What is wrong with me, I wonder. There is this desert of thought. Dry sand blown by the wind tossed about all whimsical and deceitful. It moves like purple gravy in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. I think I may have forgotten how to write in cursive. No one uses it anymore. Everything is pressed. So many lost arts. Like typing on a typewriter, and I had a dream about that just the other night. Tap, tap, tap… Smack, smack, smack… The keys smack against the paper. The letters work their way through the carbon paper. That’s how we made copies. A bell rings, tap a silver bar. Onto the next line.
So many lost thoughts. Now, here, go. Anxious as a fire ant on a hot hill beneath a magnifying glass. What is this desire to burn life? Everyone is looking at me. I don’t want to be judged. I just want to be liked. I don’t want to be punished. I don’t want to suffer. I hate suffering. I’ve spent much of my life suffering. But so have we!
Orange sky fence big round sun. I’m feeling sloppy and unkempt. It’s okay to be whatever I want to be. Time sure does slip away. Why, it seems just like yesterday I was in a summer alley in that Wisconsin town, and it stretched all the way down to the lake. And there, sitting off to the right, is the big blue house where the cigarette lady lived. Mrs. Ruppert. She had wrinkles and a strangled voice. I’m sure she died a long time ago.
I remember there being crystal bowls atop polished tables and the bowls were always filled with candy. “Go on, take some,” she would say to us. Then she smiled a funny smile. She lived alone. Her husband had died. The children had all moved away to Milwaukee or Chicago.
She had us follow her upstairs to her bedroom. She had us lie down on the bed. There was me, my best friend, and his sister between us. The cigarette lady would pull up a chair and look at us, smile, clap her hands. “Are you ready for a story?” she would ask. She told us about times when there was war and great poverty. Her stories were all about when she was younger. She told us about a time she got caught sneaking into a movie theater and the manager threw her and her friends out. The man had pushed her extra hard and she fell to the sidewalk, scraped her elbow. She had cussed him, she told us.
“I called him a shit face,” she recalled, and then she laughed. I wasn’t sure if I should be listening to such talk.
She would go on and on and on and most times we fell asleep because it became so boring. When we woke up, the bedroom door was closed. We went to open it and tumbled out. Old Mrs. Ruppert was downstairs in the kitchen frying up pork chops and cooking potatoes. “Dinner’s almost ready,” she’d call out. We’d never stay and sneak out the front door. She’d come to the porch and wave as we ran off. “Goodbye kids,” she would say. “Be careful out there… It’s a cruel world.”
The luscious homes of the neighborhood so enviable
People were casually milling about
Momentarily enjoying their lives
Talking, laughing, smiling
Swinging shopping bags with materialistic glee
But then the people were frantically scattering
There was a great change about, a sudden twist of reality
Like the American classic — a school shooting
And there was a guy with a baseball bat
He was swinging at people like a madman
I saw a few fall to the ground
Like string-cut marionettes
Quickly, haphazardly
I was watching all this from a window
Of a busy breakfast place in the heart
I was having jalapeno French toast
The waitress thought I was insane
I told her that I was
But not as insane as that guy outside crushing people with a baseball bat
Restaurant patrons clambered toward the windows and watched with horror
Cell phones whipped out and filming
I heard the obligatory, “Oh, my god!”
And I thought to myself, Yes, God. What about this one?
The manager of the breakfast place rushed to lock the doors
I asked for some more maple syrup
The waitress angrily waved her hand at me as she watched the unfolding of another tragedy for the books
“Not now,” she said, pointing out the window. “Don’t you see there’s a guy out there killing people with a baseball bat?”
“Are you surprised?” I asked her. I stood up and yelled out to all the people gathered there. “Are any of you really surprised? It’s just another day!”
I just don’t understand why you can’t just be happy for me…
Family turns distant
I spent one of my birthdays at a Motel 6 in Laramie, Wyoming. It was so cold outside; the sky was a steel gray with white edges. The entire town seemed lonely and lost. I was lonely and lost. I was at a Motel 6 in Laramie, Wyoming because I had just gone through a two-day job interview. It was a brutal thing to experience with a wrecked heart and disenchanted mind. The bitter loneliness was like a chilled spike through the soul.
They had a Godfather’s Pizza in Laramie, and this was a real one like they used to have, not some fake crap in a convenience store. I got myself a pie, Italian sausage, black olives. I sat in the dim reverence of the restaurant. There was a fake candle on my table. It was black in an orange jar. Maybe it was a witch. Pop slop music played overhead. A few other tables had huddled people. Young punks chattered in the back as they made pizzas. I ate alone.
“I can make anything happen. There are no restraints,” I said aloud to myself as I drove my car down to Chillicothe. I talk to myself a lot. All those inner notes and thoughts just leaking out all the time. I go to Chillicothe because there’s an old bookstore downtown. I like to go in to smell the paper smeared with coffee and to have the thoughts of thousands upon thousands of other writers impressed upon me. In my whole life, I remember the smells best. Smells ignite my greatest memories.
There’s a pipe and tobacco shop next door from the bookstore. I don’t smoke a pipe, but I like to go in there because of the smell. That smell. Pipe tobacco. Pipe smoke. Grandfathers puffing away in an old easy chair while watching the Green Bay Packers on an olden day’s wooden television in the 1900s. My wife once bought me a bar of pipe smoke scented soap for one of those Christmases we once had. Now she’s gone and I don’t know where she is. Her name was Ladeline. LAD-A-LINE. (I always appreciate it when other people boldly announce their words as they speak. They enunciate). I believe she left because I’m crazy. She didn’t want to do the whole in sickness and health thing after all. That’s okay. I don’t care anymore. Everyone in my life could leave me and I would be fine with it. I’m a lone dog on the road. Madness makes me howl.
My phone alerted me as I stood outside in downtown Chillicothe and stared at things. It was my Realtor, Regina.
“I have another house to show you,” she said.
“It’s all okay,” I answered. “I’ve decided on the big old house right there in Circleville. I want it.”
“That’s great.”
“We can discuss the details later. But I wanted to ask you something.”
“What is it?”
“I was wondering if you’d mind some company when you go to the next Orange Mass.”
There was a brief pause, then an excited, “Yes.”
“I’m not exactly sure why I want to go,” I said. “Let’s just say it’s a feeling.”
“I completely understand. What you are experiencing is a calling. It happened to me, too.”
“I’m not going crazy?” I wondered.
“Not at all. This is the beginning of your fulfillment,” she assured me.
We met at what was once the First Baptist Church of Circleville. The marquis sign outside had been stripped of its black letters and was spray painted over with a large orange X on both sides, signaling that it was now an Orange Mass Worship Center. It was a sloppy job. Everything had to be done so quickly, and the organizers of all this were unorganized.
There was a gathering of people outside the church. Many of them were wearing red Make America Hate Again hats. They were talking and laughing, but as we passed by they stopped and stared at us as if we were part of the Unwanted. The resistance. To them, the scum of the Earth.
The inside of the building looked similar to what it must have resembled when it was still a Baptist church. As I looked around I noticed the obvious changes. Any reference to the woke Jesus Christ had been removed. The large cross at the front of the sanctuary had been taken down, burned, and they pissed on the ashes while declaring their new faith and allegiance to the Orange King. In its place was a very large portrait of the Orange King himself, when he was much younger, though. They used the young image as a way to portray his perceived eternity, his perfection. An everlasting morbid stain, I thought.
On the sides of the sanctuary, small versions of the very same portrait were hung. His grimacing eyes ever watching. We made our way into a pew and sat down. I noticed the holders on the back of the pew in front of us were void of any Bibles or old hymnals. In their place was hardly anything. Reading about and singing to some other god was now frowned upon. In its place was a pamphlet, an encouragement to get plastic surgery. And as I looked around as the crowd filed in, I noticed all the fake people, men and women alike. The fake cheeks, the fake lips, the fake eyes, the fake brows, the fake hair, the fake breasts, the fake tans. The fake laughs, the fake voices, the fake sentiments. Fake. Fake. Fake. All of it, fake.
I looked over at Regina. She seemed to admire these people for some reason. She gently felt her own face with her fingertips and sighed as she watched them. I could tell she was thinking about it. “You’re beautiful just the way you are,” I let slip out.
She turned to look at me with a shocked expression on her face. “Beautiful?” she replied, as if such a notion never registered within her.
It was then that there were three quick buzzing bursts of an alarm. Everyone in the sanctuary suddenly hushed their voices and turned forward. It was eerily silent except for the minuscule cracking of all that plastic.
A man wearing a long orange robe entered the sanctuary from the left. He glided to a podium, turned on the microphone and began to speak. “Please be seated.” There was a rush of human bones and skin bending. He opened the sacred book. “I will now read to you from the Orange Guide… And the Unwanted shall litter the earth and spread untrue vows of love, acceptance, and peace. They will fornicate with the same and call it freedom. They will alter their gender, fill our prisons, steal our food and jobs.”
Someone in the crowd suddenly shouted out, “America!”
The man at the podium raised his hand to quell the outburst, despite the fact it was allowed if kept at a minimum. He continued with his reading. “Beware the female versions of the Unwanted as they will desire equality and positions of power. And this they shall receive, only as long as the shell is not flawed, and they are giving of themselves.”
“Stay in the kitchen!” someone else shouted.
Again, the man at the podium raised his hand, then continued. “The female shall lie back, take the man’s seed, and then cleanse him and herself as well as the ceremonial bed.”
The man at the podium stopped reading and closed the book. “As well as the ceremonial bed,” he repeated. “What does that really mean?” He gripped the sides of the podium with his hands. “It’s not just the bed, my friends. It is everything in the household. The kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, the garage, the patio, the garden, the yard.” He paused to clear his throat. “But it goes much deeper than the surface dirt. It goes into the heart and mind of the woman herself. Rebellious thoughts are also unclean.” He stepped away from the podium and started walking back and forth on the carpeted area of the raised altar. “Thoughts of autonomy, this so-called independence they hunger for,” he continued. “That kind of rot must be cleaned as well. And as the book tells us… Spit it forth from your thin lips and never think on it again… I look out on the women here today, built up, artificial, mechanical, unintelligent, beautiful, and obedient. You all radiate, and the Orange King would be proud.”
He stepped down from the altar and began to walk up the main aisle of the sanctuary very slowly. He stopped beside our pew and looked at us. His eyes were especially fixed on Regina. She bowed her head to avoid his gaze. He continued to walk. “Even among us today,” he said. “I can sense the roots of rot.”
He paused at another pew and looked at the plastic woman standing there. He suddenly leaned in and kissed her on that inflated mouth and touched her between the legs. The crowd looked on in wonder and happiness. After he broke away from the kiss, he exclaimed, “That is what a woman should feel and taste like! Like glue. Adherence to the new way!”
“Yes, yes, yes!” the men chanted.
“The old is new, the old is new, the old is new,” the women chanted back with less enthusiasm.
I looked at Regina. I knew she wanted to resist. Her lips moved but no words were spilling out.
When Paul awoke, he was just above the tree line and sitting in a scramble of rocks. He was surrounded by mountains. The air was bluish-white and crisp and smelled clean. He could hear it move. When he looked down, he saw the town of Chandelier, Idaho snuggled up in the valley floor miles away. A soft wind blew, and he heard the whispers of something else. He got up and some rocks shifted. He listened to the sound of them clicking together, small and rapid taps of stone on stone letting loose and sliding.
He breathed the air deeply. He turned around and studied the rocky peak behind him; massive slabs of stone crafted by Earth and time, a few patches of snow clung to the mountain here and there. He returned his gaze to the town below. It would be a long walk. “Or I could just fly,” he said aloud. It was fine if he talked to himself. No one was there. But then he wondered if any of it was real after all. As in, was this the real part of his life right now, or just a sliver, a glimpse, a fictional account. What about his visit to Sarrah? What happened? What led him astray? How did he get here? It was some sort of sudden displacement. He couldn’t rely on his memory at that moment.
Paul decided to make his way down the mountainside. It was getting cold. He slid at a side angle until he came into the cover of the trees, the forest, the canopy of deep pine green that smelled like true life. He picked up a path near a stream; it was a soothing sound of water flowing over smooth stones as he walked. He followed it until he came to the base of the mountain and one lonely dirt road. This he followed to a lonely highway which led to a less lonely highway which in turn brought him to town with the scatterings of traffic.
He went into an old western coffee shop on the edge of town. He sat in a booth near a window. He wasn’t even tired. He could walk for miles and miles if he wanted to. It just took time. Then he suddenly thought of Josiah. What had become of him, he wondered. He had to find this stray, he thought.
Bergen Baystone the State Farm guy snuck up on her quietly as she sat on the bench near the fountain in the park scrolling through her phone and severing a banana with her teeth. Something she read must have been funny because she smiled and laughed to herself.
Bergen became the bushes, the leaves, the limbs, and his eyes danced all over that Beverly from accounting. He wanted to jump out and yell “surprise!” Something broken inside him wanted to drop his tan pants in front of her, out in public, during the day. That would embarrass her, and that would be no way to gain her favor, he decided.
He thought she looked beautiful, just sitting there and full of breathing, beating life. The hand he was using to hold the bag of Chinese food shook. The bag made noise. Beverly stopped what she was doing and looked around.
He had no choice now. Bergen bounded out to reveal himself. “Surprise!” he yelled. He did not drop his pants, though.
Beverly was shocked and lost her drink. “God damn it!” she cried out. “Look what you did. What the hell are you doing here, Bergen?”
“I was out hiking in the park, and I just happened to see you.”
“You mean you were creeping around in the bushes watching me.”
“Yes,” he confessed. “I suppose I was being a bit of a Peeping Bergen.”
Beverly shook her head and started to pack up her things in a furious state. “You’re so fucking weird.”
“Where are you going?” Bergen wanted to know.
“Seriously? Do you think I want to stay here with you?”
“I was going to eat my lunch. Care for a crab Rangoon and some witty banter?”
“A what?”
“A crab Rangoon.”
“No. And besides, you’re the goon.” She stood up to leave.
Bergen stepped in front of her. “Wait.”
Beverly tried to step around him. “Get out of my way before I start yelling for help.”
“Please don’t do that. I just want to spend some time with you.”
“No! How many times do I have to tell you ‘no!’”
Bergen Baystone grabbed her arm. “Don’t treat me this way. I don’t deserve this. Show some respect.”
“Respect?” Beverly yanked her arm away. “If you ever touch me again, I’m going to break your jaw.” She aggressively walked away and headed back to the office.
Bergen resigned himself to sitting on the bench and eating his crab Rangoon dipped in sweet and sour sauce all by himself. But now he was worried. He had gone too far with grabbing her arm like that. She was going to report him. He couldn’t allow that. He couldn’t lose his prestigious position at State Farm. He jumped up, spilling his food everywhere and ran after her.
The cerulean rabbit drove without saying a single word. His paw-hand reached for the stereo, and he turned on some music. Classic 80s rock. He strangely moved his head to the beat of the music.
Josiah looked at him with wide eyes as he clung to the door gathering the courage to say something. “Where are we going?” he managed to get out. He winced, expecting a slap.
The rabbit turned to look at him, then back to straight ahead at the road. “The farm,” he said in that low, slow, warbled voice. “I’m taking you home.”
“Is that a costume?” Josiah asked.
The rabbit laughed. “A costume?… Do you seriously think I am not real?”
“Yes.”
The rabbit laughed again. “Touch me.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Touch me!”
Josiah reached out his hand and put it on the rabbit’s arm.
“See. It’s not a costume. Can you feel the muscle and bone beneath this cerulean fur? Can you feel the warmth of my blood flowing?”
Josiah jerked his hand away. “I want to get out.”
The rabbit stomped on the gas pedal and the car jerked forward. “Not until we get to the farm.”
“And then what?”
“You do as Paul told you.”
“Are you part of Paul?” Josiah asked. “I know there is something different about him. Are you another dimension of Paul?”
The rabbit tuned to look at Josiah and grinned. “Perhaps we are all just another dimension of you, Josiah Peppercorn. Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe, you are a very sick man?”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it. I was the one who punched her.”
“Who?”
“You’re wife… I punched her. Repeatedly. In the hospital. But then again, maybe it was you. You’d already beat her at the house, or maybe that was me. We could be the very same thing; it’s just that now I’ve gotten out of you, and I am running around loose.”
“You’re confusing me.”
“You’re confusing yourself.”
They finally took the last turn and rumbled up the long drive at the farmstead. When they stopped, the rabbit got out and went around and removed Josiah from the car. He led him to the barn and threw him inside. “Enjoy your new life,” the cerulean rabbit said to him. “As I do the same.”
By
Aaron Echoes August
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CEREAL AFTER SEX 