Satan Burger

Scene 7 Problems With a Hand

Inside of Satan Burger:

Gin is not taking to being dead. He’s not been dead for twenty minutes and already he’s going moldy. His skin is all white now, all of the blood cells under his skin have suffocated and died, and his muscles and joints losing flexibility. His mind is getting iron-muzzy and weak, like it wants to rest in peace after death, inside some cozy grave. It doesn’t want to live on and on until forever, because forever is a long and boring period to spend in one place. His thoughts go claustrophobic inside the skull, wishing to burst out, leave his corpse and go to Punk Land or some place like it, where bodies do not live. But he’s trapped, always-already trapped.

A VCR asks for their order. Of course, a VCR can’t speak, so it makes rewinding and fast-forwarding sounds to communicate. Gin and Nan don’t understand, so they do not order. Actually, they are getting rather scared.

“Nan is outside,” I say.

Everyone gets up to go see her. The chairs are relieved at our departure, a whistling of sighs, especially the chair that held me weakly. Nobody asks how I know Nan’s outside, nor do they care. They just assume I know what I’m talking about and go.

The door doesn’t give us trouble this time; it’s asleep I think. Doors love their sleep.

We go to see Nan and Gin — hands folded together on two chairs that secretly molest their butts.

“How’d you get here?” Mort asks Gin.

“Lenny drove,” Nan answers for undead Gin.

“Where is that nerdy then?” Mort asks. “I missed him at the show.”

“He’s outside,” Nan says. “He refused to come inside on the count of his vegan-straight-edge-in-your-face attitude.”

“I’m gonna go be vegan with him,” Mort says.

He leaves the conversation and then the restaurant. A faint odor follows behind, breathing through the flex-kindly door, which was born in the kitchen’s refrigerator.

Satan slups on his queer grin.

Then he aims this grin at Gin and Nan, striking them with happy-laced words, a motion that he has practiced for days: “Welcome to Satan Burger.”

Nowhere and oblivion were completely different things/places to Richard Stein. For him, oblivion is when something goes into nothing and nowhere is the place where something can come out of nothing.

Out of nowhere, I cry: “Don’t order, Nan.”

And there is silence and eyes.

Richard Stein said that some people are allergic to being looked at. I am one of those people. I like being considered a shadow for this reason. If I don’t talk people won’t look at me, and I won’t get an allergy attack — also known as a panic attack.

“What would you like?” Satan asks them.

Christian says, “You’ll lose your soul if you eat this food. Don’t order.”

Slamming fists, mad. “You’re killing my business,” Satan says to Christian. “Why did I hire you people?”

“She’s a friend of ours,” Christian says. “I’m not gonna just let you take our friends’ souls.”

Nan doesn’t understand. She shrugs and makes a smacking noise with her lips, tough guy trying to be cute again.

Christian takes her aside and discusses the situation, and I watch a table mounting a peanut. She doesn’t like him pushing her about, even if it is important, so she elbows his hand away. He tells her Satan’s story and she tells him about Gin’s condition, and they both feel the serious weight of the situation weakening their shoulders to the ground. Apparently, Gin is living proof of what has happened to the world. And even without feeling his beatless heart, Christian can tell Gin is dead. He looks like a zombie, or more like a vampire — like Vod. Now they believe Satan’s story is Truth. Nobody is going to Heaven and nobody is going to Hell. Our boring life is eternal.

Then Christian introduces them to Satan.

Satan shakes Nan’s hand. “Hello, Nan.”

And he shakes Gin’s hand. “Hello, Gin. You are another of my landlords.”

However, Satan doesn’t realize that in shaking Gin’s hand a blue light quietly sparks, turning it into a living creature that eats, breathes, thinks, poops, and sleeps. Neither Gin nor Satan realize what they’ve done, and I don’t feel up to telling them.

Mort comes back alone.

“Lenny’s not there,” he says.

“What? He just disappeared?” asks Christian.

“I don’t know,” Mort says. “I saw his truck, but Lenny’s not there.”

Nan mumbles this: “Where’d that faggot go?”

She does not realize that Satan is a homosexual, and was very offended by that remark. He already hates her. Satan usually hates all girls anyway. They always steal men from him.

“He was out in the parking zone?” Satan asks.

Nan looks to him. “Yeah, why?”

“The Silence,” Satan says.

Nobody questions him.

“The Silence took your friend.”

Nobody says What’s the Silence?

Satan Says, “It is a creature that came out of the walm. Large as a lake, this creature, but it’s not made of water. It is made of sound. And it feeds off of sound, or anything that makes sound, or anything that can hear sound. It will empty this entire world of sound if we let it. It claims this side of town its territory. Anybody that’s out on the street is at risk. It will eat anything that it hears and your friend must have been something it heard. He will never come back. Nobody ever escapes from the stomach of Silence.”

Satan is wrong about that last statement. I have been to the stomach of Silence, and I have escaped. (Then again, I consider myself nobody.)

We decide to eat some sandwiches, which is my favorite style of food. We wanted to eat Satan Burgers, but Satan tells us that it is impossible. If we eat Satan Burgers our souls will fall out of our bodies and the walm will chop them up and turn them into sillygo to make itself go. So sandwiches are fine.

The sandwich is one of the most important foods ever invented. Named after John Montagu, 4^thEarl of Sandwich, who also had a pet bulldog named Sandwich. The bulldog had a silver collar that said “Bulldog of Sandwich.”

The sandwich was invented all by accident. Someone dropped a food tray at John Montagu’s birthday party, which was on a fun-Sunday. The food tray had small pieces of bread, pieces of cheese, and pieces of meat.

Then Sandwich, John Montagu’s bulldog, ate all three of them at once. And some woman cried, “What a disgusting bulldog. It ate bread, meat, and cheese all at the same time. Bulldogs don’t have any manners at all, do they?” Bulldog just sat there and farted.

And from that day on, Bulldog of Sandwich would not stand for eating anything less than meat and cheese on two pieces of bread.

John Montagu told his bulldog that nobody liked his disgusting eating habits, and that he should eat the meat, cheese, and bread all separately, but Bulldog of Sandwich would not give in to the immature ideals of high society. So he went on eating his food in his own way, and later went on to market this style of food to the public. He called it the sandwich.

“How dare you name a disgusting food creation after me?” said the Earl of Sandwich.

“How dare you name me after a disgusting creation like yourself?” said the Bulldog of Sandwich.

Then John Montagu became so angry with his bulldog that he killed him and ate him between two slices of bread just to prove how disgusting a sandwich was. Surprisingly, when John Montagu finished eating his bulldog, he said, “My Sandwich was a genius,” but by now, the genius was already digesting in his master’s stomach.

When Gin tries to eat, he notices that one of his hands doesn’t work right. He looks down to see if it is still there, and it is. But it’s moving like a frantic spider, crawling up his side and attacking his other hand.

“WHAT THE HELL HAS HAPPENED TO MY HAND?” Gin screams, crashing backwards to the floor-sickness, sandwich scatters everywhere.

We all look.

The hand is rummage-running all over the floor, slipping in the sandwich mustard and mayonnaise, trying to detach itself from Gin’s body. Gin’s shock takes control of him and his body flop-jerks crazy. His dreadlocks get covered in sandwich, and his hand eats a piece of tomato and onion.

“What’s wrong with him?” Satan yells. “Is he spazzy or something?”

Nan grabs hold of Gin and tightens him in place, trying to stop his hand from eating his sandwich. “It’s alive,” Nan says.

“What?” Christian screams, examining with wire-eyes.

They think about it for two seconds.

“Satan,” Christian yells. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Satan replies. “Just because everything I touch comes alive doesn’t mean I have anything to do with his hand. I’ve touched all sorts of people in all sorts of places, but their parts never come alive like that. I make inanimate things animate, not animate things animate.”

Nan starts crying for Gin again. This just isn’t his day. First, he gets killed. Then he turns into a zombie. Now his hand is a separate-minded creature that is eating his only sandwich.

“Yeah, but Gin is dead,” Christian argues. “He’s one giant inanimate object.”

“Well,” Satan says, “how come his hand turned alive instead of his whole body? Wouldn’t my touch just resurrect him?”

“How should I know?” Christian yells. “I don’t know anything about dead people. Shouldn’t you know? You’re the Lord of the Dead.”

“I’m not the Lord of the Dead,” Satan disputes. “I’m the Lord of Darkness. The Darkness and the Dead are two completely different things. I know more about life than death.”

“Well, you know more about death than I do,” Christian says. “You’ve probably met all sorts of dead people in your line of work.”

“Yes,” Satan says, “but my job is to damn them to hell, not drink tea with them and discuss what their lives are like now that they’re dead.”

“Whatever,” Christian says, and a salt shaker agrees by hopping up and down splashing salt all over the counter.

Nan calms Gin eventually. She tells him that it’s not all that bad. Someday the hand will learn how to be a hand again. He’ll just have to adjust, and he’s got all of eternity to do that, even if his soul gets sucked away.

She says, “Life is funny that way.”

Gin names his hand Breakfast. It’s the first word that poops into his brain. That’s the way Gin names everything. He doesn’t care if it is a bad name. Names are just names, he says. His dog was named Cancer. His car was named Forward. His goldfish were named Socks, Aluminum, Bookshelf, and Paper Cut. The first choice for everything is always the right one. That’s what he says about buying things, that’s how he answered test questions in school, that’s how he watches television.

His father was like that too. “First choice is best,” his father would say. The father was drinking gin when Gin was born. He was drinking vodka when Vodka was born. They also had an older sister, who moved to Colorado and married a man twice her age. Gin’s father was drinking whiskey when she was born. If he outlives any of his children, Gin’s father plans on drinking a fifth of the appropriate liquor in honor of his lost child, right on the grave, mourning drunk, alone with the corpse. Of course, that will never happen now.

Breakfast is back to normal color again, unlike the rest of Gin’s flesh. Eventually, Gin’s entire self will be rotten, white and shriveled and crusty. His eyes might roll into the back of his head. All the skin might peel away. Maybe he will become a living skeleton that can’t do anything but sit there. Only the hand will be fresh.

Gin ties his hand up for the time being, and puts it behind his back to keep it from his mind. He’s still agitated by the whole situation, feeling worse about his hand being alive than the fact that he is dead. Nan gives him her sandwich, even though he doesn’t need to eat anymore, and he eats in silence.

Satan’s sandwich is alive and screaming as he eats it. If I had emotion enough to cry for the poor thing, I would. It never had a chance. The sandwich’s guts — pickles, tomatoes, and onions — squeeze-spray all over the counter. Then it bleeds mustard and mayonnaise until it goes into shock and faints.

Gin feeds Breakfast some of his sandwich. Its mouth is where Gin’s lifeline used to be. The mouth is thin and it doesn’t contain any teeth yet. Its stomach and lungs have formed beneath the skin of the palm. The digestion track ends at the base of the wrist, where the sandwich will exit once the time comes. The hand doesn’t have any eyes, but uses its fingers like antennas which have an extremely keen sense of touch.

Breakfast picks apart the sandwich, using its feelers and mouth. It doesn’t like the bread. Hands mostly like meat and onions. Boiled onions in beef gravy is a very popular meal for hands.

After eating is over with, the room goes tired.

The long night has hit everyone really hard. Mortician is asleep on a bench, which is also asleep, his pirate hat rests on his head. Earlier in the night, Satan had touched the pirate hat. Satan doesn’t think before he makes things alive, and it’s quite normal for him to have all objects surrounding him alive. But it’s not normal for him to use caution around inanimate objects, so inanimate objects who don’t want to be animate must learn to avoid his touch. Now the pirate hat is alive and sleeping on Mort’s head.

Satan’s hobby is creating new demons. Sometimes he will get some modeling clay and sculpt a large monster with horns and wings and sharp teeth. Its appearance is meant to be scary. Once he touches them, they turn into demons and spend most of their time scaring people. This is how humans believed demons looked, but they were mistaken. Only few demons were made in this style. All of them are dead now. The majority of demons are pieces of furniture or doors or tools.

The demons in Satan Burger are all sleeping on their backs, or stirring quietly in the kitchen. The draining feeling of an endless night seeping into a stale morning has gotten into us all. Even the furniture-demons need rest.

Gin, Nan, and Vodka have left for home. They used a teleportation device — a satanic device — to travel back to the warehouse. The device looks similar to a piece of candy corn. When you touch the yellow butt, a door shoots out of the white tip. And you can go anywhere you want through that door, if you program it right. Satan has programmed the door so that all of us can get between the warehouse and the restaurant with no trouble or time wasted.

Vodka found the teleporting door very interesting, but nobody else seemed to care. Doors are doors, no matter how unusual or magical they might seem. Everyone else said, “That’s a very convenient door,” but nothing else. The door looks even more bizarre than the candy corn remote for it. It’s made of energy, orange colors that swirl all around, which is why Vod likes it. He’s into bizarre-looking things. He’s a bizarre-looking thing himself.

Gin, Nan, and Vodka went to sleep. Their shift is in the morning and they’ll have to work all day collecting souls from unsuspecting customers. Mort, Christian, and I have the later shift, so it’s not necessary for us to go to sleep right away. My body is getting awfully tired, though, so I let it sleep. But my vision stays awake, soaring into the air above, hovering over Satan and Christian. Neither one of them have tired. Christian doesn’t wear down easily, going for days at a time without sleep. He has started on another bottle of gold liqueur, soon to be gritty-mad drunk. This brand is called Gold Rush, the second best brand you can buy. Fool’s Gold is piss compared to Gold Rush.

Christian and Satan are drinking and smoking with each other’s company. Satan is drinking a beer from a living bottle — the bottle’s beer is its blood, so Satan is bleeding it to death — but the bottle can’t complain. Satan is its master, after all.

Satan gets to talking about where he came from. First, he first mentions his father, Yahweh, who is God.

Yahweh’s main job is to create things. It is the job that all gods are paid to do. There is a god inside every living star. Within our sun, there is Yahweh. He is not in our dimension, however. If God was in our dimension, the sun’s fire stomach would burn Him up.

Inside of the god dimension, a sun looks like a shopping mall, where the temperature is always perfect, and there are plenty of benches to sit on near fountains and plants. Some people call this shopping mall Heaven.

Inside of the shopping mall, God creates all of his creations.

The first thing Mr. Yahweh ever created was a small table. It was not a very good table. The legs were not evenly cut and it wobbles when you touch it. Near the center of the shopping mall, you can still go and see it on display. It’s a good example of how nobody is perfect, not even God.

Satan was the first intricate structure Yahweh ever made. Satan was the first angel. An angel is the same as a human, only it’s born in the dimension where gods live. They also get special powers. Some angels have the power to fly. Others can see in the dark, or read minds, or run really fast. Satan has the touch of life. Satan was God’s favorite.

Gods live very frustrating lives. That’s why they are so frustrating to get along with. And they are bitter for living such a long-long time with no end, and being responsible for billions upon billions of life forms is a very demanding job. Gods are the fathers of their worlds, but Yahweh seems more like the drunken abusive father that wears a wife-beater T-shirt, who doesn’t like his home dirty when he comes back from work.

When Satan came out of the closet, he was sent to hell. Hell was just a giant prison located at the center of the Earth, within the god dimension. Of course, it was the most pain-drudgy prison ever built. All of the evil souls of history lived there, and Satan was the prison guard who monitored the evil. Yahweh labeled him the most evil person in hell, because he was the first homosexual. And God considers homosexuality the most disgusting evil of them all.

Satan is glad Hell doesn’t exist anymore. It was a shitty job, and he didn’t need it. The walm ate all of the souls from hell before it started eating the ones on Earth, so all the tyrants of history that you’ve known are in oblivion now. Only your memory of them exists. Satan saved some of the souls, though, because he is a collector of souls. Hitler is one. Kublai Khan is another. Aristotle is another.

Richard Stein said that God is very picky about the souls He lets into heaven. He won’t even let you in if you haven’t been baptized. And people like Aristotle are the ones that really got screwed, since the art of baptism didn’t even exist in their lifetimes. Aristotle was a good man, but he was born too early in history and had to go to hell.

Richard Stein hated God for making up that rule. Actually, he just hated the Christians for it. He never met God. Why should he care about somebody he never met?

Scene 8 The Festival of War

Awake around noon, I tremble my corpse throughout the warehouse, feet sticking to the concrete floor, grits of sand cleaving, devoted to my feet. Going without shoes makes your feet go tough and leathery, but they become susceptible to picking up rocks and bits. A piece of broken glass can never cut you when stepped on, but it will stick to your heel and walk with you for days.

Nobody else is encircling yet. Three of them are at work and the other two are sleeping. My hair is stiff-scrabbled from the hard rest. The head my body owns is heavy, pulling my neck muscles to work. The neck bone is cramped up. A good sharp pain would relax it, massage it. The jab of a knife might do the trick.

I find a knife near the band equipment, one that Mort uses for screwing.

Stabbing my neck’s back with the sharp of the knife, I sit on the toilet in the center of the room. As I poop, I put the television on my lap and watch adventure cartoons on the network for cartoons. Johnny Quest is on right now, Thunder Cats is coming up next. As I stab my neck, making the neck tissue loose, and Johnny Quest rides his speedboat in the amazon, rolling in my rolling world…

I notice a man through the window.

At first, I don’t mind him. He’s only passing on the carpet walkway. Then he passes again, and then another again. I continue pinching out the waste-food, trying to pinch faster, hoping that the man outside does not see me sitting here with my pants down and a TV on my lap.

Another man clankers by. He’s in a suit of armor, doing some kind of construction work.

I use my God’s eyes to investigate.

A large tent picks itself up in my yard. The tent is made of gray wire lizard tissue — used in underground societies for clothing and other textiles, societies which are widely known as dark ones. Black tendons hold the tent sturdy, flags swim from the ropes on small poles, cages and cages of murk below the tent’s arena filter a smoldering fatty smell. The workers continue right by my window, annoying us (their neighbors) with a festival, just as we annoyed them with our electronic noise performance last night. Payback.

The landscape is early dark from the smothering rain clouds and a drizzle of pollution. Everyone seems a mess: sludgy clothes, grains of soil and weed milk that dreads their hairs together, and the skin cut by rocks becomes infected with crispy diseases from grooming the caged walm beasts.

I don’t see any dark ones, only the medieval tent villagers. The dark ones are a race that came from a diseased world. They lived under the planet’s surface with the giant beetles and reptiles that became their food and materials — clothing, beds, bone-weapons. Nobody in Rippington communicates with them except for our neighbors, the medieval ones, who are their friends because they are both very violent cultures. Every so often, the medieval ones and the dark ones will have a battle for entertainment, for the whole world to see, and they call it The Festival of War.

The dark ones are probably not out yet: still too bright outside. Dark ones are sensitive to the sun and can only wander during the night moments. They have pale features: white skin, white hair, and white eyes, with a hint of green to their nails and blood vessels. They look a lot like humans, but have cold blood. Some say they evolved from lizards rather than apes. I heard about the dark ones from Christian, who heard about them from our neighbors.

The dark females are known for their unusual sexual behavior. They are the dirtiest, most violent, most revolting, sex-crazed creatures to ever come through the walm. Christian says they are more reptilian than the male species: without any hair growing on their bodies, sharp claw-like fingernails, cold beady eyes, and snake tongues that are up to ten inches wide and eighteen inches long. Their sex drives are intense. They can’t be sexually calmed without being gratified at least six times a day. It gets so laborious at times that the males are forced to lock their females away, to keep themselves from injury.

A dark one’s sexual performance starts with the female injecting her enormous snake-muscle tongue within her partner’s rectum. This arouses the male’s penis, which is situated on his chest between the nipples. She can also carve simple designs into his backside to help him bleed. This is foreplay for dark ones. Once the tongue is disengaged, the female squats into the male’s erect penis.

As the struggle progresses, the female drives her claws deep into her opponent’s flesh, rip-cutting with the magic moment. She will begin licking the blood or eating the pieces of meat she has taken, or she will plunge her tongue into the male’s throat and suffocate him. Suffocation is sexually exciting to dark males. And the male will give the female extra pleasure by dishing out fist-blows to the sensitive portions of her skin. The females may look more reptilian than the males, but their skin is gentle and smooth, so the males don’t cut the feminine flesh as the females cut into them. They do, however, pound bruises into their milky scales.

After the males first started locking away the more sexually active females, they smiled their big teethy mouths a lot, very happy to be relieved of their sex duties. However, the females found imprisonment very frustrating and resorted to lesbianism.

I’ve heard of four other new races that are fierce in sexual activity. They include: the aphid clan on the north side, the fire mites, the blue women, and the cockroach people. I’ve never seen any of these races, but I’ve heard many stories from Christian.

I finish with the toilet and step outside.

All the medieval ones are at labor on their festival. It looks like it will start tonight, hopefully before I have to work. Some of our other neighbors, the midgets in presidential costume, are watching the creation of this festival. There’s a James K. Polk midget, a Benjamin Harrison midget, a Woodrow Wilson midget, a John Quincy Adams midget, and an injured Abraham Lincoln midget. It seems that all of the community, every cultural group in the neighborhood, is excited about the festival, and I’m sure to see them all tonight. There are so many interesting peoples I have never seen before, and I can’t wait to meet them all.

Lenny told Nan that he was the last anthropologist, but now that he’s dead I guess I will take that title for myself. And since I’ve given up the reading of history books, other than Richard Stein’s, I will make experiencing new walm races my hobby. I will try to write them all down, into a book — my history book. The walm might be able to take my soul away and throw me into oblivion, but my life and the memory of all of these races will live on through my writing. There should be at least something of me to live on after I die. Oblivion only wins when you are forgotten.

Once I hear Christian awake, I reenter the warehouse.

Christian, with his flashy pants and buttoning up his white shirt, wrinkled clothes and hair, goes to the steaming toilet for his morning piss.

Christian has a few cuts in his face. They’re from sleeping with broken glass. He doesn’t know how it happens, but every morning he finds shards of glass under his sheets. Nobody puts them there. There’s not much glass in the warehouse at all except for broken beer bottles here and there. He just rolls around in his bed, getting all cut up, bloody sometimes. This time the glass got his face, it must’ve been sleeping on his pillow.

Normally, the glass only gets his back. He’s got extensive scars, like train tracks, like stretch marks on his love handles. My only guess is that the glass hates the cold concrete floor, and at night the shards snuggle into bed with Christian to nuzzle against his warm hips and fat.

Christian notices the festival through the window. “What’s going on?” He goes to check it out before I answer.

“Big, big, big,” he says.

Many more cultures are out here now. I see a family of the aphid people.

The aphids are standing with refreshments from the refreshment stand, so apparently some festival booths are open. There are four adults and eight children, watching the caged animals growl and sleep. The medieval ones don’t mind the spectators, working away at the tents and stages. One warrior says, “Looks like we’ll definitely have a crowd tonight.” The other warriors practice for their fight in the arena. I call them warriors instead of gladiators — though it is the same type of bout — because gladiators are slaves that fight other slaves for amusement, and these warriors are freemen that fight other freemen for fun.

The aphids are a peculiar ant-like people. Their male/female ratio is one to three, because of their sexual performances. The males have three sexual organs on three places of their bodies. All of the sexual organs look a lot like tennis shoes; one is on his stomach, and two are on each of the hands. When the aphid people mate, three women fuck one man, one woman for each sex organ. They are also joined in marriage in fours. One husband and three wives. Each of the wives have assigned jobs: One is in charge of child care, one is in charge of home maintenance, and one assists the father with putting food on the table. These families usually produce twelve to sixteen children and are prejudice against other aphid families. As a result, incestuous behavior is very common, sometimes encouraged.

The aphid family jolly-walks away from Christian’s vision. The husband of the family goes first; and his wife — the second father and also his sister — is in the back to make sure the children don’t wander. The children all hold hands, crab-claw hands.

“Let’s go check it out,” Christian says, stepping out the door.

I follow him barefooted. He already has his shoes on; he didn’t take them off last night.

We stroll, watching… I waddle with rolling visions of water wheels and windmill turnings being constructed outside of the BIG tent. My shaggy nest of hair, greasy and dry and dready, lonely for shampoo, butterflies in the wet wind.

Medieval ones break apart pieces of wood, shredding them to make the floor for the inside tent. Loud hammering sounds, like metal rain falling around us. We drift closer to the tent village. Most of the spectators are here, watching all the construction, eager for tonight’s events.

Christian recognizes a man coming out of a festival tent. It is Cecil Sword Dodd, an older drunk about thirty-five, the only medieval one we know. He doesn’t have a family and drinks with anyone willing, even an outsider. Drinking is what Christian has in common with him, which is why they consider each other drinking buddies.

Cecil’s middle name is Sword. All male medieval ones are supposed to have a weapon for their middle name. Common middle names are: Dagger, Arrow, Club, Sickle, Hammer, Trident, and Hatchet. The middle name you have is the weapon you specialize in. Middle names are required and enforced so that nobody gets confused about which medieval one is good at using which weapon. At first, I thought it was strange, but then I got to know the medieval ones. Their lives revolve around weapons and fighting, even when they don’t have any enemies to fight.

When Christian met Cecil, Cecil called him over from the train tracks. He offered him a drink and so they drank. Then, when they introduced themselves, Cecil wanted to know Christian’s middle name. Cecil said this: “So what’s your weapon?”

“Huh?” Christian then said.

“Your middle name.”

“James,” Christian said.

“That’s an odd name for a weapon,” Cecil said. “What’s it look like?”

“It’s not a weapon. It’s a biblical figure.”

That’s when Cecil told Christian how middle names are weapons. And Christian told Cecil what biblical figures were.

Christian then told him his new middle name: “Broken Beer Bottle.”

“Cecil,” Christian yawps.

We head over to the tent. Cecil looks up from his cake-making. He’s the fried cake-maker, and he runs the booth himself. The only customer he’s had is an Andrew Jackson midget, who has already purchased a fried cake and is now glazing it with raspberry topping.

“My friend, Christian,” Cecil says in a toothless smile, alcohol breath. “Are you coming to the fights tonight?”

“I don’t think so,” Christian answers. “I have to work.”

“You’re going to miss a lot. I’m fighting a Carpet Beast.”

“What’s a Carpet Beast?”

“It’s like a small bear, but it has carpet instead of fur, and walks like an ape.”

“Sounds tough. I wish I could see it.”

“There’s going to be fights all day long, including one with a Prowler Beast. You should at least watch the first match. It should start pretty soon.”

I stop paying attention to Christian and Cecil and use my God’s eyes to go after a naked woman that’s passing in the distance.

She is naked, but nobody minds.

She’s walking, free from the rest of the world it seems, hidden inside of her mind, smiling like a four-year-old. Thin and perfect. Yes, she is absolute perfection. She’s like a machine. Only a machine could be perfectly beautiful, so artistic and unnatural. To me she’s the most breath-filching creature I’ve seen. Nobody else seems to notice her, even though she doesn’t have any clothes on.

No sound comes out of her walk.

Only a machine can be flowingly silent.

She must be a blue woman, because she has light blue skin and deep red hair, a fire crotch too, and green-blue eyes that are sharp like turquoise. Her eyes are the largest feature on her face. BIG and innocent.

I bring my vision around close to her face and take a look into those eyes and fall still. One look. I feel weak, small, possessed maybe. Her eyes are so BIG that I get my soul sucked out, drawn into her. She could take my life away in a breath, and I would allow her to, let her inhale me inside of her, just so I could be inside of her. And that is all I want to do, with the last of my life — to be inside of her. Forever-forever.

I do not follow her once she’s gone.

Christian snaps me out of my God’s eyes.

“Where were you?” Christian asks me.

“Over there,” pointing thirty feet away.

“What were you doing?”

“I think I saw a blue woman.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It’s the first time I’ve seen one.”

Cecil butts into the conversation. “Don’t ever go near them blue women. They’re trouble.”

“How are they trouble?” I ask him, almost offended. The blue woman was soo perfect. There could never be anything troublesome about them.

Cecil says, “The blue women live all around this area, but you don’t see them too often. They’re all lesbians. Don’t ever trust a lesbian. They’re a race that doesn’t have a male species. The women impregnate each other through organs on their faces. Their children are born through the alimentary canal instead of the vagina.”

“So what’s wrong with them?” Christian asks.

“They’re lesbians. That’s all,” Cecil says. “Lesbians aren’t any good. There’s no war or fighting without any men. It’s a terrible-terrible race.”

“So they don’t have sex with men?” Christian asks.

“Well…” Cecil says, “supposedly, blue women still have intercourse with males of other species, but only for tension release or recreation or something. Males have nothing to do with the reproduction of blue women, so they don’t marry men. They’re a bunch of sluts and got all kinds of diseases. Don’t touch them. They’re no good at all. Pure evil, I call them.”

Both Christian and Leaf diagree with Cecil. I am definitely still intrigued by blue women. I can tell by Christian’s slimy face that he is too.

As we leave the fried cake stand: mud rocks on my bare feet, more and more people joining the festival crowd, my eyes giving me a small dizzy spell from the drizzling sludge, and Cecil gives us some fried cakes with strawberry sauce.

Then, walking away with a wooden bowl and wooden spoon, Cecil with his mug of beer asks us this:

“Where are you headed?”

We keep walking. The new rain seems to be issuing from the ground and sprinkling on the sky and clouds. Like all of the underground was so filled with water that it had to rain it out, into the atmosphere.

Christian turns around to Cecil, and answers him this:

“To oblivion.”

The act of eating cakes persuades us to catch a place for sitting, so we choose the insides of the tent arena. Most of the seats are soaked from the ground rain, a strong wet-forest odor. The crowd is seated with no complaint to the rain or the tent manufacturers or their wet butts, waiting in anticipation for the first of fifty fights that will journey nonstop into late this night.

We don’t bother with searching for any dry seats. The water instantly soaks through my pants to my butt skin, shocking cold, but I let it go. Dark pools will probably be imprinted on my butt all night at work, unless I find my other pair of pants.

The first fight is between a medieval one and a krellian.

A krellian is a very tall, very strong, very thin creature/person. It looks like a giant stick man made of rubbery pale skin. They’re an uncommon breed that were invented by other men — created to be the strongest and fastest fighters of all time, which means this fight will be a short one. A medieval one cannot defeat a krellian, even when cheating.

In that world, the men were being overrun by zombies -which were called fortics — and didn’t want to be bothered with defending themselves, since there were more important things to be done than worrying about getting killed and eaten. So they made the powerful race of the krellians to protect their cities from obvious destruction.

The krellians live for hundreds of years, usually all by themselves, and never completely out of danger. When they’re not killing zombies, they spend their time meditating and practicing religion. Their god is called Crawn. Crawn is the second god of nine in our system. Yahweh, I believe, is the seventh. This particular god has more influence on his followers than most gods in his clique. He gives them powers, even magical powers, to enable them to be muscular and masterful, the greatest race of all for intelligence and efficacy.

Yahweh used to be the opposite of Crawn. He believed in spiritual strength and love. He wanted his people to be powerful in the heart — physical and mental strength meant nothing to Him. But now He has turned his back on our spirits, so I don’t want to talk about His good aspects.

Sometimes I wonder if He didn’t have a choice.

Maybe He closed the pearly gates so that the walm couldn’t vacuum away all of the souls that He collected. Maybe He was afraid that His own soul would be taken away and turned into sillygo. Maybe He cries for the ones he left behind. Maybe He feels guilty.

Or — maybe His soul is already gone.

And that great rotting corpse up in the sky that was once our God, is staring at his great holy wall, shrugging his great holy shoulders.

With his great holy spirit vanished to oblivion.

The fight starts.

Neither of them do anything, staring statues, glacial. The krellian is unusually large, even for a krellian. Intense features. The crowd seems cheer-happy, excited, impressed by the dominating appearance of the krellian versus a very scared opponent, but I get bored. Neither of them move.

A krellian will not strike until his opponent strikes first, that is the moral thing to do if you’re krellian, and his opponent is too frightened to attack him.

In boredom, I ask Christian about what he said to Cecil as we were leaving the fried cake stand. “What did you mean? To oblivion.”

Christian thinks back.

He remembers. “Yeah, that’s where we’re headed.”

“Do you really think so?” I say.

“That’s what Satan said, didn’t he?”

The medieval one runs to the back of the krellian, but does not attack, still scared. The krellian doesn’t even turn around; he’s quick enough to turn and defend once his opponent’s sword is swung.

“Can you really believe Satan?” I ask him.

“There’s no reason for him to lie about this,” Christian says. “He has nothing to gain.”

“Maybe Satan just wants to have us work for free,” I say.

“I’d rather take the chance,” Christian says.

I nod.

“Satan’s not that bad of a guy,” Christian says. “He’s just a homosexual.”

I pause for a minute, finishing up my fried cake.

The fighting medieval one’s name is Sanders Sword Sunblanket, or S.S.S., also a friend of Cecil’s and is considered one of the better swordsmen here. Much better than Cecil. However, he thinks very highly of himself, BIG ego here, so BIG that he thought he could beat a krellian. Seeing a krellian now, he doesn’t think the same way.

“So you think we’re going to oblivion?” I ask.

Sanders runs around to the krellian’s front. Then he goes behind him again. Then to the front. Circling the stickman — motionless man, does not move, like a mantis, waiting for the man to strike, waiting to make its own strike.

“Of course,” Christian says, his eyes not leaving the fight for a second. “Unless the walm is destroyed, it will get us eventually. There’s only so many souls we can steal before our own souls are stolen, only so much. We’ll prolong the inevitable, and that’s okay. But someday, probably soon, we’re going to be emotionless, just like our parents.”

“You don’t seem too worried.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’d rather keep my soul, but if it happens, it happens.”

“But your soul is the most important part of you. Satan’s right about that. Without it, you’re absolutely nothing, a zombie, a flesh machine. And oblivion is the worst place you can ever go. Everything you ever did will be forgotten. You’ll have no future, no present, no past, no consciousness, nothing.”

“It’s still not that important,” Christian says. “Going into nothingness isn’t something you should worry about. If anything, it should be a worry-reliever. Your struggles, uneasiness, fears, bad times are all uplifted, erased. It’s the only true peace. It is like sleep without dreams, forever.”

I argue with Christian because I choose to fight oblivion as Satan does. Oblivion is the only enemy I have and I will not let it win. I think there is still hope for my soul. Maybe the walm will go away in time, or maybe I will be working with Satan forever. Either way, I will never give up, and never go into oblivion.

Sanders thinks about attacking. This thought is such a strong thought that it reaches the krellian’s mind, and the krellian thinks that Sanders is really trying to attack him. So he swings around and clubs the man in his forehead. Sanders completely startled by the stickman moving. And he is more startled by the movement than by his skull being broken indoors, and the blood tickling down his cheek and neck.

“Well, why don’t you go there now?” I ask him. “Without a past or present in your future, why live your life at all? Everything you’re doing here is going to be for nothing.”

“On your way to oblivion,” he says, “always take the scenic route.”

Christian smiles, watching the medieval one’s body as it is hauled away, trailing some roasty hot red, and a chunk of hard white…

Scene 9 The Trouble with Music

Rippington is facing an overpopulation crisis today. Word got out through the walm about the festival of war, which most races have heard is the greatest and most violent entertainment in the universe, and hundreds upon hundreds of people are piling into this (my) city every hour. And Satan speculates that all of these beings will take up permanent residence in this (my) world and so will not be returning through the walm.

I’m not positive how overpopulation is going to affect Rippington. There might not be enough food and water to support so many people; everyone is going to suffer. But I’m only afraid for my own suffering, selfish thing that I am, especially because I’m afraid of being inside of a large crowd. I am not normally claustrophobic. Being inside of a closet or a tiny room or a coffin doesn’t scare me, but inside of a crowded room or a crowded party puts me into a tornado-like panic. I’m not good with people other than my friends. People that go near me make me uncomfortable; they steal my air before I get a chance to breathe it.

This overpopulation is good for business though. All of Satan Burger is filled with beings on their way to the festival of war, getting some food for the long-long walk across town. And everybody has a soul to sell for a deep-fried grease-filled Satan Burger. I always have to explain to the customers what a Satan Burger is. I tell them, “It’s deep-fried in animal fat, which makes it crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside. And remember, they’re only two for the price of one.”

It is twilight now, but the outside still looks like morning.

I am working the register while Mort and Christian cook. All of us have to where a uniform of red shirts with red hats, and the hats have tiny red horns on the top, to make us seem more satanic.

The line is very dragging and I am the only person managing it. The register is rolling in my rolling vision, making it hard to find the right keys, swirl-whirling off the counter. I hear many complaints in many different languages — complaints that I’m not moving fast enough I’m sure. I go out of my body and into the line to see how I look: I am like a confused old man, hitting only one register key each minute, drugged up in a daze. I find it funny that everyone is so impatient to lose their souls.

Since nobody pays in money, you’d figure there would be no reason for a register — that’s what I was thinking yesterday and why I agreed to work the counter. But the register is used as a typewriter that writes down each customer’s order, and prints it up for the customer to sign. The signature is an approval for Satan to take the soul away from the customer after the soul leaves the body.

The customers are willing to trade their immortal souls for food. True, it’s the best tasting food ever created — so they say — but I wouldn’t trade my soul for anything. They do not know, however, know that they are to lose their souls immediately. Most of them think that they will go to hell after they die, which they don’t think is bad because dying doesn’t exist here anymore. But that’s not the way it works. Satan Burgers are so good that they make your soul lighter than air, and it floats out of your body and flies around the room.

Right now, Satan is chasing souls around the dining area, scooping them up with butterfly nets, placing them inside of a little tupperware container that says, in BIG black magic marker letters: H E L L

When a soul leaves a being, the being’s consciousness doesn’t completely leave with the soul, some of it stays with the corpse. The consciousness is made up of memories, thoughts, and emotions. After the soul leaves, the body keeps a little bit from each of these things. It gets the soul resin — the only energy that the majority of people have inside of them now. You can go on living with soul resin, but it won’t be any fun. The only real point to living when you’re in the soul resin state is to keep on living.

Before, when there were still gates open in heaven, when people were allowed to die, dead corpses would have soul resin still inside of them, left behind. Sure this resin would be useless, because the body doesn’t move anymore, but it could still be sensed by certain individuals that were born with the ability to sense creatures from the afterlife dimension.

Now that people can’t die, there are all kinds of undead beings drifting about, just like Gin. They are only undead because they still have their life-force. If something like the walm takes away their souls, they will no longer be undead. Their soul will go to oblivion and their zombie body will only have soul resin. And when a zombie has nothing but resin for a soul, it thinks: “The only real point to living is to keep on living. But since my corpse has no life to keep on living, I must go to my grave and fall into a deep, dark sleep.”

Sometimes, when you scream really-really loud, you can awaken the sleeping dead. This is the worst possible thing you can do to it. If a woken corpse is notably cranky, it might try to eat your brain to stop you from screaming. If you continue to scream after your brain has been eaten, the corpse will eat more of you until it is absolutely certain that you will not be capable of molesting its slumber anymore. This is how the brain-eating zombie stereotype originated.

Nighttime now, but it still looks like morning outside.

Satan has been playing some music on the stereo system. He calls it Satan Music, because he recorded the songs himself. It isn’t like anything I’ve heard before. Seems more like noise than music, but it is much different than the electronic noise that my band plays. Describing it is extremely difficult. Definitely something to be heard rather than heard about.

Basically, it is described as this: put every sound in the universe into one instrument and play a half-melodic tune, with a female vocalist who is being tortured and sexually gratified at the same time; also, throw twelve thousand stones at a single target without rhythm. The music is very intense and very loud, and gives you a feeling quite similar to the flu.

Before I met Satan, I knew of a certain type of heavy metal that was called Satan Music. This kind of Satan music was created in the eighties to make bands such as Iron Maiden and Dokken look like wimps. One of the first Satan music bands was called Venom. All the Venom fans would dress in black clothes and dye their hair black and let their faces go pale from lack of sun. This was all an attempt to look scary and vampiric, kind of like Vod.

In other words: VENOM = EVIL.

The music is very intriguing at first, but then it gets annoying after an hour and you just want to get away from it. I keep trying to get Satan to turn the music down, but Satan doesn’t ever listen.

I try sarcasm and say, “Satan, can you turn the music any louder?”

And he says, “No, that’s as loud as it gets.”

So I continue with nonstop soul-buying for another hour.

Eventually, business slows and the line thins. Then, all of a sudden, it’s all gone. No more orders. Only ten people left in the store, eating their food and losing their souls.

I exit my post and sit into a booth with a hot cup of orange-nut coffee, creamy blend. The music forces my temples to tighten up solid, vibrating my upper spine.

And then an explosion: “SATAN, TURN THE FUCKING MUSIC DOWN!!!”

A yell.

For the first time in years, I yelled. You could barely hear it over the music, but I yelled.

Satan agrees with my nodding head by nodding his head. He turns it down to a nice background score and says, “You’re right. Silence is in the parking zone again. It might hear us.”

“How do you know?” Christian asks, stepping out of the kitchen with one Newport cigarette on his tongue.

“No more customers,” Satan responds, lowering his Satan Music a touch more. “Silence either swallowed them up or scared them into the distance.”

“Why do you keep playing that music?” I ask Satan.

I drink down half my coffee and go to refill it. The tangy brown fluid whirls from the cup onto the floor.

“Music attracts customers,” Satan says.

“ Goodmusic attracts customers,” I say.

The last of the customers leave, the cigarette machine opens the door for them, to be eaten by the Silence.

“But I do play good music,” Satan argues, almost offended. “I wrote it.”

“It’s not good,” I say. “You’re music scares people. Especially me. The only thing it’s good for is making me sick.”

“Do you really think so?” Satan says, understanding voice. “This is the kind of music I’ve always found most appealing.”

“Actually,” Christian butts in, “I’ve heard some people say that they came here because of the music. They heard it from half a mile away, and they came to see what it was. They seemed really interested in it, until their souls fell out. Personally, I think the music’s unusual enough to be interesting. I think it actually does attract people.”

“Well, it makes me sick,” I say to Christian.

“Really?” Christian sits across from me. “I actually like it.”

Satan is happy with his music and turns it louder again. Not too loud, I can handle it at this volume for now. As he passes me on his way to the office, he flicks my shirt like a little kid, the red Satan Burger shirt, and the shirt becomes a demon, squiggling on my chest. It doesn’t seem to bother me.

I just notice that I’ve been a part of the past conversation. Normally, I don’t speak that much. And I never get into arguments or yell or complain like I just did. Also, the shirt that is now alive and squiggling on my torso usually would have put me in suffering, irritatingly squeamish.

Maybe I’m drunk right now, even though I don’t remember drinking anything. When I’m drunk, I say things without thinking. Drinking numbs you from your ability to reason. It makes you forget your own character and become a crazy. Maybe I am a crazy now; I’m going through so much chaos these days that reality is hard to grasp.

Or maybe all the sillygo, floating around in my oxygen, is making me go silly.

“Well, Gin’s not doing too good,” Christian says to me.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Still upset about his hand?”

“Not just his hand. Early today, when they were working, Satan accidentally touched him a few times, made more of Gin’s body parts alive. If this keeps up, Gin’s going to have nothing left that he can control besides his brain.”

I use my God’s Eyes to go see Gin.

He looks the opposite of well, sitting on his bed with Nan, trying to fall asleep, Nan brushing his hair away and holding him, like a concerned lover, something she’s never been to him before. Maybe she’s getting soft.

Breakfast is attacking Gin’s neck, trying to shake him up, but he ignores the hand. Gin’s eyes dribble back into his head, with some white on exhibition for the draft to parch. The room is lit by one candle, which is a symbol for Gin. He’s the type of person that romanticizes candlelit lifestyles, like the people before the electricity days, nights by the fire in the living room and just a candle for the bedroom. He says that candles make the world a droning softness, a falling whisper.

Gin’s new flesh-pets are asleep. They’re more upsetting to him than the hand, because they are more numerous. Now he feels his whole being has basically come to an end. It is just a vehicle for other creatures to live. One of them is his left shoulder, who he named Encyclopedia, another is his little finger, who he named Battery, and his right butt cheek, who he named Selenson. Selenson means Son of the Moon. Nan created this name for Gin; she says it’s never been used before.

Satan also patted Gin on the head, and made eight of his dreads alive. At this point, Gin wasn’t in the mood for naming any more body parts, so he calls them Medusa Hairs.

Richard Stein mentioned the Medusa to me. He said that she was a little woman in Houston, who could turn a little man into her slave, making him work his little butt all day long, just for her, just so she could take his money and buy herself things. This happened every time they stared deep into each other’s eyes. What the man saw was love, what the Medusa saw was money. After the man stopped earning enough money, the Medusa divorced him, leaving him broke and empty. Richard Stein said that his first wife was this Medusa, and she had snakes for hair.

Gin’s dreads are snakes now too, worming around in the candle flame, in the forehead of a dozen naked beings. I zoom my vision to see what the naked beings are doing inside of the candle’s flame.

They are a group of Firemites, beings made of energy, living in fire. They originally came from the surface of the sun, where thousands upon thousands of them live, swirling around in the BIG hot. Without fire, Firemites turn into one-dimensional shadow creatures that eventually die if they don’t find fire again, just as we would die without food. This is not a problem for Firemites on their home world, but it is to the ones that are in this candle now. Their sizes change with the size of the fire, a candle will make them tiny, a bonfire will make them man-sized. It may just be a rumor, but the Firemites are supposed to have highly intelligent societies on the sun, that we cannot understand. They don’t seem to be very intelligent to me right there in the flame. They seem rather primitive, moronic.

They gaze as a giant orgy of flames, rolling over each other, exchanging energy-like kisses, large fire cocks penetrating fire vaginas. The only thing that matters to firemites seems to be food and sex, which might be why they are considered so intelligent.

Gin and Nan fall into blissful sleep — the best thing in life — with Gin’s living body part pets, the dreadlocks wave-snaking inside the air, hissing like Medusa, and the family of Firemites are sweating in their orgy of food and sex, hoping the candle doesn’t burn out anytime soon.

When I go back inside my body, I see that Christian has left the room, went to the back of the kitchen, to be with someone more talkative. I totter to the employee section of the restaurant, to where Mortician is working.

Mortician is always the one doing all the work. He’s chopping vegetables and tomatoes now, while we sit on our asses. I think he’s only like that because it’s in his character to do work all the time, no matter what it is. He must keep busy so that he won’t get bored. And I know that once he stops working, his soul is lost. Soul resin won’t have interest enough to do work as obsessively as he does it now.

I hear Christian and Satan talking about the blue women and hurry my God’s Eyes inside with them. I can’t miss a conversation like this, not when the most beautiful creatures on Earth are involved. I still can’t get the face of that BIG-eyed blue woman passing through the festival out of my thoughts. I know Christian is as interested in them as I am. We will both go after them soon enough.

Satan describes the blue women like this:

They look a lot like humans, but they have red hair and what appears to be blue flesh. Their skin is really just white, just like Caucasian skin, but all the fluids underneath the skin are made of blue so the blue women appear to be blue. Actually, they’re much different than humans. On the insides, they’re more like machines, like the insides of clocks, with gears made of cartilage. They have both male and female sex organs in their mouths, and they reproduce by kissing: two blue women become impregnated by a long tongue-rubbing kiss. The sperm that ejaculates is more like lime juice than regular human sperm; very sour if you taste it.

Another reason why blue women smell like machines is that they don’t need to sleep, and instead of eating they run on fuel, a fuel that males produce. Actually, any male mammal produces the same fuel, and all types will do them fine, but human-like males are attracted to them and will get inside their vaginas without being forced. Blue women usually molest every male person or beast they can get their wiry fingers on, because they need to ingest the cum through their vaginas and into a certain gland that isn’t all that different from our stomachs. That’s why they still have sexual intercourse with. To men, it is sex; to blue women, it is food.

Sometimes the blue women carry diseases and give it to the males they sleep with, just like some mosquitoes give people malaria when they drink blood. It’s very dangerous to be around blue women because of these sexually transmitted diseases, mostly because they are irresistible to men. If one comes in contact with a hungry blue woman, there is no escape; even an old blue woman is irresistible. They must remain irresistible their entire lives, in order to attract males. They grow up to full maturity when they are two years old and die at the age of two hundred, before their bodies grow too withered and smelly to attract men. During their two years of childhood, blue women molest animals, forcing the mammals to ejaculate into their vaginas by handling or sucking their sexual organs.

Blue women are also mute. They only speak to each other telepathically, and they have no vocal chords at all. The only sound that comes out of their throats are soft breaths, and smacking lip vibrations. Other than that, they are as silent as a landscape painting.

“Leaf?”

I hear Mortician calling to my body; my mind is in the next room.

“Leaf, could you take out the trash for me?” he says.

I look over at him, dizzy from the mind-body transaction. I don’t say anything.

“That one over there,” he says, pointing his knife at an orange garbage bag.

I tie it up and take it out to the thick-greased dumpster behind Satan Burger, out into the fresh-sober morning. Another cigarette machine hostess, not the one at the entrance, opens the backdoor for me. It’s the employee cigarette machine, made for employees to buy cigarettes conveniently on their cigarette break, on their way outside. Since they’re free, I decide to take a pack. I was never a smoker before — I never cared enough to start smoking — but it’s all right to now. The worst smoking could do is kill me, and dying isn’t something to be afraid of.

I buy a pack of Carlton’s, which were always considered one of the low-tar brands of cigarettes, very sophisticated too I think. I’ve never tried them before, but I always said that they’d be my personal brand of cigarette if I became a smoker.

If everyone had not lost their soul, there would still be a BIG conflict between smokers and nonsmokers. Neither of the two groups would ever have given up until the entire country, or maybe even the entire world, was split into two parts: a smoking section and a nonsmoking section. Many of the people were neutral, like me, not smoking but not complaining about smokers. I hate the nonsmokers that complain. They’re the reason why I take the smokers’ side over theirs. Smokers always seem to be more down to Earth, not so uptight, not afraid to die.

The outside is still morning, infinite morning. Richard Stein always called the morning his cool blue lady. It was the only woman he ever truly loved.

I light a Carlton cigarette with an old book of matches I found under some newspaper wanderers, and fill my insides with acid-pleasant harshness. This harshness is what I enjoy from smoking; the nicotine doesn’t do much for me.

I look up the hill and see a swarm of scorpion flies, circling, no one is below them, except me, but I’m not worth eating. The scorpion flies find a nice cow and settle down with it.

The scorpion flies are buzzing closer than they should be, all wired in some sort of panic. Like something is wrong. Like disaster is going to happen.

Scene 10 Hog World

After the working day is considered fully cooked, and Mr. Satan is left within his cancer-breathing office counting his newly earned souls, licking chortles and rubbing himself with fruition, Mort, Christian, and Leaf, go out for a night of drinking and celebration. The celebration part is meant to stop boredom and make us happy. Without happy, the walm might steal our souls before our first paychecks come in.

We go to a pub called Hog World, around the side of the Tower Shops — the only business still open at night. It’s a dirt-sweaty place, but always filled with new and slosh-interesting people who always know to fun it up crazy.

The owners and most common customers of Hog World are of the Hoggian race, but we all know them as Hogs. They are the only race of people that brought their riches with them through the walm. They never go anywhere without their wealth, and were able to fit into Earthling society without difficulty. Hogs are actually the only wealthy people left in Rippington now. The original Rippingtonians are all poor or going poor, including those of us at the warehouse. The only income we have, besides life-force, is rent money from John and Satan, and we have to split that up four ways. We’re going to Hog World to blow the last of this money, but it is blowing to a worthy cause, so none of us are caring. It is, however, the last time we’ll be able to have this sort of fun, which is very ill-depressing. I try not to mull on it.

The walk from warehouse to Hog World is still carpety soft on my bare feet, and I have a constant need to say, “Oh, poor parasites,” over and over again, directing it toward the people on the streets, but I mean to direct it toward the rest of the world too. The alcohol has given Leaf some sense of disgust for all people, even the thousands of homeless around me. And I think it’s fun to be mean to them. They are, mostly, the ones responsible for ending happiness in this world, even their own happiness. So I say, “Oh, poor, poor, poor,” all the way to happy Hog World.

Hog World doesn’t let any parasites inside — they have no money and do nothing but steal oxygen. The Hogs charge ten dollars at the door, which isn’t that much considering it’s the smug-fanciest pub in town, but during these weeks ten dollars is BIG money, and wasting BIG money isn’t that terrible anymore. Money is an endangered species now.

They say, “Fifteen Dollars,” when we get to the door.

Face-fuckers, Christian whispers, but I just laugh, not very surprised. And there is a snarled crowd of starving people, watching us as we pay to go inside. A child with penis breasts cries into my thigh.

I just say, “Poor, poor parasites,” with a cold smile.

Richard Stein always said that the RICH are the scum of the world. He is wrong. In this world, we are all scum.

Inside is another one of these round-a-go crowds that I keep seeing into… too many people jolly-dancing in the waves of my vision…

God’s Eyes:

Above the crowd, a ceiling fan’s view, Christian, Mort, and my body walk through to the bar and sit down for some sticky goo-doo — a drink like honey with alcohol mixed in. A shoe spider is on the counter, pulling a small wagon of walnuts for the customers to handle and eat. Shoe spiders are much like hermit crabs, but they live inside of shoes instead of shells.

I take a walnut and put it inside my sticky goo-doo. Walnuts have strong flavor and taste good in thick drinks.

“Let’s get fucked in the ass!” Christian says, screeching a party call.

Christian is not as homophobic as Mort, and thinks it’s funny to talk like he’s a homosexual. But he wouldn’t have said anything if Satan had been around; Satan doesn’t realize that Christian only says these things when he’s drunk.

In other words: GETTING FUCKED IN THE ASS = PARTY.

Christian actually enjoys getting fucked in the ass — that is, if a girl is giving it to him with a strap-on dildo. He feels very homosexual for enjoying the performance and won’t tell any of his friends about it. Sometimes a girl will think peculiar thoughts of Christian when he asks her to take him in the behind. Sometimes a girl will become thrill-enflamed by the opportunity to take a man like men take her. Sometimes Christian masturbates with a dildo.

The shoe spider crawls back into his shoe.

“I’m getting laid tonight,” Christian burps.

He puts on his girl-maker face — a sly hollow. Then he turns the beams of his forehead on, scoping the room for a good score — a woman with six breasts maybe or one with more curves than a human girl would own. I only see two humans in here, females, sitting on the laps of Hogs, very RICH.

Hogs are a flabby sort of people. Not too ugly, but very unexercised. The women have large ears and unusually large breasts that bludgeon their sex opponents. Their eyes are speckled with purple and their clothes, ripped for style, expose the very pale, almost gray, skin underneath. The men are shorter than the women, stocky, BIG teeth in their smiles. They go, “Gar, gar, gar!” when they laugh.

Christian isn’t interested in a Hoggian though. He wants the girl with two sets of arms, sitting in the corner over there. She has a very attractive face, but no breasts. Smooth yellowish skin, sliming, which is why Christian wants her. His color is yellow this year. He goes to her without telling us, a man-sly walk to her and she actually seems interested in it. Well, maybe she’s just happy that somebody is interested in her. She looks very lonely.

Now it’s just me and the Mortician. Drinking…

I decide to get very drunk, not just normal drunk like I usually am. I want to drink like it’s the end of the world, which it might be. Where the world ends, hell begins… at least in the traditional sense of the word hell.

I drink some sticky goo-doo and wash it down with common Earth gin. Mortician neck-dribbles the gin after me, garbling about his philosophy on life.

“That’s how every day should be,” he says, Japanese accent thicker than usual. “You just work all day and get drunk all night.”

“What about weekends?” I ask.

“You get twice as drunk on them.”

“Great philosophy,” feeling the buzz stab deep inside.

He slicks back an oil-stiff drink, hard on his chest. “Goes down like a cactus.” He hasn’t been speaking in his pirate accent today. I don’t wonder why, but I’m glad.

“Speaking of philosophy,” he says, making me cringe. “Did you read any Sorpon Black?”

“Sure.” I don’t get excited. Philosophy is an ugly

color, especially when you’re drinking.

“What do you think about him?” Mortician asks.

Mort is BIG on philosophy. Always gaming for debates during the drinking times, his way of socializing. He does this with religion too, and politics, and food selections. But Mort is more into the arguing part than the deep-thinking part. And Mort is never able to start up debates with enough people these days since nobody believes anything sacred enough to argue over.

As for Sorpon Black, he was an oldtime hippie philosopher, whose deep-thinking came out of his ample supply of repressed sexual energy. Old Sorpon never had sex a day in his life, not even with himself, and he was an extremely attractive guy. But very bitter. The reason why he never had sex was because he was afraid of his own penis. He couldn’t handle the way it slunk-stickered in his shorts, so sensitive when rubbed against his thigh. To make matters worse for him, his penis was unusually BIG. It was five and a half inches larger than mine, and my penis isn’t considered small — at least for my height.

The sick-scary part for Sorpon was the erection. When erect, there’s nothing a man can think about other than his penis, whether he’s sitting at work or playing a basketball game or fully-engorged within a woman’s vagina. When Sorpon was in elementary school, he would scream blood-shrieks while watching his erection grow and grow and grow to the unbearable maximum. It was like a poisonous salad snake had been dropped in his lap.

This phobia came from a childhood mind-molestation, at the age of six, when his very nice neighbor taught him how to perform oral sex and anal sex by showing him homosexual pornography. But the neighbor never performed these sexual techniques on him. He just liked to mess up the insides of young brains. Experiencing this kind of thing as a child will definitely mess up the insides of your brain. It will either discourage you from being intimate with anybody when you grow up, or it will throw you into the opposite direction: nymphomania for females, andromania for males.

But Sorpon Black’s philosophies had nothing to do with his enormous cock. They had to do with the intelligence of sandwiches.

“I don’t think anyone really believes that sandwiches are the creators of the universe,” I tell him. “Sorpon Black was just trying to be entertaining.”

“Hardly,” Mort says. “It all makes sense because sandwiches are made from all four food groups. And if you compare the four food groups to the four elements, they are relatively the same idea. And if the four elements were layered together like a sandwich, you would create a god. Therefore, sandwiches are gods. Don’t you agree?”

“I guess,” I shrug. Not actually interested. Like most philosophies, Sorpon’s theory is worthless to argue against. And I am not one for arguing.

“You’re not a deep thinker, are you?” He realizes my lack of enthusiasm.

“I was into deep thinking when I was a kid, but then I grew up,” I say, insulting his use of the word deep.

“Are you saying philosophy is immature?”

“Basically,” I tell him. “To most people, philosophies are just common sense.” Then I get personally mean — I’m in an odd mood I guess. It’s fun to be mean. “People like you don’t have common sense, so philosophies seem new and interesting to you, but you don’t realize that they’re not at all new. Only to the immature.”

Mortician tries to speak, but I cut him off — the first time I have ever cut anyone off. “Mature people don’t need to question the world they live in, because they’ve already figured it out.”

Mort grins at me. “So you think you’ve figured out everything about reality?”

“Not really, but I’ve figured out that nobody can prove any philosophy theory, so they’re useless. Nobody’ll ever know the complete truth, so there’s no reason to worry or argue over petty beliefs. The only groobly thing about Sorpon Black’s philosophies is that every single one revolves around sandwiches, and I love sandwiches.”

“You’re such a philosophy-bashing philosopher,” he says.

I am insulted, of course, because he’s right. I never expected Mortician to call me a philosopher — he’s more perceptive than I thought he was. But I’m happy to be insulted. It’s a surprise that the emotion is still within me. Maybe arguments are good things after all.

I switch the subject. “What do you think about our situation?”

“What?” he says. “You mean living forever? Sounds boring to me.”

“We won’t last forever here,” I say. Our lives might be longer than those already dead from history, but those from history have souls that are eternal. They are the ones who will live forever.

I chug some HOT liquid.

The drinking is killing the poor mood I was in. Taking me from hating things to loving things, and I smile.

Mortician says, “Yeah, the situation we’re in is not good at all, but you have to look on the bright side as I do. Think about how everyone else in the world are all zombie-like. All gone. Thousands of soulless bodies wondering the Earth.” Brains like pillows. “And we are fine. We have lives and each other. We have responsibilities and fun.”

I nod at him, scratching my drink.

“We are the luckiest people in this world. I mean, we still have a chance. I don’t want to live like this forever, but it’s better than nothing.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I say. “Because I’m positivethat we’ll be nothing before the end of forever.”

“Not me,” Mortician says. “I’m sure there will be a way out someday. If we hold onto our time and work at Satan Burger, eventually the walm will be gone. Eventually, there will be a new world.”

A new world.

I take my God’s Eyes to Christian and the four-armed yellow girl he has with him. She seems to be all over his skin, in a slut-ticking frenzied way. The skin leaks a little yellow on him; paint smearing across his neck and face, but it’s a sort of grease that seeps through arm-pores. A reaction similar to sweat, but only produced during fornication.

I examine her closely. One pair of arms is human-sized but the other is longer and closer to the hips. The longer arms come thoroughly around Christian’s waist section, tugging him into her possession. Her eyes have only one color in them: red. Her lips are thin and curled at the end. Christian digs his taster deep between those rubber lips and he seems happy. Well, I would be too if I was with a creature as beautiful as her.

When I was a kid, my parents always told me to only marry inside my own race, but I didn’t find much fun in that. I always wanted Asian women or African women or the Hispanic ones or any of them that didn’t seem to have boring Caucasian skin. I also believe that the melting pot that is America is really going to melt all of us people-ingredients into one product. ONE RACE. That isn’t black nor white, but a grayish mud-color. Because people fuck an awful lot and eventually don’t care who they are fucking.

Of course, fucking is an endangered performance like everything else now, so Americans will never be gray. But there’s a new melting pot in Rippington and there will be a lot of interracial fucking going on. I doubt that this will result in the melting to one color; there’s just too many races to mix.

When I was young, I liked to drop a cluster of colors into a paint bucket and watch them swirl around and into each other, color-motley, moving, LOUD. And I kept swirling and swirling and swirling to see what spatter-storm of colors I would come up with, but in the end there was only one color and it was a murky purple-brown-puke that was very boring to look at.

I always thought that the only way to end racial prejudice was to melt us all down to one color, but now I think that God created racial prejudice so that his colorful paint bucket would not turn into a single, boring race.

Mortician is talking about a theory of his, so I go back to my corpse. He’s talking about the new world that the walm people will make if the walm ever disappears.

“It’ll be a shitty place at first,” Mort says. “Too many races will produce a BIG ethnic war, and the race with the most people will probably be the first in power. Of course, slavery will definitely come back. The humans are perfect slaves. They won’t put up a fight without their souls, no complaints, and they’ll last forever now that they can’t die. New governments all over the world. Different races will take over different territories. And there will be wars for land and religion as usual. The whole world will be a new place and the only memory of human civilization will be on the blank stares of the human zombie faces, working like machines until the end of it all.”

“Do you think that we’ll be made into slaves too?” I ask.

“Probably… but hopefully not.”

I leave the conversation and go back to peeping at Christian’s situation. The idea Mort has put into my head is very disturbing and I want to ignore it. I don’t want to be a soulless person, but it’ll be hard to be a slave with a soul, especially if I last forever. But there’s always hope. And hope is what I am counting on.

Christian is really getting wet with this girl. He’s drunk and laughing at/with her, biting on her lip and shoulder. Her stomach is hard with muscle, but she doesn’t seem like the muscular type. More fragile. Christian licks her fragile parts.

Creeper-hands caress to her breasts. The breasts aren’t BIG at all. They’re more like flabby pockets. Almost all races have breasts, no matter how unusual they look. I guess her race is one of the few that don’t.

Since there are no breasts for Christian to feel, he goes into her condom-like skirt and heads for the pubic region, and she reaches into his slacks and heads for his.

The two faces flash with alarm… then disgust…

And the girl’s boyfriend — or maybe he’s her ex-boyfriend — appears behind Christian. Time for a pummeling. I don’t realize what’s going on until I see the male species with very large muscles and large breasts — female breasts — and so I seep into the girl’s underwear to make sure. I find a penis inside.

The gender characteristics are the other way around in this race. The males are the soft pretty things. And the women are the diesel beasts, hard and tough — men with breasts and vaginas.

Both Christian and the girl-male he’s been sexing up begin spitting out each other’s flavor. Christian smacks the boy across his face, grinding his teeth and crazed…

All the people around him are rage-laughing. Music starts up as the power-large woman takes Christian off of her man and throws him into a band of dancing Hogs. And Christian drunk-chuckles at the manly woman, who won’t fight Christian anymore. She knows he is a man, and in her race gentlewomen don’t hit men, no matter how ugly they are.

Christian is slurped into a breaker of dancing Hogs. The hogs wrench him onto their shoulders and flaunt him around the scope. We are the RICH and deserve to get crazy with joy, because we can afford it. Christian, in his dirt-rich suit, gaggles at me. Screaming, “Come on, come on.” And I’m pulled in with Mortician and a bunch of other Hoggians. Into the carousal.

Then the whole pub becomes a fury of movement, with food drippling from Hog chins, drunken women ripping off their clothes and showing off sweaty pale bodies, and everything in the room becomes a crowd of moisture, an orgy without sex. Pure indulgence. The music drive-piercing the ecstasy. Laughing screams. BIG smile across Christian’s face. BIG, BIG smile…

A Hoggian woman with wicked eyes pours some liquor down my corpse’s throat, molesting my stomach while I’m out of my body. I go back to gorge into her, but she’s already gone to the next man. So the body tours into the sweaty food carts that usher the shuffle-prancing mob, with several other Hogs, scoop-pressuring the pies and meats into my mouth. I’m not hungry. I do it for fun. And I gobble so fast that I don’t even enjoy it, but that’s not the point. Then I dunk my face into a bowl of fruit liquor, flogging bubbles. My wetness drizzles inside the liquid.

Next: body twitchings, I throw the cart over and cackle into the Hogs that were eating there. They laugh with me, hopping on the wasted larder — a joyous performance.

And the Hog World dance takes me over again, sweeping my conscience away, away… Drifting with my rolling life, my round-a-go crowd. Spin-happy, Mort and Christian take to the top, pouring me onto a balcony with a round-faced belly woman packaged around me, sinking into my skin like so much butter, warm. I stand whooping with her at my waist, dizzy-balancing, smiling. She’s very pleasurable against my skin, though a half-ugly race for the most part.

Then, up here above the crowd, I stare out whirlpool. Looking on the bacchanal-tingle, on the RICH indulging faces. I smirk.

Beyond the happy crowd, I gleam the outside windows, where hundreds of parasites have gathered, smoldering eyes tearing into me, faces pressed against the glass. Poor, poor, poor. I put an end to my smile and go inside my head. At this time, the parasites have sadness and we have happiness.

If all of us were to agree to let them in they would have some of our happiness, but we would get some of their sadness, and we would all be at the same level of emotion. However, we would be compromising our happiness to end their sadness, which is not appealing to us, even though it is the even thing to do.

After the moment for pitying the poor slips away, I go back to the fun. It was a good, fair idea for me to come up with, but since I’m at the TOP and want to keep my happiness and my luxury, I’m willing to sacrifice the poor ones to the cold.

Richard Stein always said that nobody deserves to live in the cold. But right now, I really don’t seem to care.

Scene 11 Another Day in Oblivion

Today, when I wake up with my brain squishing into the back of my skull — Hog World gave me a nasty hangover, with some sour muscles and a bruise — I decide that I’m inside of oblivion instead of reality. I have said oblivion is the worst place in the world to be, but it is okay when you are only pretending. While you are nothing, there’s not much to worry about. And doing without worry is the best possible thing I can do for myself.

I say:

“I am in nothing.”

This is a very relaxing thing to say. All my nerves trickle right out of me, because nothing has no nerves at all. I wrap my whole corpse in a cocoon of blankets, pressing my skin into a small comfort. Only my face feels the fingering draft.

I decide to sleep like this all day, going in and out of actuality. There is nothing more important than being in a dream world when the conscious world is horrible as it is. Christian comes in and out of my closet/room every half hour to see if I’m up for some ugly fun, but I tell him that I’m having all the fun I need for today.

Christian whines and leaves, back to watching old reruns on the pawnshop television. I don’t need to explain why they only play reruns on television. There hasn’t been a new show for at least three years, which is why I only watch Battlestar Galactica. Christian watches Hart to Hart and The A-Team. Sometimes, while Christian watches The A-team, I wonder if Mr. T is like the rest of the world — boring and emotionless. Christian thinks it isn’t possible for Mr. T to get boring, because Mr. T is a national icon, and should’ve been the messiah instead of Jesus Christ.

I remember that I’m supposed to be in oblivion and not allowed to be consciously aware of the terrible things in the world, such as Mr. T losing his soul. I try to empty my mind. Then I let my eyes put me back into the sleep world again.

Inside of sleep world, I decide I am a butterfly that gets raped by a dragonfly girl in midair. Then a frog slurps us both up and its stomach acids dissolve us as she continues her sexual assault. The dream lasts for about two seconds and then weaves into one where I am five aristocrats eating a sausage.

At work, it isn’t so easy to pretend I am in oblivion. I can’t work the register if I’m nothing, it’s just not possible. I decide that only my mind is in oblivion — only because I have decided that — and my corpse is a mindless zombie that can still perform simple zombie tasks like typing and passing out food. Hopefully, the rolling world doesn’t make me remember I am Leaf, spilling me into the real world, which is where I don’t want to be.

The early shift — Gin, Nan, and Vodka — is still here. Leeching at a BIG rounding table with Satan, drinking storm-warnings and eating beer chips. Apparently they’re not interested in going home for the night. Instead, they want to get drunk-happy and be party maniacs all tonight inside of the Satan Burger, while the rest of us work.

But, since I am nothing, I don’t care to mind them now. Mort, on the other hand, complains, as usual, about the usual. If he isn’t making fun, nobody should be making fun. But I don’t blame Mortician for his bitchy attitude; it’s in his character to act that way. Without his bitching, he would be as boring as the rest of the world.

Mort hammers at some syrup ants who have invaded his kitchen. Syrup ants are a very pesky type of ant. They are BIG like fingers and have large butts filled with syrup. In the world they came from, people would squeeze the syrup from their butts and put a collection into bottles. On the label of these bottles would be the words: “Syrup Ant Syrup,” with a BIG cartoon syrup ant smiling away as his syrup-butt poops on a stack of pancakes. However, on their planet, pancakes are made from sawdust, because flour doesn’t exist there, not to mention that wood is one of their four basic food groups instead of breads and cereal.

As he hits them, their butts explode and a pool of syrup occurs, getting his counter goo-sticky. Tiny drops of the sweet juice slop onto his wrist skin, pasting the hairs together. And nothing frustrates Mort more than having pasty wrist hairs.

Mortician decides there isn’t time to bother with the ants and sends a demon stapler and a demon meat cleaver after them. These objects have never eaten syrup ants before, but they are willing to try anything with syrup in its butt. At first, the demons chomp at the air, spinning in circles, unsure how to work their invisible legs. Once they learn the how to move, however, they gobble up the pests no problem. Exploding the ants in their metal jaws, leaves the counter a gooey mess. Mort continues his working and bitching.

I come out of oblivion and hear this:

“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU TOUCH HIS PENIS FOR?”

I see Nan in an argument with Satan. In my rolling vision: three stretched figures like radio wax, melting into each other with their screams at each other. There are three distinct voices: Satan’s is calm, Gin’s is a choking cry, and Nan’s is a hysteric shriek, like a mother whose seen her child ruined.

“I didn’t touch it,” Satan replies, shaking his head childishly.

Nan unzips and drops Gin’s pants to reveal a dancing worm, “Then how the hell did it come alive?” she says. The worm wiggles excitedly. Its mouth has developed from Gin’s pisshole and Gin’s bladder is now its stomach sack, two small eyes on the sides of its head, quite like a snake’s.

“I’m sorry,” Satan says. “I couldn’t help myself. You know, it’s not easy being the only gay person left. I have urges that are hard to resist.”

“Well, you better resist,” Nan argues. “Gin is mine. And he’s not like you. Only I can touch him in that way. Why can’t you stop touching him? You’re turning him into a freak. Why can’t you leave him alone?”

“I didn’t think he’d mind,” Satan says.

Nan seems more upset by the situation than Gin, shouting and mewling like it’s her penis and not Gin’s. Actually, that’s basically the truth. Gin and all his parts are Nan’s personal property, somewhat like a slave’s parts would be. When Gin is looking shabby or unclean, Nan will order him to shower and put on fresh clothing. Until now, I never realized that she had complete control over him. I always thought Gin was a free-spirited guy who refused to be held down. But things are clearing. I don’t know if Gin has become this way recently, just after his death, or if he’s always been like this and I just never realized it. Maybe he’s losing soul, losing his will to resist her commands. If I was in his shoes, I would give up hope altogether. Maybe I’d even embrace oblivion — the real oblivion.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with a living penis?” Nan says, shaking Gin’s penis around. “It’s not going to work right. I need a real penis, not a snake attached to Gin’s body.”

Satan doesn’t seem to care. He says, “I don’t care.”

“You better care!” Nan yells. “You keep touching and touching and touching but you don’t take responsibility for the things you make alive. You better figure out a way to put him back to normal.”

Satan shrivels his lips. “There’s a person who can lift a demon spirit out of an object. But I haven’t spoken to him in years.”

Satan goes on to talk about his twin brother. He is supposed to look exactly like Satan, but his complexion is pale and he’s not a homosexual. And just like Satan, his touch is magical. But instead of a touch that makes things alive, his touch makes things dead.

He has the touch of death.

And the man’s name is Death.

Satan and Death were both created to perform specific jobs in the world. Death’s job is to touch people when they are supposed to die, making up some ridiculous cause for each death. Sometimes he touches people to give them a heart attack, sometimes a car accident, sometimes a bullet in the head; it all depends on what seems reasonable to Death at the time. Sometimes Death screws up and gives a little girl a heart attack, or once he had a young mountain climber who was falling to his death die of natural causes. One of the world supervisors (those angels in blue suits, red ties) got on top of Death’s case for that one, and suspended him for three months. During the three months that Death wasn’t working, nobody died.

Satan’s job is to collect and separate the souls from the people that Death touches. He puts them into two groups: good and evil. The good souls are the ones that the rest of the universe can use, so they’re sent to heaven to be processed. The evil souls are either recycled and used for soul-fueled machines like the walm, or Satan keeps them in hell.

Satan and Death haven’t spoken to each other in years. They never really got along. Death thinks that homosexuality is unacceptable. So unacceptable that he created a disease called AIDS to make men think twice before having sex with other men. Death was almost suspended again; once his supervisor found out that he was being discriminatory on the job. But there were people that needed to be killed, so Death only got a decrease in pay. And to make things right, Death had to make the AIDS virus just as common in straight sexual relations as it was in gays.

“Death has no prejudice,” was once a very popular catch phrase, but it was obviously written by a man who had never shared company with Mr. Death.

The catch phrase was meant to scare people away from dying. It didn’t work. People were still becoming dead.

“So your brother can make him normal?” Nan asks Satan.

“I don’t know. I don’t speak to him anymore,” Satan replies.

Christian decides to make a fort underneath one of the tables. He can’t work ten minutes without taking a twenty minute break. The engineers that made Christian did not take durability into consideration. They just molded and bolted him up in the cheapest way possible and shipped him here. So you can’t really hold Christian accountable for his laziness.

Christian’s fort is designed to prevent industrious people from verbally assaulting him while he relaxes inside of it. The design doesn’t work, though, and unfortunately, he’s too lazy to try and fix it.

Which is why this discussion takes place:

Satan complains to him, “Get back to work. I don’t pay you to sleep and make table forts.”

Christian says, “Screw off. You don’t pay me at all.”

Satan says, “You won’t get any souls if you don’t work for them.”

“I don’t care. What do I need souls for?”

“Don’t be an idiot.”

“Go to hell.”

“I’m going to fire you.”

“I’m going to kick you out of the warehouse.”

“I’m serious.”

“I’m serious.”

“No, I’m more serious.”

“I’m 150 percent serious.”

“I’m infinity percent serious.”

“I’m going to punch you in the stomach.”

“I’m going to punch me in the stomach too.”

The argument continues but nobody wins.

I take my break from work — and oblivion — outside and decide to smoke another Carlton, pissing out by the dumpster which coughs at me in disgust. For some reason I feel good. My eyes rolling, breathing in the cold air and then some of Carlton’s temperament. Nicey thinkings run wild inside my blood. Sharp emotions. I look up to the clouds — an attractive day, even with life so glummy and sick.

Then I see a storm on the horizon. Headed this way. Blue lightning bolts with curvy rounds, like noodles, and instead of raining water, I see it will rain madness.

The storm will go for eighteen days, not stopping until everything is wet and insane. A blubbery storm. I can smell its odor from here. My eyes open and then close a few times.

In the background, the walm licks its fleshy lips with anticipation, hungry for the force that makes men move.

Scene 12 Pleasure Features

The window still says that dawn is coming. It’s getting very old. It’s been saying that for three days now, nonstop, without saying anything else, like “What’s for breakfast?” or “Look at all the people in the street.”

The window says, “The dawn is coming! The dawn is coming!” But nobody is listening anymore.

I’m still on break, ignoring the windows, pretending to be in oblivion instead of in Satan Burger. Thinking a blank wall, drinking some black caffeine, echoing a tap with my heel.

Ogling a table:

The table flat and square, colorless. It doesn’t breathe very much. Demons can go long periods of time without oxygen, like dolphins, but dolphins are much smarter than this table, so they shouldn’t be compared — especially since dolphins are very prejudiced against tables.

The table gets me thinking about a world that Christian has heard about, where almost everything is cubic.

This cubic world is made out of wood, carved from a branch of a universe tree.

There’s a forest of these trees that lives in the center of the universe. The sole purpose is to grow wood for planet-building. Each tree stretches into the tall of space, dark spider-crawling trees rooted inside planets that are three times larger than Earth’s sun. The trees only need starlight to grow.

Nobody lives in the forest except for the forest creatures and the forest ranger, who guardians the trees from brigands and comets. He inhabits a hut-like creature that lives inside of a dead star, drinking moonshine made from a moon. Besides protecting the forest, he chops branches down for the wood merchant, who comes around every Erdaday.

The wood merchant sells the wood to the world-makers, who carve planets from it and sell the planets to gods. The gods put them into orbits and make the planets alive if they want to. The world-makers don’t always make their worlds out of wood, because wood isn’t very durable and needs to be replaced every three thousand centuries. But it is the quickest and easiest way to make a planet. If I was a world-maker I would only build my planets with wood. That way, gods would need new worlds every three thousand centuries, and I wouldn’t have to worry about going out of business.

One time, a world-maker who liked to create wood worlds decided that he would make a bunch of square planets instead of round ones, trying to be more creative than his competitors. He found only one god interested in owning square planets, and the god filled an entire system with them, not a single one being round.

On one of the planets, the god created people out of cubic shapes to live there. These people ate square food and drank square water in square glasses. And there were square mountains that would get square rain that would drain into square lakes where square fish would swim around and eat square waterbugs then poop them out in square little turds.

And when the square version of Christopher Columbus tried to prove the world was round, he fell off the edge of the planet into the sun.

“Let’s go outside,” Christian says, trying to make the best of our lunch hour.

I agree, even though I should already be done with my break.

Time to end the boredom that work has brought, before our souls go away completely. Satan says that boredom has nothing to do with losing soul, but I don’t believe him. I don’t think the walm will steal a soul from an interesting person filled with life. It prefers easy prey, like my boring parents.

Outside, padding down steps, the Silence seems to have left a warm presence behind, and there is another lifeless calm. The street is empty, but it will soon fill up with new people. Overpopulation is really starting to show in the city — especially around the warehouse — since yesterday’s festival. None of the peoples that attended the festival ever left, so now we have a city full of homeless oblers, aphids, kruuty pods, gobbobops, strik pickies, krellians, hontolos, muckies, turtle nesters…

“Where should we go?” I ask him, as the sky melts like candles and drip-drips onto the empty parking lot’s swirly-thing.

“I’ve got a place.”

Christian smiles and I follow him, up for anything.

We go silently, trying to avoid Silence. The streets remain lifeless-calm the whole way to there. It must have been a BIG feeding today, taking dozens of new ones out of the population and into its belly.

Christian seems to be slinking as we go, only half-excited at the exciting thing he wants to show me. I’m noticing that Christian’s soul is losing him today. Maybe he’s just hungover like me. He isn’t the same as he was yesterday, rowdy at Hog World, but even at Hog World he wasn’t as soul-filled as he was the day before. I can’t tell if the others are losing soul. But it shows with Christian. He was always vigilant and aflame, even hungover, without giving one minute to depression, but now he’s a drone-slinking downer.

And even though I am positive my best friend is dropping his soul, I don’t seem to really care. Am I losing soul too? Or am I just losing concern for other people?

We arrive to The City of Scrap Metal — Christian’s destination. Darker inside than the morning street that we are on. An infesting darkness.

A sign on the gate tells us, “Yard of the Autocars.”

A trillion tons of speckled metal meat stacked in piles of piles, into skyscraper buildings. Half eaten by the rust parasites, all in the sweating dirt yard, where the children live, where automobiles are left to die, left to suffocate.

All the poor autocars…

Living like the dead, every day in a painful festering heap. They can feel every second of time tearing at them, breaking them down to ruins. There’s no gas or oil or passengers for the cars to eat. They are left to cannibalism. They eat the other autocar corpses: cars that are too damaged, cars with broken arms and legs, devoured by the stronger trucks. And the people come everyday to pick at them, stealing pieces of their brains and insides, taking the last of the good parts and leaving them with rotten metal oddities and the rat-infested seats.

But the poor autocars try to tell themselves that the parts will help other cars, even though their selves will remain in the autocar yard, suffering and dying.

And all the little autocars cry out: “Why can’t they just crush us?”

And the elder autocars answer: “Don’t worry, eventually they will.”

Richard Stein said that he cried every time he passed an autocar yard. Now I understand why. It’s a graveyard for the not-quite-dead. And all of the metallic body parts whirl me dizzy-sick and disgusted.

“Why’d you bring me here?” I ask Christian, sick and hunched, drooling in the center of the lanes of Autocar City’s main street.

But he doesn’t have to answer. I see her. It’s the same blue woman I saw at the festival, the one with BIG eyes and deep red hair. Still naked but not dirty. As beautiful as a machine.

She’s coming to get her food. Two others join the advance. One is short and very thin, with short hair and large breasts, and the other has straight hair and Asian eyes, breasts perky but small.

The blue women seem to have the power to lure us to them, melding our minds to theirs, communicating with emotions rather than words. I find that the short-haired one is the oldest, almost a hundred years. The others are just children. One is seven and the other, who is my girl, is only four. Despite their ages, they all look their twentysomething prime. The youngest one comes running to us, childishly.

“I get the first one,” Christian says, meaning my BIG-eyed blue woman.

“Fuck you,” I tell Christian, very strongly, with all my steel-jagged emotions. That’s all I need to say to back him away from her.

I know that the girl is only a four-year-old. It sickens me if I compare her to a human four-year-old. But I can’t let it bother me. They’re from a different world, where sex is as common and no-big-deal as going to the bathroom. And, strangely, her immaturity makes the attraction stronger. She is innocence. Full of life.

When she arrives to me, all she does is leer into my eyes. Sucking all of my power into her possession. If she asked me to go into oblivion right now, I would do it for her. I would put on chains and be her food slave, a cow in a dairy farm. Sex slave to a four-year-old.

She puts out her hand and embraces mine. A slight smile on her face, childish, biting the corner of her lip in a mechanical way. Her fire eyebrows curl, and I’m sucked into her BIG pools again. Swimming in shiny blue-emotions.

And now I know I’ll actually get to taste a little while of this perfect creature.

As Christian tries to figure out how to get them back to our warehouse, I notice two small words printed on the blue woman’s stomach.

They say, “Pleasure Features,” with five arrows pointing at her pleasure parts: her mouth, butthole, both breasts, and her vagina.

Scene 13 Frog Crimes

We decided to have lots and lots of greasy sex with the blue women instead of going back to droming work, Mortician probably shitting his pirate pants right now — all of his anger drooling out the back, down his legs. He won’t forgive us.

I said lots and lots of sex, but I didn’t personally get lots and lots. I only got a little. The blue woman was so hungry that she shoved my shank inside her and made me cum in less than two minutes. And one spurt was enough to fill the four-year-old up. The best two minutes of my grim life probably, but a disappointment afterwards.

Christian, on the other hand, is lasting, getting sexed inside and out and all around his room, grunt-thrashing against the walls, trying to please the two beasts he has with him. But it’s more like them trying to please themselves. BIG hunger. BIG crash-noises and screams. The blue women can’t really scream, but their mouths can make a whistling sound. And they make him feel cheap.

I decide to peak in on them.

God’s Eyes:

My vision doesn’t come across right once it goes inside. Too much drum-movement, and a strobing light that Christian bought at a pawnshop four years ago goes pity-pity-pity-pity. A broken zoo of water creatures attacking a cloud person, shifting around each other for a comfortable screw. And the screwing works like batter-pulp, water sifting through hairs, going Mmmmmmmm…

It all frustrates me. I go back to my corpse, to my blue woman, who seems very bored and agitated. She just stares at my self, says nothing, just stares. Eye-gazing and I am too shy to handle looking back at her, drinking on a cup of brandy.

Peripheraly, I offer her some of my liquor. “Do you want a drink?” Then I realize she’s only four. “Oh, nevermind. You’re underage.”

I feel like such a pedophiliac.

When the two blue women are done with Christian, they brush off some wetness from their smooth blue skin, curling sight, and then they depart. Leaving two things behind: One is my young blue woman, still staring at me without blink; the other is the performance of shutting the door behind them, which exposes us to a large gang of tree frogs, who are in the act of fleeing from something, like criminals.

“Why didn’t she leave?” Christian asks, gesturing to the blue woman.

Croaking frogs.

I shrug and he squats down on a milk crate next to me. Half-shaking from his fierce workout, he befriends a freshly lit cigar.

He says, “They’re like cockroaches.”

“Who?” I ask. “The frogs?”

“No, the blue women. They’re disgusting.”

Alarmed, I drink some brandy. “What…”

“Cecil was right. They’re dirty, disease-ridden whores. Disgusting.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tell him, upset but not showing any emotion. “I like my blue woman.”

“She’s not leaving.” He looks at her — sitting there, staring at me. “What are you going to do with her?”

“I don’t know, keep her in my room,” I say.

“That’s disgusting.”

“Why do you hate them so much?” I drink. “They are so innocent.”

“That’s why I hate them. They are innocent. Innocence is disgusting.”

“That’s kind of a harsh statement,” I say. “What do you hate about it?”

“I just hate it. I hate kids, I hate retards, I hate idiots. Simple minds are boring as hell and I hate being around them. Innocence is just a nice word for ignorant, and I hate the ignorant.”

“Stupid people can’t help being stupid,” I tell him and take a sip.

“I don’t care. Stupidity is evil.”

“Evil? Calling innocence evil is what’s evil.”

“Children used to be considered pure evil once — born evil — because of their ignorance. Their parents would have to beat the evil out of them on a daily basis, so that they would not be evil in adulthood. That’s why children are so cruel to other children and to animals and so on, because man is born from evil. That’s also why the only adults that are prejudiced and mean are the ignorant ones, who are too stupid to grow out of their childhood attitude.”

Christian puffs on his cigar. The blue woman watching the wheels churn in my brain.

“I don’t get it,” I tell him. “People used to beat ignorance out of their children? Those people sound like the ignorant and evil ones to me.”

“If I had kids I’d beat the evil out of them.”

“Well, you better not make kids then.”

Richard Stein always said that children came from good. Before you are born, you are with God, which is Happiness. So during the early years of life, children are filled with good spirit and are happy and comfortable. The older you get, the further away from God you are, and you become bitter. That’s why so many old people are crabby. They’ve lost their memory of the good spirit.

“You know why I think the walm is here?” Christian puffs and gurgles.

I shrug, watching the blue woman smile at me.

“I think that the walm people are prisoners from other worlds, that have been sent here because all their prisons are full. All the governments in the rest of the universe decided to make one planet the BIG prison planet, so they chose Earth. It makes sense in a way.”

“I guess it makes sense,” I tell him, but I don’t like it when other people think their ideas are clever. I believe that my own ideas are clever, so I don’t like me either.

The frogs hopping indoors agree that we are on a prison planet. They themselves are frog criminals that were convicted of doing frog crimes. But the frogs are trying to escape imprisonment. They’re getting out of Rippington, out of Earth.

Richard Stein said that frogs were invented for a special purpose. They are the containers for dreams and fantasies and ideas. He said that there is no such thing as creativity/originality and that everything that can possibly be thought up has already been thought up; before time began, every different story existed in every different way. And every idea is stored in a huge vault near the center of the universe. So every time you create a song or draw a picture or write a poem, you’re not the true inventor of it, you’re just stealing it from the vault and calling it your own.

Frogs are the beings that disperse ideas to people. In some worlds, rocks have this job. In others, caterpillars do it. Sometimes even a strap-on dildo has the responsibility. But in this world, frogs are the dispersers. So there’s no such thing as originality. Sometimes an idea will seem original to a world, because that world has not experienced that idea yet, so it’s called new. But it’s not. Of course, the word originality contains the word origin, and origin means something that has already been done… my diction must be getting confusing. What I should say is that nothing will be fresh ever again. All creativity is just musty and stale.

But frogs must disperse fantasy because fantasizing is extremely important to the soul. It’s a mental block from reality, which is needed at times, like my go-away place. It is my stress-reliever. Without fantasy, reality would be hard to stomach.

The frogs see the storm moving in from the distance. It’s approaching very slowly, which means it will be leaving very slowly. The frogs are trying to flee, hopefully off the planet. Of course, if they get off the planet there will be no more imagination left in anyone’s brains. So hopefully they don’t get away.

Besides the storm, the frogs are fleeing imprisonment for having committed frog crimes. Frogs break the law when they don’t hand out fantasies. But it’s not their fault. The frogs stopped handing them out to the humans of the world, because nobody cared to have them. Soulless people have no need to meddle with imagination. So the frogs gave up on all of our world, except for Rippington. Some people still have souls here. That is why the town is overrun with frogs.

I finish my brandy and go to shut the door, kicking all the frogs outside. I’m not at all gentle with them and smear them against the concrete. I wonder if frogs are judgmental when they give out ideas. I wonder if my dreams are going to suffer tonight for hurting them. I wonder if I would be a very imaginative person if I became very nice to frogs.

I shut the door and turn to the blue woman. She’s still ogling me. A curious look. I hope I can feed her before I go to sleep.

Scene 14 Listen Day

Bladder: puffed to full, teeming with truncheons and pressure pain, the creature’s weight motivating it tighter tighter…

I awake early today, underneath the blue-skinned woman, whose sweating-smooth face is pressed into my flabby chest. Soothing skin against my body, eyelashes fluttering on my nipples and tickling…

I do not want to wake her, so pacific, but my bladder can’t hold in the pain for much longer. Her hair combines with the fire sheets, motions to billow-waves, a sea of flames crashing against my coast-like ribs… I’m still not moving. Still contemplating how I can get out from under her without waking her…

I’m still not moving.

God’s Eyes:

I go to Christian. He’s pacing in a dust suit, chalk white against black. His pacing goes back and forth from the thin of the warehouse to the metal-work sculpture section. Faster-faster… Then he slips into the teleporting portal and transfers himself to Satan Burger.

My vision follows:

There’s a sign on the Satan Burger window that tells me, “Satan Burger Closed For The Holiday. Reopens Tomorrow at 8:00 a.m.”

All the demons are resting. When no work needs to be done, the demons go back to standing still, acting like normal furniture. They let the warm sun dry their skins, and let the dust collect on their backs. Dust-bathing is very smoothing to furniture.

Satan is also dust-bathing. Cherry-red face pressed asleep against the table. Dreaming dreams of stories older than Earth I imagine, when he was God’s favorite invention, God’s first born son, born several minutes before his twin brother. His dreams make him cry, like my dreams used to make me cry. When I dreamt of the past — the time before my parents turned their back on me, just as Satan’s father did him — crying was frequent. It’s hard to stop remembering.

I don’t cry these days when I think back to my childhood, to the happy times before my mind caught a disease. I guess I just don’t care enough to cry. I lost the part of my soul that found caring necessary. Even when I’m sad, I cannot show the tears. I can only show a silent expression.

“Where is everyone?” Christian wakes Satan to ask. “Why is Satan Burger closed?”

Satan awakes. He shakes the bad dreams from his skull and flops them onto the demon table like jelly. “It’s Listen Day, nobody works on Listen Day. My twin brother is having a get-together to celebrate, and he invited your friends. Hopefully, he’ll be able to make Gin’s body parts dead again.”

“Why didn’t they ask me to go?” Christian complains.

Satan places his head back on the cold of the table surface. He says, “Nan is still here. You can go with her.” And then he closes his eyes so that dust can pile onto the lids.

Today is Listen Day, a holiday that the gods and everyone from the god worlds celebrate. Even Satan, who doesn’t believe in celebrating any holiday, celebrates Listen Day.

Everything was invented by someone or something, even time, space, love, sight, physicals, mentals, sound — and whatever you can think of. Most of these were all created by the Creators, which came from outside the universe’s understanding. They’re the gods of the gods, you could say, and they made time and space and the universe and the gods. Almost everything. Nobody knows who made them.

Sound wasn’t invented until recently, though; about a few billion years ago. It was invented by a god named STNT (pronounced Stint). He chose to stop existing so he doesn’t exist anymore. Some say he’s in hiding, others say he went to join the Creators. But according to history, he just stopped existing completely. He wanted to be nothing, and now he is.

At the end of Stint’s life, he invented sound. His last gift to the universe. Though his inventions were all revolutionary, humans have yet to understand the importance of the things he created. They’re all ideas that exist in the god world; we can’t even begin to comprehend them. “Complex things are easy to invent,” Stint said after he created sound, “it’s making something basic that is difficult.”

Sound was then known as the forty-eighth sense, and to the planet beings like humans, it became the fifth sense. Stint created only the plans for hearing. He left the universe before he got the chance to hear anything.

The manufacturing of sound took months. Millions of workers offered their services for free. Needing to make sounds for every object, they made creations called vocal chords to communicate sound, and objects called ears were made to hear them. They made loud sounds for BIG objects crashing, and shrilling sounds for small objects rubbing together. Every sound all had to be different. Every sound needed to be special/unique, like how every being is special/unique.

On the last day, sound was thrown across the universe. Every entity that existed had the capability to hear. But nobody was allowed to listen until the start of the next day, waiting with earplugs through the remaining hours. It was decided that the next day would be a celebration, dedicated to sound. It would be called Listen Day.

On the start of morning, everyone was allowed to use their new sense. The beginning of a world with sound. They spent the entire day listening to their new hearing worlds, listening to everything and everything, whatever they came across. It was a feast of audio noises. The first BIG celebration in millions of years.

From then on, Listen Day was considered an annual holiday and nobody was to work on that day, every year — though years go by differently depending on where you live in the universe. There were celebrations where everyone would make noise in the gathering areas. A festival phenomenon arose. Eventually, music was invented, and the whole celebration became a music festival, where a non-stop concert replaced the noise-making. And beings would feast their ears to several music compositions, and they would sing.

All over the universe, these festivals are cooking up right now. But my God’s Eyes don’t go far enough for me to see them.

Christian finds Nan masturbating in the bathroom. She’s holding a picture of Jesus Christ. Jesus is hanging dead from his cross. Blood prickles from his nails, from the crown of thorns.

“GET THE FUCK OUT!” Nan screams, throwing the picture at Christian.

Throwing the picture was an act of violence. It was an attempt to explain to Christian her level of anger. It wasn’t meant to cause him pain. But if Nan was using some kind of dildo or any object pretending to be a dildo, she would have thrown that at Christian to cause him both pain and disgust. Getting a smelly dildo thrown at you is extremely insulting too.

Christian steps out of the bathroom with the picture of Jesus Christ. He doesn’t seem to be bothered by Nan’s performance.

He says, almost laughing, “Nan still masturbates to pictures of Jesus.”

Satan hears this, since Listen Day is all about listening. “She’s attracted to Jesus?”

Christian nods.

“Why?” Satan asks. “Jesus is BIG and fat. Why does she masturbate to him?”

“Jesus is obese?” Christian smirks slightly. “She’s obsessed with raping the messiah, got a sick little head on her shoulders. She only knows the paintings of him though. Nobody knew he was fat.”

Satan says, “You know he’s here, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Jesus. He lives here in Satan Burger.”

“I never saw him.”

“His room says Men’s Bathroom. Haven’t you been in there?”

“Actually, I did see a fat guy in there before. I thought he was a customer.”

“He was kicked out of heaven just like I was, so I let him move in here. Our dad doesn’t like it when we rebel against him. It’s a common thing for kids to do, but God doesn’t accept rebellion from his angel children. After awhile, he banishes you to a place where you can only interact with humans and demons. It’s called damnation when your God banishes you, but it’s not all that bad — I guess.”

“I thought you and Jesus were enemies,” Christian ponders.

“We were, not anymore. Now our father is the BIG enemy. We team up together so that we can take him out of power, to make heaven a more democratic place. Of course, we’re only kidding ourselves. Angels can’t destroy gods.”

“So you and Jesus are friends?”

“Let’s not go overboard now.”

Nan gets out of the bathroom and starts out the door.

“I’m coming with you,” Christian tells her, ensuing.

“Fine,” she says. Incensed.

They go blue, bottomward to Lenny’s autotruck, no Silence but it’s quiet, and Christian remembers her masturbation sequence. He laughs…

“Talk shit and you’re dead!” Nan says.

But Christian laughs again. He doesn’t need to mention anything to be teasing. And he mostly laughs at the idea of Jesus being a large fat man instead of the perfect man that Nan fantasizes about.

I go back to my body:

The bladder is in worse shape than before. I see a large yellow pulsating creature as I go inside my body with God’s Eyes. Neglecting to urinate any longer will give me future urinary problems, like kidney stones or golf-ball-sized testicle disorder, so this blue woman needs to roll off me, or I need to wake her off, or push her off.

I hear somethings crawling in the walls. Rats?

It’s okay, rats in the walls aren’t uncommon for warehouses. Right now, nothing in the world matters except getting rid of my bladder pains, even if the rats are really squirrel-sized spiders. And a spider is the only creature left that scares me, besides the scorpion fly. The pain pounds hell-fists at the surface flesh.

I try to move, but it only makes the pain worse.

The somethings in the walls continue to make crawling sounds.

Eyes to Death’s house:

Gin, Mortician, and Vodka are sitting in a sitting room there, drinking dog tea, with Gin’s living dreadlocks serpenting, jellyfish. They’re waiting to meet Satan’s twin brother, but they haven’t seen him yet. Supposedly, he’s doing business somewhere.

Mrs. Death is there with them, petting her daughter, who has three years. Her other daughter, who has eleven years, is in another room, listening to things that have interesting sounds. Mrs. Death says Death will be back soon, and Gin says that Nan will be encompassing shortly. The word encompassing is a good adjective for Nan

Mrs. Death says to them, “He is out with our son, Jerry Jr., getting some music for listening today.”

She eats from a pretzel-cheese mix, crunchy-crumbs crumble and fill her dressy lap with snacking food.

Mortician says, “Is that Mr. Death’s first name? Jerry?”

She looks up. Her pudgy lips, cherry red lipstick (a child’s brand), smacking at the cheesy pretzel mix. “Oh, no. He was named after me. I’m the Jeri that Jerry Jr. was named after. My husband’s first name is Chuck.

She pauses to choke down a mouthful of martini.

“Our other daughter, in the listening room, was named after him. But we call her Charley. Do you like that name for a girl? I always thought Charley was a cute name, but she doesn’t find it aristocratic enough. She wants to change it to Adelaide.”

“I like the name Charley,” Gin says. Breakfast spasms to the discomforting cold.

“Good. I like it too.” She smiles pleasantly.

Jerry Jr. has six years. He is Death’s only son, and he is Death’s love and pride, his will to live. Everything that Death has accomplished means nothing in comparison. The universe means nothing, life means nothing, everything means nothing except for his son… and the rest of his family.

But Death has never been able to touch them, because of his Death touch. He could never caress his wife in passion, could never hold her, never sleep with her. Just a little brush of his fingertip would put her down…

They still created three children, but it was done in the least passionate way possible, without even touching, without even having sex. He didn’t want to risk killing his wife, even after she suggested handcuffing his hands behind the bedpost, where they would be safe and clear from touching her.

Worst of all, Death will never be able to pat his son on the back when he gets an A in geometry, or when his football team goes to the state championship.

Because his touch brings death.

Back at the corpse:

The infested spider-sounds refuse to stop.

The blue woman still in her position on my bladder, pains do not desist.

I move, quick without hesitation without worrying about her, or the pain in my bladder.

A sharp blunt pain, but not as bad as I anticipated. It’s just like me to exaggerate something so inconsequential.

The blue woman doesn’t even wake up. A slight vibration-fizzle whimpers from her throat, which is supposed to be snoring, and she plops down where I was groaning. Her ocean breasts squishing into the mattress brings me a smile.

Then I rush out of my bedroom-closet to the toilet, which is still situated in the middle of the room instead of in a bathroom. And I leak away a pain-filled balloon.

I am surrounded by people that I have never seen before. All walm comers, all new. None of them stare at my penis, but it’s still disturbing to have it flashed out to them. My pissing is more important to me now than my embarrassment. I let the urine leak completely away, but there is still a slight pain in my bladder from the stretching.

For one reason or another, the new homeless people in my home aren’t much of a bother. There’s about three or four medium-sized families that all look human and decent enough. The overpopulation in the streets was too much for them, I’m guessing, and forced them to take refuge inside of the warehouse. It was going to happen sooner or later.

On the way back to my azure woman/thing, my mouth speaks to the new people — and let me mention that my mouth says this and not me — as if my mouth is their governor:

“I will allow you all to live here for free on two conditions. One, you can’t ever go in any of the bedrooms. Two, you have to stop any other outsiders from moving in here and crowding us. Be the protectors of this place and it can be your place.”

Then I say, “Smile, it’s Listen Day.”

And go back into my cozy closet-room, where the most beautiful creature ever created is sleeping.

I curl up next to her and go into my God’s Eyes:

Nan and Christian are just arriving at Death’s door. They are saying their hello-greetings to Mrs. Death and placing themselves next to Gin and Mort — Vodka is there too, but he hasn’t said anything for two days. Mrs. Death seems quite scared of Nan; she’s never had a skinhead girl inside of her home before.

“So what are you doing for Listen Day?” Mrs. Death says to Mort and Gin, ignoring her new guests — Skinhead Girl and Skinhead Girl’s friend — smiling in her very energetic style.

“We’re going to have a concert at our warehouse,” Mort says in his very fake British accent, a slight modification of his pirate accent. Of course, he was going to have the concert anyway. Listen Day just seems like a good excuse to have a concert, even though Mort has never heard of Listen Day before and is trying to impress Mrs. Death with a lie.

Now that I think about it, Mortician seems to be attracted to Mrs. Death. She isn’t a bad looking woman for her age. She has cute white skin, chubby lips, farmer-blonde hair, and an old-fashioned style of clothes. Her body is the same as any healthy thirty-eight-year-old, but I can see why Mort would be attracted to her. Especially since Mort is obsessed with pirates, and Mrs. Death is the type of woman that pirates would love to conquer and rape.

Mrs. Death starts lunch.

Mr. Death still hasn’t arrived, and Mrs. Death is worried. He’s way past due, four hours past due actually, and it’s unsociable to not serve lunch at lunchtime. She’s left with no choice.

Since it is a Listen Day meal, the lunch consists of foods that make sounds. For an appetizer, she serves them the squishy sounds of stuffed mushrooms, which is Charley’s favorite food. She likes fungusy-tasting things, I guess. She also serves an orchestrated salad, with crisp vegetables, crunchy croutons, and gooey dressing. They listen to their food carefully as they eat. It’s a tradition, on Listen Day.

I go back to my body, shivering excitedly because of the thought of the girl I’m sleeping next to. My palm squeezes a blue cheek, then rubs its smoothness. She doesn’t wake up. Blue women are deep sleepers. All they need for survival is sex, and all they need for enjoyment is sleep. Their lives are complete perfection because of this. I wish humanity’s culture was more like theirs. Then again, blue women are machines, and humans are the opposite of machines (whatever that is). They have too many emotions and imperfections.

The scratching-crawling sounds continue. They’re concentrated in a single spot, in the corner of the bed’s wall. The blue woman doesn’t wake to the sound even though it’s right next to her ear. Deep-deep sleeping…

The scratching/crawling turns into scraping into tearing into pounding/ripping. It’s trying to get through the wall into my closet-room, to my bed, to my blue woman. Then there’s a crack. In the corner, the wall’s cracking right through, it’s going to come into my room. Blackness takes over. I can see it coming out. A rat maybe, or a thousand-bug army. Coming from their world into mine.

The crack splatters and the blackness gets BIGGER. But nothing moves inside of it…

Mr. Death enters as a zombie, the same way I was always said the grim reaper would walk. But this isn’t a robed skeleton; it’s a man in a normal suit, an average American man. Cold from the cloudy day, but sweating, nervous. A horrifying expression on his face.

Mrs. Death smiles and says, “Hello, precious.” But the rest of us, all of my friends and the two daughters, frown and say nothing.

The bringer-of-death is actually a normal person, well-dressed, well-groomed, well-classed, average. I didn’t expect this. He’s just like any other father — well, besides Nan’s father, the alcoholic.

They watch the man discreetly as he begins crying into the table, wetting the table’s cloth, making small whimper sounds.

Mrs. Death smiles without concern — a natural reaction to everything. Or maybe she has lost soul too.

The man doesn’t speak. He just cries.

Cries.

My body:

Something appears from the hole near my bed. It’s a small man, the size of a human child’s action figure, who looks like a cockroach. Cockroach man. Staring at me with its pickax, which it used to break my wall apart. Tiny, spider-like eyes.

The cockroach people look just like humans, but have many cockroach characteristics. They’re the size of cockroaches, they eat shit like cockroaches, and they live in the walls like cockroaches. Millions upon millions of them live on top of each other because their tribes are so BIG. A single mother produces at least one hundred offspring with each pregnancy, and reproduction is their main activity. Each cockroach person lives from one to two hundred years and usually produces two thousand children

Every father abandons his mate after intercourse, and every mother abandons her children after birth. The schools take care of them during childhood, which lasts about twenty years. The cockroach people have the intelligence of any normal human, but they don’t use their intelligence for intelligent things. They prefer pestering larger creatures, eating shit, and fucking out more and more and more pests to clog up the walls.

Their lives are long, but unfulfilled. Their whole point of living is to act like bugs. But in the cockroach people’s dimension, the mammals are as small as bugs, and the bugs are huge like mammals, so there’s probably no point in bettering themselves.

“A storm is coming,” the bug man tells me. “It’s going to be a bad one.”

I nod to him and the little man smiles.

He climbs my bed, and up my blue woman’s fire hair to her shoulder, around her neck to her chest. Then sits down, nuzzling his back into a plump mound, a massive ocean breast, her clock-like machinery pulsating into him, vibrates his back and buttocks. And he blurts, “Comfortable.”

I hesitate to speak with the small man, rolling through my dizzy vision.

He says, “I’m sorry about the wall, but we needed a fire exit.”

“You live in the wall?”

He doesn’t answer me.

He says, “There will be lots of lightning, lots of wind and fire, lots of people going insane. Lots of people dying.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Child Earth wants to have some fun with us.”

The blue woman awakes to the little man on her breast, calm to his presence. Calm. She picks him up, looking down at him, studying.

“Innocent and curious…” I say to myself.

The blue woman tosses the cockroach man against the wall. He screams and breaks his neck and back and insides, and the little body plops to the floor, limp and dead.

Her blue face rests against my arm. Her mouth is wide open. The liquid flowing out of it is icy and ill-flavored.

God’s Eyes:

Mr. Death stops crying. He looks up at his audience, at his wife and kids’ unfeeling smiles. Vodka is still silent and also shows no feeling. Nan and Gin seem concerned for him, but probably just because he’s Gin’s only hope. The room is dim. The room is always dim when you’re at a table facing Death.

Death speaks:

“I killed him… my own son.” He looks up at Gin, curling his lips. His words begin slur-sobbing as black tears fall from his eyes. “He was about to get hit by a car and I pushed him out of the way… I was trying to save his life… I didn’t mean to… but my touch killed him.”

He starts crying again. The wife gets sympathetic now — out of habit — but not as much as she should. She doesn’t break a tear.

Gin says, “But I was killed, and I’m not dead. How did your son die?”

Death responds, “You are not dead because I did not touch you. I was fired by God, my father, and was ordered to never touch anybody ever again. My touch is what kills the body and sends the spirit to its destination. Without my touch, people that die become zombies, like you. When my touch killed my son, his soul was released from his body and sent into the walm, to be turned into energy. He is erased from us.”

In oblivion.

“About my hand…” Gin interrupts him as if he was talking about weather, holding up rotten Breakfast, who squirms in rhythm with his medusa hairs. “My hand was touched by your twin brother. Can your touch take the life from it?”

“I cannot help you,” Death whimpers. Then he stands up and reveals his hands. They are gone. Not cut off, just gone. There isn’t any blood or signs of chopping. They’re just stumps, like he was born without them.

Death says, “I will never touch anyone ever again.”

One of his daughters chuckles at him.

The wrist between Breakfast and Gin rots away as Gin holds it up to Mr. Death. Then there is no wrist left at all, and the bone breaks from Breakfast’s weight. It falls into Gin’s Listen Day dinner plate and begins to do a happy dance.

The two girls laugh first, then Mrs. Death and all of Gin’s friends, and even the miserable Grim Reaper, starts chuckling. Soon the room is filled with insane giggling, all for the dancing demon hand.

Gin doesn’t respond. His eyes look like they’re tranced.

Then Gin hard-blinks and shakes his head, looking around at his hand’s audience and their jubilation. And after a few more hard-blinks, he joins in. But instead of a laugh coming out of his mouth, it is a long red cry.

Scene 15 Boot Lips

I am watching the baby blue woman watch television with awe-filled eyes, and many walm people are watching from behind me. Probably never seen a television show before. All of them are enthralled within six-year-old news reruns. I’m surprised they still have shows on, surprised they didn’t shut it all down completely, the whole damned entertainment market. Surely they will soon, and it won’t bother me much. I haven’t seen Battlestar Galactica in days and don’t seem to care. I’ve already seen them all, but that never stopped me before.

The blue woman is on the floor instead of on a milk crate, comfortable with the cold hardness on her butt flesh, or maybe she didn’t want waffle prints on her skin. I haven’t given her a name yet. I don’t think I’m going to get around to it either. Blue women don’t need names. They don’t seem to own enough individuality to have them.

Richard Stein said that names are inconsequential within a race of perfect people. If they all look reasonably alike, if they wear the same clothes, and have the same style, speak the same, maybe they even think the same. If individuality is wiped out then names should be nonexistent, or maybe numbers should replace them — I should call the blue woman Number Nine. But Richard Stein wasn’t talking about blue women. He was talking about the nazis. If the nazis would’ve taken over during WWII, overpowering the world with their Hitler-loving ideals, they would’ve made everyone identical. They would’ve killed their enemy, which was individuality, which would’ve made for a horrible world, maybe even worse than the one I’m living in now. Because without individuality, everyone would be as boring as a blank piece of paper.

In other words: NAZI = FRAMED PIECE OF BLANK PAPER.

But the anti-nazi people had too much soul to let the nazi utopia happen. Souls were very bright back then and individuality won the day.

The others arrive in time, just before the boredom’s arrival. I sense cold crisps and meat flakes on their minds as they enter from the queer world. The cold crispy emotions they emanate were created from thinking too much while within the untamed outside, mad-agitating streets, which has happened to myself times before. But I’m not sure where the flaky meat emotions came from. It probably had to do with being around Death for so long, or maybe they’re getting disgusted with Gin’s appearance. I’m not for sure, it seems like a very uncomfortable emotion to have.

They tell me about their encounter with Death, taking off their outside clothes and getting drinks from a flapboard box they’ve brought with them, and I try to sound surprised by their story, even though I’ve seen the whole thing in the third person.

I say, “You poop-dicks ate without me? What am I going to do for food? I’m not going out by myself with my crappy vision.” I say this because I want to go do something. Eating seems like the logical activity for me. And I think my whining is funny.

“Take your blue woman with you,” Mort says snobbishly. He doesn’t enjoy the blue woman’s presence either. Maybe he’s jealous.

“We’ll go with you, Leaf,” Nan says for Nan and Gin — Gin completely overrun by the flaky meat emotions. “I’m kinda getting sick of this place. These people are getting to me.” She looks straight at the walm people in the corner, unashamed of her rude, ugly smirk.

“I’ll go too,” Christian sputters, quiet.

Mort gets all rut-pissy. “Who is going to help me set up the stage and the equipment? I’m not doing it all by myself like the last show.”

Christian sighs. “Vodka will stay and help you.”

“No, he won’t,” Vodka says.

“You’re all a bunch of twats,” Mortician says.

We leave after an hour of drinking small scotch bottles and watching Scooby Dooby Doo — who the blue woman finds extremely fascinating. She seemed to understand how the news show was brought about, because they were real people. But she doesn’t seem to have a clue how animation came about. She doesn’t know about drawings or moving drawings, and she probably thinks they’re real creatures from some strange cartoon world on the other side of the universe. Captivation leaks out of her gluey, wet eyes. Of course, she probably likes Scooby Dooby Doo because she’s only four.

I thought I would’ve been able to leave the blue woman in the warehouse watching the cartoons, but she wouldn’t let me leave without her. Sleek-gloss in her eyes when I tried to lock her in my room, a look that almost made me cry. She sometimes seems emotionless, cold, but has an ability to push emotions into me. Love and regret are two of them. Obviously, she has control over the way I feel. Maybe I like it that way.

I didn’t want her coming with us. I was afraid she would run away or get lost or hurt.

Mortician is already on top of the concert preparations. He wheels around in my vision as a twisting robot worker. Spitting. And he doesn’t respond when we tell him goodbye and head back into the cruel streets of Rippington.

The first thing I notice as I get through the door is the gray blob of sky overhead, storm clouds moving in, vein-puffed and breathing. I walk and enjoy the cool air and the different colored street people. The crowd they make is everywhere. Thick with ugly. But I can enjoy it from the distance.

I just smile and say, “Nice day for a walk.”

Surprisingly, the tower shops are still open. We go there. But they’ve changed the place quite a bit since the beginning of the week. The upper levels now say, “OFF LIMITS,” due to the accidental assassination of the female baboon that was living up there, which means that the high area is vulnerable to scorpion fly attacks. And which means that the burrito stand that was up there no longer exists. The emotion monitor on the neck of my mind tells me that I do feel some sadness from this happening and I pretend that it feels good. “Sadness is better than nothing,” I whisper, and try to believe it.

Nan takes me to Sid’s Apple Barn,a place that looks like a toilet stall and is located up inside the brain-tangle section of the tower shops. It’s kind of a hangout for her almost-friends Liz and Toma and Sid, who owns the Apple Barn. Sid is a good guy, happy all the time; he’s one of the few people I look up to. A strong-headed man, violent like the color purple. He goes by the nickname, Boot Lips, and if you ask him why that’s his nickname he will make up a new reason just for you. His favorite one to say is this: “My skinhead friends always wrestle me when I’m drunk and they like to kick me in the face when I’m on the ground, right in the mouth with their combat boots. The morning after, my lips would get all swollen and purple. So my friends’d call me Boot Lips and think it was funny.”

I’m not sure about a place called Sid’s Apple Barn, but I’m no longer dead set on eating good food. Anything will suffice.

We see Nan, Leaf, and the unnamed blue woman go up to the counter, leaving Gin and Christian to find a table over in the Food Court Seating Area, which used to be called the Emergency Food Court Seating Area. Nobody ever ate or sat there unless the female baboon wasn’t on the rooftop. So with the female baboon permanently gone, the Emergency Food Court Seating Area is just called the Food Court Seating Area. But it’s very badly arranged with autocar seats and wood planks on piles of broken television sets or other useless appliances found in the streets.

The only good thing about the tower shops now is that there are still security guards that make sure that the walm people don’t crowd the place or turn it into their home. Which makes it a refreshing place to go. And they let some of the skinheads hang out, because they’re native Rippingtonians and have the driver’s licenses to prove they are.

Right now, there aren’t many skinheads around, just a small group of them, and one of that group’s members is Sid’s Girlfriend, Aggie, who never liked Nan because she screwed Sid once in ninth grade — long before she met Gin or any of us, and even before she became part of the skinhead crowd. Nan isn’t considered a skinhead anymore, at least not by other skinheads. But she still shaves her head and dresses and acts like one.

We go to Sid so Nan’s old friendship with him can rekindle. Nobody seems to notice that I’m here to order food. I just swirl the counter in my vision for fun, with the blue woman rubbing my elbow and smelling the dirtiness on my skin.

Aggie, coated with dark red paint and piercings like facial hair, leans against Sid’s counter. She curl-bobs her eyes at Nan, then coughs and pretends to be a nice person. She feels threatened by Nan, as always, because Aggie was Sid’s second choice — Nan being the first — way back in the day. Aggie feels even more threatened by my blue woman; Sid can’t help but stare in her direction between sentences. I don’t blame him. A naked woman with rare beauty and turquoise skin is hard to resist.

Nan and Sid and even Aggie spray some words back and forth, mostly about Gin, but my mind wanders and I don’t get to listen to them. I look at Sid’s menu and see that it’s full of apple-based foods with alcohol mixed in. It sounds strange to me that an ex-gutterpunk would open an apple barn, but Sid thinks he needs the money. His parents own an apple grove outside of town and he drives there to get bushels of red-yellow apples for his pies and ciders and casseroles all the time. “It’s the only work I could get,” he claims. And it’s a good business since overpopulation is making food places scarce. In a couple of months, I bet all restaurants and grocery stores will be gone, extinct, and everyone will have to kill themselves and become zombies like Gin so that they won’t need to eat anymore. Or maybe they’ll all get in line at Satan Burger and sell their soul to oblivion. If, that is, Satan Burger doesn’t go out of business before then, from losing its suppliers.

I order the apple-vodka cobbler — not sure how Sid got his hands on the vodka — and some fritters. I pay with some change I found in my second pair of pants, eighty cents away from becoming broke. Then we go to the table that Gin and Christian picked out. It’s a stripped pool table with no legs and chairs from the old high school, but there aren’t enough chairs for the blue woman who sits on my feet. Sid and Aggie come too, with Aggie’s two girlfriends who don’t speak at all and seem to have no soul left, or maybe they’re just goths who find it trendy to act that way.

Nan and Sid continue talking. Then Sid begins talking about what’s happened to the world around us. He still has lots of soul, it seems; he’s not hunched over or anything. It’s funny how he wants to talk about the human situation here. Most people try to ignore it or don’t have enough lifeforce to mind to it.

“It’s crazy,” he says. “I love it. It’s chaos.”

“Anarchy,” Aggie says.

Boot Lips doesn’t understand that he is at risk of losing his soul, nor does he know about heaven getting shut off for good. He never believed in heaven anyway. Boot Lips is another person who wants to go to Punk Land when he dies, but I don’t think Punk Land really exists. Maybe my faith isn’t strong enough. He doesn’t realize that the world is bread festering with mold, nor does he realize that Gin is dead and still walking around, and hisself could soon be like Gin too.

Gin is still stiff with flaky meat emotions. Scared maybe. And Breakfast is hidden away in his patched pack, scraping to get out, hungry.

“The world is just as I always wanted it,” says Boot Lips.

“Apocalyptic?” Nan utters.

“I like living in craziness and being unstable.” Boot Lips begins picking at a wart. “Nothing makes sense anymore and I want us to hold on to that. The world has always been a boring place of order, at least in America, with chaos only in some ghetto areas. But even the ghetto chaos was boring. They were all about who’s who; ghetto gangsters were childish and superficial. They weren’t much different from rich white preppies from the suburb areas who hated anyone different, hated anything that wasn’t part of the trends. Even punks were superficial back then, confused about what the definition of trendy was. Now there’s no trends to follow. Nobody to look up to or down to, besides yourself. And nothing gets boring here. Nothing.”

Right now, I want to tell Boot Lips about how our situation is more serious than he realizes, and how the walm will take his soul, and how he’s damned to this world forever. But I don’t tell him. He looks too happy and too excited about the world. I don’t want to bring him down.

Boot Lips tells us about his band Slaughter Shoes. Nan invites him to play at our Listen Day Concert tonight, even though Nan has no business booking bands at our shows. She has a new swimmy personality around Sid and starts to realize that she would rather be with him than Gin. Normally Gin would’ve cared about Nan’s change of heart. But now he’s consumed by writhe-suffering today.

A few seconds later, Nan takes Gin aside, around the back of a water store, to tell him how she feels. I want to follow them, but my God’s Eyes decide to go inside of Boot Lips’ brain instead. I discover that he doesn’t have any more interest in Nan. He wants to stay with Aggie.

The only thing I hear Nan tell Gin is: “I don’t want a man with an wormy penis.”

I’m sure Nan and Gin will stay friends. They’ve been close for quite a long time and Boot Lips doesn’t want Nan. But, surprisingly, Gin’s emotions don’t seem to get any lower after Nan’s breakup statement; he’s already hit the craggy undersurface. The sight of his hand dancing in his food was the breaking point. It doesn’t really matter what happens to him now, with or without soul.

I eat my food slowly because Nan wants to hang around here until the show starts. Aggie and Sid take off to get ready, pull Sid’s band together and maybe practice a little. Nan and Gin act like nothing’s happened between them, like they’re still together, but that’s because Gin is in agony and Nan pities him enough to try and make him feel better. As a friend.

“It’s over,” Gin says to us.

I suddenly get an odd feeling. Like the world is about to end, even though it can’t. Like something cataclysmic is about to happen, in Rippington, or maybe just in my life. Terrible.

Richard Stein once said that there will be a day when the world will crossover from its tiresome yet basically happy state to a place of PANDEMONIUM.

I think that day is here.

Scene 16 The Rabid Storm

The storm comes first.

It goops in as the sun blobs out. Orange fuzz dissolves into the skeletal-patterned skip-clouds, frigid with gray and hints of blue. Spider limbs talon-reach for the soap mountains on their avenue. Uneven faces secrete slowly out of it — the cloud is going to leak more people-creatures instead of rainwater, spat-splashing onto the great mob of overpopulation below.

It rents through light, oozes sideways, chokes it into darkness.

And dusk becomes night.

The mob:

Crowds of people sleeping in the streets, the carpet walkways, smushed into buildings like snail shells. All different races, sizes, shapes, colors, clothing, trying to ignore claustrophobia. Every empty piece of ground taken up by a living being. Rippington is Earth’s toy box, overflowing with piles and piles of action figures. They are motionless and hushed. Some coughs and shaking. Waiting for starvation to kill them and make them like Gin.

The roadway people become aroused when they see sheets of lightning dazzle-striping from the clouds. Flashes reflect against their BIG glazed eyes, haunting their children. Coils of wind corrupt their naked parts with invisible fingers. Some people enjoy the storm, for now — the water clouds aren’t collapsing yet — because there’s no amusement in Suffocation Land besides what’s up in the air.

The warehouse is ready for another concert. It’s burning warm with gum-crammed groups of people and thick sweaty air. Mostly filled with walm people trying to get off the stormy streets, and some of the usual crowd of punks and skinheads, trying to get rid of their boredom. The rest of the usual punk crowd — the larger portion — must have lost too much soul to make it here.

There won’t be another show after this one.

Only two bands are playing tonight: The Oi!s and Sid’s band, Slaughter Shoes. My band was supposed to play too, but Christian refused. He said he wasn’t in the mood, and neither was Vodka. And Vodka has BIG round pads on his breasts. I don’t care for playing either; playing with my blue woman is more fun. I’m in my room with her right now, caressing her perfect ocean skin. Her sensations not as quick as a human’s but that’s because she is like a machine.

Slaughter Shoes starts playing — a melodic hardcore sound with a saxophone player. Boot Lips, the singer, hop-bangs to his songs, more soul-filled than anyone else here; it’s like the walm hasn’t touched him at all. He’s even more up-up than he was back at his apple barn. I’m sure his soul will outlive everyone’s in town. Good luck to him.

He really adored the steel sculptures that live inside the warehouse and ordered them to be placed in the center of the crowd, surrounding the toilet where Vodka is sitting. The sinister/gruesome aspect of the sculptures is what he liked. They are black and rusty and crude, also very sharp. One looks to be a palm tree of knives and another is like a tangle of meat hooks and a headless woman with spiked skin and sword nipples. She smiled at Boot Lips with her prickly vagina and he immediately fell in love.

The name of this unrefined sculpture is Fria.

Vodka sits alone on the toilet, staring at Fria’s butt and the butts of every other sculptures around him, boxed in like he’s in the bathroom stall of a sweat-dizzy night club, but the stall doors are sharp and spiny and stabbing inwards. He complains to the sculptures for crowding him, but they won’t give him anymore room. His stare is blank and evil, but his response is silence. And nobody outside of his little boxed space realizes that he’s in there.

The blue woman begins to touch me now, to excite me, trying to get my penis erect so that she can eat. She’s always touchy-feely when she is hungry, and very alert instead of inside her dream world.

Mooshing her plump breasts into my stomach, digging into the skin with flinty nipples. BIG eyes looking into me — she knows I like that, it jingles our souls together. I’m not certain that blue women have souls. They’re more like machines or like animals, and I’ve been told that neither of the two possess souls.

I slink into her neck, washing the azure plastic, feeling her smooth-fleshy. She doesn’t have human neck bones. The neck is more like the human calf — lots of meat with one hard bone… but her bone is soft and thin, flexible. I can also feel a slight tube, probably for mouth reproduction. It creak-chirps when she slavers on my chest.

It begins raining.

I hear it tinkle-clanking against a metal shelter from my sex bed as the blue woman rubs me. I eye to the outside, leaving my corpse with the four-year-old creature engorged.

The rain clouds weeping needle-goobers, thick and colored like pig snot. But I know the rain drops are not made of water. They’re particles of madness instead.

“The storm will bring insanity,” said the scorpion flies.

“The Earth wants to have some fun with us,” said the little cockroach man, still dead and now crunchy in the corner of my room, listening.

The insanity leaks onto the unsheltered street people, sloshing onto their naked faces, seeping into their minds. Their mental states become schizophrenic at first. Slow and scared… paranoia. They begin shivering. They are unable to move.

The insanity rains onto the warehouse as well, dripping only the madness-scent through a few cracks, but the smell alone is enough to drive lunacy through your skull.

The aroma fills everyone’s breath, even mine… and peculiarly, it also affects the blue woman, who doesn’t breathe.

This is where the fun begins…