Tag Archives: Short Story

The Boy With The Spanish Bayonet

Her cactus bed smelled like butter nectar. She swears that lying down on the thorns helps her back, yet all the red marks there on her skin, looks like she was nearly eaten alive by fire ants.

Fire ants. She remembers the hot summer day when she was maybe 12 and she was playing in a field in Colorado with the boy who lived next door. He was a year or two older and she liked him, so she didn’t mind playing in a hot, thorny field in Colorado.

The fire ants build great volcano looking mounds and they were streaming in and out of the top of them like an army. The boy thought it would be fine and fun to destroy their mounds. He gripped big stones and hurled them at the ants. The sand and dirt splattered like a bomb hit. The ants grew angry, and their movements sped up as if someone pressed a button… And then the bites came, all over her legs, his legs. The pain made her cry, and she was embarrassed, and she ran home.

Her mother was upset that she had gotten bit by the ants while playing with the cute boy next door. She made her stay inside and so she sat near the window and watched him play football with her brothers in the long yard between their houses. When she knew he saw her there, she smiled and made kissy faces at him.

Then her mother came up behind her with a thin stick cut from a lilac bush and in a threatening way she tapped the stick against her motherly palm, and she said, “I don’t want you around that boy. He has problems and will be nothing but trouble for you.”

The girl looked up at her mother. “What problems? He doesn’t have problems. He’s just a boy.”

“He’s not just a boy,” the mother sternly answered. “He’s a dweller in the darkness.”

And perhaps he was, for just the other day he had been out in his front yard wrestling with one of the neighbor boys who lived around the corner and up the hill that led to the foothills. It was supposed to just be a fun thing, but the troubled boy took it too personally and started punching the other in the ribs as hard as he could. When the meeker boy was breathless and writhing on the ground, the troubled boy cut a green spear from a Spanish bayonet plant growing at the edge of the yard and proceeded to stab him in the stomach with the sharp point.

The boy started crying out in pain and that’s when the troubled boy’s mother came bounding out of the house yelling at him to stop. She yanked him aside and berated him in front of the other kids gathered there in the yard. She shook him as she screamed at him, “What are you doing!? You’re hurting him! Stop it! Stop it you crazy child!”

He pulled away from her and grinned. He couldn’t help it. “We were just playing,” he said.

“Stabbing is not playing,” the mother corrected him. “Get in the house!”

As he walked away, he turned and saw that his mother had knelt near the boy he stabbed with the Spanish bayonet, and she was caring for him. She was caring for him, this weak boy, this new boy, this stranger boy. She was caring for him more than she had ever cared for him. Maybe that’s why he was crazy and reckless and dangerous and unstable.

The girl’s name was Linda, and she was Middle Eastern in a way and so her parents were strict. The boy’s name was Coal, but not the normal Cole, Coal like the earthly material. They decided to meet one day in the Netherlands, not the country but a place beyond the new neighborhood that was pressed up against the foothills of the green Rocky Mountains, a place undeveloped and open. There was a strip of forest that was dissected by a cold mountain creek, and there was a trail that ran along the creek and the trail meandered far and deep until it ran up against the very base of the mountains.

It was in these Netherlands that the outsiders would escape to. It was in these Netherlands that Linda and Coal decided to go to together. They walked side-by-side. She reached out to hold his hand. He held it loosely. She stopped and turned to look at him. “Do you want to kiss me?”

He moved quickly and did it. The he turned his attention back to the exploration. “That’s the reason for all life in the world, human life, I mean.”

“What is?” she asked.

“That kiss… A kiss like that is the start of everything for humanity and beyond. Just look around at the world and everyone you see walking or talking or falling down. It’s all because of a kiss.” He picked up a rock and tossed it. They heard it smack against the trunk of a tall pine.

Her heart smiled at the sound of his words. She thought he was everything. “But it takes more than a kiss,” she said.

He stopped and looked at her. “But not today. I want to remember that kiss just the way it happened. Nothing more and nothing less. So, leave it at that.”

“Okay,” she smiled. “I’ll leave it at that.”

“Until I say different… But let’s make a fire. I like to look into the flames. I like to look through the little Russian black doors.”

“What do you see on the other side of those doors?”

“Most of the time I see nothing but more flames. I think that it means that life means nothing to me.”

“How can life mean nothing to you?” she asked as she followed his lead and picked up twigs and set them in a pile. Then she helped him gather stones to make a fire ring.

Coal looked down at the gathering of stones once it was a complete circle. He assembled the sticks inside, laid out the kindling below, set fire to it with a yellow cigarette lighter. The flames attacked the dry wood. There was crackling and smoke and the smell of a campfire.

They sat down on the ground around it. Coal seemed mesmerized. Linda watched him. “What do you see now?”

“I see a future fraught with upheaval… You may want to do yourself a favor and step away from me.”

“My mom says you’re a ‘dweller in the darkness.’”

“She’s not wrong.” Coal turned away from looking at the flames and fixed his eyes on her. “That’s why my name is Coal,” and he spelled it out loud, “C-O-A-L. But that was my doing, not my mother or father’s. I mean, the name and the darkness… Is it true that your family are terrorists?”

“No!”

“Because everyone at school says your family is from Iran and that you are all terrorists. Your brother, at least, seems like a terrorist to me.”

“He’s not a terrorist. None of us are. People are so stupid. We lived over there because of my dad’s job. That’s where he met my mom. So yeah, I’m part Iranian but I’m not a terrorist. Small minds…”

“Do you want to get high and go listen to Rush in my bedroom?”

“I’ve never gotten high. What’s it like?”

“It’s weird. Hard to explain. But everything changes. Perception changes, sound changes, time changes. I want to see what it’s like to kiss you when I’m high.”

She was intrigued by that idea. “Are you sure I won’t go crazy?”

“I can’t promise you that.”

“Are we ever going to be more than this?”

He ignored her question as he worked to douse the fire with dirt.

“Are we?”

Years later, Linda sat on the edge of her cactus bed and blinked her eyes and took a breath. “What am I doing with my life? What are any of us doing with our lives?”

END


The Salaman

Photo by Mikou0142aj Kou0142odziejczyk on Pexels.com.

The Salaman stood inside a half-circle shower stall made of smooth zoo stone and let the water spray upon him. Cliff was in a rubber suit and wearing high rubber boots and he stood outside the stall, his hands gripping a thick green hose that shot out a forceful stream of water. “Raise your arms and let me wash out those pits,” the zookeeper barked at him. He looked down between the Salaman’s legs and nodded with his head. “And make sure to wash that rotten crotch of yours, too. No woman is going to want to go down on that if you’re dirty.”

“How about a fresh bar of soap, comrade?” the Salaman asked in his deep voice.

Cliff scowled. “I gave you a fresh bar last week. How can you possibly use so much god damn soap?”

“Zip it. I like to be clean, you bastard.”

The zookeeper sighed, twisted a valve on the hose and walked off for a moment. When he returned, he unwrapped a fresh bar of soap and tossed it to him. “Here.”

The Salaman snatched it out of the air with one chimp-like hand. “Thanks.” He proceeded to lather up his lean, hairy body to the point he looked like a five-foot, nine-inch pillar of suds. “Have you seen her yet?” he asked through the foam. “Am I going to be glad she was on the menu?”

The zookeeper relaxed his stance some. “She’s a good-looking woman in a tight package if that’s what you mean. But remember, no romance.”

“I know. I’m glad you were able to secure some prey for me. And she is also aware of the stipulations?”

“Of course. We went over all of it with her.”

“No cuddling. No follow-up calls. No relationships whatsoever. And especially down the road when the little rug rats pop out. I don’t like kids; I just like making them.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Cliff repeated with a certain degree of frustration. “It’s all in the contract.”

“Because you know, I’m not one for love,” the Salaman explained once again. “There can never be love. If it ever turns into love, my life here at the zoo will be over, and I can’t have that. I’d never survive in the world out there. This is my home.”

“Yes, yes, we are all aware,” Cliff said. “The world is no place for an animal such as yourself.”

“Spray me off now,” the Salaman ordered, and Cliff reignited the hose and white suds flowed off the Salaman’s body like lava down the side of a volcanic mountain. Once he was completely free of the suds, he motioned to Cliff to shut off the water. He stood there naked and dripping, waiting for the zookeeper to hand him a large, fluffy, white towel. He dried himself and then wrapped the towel around his waist and stepped into a pair of leather sandals.

“Would you like to go out into your enclosure and look at the sunrise before you hump her?”

“I would like that, Cliff. And I like that you know me so well, all my quirks and my keen interest in things like nature and astronomy.”

“And your films.”

“That reminds me. I think after mating I’d like to watch ‘Taxi Driver’ again.”

“That’s a good one.”

“One of the best.”

“That DeNiro is one hell of an actor.”

The Salaman nodded his head in agreement as they made their way through a heavy metal door to the outside enclosure. “I really do like how much you understand me, Cliff old boy. It’s fulfilling. Like I always say, you’re a good egg.”

“It’s my job. I do my best.”

The metal door closed with a heavy clang behind them. The Salaman looked up and sucked a deep breath from the morning air as they stepped out into it. “You know what my favorite planet is, Cliff?”

He sighed because he knew the joke but played along. “No. What’s your favorite planet?”

“Uranus.”

“Oh really?”

“What I meant to say is, well, not your anus, her anus,” he clumsily tried to explain. “Oh bother, what the hell am I even talking about?”

“Ass, I think. I’m not certain. Perhaps you’re just a bit worked up as you ready yourself for mounting.”

“Perhaps. I hope I’m not coming down with something. Germs. What horrible things. How about some hand sanitizer?”

Cliff the zookeeper patted himself down in search of the small bottle he always kept with him as the Salaman held out a hand.

“You know, during my days back in the real world, people used to make fun of me for using so much hand sanitizer, but mark my word, Cliff old boy, some day in the future, maybe 20 years or so from now, hand sanitizer is going to be one hot item. I have a sense about such things. I can feel it.”

“Found it. Here you go,” and he squirted a glob of the liquid into the Salaman’s waiting hand. “Now rub vigorously,” Cliff instructed.

“That’s what I plan on telling this hot babe today,” the Salaman said with a devilish grin, his perfect teeth glistening under the dimmed park lights of yellowish morning glory blue and pink.

 “I don’t doubt it,” Cliff said.

“You can leave me now and check to see if she’s ready.”

“Do you think you’ll ever let me warm one of them up? I could really use the practice, and the exercise. Because, you know how it’s been between my wife and I.”

The Salaman clamped a sympathetic hand on the little gray man’s shoulder. “I’m sorry you don’t get any action, Cliff old boy. I truly am. But you must face reality. Look at yourself. You look like Arnold Horshack in the future. The women would run off screaming and where would that leave me?” he asked rhetorically. “With big, aching balls, that’s where.”


In the interior part of the Salaman’s zoo enclosure, there was a separate area off to one side with a luxurious four-poster bed draped with sheer curtains and Cliff had instructed her to wait there for him.

When the Salaman arrived, he moved aside a red drape and entered. He still had the towel wrapped around his waist, but he quickly undid it and it dropped to the floor before her revealing the legendary tool of animalistic penetration. The woman moved to the edge of the bed to get a closer look at him. Her eyes widened.

“Why don’t you take a picture, it will last longer,” he said to her.

The woman was taken back and looked up at him. “I’m not going to end up on that Internet thing, am I?”

“It’s a figure of speech, lady. What bus did you come in on? The one from Ding-A-Ling Town?”

“I was out for my morning run when that man approached me.”

The Salaman stepped over to a video camera perched on a tripod and turned it on. He peered through the lens, aimed it toward the bed, angled it just right, and made a couple of adjustments. “You left us an address to send your souvenir videotape to, right?” he asked.

She crinkled her brow and sighed. “Yes. In discreet packaging?”

“I run a reputable operation. If I say discreet, I mean discreet.”

“Because, god, if my husband ever gets a hold of this.”

“Don’t be dumb and leave it in the VCR, or, for an extra charge, we can provide you with a DVD. Do you have a DVD player?”

“Not yet. We’re thinking about it.”

“You should. Nearly flawless playback. Crisp, clean. I like that.”

“Can we please just get on with the sex? I heard you really know how to bury the seed.”

“You’re not wrong.”

“I hope I’m not. My biological clock is ticking.”

“Do I look like Father Time?”

“I mean, you guarantee it right? That’s what I was told.”

“If you’re not satisfied, come back again until you are. That’s my policy. It’s in the contract. Don’t you know how to read?”

“Yes, I know how to read.”

“Then put down the book and unzip it.”

“What?”

“Get naked,” he ordered. She shed her remaining clothes and waited.

He walked around the edge of the bed, looking her over. “Did you wash yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Because you’re required to wash yourself.”

“I know. I did.”

“Soap and water?”

“Yes!”

“Spread yourself and let me see.”

“What?”

“Do I stutter? I said spread yourself.”

She did as he ordered, and the Salaman closely inspected her. He grunted an approval, cracked his knuckles, and loosened his neck. “Now,” he commanded. “Make like a dog and I’ll give you a bone,” and he quickly moved on her like a jungle beast attacking its prey.


“Well, Cliff, I must say, that was refreshing,” the Salaman said to him as they lounged on lawn chairs inside the enclosure and looked up at the blue sky and a train of clouds. “I really gave it to her… And she took it like a real pro.”

“Congratulations on all your sexual success,” Cliff said halfheartedly.

“O, come on, Cliff. What’s the matter.”

He pointed up to the sky. “Time’s ticking down for me my friend. Just look at it. You can see the world just moving on and moving on and me along with it. My time is almost up. I can feel it in my bones.”

“Ah, knock it off, Cliff. You still got plenty left in you.”

“Do I now?”

“Sure, you do. Just because you’re not banging fresh meat every day… Don’t you have any hobbies?”

“Hobbies? Not really. I come to work. I go home. I watch television with the misses. I eat, drink, sleep. And church on Sundays.”

“Hmm… Say, you seem to have some interest in film. How about the next time I have a breeding session I let you operate the camera?”

Cliff excitedly sat forward. “You would really let me do that!?”

“Sure… You wouldn’t be uncomfortable, would you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Just don’t try and play with yourself. I don’t need these hot babes running off screaming.”

Cliff scoffed. “Oh, brother. I wouldn’t do that. I’d do a good job. I’d take real pride in it.”

“I’m sure you would, Cliff. I’m sure you would… Hey, it’s a glorious day. Why don’t you go get us two boxes of animal crackers and let’s celebrate… You know, the ones that look like a train and have the white string attached.”

Cliff groaned. “Oh, boy. This is what my life has come to… Fetching animal crackers.”

The Salaman glanced over at him and smiled victoriously. “Yes, Cliff. It is.”


The Zodiac Salamander

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Alabaster eggplants frolic in a purple haze. Munchkins drop acid and watch Wizard of Oz repeatedly until one jumps out a window. Wood gnomes with shotguns play patriots on the streets of D.C. The world looks at them and laughs. Sharpie abusers make cardboard signs declaring freedom and love. Love? Love runs rampantly abused. There is no such thing as a pair of dice. Las Vegas doldrums, sadness in a sea of glitter and gold. The tin man walks against the tide, his metal hide, the mental ride, rising, like Calypso. He feels sick to his stomach and vomits nails. He’s so visual yet so invisible. All those magnetic eyes stuck to the rides, plowing the sleigh bells, the conch shells, halls of injustice carpeted in velvet and blood. The soul ship arrives, to take us on a ride, to the other side.

His heart is dwindling, his skin is splitting, magic means nothing. He has a heroin sandwich for lunch on the 32nd floor. The room is quiet except for the soft whirr of an invisible A/C unit. He steps out onto the veranda, looks over the edge, the city roars, there’s wild boars, mandible monsters pound the pavement, the invisible man falls… No one even sees the crash. It’s all madness walking over and clockwork cuckoo skins. The fountains spray jest, the endless hallways cradle the wild, the wind, the sin, the ever-flowing gin. There’s sonic bathhouses and orbital areolas, Italian soda kisses that send some to Kingdom Come.

Flight patterns are all nonsense now, like sauerkraut rainbows, mint gravy, acidic donuts, laundry detergent made by skunks. The wires are so loose, obtuse, full of fruit juice. Here we go. The whore canals swell in their suits of lies, another tried and died, another tear-filled sky, standing on the deck of the wet city, the rain finally flies to wash away all the deliberate unlove.  

And now there are men who think they are animals, and they pay to live in a glass cube at the zoo…

When one gazed into the room, his eyes were like little red lights… Little traffic lights they were, in that bloom of darkness. But when he stepped out of that darkness some, his eyes then turned green, as if fireflies were bouncing around inside his head and peering out the eye holes. And when he finally came full into the light, he would blink madly, and his eyes took on a golden glow. It’s because he’s an animal. It’s because he’s a human animal, a man who lives in a cage at the zoo. The sign outside his enclosure reads: The Zodiac Salamander. He’s an amphibious being with fire for feelings.

Cat food chaos envelops the world, the morning, the night, the knights of the trapezoid table. Maximum fluoride, ambient chloride, synthetic metropolis, a glimpse from the cage. He sees the eyes stare back at him, the monkey grins, the Karen chagrins, the popcorn tossers and word salad snipers. The girl cracks the skin of a banana, takes one lonely bite, throws what remains at him to see if he’ll play chimp. Gimp. Shrimp. A wholly cocktail to turn him different colors. The sky is a blue sheet of frosting, the clouds twisted puffs of cream, he lives in a dream, a chocolate fountain by his bed, a loaded gun to take off his head.

The purple bus steams as it waits, passengers fidget in the queue, he watches as it pulls away toward a desert moon, a wandering bride swallows a monsoon. He’s satiated where he stays, the curtains of his command center are frayed…

“Why can’t I be just like everyone else?” he asked himself as he stood before a circular mirror inside the Gilligan hut that stood inside the larger enclosure. “Because I don’t want to be like everyone else,” he answered his own question. “I’m not merely a man, I’m a man who’s an animal… I’m animalistic. I am extreme. See how my eyes glow?”

The Zodiac Salamander got on a black telephone attached to one wall of the hut and pressed some square numbers. “Hello, central operations? It’s the human animal again. Say, when am I going to get some hot prey to mount? Isn’t it mating season yet? Can someone bring me the menu?”

He paused as someone on the other end of the line spoke.

“Uh huh. Right. I understand. Not too many willing participants? Now I don’t understand… Uh, huh. Right. Society frowns upon human breeding experiments at a zoo facility?”

Again, he paused as someone on the other end of the line spoke.

“Well, surely you can find some wandering aimless babe looking for a good time. My hanging fruit is ripe and full and I’m about to blow a packet of seed. So, when you do, let me know. Thanks.” He set the receiver back upon its cradle. “Damn society and all its correctness despite all its ill repute. This societal schism is giving me mental illness.”

The zoo wasn’t a big city zoo in a well-known place. It was a small zoo out on the edge of a brutal southwestern town on the fringes of the mad desert. The animal animals were limited to the usual small-town zoo fare plus various creatures that were native to the region. The Zodiac Salamander was neighbor to foxes, coyotes, a black bear, bison, devil snakes, lizards, icky spiders, evil goats, a long-horn steer, brooding vultures, and a passionate mountain lion.

After watching the movie Taxi Driver—his favorite—for the 919th time, the Zodiac Salamander stepped out from his hut and into the open air of the enclosure. He liked taking time to look up at space before he went down for the night. The jagged universe tossed back its grand array of colors and shapes and the milk of the Milky Way spilled and ran down across the faces of all the stars and other celestial objects.

It was just then that a small, gray man came into view beneath the light of the moon. The Zodiac Salamander sniffed the air. “Cliff? Is that you, Cliff? Cliff old boy?”

The man stepped forward to reveal his true self. “It’s me. How are you tonight?”

He sighed a painful sigh. “I’m lonely, Cliff. They’re not bringing me any women to mount. I have needs, Cliff. I have animalistic urges.”

“I suppose they haven’t found a proper mate yet,” Cliff answered. He scratched at his head. “These things take time, but I’ll see what I can do.”

“You’re a good egg, Cliff, and my favorite zookeeper.”

Cliff looked up at the stars. “Do you ever consider the sheer vastness of space?” he asked.

The Zodiac Salamander followed his track up to the heavens. “All the time.”

“Yet we toil with such meaningless wonders here on Earth. For instance,” Cliff pointed out to him. “My greatest worry is not being left alone or the fate of my everlasting soul… It’s will I be able to afford the rent or be able to buy enough food or keep the lights on. Isn’t that just such a terrible way for a man to have to be?”

The Zodiac Salamander nodded his head in agreement. “That’s why I’ve chosen to live how I live. My only true concerns are of a deep and primitive nature. I let the world out there worry itself to death. I mean, what can I do it about it. My hands are tied.”

Cliff tapped at his fuzzy gray head. “It can make a man go insane. We weren’t meant to live like this, yet here we are, living like this.”

“Sounds like you need to mount some female prey, Cliff. You’re wound tighter than a toy top.”

Cliff laughed at that suggestion. “I’m afraid my mounting days are over.”

The Zodiac Salamander frowned at the thought of the same thing happening to himself one day.

“Well,” Cliff said. “I need to finish my rounds. Unless I do myself in, I’ll be back at the crack of dawn’s early light to hose you down.”

END


The Gravy Canoe of Wild Wyoming – 12

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Steel Brandenburg III felt the presence of a large wild animal as he stood on the back patio of the Gould house. He could hear the animal struggling to breathe. He turned to see her there with a disappointed look on her face.

“Can you please explain what that was all about?” Carrie said to him.

He called himself back to reality. “The guy is a jerk. He’s an a-hole.”

“He’s the pastor of my church, and a guest in my home.” Carrie waved her hand around in the air. “And must you smoke? It’s disgusting.”

Steel turned on her. “Must you eat five-hundred pounds of food every time you sit down at a table!?”

Carrie’s face began to sour, her bottom lip trembled. “Must you always be so cruel to me? Why can’t you just love me?”

Steel laughed. “Love? You’ve lost your marbles.” He pointed with his cigarette hand. “Everyone in there has lost their marbles.”

“Will you please just come back inside? And I want you to apologize for your abhorrent behavior.”

Steel sighed, took one last drag, and tossed the cigarette aside. Part of him wanted to just tell her to ‘fuck off.’ Part of him wanted to just walk away and be done with it all. But then there was a part of him that wanted to see things through for some curiously sick reason he didn’t fully understand. Did he really care about Carrie Gould? How could he? “All right, all right,” he relented. Maybe he just wanted her like an animal. “Just get off my back.”

She half-smiled at him and went to hug him. Her plump body felt good in his arms, Steel thought. She even smelled kind of nice. He moved to kiss her, but she turned away. “Gross. Not until you brush your teeth and use some mouthwash,” she told him.


Once back inside and with apologies made, Steel helped Mother Melba clear the table and clean the dishes. They stood side-by-side at the kitchen sink, quiet at first, with only the clinking of dinnerware and water running forth from the spout to be heard. He stared out the window as he lackadaisically ran a dish towel over a plate. He wanted to run, but at the same time he wanted to stay there forever. She nudged him with her elbow.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she said, and then she chuckled. “I guess these days I better ask for a quarter.”

Steel snarled to himself on the inside. He wanted to punch her in the face or hold her head down in the soapy dishwater. “Do you ever wonder how you get yourself into a particular situation. I mean, even with all the best intentions and planning and trying to do the right thing, you always end up in a bad situation?”

She turned to look at him with a certain degree of concern. “You think you’re in a bad situation?”

“Not this,” he assured her. “But this job I have and this town I find myself living in. How did I end up here if everything I aimed for was the exact opposite of this? How does that happen? How is it I stumble over my own feet so badly?”

“Well, Steel… I believe you were moved by the Holy Spirit, but you’ve been resistant,” Mother Melba said. “I believe the Lord has brought you here for a reason. It was out of your control. You shouldn’t fight it so much. He has plans for you.” She tapped the back of his hand with her wet one. It gave him chills for some reason, and he leaned over and kissed her cheek. She turned her mouth to him and let him kiss her there.

She suddenly pulled away. “Oh, dear,” she said.

“I’m sorry… No, I’m not,” Steel confessed, and he kissed her again.

Mother Melba put her hands on his chest and backed him away. “No, Steel. This isn’t right. You’re Carrie’s fella.”

He pulled her closer to him and put a hand between her legs. “I’m being moved by the Holy Spirit,” he whispered.


Pastor Craig Stikk stood by the large window in the front room of the Gould house. He looked out and sipped at his coffee, his eyes narrow. Carrie was sitting politely in a nearby easy chair. “You know, Carrie. When Jesus was on the cross, you could see his ribs. He was thin.” He turned from the window to look at her. “But it seems to me that you would prefer to eat ribs. I can just imagine the sloppy barbecue sauce all over your face.” He nodded toward her body. “Blubber like that was never part of Christ’s life.”

Carrie gave him a confused look. “Pastor?”

“Look, I saw how you ate at dinner. You probably don’t realize it, but you’re gluttonous… And gluttony is a sin, Carrie.”

She bowed her head in shame. “I know. I’m sorry, pastor. It’s a constant battle for me.”

“And a battle you’re losing… But I could help you with that,” he said with a sly grin and a twinkle in his perverted eyes.

She perked up just as he began to walk over to where she was sitting. He moved around to the back of her chair. He set his coffee cup down on a side table and subtly leaned an arm over her shoulder. His hand lightly landed on one of her large breasts. He kept it there as he continued, rhythmically kneading her like tender bread dough. “I could help you focus on other things. I could help you fight the temptation to stuff yourself… With food, that is.”

Her head whirled around to look up at him. “A Bible diet?”

He laughed. “No. A love diet.”

“A love diet?”

“I could be your sustenance, Carrie. Let me be your everlasting sustenance.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Then I’ll just come out and say it, Carrie… I’m hungry, too. But I’m hungry for you.” He came around to the front of the chair and knelt before her. He took her hands in his. “He’s not right for you. I’m right for you. We’re right for each other. You deserve to be loved better than how he loves you. I mean, you couldn’t even call it love, what he gives you. Steel’s not dedicated to you, Carrie. I could be dedicated to you.” He suddenly let his head drop down between her legs and he inhaled deeply. “My God, Carrie,” he said in a muffled tone. “I must have you. God has spoken to me, and He has told me that you are my only hope for a proper lust.”

She let her hands go to his head. She played with his hair as she pulled him in closer to her feminine depths. “Yes, pastor,” she mumbled. “Yes, yes, yes.”

TO BE CONTINUED


Ms. Grundy and the Bone Ghosts (5)

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Mary O’Shea blundered into the house and kicked off her shoes. Her husband, the constable, was sitting in his relaxing chair in the front room and staring out the window while he sipped on a glass with three fingers of Jameson Whiskey inside it. “Where have you been?” he called out without even glancing over at her as she stood in the mysterious shadows.

“Working,” she huffed.

“Working hard?” Harley scoffed.

“I always do,” she replied.

“I bet you do.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she said, stepping further into the room.

He finally turned to look at her. “How’s Lloyd?”

She shifted nervously. “Lloyd?”

“Lloyd the bartender from The Village Fig. I paid him a visit today.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Because he’s up to no good, that’s why. And so are you.” Harley O’Shea sat his glass down on a side table and got up out of his chair. He sauntered over to where she stood and looked her up and down. He sniffed at her. “I can smell him on you,” he said. “You smell like his place. I have a nose like a bloodhound.”

She backed away from him. “And a face like one, too.”

Harley roughly grabbed her by the arm and ran his nose all over her, inhaling her like a vacuum would a dirty carpet.

“What on Earth are you doing!?”

“Inspecting my wife,” he answered. “You do remember you’re my wife, right?”

“I need to shower,” she said, and she started to walk away, but Harley clamped a hand on her shoulder to stop her.

“Wait. Get undressed right here,” he ordered.

Mary protested. “What!? No. I will not.”

He jerked on her arm. “Strip.”

“Harley, you’re hurting me.”

“And I’ll hurt you a lot more if you don’t strip right now… And then I’ll arrest you.”

“For what?” she seethed.

“For adultery,” Harley told her, and he was dead serious.

But she just laughed at him and tore away from his grip. He quickly grabbed her by the back of the neck, but she countered with a quick, hard knee to the groin. Harley stumbled back, clutching his precious jewels. “You bitch,” he hissed.

“Don’t ever put your hands on me again,” Mary said, a stiff finger in the air. “Ever!” She turned away from him and went to take a shower.


It was Lloyd the bartender’s day off and he had decided that what he needed was a good walkabout in the woods. But first, he decided, he wanted to stop off at the church on the edge of town to see if he could get a few minutes of Father Oban’s time.

The church was a small stone relic from another time and that gave Lloyd some peace in his guts for he has always had an appreciation for the warm aesthetics of divine architecture. He pushed on the red door, and it creaked. He was greeted by the scent of burning candles and old stone and old wood and the remnants of funeral incense.

There was a large figure kneeling in one of the front pews and they were looking up at the big cross with ripped up Jesus on it. A head turned when the figure sensed Lloyd’s presence. He motioned at Lloyd to come forward.

Lloyd walked forward and shuffled into the pew and sat down next to Father Oban. “Hello, Father,” he said. “I was hoping I could speak with you.”

Father Oban moved up into a sitting position. “Absolutely,” he said, and he turned to look all around at the empty church. “As you can see, I’m not very busy… Is something troubling you?”

Lloyd took a deep breath and came right out with it. “I think I’m having an affair with a married woman.”

“You think you are?”

“I mean… We’ve been flirtatious. She’s been to my apartment.”

“I think you know exactly what I’m going to say… Do not tread on another man’s land, Lloyd. You must resist temptation.”

“But she’s unhappy with him. I’m sure he’s awful to her,” Lloyd said.

“Lloyd, my advice would be to step back from this situation. They need to resolve it their problems, not you. The outcome, no matter what it is, must be facilitated by them. If I were you, I’d keep my distance… For now, at least.”

“But I’m lonely, Father.”

Father Oban, who was a large man with a golden color, clamped a hand onto Lloyd’s thigh. “I know loneliness as well, Lloyd. We all do at some point in our lives. It’s a constant in the human condition, I’m afraid. But you cannot allow loneliness to be a catalyst for sin. You must find ways to cultivate this loneliness so that something new and green and positive begins to grow.”

Lloyd looked at him as if he didn’t understand anything he just said. “You mean… Like a hobby?”

“Sure, a hobby,” Father Oban replied.

“I have a stamp collection I haven’t touched in years. Maybe I could get back into that.”

“Stamp collecting, huh? Seems like a noble pursuit,” the priest said, and he moved his hand higher up on Lloyd’s thigh.

Lloyd glanced down at it for a moment. He found it to be a strange sensation. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

“Lloyd?”

“Your hand. It seems to be creeping up to somewhere it probably shouldn’t be.”

Father Oban pulled his hand away and embarrassingly smiled. “I’m sorry, Lloyd. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

“It must be hard not to be able to be intimate with others.”

Father Oban sighed. “It’s part of my oath, my commitment to God. But yes, it is a struggle.”

Lloyd then reached out and took the priest’s hand and placed it on his thigh like it was before. “It’s okay if you want to,” Lloyd said, and he moved closer to Father Oban and they sat like that together in the empty, quiet church for a long time.

TO BE CONTNUED


The Sour Scarecrow

Photo by Samuel Benjamin Hernandez Lopez on Pexels.com

A dark day rises gallantly toward the sun. Love is tattooed on the skin of beckoning stars. Red huts line the perimeter of the crater. Down in the belly is where they grow worship plants. The royalty ships float above, the strong hulls crush the air, the flamboyant sails unfurl ahead of the breeze of a sun flare.

The Egg House is crowded this nochy (night) and the barons of love and lust are roaming freely, checking pocket watches and the walls and the windows and the doors.

Harver Fielding feels his guts are all clamped up as he sits in the corner and tries to write a novel beneath a lamp with a green glass shade. This is what it feels like, he thinks. Trying to write in a noisy atmosphere such as this. He does it to train himself, to make him better in the battle against distraction. But the work forces deep breaths and tinges of twists and turns in the guts. Breathe.

He scratches a pencil into paper. The tip breaks, his heart breaks, his eyes cascade over the clamor of the room. A large room, a dim room, a room filled with people, the ones who live in the red huts out on the rim, the ones who caretake the worship plants in the crater’s belly, the royal ship captains and their high brow beaten bruises, the ones the women cling to like plastic wrap in space.

He breathes a restless scarecrow sorrow, a sour candy taste… Keep going he whispers to the inner parts of his own mind. Keep going. Sleep is still, sleep is destiny unfolded. A warm mouth beneath a tree unpeeled, a ripe banana wristwatch, a Fielding statue at the great park. Images upon images bleed fast through Harver’s mind. He’s scared, he’s happy, he misses love, he’s alone, he is crowded in.

The Egg House is a big wooden structure with multiple decks and porches and small windows and ceiling fans that chop away at the smoke and the talk and the smell of the eggs they cook all day. It’s the biggest place to be out on the edge of the crater. It’s the center of humanity for most. It’s the centrifugal engine of all life in this place, this far away place, a place etched away in the corner of the universe unplagued by God and his soldiers of misfortune.

They are far from Earth now… Farther than any of them have ever been. It was a high so high that none of them thought they would ever come down… And now, they don’t want to come down. There’s something in the air here, the shallow thick air that tastes like butter mints and paint. There’s something in the rain, the snow, the chill, the heat, the eggs. The eggs are eggs plus. There’s always a little extra something added that sharpens the corpuscles, unfamishes the blood, lifts the fog and makes the whole world seem like polished glass.

Harver closes his notebook and relents to the growing madness of the people. He sees a woman looking at him… But the restless edge of his heart and soul rust from the weight of love, the weightlessness of joy. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the small plastic pill bottle. He swallows another mood stabilizer and washes it down with water. What seems to be water. Nothing is defined as it used to be. We are no longer Earthlings; we aren’t any sort of Ling… We are puppets or masters or anything in between, Harver thinks, knows, believes, distrusts.  A cluster of royal captains shout and laugh… their princely lives off Earth seem to suit them well.

Harver suddenly gets cold and pulls on his beat down brown leather jacket. He tucks his notebook under his arm and exits The Egg House, the Exeter, the exile, the existence, all in the same. Once outside he sees the green and blue suns are beginning to dip away. The devil is playing with his chips. He’s betting on frailty and poverty and hate. All the things that destroyed Original Earth, well, some of the things, Harver thinks. The wind plays with his hair. He’s disheveled now, sour, sweet, bitter, and blessed. He wonders as he walks along toward the inner guts of Crater City, if his skin will simply just split tonight and all that he is will spill out onto the floor of his domicilian cubicle. Where to next? Harver wonders. The vastness of all space is deeper than anything that’s ever been.

The wind kicks up as he turns onto Castleberry Street. It’s a place of narrow walkways and tall thin trees and lamp posts that squirt liquid light of orange and basil green. It’s a place of tall buildings, squat buildings, windows, doors, lights, tears, falling souls, nightmares, and beautiful dreams. His building is number 117. He activates the lomtick clock tick, the amber lock, with a wave of a hand and the peering of an eye. He steps onto an air pedestal and is immediately lifted with great speed. Harver almost feels as if he is flying. Almost? He is flying. It stops at level 42. The lock disengages. He steps inside. He goes straight to the one window and looks out.

The world still breathes and then Harver thinks, the world will still breathe long after he himself stops breathing. That pains him, and he wonders if he’ll miss the world or if the world will miss him. The new world, that is. How could the new world possibly miss him.  

In the lonely edge of the end of another day, he regrets much. He laments the losses; he winces from the tragedies. He sits sown in the one chair and is quiet for a long time. He listens to the rhythm of his own heartbeat, but then it changes, it slows, then stops completely. The notebook slips to the floor, and Harver now floats above the rim of the crater, his soul tenderly grazed by the hull of another royal ship.

END


A Restless Vessel

Photo by Rodolfo Clix on Pexels.com.

He was feeling restless in his overheated testicles on that day when everything changed.

The man named Steeple resembled a yellow wooden pencil as he shimmied down the sidewalk and away from the store on Story Street that sold mostly women’s lingerie and unmentionable undergarments. One of the clerks in the store had caught him grotesquely fondling frilly panties that were displayed like religious pamphlets on a table in the center of the store. He had been quite brazen about it, too—whispering unspeakable things and moaning. The clerk forcefully asked him to leave.

“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy I’m in trouble,” he said aloud to himself in a sing-song kind of way in his getaway. He walked rapidly, his long legs skating along awkwardly, arms pumping, elbows cocked out to the side. He kept turning around to look to see if anyone was following him. His head spun in all directions as he scanned the cityscape for a fresh poppin’ police cruiser tailing his ass. There were none.

He ducked into a small park and hid behind a tree. He suddenly had the urge to make pee and he undid his zipper and let it out. A woman holding a small child by the hand saw him as they passed by. “What are you doing!?” she cried out. She whipped the child around so she wouldn’t be able to see him.

“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy I’m really in trouble now!” the man who resembled a yellow wooden pencil said, and he quickly zipped up and scurried off like a frightened small mammal.

“You’re a pig!” the woman called out after him. “You should be behind bars!”

Steeple started to run, tripped, and fell, and then hurriedly got back up again. He had ripped his pants when he fell and could hardly stand it. He went straight off to see Mr. Calypso, the tailor on Harding Street.

A small bell attached to the door jingled when he walked in. “Hello… Mr. Calypso! Are you here!?”

A short man with flowing white hair and a big white moustache wriggling beneath his swelled nose emerged from the back of the shop. “Oh, hello there, Steeple. How are you?”

“I’m having a rough day,” Steeple replied. “A very rough day. And now my pants are torn… Right here in the knee.” He displayed the rip to him.

“Oh, my,” Mr. Calypso said, and he came out from behind the counter to take a closer look. “Take them off and I’ll get them fixed up for you.”

Steeple looked around the dim shop. “Right here? But people will see me in my underwear.”

Mr. Calypso bent his head down and looked at him judgmentally over the top rim of his glasses. “Do you think I have that much business?” He waved a hand in the air. “No one will come in, but if it makes you feel any better, you can come sit in the back with me while I work. Okay?”

“But then you’ll see me in my underwear.”

Mr. Calypso shot him an annoyed glance. “It’s underwear, Steeple. Everybody wears underwear. If you want, I’ll take my pants off, too. Then we’ll both be in our underwear. Okay?”

“That’s fair,” Steeple said, and he followed the old man to the back of the shop and the area where he did all his work.

“Now,” Mr. Calypso began as he undid his pants and stepped out of them. “I’ll just sew on a patch, okay?” He folded his own pants neatly and set them aside before spreading Steeple’s pants out on a broad table. He sat down on a stool and clicked on a light and went to work repairing the pants. “So, what’s this about a rough day. Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Just between you and me?”

“Just us, my friend.”

“I got caught messing around in the women’s lingerie shop.”

Mr. Calypso suddenly stopped what he was doing. “What? What kind of messing around?”

“I was just touching the women’s underwear.”

“More god damn underwear! What’s with you and underwear?”

“Yours are funny looking, by the way.”

Mr. Calypso looked down for a moment at his plain white briefs. “Never mind that!”

“Have you ever touched a pair of women’s panties?”

 Mr. Calypso chuckled as he went back to fixing Steeple’s pants. “It’s been a few years.”

“They’re so nice. So soft and lacey and… I just can’t help it. I mean, men’s underwear are like tool bags, whereas women’s underwear are like cradles full of lullabies.”

Mr. Calypso looked at him strangely and shook his head to cast off the words Steeple just uttered. “And so, what happened? You were touching them and then what…?”

“The lady that worked there, she like, yelled at me to stop and I ran out of the store.”

“Well… I don’t think they’ll send you to prison.”

“And then some woman and her kid caught me peeing in the park. That’s when I ran off, fell, and ripped my pants.”

Mr. Calypso laughed out loud. “Oh, my. You have had quite the day. Ooo hoo. Anything else?” 

“No. Not yet.”

“Come on,” Mr. Calypso said. “Don’t be so glum. It could be worse. It can always be worse.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“I am right. I’m always right.”

They were silent with each other for a while as the tailor finished his work on the pants and then presented them to him. “Good as new,” he said.

“Thanks,” Steeple said, and he hopped off the stool where he had been sitting and put the pants back on. “What do I owe you, Mr. Calypso?”

“Don’t worry about it… Think of it as the one good thing that happened to you today. Free pants repair. I know it’s been bleak.”

“I appreciate it… I’ll see you around.”

Steeple walked out of the tailor shop and went up two blocks to a coffee house. He ordered a regular coffee and a piece of cherry pie. He sat in a small booth by a window. He sipped at his coffee and poked at his pie with the tips of the fork tines. “Oh, boy, oh boy, oh boy, I’m a damn fool,” he whispered to himself. 

A moment later something in the corner of his eye caught his attention. It was a red balloon floating listlessly in the air. He followed the white string down and saw that it was tied around the wrist of a young girl. It was the girl from the park, and her eyes were boring into him like the gigantic drilling machine in the movie At The Earth’s Core.

The girl tugged on her mother’s sleeve and when the woman realized who it was, she thrust out her pointer finger and yelled across the restaurant, “That’s the man who made pee in the park! Security!”

Steeple panicked. He roughly got up from the table and ran out of the coffee house without paying the bill. He ran and ran and kept on running. A police cruiser eventually rushed up beside him; it’s lights suddenly illuminated and there was the blurp blurp sound of warning.

Steeple could run no more, and he hunched over and placed his hands on his knees as he tried to catch his breath. The new patch felt strange against his palm. He could see the officers approaching. Then once again from the corner of his eye, something caught his attention. There was someone sitting in the back of the patrol car. It was Mr. Calypso the tailor and he was scowling back at him and wagging a finger of shame in Steeple’s direction.

“Oh boy, oh, boy, oh boy,” Steeple mumbled as the officers of the law roughly put him up against the outside wall of a building. “It was all just a trick. Life is nothing but a trick.”

END