She is beautiful on a space sofa, that cushioned ass.
The ambient drive of a midnight cockatoo tail.
A tale of breathlessness, a tale of wind in the face on a warm summer day.
Vanishing, all vanishing like liquid ghost meat…
The librarian brushes his hair at the checkout counter when he thinks no one is looking. It’s a big bush of rust-colored wire, tangerine-flavored spun sugar really, and he must force the black apparatus through. His eyes shift at a glide to the side to forever abide… Asking “I wonder if anyone is watching me?”
His name is Troy and he used to be a mannequin but now he’s a real living boy. There’s a female librarian clerk on the other side of the round counter. She sits at a computer and inputs information. She makes him nervous because he is the beast, and she is the beauty. “I wonder if she likes my hair?” he asks himself in inner monologue speak.
At lunch in the park, the female librarian clerk, her name being Beth Combs, snickers in unison with her friend. “What do you think of his hair? Isn’t it weird.”
“It’s like he’s never done a single thing with it since the day he was born,” the friend answers. How does he not realize he looks ridiculous?” They both laugh out loud.
Troy doesn’t know how they talk about him behind his back. He eats a Launchable Luncheable in the breakroom all by himself… Crackers, meat, cheese. He wonders if he himself is cracking, if he were to be snapped in half would the crumbs of himself scatter on the wind of the chilly library air conditioning.
A hurried woman sneezes. Troy shelves books with a raging erection. He looks like a younger, orange-speckled version of Gene Simmons from KISS. He wants to Detroit Rock City his member across the entire void of the world. He enjoys the musty smell of books left long untouched. Voices bellow throughout the place and he just wants to scream: “Shut up! It’s a fucking library!” Bruzz, bruzz, bruzz… the noise is like a chainsaw on a chalkboard. “Shut up!!”
He sneaks off to a hidden corner of the library and talks to his grandmother on his phone and smiles. He whispers into the receiver, “I think she really likes my hair. I think I’m going to ask her out, but I think I’ll bring her a dozen roses first. That will for sure knock her socks off.”
The next day before his shift, Troy stopped off at the florist shop. “I’d like your finest dozen roses,” he told the big man behind the counter.
“Oh, my my. Someone must be in love,” the florist said.
Troy shifted nervously. He never really thought about love and now he was most likely in the midst of it. “Well… I need to ask her out first,” he said with a nervous chuckle.
The florist presented him with a full bouquet of plump red roses. “She’ll drop dead over these,” he said.
Troy looked at him funny. “I hope not.”
“Okay,” and he figured in his head as he looked toward the ceiling. “That will be 112 dollars.”
Troy’s head nearly exploded. “One-hundred and twelve dollars!?”
“That’s what I said… Flowers aren’t cheap, and having a lady friend is costly. In more ways than one.” The big florist winked at him. “Everything has gone up, I’m afraid.”
Troy grumbled as he dug his wallet out and reluctantly handed over the money. “Here you go.”
“Good luck, young man. Come back and tell me how it went. I own this place. Name’s Ralph.”
“Ralph Furley?”
“No. Does this look like Santa Monica to you?”
Troy laughed to himself. “Guess not. Thanks, Ralph.”
Troy sat in the parking lot of the library and did some deep breathing exercises to try and calm himself. “This is crazy, this is crazy,” he repeated. For a moment he thought that he might chicken out and throw the flowers in the restroom trash can. He glanced at himself in the rear-view mirror. He practiced smiling. He petted his head. “At least my hair looks good,” he said to himself. He took one last deep breath and got out of the car. He forced himself to march straight to the front doors and into the library. He proudly held the bouquet of roses out in front of him.
Her eyes widened when she saw him coming in her direction. She looked first at his hair, then the bunch of roses. “Oh, no,” she muttered to herself.
“Hi, Beth,” Troy nervously said, and he thrust the bouquet in her direction. “These are for you.”
She nearly fell forward when she got up to take them from him. “Thanks,” is all she could muster.
“Would you be interested in falling in love?”
“Troy?” she said, and she looked around and people were staring, people like patrons and co-workers, small children, mocking teens. “Can we talk about this in private?” She was mortified.
That’s when Troy got down on both knees, clasped his hands together as if in prayer, and looked up at her. “Please go out with me. Please. I’m begging you. I’ll die without your love.”
“Get up, Troy.” She tried to laugh but started to cry, and then she hurried off to the breakroom in milk utter embarrassment.
When Troy moped into the breakroom, Beth’s face was sour, her arms folded, her jaw clenched so tightly she thought her teeth would be ground to dust. “Hey,” he said.
“Was that some sort of prank?” Beth wanted to know. “Because if it was, it was a horrible thing to do.”
Troy managed to raise his head and look at her. “No… I just wanted to go out with you.”
She pushed the bouquet of roses in his direction. “I’m sorry, but I can’t accept these… And I don’t want to go out with you.”
He ached inside as he took the flowers from her. “Why?”
Her eyes went to the top of his head. “It’s your hair. It’s just so… It grosses me out. I just imagine things living up in there. You really need a haircut, a good haircut. I can’t be seen out in public with someone with hair like that.”
“So, if I get a haircut, then you’ll go out with me?”
“No, Troy. I’m not interested in you like that. I have much higher standards.”
“Okay,” he mumbled, and he turned away from her and walked out of the breakroom. He rushed by his conveniently positioned boss and blurted out, “I quit!” and he kept on walking until he was all the way out in the parking lot. He slammed the bouquet of roses down onto the grimy asphalt, red petals splintered, thorns scraped against Troy’s broken world.
He fell to his knees and looked up at the roaring blue sky and its ship of clouds. He screamed like an animal. “Oh, heartbreak has me now!” he bellowed. “I’ve been slain by the arrow of love, the bowman a she-devil!”
Several people stopped and looked at him. “I’m all right,” he said to the gathering crowd. “I’m just in a great deal of emotional pain.” Troy stood up and brushed off his dirty knees. He turned and started to walk away. A car pulled into the space where the roses were gasping toward their final breath, a black tire pressing down and forever sealing them into the scrapbook of bad memories.
There was a heart in Central Park. It was lying there in the curled leaves and the grass saying goodnight. It beat a bit but was slowing. I was sitting on the park bench watching. Nobody cared. The idiots were oblivious. I was alone as usual, trying to get some fresh air and think about things that didn’t have to do with the mad city. I thought about love, with that heart lying there all derailed and fucked up and crying. Imagination haunts us. I have nothing left but this walk I take every day. Why do I have to end up seeing someone’s cut out heart lying in the grass like that? My apartment isn’t far, it’s small, and only about 723 square feet, but I like the tight corners and the lack of space for all those pitiful material things. There were dreams upon a time, you see. They had ripples like fire set on fire. So maybe that’s my own heart lying in the litter.
What words we breathe. What words we digest. What am I? A bucket of skin ready to toss? I am a slice of time in flesh. I sit at the counter and eat my food like everyone else. But I know I am different. Some birds came and pecked at the lawn. I thought about the peace of modest brick houses on a tree-lined street in a cozy suburb of Chicago. I can hear the lake smashing against the shore ever so gently. Dad looked out at the sea, and I wished I was alone so I could smoke a fag. Big jets scraped against the sky, the massive whirl of the heartless city of souls hummed all around.
Sometimes I can’t breathe; like a diner joint in T or C and the toast was good for my heart and the local souls all around me glowed a fluorescent green. I got lost in the desert, totally immersed in isolation, and I read On The Road by a trickle of water under the sun. On the outside world, everyone was dead. I didn’t have anybody—ever so it seems. There was but sun and sand and coyotes and my own wayward mind settling in the dust of the earth. And here the world goes on and a man like me doesn’t know where to step—I’m in it, but out of it. Turn a page. Hold your head in your hands as the mighty tangerine sun slips away. I’m a disposable heartbeat. Sin is no longer an option to avoid. I wish I was a normal man of love. I got off the bench and stretched in front of strangers. The walk home was a bit windy, but I didn’t mind. I don’t mind anything anymore. Life is life. Love is a crap shoot. Maybe the past is gone, but still alive in the hurting ways. My apartment is on the third floor. I go home like I always do, alone, one stair at a time in a hollow hallway. I open the door, and everything is butterscotch dim. So, this is the end, I wonder, solo in a glazed apartment. I’ll wander after them—chased by the blue ghost in my grandmother’s guts.
He made it with her in the bathtub because she was bleeding. That animal. That gyrating, groaning animal. It was that negative breeding. She pulled him in, he slapped against her. They breathed, they kissed, they tangled. When they were done, they stayed in and showered. The water felt like rain against them, tasted of the sewer city dry desert beat town. His name was Francis, and she was Chloe. They beat each other senseless with their reckless hearts. He loved too much, she too little. They met naked in the middle.
The bedroom was a blue bejeweled blue, dazzling in its dimness, the floor wooden, how the bed posts glided across when they ground into each other like an overworked oil drilling rig. Francis was a butcher; Chloe was an aid to the elderly. She enjoyed making friends with her distant future. He liked to cut things up with sharp instruments. Francis had wanted to be a doctor but never made it. Chloe just wanted to be loved by anyone, and so she made it with more men than Francis. She didn’t think he knew it, but he knew it. Chloe was an over-shaken bottle of seltzer in the social circles. His heart bent toward a distant sun, a far horizon, to the day when she would be nothing but a memory and perhaps, he would be her greatest regret, the lost escape.
He recalls the Fish lyric: Read some Kerouac and it put me on the track to burn a little brighter now…
It was at the Variety Lounge on the west end of town where he got a full taste of her flirtations. It was the mad tolling noise and the whiskey smoke, and her playing ho hen as she jumped about like a Roman candle all ablaze from seat to seat to see whatever handsome ho Mr. Kool was getting on about in drunken hazy wisdom of the dream. She smoked fat Camels and laughed and touched while Francis brooded at the end of the bar, head hung low in a shot glass, hot amass, alabaster crass, swirling slurring words of talk with a stranger arrow, the desert yarrow, the place on high near those decrepit dams in the dryness beds.
Francis was 14 years her elder, but Chloe only thought it was something like 10 because that’s what people told her, and he never admitted to her the truth even on the day of his birth and the candles on the cake ablaze in a veil of misleading. But then poor Francis never thought it would matter for her to know anyways… What good would it do; nothing would change, nothing would stay the same. She had her plot all laid out in front of her nice and neat. She knew she would be going; she knew she was to leave him behind in the desert dirt, to ditch him to the hot earth to ache and mope and question his own heart and ability to love. Love? Chloe didn’t know what that really was yet. But there would come a day when perhaps she would, and she would look back and wonder where Francis burned out at. Wonder where he crash-landed and vaporized. Whatever happened to poor Francis? Oh, how I broke his heart. She laughs so hard all the windows in California shatter.
These nerves are voiceferous and restless, like a baby with Batman, a highball hangman, make them speak, red walls with dust, a sleeping woman, a YouTube chime in the head, celestial salad raining down from space. This world all nonsense, like the gravity of a rainbow, the yoga of a leprechaun, the salsa of Chen Chin Chong.
He feels plastic and numb. He feels as flat as a flatline. The interstellar heart like a champagne rowboat floating. He just realized that he no longer laughs. Does he even smile? For real? What does he feel? A perpetual boredom, a perpetual disinterest in life. The pharmacology of alteration. The pills keep us in line. Living life in short bursts, like fireflies in the grass, momentary blips of Hollywood, champagne bursting bubbles, rubble, glittering crackers. And why do we divine so much time to barely trying to survive? If we could just be what we wanted to be… Imagine the world. Instead, we wrap our wrecked minds around all the glittering nonsense, all the traps, all the worries, all the fucking battles with bread.
I fight to find purpose in my movements. I struggle to fill in the gaps between the numbers of the atomic clock. I ache to flow like the softest, unmuddied river. I wander like midnight in the gardens of Ankara. The tower bells toll. The smell of fertilizer comes from space, the air is wet, lights flicker, traffic groans out there on the great Interstate rolling west, rolling east, the great asphalt ribbon full of crazies and hipsters, and the dead, and the meek, the young ones rolling toward new life, the old ones rolling to final spaces and memories.
Sometimes I don’t even remember the days on which my parents died. Ah, this littered life, my constant motions, breathing but a tick, I’m a clock with a sock stuffed into the medusa obligate, like irate pyrite, irrational hawk men, desperate gold men, trapped in a Cripple Creek hotel room, dim and dark, gold and orange and green reflections on the streets, ghosts in the halls and I felt them there in that desperate getaway from death, the longitude all latitude, my drunken attitude, playing mechanical poker at the bar, alone, made her cry for the very first time on those streets of gray gold. The red brick buildings, the church on the hill with its faint stained-glass preaching pictures, and we drove in the night, and I made her cry under the mountain moon of blue.
An empty Coke bottle sits on a worn, brown Formica table in a restaurant booth. The resting back and seat padding of the booth is a sickly mustard color. A half-used plastic bottle of generic brand ketchup sits at the table’s edge along with a silver napkin holder, a miniature silo of sugar, salt and pepper shakers, and three plastic menus ripe with human disease.
The walls of the restaurant are half wood paneling—on the bottom half—and a pale-yellow paint job on the upper half. Crooked pictures depicting old time western scenes hang on the walls in various places. And old television set that no longer works is perched on its dusty metal cradle in one corner. The unplugged cord dangles behind it. Country music moans through the dusty speakers of a dime-store stereo that sits on the end of the lunch counter among a tangle of green vines from an overhead hanging plant in dire need of watering.
The windows along the booth are oily and smudged with the fingerprints of unruly, messy children. The scene through the windows is one of dry desolation, wayward desert brush, and purple-blue mountains rising in the distant haze. Sunlight streams in and casts perfectly cut geometric glows across the tables.
There’s the murmur of broken passions among the patrons that sit around there. Many are hard-working people with bitter assessments of the world and their talk of rebellion comes from deep within troubled, trembling souls encased in dusty work clothes. Others are merely travelers, passersby with no hint of what it’s like to live in a town that is merely a speck on a map, a quick piss stop on a highway, the dead end of a dream or two. These are the people on their way to somewhere more like paradise, bigger, brighter. They’ll talk about Feldspar, California with scathing laughter and jokes. “How can people live there…?”
People are living there, some have lived in Feldspar for a long, long time. People like Brady Gander who sits in the restaurant of bitter souls and eats a chicken pot pie with a cup of black coffee. People like Brady Gander who works on fixing cars at his very own Gander Auto Repair on the far-flung edge of town. The Brady Gander who spends his days beneath a propped-up hood and goes home every evening with greasy hands and beat up knuckles. The Brady Gander who once he showers all the grime and pain away goes into his padlocked secret room to have secret meetings with his Council of Mannequins. They love to talk about guns, and the government, and patriotism. They vote on their own brand of law making and they have a binder stuffed with papers that Brady Gander, being the official secretary, meticulously types up and prints off. But the newly enacted laws of pretend never leave the secret room. The only thing that ever leaves the secret room is Brady Gander, and maybe a mannequin or two or three or four or even five.
Brady Gander never married because he has problems with socializing and relating to others, especially women. They make him nervous, and he acts brash. His house is a squat place of little stature out behind the business. It’s the color of the desert around it so it blends in and sometimes vanishes all together, which Brady Gander likes. On the hottest days of the year, the house simply vibrates and moans like a highway mirage. Brady Gander has lived there for 23 years, and tonight he has a visitor.
The honking of the horn out at the fixing garage was incessant. Someone was desperate and determined, Brady thought as he walked with his LED lantern to see whoever it was. They must have seen the house lights on and put two and two together.
He arrived at the front of the shop to find a young woman leaning against the outside of her convertible and reaching in with her arm to press the horn. “Oh, thank God!” she said when she saw him. A nearby streetlamp cast her in a pinkish, yellow glow.
“Were you fixin’ on honking that thing all night,” Brady said to her, and then he spat at the ground. “Because if you were, you’d better think twice about it.”
She immediately straightened herself. “I’m sorry… It’s just my car keeps doing weird things and I need to get to Phoenix and, well, I was hoping you could look at it.”
“Weird things?”
“Like stalling out, jerking.”
Brady rubbed at his chin as he looked her up and down. “Shop’s closed until morning.”
“Ah shit,” she said, and then she started looking around as if she was going to find someone else more willing. “Ah, shit… Can I leave it with you for the morning then.”
“Sure,” he said, and he stepped closer and reached out his hand.
She didn’t know what he wanted her to do.
“Your keys,” he said.
“Oh, right. Here you go,” she hesitated to let him have them. “You aren’t going to steal it, are you?”
Brady laughed and turned his head and pointed. “Do you see that house back there. I’ve lived there for over 20 years. I’m not going anywhere, sweetheart. This is my business, my livelihood. I don’t steal people’s cars.”
She was looking around again. “Is there somewhere I can stay?”
“Hmm,” Brady thought aloud. “Well, I’ve got a spare room if I don’t creep you out too much.” He let out a nasally snicker.
Her expression soured. “Maybe I’ll just sleep in the car.”
“No, no, can’t let you do that,” Brady said. “All sorts of weirdos wander around here at night… All sorts. This happens more than you might think. People wander into my life. I never eat them if that’s what you’re thinking.” Again, he let out the nasally snicker. “What’s your name by the way? I’m Mr. Gander, but everyone just calls me Crazy Brady.”
“Lillian. Lillian Hampton.”
“Lillian Hampton? That sounds puffy and annoyingly self-important… Did you say something about Phoenix? Are you planning to rise in Arizona?”
“What?… One of my best friends is getting married there Saturday. In the hot city it is.” It was Thursday. “That’s why I need my car fixed. I’m in the wedding party.”
Brady watched her underweight body as she went to open the trunk and retrieve a bag. “Here, let me get that for you,” he offered. He could smell her feminine flowery scent as he got closer to her and grabbed the duffel. “Anything else?”
“Nope. I travel light.”
“Follow me then.”
The moment they got into the house Lillian sensed something was off. There was a strange smell, it was dimly lit, and someone was sitting on the couch, but they didn’t make a move when she approached to say, “Hello.”
“Is that a mannequin?” she asked Crazy Brady.
He whipped around to look at her as he worked to clean some of the mess in the kitchen. “A mannequin? Yes, it is a mannequin, but he’s much more than that. That’s Councilor Troy Brisbane. He’s a very important member of the board. Very powerful.” He watched her as she just stared at him. “Well, don’t be rude… Say ‘hello.’”
“Hello,” she breathed cautiously.
There was no reply from the plastic person. Councilor Troy Brisbane just smiled his fake plastic smile and said nothing.
“He’s just tired from all that impactful decision making he does,” Brady told her.
“Is this the couch I’m going to sleep on?” she wanted to know. “It seems dirty.”
“No, no. I told you I have a spare room… Right next to mine. Come on, I’ll show you.”
She followed him around a corner and down a short hallway. He opened a door. It squeaked. “Here you go.” He motioned with his old head. “Bathroom is right back over there if you want to clean up before going to bed. You know, get all that sticky road grime off your silky, sweet-smelling skin.”
He turned on the light for her and she poked her head into the room. There was a double bed, a dresser, a chair, a desk. It smelled funny, she thought, like musty old furniture, like musty memories.
“Do the doors lock?” she asked him.
“No, no. I removed most of the locks because… Well, my plastic friends tend to close themselves in… And if I’m not around when it happens, well, they can get violent and break things. But then again, without the locks, they often wander the house. It’s a challenging situation.”
She half scoffed; half laughed at him. “Are you being serious, Mr. Gander?”
He was very serious, and his eyes twitched in telling her so. “Yes.”
In the deep of night, Brady Gander went before the Council of Mannequins in the secret room. He walked back and forth across the cranberry carpet, tapping his knuckles together as he thought. Councilor Troy Brisbane tapped a yellow pencil at his center seat in synchronicity. “Will she still be here at the dawn of hounds?” he wanted to know. “You don’t plan on eating her, do you?”
Brady stopped where he stood and turned his head to look at the council. “I’m not a bad man,” he began to tell them. “I just have all these crazy thoughts in my head. I’ve tried to get help, but you know how it is out there in the real world.”
Pencil thin and eyeglassed Councilor Eduardo Greep leaned forward. “We really don’t.” He looked at the other mannequins before turning back to Brady. “But you didn’t answer the question, Mr. Gander… Do you plan on eating her?”
Brady took a moment to breathe. “I’ll try not to.”
Uptight Councilor Stella Spaceport smiled at his haphazard answer. “Does she have any weapons? Does she have anything of use to us?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” Brady answered. “But we are running short on time. She’s planning on leaving in the morning.”
“Have you considered gassing her?” Councilor Greep asked.
“It’s crossed my wicked mind,” Brady said.
“But what’s the goal here?” Sharp-shooting Councilor Adam Eve demanded to know. “What is the end game for this girl? And for us? Do we simply want to play with her and send her on her way, or will she serve a greater purpose? If she is to serve no purpose, then let’s just get it over with. But if you simply want something pretty to look at, get yourself a plotted plant or a dirty magazine.”
“Orgy!” Rough around the edges Councilor Karl Capshaw stood and declared. “It’s been eons since we’ve had a decent orgy around here.”
There was a communal sigh. “Sit down, Karl, and oil your joints,” Councilor Spaceport said.
“Look,” Brady began to speak. “She expects me to fix her car, but what if I can’t. What if I purposely keep her stranded?”
“I thought she was attending a wedding,” Councilor Brisbane pointed out. “Surely, she’d find alternative transportation. No. Something more drastic, something more physical must happen to keep her here. And I for one will make it happen if no one else has the wax to do it!”
There was a grumbling rumble among the council.
Councilor Eduardo Greep stood and pointed a finger straight up into the air. “I for one am tired of outsiders bothering us. We have more important things to consider. We have important work to do. A revolution doesn’t happen overnight! I say we beat the hell out of her and leave her in a ditch.”
Stella Spaceport leaned forward in her place. “Mr. Greep, that seems a bit drastic.”
He threw his plastic arms in the air. “Fine! But can we at least just go watch her sleep?”
Lillian Hampton felt a presence and stirred in the sheets. Her sleep in the strange place was restless and full of cracked dreams. Her hand rested against something out of place, it was like skin but cold and hard. She heard wedding bells in her head. Then she felt something move and there was a pressure upon her, a weight. Her eyes flickered into focus, and someone was inches from her face. “Hi there,” came the voice. Lillian screamed and bucked and leapt out of the bed. And then she saw him there in the bed, naked plastic and with a smile stretched across his fake face. “What’s the matter?” Troy Brisbane the mannequin councilor wanted to know. “Don’t you think I’m sexy?” Lillian screamed again and rushed for the light switch at the wall.
The room illuminated and then she saw that it wasn’t just Troy Brisbane in the bed, the room was occupied by the entirety of the Council of Mannequins, and then coming toward her with a grin of his own, Crazy Brady.
Lillian went to pull the door open, but Brady slammed a wide hand against it and forced it shut against her will. “I’m afraid I can’t let you do that. My friends here are looking for a good time and we need you to stay.”
She hurled a fist in his direction, but he gripped her by the wrist and spun her around, pinning her arm behind her back. Brady hissed like a rabid porcupine. “Now listen. I am strong and you are weak. Got it?”
Lillian scanned the room. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing—mannequins come to life and holding her captive—“What do you want from me?” she whimpered.
Pencil thin and eyeglassed Councilor Eduardo Greep stepped forward and touched her face with his dead hand. “We want your respect, we want your loyalty, we want your warm, moist love.”
“Love? I could never love a mannequin!” she snapped. Then she screamed again, and Brady tightened his grip on her.
“We want to mate with you!” Rough around the edges Councilor Karl Capshaw cried out as he jumped up and down like a lunatic. “Won’t be any babies, but there sure will be some noise!”
“Cool your jets, Karl,” Sharp-shooting Councilor Adam Eve said. “But it’s obvious we need to put her out. Bring me the Huff ‘n’ Puff cloth with the magic juice on it.”
Stella Spaceport stood at the ready and handed him what he asked for. Adam Eve held Lillian’s bony jaw with one hand, and then with the other, he smothered her mouth and nose with the cloth until her eyelids came down over her glazzies and her body went limp.
It was incredibly hot as Lillian’s car broke past the city limits line of Phoenix, Arizona. Councilor Adam Eve drove, Troy Brisbane sat in the front passenger seat, dirty Karl Capshaw, Crazy Brady, and Stella Spaceport filled the back seat. Lillian Hampton was gagged and bound in the trunk, her eyes wide and crazy with fear, the sweat beading on her face.
“You did a good job on this car, Brady,” Adam said. “It drives like a dream.”
Karl was restless in his seat. “You should have let me put it in her tailpipe,” he laughed. “Why didn’t you, huh? She was still okay to take it.”
“Shut up, Karl,” Troy said, and then to the others, “Why did we bring him?”
“Because I don’t trust him enough to be alone at the house,” Brady said. “Now, you have that church punched into the GPS?”
“I got it, I got it,” Adam answered, and he tapped at his fake plastic head. “I may be a mannequin, but I’m not stupid.”
When they arrived at the Church of the Great Alabaster God, a white torpedic building that reached high into the sky with great stained-glass motifs of universal love, they quickly jumped out of the car and scrambled to the trunk. They opened it and Lillian, always the screamer, screamed through her gag cloth.
“Hurry up and get her out of there,” Brady ordered. “Quick now before someone sees.”
Karl and Adam lifted her out and carried her toward the front of the church. They laid her down on the cement walkway. She wriggled like a worm. Karl kicked her in the side and then leaned down near to her face. “You should have been nicer to me,” he said to her.
They all got back in the car and as they drove away and left her there, the front doors of the church suddenly burst open, and the wedding parade emerged, and the celebratory rice flew high into the air, the grains coming down atop her like rain. Lillian rolled and watched as a crowd quickly gathered around her, and the eyes that looked down upon her were no longer real.
CEREAL AFTER SEX 