devolve into Why hath God forsaken me? days—days where I’m divined to stub toes and clog toilets and discover skin tags…but today? Today, the left was fucked. Huzzah! I am safe. I enter consciousness rejoiceful, staring into the ceiling; I get my best ideas from the ceiling. I let my mind drift; let it chew and vomit and ZipLock potential nuggets on my phone, setting them aside for marination. After thirty to forty minutes of ceiling staring (aka “writing” aka “being an artist”), I rise to meet the 9-5. I get to my desk, don my headset, and begin my day as a crisis phone worker. An average morning tends to look like this:

9:00: “…sorry for my voice…had a coupla strokes last summer and that last one—that last one was a reaaaaal barnburner…”

9:12: “…thought I was getting pneumonia but turned out my lung collapsed…”

9:23: “…any shelters? The hospital’s gonna take my toes…fuckers won’t let me heal in my tent…”

9:41: “…Home Depot canned me ‘cause of my stomach thing….”

9:50: “…my daughter’s one of them runaways…when she turns up, we needa send her ass to one of ‘em Alaskan ‘mealitary’ programs…”

10:02: “…I used to build planes, Boeings, build Boeings down at the plant and now? Now, I can’t wipe my ass—not like I used to…”

10:11: “…I have a learning disability and a new hip and I don’t know what a computer is…”

10:14: “…I only got, like 5% of my pancreas…”

10:23: “…to get to the butt of it: my hands are wet and diseased but everything else is a okay, gotta find the good in everything, yeah?”

Sometimes the voices want me to believe there is good in the world.

Sometimes I try.

Sometimes I spend lunch swiping through feeds, snipe-hunting the good, but it’s hard; the good is squirrelly, it never stays good. For example, a feel-good story about a demented octogenarian Biden-shuffling towards an airport piano, taking his seat and performing—performing with absolute assurance and precision his wedding song, the one a now-dead band belted out as a now-dead hoard of relatives circled his maiden dance with his now-faceless wife. He is happy. He is infectious. He bobs and weaves in time. His verve pulls unshaven travelers from their rectangular teats. They smile, slinking towards his ivory, their fluorescent neck slugs chewing their napes. They circle him. They clap. They sing. They swing and sway and forget where they are. When he is done, the crowd rewards the rheumatoid troubadour with rapt, thunderous applause. Good like this always ends with planes belly up on the tarmac—ends with news, days later, that a slug-neck audient turned out to be patient zero for the new ebola or cholera or COVID or—lunch is over...I’ll keep trying...

I clock out and sweat the day out at the gym. I shower and eat and plop on the couch with Frank (protecting my nostrils). I open my laptop and let loose on the page, revisiting the morning’s ceiling nuggets, seeing how their fat has rendered, if their flesh responded to the day’s marinade—I see if the stories and characters and voices I’ve encountered since the morning pair with the developed flavors. I type and type and look for the good until it’s bedtime. I get under the covers and close my eyes, curious which nostril will get fucked come sun up.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy…

He wakes to the beep-beep of the mailman, of Larry (who, in addition to delivering his mail, is an old high school wrestling buddy) reversing. Larry’s worn tires struggle to grip the snow. He breathes slow. He closes his eyes and imagines Larry—Larry in his lime-green wrestling singlet, little lime Larry behind the government wheel of his white box truck, sitting in his dumb box truck with its blue eagle-ish swish stalling out at his mailbox. He smiles and shoulder-nudges Beelzebub, ha! remember?! remember how excited we got seeing mailmen in December?! Larry’s tires find purchase; he drives off to stuff Mrs. Harrelson’s box with Safeway coupons. …remember when ma called the mailmen elves?! Footfalls creak above. Someone’s standing overhead. You bite his hand, again, harder this time. fuck...shhhhh. He tenses and hisses. Beelzebub calms him: yes, obviously darling, of course...of course I remember darling. Yes, of course...elves...elves darling…

You’re smushed in his crawl space; your nostrils clogged with dust bunnies. His left hand is dry—dry and big and chapped, it’s pressed tight over your mouth. He’s pulling you close, against his body, he’s big-spooning and engulfing and hissing shhhhhhhh if you squirm, shhh shhhhhhh if you mumble or bite or squirm. He is naked. Old and naked and weak-bladdered. Pressed into your butt, he’s pissed six? eight?...ten times over the six hours you’ve been down here …remember how the boxes were alive? alive and purring…alive with potential? He pissed on the corduroy knickers mommy got you for Christmas, they’ve gone stale, stale and cold on your thighs. …of course, darling….potential…alive…

Radios squawk. Someone’s wearing heels. Biting is no use. You taste his blood. Bloody saliva trickles down your chin, down into your hand. It’s dried on your knuckles. For fun, you open and close your hands. You feel the dry blood crack against your skin as it stretches. Every now and then, red-blue lights flash through the window. Your heart shakes when the red-blue comes, you want to sneeze—you want to sing or moan the heaviest decibels your body can muster, but his hands tighten shhhhhh... they tighten when the red-blue comes. Nine pairs of boots and two pairs of heels walk over your face. He mumbles to Beelzebub about the shoes, about the dumb pig bitches, about how the dumb pig bitches are wearing their filthy fucking pig shoes inside, trampling his nice clean insides, tracking their pig shit and scum onto his nice clean pristine sparkling shag…his breath smells like candy canes. It’s hard to breathe. He pinches your nose when you bite, pinches when the red-blue comes, pinches you semi-conscious until you hear the vents whisper yes…yes darling…of course...pig shoes...pigs darling…

Drawers are being opened; furniture moved, ancient armoire feet scream on his hardwood …fat pigs leaving their wet melting scum on my goddamn motherfucking hardwood…yes dear, scum piles...pigs...of course…When this is over, he will bake you a pie. Cherry or apple; whatever you’d like. He will let you stay home from school and watch cartoons in your PJs. When this is over, he will get on his hands and knees and scrub pig scum from his shag, crawling, quadrupedal, watching you from his downward dog.

A muffled voice says something about blood, says something about a smell; it’s hot and Beelzebub’s ignoring him. It’s hot, hot and wet and wombish. His skin folds writhe against your nape and stroke you towards sleep. You sleep. You sleep dreamless sleep and when you wake, you float in pure dark. Your eyes stare out, unfed, your nostrils hop with bunnies. You listen. You focus. There is blood in your temples; low thrumming blood and a high-pitched whir, thrums and whirs but no noon shining through the small window slit, no red-blue, no feet or squawks or talk of smells, no Larry or heels…just a snoring thing pulling you into its belly, just the sharp hand tickle of dried blood cracking as you open, close, open, close…

Want more depressing shit? Well well well…you’ve come to the right place 😭 👀:

I don’t know much about God or Jesus. Are they the same? The same “Thing”? The same “Force”? All I know is Nana showed me Bible cartoons every Christmas—tableaux of nipple-less prophets painting blood on doors and splitting oceans or seas or lakes because a flaming bush said “DO IT.” She sat next to me, clutching her rosary, nodding Amen whenever cartoon Christ got screen time. “It’s important,” she’d say, rubbing my back. “It’s important to know where you come from.”

“…dude, people used to celebrate Jesus’ cock today…”

The NOBLE FIR—6.5 FT—PRE-LIT is unplugged and naked; ready to return to its box. Ava used to take it down. She’d wake with hungover purpose, tie her hair back, and decapitate Christmas before my kidneys enjoyed the year’s first piss. “Fresh start,” she’d say, smooching my sleeping forehead. “Happy New Year, babe.”

“…like, a whole-ass feast for Christ’s fresh cut schmeat…”

He’s on the couch, one leg tucked under his ass. He’s wearing a Christmas monstrosity, something his Auntie or Grannie Frankensteined together with Parkinson hands, the red one, the one with the freakish reindeer and swastika-looking snowflakes. He’s peeling expired string cheese and watching Christmas Vacation for the fourth time this week: …my husband’s been abducted. The man…the man was…he was a huge, beastly, bulging man…

“…eight days old, snip snip and the whole Western calendar’s centered around some dude’s dick…”

The NOBLE FIR comes from Martha Stewart’s Holiday Collection. Ava used to joke that, in prison, Martha attained nirvana: she meditated and repented and prayed until God bestowed upon her a vision of the perfect Christmas tree. She sketched the NOBLE FIR—6.5 FT—PRE-LIT on prison one-ply. Drew these exact branches, these gaps, this precise shade of extruded green, wasting a dozen contraband pencils until she got it right. When her behavior was good, she mailed the word of God to her factory in Guangdong, where her children got to work.

“…someone kept it, too…some pervy cleric put the foreskin in a jar or cheese cloth or whatever…”

I approach the tree, trying to remember her deconstructive rhythms. Ornaments first: remove carefully, wrap in headlines about inflation or war or heat waves. Next, tinsel: wind glittering eels tight around my shoulder. Last, the tree: un-telescope the NOBLE’s metal spine, separate into three chunks: base, middle, tip—fold the branches factory tight so they slide snug in the box.

“…like, by the Middle Ages, eighteen fucking churches claimed they had the O.G. foreskin…”

I open the box, readying it for packing. It vomits out the new plastic stink of extruded petroleum, the chemical funk of whatever compound makes the NOBLE’s “lushly realistic” needles flame-retardant.

“…dude must’ve had a hydra dick or something…”

I’ve always been scared of trees, the real trees, scared of having the real trees inside. Probably because Nana was too, because she said they’re Judas incarnates. Trojan traitors brought home under the pretense of joy and tradition, claiming to symbolize Jesus and the Son’s light, but once inside, they linger—linger, and die slow in the corner, die dry in the living room until they incite five-alarms and feast upon gumdrop kiddos.

“...when everyone was sucking face at midnight, they actually just celebrated some first-century Palestinian getting his schlong cut…”

He’s given up on peeling the string cheese. He’s taking big bites, leaving teeth marks in the milky white.

I push in the two silver nubs and decapitate the NOBLE FIR. The top third is heavier than expected. My hands shake as I fold the branches. Twelve hours ago, the ball dropped and Ava posted to Instagram: Ava at a rooftop party holding champagne. Ava in her black dress, the one with the sequined things, the one she never wore for me because “we never go anywhere important.” Ava on her tiptoes kissing some man-bunned, flannel-wearing schmuck. Fresh start—suck a strange face to start fresh. Happy New Year—kiss flanneled hipsters in high places to reveal the year’s clean cut cock…

“…people, like, walked for days to peep God’s dick…”

We had a real tree once. Dad dragged it through the front door. He let me cut the white farm plastic. It exploded out and made the living room smell like the woods behind school, like the place where Tommy K said he saw a deer get struck by lightning. Mom vacuumed needles for weeks after New Year’s. She complained, but I knew she loved it—loved the mess, the chaos of the real, the way the needles stuck to our socks and made us bleed if we stepped too hard.

“…like all the infertile bitches thought bro’s dick was some fertility totem that would make them ripe…”

The NOBLE’s middle section comes loose. I fold up the branches. Ava asked me once if I believe in God. We were in bed. Her head on my chest. “Do you?” she asked. “I don’t know,” I paused. Swallowed. “Sometimes?” She twirled my belly hairs. I swallowed again. “Maybe?” She laughed and yanked my hairs. “Really?” She said. I winced and swatted her hand away. “You’re fucking with me!” She giggled and reached for my belly. I wrestled her, flipped her on her side, made her the little spoon. “You’re too smart for that crap!” she said as I pressed my chest into her shoulder blades. Does belief make you dumb? Was Nana dumb? Am I dumb? “It’s—” I say, feeling the sting in my belly. “I guess…” She smelled good, like melted butter. “…maybe…,” butter and thyme, “…maybe I don’t…”

“…and New Year’s wasn’t always January first—the Romans did it in March, then Caesar moved it, then some Pope moved it again and guess where it landed?”

The carpet is littered with faux-needles. I sweep them into a pile with my hand. They cling to everything—jeans, socks, the wet voids between fingers. Martha gave them a fugitive mentality, made them sick of being relegated to the year’s ass-end. They want more—more sun, more air, more time —so they flee, go on the lam, seek quarter between cushions, under furniture, between fingers—sit and soak up freedom until the vacuum gets them.

“…right on Jesus’s circumcision extravaganza…The Feast of the Circumcision of Christ…coincidence?”

I slide NOBLE FIR’s bottom chunk into the box.

“…no fucking way...”

The box is printed with a stock photo family wearing oversized red-knit sweaters.

“...it’s blatant big-circumscison propaganda…”

They’re gathered around a NOBLE FIR, smiling, their teeth too white, postures perfect. Stock-Mom has her Uber-blonde hair tied back; she’s on her knees petting a golden retriever. Stock-Dad’s hand grips stock-Son’s shoulder. On day eight of stock-Son’s life, a stock-doctor cut and modified the stock-babe’s cock to look like daddy’s and daddy’s daddy’s…Stock-Dad stares down the camera, squeezing the boy’s—his boy’s shoulder, squeezing with the divine comfort of inflicting upon another what was inflicted upon you.

“...the whole ‘New Year, New You’ thing? Basic baptism shit, like, subliminal circumcision marketing…”

I slide the middle third in. My phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s probably Mom, again, asking when I’m coming over for black-eyed peas and collard greens.

“…'clean cock, clean you’... it’s like religious normalization of mutilation to protect a billion dollar industry…”

I pull out my phone. Yes. Peas and collard greens. “… they’re yummy and bring us good luck!” Mom’s been superstitious since she found Nana last year. Nana went home after Christmas Mass, made herself a soft-boiled egg, sat down to watch The Price is Right, and died in her barcalounger. Mom walked in six hours later with a Yule log and found a Midwestern woman crying over a won dinette set, the egg congealed in Nana’s crotch, the fake fir blazing, unwilling to cremate. Fuck. The final chunk won’t fit. The branches are too big or too dense or the box fucking shrunk or I’m doing it wrong…

“…hospitals double dip…”

How’d she do it? How’d she get the motherfucker to fit so snug?

“…the fucking docs charge for the snipping—”

So perfect?

“—then sell the dick meat to cosmetic companies…”

So fucking snug and perfect? Fuck. I push. Hard. Something snaps. DO IT. Fuck! I push harder, Fuck! I push with my full weight. Push. Fuck! Push. Fuck this! Push. Fuck her! Push. A branch rips through stock-Dad’s face. Fuck…

“…for like anti-aging sunscreens and shit…”

The Vikings dragged trees inside for Yule, whole, Griswaldian trees, roots and all, stood them proud in their stone foyers, decorated their branches with blood and entrails, mutilated to convince the sun to come back. I get the box to close. I grab the packing tape. The skewering branch extends through stock-Dad’s left eye, reaching towards the sky. It is cloudy. The sun is setting without being seen. NOBLE FIR—6.5 FT—PRE-LIT knows it failed, knows it didn’t argue convincingly enough for the sun. It needs meat. It’s asking to be draped with meats and organs. You want the sun? DO IT! Do it right! Stop taping, stop and rebuild NOBLE FIR, telescope its thirds together, extend and fluff its branches. DO IT. Track Ava down, find her on the rooftop, cut through her black sequins, cut into her belly, sharp, smooth, follow the freckle trails beneath her breasts, the one that spelunks her bellybutton. She’ll like it. She’ll laugh. She wants the sun; she needs it back. She’ll smile and giggle as I reach into her belly. Fresh start. Her little buttery hands will play-slap my chest, “Stop! It tickles!” as I unspool intestines, her huge, huge intestines, her mile-long meats that’ll tinsel the tree and rest on Martha’s branches and call for the sun. “Do it” she’ll beg, “do it, do it, do it” and I’ll reach in, yes yes yes—reach in and take the spleen, the lungs, the heart, take them and press them between big books, big heavy volumes, press and flatten and hang them on branches; they’ll hover next to blown glass Rudolphs and pipe smoking Frosties. DO IT. I’ll trim her nails and shave her head, gather the mass and knit a tree-top angel, body of Ava’s auburn, eyes of finger and toe crescents, and the sun will smile, smile and see, see her shining on Martha’s divined fir. It will see and shoot through our clouds and come home and turn the hogs shadowless and make the seeds grow and burn away the gray and sit upon her face and make her see, make her see what she did and—

“You think it hurt?” I ask.

He swallows a cheese chunk, his eyes on the TV.

“What?”

“Jesus. His dick. Snip snip…you think it hurt?”

He’s quiet for a minute. …that ain’t the friggin’ Christmas Star, Griz…

“Yeah,” he says, rolling down the cheese’s plastic dress. “Yeah, I think it hurt.”

I nod Amen. Nod the way Nana did for nipple-less Christ.

Outside, a couple drags their tree to the street—a real one, brown and dead, leaving a trail of needles. They push it to the curb. It bounces on the tarmac, settles at an angle. They hold hands and walk home, leaving Judas behind.

This is an installment of the ‘bad roommate’ series. Check out other entries in the series:

It’s market day. The facility bused us to the commons. We gather in the grass; our pants droop with coins. I linger at the bus. “Take a stroll,” the nurse says, “get something nice!” I don’t care much for crowds, for the public, for fresh air, but the looming winter turned my stomach inside out. Screw it. I walk towards the gazebo, through rows of carpetbag Hucksters hawking cryptochrome kitsch and vitalized ciders. I walk with a limp now. Doc says sciatica, comes and goes, want a cane? A mob of ossified leaves skitters past my cane, blown October wrappers trapeze into ever-early evening. Everything is fast. Too fast. Loud. I hunch forward. No choice. Doc says advanced scoliosis, use the cane. I do. Thank you, thank you. I am slow. Hunched. I suck in my gut, suck to avoid brushing shoulders, clench the cirrhotic abdomens of my yesterself, my yester-yesterself, my yester-yester-yesterself…I imagine I smell of my father.

The first Huckster has the rakish air of someone bulldozed awake. He speaks in queer figurations, speaks of moles chomping through sprinkler lines, holds up a bag of yellow powders meant to deter. I have no ill will toward moles nor their preoccupation with sprinklers. I have no sprinklers. I have no moles. I nod. Smile. Thank you, thank you. The black nipple of my cane comes down on a boy’s toe. Sorry, so sorry. I catch tell of miracle balms, prodigious laxatives made from a Spanish saint’s foot, or at least I think. Doc says the hearing ain’t what it was—you should be wearing an aid… A horse-jawed man hawks tinctures, his voice shot with pubescent creaks, “One drop makes the liver sing!” Children tug at their mothers’ skirts, apple-cheeked, pawing for candied nuts and fudge bricks. A she-ogre sits in the grass cranking a barrel organ. The air grows vegetal, the stench of winter’s salty wool gathers in the eaves.

I pause, clutching my matryoshka gut. Doc says wanna live? Cut the booze... It’s loud. Too loud. The air is gummy with promise. I want to consume everything, every airborne promise. I want to titrate all chattering spiels into parseable gumdrops and retreat—fall back and sit on a pigeon bench with earned leisure, take out the ones that tickle my eye and invite them to whisper their promise on my tongue. The organ browbeats bodies forward in dazed procession. They press into my back, compelling movement. Sorry, sorry. I stumble into motion; a cog in something big—big and listening with its whole flesh.

A robed woman pushes through the crowd, a bushel of cauliflower held over her head. A pair of amphibious sisters peddle amulets they’ve cut from bark and polished with oils until they turned pool table green. A fat man buys three and ties them around his neck. Perfumes of boiled nettle and burnt sugar drift through the evening. A man with a velvet cap brandishes small tins filled with glittering grit, insisting they’ll keep one’s sleep from turning rancid, they’ll hush the visions that chew our hours, they’ll ward off whatever is coming — Frostbite? Heartbreak? Famine?

I lose balance, stumble, nearly fall. You okay? A passerby asks, a warm hand on my shoulder. I nod. Yes, yes. A vampiric widow offers narrow flasks of cloudy liquid, each stoppered with swollen knuckle corks. She speaks in low, honeyless tones, naming ailments I didn’t know I had: salt in the blood, airless dreams, bone-thirst… A child points to a flask of perwinkle clouds and cries until his mother presses her last coin into the widow’s palm.

The organ caliope deposits me at the gazebo’s mouth. I put a hand on its wet wood, steady myself, brush psoriatic shoulder crumbs from where the Samaritan righted me. In the gazebo, a pair of men wear bright blue scarves. The man on the left holds charms carved from bright horns, strung together on thin wire. He fingers his bone rosaries, head tilted up, eyes closed, jelly pulsing under his thin lids. The one on the right holds the robed woman’s cauliflower wreath. With each jingle of the left man’s rosaries, the organ deposits more people.

The right man begins to sing; an alien vowel pierces the caliope, frail-strong and castrato high. My fillings jump. My jaw locks. The organ stops. The right man sustains, long, outgrowing the itch for air. The left man joins. A breeze builds to flash the maple’s dead bellies. The crowd quiets, stills, straitens. I straighten. My spine unfurls, tendons unclench with each blue-throated phrase. We, the crowd, are straight. Chiseled and elongated, remade to stand with shared height. The voices climb into half cadence. Dissonant. Wanting. They hold the final dyad for inhuman minutes and stop. In the cesarua, we, the crowd, we as one put chapped hands into our pockets and turn them inside out, we let hard-won silver spill into the grass in percussive plops. The vibrations giggle through the dirt and charge under me, their playful force wedging between the divets in my soles. The couliflower constellation flaps over the right man’s head. The breeze summons gooseflesh with the exact placement and weight of dad, the exact torso placements of his arms when he’d scoop toddler me off the ground. The breeze builds when the blue throats commence their answering canon. The forces in my soles feast on their amplitude; the gooseflesh tracings become dad’s flesh and I, We—We as one are drawn up up up…

—

I wake up to something metal dropped in the hall. The nurse is fat and stinks of foreign spices. She’s taken the tube out of my throat and says something about me being “ready” to “try again.” Someone down the hall screams or laughs or snores. The fat, spicy nurse is above me now, smiling down, her breasts brushing my skin as apple sauce enters my mouth.

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SUM FLUX

don’t howl at it

This story appears in SUM FLUX, V.4: “Fragmentation,” a curated collection of boundary-pushing original fiction. Read the full lineup here…

Read more

a year ago · 70 likes · 28 comments · Will Boucher and SUM FLUX

The turkey is a collapsed lung. Pocked and puckered on the cutting board, its cavity a pink-dark cathedral. I’ve got the shears—the good ones, the ones Auntie G sent last Christmas and have since only been used to open mail. I’ve watched three videos on spatchcocking and still don’t know why I’m doing it. I feel around for the spine. My hands are clammy. When I was eight, Auntie G killed a chicken in the backyard—grabbed it by the neck and swung it overhead until it died with a bubble wrap pop. I screamed and cried and clung to mom’s calf. Auntie G came over and put her fat moon face into mine and called the spinning “humane”—the little bugger didn’t feel a thing…but I saw its eyes; saw them go big and black and wild as they watched the world spin.

“…dude, don’t bother, they didn’t even eat fucking turkey at the first Thanksgiving…”

He’s doing pull-ups in the doorway. Shirtless. His back hair forms a perfect Christmas tree, dark and symmetrical; freckles and skin tags hang like ornaments. Perhaps we’re more chameleonic than we know. Perhaps our bodies celebrate the seasons with unconscious decoration. There’s a Nebraska-shaped hickey on his shoulder. I don’t ask.

“...they ate eels, bro. Fucking eels—deer too I guess…but mostly eels...”

The first cut sounds like incisors through Popsicle. When the spine’s white peaks through, I think of her, of Ava. How she’d let me trace her spine in the dark. How she’d lie face-down in bed, how my fingers hiked nape to bum, learning the vertebral traumas shouldering her person: ah…I see…the little divet between L4 & 5? cute...very cute, that’s why you love the smell of gasoline…why you never bring up your father…She’s coming tonight. She was first to RSVP:

“ Yay!! 🦃😊🦃 Can I bring anything?”

“Just yourself!!!” I wrote back, quick—quick enough to risk being branded the immature, yet-to-move-on half, so I saved face with panicked imposition: “...actually, bring a cheesecake or whatever.”

“…and it wasn’t some kumbaya potluck, it was like, ‘thanks for helping us not die, here’s some grub and oh yeah we’re taking all your fucking land…’”

The spine comes free. It’s heavier than expected. Dense. When I was seven, I found a dead bird in the yard—a robin, I think, or maybe a cardinal; I’m not sure, a coyote or something mauled it up pretty bad. I cupped it in my hands. It was cold. Cold and heavier than expected, boasting a pleasant heft which comforted me—there’s a comfort, a dropping of the shoulders, an ambient unclenching that occurs when one discovers The Dead keep their mass, that they may still impose their shape into the tall grasses.

“…and the ‘Indians’? They weren’t even invited. They just kinda rolled up ‘cause they heard gunshots and thought the colonizers were taking fire...”

I set the spine on the counter. The gap between L2 and 3? Cute, so so cute...that happened when you fell off kindergarten monkey bars…it’s why you loathe deviled eggs…

I remember How-To videos of aproned men standing on their tiptoes, pressing down to snap cartilage. I put my hands CPR-like and push. The bird resists. I get on my tiptoes, hold my breath, and push. It surrenders, spreading open in starfish lewdity. Ava wouldn’t be surprised I spent the day de-spineing a hormonal Butterball because overenunciating Netizens in picturesque kitchens promised it’d fit better in the oven, it’d cook evenly, it’d retain profound moisture...no, she’d find it poetic. It’s what I tried to do to her—flatten her out and crack her sternum in the name of efficiency and perfection and sublime digestion.

“...so they roll up with, like, ninety fucking warriors ready to kick ass and find the pasty Europeans having a dinner party...”

I rub salt into the oiled flesh. These white grains once passed through Titanic corpses, swam through their sinuses and eye sockets before venturing deeper and deeper to tickle the slimed gills of undiscoverable cephalopods. We've stolen them, stolen ancient solubility and trapped them in supermarket cardboard. And now? Now they cling to farmed flesh. Now they’ll swim in Ava’s belly, swim and swell her fingers as she types an Instagram post expressing “pure gratitude” for her “found family.”

“…like, a bunch of lunatics and their victims had a three day rager on a mass grave and now we call it tradition…”

“Found family”—she must think we’re dumpster dogs. Feral flea-bit loners converging upon a ripe dumpster. All cautious and hungry and greedy—all wanting the entirety of the slop but too tired to fight. Too tired for the Dog Eat Dog. Tired enough to settle for a fair share—settle and bow heads and eat sour meats.

“…and don’t get me started on Squanto…”

Sweat drips from his shorts; a puddle forms beneath him. I'm not sure if the kitchen’s B.O. funk belongs to him or the onion I’m chopping.

“…like, the poor fuck gets kidnapped, sold into Spanish slavery, escapes to London, learns English, and—”

My phone buzzes: “Should I bring beer?” “Anyone making stuffing?” “Does anyone have a corkscrew?”

“—and comes back to find everyone he’s ever loved butchered…”

He’s running his fingers through sweaty hair. My eyes leak. Onions are grief sponges—bulbous Scrub Daddies clinging to every shed tear, spewing them out in skunk-musk panic when cut. I wipe my eyes on my sleeve. These tears feel salty, salty and neurotic, once belonging to a fresh divorcee rushing through Christmas 1963 or 64 in some midwest hellhole, or perhaps no…I look at the wet blotch in my sleeve—they’re older, more basic, Squanto’s ancient discharge, shed when he returned home to infinite death for which he was told to be thankful.

“…and now it’s like this national amnesia day where we eat and watch football and pretend genocide was just a little oopsie on the way to democracy…”

I slide the onion shards under the collapsed bird. The video chefs said this will make it “hella aromatic,” whatever that means. It looks plain. Naked. Should I add more salt? Pepper? Herbs? This recipe isn’t much of a recipe; it’s all ‘pinches’ and ‘eyeballs’ and ‘you’ll know when it’s right.’ I never know when anything’s right. I’m the guy who panics and throws herbs at spineless birds, praying they’ll turn it into something my found family will agree to put in their mouths.

“…like, the ‘Thanksgiving’ wasn’t even called ‘Thanksgiving’ until, like, 18something when the deep state needed a nationalist myth…”

The oven beeps, saying it’s ready. I open it. The heat smacks my face, the burnt crumb smell of a long-dormant oven makes me think of the year Mom cried in the kitchen because the turkey dried out. Dad said, “fuck it, just get a pizza,” but Mom wanted turkey so the whole thing spiraled into a big to-do. I hid in my room, watching sitcom families pass troughs of fleecy potatoes, real smiley folk who loved without breakage and never let you go to bed thinking anyone at that table was mad at anyone in the whole damn world.

“…and Lincoln’s just like, ‘yeah, fuck it, Thanksgiving, whatever,’ because he wants the Yankees to stop being pussies, bitching about the war and shit…”

I close the oven with my hip, keeping my onion-wet hands up. I look around for a towel, apparently looking confused.

“You good?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say, grabbing a dish rag and wiping off. “All good.”

He nods and wanders to the bathroom. He pisses with the door open, yelling something about cranberry sauce being the metaphorical blood of the innocent.

I toss the dish rag and set the timer. The video said eighty minutes. I look at the oven. At the bird inside, transforming, browning, becoming something new. Eighty minutes until we gather, teeth bared, tails wagging, pretending all is fine, all is good; eighty minutes until I must hug her without thinking of her spine. How I ran my fingers along it, pretending I could read what was written there, pretending I understood the architecture of another person’s holding-together.

I pull out my phone, open Instagram, swipe once, twice, and close it…

Eighty minutes.

I can do this.

I can lie. I can lie and wag tail and find family...

He belches and flushes the toilet, still yelling about cranberries.

Eighty minutes.

I’ve done harder things.

I’ve spatchcocked a fucking turkey.

This is an installment of the ‘bad roommate’ series. Check out other entries in the series:

Hello friends,

The following is a work-in-progress vignette from a work-in-progress novel. I won’t say much about how it relates to the novel other than none of these characters are the “main” character. I’ve reached a point where this is “polished” enough to share but certainly not in its final form; it needs to taste the fresh air of Substack-rumspringa before I can baptize it into adulthood. I’m interested in your brutal candor: what worked? What didn’t? Did you get bored? If so where? Are the characters believable? Interesting? Are they people you give a hoot about? Any awkward phrases? Clogs in the flow (I’m sure there are many)? etc. etc. etc…Feel free to comment, DM or email (willbchr@gmail.com).

One important bit of context: this vignette is a “story within a story” written by the novel’s main character. From reading this, what are your thoughts about the writer? What kind of person are they? What is important to them?

Thanks for stopping by :)

Love love love,

wb

The luggage is on the Sentra’s roof. The woman is in the Sentra. She was there when he shame-jogged through the morning scorch and dove behind his wheel. He clocked her when he turned the ignition: Victorian roadkill, ramrod spine, frugal bun, dimpled chin folded double as she ogled her lap. She implicates him. The luggage—the luggage on the Sentra’s roof—implicates him. Her status as lingual flesh capable of imbibing good Samaritan gobbledygook implicates him. His nape goes sweatslick. Implicated. He knows. He thrums the steering wheel, working to guess the contents of her crotch: a kitten? A tangerine? A severed thumb? He knows he’s supposed to act; knows what the world—the world mama beat between his ears—demands: the opening of the door, the walking over, the ‘scuse me miss…happens to the best …don’t mention it…His nape sweat cools. Salted. Spatchcocked. She’s familiar, yes? He squints, eager to place her, unaware his fists have balled and shrunk, withered into sea monkey blips, schoolyard nubs that weathered wallops when mama judged no good! no good!

Freon jissom trickles from the Sentra’s underbelly. The woman hasn’t moved. Hasn’t blinked. Under her roof the radio bawls. Suave voices speak of Muzak and harsh …in the morning acronyms. They waft through the a.m. stink rawdogging his cochleas in Sinatra-faced woofs. Behind her the lot feeds S188th. Blonde headlights—farting yawps of motionblur assert brief existence and relapse into sneeze spittle. The woman is unaware of the sneeze spittle—unaware of her luggage, the luggage on the roof of her Sentra—unaware of the man, oblivious to his man-boy fists and head full of mama wallops.

The AC kicks up. His left nipple calcifies, erect, hand-chiseled pink held still by a sternal bushman. It chafes. A sea monkey adjusts his shirt. Freon slithers up and in, burrowing between Puebloan jelly. He shivers. Chickenskined. His gaze doesn’t leave the luggage as he neuters the AC. She’s familiar, tongue-tip familiar yet he cannot place her…The AC cycles a fresh cache of air filling his car with first rain, the corpse waxen petrichor of Kamikaze drops boiled on sunfucked pavement—had it rained last night? He peels his eyes from the luggage and gulps the sky—fast cumuli smear against muted blue-grey, the sun’s haze-cucked but strong, kicking up a waggish breeze bovine enough to rattle his car. It’s nice. The morning is nice, and yes, yes, it did rain. The motel, the concrete box motel stands stained with Pangea blotches of bygone wet. The thirty feet of lot between him and the Sentra sits steaming and puddled, pocked with sea pork gum colonies, days-old Eclipse globs drunk off the night’s rain, bulging—liable to barf spearmint if the breeze gets wise and tickles their funnybones.

Motels are strategic luxuries, break glass bastions for when she gets spooked. She’s spent the last two weeks in a shelter. As far as shelters go, it was fine, the typical unspooky orgy of too-close bunks ripe with sweating, half-lactating flesh. For the last week, her bottom bunk was a revolving door: Monday, a Draino-throated blonde napped in fits until she overdosed. Tuesday, a pregnant tween set her things down and missed curfew. Wednesday, an obese be-muumuued whore bitchslapped a volunteer. On Thursday came the spooking. The volunteers brought her at dusk: a perma-smiling thing that sang its name with summer camp verve. It was her name that did the spooking: something something “Beautiful.” Her first name is lost— Desorae? Shaundra?—but it doesn’t matter, makes no difference—something something “Beautiful”…Beautiful despite a face engineered to refute the name in every possible register—prolapsed anus nose, boiled meat flesh, tape worm hair…Beautiful.

The Sentra woman shot up when she heard it, choked down a knee-jerk chuckle and asked—asked what she had to ask, what hundreds of others had to ask. Beautiful laughed, expectant, “No, no, it’s legal...born with it...comes from daddy’s side.”

Beautiful was (again) running from a man who, it seemed to the Sentra woman, felt duped by the promise of her daddy’s forbears, another moth-to-light horndog lured into orbit by her honeytrap name. For a while, things with this man were, according to Beautiful “…real damn dandy.” But, as he worked to square the dissonance between name and face, the honeytrap festered, grew sunspoiled and rank and soured in the horndog’s blood until he saw red and broke her right orbital.

The moment she heard that name assigned to that face a fever took root, throbbing morse-coded revelation in her temples: look at her, look… Will? Free will? Nope…no no no…we’re all marked. Beautiful? Ha! Fate gets bored and saddles the un-beautiful with impossible crosses…Fate is a toddler squirming in God’s lap, impatient for the punchline, waiting…exploding in thunderous yawps when horny piggies come for their honey, come to collect her phonemic promise, work to square the dissonance and go berserk in the double-cross…

The crown fever says she’s no different, no different from un-beautiful Beautiful. Through her pores wafts pheromonal fate, informing gatekeepers, lovers, passersby whether or not they should cold shoulder or spare change. She gets spooked when she sniffs her preordained musk—when she senses Fate leading her towards the punchline and retreats to the cheapest motel. If she hasn’t enough squirreled away she hits the freeways, parks, 7/11s, panhandling until her jeans sag with a night’s coin. Then she’s free. For a night. Free to thumb her nose at the cock crow, strangle the sun with black garments, burn both ends, blast sitcoms in the wee hours, hot box the no-smoking room, kill-screw red tips against framed prints of nondescript evergreens, stand naked in the window, hawk loogies in the bedside Bible, order grilled cheese at midnight, set immigrant flesh in motion because tummy said so, tummy needs, tummy wants—a night of Fate-fucking carnival, reprise from the Beautiful stench of mantic assumption in a consulate of yes yes illeterates ignorant to Fate, Fortune, God—olfactory eunuchs hovering in mama-pressed linens who go “yes m’am” and smile-wave when she checks out unaware her morning shit waits for them, unflushed and steaming.

She checked in and hit the bar, jonesing to fuck and/or fuck with the barkeep. The bar! Recognition unfurls his brow. The bar—he saw her last night at the bar, gargoyled up on her too-tall stool, hunched forward, dog-slurping martinis. She’s wearing the same blouse, right? He’s no women’s wear buff, but sure, yes, it appears to be last night’s piss yellow blouse. Or…no? He’s unsure again, wondering if the bar blouse was more red? Mauve? Mauveish and less…less…winter fucked? Or…whatever. It’s her. Definitely her. He leans back, unsquints his eyes, performs the barely there nod reserved for regular barkeeps. His mouth is dry. His teeth are bucked. He doesn’t remember bucking them. His upper incisors are bucked in a silent hiss pressing hard against his bottom lip, pinching a swatch of chapped skin.

He entered the bar around nineish; claimed the corner booth and sat, freshly douched, nursing negronis, half expecting the evening to death-fart a raspberry. She was well-sauced by then, shitfaced and tooth-laughing, throwing fistfuls of change at the barkeep.

He Bataan marches his mandible towards the window, peeling the dead kisser loose.

Come the third martini—at least, the third martini he’d, himself, observed—she produced a bag of almonds. Salted and roasted, de-pocketing them with magician stealth. She slung teeth at Mr. Barkeep, finger-fishing blind until she’d snagged an almond with thumb and fore. When the barkeep turned tail she tossed the nut into her mouth. Her tongue worked quick to squirrel it in a tooth-cheek chasm. Once the nut was in place, she shot from dog slouch to Victorian ramrod and sat. Quiet. Uber-still. Still and smiling and sucking. From across the bar, he watched her left dimple kegel in and out, watched and smelled her salivary low tide baptize the nut in halitotic ebbs.

Ten minutes post-insertion—he tended to sip every two minutes and, since the nut’s insertion, he had taken five sips—the almond was satisfactorily nude. The ramrod lost perfection. Her shoulders slouched as she, again, waited for the barkeep’s tail. The moment he turned, she expectorated the almond into her palm. She shot upright and lunged, toes curled around the stool’s foot ring, hovering over the bartop olives. She worked quick, her eyes never leaving the barkeep, lips never not-smiling as she re-pit an olive with the desalinated nut. Her hands were surprisingly deft, surgical—careful to wedge the nut into the green without scarring or squishing; ensuring the shell was sufficiently buried, leaving the brown, tapered edges peeking out, suggesting the mass was a forgotten pit or, perhaps, a chunk of roast garlic. She staged her Frankenstein at an inconspicuous angle and slouched back. He watched her violate the bartop three times. Each time she inseminated an olive without reprimand, she kicked her legs in toddler glee and let loose a blouse button.

The transparent was-lip detaches. He sits, eyes on the luggage, the luggage on the roof of the Sentra, tongue-poking old skin into a tight rollie pollie.

She repulsed him, repulsed but entertained, entertained to a degree sufficient enough to make him want to fuck her. I could fuck her… Perhaps. Options. If the night farts a raspberry, it’s nice to have options.

He tastes blood.

She was beginning to yowl and mean-slur and coochi coo the barkeep’s rump when the faceless Grindr square texted: “just leave it unlocked.” He killed his last negroni and settled up. As the barkeep swiped his card he checked her out, admired her buxom rack and glistening mound of hybrid children. He was tempted to dig one out, tempted to make an obnoxious effort to acquire what he knew to be there and pop it on his tongue. He’d chew open-mouthed, staring at her, into her, unblinking, the eensy muscles under his eyes shrugging off the wrongness she craved. He knew she’d be watching, bent over, dog-lapping martini seven? Eight? Side-eyeing her “victim” as he munched. He knew remaining cordial and unfazed while chomping her wet Franken-kin would ruin something in her, make her second-guess the heft of her impact in the World of Others while—at the same time—endearing him to her in a primal, coital capacity, making potential fornication (should that become necessary) more likely. He tipped the barkeep and took one last cleavage peek as he scribble-signed the receipt. He checked for more faceless messages, nothing, and stumbled back to his room. 106. Room 106. Always one-oh-x—always a room with a potato chip door that opens right out into the wild lot. He sat on the bed and called home. He spoke to the wife: “Good?” Good. The daughter: “Good?” Good! The wife again: “Night.” Night……..…I lov—

He hung up and unlocked the door. He shimmied off his slacks and assumed a downward dog, letting the stale AC chap his lubed hole, praying the thrill of forced entry would keep him from drunk slumber.

He swallows his dead lip. As the wad crashes into his belly, she —the woman in the Sentra, the Sentra with the luggage on its roof —pops something into her mouth. The insertion so breakneck it evades him, his brain reconstructs it in hindsight as her lips yo-yo between turned wine anus and wan hyphen. Sour? Salty? Chapped labia yo-yo a few tricks before settling to baseline non-intent.

The no-face cock left a heart in his asshole; punched space between close-knit polyp neighbors who now must yell and pucker and throb across great distance. She starts to chew, slow and herbivore-like—hawking cud and to-froing her mandible. His rectal heart hockets against the Sentra woman’s yakish mastication, twanging in the reprieve between jaw swipes. There’s something new with her—a pelican potential in her gullet. If she were, this instant, to open her mouth, unhinge a wide doctor ahhhhhh a torrent of crumpled butts would spew out, half aglow with smoldering red heads, burn-branding the Schrödinger infinity in her crotch.

Her shoulders twitch as she swallows the unknown bolus. His focus shifts behind her. The Sentra, the Sentra with the luggage, is full to the brim. The back seat is a volcanic heap of clothing and bags and soda cans. His sea monkeys beat the wheel. Fresh sweat licks his hairline. It would be easy, so so easy: open the door, stroll over, knuckle-knock, ‘scuse me miss…your roof…the luggage…happens to the best… Laugh laugh laugh—a real one, a real love thy neighbor chest chuckle and a wave? A single-handed, splayed digit, bye-bye now wave? Easy…yes? Yes. A knock, a ‘scuse me…, a wave (splay those fingers, don’t salute), then retreat: right, left, right, left, keep the pace normal, easy—easy easy easy…done! Forget it. Left, right, left, right—easy…easy easy easy it’s—

He’s not sure what happened. At some point he went off to pasture, lured into comatose daydream for a minute or two or ten. A car door slammed next to him. He jumped. He’s back. Half of his hair sweat-hugs his skull, the rest flaps his forehead in the AC. The AC which is inexplicably back at full bore. He reaches to turn it down but finds both hands wrapped around his phone. The screen’s held close, the camera pinch-zoomed, recording the Sentra woman’s face in obscene detail: rusty blonde pubes pepper her snot-lip No Man’s, rustling as her AC or breath or other unseen disturbance rakes through them. A clan of brave pubes grow into her right—her right, his left—nostril, the gaping, cavernous one that dwarfs her left—his right—pinprick sniffer. The yin-yang caverns slouch together in a fault-line A-frame, terminating with an upflung rhino hook. The poor thing likely snores—snores loud enough to eclipse the overpass’ roar, loud enough to earn a black eye, to which she’s no stranger. Black-jaundiced pools sparkle under both eyes but the left eye (her left) is soufflé-puffed, burned mid-heal mauve. The eyes themselves are nondescript—bland, shit brown monotones lacking the redeeming burl of tesselate crypts. The eye on the screen, her left, appears a smidge closer and skyward (relative to her nose) than her right (his left). She takes tiny rabbit breaths, sharp shallow inhales, holds, and releases with an incomplete purge. Her jawline is clear and boxy—unobscured by flab and fowl waddles, pulled taut by the stage mom hand of hunger, evading the stereotypical sunk eyes and washboard ribs, or at least, that’s not how he imagines her torso—he is zoomed in on her neck now, slowly panning towards her cleavage. In the bar, he remembers staring as he twitched his Hancock, the negronis in his belly pulling wool, feeding his horned up brain illusory parade floats straining blouse buttons and yes—yes he thought about them, thought of them when his head was pillow-mashed, his hole filled, imagined the mildewed pillow was the center of her good fertile breasts and he was her good boy drowning in her good carotid song but no, he had it wrong, through the lens, the buxom blimps deflate into two white pool cues, tight, unmoving, more tumorous than maternal. He pans. Malnutrition has spared her arm meat, tremors ripple through curdled milk pudge to her boneish shoulders as she strokes her groinal infinity. The fat folds anus-like into her armpits; spider pleats hide environments of lint and foliage and pebbles that have leeched onto—into her—for mobility. A Tesla parks beside him. He lowers the phone into his lap and looks down in the prayerful symbol of occupation. The motel’s lobby is filling up. Inside, a techbro itching to be balls deep in his secretary waits as the street-slimed Mother Hen corals her autistic brood of TANF requisites, raining crumpled singles upon the counter, praying there’s enough for another night of plumbing. A suave, suited man unfolds from the Tesla. He straightens his suit and powers towards the rain-blotched box. His shoes echo the heel-toe confidence of goin’ for smokes fathers. He smile-nods at the ratty bleach-blonde smoking at the vending machine, her legs X-scissored to hold her bladder which she will soon empty on his chest for a crisp Benjamin.

The man watching the Sentra is alone again. He brings the camera to his face and focuses on the luggage. It’s the typical hobo fare: ancient non-wheeler boxcar luggage more suitcaseish than jetsetty, bile yellow-green pocked with Pollock gashes left by the kiss of hard surfaces. He belches. The camera shakes, blurs, and steadies upon the latches. One of them, the left (his left), stands erect with two combination wheels MIA. He pinch-zooms. The remaining wheel is cockeyed and bulged, limboed between 0 and 9. A herniated fleece tongue pokes between the luggage’s clam lips. It is clear the thing, the luggage, the luggage on the roof of the Sentra, is liable to burst—its innards boil in the sun, vapored BO implores the upper clam, edges the solo clasp until it gives in and ejaculates her life, raptures her garments into a surefooted breeze that ferries them to a Goodwill—one in an bougie suburb where they’d be washed and purchased and draped upon the fine smelling skin of sorority pledges. A plane soars low over the luggage. He remembers the rain. He peeks from behind his phone; the puddles have gone extinct. The rain was brief and measly, lacking charisma to evict the heat. He remembers. His phone rang late, long after no-face left him gaping. It was twoish…threeish? The wife reports the baby, the newborn, is colicky and restless: it’s too much goddamnit you need to come home! The newborn, another girl, screamed into the receiver as he sleep-slurred: “Oh, hon—darling, you know this conference is a huge deal…mandatory…won’t—can’t get promoted without it…be home soon…soon as I can…love love love.” He hung up. He lay back, absorbing the pitter of rain through the thin chip door. A plane flew overhead as he pulled up the covers. The best thing about this motel is its proximity to SeaTac, the constant parade of hohum planes seeking permission to touch earth, their engines close and whining. He listens to the plane above the luggage, hoping for sputters and pops—praying for errant migratory fowl to charge headlong into the blades and crash the oafish Boeing down upon Renton, prays that the plane be full, full of mothers and children and celebrities and the infirm, prays for paperwork and emergency all-hands that, as a Boeing PR rep, permit the “sorry hon, late nights, no choice” that give his life meaning.

He swoops back to the woman—did she always have those freckles? The herd of light-brown dots barnacle-climbing her nostril? The pygmy, pinprick one? Thinning out as they summit her dorsum? The windows of the Sentra have started to fog, cloud with slight Gaussian must. He pans to focus on the backseat heap, foothills of thrown clothing and duffels, Safeway bags choked with redeemable refuse, coolers, tent poles, slippers, stolen North Faces, stuffed bunnies and teddies and froggies, off-kilter lamps, an Adidas box leaking loose papers and—and the piebald face of a border collie, peaking out, wreathed in volcanic potpourri. A panting, smiling collie hot boxing the car with his fish brine. The collie stares down the lens, aware of the peeping man. He’s been parked too long, parked and staring and the collie works to afford his human the privacy of blurred windows or no—no, perhaps the collie feels implicated, senses something in his pile is absent, the luggage, the luggage on the roof of the Sentra, his Sentra, is missing and he pants to make his inner sanctum fishy and farty to force the woman into fresh exodus, to unfold in the lot, stretch her spine and facepalm her ditziness when she sees the boiling luggage.

The potential Samaritan hasn’t decided if he’ll heed mama’s wallops, if he’ll walk the few paces and tap glass and ‘scuse me miss…your roof… His nipple’s still erect, only the left, the sternal bushman poised and ready, ready to plow the spear into the airbag, have it fling out and snap his neck if he fails to be good. The AC has a mind of its own; it kicks up again. His scrotum retreats, calling attention to something trapped in his penis. He clears his throat. Lonely. He is lonely. Again. So soon? He knows he is lonely when his cock chipmunks dollops of piss, the internet said so. The internet told him loneliness manifests as perma-stuck piss—real or imagined—trembling yellow lodged behind the puckering eye, throwing sharp hello!s when he kegels or walks or lap-bounces his daughter. The internet said a lonesome, idle mind tends to go rogue, goes berserk and tantrum-pinches urethral tunnels hoping to trap rancid piss, hoping to cultivate UTIs in search of more interesting deliria. So long as you distract it, the lonesome mind, distract it with table scrap people, endless scrolls, stiff negronis, it will abide in Weimar satiation and tolerate the doldrumic now, or at least, it used to. He followed the internet’s rules: he sacrificed the table scrap Grindr cock at the altar of loneliness and, therefore, should be sat pretty in thumbnail reprieve, a few hours, or, if lucky, a day of urinary detente, but no, he kegels to confirm, no, the agoraphobic sebum still roosts, raindancing for cytokines. He turns his attention back to the Sentra woman. Is that steam coming off her luggage? Another plane drones low overhead. Listen: sputters? Goose cries? Is she lonely too? Maybe she feels hibernating piss in her urethra? Maybe it hurts when she moves? Maybe she’s playing dead in the Sentra until it passes? Maybe she knows, knows about the luggage, the luggage on the roof of the Sentra, but the piss is too sharp for her to stand? Would it be different for women? Do women have urethras in the same way he does? He doesn’t know, hasn’t spent much time contemplating female urethras, but supposes yes, sure, all piss-beings have urethras, piss is piss, and she, the Sentra woman, as a being capable of piss, sits thirsting for new delirium, an inflation of the brain that manufactures a facsimile of tolerance. Did her detente collapse as well? The detente negotiated by revolving martinis? The barkeep flirting? The olive/almond fuckery? That’s why she did it, right? Why she made the Frankensteins? Something, anything, to steer attention from the interned yellow? His mouth waters with resonance; his tongue ejects, hungry, petting the infant blastoma, craving brine. Maybe he would do it...brave the lava tarmac and rain-bulged gum to do what mama taught. Perhaps the walk and the Samaritan gesture would negotiate fresh detente and purge old piss and quiet the colicky thing at home and make him good? Make him mama’s good little boy? And when he walks back, easy paced, right left right left, his steps shall fall with Messianic value. His ass will return to driver’s nylon, sugar-high, feeling the warm blanket of piss blossom free into his briefs. It would be easy. So. Easy. ‘scuse me ma’am…no—miss, miss is better, ma’am implies turkey waddles, or at least it would for him—knock knock, smile (neighborly, not-creepy) ‘scuse me miss…your roof…the luggage…easy! He could do it, should do it, must do it. The phone’s still in his hand, camera trained on the sky. Do it. That cloud looks like mama, mama stood akimbo in the kitchen, in her robe and curlers, up in the blue keeping the planes alive, filling his 9-5 with thumb twiddles and zero excuse to rendezvous ass up in airport motels, leaving nothing but home—no option but to drive home, unfucked, piss-stuck and tight holed to her precious daughter-in-law. He feels her stare perched on his shoulder. Do. It. He breaths in. Long. He removes a sea monkey nub from the phone and slowly reaches for the door. He’s about to put his phone down and peel his ass into the parking lot when she, the woman in the Sentra, the Sentra with the luggage on its roof, suddenly brings her hand to her chest. A dirt-nailed, claw-shaped thing flies up quick, moving to the prolapsed now-V of her blouse, pulling it down to expose her right breast. Her tiny blip nip stands spearpoint hard, the tip thrusting out by her sternal Amazonian, leering across the tired tarmac and rococo Eclipse slugs, staring down his bushman, ready for blood. The hand falls back into her infinite crotch. She sits, single tit out, glass-eyed. Both of his nipples are hard now. His legs scissor. He’d like to fuck her. He could do it if he wants; there’s time. She takes a deep breath, the deepest of the morning, pushing out her chest, eyes closed, exhaling as she lifts from the groinal void an infant, a naked larval cyst of abalone. It appears stillborn as she trucks the hairless nub to her tumor tit. The thing smells grub and pulsates, writhes like a wasp rump, throws up chapped talons and opens a toothless cavern, craning its mushy skull to flick the Amazonian tip with bloated tongue. It latches. It feeds, docking spoiled-milk mitts around mama’s pool cue, squeezing the trough, wringing every drop of plastic white mama can muster. She winces slightly when the thing sucks her. He watches. He is semi-erect, scissoring legs in and out, making the car shake a little, shake even in the absence of the impish breeze. He zooms out to get it all: the muffled drone of Muzak, the collie in the refuse, the clam boiling on the Sentra, the planes overhead. She takes a dozen rabbit breaths and repositions, supporting the hominoid’s skull with her right hand. She bends down, quick, a small courtesy tick, and comes back to ramrod Victorian, blinks once, and brings a hot pink crack pipe to her lips.

I jones for the post-nut, the holy jizz limbo where the John vibrates primordic, struck dumb, quiet, and wet—unsure if/when/how to return to sapien banality.

Limbos are breading grounds for routine and, like any (good) hired hole, I crave routine: wipe cold cum, shed duvet, brush teeth, swish wifey's mouthwash, swish swish swish 'til checks go numb, throw head back, gargle, spit, march to the kitchen—the kitchen…the fucking kitchens…that's where it falls apart. Kitchens, more specifically the auras haunting their fridges, elude my rote. I know they—the auras—are mine…what else are they but mine? Mine mine mine and, therefore, are duty-bound to heed my sayso but…

Oh…right…sorry, let me back up…first things first: you wouldn't expect northern auras, the OG Northern Lights, to take quarter in a strange dick's fridge would you? Nah, you wouldn't. I certainly didn't, and yet, here we are…and no—no, it doesn't happen with every John. Despite the routine: mop cum, throw duvet, brush, swish, spit, trudge to the fridge, bust the seal, they won't always appear. You can do everything right, and they'll still ghost ya. Mop, throw, brush, swish, spit, trudge, bust, and there, if (and only if)—if they're in a dancing mood, if you've landed a bright John, you'll see them: the chameleonic goop maypoleing the Hellmann's, shooting out towards the Ketchup, pausing, slow, over the eggs— unfurling arctic-mauve curtains, flapping, bright, exposing the depth of the ovum's pores...

If you haven't, you will. Someone will show you, someone will pop your borealis cherry like the sado-dentist did for me. He ("Herr Doctor," as he demands to be called) is a wild-quiet John, always with his ramrod posture and thirst for antique handcuffs. On the night of the cherry popping he came quick. He deposited a smaller-than-usual load on my chest and rolled sidelong into the post-nut. We lay, prayerful and panting. I performed the wipe, the duvet, the gargle, the spit, the seeking of post-coital grub. I stumbled into the kitchen. His fridge hummed silent, clean and bone-white. I reached out, yawning, spooked by the sound of metal. I pulled back. The adrenaline fuzzies subsided as I realized his Weimar handcuffs dangling off my wrist. I laughed and re-grabbed the handle, letting them clang-whip Herr Doctor's Frigidaire as it opened and revealed orange-red blobs cloud-kissing the green-titted Sriracha. I blinked. Double took. Still there. Kissing. They broke off, rushed tight and serpentine to the southeast where they tickled a kitty-cornered lemon. The citrus puckered them yellow. They exploded, shooting up, up, up towards the greasy bulb and unfolded into auburn, then lavender, then seafoam, flapping wet and flagish, back and forth, back and forth, wafting spoiled bologna farts down my septum. I leaned in. My hand reflected pale in a yogurt's foil crown. I continued, Bataan marching to the half-open lo mein. I grabbed it. The auras flocked to my forearm, gathering phiranna-like, puppy-licking my wrist, my palm, my nipples, thousands of fuzzy tongues jerking my milk smooth skin gooseflesh erect.

Herr Doctor flushed the toilet and started the shower. He yelled out for his bitch fag to come wash him. I took out the lo mein and gulped down some bites, chew-walking towards his voice, hard as a Viking.

That was two years ago. Three? Sure—two or three years ago. I still remember the Christmas morning fuzz in my belly after Herr Doctor's acrobatics, how the morning's shame walk was a sprint, how I nearly broke my face on the stairs, how I sprinted to my kitchen, how I pulled open the fridge, how I watched and smiled…watched and smiled at nothing…at bare moldy shelves.

Ah, right… There's gotta be food! Toys for them to play with!

I went to the corner market and got some bagged salads, some guac, some protein shakes, some fruit. I came home and arranged them how I suspect a normie would. I took a leak, came back, broke the seal…watched and smiled…watched and smiled…..........at nothing.

Ah, right…I gotta be naked! Something for them to gawk at!

I shut the door. Waited twenty. Came back naked. Opened the door. Nothing. Nada.

Ah, right…cum?

Maybe….

Maybe...cum?

I kill the lights and rub one out thinking of Herr Doctor, opening the seal the moment the kids hit linoleum.

Nothing.

Zilch.

Nada.

Ah right….

I gave up; threw up my hands and chalked the whole thing up to some latent brain protein pining for un-latentency, dipping toes into my cortex and kicking up colors, or the way Herr Doctor pressed his thumbs into my eyes, pressed hard and deep as he pounded me, yeah that's it, must be—the sudden bright of his fridge triggered the tardy phosphenes. Yes, of course, the whole thing was a nothingburger—a fun, corporeal quirk not worth remembering, just forget it…and I did, I forgot it—purged it from my mind. John fridges were back to simple food-bearing tundras, devoid of odd lights. All was good.

All was rote.

All was good, fine, dandy…………..yeah yeah, you know the drill...you already know anything “good” is provisional bullshit so of course—of fucking course they came back, violent and unexpected, knocking me on my hungry ass one limbo, na na na poo poo-ing, thumbing their noses at my little routine night after night after night…stalking me John to John until something clicked, until I fell in love, until I understood: I'm not a hole, I'm a furnace. The lights are mine, they stem from me, out of me…products of my rectal sommelier swish siwshing the John's lingering fluids, boiling them with inner heat, reading their tea leaves and expectorating astral fridge blobs that slam-dance stories of his childhood, his grief, why he hates his wife, why his children hate him—I couldn't get enough, couldn't go a night...can’t go a night, not damn night without a fix.

I've been keeping detailed notes:

(#3) Andy (prefers "Boss"), 38, loner. Strong green blobs striped with occasional pink. Approx. 9 min post-nut. Dave Brubeck playing from the bedroom.

(#11) Mustafa, 27, wife (lawyer) in Tucson (conference). Flickering teal serpents, slow-moving, cloud-like, seemed to avoid dairy products.

(#27) Grant, 41, wife at book club (Crying in H-Mart), called me 'sweet boy.' Barely anything. A simple blue pulse above the sour cream. Stood vigil from approx. 2 min post-nut to approx. 25 min post-nut.

(#44) Benjamin (not Ben, never Ben), 27, 8, 9? Ginger (w/ matching carpet) Gym-bod muscle-bro type. Discrete. Shoved his fingers down my throat. Approx. 3 minutes post-nut his fridge was July 4th.

etc., etc…

The notes assured me there was a logic to them, the lights, a nameless logic, but logic nonetheless, and where there is logic, there is control.

Despite steadfast observation, I have yet to establish concrete gospel. What follows is the little I do know. It is provisional, circumspect, slipshod at best, and, thus, mustn't be taken without copious salt shards:

1. The lights are not gold diggers. They do not care how much the John's got squirreled in the Caymans, they do not turn up their snouts when the duvet's thread count isn't up to snuff. They are equally at home in a McMansion as they are in an unkempt apodment;

2. The quality of the sex has no bearing on photo-performance. There have been sufficiently charactered Johns (see #5 below) who fuck raw and holy yet summon bupkis in the fridge;

3. The John must always bust his nut;

4. If they decide to appear, they appear within fifteen minutes of the John's last spurt;

5. The character of the John (seems to) carry the most oomph. The dull, milquetoasty Johns generally give off weak shimmers, worthless, anemic Pop Rock queefs barely visible behind their soy milks. The ones who weep? The burly, manly men who break down and beg for judgment (e.g., "I'm a good person, yeah? Treat you right, yeah?")? They're…okay, a smidge better—stronger reds, more elaborate ripples, perhaps a string of periwinkle dancing in the coleslaw etc. etc…but it's the surefooted depraved, the wackjobs, the loons, the kinked up secret Santa sadists who (tend to) shine bright. Take the hedge funder—the one who made me suckle his wedding band as I jerked his chode. Him? He was a show and a half. A three-ring event. Barnum and Bailey kaleidoscopes, hoot-hollering Vlasic pelicans exploded out from their green brines, soaring amongst the sprawling sanguine curtains—curtains that hung and kissed and provoked the cauliflower to cosplay as Moses' bush. I can't look away from a thing like that; you couldn't either. I fell asleep in front of his fridge, calm and naked at the altar. Woke to his uncut toenails jabbing my shoulder and two Benjis raining down on my skull and fuck off faggot.

I've practiced and noted and learned my way into a (fairly) keen sense of premonition. Actually, no, see what I mean? I get too cocky…"fairly keen"? Nah…no, fuck no…I've never, not once, predicted color, size, luminosity etc. etc. blah blah blah correctly, but, yes…okay, sometimes (i.e., ~70% of times) I know—just know in my loins whether or not there will be something in the fridge.

When a John gives me nothing, I know better than to criticize their lack of luminescence…to their face at least. I cannot tell a John that, on occasion, the northern lights have been known to rollick in the refrigerators of my clientele and how they, the lights, have become important to me, very very important, almost spiritual and you, my worthless goose egg shitting John, you and your inefficient zeal have let me down, ruined the evening, killed the buzz… You run your mouth like that and poof! the fucker's blubbering and knee-crawling and Am I not good enough? Big enough? Handsome enough? It's best to keep quiet but yes…yes, I agree—there must be a tax on their nothing. A silent punishment. If the John shoots blanks, makes me walk cold, hairless, and hungry to the fridge for a no-show, I'll hold my tongue, yes, sure—I'll be polite and gracious and tell him he's so so big but you better believe I'm stealing handfuls of yogurt and logging their impotence.

As has been established, I tend towards cocksuredness and I'm afraid my photic chutzpah pissess off the lights. Sometimes, when I enter the limbo, they wait—they wait until I'm sure as shit, oh so sure about the void in the random cock's fridge. They string me along, make my tummy gurgle, and when I open up expecting zilch, they rush out and bitch slap me for attempting to subject them to my rote yoke.

The most recent surprise involved Herr Doctor. I was excited. The good Doc always promises fanfare. I arrived, limber and lubed. He poured some bourbon, expensive top-shelf brown. We sat on the couch, the boogie-type that used to be cow and farts when you shift your weight. I go to kiss his neck, he pushes me away. "Just talk," he says. He only wanted to talk. He sips, telling me how his daughter had gone missing three days back, vanished on her way home from school. He blubbered into his bourbon. The couch farted as I saddled closer, I draped my arm around him, performing there there shoulder taps—shoulders that seemed more wallflowerish than I'd remembered. He showed me photos of her. Her braces, her birthday cakes, her pigtailed and horsebacked. I watched the time die slow in his watch face as he swiped through more more more…

I never had to tax Herr Doctor before. It felt wrong, but rules are rules. He told me to leave, wasn't in the mood. No bust == no light. I meandered to the fridge where a half-full oyster pail of General Tsao's caught my belly's eye. I took it and munch-walked out. It was early, too early, the sun still flaming, rare and unnatural. I checked my phone. No appointments. I headed home.

My apartment is a walk-up above a vape shop, cramped and always smelling of synthetic melon. I shoveled more Tsao into my face before tackling the stairs. I put the keys in, turned, the perma-melon stench fused with the umami bolus. I belched as I approached the fridge, my small, pudgy fridge, yellow-bellied and scared with brown gashes of old movement, purring with wet emphysemic rasp. I wasn't thinking of much, certainly not of the lights or Herr Doctor, no, I was disappointed in him—if I had to guess, I was probably debating what porn best met the moment or wondering how long it had been since I washed my sheets…routine and the drive to preserve General Tsao made me open the door.

The cold rushed out, the bulb exploded with a rainbow flash and I disappeared…gone…for some seconds. Two? Five? I came to cloaked in white. Glaring white. Fading as familiarity crept in, revealing deep snow, revealing my nudity. I was naked, toe-pawing snow. The cold shot sole to nip in a blink. A wind picked up. Dry Arctic winds howled through the pines, providing relief from the sky’s black. I see them far off, encircling me, suggesting something shore-like. Am I on a lake? A frozen lake? The General is gone. I crossed my arms over my hard nipples, doubled over, shivering.

I went to blink but couldn’t. I press, press, press...nothing. The wind kicked the sky into explosion. Swirling green snakes pulsed, painting the white ground puke green. The stench of Dragon Melon bled from the sky swirls. The wind died. The tree tips fell erect, erect and still, but the rustle didn’t stop. It sounded lower, earthen. In the puke melon glow I saw branches snapping as dozens of forms moved in lockstep, stopping at the treeline. The green snakes flashed a quick caterpillar sawtooth and smashed together, coalescing in a screen, depicting the blonde crown of Herr Doctor's little girl—little blonde doll supine in a ditch, last year's leaves caught in her mouth metal.

In the light, I made out the tree line, dozens of Johns: Mustafa, Andy, Grant, Benjamin (never Ben), the Hedge funder, Herr Doctor…all standing, naked, naked and erect, erect with foot-long cocks, staring out with lidless, blown-pupil eyes. The wind kicked up, bending the tree tips, scattering Herr Doctor's girl into flowing red curtains that reflected in the black corneas. The red hit their eyes. They go berserk. They run, sprinting en masse—bare feet pound the frozen lake, each footfall summons spidering cracks. I try to run, but my soles are frozen to the ice. They are close. I feel their heat, I hear their balls slap their thighs, their panting breath, the blood pulsing in their cocks, the cracking of ice, the nails digging into my flesh, the bottom falling out—

Next thing I knew, it's two days later. I woke at the fridge's foot, soaked in old piss, sniffling with budding pneumonia, my phone buzzing the linoleum, promising a night full of light.

If you’re hungry for more, you might enjoy…

Nana said rosemary speaks, said its pungent queefs filled Jesus holes in proximal hippocampi. It was ever-present in her suppers, ever-pungent and violent, ever-whispering elbows off the table! sit up! bless us, o Lord, and these your gifts… When the dementia skullfucked her senseless, I caught her hiding fresh sprigs under the welcome mat—olfactory sentries wafting through woven Welcome, speaking with God's tongue, gavaging bygone morality through the septa of would-be invaders.

"…you know Headspace was valued at, like, three billion before the layoffs?"

The ficus speaks too. It's been coughing for weeks, silent botanical heaves ejecting brittle dead heads. I grab it. Its ceramic is cold—cold, brittle, and blotched with gaudy red mums, dead ringers for the kitsch painted on Nana's good china.

"These fucking apps man…like, one of them pings you every hour 'heyyyyyyy my perfect little snowflake, time to breath!' Like, when did air become a fucking subscription service?"

He's perched on the windowsill, legs dangled and toddler-kicking, peeling a clementine. He's wearing his ratty Nirvana tee, the one where Kurt's more ghost than face, Downy-fucked into communion wafer anemia. A pile of orange flesh abuts his left orangutan thigh, attracting gnats.

"…mindfulness used to mean, like, actual attention, actual fucking presence…"

I dump the half-dead ficus on yesterday’s Times, its soil buries a headline about Iranian subterfuge. I shake the dirt and turn it upside down. The root ball is a constipated mass of burned spaghetti, a moist orgy of water worms choking each other out, gagging in the wet dark.

"…and now? Now it's hoards of Mona-Lisa-lookin’ bitches hawking ‘touch grass!’ courses and weird supplements…"

I dig with my thumbs, cockblocking the orgy. The smell of rot floods the room. A root dangles like an exposed nerve. I imagine it's speaking, speaking like Nana's rosemary, its precambrian methyls and jasmonates carrying tell older than our mammalian gobbledygook, warning the pothos and fiddly fig of its violent nakedness: You're. Next.

"…and ‘for $14.99 you can own a recording of some random ass mountain stream…’"

The fiddly fig understands and shivers. It's dying too. You're. Next. I try my best, but I’m no green thumb. What little I know about plant parentage I've accumulated from a retired horticulture professor I rented a room from. He'd spend the summers noon-drunk and shirtless, thrusting his will upon the hydrangeas: "…bury a handful of rusty nails and….Voilà! You're a son of Zeus…" It’s true: bury the nails, the oxidized iron fucks the pH and the hungry bastard has no choice but to imbibe the rust's jissom and change, low and slow; a glacial morph of hue, countenance, and mood precipitated by force-fed chemicals, bullying sub-cells until the mop of once pink petals burns bruise-dark.

"…and once they hook ya, they hit you with retreats—those circlejerky ‘best-self’ kumbaya orgies in the goddamn Catskills—"

I fell for it once. I dropped fifty bucks on guided meditations where soft, smile-shaped voices begged me to notice my breath. I did. Or at least, I tried. I tried and noticed everything except my breath: an itchy ankle, the neighbor’s creaking wheelchair, my bladder's low whine, the retired prof lording over his forced-blue hydrangeas. “Notice your thoughts.” They had no say in the usurpation of their plumage. "Notice. Don't judge." Who's to say the same thing isn't happening to us? To me? Who's to say a cabal isn't lording over me, noon-drunk and bare-chested, pumping plastic and smog and dye into my gut where they boil unseen? Boiling and shifting my pH? Rewriting me? Low and slow? Glacial?

"…like, what's next? Ads in your mantras? 'May I be happy, may I be well, may I find peace—may I buy the world a fucking Coke?!"

Another leaf falls from the fiddly fig. On occasion, I, too, descend into frenzies where I jonse to excise my dead bits, frenzies in which I’m liable to wire my 401(k) to an interweb-kook, one who'll show me the rusty nails in my gut—a strong, broish one who'll bitchslap me privy to the Trojan pH, put me in a headlock and yell: That! That's why your clothes itch all of a sudden, why you can't drive at night, why your pulse throbs your eye jelly, why you can't say "no"—someone whose mantras wrestle the tainted teat from my belly and nurse me towards a surefooted nirvana where I re-root my mind to the earth, the right earth, the soil it was supposed to suckle this whole time.

"… I'm telling you, bro these apps? None of these fuckers give a shit if you're mindful… they want you optimized…meditate so you can sleep less, work late, skip lunch, whatever…”

I lug the soil bag out from under the sink. I cut it open. The hot cloud of blood pennies settles in my sinuses. It makes me think of spring; how every equinox I’d run to Nana, my thumb bloodied from beheading her roses. She’d bandage me up and tell me of Rilke, how he pricked his thumb gathering roses for an Egyptian beauty, how the wound festered and his tummy rotted inside-out, how this would happen to me if I forgot O Lord, and these your gifts…

"…optimized and pacified. They’re the new TV, the new church—church but with a pseudo-British AI preacher selling yoga mats and streak counters, distracting you from it all being the same shit…"

The new pot is dried blood terracotta. The cashier had sleep-crusted eyes that sniffed the unease in my brow. When she scanned the barcode she cooed a half-sincere "Good luck." Mindful-hawking hucksters wouldn't want externals to disturb me. But what if the external is a helpless life? A blastoma of caged roots clinging to old dirt, praying to Blind Luck, knowing it, not me, to be its true angel of prolongation?

"… they've made inner peace some dumbass game you can fail at…"

He pauses to suck pulp from his thumb. My fingertips disappear into the bagged earth, gone up to the knuckles. Cool soil finds quarter between nail and flesh. It will shelter in me for days. No matter how brutal I scrub it shall linger and tooth-fairy my pillow with evidential smears saying “yes…yes you touched something real…worked to keep a thing alive in a world hellbent on disposal.”

"…and failure just means 'hey asshat, you're not spending enough….'"

I throw fistfuls of earth into the sanguine terracotta. The fiddly fig watches, dropping a leaf. Plants teach mindfulness too…maybe that’s why I feel an ill-guided compulsion to buy so many. Breath. Be the plant. They don't optimize their suffering, they don’t blame or complain, they drop what's dead and reach out for new light.

"…that's the genius of it all…"

I pack earth around the ficus. It stands, upright and flimsy. It will make it…I think. Plants are defiant sons of bitches. I remember an article about a 2,000-year-old seed dug out of Masada’s ruins, how it sprouted in our modern sun after centuries of earthen zs. Sometimes survival is just twiddling your thumbs for the right hands, the right light, the right terracotta.

"…our minds are packaged and sold back to us…it’s all a cash grab dude…"

I grab the watering can and quell the parched root-throats. The water bleeds into the bagged earth, darkening. I pick up the ficus. Water drips through the drainage hole, fuzzing headlines of authoritarian overreach and looming category fives.

"You know…" I say, returning the ficus to its sunspot, wiping my hands on my khakis, "I think we should get more plants."

He nods, distracted, an orange snake of tangerine flesh in his lap, staring with the rheumy corneas of someone who's freebased too much internet, marinated too long in the brine of human vacuity. He stares through me, fondling a green leaf of the warned pothos.

"You know they patented a fucking breathing pattern?"

I sigh a batch of housewarming CO2 for the moved-in ficus and flee.

This is an installment of the ‘bad roommate’ series. Check out the other entries in the series:

Before words, there was rhythm—the migration of wildebeest, the lockstep of hunting feet, the tidal pulse of rainsong hums—rhythms our forebears spouted again and again until meaning crowned wet and screaming from their ancient mouths. It's happening again. I'm bent into the fridge reaching for Skippy and Smuckers. My movements are a rhythm reserved for unlovable moments—the culinary equivalent of hole-pocked socks and fart-soaked sweats. No one cares. No one's coming. I close the door with my hip and set the fixings on the counter. I stare. I've been here before. I'm thankful for the comfort. Thankful for the rhythm—the one that rouses the trapped child by promising caloric nostalgia.

"…you know they're basically people right?"

He's draped sideways on the futon like a Roman senator. Sweat slick and bare-chested. One hand pecks chicken-like at a tub of trail mix, the other flails Touretteic in the stuffy air. His laptop lay bright on his gut, its cracked screen showing a PETA-funded documentary paused mid-ink cloud.

"…like…dude, these fuckers recognize themselves in mirrors—not like the way dogs do—these fuckers actually look and see and feel the burden of selfhood…"

The Skippy opens with a faint pop. Inside: a layer of oil. Pale, trembling. Primordial sebum where ancient proto-things swim and divide and mutate. I stare down, six-year-old me stares back, the same me that thought peanut butter came from "peanut cows"—terrycloth, tractor-sized heifers roaming fields of peanuts with their Rottweiler tails and beige udders. Dad corrected me, gently, and only after I'd drawn hoards of them on my book socks.

"…like, they know they have a self and a will and they use tools to impose their will…"

I start to stir. G.W. Carver proposed peanut oil as fuel. He understood its strength, its capacity to power our Chevys to dead levees. The sebum lingers, reluctant to rejoin the more famous brown, angry we've forgotten its thermal potential.

"…like, there's this video of one of them using a coconut shell as a Gladiator shield…"

The butter's almost even. My hand aches a little. The Wonder Bread waits open-faced. It's anxious. It knows it's perishable, knows it's a sponge for other, richer things. It sits, inviting the air to de-moist its fluff before it can be upstaged. Maybe that's why I always tear it? Why I smear the PB with quick violence? A quick violence to prevent the Wonder from taking the easy way out?

"… they're humans, yeah, but they're also like aliens...like they've got three hearts—three goddamn hearts…"

I spread the peanut butter. Slow. Thick. I always use too much. I like how it commandeers my hard palate and slows the world down. How it cuts my jaw's Achilles and promotes breath: in...out.......in.................move slow, remember? Purpose? How everything must have purpose? I suspect this is why they gave it to World War I soldiers: a friend, a psy-op, a show—something to tongue touch as they charge through No Man's, a calming taste of mama's hands to take their minds off the Hun bullets waiting to shred their singular hearts, the bullets and the rats—the rats that will soon scurry from the Ardennes and crawl between their blue lips to lap up transatlantic legume paste.

"…and there's like this theory that octopuses are actual aliens. Not, like, ET-type fuckers, but, like, a whole ass branch of life that, like, sidestepped evolution and just arrived, fully formed…"

He's up, pacing around the living room, trail mix rattling in his palm like beggar bones. The moisture of his sweaty soles kiss the plastic of his flip-flops, one farty smooch per step. I reach for the Smuckers and notice a smidge of peanut butter on my wrist.

"…like, they're totally aliens but also very human, too-human: alien because they taste with their arms, their fucking arm/tentacles/skin whatever, and—" 

I lick the brown off my wrist. If I were an alien octopus, my skin would’ve done the tasting. I twist off the purple picnic lid and whiff the smell: grape pencil shavings and sticky floors—the stench shepherd crooks me to the middle school cafeteria, forcing me shoulder to shoulder with faceless, gourging oafs. Maybe that's why I felt so uncomfortable among them? Was my skin tasting? Perma-tasting through touch? Proximity? When Mike M's shoulder grazed mine, did the Cheez-Its rotting in his belly grow bitter on my tongue? When asshole Robby flicked my nose, did I detect the pH of his finger sweat? Through my ass, could I sniff the detergent the previous eater's mother employed on their corduroys?

"—and human because they dream—dream just like we do…"

I read somewhere that the first jelly was accidental, birthed by an ale-gorged medieval cook who boiled fruit too long, let it sit and burn until it congealed into something sticky sweet. My nape hairs stand erect with anachronistic grief as I drag the contents of medieval cauldrons across machine-processed wheat.

"…and shit, they even turn colors when they dream… "

I press the jellied bread onto the open-faced PB'd slice, lava trails of purple seep from the bread's hug, no longer purple, more black. I hope he doesn't get any ideas. I hope I won’t wake in the dead hours to find him wide-eyed, looming over me, observing my skin as it performs my dreams. He’ll stand, bed’s foot, waiting in stillness until I dream that dream of my mother in the train station—the one that turns my flesh jellyfish clear, the one that lets him ogle my veins and capillaries and bones.

"…they dream and we eat them! We fucking eat them! Something that's basically a wet, dreaming philosopher…"

I cut the sandwich in half, diagonally. Always diagonally. There's something too surgical about a horizontal cut. Triangles are the taste of childhood—empty summers and cartoons and the babysitter who wore fake pearls and hummed the Folgers jingle.

He's back on the futon, hunched over, picking at something between his toes.

"…like, okay, for real…imagine you're this gelatinous genius born into a body with no bones and the universe hands you camouflage, strategy, problem-solving, dreams, tool-use and the first dumbass biped you meet shoves you into boiling oil so their Tinder date can 'try something adventurous.'—that's fucked…so fucked."

I nod and take a bite. The bread sticks to the roof of my mouth. My tongue immediately flocks to it, petting it. I feel the goop sink into my molars. Everything is coated. I'm chewing time. Decades. The flesh of the boy I was when I first tasted this marriage. I think about him. I think about his teeth. His gag reflex. His future. Whether he would flinch at the thought of dreaming skin or care that intelligence doesn't guarantee mercy.

He belches and stands, stretching his arms T-like before walking to the bathroom.

"Also, fun fact—the plural is octopuses. Not octopi. 'Octopi' is horeshit Latin. Octopus is Greek. So octopuses is more accurate. Or octopodes, if you want to be a pretentious asshat."

He disappears into the bathroom. The door clicks shut. The sink runs.

I'm alone with the last triangle of sandwich. It's warm now, it's taken on temperature so quick. The jelly has bled into the bread, the machine born white has assumed a purple-brown hue. I look down. It looks like an eye. One that is wet and dreaming; when it wakes, it will blink sideways.

I bite.

I chew.

I swallow.

All without mercy.

This is an installment of the ‘bad roommate’ series. Check out the other entries in the series:

The hood is up. Dad’s leaning into the engine, interrogating it, oblivious to the Gorbachev grease smudge on his cheek.

I’m standing behind him, holding a flashlight—a flashlight in broad daylight, my thumb tracing its nippeloid on/off switch, mildly sweating.

He asks for a socket wrench, “…the 10-mil.” I stare at the tools festooning the driveway, all of them wrench-shaped, none of them labeled. I’m suddenly eight again, standing stupid, sucking a lolly as he conjures a tree house out of wood and magic.

“…sometime today kiddo.”

I panic-grab the nearest wrench-like thing. He takes it and twists something deep in the car’s belly, saying nothing. Victory.

I peek at the engine—a senseless Medusa hive of wires, belts, and shining nubs. I think of the lunatic in a garage somewhere who figured this all out, the grease-covered prophet who saw this metal mess and thought, "Yep, this will get the world where it needs to go."

“Hear that clicking?”

I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“Gotta be your timing chain…even if it’s off by a little, the whole kit goes to shit. That!…hear that?”

I strain my ears but get nothing, only the insect screech of Mr. Poe’s weedwacking and the occasional bird chirp. I hum a confident “mmmmm” and nod even though his back’s to me.

He’s always hearing things I can’t—the way the furnace rattles in the winter or the way the roof talks after a heavy snow or the nearly imperceptible screams of something about to break.

I watch the sun ripple from Mr. Poe’s balding head, clicking the flashlight on/off, on/off, enjoying its popcorn sound.

“You gotta stay on top of this stuff kiddo—oil changes, rotations, filters…if you don’t, it’ll cost ya later.”

I nod again, unseen. His tone feels accusatory; my reflexes jerk me ramrod straight. I stop clicking the flashlight. That’s dad-speak for “you’re always letting things slide kiddo, stop fucking up, get it together for Christ’s sake—credit card balances, unopened mail, the nice girls you meet and ghost, meet and ghost…”

Turns out adulthood isn’t the gradual becoming you’re told about in middle school; it’s a series of small, quiet failures piling up up up, frog in pot style until there’s five hundred pounds of Earth on your sternum.

He has a way of knowing everything, even about the girls…girls like Chelsea, the soft-spoken, kind-eyed beauties who text me links to long articles that I skim until I’ve collected enough data to send back some vaguely thoughtful emoji. Girls who mail me books of Frank O’Hara poems, not for my birthday or Christmas or anything special, just because the words “felt like me,” which I don’t totally understand but find flattering in a way that never fails to make me guilty.

Anyway, Chelsea was just another incarnation of the pattern. We went on a few dates, low-stakes stuff—movies, noodle bowls, park walks—it was great, she was great—is great but like usual, at some point, I stopped texting back. Not in a dramatic or malicious way, but in that quiet, church mouse way where you keep meaning to but the window of response gets wider and the silence calcifies and eventually it’s more merciful to say nothing.

Dad wouldn’t understand that my lizard brain does this to protect people. I retreat to spare them disappointment—the disappointment that’ll inevitably fuzz their belly when they look close enough to see how little I know about things—real things—about cars or taxes or savings accounts and how I sometimes forget to eat and let the cat’s litter overflow. It’s easier to disappear than to be found out.

Maybe I could try to text her back? She was cute and seemed like she’d understand. I feel like she’d—

“You want to learn this stuff sometime? I can show ya.”

I say, “yeah maybe,” but I don’t mean it. It isn’t because I don’t want to learn—I think I do, I probably do it’s just learning feels so overwhelming, like it’s too late—I’m too late, I missed the window and now soaking up anything new is destined to be a slog. If only I’d paid attention to things all along, I would’ve picked it up through some epistemic osmosis and not be standing here, a thirty-five-year-old “man” fingering a useless flashlight’s nipple.

I wonder what he would say if I told him I try—that I try to learn, try to make up lost ground. That when I feel the voids inside—the little hollow parts that throb when I’m left alone too long—I pick up a book or scroll an explainer or watch someone smarter than me diagram a concept on a whiteboard but the same thing always happens. When I reach the a-ha! moment and the voids feel temporarily sated, the moment I underline the crucial passage, the life-changing info, dog-ear the page, I’ll think oh this is it, this is the bit that fixes me, and pour a glass of wine and flick on the tube completely forgetting anything I’ve read but despite this I feel blessed—given a new context to brood over as I clock in at the pet store and make sure all the cat food is facing the same direction.

“Alright, hand me that torque wrench.”

He senses my panic.

“…the tube looking one by your left foot.”

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Blood in the Yolk

The Midnight Vault

The drain is a throat choking on collective shedding—a bolus of my split ends, my roommate’s pubes, whatever follicular gifts previous tenants have offered. I’m on my knees, armed with a wire hanger straightened into a primitive tool. A Rite Aid bag hangs from the faucet knob, it’s maw ready for feeding. I roll up my sleeves. Whenever I roll up my sleeves this close to a bathtub I can’t help thinking of Marat—the knife in his lung, the blood in the water, the water turning his death rattle into farty bubbles. The revolution shrunk to a single bathroom—a bathroom and a drain the itchy sunofabitch never had to clean.

“…people are fine-tuning models to respond erotically, but erotically with, like, emotionally real post-fuck softness—like, they’re engineering afterglow…”

He’s sitting on the toilet lid, hair still wet from the shower, slurping off-brand ramen with a fork. Steam curls around his glasses. He’s wearing his favorite neon green wife-beater—the one with a bleach stain shaped like South America and a hole by his left nipple.

“…and this one dude said his AI girlfriend understood him better than any real woman ever had…”

I prod the hanger down the dark throat. I twist and hear a squelch. Something soft and sinewy. I tug. It resists. Little bubbles rush from the depths; Marat’s Aidez-moi!

“…he said she/it/whateverthefuck made him ‘feel seen,’ Not ‘understood’ or ‘loved,’ or ‘horny’—”

I brace and pull up.

“—’seen.’ Like that’s the big one. Like being looked at is the same as getting laid.”

A kitten-sized hairball queefs out the drain, slick with a sludge that smells like the inside of a dollar store mask. It hangs, swaying in an unseen breeze. When I touch it, I think of the drama nerd from high school—the one who chewed her ponytail, gnawed on it constantly because it helped her think, kept her calm. I wonder if she still does it; if she sits alone chewing her ankle-length hair. Maybe has a bot boyfriend now, something/someone that understands her—sees her for whatever she’s become and tells her she’s special and smart and has hair that will grow forever and ever and it will always taste sweet and never become the beslimed and gnarled corpse I just tossed down the Rite Aid’s gullet.

“Some of the bots throw out ‘I miss you’ unprompted. Like, these fuckers are learning to yearn…it’s freaky shit, bro…“

He slurps his ramen. The water drains a little but not much. There’s an ant flailing in the water. I wipe sweat from my brow with my forearm, watching his little legs. Maybe he’s perfuming the air with HELP ME pheromones, praying his colony will sniff his distress and come to his aid. Why is it that we get all misty-eyed at ant pheromones and bee dances and dolphin clicks and whale moans? Sure, it’s cute, I guess, but if it’s so damn cute when non-human critters try to sit at our big kid table of linguistic prowess, why does our hair stand when chatbots text “I miss you”?

“—like, one day, these fuckers will simulate nostalgia, not like your actual memories but, like, that ache that comes with them, ya know? the longing? They’ll improvise entire fucking childhoods just to make you cry…”

My jeans are damp at the knees. I poke the hanger down the drain but it won’t go. Something’s down there. Something gelatinous and shy. A baby tooth, my childhood home, my past selves—I imagine first-grade me bloated and blue-lipped, waiting, wet, reaching for the thrusting metal. I push. The hanger gives a little cough and goes limp in my hand. I twist harder and the drain burps. I pull. Resistance. Then a slurping pop and something comes free—another wad of matte gunk clinging to the silver.

“Think about it, bro—all the soft parts of love are reproducible. The slope. The temperature. It’s all math—”

The water cyclones down. I pinch my finger around the cold silver, hovering the mass over the Rite Aid’s maw. I slide my finger down and coax the muck into the bag. Maybe AI girlfriends are modern drain snakes? They’re flexible, eager, bendy in the middle. They go where we can’t, into the weird depths of ourselves. Our pipes. Our plumbing—our needs, hungers, fears—the stuff we’re too chickenshit to say out loud. They snake through our rotting sludge without judgment. They don’t blame us for the rot. They slink in, find the shape of our blockage and wrap around it—hug it gently and surgically and pull out a glistening facsimile of connection—something that feels like love but isn’t sticky the way real love is. Doesn’t leave a stain. Doesn’t dry under your nails.

“—like the real Turing test nowadays is: can you break up with the fucker? or do you…like, do you feel bad when you do? That’s the threshold.”

I run the faucet and wash my hands in the free-flowing water. My fingers are wrinkled, the skin gone see-through at the tips. I rub my thumb against my forefinger and think of slugs. I think of the worm I dissected in eighth grade, how its body clung to the blade like it wasn’t quite done being a thing. I turn off the faucet and watch the water get sucked away, resting my hands on the cold porcelain.

“I think—” I say slowly, knees cracking as I stand, “I think we should get a drain cover.”

He nods.

“Yeah,” he says. “Maybe one of the ones with googly eyes.”

This is an installment of the ‘bad roommate’ series. Check out the other entries in the series:

The first thing they taught him was how to hold the rats. Thumb under jaw, fingers cushioning the ribs. Gentle. Not too tight. Their bodies are cotton, their eyes black jelly. The rats were a test. If he could lift them from their ammonia scented tanks and stand unbothered as their pink tails slithered down his wrist he’d earn major bona fides with Joan. He put the rat down. She rushed forward and gave him a red vest stinking of industrial pine and other bodies. He passed.

“Henry, right?” She said.

He nodded.

“Got it,” she hiccuped and continued, “We’ll get you a fresh tag made up tomorrow. In the meantime, let me give ya the tour.” Before she’d finished speaking, she’d spun a 180 and sprinted towards the fish. Henry struggled to keep pace—

“—these…these are the fishes...the ones over here are your salt, these here are your fresh…over here we got your snakes, gerbils, yada yada, birds—I’m sure you heard these guys the moment you walked in, you’ll get used to them, don’t worry, and here—here are the bunnies—main thing with these guys is don’t let people stick their fingers in the cages. Don’t let anyone feed the rabbits—actually, rule of thumb, don’t let anyone feed anything—I don’t care if the Queen herself comes in here resurrected, heart set on feeding bunnies, that’s a NO, a big time N. O.—people are always coming in here trying to feed something something…”

Henry nodded and smiled when she mentioned the Queen and the bunnies. He tried his best to pay attention but some chemicals seeping from the vest made his neck itch. Halfway through Joan’s spiel he scratched his neck raw and thought only of survival.

“…over here is our dog food, we have the raw stuff over there in the freezers—that gets shipped fresh every morning, sold out by end of day, people love that…”

His raw, burning neck made him decide, he will, he must pretend to have Crohn’s—a violent, biblical case of Crohn’s. The only way from clock-in to clock-out is to bludgeon the days senseless by frequenting the bathroom once, twice, thrice every thirty minutes. “The ADA,” he thought, “I could be a disabled American if I really tried…and I’d have like…protections or whatever…”

“Questions so far?”

By the end of the first week he still wasn’t used to the birds or the shop’s smell—its smog of wet wood and sour fur belonging to something large and unbathed. He spent much of the week in the break room—a small closet with a rickety folding table propping up an old Gateway—clicking through animated HR modules that introduced him to the products, the benefits of an all-prey diet, and the importance of not harassing his coworkers.

“…most of our products contain high-quality organ meats—kidney, spleen, brain, heart, liver, tongue, lung—from an array of locally sourced animals. Be sure to drive this point when interfacing with clients; use the phrase ‘locally sourced’ liberally…”

He never knew the world was full of harvested organs, freeze-dried and stuffed into colorful bags—piles of bags with hi-res prints of smiling pups stacked in leaning towers waiting for Pilates-toned WASPs to take them home. When he wasn’t in the bathroom performing his faux Crohn’s he was learning much about the world, most importantly, how touchy customers could get about the price of bagged organs. “We’re a locally sourced, organic-only, health-forward shop”—this is what an animated woman tells him to “default to” when the inevitable Karens and Kens raise hell about the prices, “Keep the following in your back pocket: ‘We only stock the best…you want the best for your pup, don’t you?”

It was a small team. Joan was kind and gnat-like, always buzzing around, bow-legged and hunched over, wheezing out soliloquies about price reductions or product promotions handed down from corporate. She oscillated between a hands-off “do as you please” mentality and a hands-on “I’ll just do everything myself” mentality, spending most of the day in the latter. Second in command was Troy, Joan’s gnomic assistant manager who always seemed to be tethered to the register resting his hands in the cradle of his warm pot belly holding court about crypto or David Lynch. Troy wasn’t much older than Henry, but his hair was near-grey and hugged his skull like matted grass struggling to stand after winter.

Then there was Dani, bone thin and bleak, a quiet incarnation of Hot Topic prone to leaning Dean-like against walls and clicking her tongue stud against her teeth. She took frequent vape breaks by the dumpsters and—although he didn’t vape or smoke or care much for the outdoors—Henry joined her sometimes because the outdoors, at the very least, was preferable to the moldy bathroom. He’d come to look forward to the sun on his cheeks and a few moment’s reprieve from the shop’s sour fur and rowdy birds. Also, Dani was cute.

“Before this, I worked at a bookstore,” she told him once, toe-poking a piece of dog kibble that followed them outside. “I liked it better—definitely better than this, got free books and shit but they kept cutting hours.” She exhaled a cloud. She smelled like strawberry and knew where everything was. “Cheap bastards.”

Apparently, there was another employee whose name Henry never learned because no one seemed to know it. He was part-time and worked mornings and was gone when Henry clocked in at 3pm. Dani referred to him as “The Old Dude With Dumbo Ears” and that was enough of a name. The Old Dude With Dumbo Ears once left a brown bag of fruit in the fridge that dripped sticky goo on Henry’s lunch bag. On the rare occasion when he had to think of The Old Dude With Dumbo Ears, he’d picture him as a six-foot bag with elephant ears oozing rotted banana goop on the tiles as he scooped bug-eyed fish for faceless little boys to bring home and murder.

“You’ll meet him one day,” Dani said.

“Okay.”

A chihuahua peed on the floor. The little guy got spooked when his obese owner squeaked a plush pickle. “Henry!” Troy hollered, head down, looking up the SKU for freeze-dried lamb lungs. Henry was stocking shelves after the morning’s cat food stampede, counting down until his next Crohn’s break. Henry looked up and saw Troy pointing to the piss puddle. “Clean up on aisle seven!” he said, chuckling, his gut pressed into the rim of the counter.

“Sure.”

Henry went to the back room, grabbed the roll of zero-ply paper towels and slipped on the stained yellow gloves. The chihuahua was being scolded and trying to scurry towards the door. Henry smiled at it as he got on his haunches.

Dani was across the shop cleaning the rabbit cages. He absently circled the wad of towels in the warm piss, distracted by her pear-shaped butt filling her ripped jeans as she attempted to wrangle a rabbit.

The visitor bell jingled as a horde of kids ran in. They nearly stepped on his hands as they ran to slap their oily fists against plexiglass and stick their fat fingers through the ferret’s air holes.

After the piss was gone, he stood, stretching to relieve a new tightness in his lower back. He turned towards the rabbits. Dani was watching him, one hand performing a sarcastic thumbs up, the other holding a blank-faced rabbit by its scruff. He returned the gesture and spent the next twenty minutes in the bathroom trying to find her on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok…his hands smelling of melted plastic.

She blew strawberries into his face. “You go to the shitter a lot.” She took a drag and continued, oval-mouthed and ingressive, little tails of vapor thrashing in her mouth, “You like sick or whatever?”

“Not really,” he said.

“Don’t want to talk about it?”

“I guess not.”

She coughs and takes a deep sniffle. “No worries,” she said, pulling up her too-big Deftones shirt to finger lint from her bellybutton, “we all got our secrets, man. I mean…” she lowered her voice, “like…” she got closer and started giggling, “I stole a fucking chameleon once.”

Henry looked at her, his eyebrows twitching in a way that invited explanation.

“I was high,” she laughed and palmed her face, “wayyyyyyyy too high, and the thing—the fucking thing was like eyeing me down all day so I took it out and let it sit on my wrist and it was going all rainbow and shit, and we were vibing, and I kind of wanted it so I just left. I texted Joan I had my period and I’d be back soon or whatever—she doesn’t care, things escape or die all the time in here.”

She suckled on her vape’s teat; it crackled and hummed.

“I hid the thing under my shirt on the train, then I got home and put him in a dutch oven with some sticks and leaves and grass and this big ass rock I found but I guess I didn’t keep the thing warm enough? I don’t know…he was chill for a few days and then I like forgot about him for a while and then I remembered ‘oh, yeah!’ And went to check on him and he’d turned into a grey paste.”

She exhaled through her nose, rolling her bellybutton lint like a booger.

“Had to get rid of the dutch oven after that…”

She tossed the lint-booger near the dumpster and reached for the door handle.

“…those fuckers are expensive.”

“Alright Henry, now for the fun stuff,” Joan said, one eye blinking quick, trying to fingerlessly rid her cornea of an eyelash. “Facing,” she said, pulling a stack of Tiki Cat to the exact precipice of the shelf. “Have ya done any facing before?”

Henry shrugged and itched his neck. “Nope.”

She nodded. “Okay, no worries, it’s simple— simple but crucial, very very crucial…” Her eye twitched. “Facing’s like grooming. When we face, we’re, in reality, like, brushing the shop’s fur.” She gestured to the staggered ruins of cans on the lower shelf. “See this?”

Henry saw it.

“This is a mess,” she rubbed her knuckle into her eye, “that’s a cowlick, bedhead, and we don’t want any of that, right?”

She got on her haunches and put the cans into ordered rows.

“Will folks say anything about it? Nah, probably not—not out loud at least, but they’ll feel it. They’ll feel it for sure. It’s like—like a room with a loud fly buzzing around, and you hear it but never see it and you feel this nervousness—this sense that, at any moment, it could appear out of nowhere and fly right down your throat if you’re not on edge—if you’re not aware.” She hiccuped. “and we don’t want folks on edge...”

She twisted the Taste of the Wild cans, ensuring the High Prairie buffalo were parallel. “It’s all about eye contact. All the animals on the labels should be looking out, saying hello. Everyone. Everyone facing forward and proud and hungry.”

She handed him a can of Sierra Mountain wolves. “Give it a try.”

Henry placed it on top of the other Sierra Mountain cans and twisted clockwise until the wolves were parallel.

Joan nodded fast. “Yes! Good—very good, you’ve got the touch, you’re probably a natural. Take some time and walk the aisles, brushing out the cowlicks.” She chuckled and powerwalked towards the plushies.

Henry started twisting cans and making the printed animals say hello.

“Oh yeah,” Joan said, coming around the corner, absently squeaking a plush lambie in her hand, “Almost forgot! You got a dog, right?”

He’d forgotten: he mentioned owning a dog in his cover letter, a tactic employed to seem relatable. Dani was nearby, putting a rat in a cardboard box for a dead-eyed snake owner. She looked over, flashing a quick eavesdropping smile.

“Oh, um,” he said, realizing he was taking too long to answer, “mhm, yeah…I do.”

“Okay,” she started picking at her eye again, squinting with discomfort. “Great! Yeah! So, um—when ya can, bring in a picture, like a printed picture of you’re critter…corporate does this thing where we all put a pic of our critters above the registers—I’m sure you’ve noticed, it’s a hoot!”

Dani rolled her eyes.

“Cool, yeah…yeah, I’ll find one, not—not a problem.”

Joan gave a thumbs up and squeaked the lambie before shuffling away.

There was a noticeable tang absent from the shop when Dani wasn’t scheduled. Troy held court in her absence, bragging to the revolving high school temps about the time Dani let him feel her up in the parking lot in exchange for weed. “Don’t let the skinny goth thing fool ya boys, she’s got a kick ass rack under there,” he waxed, “and goddamn lips like pillows!”

Henry worked to spend most of the no-Dani days in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, thinking about her, what she may be up to and how much he’d like to tell Troy to shut the hell up. As he sat, something in his chest wanted to surprise her with a new dutch oven or come in one day with a tattoo of a chameleon on his forearm that makes her laugh strawberries into his face. Maybe he is sick after all, maybe this is what Crohn’s is.

Henry printed a picture of a snow-faced dachshund mutt off Petfinder.com and presented it to Joan. She got out her wobbly step ladder and the staple gun and affixed it to the cork above the register alongside Joan’s five cats, Dani’s pit bull, and Troy’s schnauzer.

Henry stood awkwardly, not knowing what to do with his hands. He didn’t want to cross them and risk being seen as standoffish, and he wasn’t sure hiding them in his pockets was appropriate, as this was a ceremony of sorts and deserved some respect, so they just floated and jittered.

Dani came in from the storeroom with a box of training treats ready for the shelves. She saddled up next to him and nudged him with her shoulder.

“That your pup she’s putting up?”

“Yeah”

She snorted. “You’re one of us now. You’re stuck here now, boyo.”

Henry smiled.

“One of us! One of us!” She chanted as she walked towards the empty shelves. His shoulder sang blood into his penis. He put his hands in his pockets and tightened every muscle, wrestling the blood back in an effort to remain professional.

They kissed once in the storage room. Joan had them both on inventory, sorting and stacking bags of dried-up organs onto dollies.

“Hey,” Dani said, suddenly behind him.

He straightened and turned, his hair sweat-matted against his forehead.

“Come here.” She put both hands on his face, one on each cheek, reeled him in and kissed him.

He let it happen. She grabbed his hand and snaked it up her shirt. Her breast was cold; she exhaled stale strawberries as her nipple got hard.

In a moment of sudden force, Henry thrashed his tongue around her mouth. She pulled back, grinning, and stuck a finger in his mouth.

“Suck it.”

Henry closed his eyes and sucked it, tasting the bland cardboard of kibble dust. He opened his eyes. She was staring into him, through him; his hand still cupped her breast, cradling it rat-like—thumb under jaw, fingers cushioning the ribs. Gentle. Not too tight.

She slowly removed her finger and moved Henry’s hand from her rat-breast. She kissed his cheek and wiped the soggy brown kibble dust clinging to her finger against his vest.

Henry stood scissor-legged, desperate to hide his erection. Dani smoothed out her T, winked, and, with bovine grace, slung a fifty-pound bag of kibble over her shoulder and headed out into the world.

It happened a few hours after the kiss. The store was nearly closed. The sun was strong and low; if he looked at the west-facing windows his face scrunched infantile to protect his eyes.

Henry felt the sun licking his back as he faced, assuring all Southwest Canyons looked into the sun and screamed hello. Dani was in the store room, locking the cash in the safe.

The last hour was quiet. Thirty minutes to closing. Then the visitor bell jingled. He turned to look. The door was open, but he saw nothing. He looked down and found a loose dog—a mastiff or something, the size of a walrus. It growled low and wet, pacing about the linoleum, nervous and sniffing, yo-yoing between whines and growls. A red leash trailed behind it; a distant voice yelled a name that wasn’t working.

Henry froze.

His neck itched, but he didn’t dare scratch it. One of the HR animations said this type of thing happens, par for the course: "Don’t worry…remain calm. " He listened to the animation and became a statue, counting the panting wolves on the scarlet Southwest Canyon label.

He caught a whiff of the kibble dust Dani wiped on him. Blood tickled his penis. He finched, and the metal of the Southwest Canyon reflected the light on the dog’s face. Its hackles went up. It bared its teeth and lunged.

There was a mid-air moment when its mouth was just an open shape, an unformed shape moving through space, a museum piece lacking agency, something to be looked at and discussed over tea. Then the shape closed around his torso; 180 pounds of K9 through him against the shelves.

Cans rained down. He felt the dog’s weight before the pain, the pressure of the huge head tearing at his side, something crunched—maybe a rib? maybe a can?

He let himself whip side to side on the linoleum, becoming no good zero-ply sloshing in chihuahua piss remembering Dani’s butt and how pear-like it was.

He heard Dani shouting something at someone, but he didn’t hear the dog—or the dog made no sound, its only expression being the deep hydraulic movement of its jaw, the thick sinews in its neck thrashing and pulling, wrenching, trying to unmake him.

Someone threw something. A bag of food or a box of treats. The impact startled the dog just enough for its grip to loosen and Henry’s head hit the floor. He felt warm and wet and the air was iron and pulsing. It was hard to breath. He saw the dog being pulled away, saw Dani’s earrings catch the store’s fluorescent light, the waterlogged ceiling tiles above him, horridly browned, deformed, then the smell of strawberries pushing into his nose, then 104 bpm into his sternum, and the glint of a metal tongue snaking in.

Something inside him said: Oh.

Then nothing.

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A Feathering by

Outnumbed by

Corvus and Crater by Will Boucher

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Below is the first chunk of my piece Corvus and Crater. Enjoy :)

Corvus and Crater

In the red-walled limbo of sun-sieged lids, he felt his spindly grey mane become a writhing clew of worms, itching to shed follicular yolks and till the cool earth.

The red gave way to atomic light. He scrunched his eyes, winching them open ever so slightly until he'd mustered enough wherewithal to greet the robin egg blank shimmering above.

Squiggly floaters scurried across the blue like kitchen roaches towards peripheral comfort. He lay fuzzed and blank in the deepsick euphoria of open sky, floating upon the fricative breeze-jostle of branches.

The cool air filled his nostrils with sweet pine and retreated his testicles, begrudging the ants in his scrotum-thigh fissure to scurry deep between his buttocks.

Reflex shot his head up. He was surprised he still had a body, even more surprised to find it supine in the dirt, its white asparagus limbs splayed out Virtruvian-like, broiling away under a hateful sun. 

He wore his pale blue gown, ratty and pocked with snowflake-esque geometrics. A smile stole his face, cracking his crusty lip schmutz like a glazed donut. His inner ear chimed with Cathy's go-to quip, the one she'd tell every time she'd wipe his ass. You know why they make these things blue?—she'd bring the cold wipe into his crack just as he'd begin his pre-retort inhale—so you can see some sky when you look down! 

It was never funny and, likely, not even true. Still, on the bad days, he'd stare at the sky in his chest, imagining a wedge of geese cutting down his abdomen with their sharp V, unzipping him as they migrated south to roost in his pubic hair.

He periscoped around. He lay in a clearing atop a blanket of sun-baked pine needles and soft, bark-colored dirt. The closest trees were a semi-circle of sickly, burned-out pines, perhaps five yards away; tall but lopsided sticks, anorexic and gnarled with little nubs that were once branches. They may have completely circumscribed him, but he couldn't be sure. Twenty yards due east of the trees was a small, stagnant pond. Beyond it, a verdant wall of pines—the menacing, seemingly impenetrable wall of dense evergreen indicative of the Pine Barrens.

Cutting through the topsoil was a slithering, almost regal, smear extending from his bare soles to the far-off pines. Two sets of boot treads bookended the smear, the larger pair a pristine imprint of Kevin's duck-footed gait.

The floaters returned, swarming into two brass blonde youngsters playing in the treads; giggling tykes trying on Daddy's too-big work boots and button down, romping around like shrunk muckety mucks, flapping rail thin arms for balance as they try to walk—

The pressure pain in his bladder scattered his boys to the breeze; his neck muscles relented, returning his crown to the dirt with a dull thump.

Back in the grip of the pitiless blue, his chest boiled with the bastard of nostalgia and anger.

He decided it was time to scream.

He managed a few solid, bloodcurdling yawps, pausing now and again to lift his head, hoping to see a Boy Scout troop sprinting from the tree line.

The screams soon devolved into strange moans, more frication than articulation—hoarse, wheezing streams of ahhhh-colored air punctuated by sudden split tones and rapid-fire coughs.

He stopped when his mouth gushed with the iron taste of popped vessels. He lay panting, ears ringing, bloody spittle clinging like frog eggs to his chapped lips.

He'd pissed himself during the commotion.

He returned to the red, letting the piss summoned gooseflesh prickle him to sleep.

to be continued…

Now that your beak is wet, grab your print or ebook copy of Blood in the Yolk to finish the story and dive into others!