CEREAL AFTER SEX

The Pot Pie Wonder Wall

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His apartment is high and made of glass. He looks over the pinpricks, the massive cluster of skyscrapers. All is quiet inside. All is chaos outside. Black smoke rises. Spots of flickering orange mark the fires. There are swarms of people crushing forth toward the barricades. The questionable neighborhoods are cut off from the rest of the city. The downtrodden are caught in a net, reeled in, and then locked in steel boxes.

He sighs deeply and has to turn away.

How am I supposed to live in a world like this? he thinks. And what’s the point? Where is the joy? Where is the love?

He goes to the couch and powers up his gaming system.

“At least I can escape to wondrous lands,” he thinks aloud. “And kill without rhetoric and repercussions.”

In another world, an open window teases a candle flame as a cavernous mist crawls along the surface of a small lake. The writer sits down at his desk and ponders the keys. A woman calls his name from the other side of the house. He slams his fist down on the desk in frustration. “I’m on vacation!” he yells.

The woman pokes her head into the room. “Why are you so pissed off?”

“Because I’m trying to concentrate on my work and you’re disrupting my creative flow.”

“Sorry,” she meekly replies. “I just wanted to know if you wanted a pot pie for lunch.”

“Fuck pot pies!”

“Okay, okay. Geez, calm down.”

The writer puts a hand to his forehead and pinches at the stress and tension. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have snapped at you. But you know I have mental problems.”

“And you should know you can’t use that as an excuse every time you cross this barbaric emotional line.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He waves her off. “A pot pie would be fine, by the way. As long as it has flaky crust and creamy gravy.”

She makes her way toward the door but turns around before going out. “It will be a plate of steamy goodness, I promise,” she tells him, her face full of joy and excitement.

The man in the high apartment is killing giant spiders with a mighty sword in the game Kingdoms of Amalur: Re-Reckoning. “I don’t have to think about the sad state of the world when I’m doing this,” he says aloud to the room. “I’m killing giant spiders in Webwood on the outskirts of a gloomy village. The air is thick and smells of forest. I’m all alone and I like being alone…”

The daylight begins to fade. The city outside methodically starts to sparkle with lights of white, red, and blue. The Amorikan failure, fractured and hobbled, limps on. No one knows what any new day will bring. The people are tired and dumbfounded. This wrecking ball of governance. The man hacks at another giant spider as the world hacks into his soul, draining life and rights, stealing heartbeats, suffocating joy. The night comes on and the large television screen glows. Animated blood splashes. Green poison puffs. At least the bodies with holes still exist. He can smell them. His cell phone rings a Gregorian chant. Who could it be? he wonders. “I have no friends. And I don’t really want any.”

“How’s the pot pie?” she asks with anticipatory glee.

He chews, swallows, drinks milk, and wipes at his mouth with a white paper napkin. “It’s full of steamy goodness,” he says. “You did something right for a change.”

She looks down at her hands and thinks about what she’d love to say to him. But she’s scared. Instead she quips, “I’m glad you’re satisfied.”

He smiles at her. “Speaking of satisfaction, why don’t you crawl under the table and satisfy me.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Why not? Haven’t you always wanted to do it under a table?”

“I’ve never really thought about…”

“Here’s your chance.”

“We could go to the bedroom. I’ll submit.”

“I want you to do it under the table. Stop trying to get out of it.” He slaps his hand down on the table and the dishes jump.

She reluctantly goes beneath the table, crawls between his legs, undoes his pants, and does what he wants her to do.

The man looks at the unrecognizable number glowing on his phone. He swipes red. I don’t want to talk to anyone I don’t know, he thinks. “Probably someone wanting to scam me,” he says. “All of life is a scam… Especially love and kindness.”

He starts to think about dinner. He pauses his game. The man recalls seeing a pot pie in the freezer. “I could use some steamy goodness right about now,” he says to himself. “Hell, the whole country could use some steamy goodness right about now.”

He goes to the kitchen and opens the freezer. There the pot pie sits in the cradle of the electric arctic tundra. He thinks about how his wife used to make him pot pies, especially the time she did unspeakable things to him under the table. That life is decimated now. Nothing can survive in this state of the world he bemoans inside his head.

He retrieves the pot pie, reads the instructions on the box and goes to turn on the oven. “If I was smart,” he began aloud. “I’d just stick my head in there and burn my face off.” He waits for the oven to reach temperature and then opens the pot pie package and puts the pot pie on a metal pan and puts it in the oven. He sets the timer for 51 minutes. “Because I’m just so odd and different.”

He stands still in the silence of his apartment. The only light is in the kitchen and coming from the television. He thinks his life is sad, but bearable. And at just that moment there was a knocking at his apartment door. He freezes for a moment and then goes to the peephole and looks out. It’s his x-wife. What is she doing here? he wonders. The knocking comes again. “Albert? she says on the other side of the door in her painfully recognizable voice. “I know you’re in there. You never go anywhere.”

He opens the door. “What do you want?”

“It’s Christmas. I don’t think we should both be alone.” She holds out a wrapped gift. “Here. I got you a little something.”

“Oh, but I didn’t…”

“Of course you didn’t. It’s okay, Albert. It’s all about giving and not receiving, right?”

She sheds her coat and throws it over the back of the couch. She looks around and is saddened by the fact there is no Christmas tree. “Playing video games?”

“Yes. And I’m cooking a pot pie.”

Her face brightens. “A pot pie? Yummy.”

“We could share it if you like.”

“Well, Albert. How romantic.”

She leans in and kisses the corner of his mouth. She places a hand between his leg. “Do you want me to take care of your yule log?”

“Kathy… Please. Is that the only reason you’re here. For intercourse?”

She sighs. “No. I just didn’t want to be alone on Christmas. Can I stay the night? I’ll sleep on the couch.”

Albert looks her over. She still has the hot body, the cute face. She’s always been cute. “Yes, you can stay. But we can share my bed. It’s a king. Plenty of room to spread out. We could pretend we’re camping like we used to.”

Kathy smiles and goes to hug him. “Yes, I would love that.” They unexpectedly kiss.

He backs away. “Let’s not get too physical,” he says to her. “We aren’t ever getting back together. How could we?”

“I never said that was what I want. And for your information I don’t want to get back together, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be civilized toward each other.”

“Okay,” Albert says. “I can deal with that.”

The pot pie sits between them, and they take turns dipping forks into the creamy, steamy goodness.

“This is delicious,” Kathy says. “I just love a good pot pie.”

Albert watches her mouth as she eats. “Yes. I agree. Sometimes all one needs to make things better is a good pot pie.”

“Do you miss me?” she suddenly asks.

“Sometimes.”

“Not all the time?”

“I have a life of my own now,” Albert tells her. “I don’t always have time for memories.”

“Is that all I am, just a memory?”

“What else do you expect?”

“Everlasting love. Like we vowed.”

“What!? You’re the one who couldn’t wait to get rid of me. You took my things off the walls, brought home boxes for me to pack my stuff in, and even made me sleep in the guest room. Fuck off, Kathy.”

Albert slapped the pot pie off the table, and the steamy goodness went everywhere. “Now look what you made me do. A perfectly good pot pie is ruined.”

“You did it,” Kathy snaps. “You never could control your emotions.”

“Why don’t you get down on the floor and lick that mess up like the dog you are!”

“Albert! Don’t you dare talk to me that way. To hell with all this. I should have known better than to come over here for some Christmas cheer. You always ruin everything. You’re a horrible person, Albert. I’m leaving.”

“Good! Don’t let the door hit you where the good lord split you.”

And then there was silence and a mess on the floor. Albert went to the big windows and looked out at the city on fire with Christmas angst. The lights were all there, but Santa Claus was dead. Homeless toys wandered the streets and tried to sleep on spiked benches. The giving love seems to have evaporated. Tonight, there will be no apologies, no forgiveness. Humans have turned to stone.

Albert went back to the couch and fired up his video game once more. He launched himself into a better, older world where he could fight and live and wander, and remained there deep into the night and into forever.

By
Aaron Echoes August
Ashen Dump Cake

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I ate some cake last night that tasted like cigarettes

I dubbed it an ashen dump cake

Even though it was supposed to be lemon

It reminded me of a church cavern

One with green carpeting and porcelain statues of bleeding saints and such

And there was that tall priest who enjoyed drinking cola and smoking cigarettes

Maybe he made the cake

I don’t know, my brains are like raw meat, and I have suddenly decided that I don’t have a personality, and I need to invent one, quickly, so that I can mesh with society and be a well-adjusted human being who participates in the wonders of life.

What were they laughing about? Those two women in the cafeteria with the glass walls and beams of orange-colored wood. The view outside was of a late-summer forest eager to change its skin. I had a plastic tray with a little carton of milk and a hot dog with only ketchup on a paper plate beside a small mountain of plain potato chips. The sound of the gong boomed through the hall, a deep vibrato that could be felt in one’s guts. The women exchanged whispers between glances at me. I found an empty table and sat down alone. The chair made a noise when I pulled it out. Everyone there stopped what they were doing and stared at me. I was horribly embarrassed, but for what, I did not fully understand. Maybe it was my weird hair or unfashionable clothing. One of the women stood up and walked over to me. She handed me a piece of paper and then went back to her table. I opened the note, and it read: You should kill yourself.

The cafeteria was suddenly empty and void of any sound. The wall of glass was still there. The ornate beams of orange-colored wood were still there. The tables and the chairs remained, but there were no longer any people. I stood up and said aloud, “Hello…” I went to the windows and looked out at the forest. It looked like winter has caressed it. Leafless limbs of crooked black scratched at the cold blue sky. I went to an emergency exit door and pushed on it. An alarm sounded. I stepped outside into the cold, but I did not feel chilled. The door closed. The alarm went silent. I stood on a patio of geometric flagstones painted the color of spit. A wide swath of neatly clipped lawn encompassed the space between the patio and the edge of the forest. Voices came from there along the misfit mist. I could not understand them. Did I want to? Paper love notes then fell from the sky. I suddenly turned around and looked back at the building. People. Different kinds of people. And they were pressed up against the windows and watching me. They didn’t seem alive, but they didn’t seem dead. Was it all a dream?

And then there I was, an escape artist with a tattoo of a blue skeleton and I sat on a dark brown wooden bench in a marbled train station deep in the big, big city and I listened to the announcements: Atlanta, Baltimore, Albuquerque…

I recall the memory of a weird man I once knew who was obsessed with Albuquerque. He was hip and super fresh and had a lover by the name of Moonbeam. They lived together in the Nob Hill area and often enjoyed a few brews at the pub with friends, or bros. Why was I thinking about him? Why was I thinking about such an inconsequential being that had entered my field of vision in the arena of life? Snow globes suddenly came to mind, and I wanted to live inside one. I wanted to be lost in the watery snowfall and live in a quaint Norwegian reindeer house on Claus Island and everything in life would be perfect and there would be no human stains to ruin it…

I woke up at my desk and nearly knocked over an open bottle of hot sauce. The plate beside me had food residue on it. I ate dinner alone again inside a locked room with the curtains drawn and all the sound turned down. The world outside is a chaotic disaster right now. Everyone has gone crazy. The ghosts are hiding. The devils are cowering. For the inhumane insane have become both.

By
Aaron Echoes August
Weird 13

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Nerves like cornsilk on fire

A plume of atomic orange

Flames of blueberry stroke

A billion heads collapse and sleep

Earth is a bed

Towels are folded on shelves

A long, lonely highway leads to beautiful isolation

And good lonely, needed lonely

Apricot orchards wear mind caps

Black and white bat machines keep order with their sticks

The pumpkin on the wall asks what is he doing with his life

His answer draws tears, bullets, orange blood and seeds

I Love You notes lie scattered on an old wooden desk inside an old room with old windows where the ancient sun shines through like it has done so for decades. This is a different time in a very familiar voice. The bodies move in; the bodies move out. The sun stays the same, the moon is still white, stars fill the night sky. The city below grows larger. More lights, more noise, more people, more dirt.

Love notes astray in a distant western wind. Hands grasp hearts—in joyful surprise, in swoon, in shock, in death—Love notes wither and turn to dust.

Lonely, sleepy night now

Clock never stops at 13

Peppermint oil in the eye on a cloudless Sunday morning

Rows of chanting church people load their guns

The hate parade is about to commence

Prayer warriors stomp on the throats of the breathless, reckless, and wise

Love falls at every level

In the skyscraper of life

By
Aaron Echoes August
Ghouls

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Picking awkwardberries from the tree of life

A subway car injects the city with shaking souls

Human fluids in the test tube

With windows and lights and broken dreams and cataclysmic days

Green and amber are the aching colors of another dark noc (night)

Round heavens bloodied with tar

Heroin tracks are stars

Red forests all alone

Black trunks and branches against a pale pink horizon

Motorized carts rolling overhead

Heaven is a shopping mall

You must have money to get in, to play the game of life

Then the mechanical beep beep beep when someone goes backward into a wall

Holiday maze mess head

Christmas in September

Halloween in July

That doesn’t click with the elves and the ghosts

Murmured nonsense ticks through my brain like numbers on a ticker tape:

Ticker tape was the earliest electrical dedicated financial communications medium, transmitting stock price information over telegraph lines, in use from around 1870 to 1970. It consisted of a paper strip that ran through a machine called a stock ticker, which printed abbreviated company names as alphabetic symbols followed by numeric stock transaction price and volume information. Source: Wikipedia

That’s the Internet for you. Is it true? I don’t know. Is anything true these days? What exactly is truth?

I don’t believe in the corporate news. They’re ghouls.

It’s manufactured bullshit. They feed us to control us. They brainwash us with fiction while we read fiction to escape the horrors of the real world. Horrors flooding America, the globe right now. We all need to escape to a better world…

I went to a bookstore in a little town on the coast of Maine. I was wearing a toboggan. (A toboggan hat is a type of knitted wool hat, often referred to as a beanie in many regions. In the southern United States, “toboggan” specifically refers to this warm winter headwear.) That’s what the AI machine says.

It’s black, my brain emissions keep it warm.

I was reading some Kerouac, and the words took me back, forward, present…

I am mentally exhausted and spiritually discouraged by this shit of being, of having to do what everybody wants me to do instead of just my old private life of poesies and novelies of yore.

~ Jack Kerouac

To an alley, a greasepaint store, a yellow funeral home

The bodies would come out at night and walk up and down the street looking for their homes

But they never find them

They have to crawl back in

Before the very first crack of dawn

In through the heavy, ornamental front door of the funeral parlor

Down the hidden staircase where the realities of death glisten with fluids

Silver tables, chains, tubes, instruments…

And they climb back into their $10,000 coffins to be covered with dirt forever

In a cold, wormy ground

To never ever see the sun again

Only blackness, stillness, quiet

Forever tapping to get out

By
Aaron Echoes August
Corn of the Aliens (2)

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Harold jumped up and ran outside. The screen door slammed behind him as Bruce Springsteen music played from the clouds. The stars, hidden by the grunt of daylight, were there in the pointed universe. He made his way across the warm grass of the yard. He opened the gate on the white picket fence and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He looked both ways, and each way was the same—a long, straight and tree-lined street that was quiet. The homes were large. The trees were large, bushy like broccoli, and the air smelled like clean skin. Now he had to choose: Left to the lake or right toward the forbidden frosty forest burning foil green now in the late aspects of summer.

Harold chose the heart of the forest. He was scared but he forged forward. On the way, he tried to shake the image of his mother on the table with that awful Ted on top of her. He turned toward the curb and threw up in the street. When he looked up he saw an old glowing white woman standing in the picture window of a grandma house painted the color of marshmallow circus peanuts. Her hair was silvery gray, her expression demure and judgmental. Harold stared at her a long while. Then she suddenly smiled and held up a tray of cookies. She motioned with her head for young Harold to come to the door. For some reason his heart pounded. Then the old woman held up a glass of pure white milk. Her smile got even bigger, but it was unsettling. The boy wanted to run but his legs were like cement and it was like how it is when a dreamer tries to run in a dream.

That’s when the old lady stepped out onto the stoop and called for him. “Boy,” she said. “Come here boy. I have some wonderful treats for you. And I’m so lonely. Won’t you please come in and keep an old lady company for just a while?”

Harold turned his head side to side. The world suddenly seemed completely empty. A breeze made his hair dance. “Okay,” he said, and he walked toward the house and followed the old woman inside.

Her house smelled funny. Antiseptic. Surgery. It was overly neat and clean. There was old-time music playing. Music from a different era, dimension. He followed her into a room with large windows and old furniture.

“Have a seat and I’ll be right back,” the woman said as she put the tray and jug of milk down upon a low table in front of a flowery couch.

Young Harold sank into a cushion. He looked up and saw a clock on the wall, but it had an extra number: 13 where the 12 usually goes.

When she returned she was shockingly holding a large trapezoidal blade with a handle. “Do you like machetes?” she asked the boy. She whipped it through the air, and it sang a dead song. “I myself love machetes.” She flattened her feet to the floor and made a fighting stance. “Yee ha!” she cried out, and once again she whipped the blade through the air.

Harold was terrified and started to get up to leave.

“Wait!” the old woman cried out. “Where are you going?”

“I have to go home,” he answered. “My mother will be worried.”

The woman relaxed her stance and smiled at Harold. “No she won’t,” she said. “Your mother hates you. Sit back down and have some milk and cookies. And then maybe you can take a nap. I have a very comfortable bed right upstairs.” She pointed toward the ceiling with a crooked finger.

Harold looked at the machete flicking in her other hand. He sat back down. She set a gaze upon him with sparkling silver-blue eyes. “Enjoy now,” she said with a nod of her glowing head. “Eat as much as you want.”

Harold opened his eyes and saw a white ceiling. The room was too warm, but the bed was soft. He got up from the bed and went to the one window in the room and looked out. There, down in the front yard, the old woman was trimming bushes with her prized machete. She suddenly stopped and then turned her head to look up at Harold as if she sensed him there. The boy ducked away and went to the bedroom door to get out. It was locked from the outside. He pounded on the door. “Let me out of here!” he yelled. He went back to the window and looked out again. This time the old woman was no longer there.

Then there was the sound of unlocking and the door swung open. The old woman stepped in. She was sweaty from the late summer sun. The blade of her machete had green on it. “Don’t pound on the door,” she said. “You might break it. Just settle down and take it easy.”

“Why did you lock me in here?” Harold wanted to know.

“It’s for your own safety. The world out there is a very dangerous place for a young boy such as yourself.”

“I just want to go home.”

“Home? You have no home. Haven’t you heard?” She motioned toward a small radio sitting upon a small table. It’s all over the news. Your home burned down, and your mother and her lover died.”

“What? No! You’re lying. This is some sort of psychological torture.”

Once again she motioned to the radio. “Turn it on and listen.”

Harold did as she said. A voice came through and explained in horrifying detail how indeed his house did burn to the ground and that the woman who lived there and a strange man had been trapped and died inside.

Harold began to cry. “No,” he said. “It can’t be true.”

“Of course it’s true,” the old woman told him. “It’s a truth radio. Everything that comes out of it is the honest truth, regardless of how harsh it may be.”

Harold’s eyes went to the window. “I want to smash through that glass and jump,” Harold said. “I have nothing to live for now.”

The woman chuckled. “Funny how life can drastically change in a mere fraction of a second.”

By
Aaron Echoes August

My new book is now available for purchase: The Apocalypse Pipe. Available in both e-book ($2.99) and print ($14.99) editions! Thanks for reading and supporting independent writers.