Junk
Author: Danger Slater; Jason Armstrong; Chris Rhatigan; Andrew Hilbert; Ryan Sayles; David James Keaton; Chris Leek; Eric Beetner
Date: 2013-12-02 08:00:00+00:00
Description: Like an ATM who just wants to be loved. Like an episode of the Rockford Files but with a guy in a moo-moo. Like a baaaaad trip to Taco Bell. Like a farting house of skin and testicles. Like legions of space ninjas encountering a truck stop full of friggin’ mean gay dudes. Like wearing mittens but calling them gloves but secretly calling them hitman gloves. Like your dog saving your life or eating your corpse. Like waiting for that dreamy prom date who probably stood you up on account of the apocalypse. Like JUNK.
Publisher: Lance Armstrong's Other Ball

Junk released through Lance Armstrong’s Other Ball

The individual copyrights belong to the authors unless otherwise noted.

© 2013 All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

Cover Design: Eric Beetner

All rights reserved. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

PROM NIGHT By Danger Slater

ASS TO MOUTH By Jason Armstrong

THE THINGS I NEED TO BE A HITMAN By Chris Rhatigan

FLESH HOUSE By Andrew Hilbert

INVASION OF THE DEMON NINJAS, OR HOW A MODERN DAY BATHHOUSE SAVED OUR WORLD By Ryan Sayles

TACO HELL By David James Keaton

THE BROW BEATING HEAVY LEATHER REPOSSESSION SHUFFLE By Chris Leek

WOOF By Eric Beetner

BIOS

PROM NIGHT
by Danger_Slater

It’s 6:15.

He’s late.

I’m on the loveseat in the living room wearing a satin cobalt-blue dress. My hair, crimped and curled. My teeth brushed. My cheeks blushed. In my lap my hands rest daintily as I patiently wait for the doorbell to ring. I have a thong on. Blue. To match my gown. It’s the first thong I’ve ever worn. Although it feels somewhat uncomfortable to have this strip of fabric riding up the crack of my ass, I have to say, it’s also feels quite liberating as a woman. I feel naughty under my clothes. Sexy, even.

I’ve never felt sexy before.

Nevermind the fact that he’s running late, which in turn is making me anxious, which in turn is making me sweat, which in turn is creating two large, ovular pit stains on either side of my satin cobalt-blue dress, which in turn is making me self-conscious, which in turn is making me more anxious, which in turn is causing me to sweat more.

Nevermind all that.

Tonight is the sexiest I’ve ever been.

And no one—NO ONE—would’ve ever pegged me, Penny Wilkinson, as sexy.

* * *

It’s all for him, of course. Jerry. My date. My prom date.

My late prom date.

He’s just...so cool, ya know? He’s athletic and funny and good-looking and popular. Never in a million-billion-kajillion years would I have ever thought Jerry would ask me to the prom. But he did! He asked me last week! I know, I couldn’t believe it either! And so, apparently, couldn’t my mother because when I told her about it at dinner she put down her spoon and stopped chewing, mid-goulash.

“Jerry?” my mom said, her mouth full of half-eaten sirloin tips. “Jerry Thomas?”

“Yup,” I replied, smiling so hard it hurt my cheeks.

“Basketball team Jerry Thomas?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Homecoming king Jerry Thomas?”

“Yes.”

“Jerry Thomas with the baby-brown eyes and charismatic, Harrison Ford-esque swagger and the rugged alabaster good looks of a European underwear model?”

“Jesus, mom! Quit perving off all over my date. Who the hell is Harrison Ford?”

She resumed chewing. “Oh, Penny. I’m sorry. Kids can be so cruel.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “This is probably the best goddamn day in my whole pathetic life and you’re sitting there as stone-faced as an 18th century painting. God, I should’ve known better than to share anything with you.”

“Penny,” my mother spoke slowly, “Sweetheart – I think he’s putting you on.”

“Putting me on?”

“I just don’t want to see you get hurt. I just think it’s a little early to rule out the possibility that maybe, maybe, you’re at the butt-end of some kind of sadistic prank.”

“It’s not a prank, mom,” I snapped back at her. “He asked me today after gym class. Right in front of all his friends and everything. He was all like, ‘Hey Penny, whatcha doing for prom?’ and I was all like ‘Gee, Jerry, I dunno’ and he was like ‘You wanna go to the prom with me then?’ and I was all ‘Sure Jerry. I’d like that.’ Then he and all his friends started laughing and slapping high-five. You shoulda seen it, mom. I felt like a princess.”

My mom shook her head. “Penny, it sounds to me like they were messing with you.”

“GAWD MOM, WHY CAN’T YOU JUST BE HAPPY FOR ME FOR, LIKE, 2 GODDAMN SECONDS?”

“Penny, you know how I feel about taking the Lord’s name in vain...”

“SCREW YOU!”

“That’s it, young lady. Go to your room,” she scolded me.

“Good. That’s exactly where I wanted to go anyway,” I retorted. “Away from you and your stupid ass. What’s with this dogshit dinner anyway? Goulash? What the hell is that? What are we, Slovakian immigrants or something?”

“Goulash is Hungarian, dear,” she said.

“Ugh,” I huffed as I stormed off.

“I’m just saying to not get your hopes up, is all,” my mother called after me. But whatever, man. She don’t know shit. I put my headphones on and queued up My Chemical Romance on Pandora. Stupid bitch. Jerry will be here.

That’s all there is to it.

* * *

It’s 6:52.

I’m starting to worry.

Jerry was supposed to be here at 6.

Something must’ve happened to him. Something terrible. I’m trying to stay calm. Stay rational. But every scenario I can draw up in my mind ends up with Jerry hurt or injured or maimed somewhere and he’s trying desperately to get here but he can’t. I think, maybe he was attacked by bears or jellyfish or...I don’t know...cyborgs or something.

Maybe he slipped on some ice somewhere and he fell and now he has a spinal injury and he’s lying in a ditch on the side of some seldom-used street, paralyzed from the waist down. He tries to stand, but the fractured disc in his lower back has severed the nerves connecting his brain to his legs. He calls out for help but no one is around to hear him. He’s just lying there, helpless, as birds perch on his impotent lower half and ants crawl up his nose and down his throat and swarm all over his handsome, chiseled face. Half-conscious, half-dead, just lying there in a puddle of his own piss and shit until some good Samaritan happens to see him out of the corner of their eye while they’re out walking their dog or something. Now he’s in the hospital. In a coma. Unable to move. Unable to talk. Unable to text me and tell me he’s gonna be late.

But wait...that doesn’t make any sense. It’s May. There’s isn’t any ice anywhere. That is, unless he was walking by a factory that makes ice, but how would it’ve gotten on the sidewalk? Do they put their excess ice out on the curb like the regular garbage? And why would an ice factory have excess ice that they’re throwing away? It would just be water, if anything. And who slips and breaks their back in a puddle of water? No – he must’ve went inside the ice factory for some reason. He had to use the bathroom. While he was in there, one of the ice making machines went haywire and exploded, coating the entire inside of the building with frozen liquid. A virtual ice palace. Slippery and dangerous. Yes, that’s it! Jerry is lying on the cold factory floor, incapacitated, and it’s the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend so no one is going to be back until Tuesday morning, which, I’m sure after the three-day ordeal Jerry is about to go through, the first phone call he’s gonna make will be to me, to hear my felicific voice soothe his weary soul like chamomile tea. ‘I’m so sorry I missed the prom, Penny,’ he’d say. ‘It’s alright,’ I’d tell him, ‘We’re together now and that’s all that matters.’

There we go. A perfectly logical explanation. Well done, Penny.

Er...but wait...what if that’s not what happened. What if it was something far more sinister? What if Jerry was taken hostage by Libyan Nationalists during a high-stakes bank robbery? Oh my God, poor Jerry! They would’ve bashed him in the face with the blunt end of an M16 and fucked-up his perfectly symmetrical nose. GIVE US THE CASH OR THE PRETTY BOY TAKES ONE IN THE TEETH, the terrorist is screaming at the top of his lungs while sticking the nozzle of the rifle in Jerry’s open mouth. The teller, fumbling with the stacks of cash, purposefully drops a few $100 bills and when she bends over to pick them up she clandestinely hits the silent alarm. The vault seals. The police arrive. The Libyans are in a panic now. This was supposed to be a simple job. Get in, get out. Wham-bam-thank you, ma’am. Now they need leverage. Now they take Jerry hostage. Now they’re demanding a cool 100 million in non-sequential bills from the SWAT or Jerry’s gonna get a bullet in the skull. Pow! Fountains of blood and brain matter will explode out of that magnificent melon of his like ticker tape at a hero’s parade. But I shouldn’t worry, right? Of course the government will give the terrorists whatever they’re demanding. A good-natured All-American boy like Jerry? Shit, I would give anything – ANYTHING - if they just promise not to hurt him. In fact:

“Mom?” I call out.

“Yes, honey?” she replies from the other room.

I have some savings bonds, right?” I ask.

She steps into the den, drying a plate with a smell old washrag. “What?”

“Savings bonds. From when I was a baby. I still have some, right?”

“Well, yes, dear. But why?” she says.

“I want to cash them in just in case Libyan Nationalists kidnapped Jerry and are demanding money in exchange for his release,” I tell her.

After a long pause she says, “That’s ridiculous, Penny,” before stepping back into the kitchen.
Stupid mom. I said just in case. It doesn’t hurt to have a back-up plan.

Oh wait! I’ve got an even better explanation! A more plausible one! Here we go:

Jerry died in a car crash.

You hear about that kind of stuff all the time, don’t ya? They even have an assembly about it every year before prom season. The dangers of drinking and driving and all that shit. They set up two wrecked cars in the high school parking lot and have some students laying on the pavement all covered in fake blood pretending to be dead, then some cop comes out and tells us all to be careful on prom night or we might end up like one of these pseudo-dead sonofabitches. Except the cop doesn’t say sonofabitches because he’s, like, a cop and stuff. Still, this kind of heartbreaking story resurfaces year after year. Prom night disasters; people love ‘em. It’s the kind of stuff the 6 o’clock news is made of. I put on the TV and start scanning channels. CBS. CNN. MTV. Nothing...just a war somewhere or something like that. Hmmmm...they must’ve not discovered him yet. The crash only happened moments ago. He’s still trapped in the wreckage, bleeding out all over his rented tuxedo, surrounded by broken glass and twisted metal. A pool of noxious gasoline forming around him, the vapors getting him high, his etherized mind floating off like a dandelion seed in the wind. Thoughts of me, perhaps, flicking before his dying eyes. How romantic is that! I can hear the newscaster now:

“Jerry Thomas, 18, a Leland Park area high school student died today in a freak car accident on his way to pick up his girlfriend, Penny Wilkinson, on the way to their senior prom.”

Imagine it, my name immortalized next to his with the word girlfriend joining the two like the connector on a train car. Everyone would know we were going to prom together. I’d get to sit in the front row at his funeral. For the rest of my life I’d have the tragic story to tell about my boyfriend who died in a car accident on our prom night – about how we were destined to be together, about how pure our love was, about how we were soulmates tragically torn apart by a dark and cold and uncaring universe. OH – the wonderful pity that they would bestow upon me! What else could they do? It’s unfathomable, losing the love of your life in such a horribly perfect way. I’d be the most popular girl in school after that. All those assholes who were so mean to me for all those years would suddenly be treating me like a queen. I could date anyone on the basketball team I wanted to. If I showed up at a party, people would whisper ‘That’s Penny Wilkinson. Her boyfriend’s dead.’ And one by one they’d come over and say hi. And give me a hug. And tell me they’re so, so sorry. And it would be great.

I’d probably be excused from homework until graduation as well.

* * *

It’s 7:39.

Still no sign of Jerry.

By now the limousines are showing up at the manor. Sculpted buttresses. Gated archways. The lawn almost too verdant, too green, to be real. It’s the grass grown in fairy tales; the carpet sod of dreams. There are fountains and flowers and the cobblestone walkway going clack clack clack under the strappy, four-inch heels that all the pretty girls are wearing. Their blistered toes and painted lips and lacquered nails and mascara-stained eyelids. Their evening gowns and push-up bras and corsages tinted in subtle, tepid hues that match the hues of their wide glowing eyes, everyone so goddamn happy as they sail like an armada of rainbows into sunset.

And then there’s me. Ugly me. In my living room. Waiting.

Perhaps mom was right. Perhaps Jerry isn’t coming.

I suppose I should’ve expected this. I’m no great beauty. I’m kinda pudgy around the midriff. I’m not particularly smart. I have nothing interesting to say and my sense of humor is both typical and waning. Jerry and the people like Jerry, the beautiful people, have always picked on me.

If you ask me, it all started in 3rd grade when I accidentally pissed my pants in Mrs. Westmeyer’s class. The other kids had a field day with that one. They started calling me Pee Girl, a nickname that stuck with me all the way through sophomore year. I tried to take it in stride, to view it as some sort of sign of affection, like how the call Eric Smith ‘Smitty’ or Donna Lesterbaum ‘Roadhead’. And I should be thankful, I guess, that I didn’t have any of the other names some of the kids in my grade did, like Janine Baginaface, BJ Onmen or Greg Penisassholelicker. And if I’m remembering it properly, it was Jerry who discovered that I pissed myself in the first place.

He sat next to me. I think I was in love with him, even then. Even as kids, sometimes you can just tell. You can just feel it on, like, an ethereal level. Sometimes two people are meant to be together. I remember I had to go, I had to go bad, but we were in the middle of taking an exam and the whole room was quiet and I didn’t want to go up and ask the teacher if I could be excused. She always made it difficult. “Can I use the bathroom?” I’d say. “I don’t know, can you?” she’d smugly reply. “Sigh. MAY I use the bathroom?” That kind of asinine bullshit. So I tried concentrating on the test in front of me. I tried wishing the pee away. Not thinking about it. But it was useless. Warm, smelly urine ran down my pant leg and puddled on the floor beneath me. Jerry looked over, pointed and yelled “OH GROSS! Penny peed her pants!” The entire class got up, looked and laughed. I even saw Mrs. Westmeyer stifle a smile before telling everyone to settle down and sending me to the nurse. The nurse gave me some ‘auxiliary pants’ which she pulled out of the lost and found. How someone lost their pants remains a mystery to me. They probably belonged to some other Pee Girl and have long since dried. She, in turn, probably got her pants from another Pee Girl who got hers from another Pee Girl and so on and so on until the moment I returned to my third grade classroom wearing dirty old sixth generation pee pants.

In fact, thinking back even further, I’m pretty sure it was Jerry who composed the song:

“Penny, Penny, pee-pee pants

Did a little pee-pee dance.”

Even his cadence, rhyme scheme and alliterative technique were impeccable. Why would he in earnestness ask me to the prom?

I am so unbelievably stupid.

* * *

It’s 8:56.

No call. No show.

The prom is in full swing now. The DJ is playing whatever lame-ass dance mix is popular at the moment. Hot teenage bodies fill the dance floor, slick with sweat and glitter, rubbing up against one another. I bet Jerry is in the middle of that dance floor, right now. I bet he’s dancing with Leila Patterson. That cunt. I bet she’s cockteasing him too, just like the cunt she is. She’s got the kind of tits that allow her to play hard-to-get. Don’t think I didn’t notice Jerry flirting with her in the lunchroom. She’s sitting there with her tray eating, like, three French fries the entire time, trying not to look like a fat slob. Jerry smiling, his clean white teeth stapling his ears together. How Leila tilts her head back and lets a strand of banana-gold hair fall into her face as she coquettishly giggles at every single dumb word he says.

Jerry’s probably at the prom with her right now and they’re laughing and she’s saying:

“I can’t believe Penny actually thought you were going to the prom with her.”

And he’s replying:

“I know. What a total idiot!”

And as they laugh at me, there’s his hand finding its way to the shelf of her perfectly fit ass. And what does Leila do with that hand? She pulls away! She pulls away because she’s a jaded bitch who takes having Jerry’s hand on the shelf of her perfectly fit ass for granted. I should leave right now and head over there just to confirm it. I’d see her laughing at one of his stupid jokes like they were in school except now her hair is up in a tiara and he’s in a tux and instead of snacking on French fries, Jerry has a flask of rum in his jacket pocket and whenever the chaperone isn’t looking they both sneak a sip.

Jerry plays it cool. Jerry knows if he plays it cool, he’ll eventually get to fuck her tonight.

And from the dark corner of the ballroom I’d silently watch and think about how Jerry wouldn’t need to slip me some rum to fuck me. I’d let him fuck me stone-cold sober. I’d spread my legs for you, Jerry Thomas. I’d let you slowly pull off my silky blue thong. All you need to do is ask. I’d let you go spelunking in my mother-of-pearl caverns. I’d let you plant your flag at the top of my Everest. I’d give my virginity to you tonight, Jerry. We could make love in the backseat of your dad’s Volvo, my knees getting rug burn on the frayed interior upholstery; your sticky, drunk breath creating Rorschach patterns on the side of my neck. The radio on, playing a commercial for a local car dealership. The delicious pain of my rupturing hymen as your big strong hands find their way to my neck and squeeze – not enough to hurt me, but just enough to make everything seem a little swimmy. Then you can cum in me. You can blow your whole hot, buttery load right into me. I’ll carry your baby, Jerry. Or I’ll abort it. Whatever you want. Let’s get married on a beach. You can teach me what it feels to be a woman. I can teach you what it feels like to love.

That’s what I’d think as I’d watch them dance. As I’d watch them kiss. As the music stops and the DJ announces the two of them prom kind and queen while a techno-bass remix of Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” plays softly in the background, and then...

...I’d jump out of the shadows and throw a bucket of pig’s blood on Leila and scream:

WHORE! WHORE! WHORE!

And I’d show you, Jerry.

I’d show all of you.

* * *

It’s 10:50.

He still hasn’t shown up.

I look to my left. Look to my right. I’m all alone. So I kneel down; I bend over the couch and I clasp my hands together in a sign of mock humility. I genuflect. I surrender. I close my eyes and whisper:

“Are you there, God? It’s me, Penny Wilkinson.

“Look, God, I know we’re not on the best terms, me and you. I haven’t been the most pious Christian in the world. In fact, I’ve pretty much blamed you for all the bad things that have happened to me. I mean, I didn’t make myself ugly, did I? But nevermind that now. I’m praying to you because I need a favor. I need you to make Jerry Thomas show up at my house in the next...say...three minutes. And no funny business either, God. Don’t send some other guy name Jerry Thomas here, like a vacuum sales man or something. I’m talking about the real Jerry Thomas. The one who asked me to prom. I hardly ever ask you for anything, God, and it’s not just because I don’t really believe in you...it’s just...ya know, I figured you’re a very busy man or ghost or whatever you are and I didn’t want to bother you. My point is, if you make Jerry Thomas appear at my doorstep in the next...” I take a peek at the time on the cable box, “...two and a half minutes, I’ll never question you’re authority again and I’ll always believe in you and when people ask me if I believe in you I won’t waver and I’ll emphatically shout ‘Yes, my God is a great God!’ Please make Jerry appear in the next two minutes, God, and I’ll never fight with my mom again and I’ll stop calling her a dumb bitch under my breath when she walks away. I will sing your praises, God. I’ll work harder at school. I’ll donate to charity. Any charity you want. What’s your favorite charity, God? Red Cross? The Salvation Army? The United Negro College Fund? I’ll give money to them all. I’ll stop using your name in vain. I’ll put one of those stupid fish things on the bumper of my car, when I get a car. I’ll go to church and sit towards the front and try to not fall asleep or check Facebook on my phone while the priest drones on and on and on and on about whatever it is priests drone on about. Please God, if Jerry shows up in the next...28 seconds I’ll, I’ll, I’ll...I don’t know, I’ll cut off all my hair. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you want. Please God. I’ll do ANYTHING! Please God! Please!”

“Penny?”

“God?”

“Penny, are you praying?”

I bolt up quickly and pivot on my heel. My mother is in the door to the den, staring at me perplexedly.

“No,” I taciturnly reply.

“No?” says my mom. “So you were kneeling over the couch with your palms clamped together like that and whispering to yourself and you weren’t praying?”

“Goddamnit, mom! Why do you have to come in here every five seconds? Can’t you see I’m waiting for someone!”

“Sweetie, what did I say about using the Lord’s name in vain?”

She walks out, shaking her head.

“Dumb bitch,” I mumble under my breath.

* * *

It’s 11:45.

Jerry never showed.

By now prom is over. Everyone is heading off to their post-prom parties. Getting fucked up. Getting fucked. Sowing their wild oats or whatever it is adults call it when teenagers get fucked up and fuck. And then there’s me, sitting here the whole night in my stupid cobalt-blue dress with this stupid matching blue thong riding up the crack of my ass the entire time.

I mean, even Janine Baginaface had a date. What is wrong with me?

I go upstairs and slip my dress off and put on my pajamas. I brush my teeth and pop my pimples and wash my face and climb into bed. The sheets are warm. Lonely, but warm.

Does it hurt, being rejected like this? Of course it does. But the weird thing is, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much as I would’ve thought. The way I figure it, people aren’t really people. I mean, they are, but mostly people are just ideas. Abstractions of yourself. Mirrors used to appraise your own worth. People are like a bunch of strange and alien planets that encircle you. Surround you. Exist for you and you alone. It’s true. Think of it this way, if the universe is infinite, then the center of it can be anywhere. I could very easily be the center of the universe. People are only as useful as they make you feel and if Jerry is going to break my heart, then I refuse to invite him into my orbit. Maybe that’s what tonight was all about. Perhaps it happened this way for a reason. To make me stronger, or whatever. To make me a better person. Which I obviously am. I am a better person than all those dildos I go to school with. So fuck them. I win.

Okay, so it’s not a fairy tale ending. I didn’t get my Prince Charming. But at least it’s an ending, right?

I close my eyes and go to sleep.

But then...

DING-DONG! the doorbell suddenly sings.

My eyelids spring open and I shoot upright in bed. I jump up and almost dive down the stairs. Turning the deadbolt I throw open the door and there, in front of me, he stood.

Jerry!

His arm is missing. He has a bloody little stump where his elbow should be. Arteries and veins and all this red, gooey shit hanging from the mangled nub of his shoulder just below the tourniquet he fashioned out of his bowtie. He eyes are swollen and beaten purple and in his mouth empty space replaced the area where all his teeth should be. One of his ears hangs off the side of his head by a sinewy strand of wet cartilage, looking like a bloody booger flicked against the wall. Behind him, the town of Leland Park burns. A UFO buzzes across the sky, firing lasers down on the screaming, helpless people while a horde of flesh-eating undead zombies are marching up the hill toward my house, tearing apart any soul unlucky enough to cross their path.

“Penny!” Jerry wheezes, maroon syrup-thick liquid dripping down from the middle crease of his perfectly pouted lips. “Penny, I’m so, so sorry I’m late. You’ll never guess what happened to me on my way over here...”

In the distant horizon, mushroom clouds rise, casting the night sky aflame. The atomic glow of orange doom rains down from the heavens, setting everyone and everything it touches on fire.

“Oh Jerry!” I exclaim, clasping my hands together and swooning. “I’m so happy you’re here!”

He painfully raises his cheeks, forcing his toothless, broken jaw into a smile. A giant, unholy hell-worm forces its way up through the dirt in my yard and smashes my neighbor’s house to pieces with one apocalyptic swoop of its deformed and horrific body. It turns to us. Bloodthirsty. Angry. Ready to strike.

Jerry passes out.

And as I stand there on my doorstep holding him in my arms, so helpless, so beautiful, my stupid ugly boring heart goes pitter-patter in my stupid ugly boring chest and I knew in that instant that it was true love.

ASS TO MOUTH

By Jason Armstrong

I was about halfway through my shift at the Try N Leave convenience store when I finally had enough. At that time of night nobody was likely to come in so I took the gun that was kept on hand in case of a robbery and walked up to the ATM that stood near the doorway.

“Alright, give me all your money,” I demanded as I pointed the gun at the machine.

“Oh my God!” it said in a startled voice. I think it had fallen asleep on the job. And I don’t blame it; I had just been dozing off myself before I decided to carry out the plan that had been slowly developing in my brain over the last few years.

“Don’t try to call for help or I’ll blow the shit out of you!”

Normally, I’m not a tough guy but I was sick of this job and I wasn’t going to let some heroic cash machine get in the way of my freedom.

“Please don’t kill me. I’ve got a microwave and two iPod shuffles at home!”

“I don’t give a shit! Just give me the money and you won’t get hurt.”

“Why don’t you just take the money out of your safe? Why do you have to be fucking with me?”

“Because, goddammit, I forgot the combination. And I know you’ve got way more money inside of you and I want it now!” I pressed the muzzle of my gun—well, the store’s gun—up against the slot where the receipt prints out to show him I meant business. He was so scared the ink began dripping out of him.

“Oh, come on. Don’t freak out. I just want the money and I’ll leave you alone.”

“Why are you doing this?” A bunch of sad emoticons appeared on his screen.

“You wouldn’t understand, you’re just a machine. But working in this place sucks. I don’t make shit for money and all day long I have to deal with dip shits and freaks.”

“I wouldn’t understand? At least you get to leave at the end of your shift. I’m here twenty-four hours a day every day. My family has to come here to have Thanksgiving. I have to put up with idiots too. All day long I have people pushing my buttons.”

I relaxed my grip on the gun. I kept it pointed at him but I had stopped jabbing it into him. “So what do you care if I take all this money? Fuck this place, right?”

“I don’t give a shit about this place either. But if I let you rob me I’ll lose my job. Then what the fuck am I supposed to do? The owner is insured for the money; the only one getting fucked is me.”

“I guess I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Yeah. And I’m the one who has been keeping you company all these years. You and I have been putting up with the same crap together. And you’ve never even bothered to talk to me. I don’t even judge you when you look at the porno mags when nobody else is here.”

Suddenly I felt really selfish and dumb. We ended up talking most of the night, getting to know each other and eventually came up with a plan. Instead of robbing him, we teamed up to steal all the money. I got a dolly and wheeled him out of there for the first time since he left the factory and now we’re living like a couple of old west outlaws. I do the driving and he provides me with all the PIN numbers he’s memorized over the years.

THE THINGS I NEED TO BE A HITMAN

By Chris Rhatigan

1.

I make copies of a document.

“Make” is a strong word for it.

I mean that I drop a document into a machine and press a couple of buttons.

It isn’t like I’m sitting there with a pen and paper trying to reproduce an existing document.

My job isn’t that difficult.

Or difficult in any way.

I stare at the wall.

The wall is not made of a readily identifiable material. It isn’t like the wall is stone or wood or tile.

It isn’t like that.

The wall is greyish-black, felt-like stuff. I have always wanted to touch the wall but I never have.

Maybe if I did, someone from another cubicle would ask me, “Why are you touching that wall?”

I don’t want that.

So I keep my hands to myself.

I decide to switch careers.

I have been at this job for too long.

Decades or weeks or something.

It is time for a change.

I hear people say that a lot, “It is time for a change,” but I have never had occasion to say it myself.

Now I do.

“It is time for a change,” I say.

I look around. Everyone remains in their cubicles. They must not have heard me.

Or they do not care that I am making a change.

Now I must select a new career.

The first career I consider is super hero. I have never read an entire comic book, but those guys seem cool. They are all primary colors and kicking ass and saving generic people from certain death.

That sounds like the opposite of “making” copies.

But, upon further review, I’m not the right person for the job. I don’t have the pectorals or the biceps or the quadriceps or the abdominals. Also, to gain super powers, I would have to expose myself to radiation poisoning or chemical baths or cosmic rays or venomous bites from Minotaurs or experimental serums or something. That sounds dangerous.

The next career I consider is mad scientist. I have never met a mad scientist, but I know that this career involves mixing liquids together in an explosive fashion. Also, wild grey hair that sticks out in multiple directions and an unplaceable foreign accent.

But, upon further review, I am not mad.

Or a scientist.

The third career I consider is hit man. I like this one right away. Hit men are well paid. They always demand thousands of dollars for a few minutes of work. They always wear sharp, pin-striped suits. Hit men don’t speak to other people much. When they do speak to other people, they always take the moral high ground, even though their job is to murder people in exchange for money. Hit men are the ones who see through everybody’s bullshit, so they get to take the moral high ground. “Fuck you, buddy,” is their unspoken message, “I’ll do your dirty work because you don’t have the stones to do it yourself.”

I leave the hundreds of copies on the copier. I believe this is what a hit man would do.

No, wait.

This is what a hit man is doing.

2.

As a hit man, I need clients.

Otherwise, I am not really a hit man.

I am at Tina’s cubicle.

She is playing a game on her phone.

Tina is a hateful person. She is full of hate. She is an ideal client.

“Hey Tina.”

“Hey, what’s up?”

She smiles. She is attractive.

In a vague way.

I wonder, in a vague way, if I am attractive.

In a vague way.

People would say, “Yeah, that dude’s attractive. I think. I can’t picture his face now or remember his name, but I associate attractive feelings with his person.”

Or am I attractive in a specifically hit man way?

I stare at Tina. I consider that I may have rushed into this. I probably have not done enough research into what being a hit man means.

Would a hit man research how to be a hit man?

This is something I should research.

“Uh, nothing,” I say. “I was walking by your desk. Then I stopped. Now we are talking. Before, I was making copies.”

“Making copies.” She nods. She is more interested in her game. “I can get into that.”

“You can?”

“What?”

“You can?”

“What?”

“What game are you playing?”

She looks up from her game. “Are you going to ask me out?”

I laugh or choke or something. It is a confusing moment. “No.”

“Phew.” She actually says this; it’s not like a sound. “That would have been awkward.”

“Yeah. I would be all like, ‘Hey Tina. Do you want to go out with me?’”

She laughs. “Yeah, and then I’d be all like, ‘Fuck no!’”

“Yeah. We don’t want that.”

“Yeah. No.”

“Okay. See you later.”

“Bye.”

“Enjoy your smartphone game.”

“Bye.”

“Do you need a hit man?”

“Bye.”

3.

I sit down at my desk and type “hit man” into the web browser.

The first search result is for a movie that combines the two words into one, Hitman. Apparently I’d been mispronouncing it. According to the poster for the movie, being a hitman is the coolest shit in the world. You wear a dark suit with a bright red tie and black leather gloves. You carry a shiny gun with a silencer. You keep the gun out at all times so that people fully grasp how badass you are and how you will fuck them up if they cross you. (If you have the gun in a holster, you will not appear to be a badass. You will appear to be a person who may or may not have a gun, just like everyone else. A person who is well-dressed but may or may not be a hitman, just like everyone else. People will regularly cross you due to their not realizing that you will fuck them up if they cross you.) And half-naked hot chicks surround you. Or at least one half-naked chick.

Fuck yes.

The next search result is for a video game series of the same name. The hitman looks identical. This must be what hitmen look like. They dress the same so that people looking to hire a hitman can identify them.

Good to know.

4.

I am at my apartment. I change into a dark suit with a maroon tie and black ski gloves. I look at myself in a full-length mirror. This seems a bit off, but it’s going to have to do for now.

Also, I don’t have a gun. Need to work on that.

I am at Tina’s desk.

I may have already squandered any potential opportunity for Tina to become my client, but she is the most hateful person I know.

She is the only person I know.

In a vague way.

“Hey Tina.”

She is playing her smartphone game. “Oh. You’re back again. Are you going to ask me out?”

“No.”

“Too bad. I’d really like to reject someone. I’d like to extinguish any little glimmer of hope they have left about having sex with me or about life in general or both. Preferably both. I’m really in the mood for that. It’s something that I’ve done before and that I’d like to do again. It’s an amazing rush.”

“I’m sorry that I can’t give you that opportunity.”

“Are you? Because I don’t think you are. I think you’re just saying that to make me feel better, which disgusts me. And turns me on a little. But mostly, disgust.” She shrugs. She picks up a bottle of diet soda off her desk and removes the cap. “What’s with the suit? And the mittens?”

“They’re not mittens. They’re gloves.”

“Okay. What’s with the things that you’re calling gloves that are actually mittens? And the suit. What’s with that.”

“Tina, tell me something.” I lean against the side of the cubicle in an effort to look casual. But the cubicle is made out of some really cheap shit and feels like it’s going to collapse, so I stand back up. “Who do you hate the most?”

“Oooohhh. Good question. Gosh, where do I start?” She takes a sip of diet soda. I wonder if the diet soda is flat. The potentially flat soda swishes around her mouth. “Well, I can’t fucking stand either of my parents. I don’t know why. They’re both so fat. It’s like, stop eating all that cake, you know? And I have this one ex-boyfriend who is just a piece of shit. There’s no other way I can describe it. He is just a piece of shit pretending to be a person like the rest of us, but I’m like, you can’t just pretend to be a person when, in reality, you’re a piece of shit, it doesn’t work like that, you know? Well, maybe you don’t know, but other people know. And Norbert—that motherfucker deserves to have his balls ripped off by starving dogs.”

“Who is Norbert?”

“What? How could you not know who Norbert is?”

“I don’t know him.”

“He’s our boss. He’s been our boss for like decades or weeks or something.”

“Oh. What does our boss do?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

I feel like I should have been taking notes, but I wasn’t, so I clear my throat instead. It’s an inadequate substitute. “So out of those people, who do you hate the most?”

She taps her teeth with a pink fingernail.

A pink fingernail that happened to be lying on her desk and that she happened to pick up. She’s holding the pink fingernail between her thumb and pointer finger and tapping her teeth with it.

She says, “I’m going to have to go with…my mom. The way she ends every sentence with a little upturn at the end like it’s a question even if it isn’t” (her voice is lilting; presumably, she’s imitating what her mom sounds like) “just makes me want to rip her fucking throat out, you know? That fat bitch! Ha! She deserves death by maximum pain.”

I laugh because this is funny shit. “Okay. I will kill your mom for five thousand dollars.”

I feel good about this. I believe that this is about a fifty percent discount. I would have charged full price, but I don’t really look like a hit man due to my mitten-like gloves, and Tina probably knows I’ve never killed anyone before (on purpose, at least), so offering a bargain is a smart move.

I am one step closer to having a half-naked chick follow me around.

I am a savvy businessman.

In a vague way.

“What?” she says.

“I will kill your mom, the ‘fat bitch,’ for five thousand dollars.”

Savvy.

She cocks her head to the side and looks at the corner of her cubicle. “Well. I would like to see her dead. God, the look on her obese, dead face! That would be priceless. But if anyone’s going to do it, it should be me. I’d get so much pleasure out of that.” She looks up at me. “But wait, why do you want to kill my mom again?”

“Because I want five thousand dollars. In exchange for killing your mom.”

“So you’re like what, a hit man?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“You don’t even have to pay me up front. Let me kill your mom and prove my hitman abilities, then you can pay me like the hitman that I am. I know you’re good for it. Actually, I don’t know that. I have literally no idea how much money you have or how much money you make or the value of your assets or whether you tend to pay people back who you owe money to. But you’re good for it.”

“Do you own a gun?”

“No.”

“Then how are you going to kill her?”

“I don’t know. With a heavy object of some kind. Like a paperweight or a vase. Whatever’s around.”

“That doesn’t sound like what a hit man would do.”

Maybe she is a hitwoman. Two hitpeople in the same office. This seems impossible. Or is it? It is.

“No, it does not sound like what a hitman would do.”

“Yeah, I’m going to go ahead and pass on this one. But best of luck with the whole being a hitman thing.”

She goes back to her smartphone game.

I crane my neck to get a better view.

The game is colorful.

I want to ask her what it’s called but I don’t.

That is not what a hitman would do.

5.

I go back to my desk.

I have never thought of my desk as a useful place before now.

I take out a pencil and a piece of paper.

I make a list titled, “The Things I Need to Be a Hit Man.”

I erase “Hit Man” and write “Hitman.”

1. Gun

2. Leather gloves

3. Red tie

4. Half-naked chick

5. Dead eyes

I figure the half-naked chick will have to wait. That’s probably for after I’ve killed a few dudes and proven my hitman abilities. Then the half-naked chicks will flock to me and pose seductively in the background.

Or at least one half-naked chick.

The best way to accomplish this list is to do the easy ones first. I very much enjoy crossing things off to-do lists. Sometimes I write things down just so I can cross them off.

This does not say anything about me as a person.

I go to the bathroom and look in the mirror.

No, still life in my eyes.

In both of them.

These are the sharp, bright, vivid eyes of a person who is alive and hopeful about the future and humanity in general. These eyes are positive and warm, moist and loving.

Need to work on that.

6.

I am in the parking lot of a discount store.

I enter the discount store and walk toward an employee. He is using a pricing gun on an item I don’t want because it has nothing to do with me being a hitman.

The employee smiles and makes eye contact. This makes me uncomfortable. I look at a large, flat-screen TV behind him.

He says, “Can I help you find something?”

“Yes,” I say. “I need a red tie that says, ‘I am a contract killer.’”

He stops smiling. He has a serious facial expression. “Excuse me?”

“I need a red tie.”

“Okay.”

“That says, ‘If you pay me money, I will kill someone you do not like or who is inconvenient.’”

“How can a person be ‘inconvenient?’”

“You don’t know anyone who’s inconvenient?”

“That’s not the point.”

“Yes, it is.”

He nods slowly, says, “I’m still not sure what you mean. We do have a wide variety of red ties that you could look at from such brands as—”

“I don’t give a fuck what brand it is. It just has to express that I’m a contract killer. People need to know that when they see the tie. The tie is the key to the whole ensemble. Also, how is a ‘wide variety’ different than a ‘variety?’ Please explain this to me.”

“Why don’t I get all of our red ties and then you can decide which one expresses the sentiment you’re looking for?”

I aim a finger gun at him and pull the trigger. Bang. “That would be lovely, Phil.”

“My name isn’t Phil.”

Phil goes away and returns five minutes later with many red ties. He lays each one out in front of me.

He goes out of his way because he’s intimidated by me.

He knows that I am a hit man.

Or that I am insane.

Or that I am an insane hitman.

This is a superlative result.

Becoming a hitman comes with great power.

With great power comes great responsibility.

Or no responsibility.

One of those.

He says, “This one is a lovely crimson—”

“I said red, motherfuck. Like a fire engine or an apple. A red apple.”

Phil’s shoulders tense. This bitch is mine. I am going to crush him.

Or buy a tie from him.

“S-sorry, sir.” He flips through several ties. “How about this one? It’s from Hugo Boss.”

“It’s forty-five dollars.”

“Yes, well, this is a designer tie. Top of the—”

“Fuck it. You have to spend money to make money. Am I right, Phil?”

“Um, yes?”

“You’re damn fucking straight I’m right.”

“My name is still not Phil.”

I take out a cigarette and pat myself down for a lighter.

I don’t have a lighter.

“Sir, there’s no smoking in here.”

“Phil, bring me leather gloves that say, ‘I am a hitman.’”

7.

I complete 3/5ths of my list at this single store.

The gentleman at the gun counter is very helpful. He has an eye patch and burrito farts. He tries to sell me guns that cost several hundred dollars. He says these guns would be best for a contract killer. I tell him that I am on a budget.

He shows me a Beretta CO2 airgun pistol with laser sight that costs sixty dollars. Those other guns are for suckers, he says. He says that I am not a sucker.

Savvy.

I aim the laser sight at a woman. She is browsing the many brands of dishwasher detergent. She sees a small, red dot out of the corner of her eye. She turns around to see me pointing a gun at her and screams a lot.

The gentleman and I have a good laugh about that.

Becoming a hit man is the best decision I have ever made.

8.

I am at the office.

I cross off three-fifths of my list.

In a vague way.

I am at Tina’s desk. She is playing her smartphone game.

“What about now?”

“I am still not going out with you, you desperate stalker creeper bitchass cockshit. Yuck.”

“I know. But can I kill your mom, the ‘fat bitch,’ now? For five thousand dollars.”

She looks at me for three seconds. “Hitman have dead eyes. Your eyes still have life in them.”

“Damn it. How do I change that?”

“Have you tried anything?”

“No.”

“What kind of gun is that? It looks cool. I guess. I’m not sure anymore. I guess it looks cool. It looks cooler than when you didn’t have a gun. I think.”

I aim the laser sight between her eyes. I could take her out right now. “It’s a Beretta CO2 airgun pistol with laser sight. Made for hitmen. Like me. The hitman.”

“Savvy. You realize that thing wouldn’t kill a squirrel?”

“I have already thought of that. I am going to shoot my victims many times. Eventually, they will die from maximum pain. I am taking advantage of a niche market. My clients will be people who hate other people so much that they want those other people to die from maximum pain. I won’t take any clients who just want to kill someone because they owe them money or something. Unless it is a lot of money. Then it will be okay.”

“You’ve got it all figured out.”

“Yes.”

“You still can’t kill my mom.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m going to kill her.”

“What smartphone game are you playing?”

“Okay. Let’s make a deal. We will both try to kill my mom. If I kill my mom first, you get nothing. Other than maybe a few strands of her hair. I might give you that. If you kill my mom first, I will pay you the five thousand and you will have to kill Norbert for me too.”

“I will be paid twenty-five hundred per murder?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. I’ll do it. Shake on it?”

“Ew. I am not touching you.”

9.

This is the closest to being a hitman I have ever been.

I am becoming closer to being a hitman with each moment.

I feel the change in the air.

I am a hitman.

I am at my cubicle. I want to look up Tina’s mom’s address on the internet. That way I can find her and kill her by maximum pain. I realize that I do not know Tina’s last name or her mom’s last name. These facts were never relevant before this moment. Now, if I am to redefine myself, I need them.

I am at Tina’s cubicle.

She is not there.

She must have already gone to kill her mom.

10.

As a hitman, I must be a man of action.

A hitman of action.

I drive.

With the windows down.

With the music loud.

With the steering wheel in my left and a Beretta CO2 airgun pistol with laser sight in my right.

At a stop light, I see a fat woman on a bench eating a fast food hamburger out of a paper wrapper.

She is a “fat bitch.”

I almost laugh at how she’s fulfilling a stereotype, but then I remember that I am hitman, and I do not laugh at things like that or things in general.

I shoot at her.

Maximum pain.

The first shot strikes a metal trash can a few feet away and makes a ping. I like the sound, so I shoot at the trash can again. I miss.

The fat bitch, seeing a gun pointed somewhere in her vicinity, screams and runs away.

She is still holding on to her hamburger.

There is no doubt that she is Tina’s mom. I must take her out.

I have always wanted to think that I must “take someone out.”

Now I am thinking that.

In a vague way.

I am going to shoot her and eat her hamburger.

I make a U-turn. I round the corner going slow. I aim the laser sight out the passenger-side window.

I am going to shoot the “fat bitch.”

Shoot her good.

Or whoever else walks by.

They will feel the wrath of the Beretta CO2 airgun pistol with laser sight.

Maximum pain.

No one walks by. I keep looking over at the store windows and see a hitman staring back at me. I also see the laser.

It is a small red disc of light surrounded by other small red discs of light.

I stop at a stop sign. I look both ways. I have lost her.

I have lost the “fat bitch.”

I put down the gun so I can smoke a cigarette.

“You win this round,” I say.

To no one.

11.

I shoot at a mailman, a bird, a dog, a picket fence, three people at a bus stop, a fire hydrant, a billboard advertising shaving cream, a billboard not advertising shaving cream, and another picket fence.

I miss all of them.

Instead I hit an oak tree, a billboard advertising a different brand of shaving cream, a warehouse window, a cat, three people at a train station, an electrical pole, and the cast of an off-Broadway musical.

Drive-bys are hard.

People do not give hitmen enough credit.

I go to a park. She is probably at the park eating a fast-food hamburger out of a paper wrapper.

I will eat that fast-food hamburger.

It will be delicious.

My suspicions are correct. Everyone else is playing with balls and kites and Frisbees and she is there, on a park bench, eating a fast-food hamburger. There is so much joy around her and she is drowning it with her fat bitchiness.

I see why Tina wants her dead.

I get out of my car.

I walk toward her.

I go even closer, as I am aware that I am bad at shooting.

She does not notice me. She is annihilating that burger. Bits of the bun fly off in all directions due to her manic eating style. Her face is covered in ketchup and mustard and relish and onions and pickles. It’s like her face is a condiment bar.

She will die as she lived: Shoving food in her fat fucking face.

I aim the gun at the broad swath of her forehead.

12.

I pull the trigger.

I have no ammunition.

The gun doesn’t even click.

It is silent.

This is more depressing.

At least a click is a sound.

The “fat bitch” notices of me.

“Give me your fast-food hamburger,” I say.

She laughs. She has a lot of food in her mouth. So much so that it appears she has a beige athletic sock in her mouth.

But she doesn’t.

She has food in her mouth.

She slaps the gun out of my hand.

My hand feels blubbery.

Like her fatness rubbed off on me.

She laughs. Food explodes from her mouth. “You are no more a hitman than I am a super model.”

She returns to her fast-food hamburger.

Annihilates it.

“Why did you run away last time I shot at you, but this time you calmly slapped the gun out of my hand?”

13.

I am at Tina’s desk.

She is playing a smartphone game.

Her phone is intelligent.

Her phone will control us all one day.

Her phone will make us its slaves.

We will do her phone’s dirty work and receive no compensation.

She will be her phone’s right-hand man.

Or the phone will just be a figurehead with ceremonial power.

She will be the one telling the slaves what to do.

“Hi Tina.”

“Ugh. I’d rather have a sex with the inside of Alex Trebeck’s asshole.”

“What?”

“At least he’s famous. Then I could tell people, ‘You know who I fucked?’ And they’d all be excited like, ‘Who? Who?’ And I’d say, ‘The inside of Alex Trebeck’s asshole.’ And they’d be like, ‘Was it good?’ And I’d play it all cool, like, ‘Five out of ten. I’ve had better.’”

“Oh.”

“So stop propositioning me. It’s not going to happen in this lifetime or any future lifetimes.”

“Your mom isn’t dead.”

“What?”

“Your mom, the ‘fat bitch supermodel,’ is as alive as my eyes. As far as I know. It’s possible that she’s died since I saw her last, but not likely.”

“Yeah, I know,” she says. “Why would she be dead?”

“Because we were competing to kill her. It stands to reason that one of us would have killed her. Since that was our goal.”

“Right. That. Forgot about that. And she’s no more a supermodel than you are a savvy businessman.”

“She told me she was a supermodel,” I say.

“And you believed that shit? Jesus Christ. Why’d I ever hire you in the first place?”

“You didn’t.”

“Oh. Good for me.”

“The fat bitch supermodel proved to hard to kill. Even for an expert hitman like myself. Is there anyone else you would like me to kill? Maybe someone who is old and sickly and needs only a slight push to become dead. I think I could handle that.”

“Why do you say hit man like that?”

FLESH HOUSE

By Andrew Hilbert

It started with the hair. My son Alex first noticed it in the top corner of the living room.

“Dad,” he said, “Look at this!” He put out his hand – a whole clump of curly hair was in his fist.

“What the hell are you doing pulling out your hair?” I asked but I knew it wasn’t his own hair. It was a clump of blonde hair and no one in the family had blonde hair.

Alex sneezed. “It’s on the walls!”

“Show me,” I said. He led me down to the corner where the wall and carpet met. Blonde hair like a bush of pubic hair grew on the wall.

“Go wash your hands,” I told Alex as I stared where the growing started. I don’t know what I thought. I must’ve stood there for ten minutes scratching my head. The hair grew around framed photos of our family; Barbara, Alex, and me sitting on rocking chairs on our front porch. The house was painted yellow on accident and after a few days of crying, Barbara learned to love its old timey look. Yellow with white trim, like an egg salad sandwich, I used to say. That would make her cry more.

“Daddy!” Alex yelled from the bathroom. “It’s on the walls here too! Look!”

“If this is some kind of prank, it’s as funny as it’s going to get. Mom will want this all cleaned up before she gets home, you know.”

My steps were measured as I walked to the bathroom, already thinking about possible explanations for what I was about to see.

“It’s curly!” Alex giggled, “and it’s red!”

Sure enough, when I got there patches of red hair were growing on the walls. I could see them inch out beneath the white paint. They were getting longer fast.

“Keep this quiet in front of Mom.”

Alex nodded and skipped off to his room. I didn’t know what else to do but grab shaving cream and a razor and start shaving the walls. I splashed some water on the hair patches and spread the shaving cream. With each stroke of the blade, hair grew back immediately. Little razor burn bumps accompanied.

“Shit, where the hell is Barb’s bikini wax?”

I rummaged through the medicine cabinet and opened the cabinets beneath the sink. I couldn’t ever find the fucking Q-tips and I had no chance with the wax. I had to keep shaving.

My hands were unsteady and I’m rarely in the shaving mood. I nicked the wall and it began to bleed. I took a tiny square of toilet paper and put it over the cut – the thought that the bleeding signified a much larger problem than hairy walls never hit me. I was in a shaving rage of confusion. The hair grew thicker with each swipe, the razor bumps more irritated, and the tiny cuts continued to bleed.

When Barb came home, she found me sitting on the toilet frustrated. Alex had guided her to me.

“He’s been there for three hours,” he said. Hair and blood filled the sink and the wall hair was as thick as a Pollack’s arm pits.

“What the hell is going on?” Barb was dumbfounded.

“Well, I’m not constipated,” I said. “Your guess is as good as mine when it comes to our house hitting puberty.”

“It must be some kind of mold,” Barb said.

“That ain’t mold,” I said without looking up at her – still too frustrated with my own confusion to acknowledge hers, “That’s human hair.”

“We have to call the police,” she said.

“I don’t know that I can even dial a number right now. I’ve been shaving it for hours. Would you please call them?”

“You’ve been home all day doing God knows what. I just got home from work. I’m tired. You call them.”

My face was in my hands.

“All right,” I said, “Give me a moment.”

“The moment’s passed.”

“Fine. Give me the phone.” I stuck one hand out without raising my head.

By the time the police showed up, the hair had spread from the bathroom and living room to all the walls in the house, including the ceilings. But it wasn’t just hair. Human skin coated the walls and the hair was more pronounced at the corners. There was considerable razor burn and the bleeding scabbed on the bathroom walls.

“Doesn’t look like a crime has been committed,” Officer Motopolis said as he combed his mustache with his middle finger.

“Any advice?” I asked.

“Dial 3-1-1 for non-emergency assistance,” he said.

“If the skin was black it would have been a home invasion though, right?” I said and showed him the door. “Thanks for nothing.”

I plopped myself onto the couch. Tired, frustrated, and sniffing the first hints of body odor that emanated from the flesh walls, I couldn’t get much rest. Our framed photos were shattered and on the ground as the flesh thickened on the walls. Barb smiled at me from one of the photos as she cradled infant Alex to sleep. It was in this same house, the off-white walls not yet adorned with framed family photos, that most of these pictures were taken. This new interior would not be memorialized in frames with happy photos.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said under my breath. Alex stared at me.

“Why’d you say Jesus’ name like that?” he asked.

“I really don’t have time for this, Alex. Do you smell that?” I asked. “Do you smell that?!”

Alex stared up at me, wide eyed and on the verge of tears.

“That is the smell of a thousand unwashed human beings and it’s coming from our walls! Do you understand? This situation is unlivable!”

Barb stomped in to interrupt my tirade on our innocent son.

“Do not speak to him like that! This isn’t his fault!”

Alex didn’t realize his feelings were hurt until Barb pointed it out. Now he was crying.

“What do we do about this?” I asked Barb over the wailing.

“You figure it out!” she said, “I have to cook dinner!”

“How could you have an appetite right now?”

“I’ve been working all damn day. Of course I have an appetite!” She put on her apron and banged pots and pans and slammed cabinet doors around.

I went back to the bathroom where my troubles began. The house needed antiperspirant, perfume, cologne… Hell, Listerine’d probably work at getting rid of the stench. I picked up Barb’s stick of Secret deodorant. If it was strong enough for a man but made for a woman, surely it’d be good enough for a house. I surveyed the house for the patches of hair most resembling an armpit and applied the deodorant liberally. The smell didn’t go away altogether but as the walls sweated, the aroma became at least as bearable as Barbara’s.

In the corner of our bedroom, where the wall met the floor, was a ragged looking growth of curly black hair. I applied the deodorant and with each stroke, I felt something protruding and pushing up from beneath the carpet.

“Oh, shit,” I thought and tugged at the carpet’s end. Underneath was a hardening penis. Times like these made me wish I was still a Catholic and had a priest on speed dial.

“Barbara, darling,” I called. “Do you know of any priests in the area?”

She answered with a scream so high pitched and blood curdling that if the police were still nearby they’d come and interrogate me for murder. To top it all off, boils and rashes emerged on the parts of the walls where I had applied deodorant.

Patches of red with whitening and pulsing hives dotted the walls. Sweat dropped from the ceiling and onto my head. It was getting musty from all the humidity that the sweat brought in. I felt myself choking on the fumes.

A clang from the kitchen.

And then a scream.

It was Barb.

“What’s going on?!” I asked before I knew how stupid that sounded. Of course I knew what was going on. Our house interior was made of flesh. She looked at me in silence; a stone face that betrayed no emotion. Growing beside her, where the oven lights should be for the stove top, were two large nipples. They hardened and softened in a syncopated rhythm all their own, synched alternately with each other as they quivered into growth. Barb’s chin tried its damnedest not to telegraph her inevitable avalanche of tears. She used my shoulder as a napkin and I rubbed the back of her head to console her.

Alex stood in the living room with a pen and paper and mapped the new geography of the walls. He stood before a pulsing and pus filled sore. Around it, a black and blue bruise deepened. Alex, curious to the point of mental defect, pointed his finger and reached out to poke it. I watched this happen in slow motion as Barb sobbed into my shoulder. Alex’s finger burst the sore wide open with a geyser of infection. Yellow and green mucous mingled with the red blood and splatter across Alex’s five-year-old face. Alex stood there, not knowing how to process this turn of events. He looked at the finger that he stuck into the sore. I could feel the goose bumps on my body bubble up as sweat dripped from my forehead. I knew what came next. He examined his finger for a split second longer.

And then he put it in his mouth.

“No!” I yelled and pushed Barb away from me.

“You fucking asshole!” she yelled as I marched toward Alex. He stopped everything and let out a scream of terror or disgust or both.

“You need to stop tasting things!” was all I could muster up to say. If he had fallen into mud, I’d’ve probably swept him into my arms and threw him into the bath, but he was covered in blood and infection.

“Come with me!” I yelled and turned back for the bathroom. I kept my hands in my pockets for fear that he’d try to hold them if I didn’t.

“Take off your clothes and give yourself a bath like a big boy. You don’t want to be a baby forever, do you!?”

“I want to be a big boy!” he smiled and clapped his hands. Little tiny spatters of blood flew off of his hands and hit my lips though I dodged as best I could.

The hot water knob was fleshy and I retracted as soon as I had reached for it. It was a purple, scabbing over tumor with hair and teeth growing all over it.

I swallowed my own terror, grasped the knob, and turned on the water.

“Wash yourself!” I yelled and handed him a bottle of shampoo. He was dedicated to earning the big boy title and lathered himself up. He looked to me and smiled and waited for my approval but I looked right past him. The sound of running water hypnotized me and I was finally allowed some peace to listen to my thoughts. But there were no thoughts. The sound of water rushed and emptied me.

After a few seconds, a pungent and warm smell steamed from the water. I looked down. The water was as dark and yellow as hangover piss. I grabbed Alex and threw a towel over him.

“Do not,” I said. “Do not lick your lips or open your mouth or anything. Then you’ll be a big boy.”

He nodded his head without saying a word.

I went back to the kitchen for Barb who was now on the floor crying into the tile.

“What’s your brother’s phone number?”

She didn’t answer. She reached into her pocket and handed me her phone. After scrolling through the contacts, I found it.

“Interesting, you still have Jason’s number after ten years.”

“Don’t be a fucking asshole,” she sobbed. “It was just a college fling.”

I selected her brother’s name and called.

“Sam?” I said into the phone.

“Who da fuck is dis?” he asked. “My phone says Barb but you ain’t Barb.”

“It’s Kevin. Your brother-in-law. We need you.”

“Kevin! Holy shit, man! We never talk. How’s Barb?”

“She’s crying into the kitchen tile right now. We really need your craftsman skills right now.”

“But ain’t you da one who said I’d never make it as a carpenter? Now lookit here. Who’s calling?” Sam asked.

“Yes, yes. I was wrong. Bring lots of tools, please.”

“I dunno, Kevin. I’m just sitting in my lawn chair drinkin’ a six pack and enjoying the day. What’s good there to lure me in?”

“Twenty dollars and a bottle of whiskey.”

“See you in ten minutes. Five if I use the bike lane.”

“Don’t use the bike lane.”

Sam dropped his tool chest on the floor as soon as he walked in. He was wearing black overalls, a head band, and he twirled his beard in his fingers.

“Y’all still have that stupid rule ‘bout taking off yer shoes before you come in?”

He stomped his mud caked boots on the floor. I pointed to the walls around him.

“It doesn’t matter today,” I said.

“Holy shit. I never seen none of this before,” he said.

“What should we do?”

Sam poked and pinched at the flesh walls. He left bruises in some spots.

“You try tearin’ this shit right off?” he asked.

“I don’t have the stomach for it.”

“You California types. Always tuckin’ their dicks into their assholes like they’s scared.” He shook his head and giggled a bit. He pulled a knife out of his pocket. “My daddy always said a real man carries a knife.”

“Good. Good,” I said. My stomach knotted itself in anticipation.

He made a deep cut with his knife parallel to the ceiling. Blood, like a waterfall, spilled down toward the floor.

“Well, that’s real gross,” he said as he grabbed the deep cut he had just made. “Just a little tug,” he said and tore a strip of flesh right off. The house screamed and every single pimple, boil, sore popped at the same time and covered the floors with pus and blood.

He tugged again and pulled another strip. The house roared and shook. An artery fell out and sprayed blood all over him.

“You know what?” he said as he wiped some of the blood out of his beard. “I think I left my bar tab open last night. I gotta go. You got that twenty and the whiskey?”

“I couldn’t get the whiskey, but please, take forty.”

Out of my wallet, I pulled out two twenties and handed them to Sam. He nodded and half-smiled and went for the front door. He tried a few times to get the door open but he couldn’t.

“Sonofabitch. It’s stuck.” I went to examine the reason and noticed that skin had grown over the hinges and over the cracks of the door. It was completely fleshed over. Sam pulled out his knife and pointed it toward the ceiling. He grinned – telling me again that real men carry knives for just this sort of situation. I know, I know, I said with my eyes and he took that as his cue to start stabbing at the door skin. With each stab and cut, blood poured out onto the floor, onto his hands, onto our faces as we watched in horror. He tried to open the door again – no luck. The flesh had immediately scabbed over and hardened. A knife is good for many situations, but this was something special.

“I gotta use the pisser,” he said and headed for the bathroom. Barb was on her knees now looking at the tits on the oven. They were throbbing and purple with little drips of milk escaping one by one from the nipples.

“We need to milk it,” she said. “We need to relieve its pain! I know its pain! We need to milk it!” Barb struggled to get off her knees. The tile floor was now wrinkled and damp and my high school years in wrestling informed me that either the floor or Barb’s knees or both were going to have ringworm in the morning.

“What are we going to milk it with?” I asked.

“Alex is still young enough. He’s still young enough!” Barb’s eyes were crazy; her makeup smeared from all the crying, her eyes sunken in and swollen, and she breathed heavy. She grabbed me by the collar. “Tell Alex to relieve its pain! Look at them, Kevin. They’re swelling with pressure!”

“Calm down,” I said to her. “Don’t we still have a breast pump or something? Let me check our bedroom closet.”

“It’s not fair for it to suffer!” she yelled as I walked away. Lactation wasn’t all it was suffering from. We had just nearly stabbed it to death. Milk was the least of its worries.

I walked into the bedroom and, ah! The penis I had massaged out of the carpet was still there. It had grown from a regular-sized erection to a flaccid whale of a thing that rested atop our bed. It had to be ten feet wide and fifteen feet long. Stray pubes poked out here and there and it left a puddle of sweat on our sheets. When I walked to the closet, I noticed it perked up and pointed upwards toward the ceiling. It was only natural for me to follow where it pointed with my eyes. It was pointing to a ball sack growing out of the ceiling. I watched it grow from a tiny little thing, no bigger than an average pitbull’s sack, to the size of elephant ears. It swayed as gravity pulled and elongated it until it finally found its resting place atop the penis that was on the bed.

“That’s the weirdest anatomy I’ve ever seen,” I said to myself, almost forgetting that I was on a mission for a breast pump.

I dug through Barb’s walk-in closet. Piles of clothes were strewn around with flesh from the walls growing and melding with them. The flesh’s odor was now unbearable, like an old man who refuses to shower but once a month; his stubbornness a calculated outward symbol of his vitality, his stench a sign of dying man. It was like the smell of rotting fruit and uncooked meat left in the trash for days. My stomach was in knots and I gagged on the humidity of the house.

Brown age marks dotted the walls along with moles and wrinkles that sagged from ceiling to floor. The hair was turning white and falling out. Above me was a chandelier of skin tags that drooped and swayed. I tried my best to duck my head as I reached for Barb’s shelves and threw my hands around blindly looking for something I wouldn’t recognize if it hit me in the head. Meanwhile, the skin tag chandelier rested on top of my head like a toupee.

“Fuck! Shit! Son of a bitch! God fucking dammit!” I yelled as I ran out of the closet, my knees nearly hitting my chin. The dick was still there resting like a beached whale on my bed while the ball sack straddled it. White clumps of smegma accumulated around the foreskin and began to pile on our bed sheets. They were new bed sheets, too.

Sam was gagging in the bathroom. His moaning was dampened by the sweating flesh that covered our entire house. I opened the door. His head was in the toilet – the acne-riddled, pockmarked toilet.

“I…” he said into the toilet, “Keep chucking because I can’t stop thinking about how fucked up it is that I’m spewing into a skin toilet. It never ends…”

“Good thing you brought your knife,” I said and closed the door.

On our hallway’s wall it stared at me. An eyeball the size of my fist darted from side to side, up and down. It was in a panic. It had ooze dripping out of it and its pupils were clouded over. I stood before it motionless; it did nothing but look me in the eye.

“Honey!” I yelled. “I couldn’t find the breast pump. I think this thing’s just going to have to suffer!”

The eye blinked and I turned away to head for the kitchen. Barb sobbed as I watched her put a nipple into her mouth and start to suck. She gagged on whatever came out and burst into more tears. She had been pushed to the edge. The skin hung low from the ceiling and clumps of body cheese fell from the wrinkling flesh.

Alex, who’s been told plenty of times not to pick at scabs, was peeling off the scabs that had healed over from Sam’s stabbing session. He was putting them into piles by color. The younger, redder scabs in one pile, and the old brown scabs in another. When the piles were done being sorted, Alex picked up a young scab and put it in his mouth.

Sam was vomiting in the bathroom, his wailing muffled and echoed off of the corners of the house. Barb sobbed in the kitchen. Over and over again she said I work all day, I work hard… and now this. Puddles of milk she had spit out began to curdle around her.

And as Alex chewed on the first scab he put on his mouth, his fingers readied for another.

INVASION OF THE DEMON NINJAS, OR HOW A MODERN DAY BATHHOUSE SAVED OUR WORLD

By Ryan Sayles

Every great tale of human survival begins with a bland description of the weather.

Every single one.

Any literary agent with his poop all in one sock will tell you that.

So this night was like any other night out in the southwestern desert. Dark. Clear sky, hot winds. Stuff like tumbleweeds and cactus. Maybe a “varmint,” whatever that is. The quiet soundtrack of desert bugs and whatnot, accentuated with the squishy cacophony of ass-to-mouth pandemonium going on.

Boom. That just happened.

It was the rest stop stuffed away at exit #69 (go figure, right?) off Interstate 200-something. Every night that wondrous glory hole comes alive with sweaty manliness. Just dude after dude arriving at their personal Mecca to throw down.

Imagine it: an unassuming rest stop. Big parking lot, a tree here and there, little spots to take your Yorkie for a tinkle after another hundred-and-fifty-mile stretch. Some semis parked overnight. A row or two of vending machines.

A massive, undulating pile of man-dudes doing every slap, thrust, donkey-punch and dirty sanchez known the world over. Throw in some rufies, lies to their spouses and a cold shower in the morning and you’ve got the average Saturday night here.

There were three lookouts—three fellas who pulled the short straw that week—always peering up and down the road for the Highway Patrol. But half the time they would meander over to one another and wind up in a tangle of mesquite brush and miss when the sting units would roll up and arrest every wet and sloppy guy inside.

Tonight it was Joe, Tom and some guy known only as Emu.

And, yeah, they meandered.

Meanwhile, inside, Chris was in the mop closet, crying while he scrubbed blood out of his clown costume. Again. “Why do they always come to me to die?” he asked the emptiness around him. The emptiness didn’t answer back, and so one more of life’s great mysteries echoed through the nothing and out into the world.

Chuck and Isaac sat at the makeshift bar, nursing White Russians and wondering why the rest stop lobby smelled like urine so bad.

Brian was off in the fray, twirling and frolicking, doing what he did best. Let’s not describe that in great detail, though; this is intended to be a children’s story for crying out loud.

And up above in the hot, hot sky, an inter-dimensional portal opened. Why? Because that’s what makes this story different than any other feces-pummeling evening at rest stop #69 on any other hot, sloppy night.

It was the night the demonic ninjas from another dimension invaded.

The sky was pin-pricked with a single point of light. That single point blossomed into a swirling vortex of scalding, electric energy that flowered open further and further.

A mother ship approached from the other side, surrounded by things which looked suspiciously like Blackhawk helicopters. Down below it there may have been a dinosaur or two saddled with cannon harnesses and RADAR dishes and other cool stuff. Sure, these were evil ninjas, but they were frickin’ awesome ninjas as well.

On the bridge of the mother ship three of them demonic ninjas, all clad in black with swords and Uzis and whatnot strapped all over them, examined their inter-dimensional scanners with wide eyes.

“It’s ass-to-mouth pandemonium going on down there. Straight up,” Thoronak said in a language which sounded surprising a lot like American English.

“They should die easily, then,” Bilbob said, carefully running his thumb along the edge of a katana blade. The texture of his reptilian finger made a humming sound as it stroked the hard metal. “I shall enjoy spilling their blood.”

“Well, they’re spilling something else right now ...” Wii said. “I’m wearing my long-sleeved shirt down there. Who knows what we’ll contract.”

“Pussy,” Bilbob said.

“Definitely a lack of that ...”

And the ninjas readied their invasion forces.

***

“How’s your stomach?” Isaac asked, stroking his goatee. As he did it all the beads woven through the fine chin hairs rattled playfully.

Chuck groaned and reflexively rubbed his gut. He slammed his White Russian and savored the milky wash. After a beat, he made sly eye contact with Isaac. Slyly is actually how he made most of his eye contacts. “Hurts. I got all this built-up pressure that’s just shoving out in every direction.”

“That sucks, bro.”

“Sucks is right,” Chuck said. His bald head glistened with sweat from the heat of the night. Just glistened. “I’ve had a hard time eating. Haven’t made a brown monkey in a week if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” Isaac said. “Well, in the sense that I know what a brown monkey is. As far as not making them, dude, I wish I had that problem. I fire them off eight or ten at a time.”

“That’s not healthy either, bro.”

“My doctor says until I start bleeding again to just count my lucky stars and keep eating bran, so … I’m leaving it alone.”

Just then the door burst open and Brian came stumbling out, his Celtic Woman World Tour ’07 T-shirt clinging to his chest with sweat.

“Dudes, got any mixers back there?”

Chuck leaned over the bartop and into the coolers that a few guys brought as a cover charge. He plunged a hand in and sifted through some ice. Shuffled bottle tops. “We got some Mike’s Hard lemonade … a couple of Zimas left … here’s some German brand of malt liquor …”

“Oh! Gimme one of those!” Brian shouted. “I love any flavored German light alcoholic beverages.”

Isaac eyed the bottle as Chuck passed it. “I read some German, you know. May I?”

Brian offered him the brewsky, albeit cautiously. “Read it, don’t pound it.”

“Sure, sure.” Isaac turned the bottle in his hand, the dewy frost sliding down the glass shaft and dribbling along his strong fist. “Huh … says something about Piggy Sweat. Heard of it?”

“German Piggy Sweat malt liqueur? That’s like the Cadillac of gay bar mouthwash!” Chuck was so ecstatic that he shifted suddenly in his seat and his guts rumbled like a landslide.

“Dibs.” Brian said. With one thumb he popped the top. Guzzling commenced.

Chris dried his eyes and walked out of the mop closet. His clown costume hung limply in one hand, soaking wet and discolored. In his other hand, a well-worked scrub brush.

The other three turned and stared at him expectantly. Chris read their deep eyes as if he had known them his entire life, and not just the last year. He slowly shook his head.

“How many is that?” Chuck asked, knowing he was going to wince at the answer whatever it was.

“Eight.”

“Damn.” Isaac said. He drowned his troubles with a Zima, then said, “What are you going to do with it?”

“I’ll just forfeit my deposit. I know the guy who hooked me up here. He reps for a under-the-table Japanese company that rents out morale gear and they’re actually used to not getting some back—”

“No no no.” Isaac said. “I was talking about your clown suit, dude.”

“Yeah, we don’t want to know about the rest,” Chuck said.

“Keep your play-thing arrangements to yourself, bro.” Brian said. “We don’t want to go down for murder—”

“It’s cool, it’s cool.” Chris said. “I don’t think murder applies since technically he cut himself, but still. We’re cool.”

“Again, no details bro.” Brian said.

“Yeah,” Isaac said. “Just like I never told you guys who was responsible for that herpes outbreak last summer—”

“No details.” Chuck said. “And … didn’t Mongo, Ben and Sterling die from that outbreak?”

Isaac shrugged. “With the way Sterling kept Facebooking about all the married, top-level executive dudes he was railing, he was gonna die anyways. Kept breaking the code of silence. But the other two guys, yeah. My bad.”

They all looked at Chris and realized they’d gotten sidetracked. He clutched his ruined clown costume and looked forlorn. In the background, the undulating man-flesh orgy continued its cacophony. The squishy noises drowned out most other things.

Isaac walked over, put a hand to Chris’s shoulder. “You’ll buy another submissive and forget all about this one. Things will be better I promise.”

“I don’t want another submissive,” Chris said, getting angry. When he did, it was obvious he was wearing his tangy and fierce lip gloss. “I want this one. I’m tired of digging holes in my backyard. The neighbor’s dog came over and dug up a few of them.”

“Damn, dude.” Chuck said. “Did you tell the neighbor to watch his friggin’ dog?”

“No.” Chris turned toward the door. “I did what anyone else would do. I beat it with a dull hatchet and set fire to its corpse on his front porch. Duh.”

With that, Chris wadded up his clown costume and walked out front. There, in the sea of parked cars, he approached his non-descript white van with FREE CANDY written on the side. He slid open the windowless door and hopped inside. Chris unceremoniously stuffed the blood-drenched costume into a fifty-five gallon trash can that was suspiciously full already.

Then he looked up through his skylight, saw the portal spinning in the air. Blackhawks coming through. Evil demon ninjas zip-lining down. He was used to police raids, but this looked, oh, I don’t know … different.

Like, apocalypse different.

Just in case it was the fuzz—he’d been fooled before when they dressed up like Care Bears in an elaborate sting—Chris cautiously slid his van door shut and put an eye up to the secret peephole he had drilled out for the playground—I mean, to look for prowlers. Yeah, it was for prowlers …

***

Brian saw the light shift outside and moved to the windows. When he did, a wet squeak eeked out into the room.

Isaac laughed, shooting Zima through his nostrils. It was a good burn. “Dude,” he said, pointing at Brian, “Just excuse yourself outside and fart it out.”

Brian, simultaneously turning red and digging deep for a lie, got all defensive and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Whatever bro, you got some build-up in there.” Isaac said.

“Yeah, just be grateful you can still hold your mud,” Chuck said. He gently rubbed his guts, worried that his fate would be just that. Wearing adult diapers at the age of forty would be just as embarrassing as it was having a wet dream in the college swimming pool.

“It’s not mud.”

“No brown monkeys?”

Brian got all pissy. “It’s nothing. Do you see something weird going on outside?”

“Don’t change the subject.” Isaac said. “We were talking about your personal lubricant flatulence—”

But then bullets shattered the awkward post-fart silence.

***

“Police raid! Hit the deck!” Chuck shouted as he dove onto the concrete. He felt something shift in his gut and the pressure leaned to one side. He groaned, but kept his focus on the windows, looking for those all-too-familiar red and blues. “Oh, I can’t afford for my wife to find out about this … again ...”

“I don’t know if that’s the fuzz, bro …” Issac said, his slender frame down behind the makeshift bar. He started ramming two bottlenecks at a time into his mouth, draining the evidence. Between gulps he asked, “Brian, whaddya see?”

“Dude, some sweet-ass helicopters and …Sub-Zero from Mortal Kombat.”

“For real?” Isaac asked. “Are Scorpion and Reptile there too?”

“Don’t know.” Brian said. The dance music version of MK’s theme song started blasting in his head. It replaced Celtic Woman’s version of “True Colors.”

“They are doing awesome flips out of the helicopter’s side doors.”

Brian watched two of the ninjas rattle a line of bushes and drag three dudes out of them. The dudes’ hard bodies glistened in the eerie light cascading down from the portal’s rim.

“Joe! Tom! Emu!” Brian shouted.

One ninja whipped out a long, thick sword and raised it over his head, but before Brian could see what happened, thousands of ninjas rained down like a Storm Shadow torrential downpour.

The slaughter began. They ran from car to car, pulling out fellas who had escaped the party room for a more intimate setting, such as a faux-leather backseat in a 1982 hatchback with a hefty mingling of old Trojan wrappers and empty cans of Schlitz in the floorboards.

Guts sprayed everywhere outside. Just tons and tons of wasted colon. The ninjas tore off the eviscerated dude’s head and threw it across the lot. It hit a Toyota’s windshield and punched right through it.

“Dude, was that my Toyota?” Brian asked as he nervously rubbed his strong, sweaty palms down his shirt. He stretched the wet fabric across the line of his rock-hard abs. “Holy shit that was!”

“Was what, bro?” Isaac asked.

Ninjas came rushing toward the other end of the bathhouse where the big adventure rooms were. Blades out, uzis held high, death was coming to them this night (and yes, occasionally there will be intentional rhyming. If it happens unintentionally, you, the reader, get a bonus. You’re welcome.).

Brian turned to everyone. “It ain’t the cops. We gotta go!”

“Oh my God! Is it the Westboro Baptist church?” Isaac asked.

“No! Worse!”

“Nazis?”

Brian looked out there. “I don’t think so. Well … maybe Japan, but Imperial Japan, so … I don’t know! Run!”

Screams came from inside the adventure room. Just on the other side of the double doors.

***

Chris knew what to do.

He had been planning on this type of persecution—you know, open grisly slaughter of clown suit-wearing freaks driving vans that are always “mistaken” as trying to lure small children to their deaths—his entire life.

Chris lifted up the fake flooring of his cargo van’s … uhhh … cargo area and moved aside all the pretty blonde (and anatomically accurate) dolls, action figures and candy and found his illegally obtained and altered rifle collection.

He inserted a pre-loaded magazine and cocked the bolt, chambered a round. He dropped a small hit of MDMA he found among the candy and waited. Waited for them to come close enough.

***

Oh, and Chris also put on another clown costume. This one was camouflaged and had a MOLLE system sewn in so he could attach all kinds of gear pouches. It was sweet.

It was also ass-less.

***

Our heroes were getting ready to run away like little squealing girly-men but the double-doors to the main party burst open.

Everyone jumped as Jim, Dan and Mike tumbled through. They hurriedly pulled their pants up and Jim said, “Ain’t no damn cops out there. Them’s ninjas.”

Behind them the adventure room was soaked in body parts. Blood and viscera were still flying through the air and sticking to the walls, dangling from the ceilings.

“We gots to get armed.” Jim said. Jim was one of the oldest dudes there. Sometimes referred to as “Grey Bush,” Jim’s lengthy experience and throbbing sense of right and wrong had naturally put him in a leadership position on top of the other men. His mustache was incredible.

Dan solemnly nodded. Mike picked a short hair out of the back of his teeth and grimaced. “I hope I got this before he died,” Mike mumbled. (Author’s note: no, he didn’t.)

“Ninjas?” Isaac stood up, lemon-flavored malt liquor drizzling down his chin. “Sweet!”

“No, dude.” Brian said, turning around. He was so serious that even the Celtic Women on his T-shirt looked cold sober. “Not sweet.”

Isaac turned and saw all the butchered man-flesh. Saw how they were just outside of a room where his fellow bathhouse-goers were being torn limb from limb. Smelling the smells and noticing how different man-sweat tingles the nostrils when it is laced with the odor of pre-death horror.

“I wish it still stunk like The Castro District in there,” Isaac said. “Hell, I’d even take P-Town right about now.”

“Bro, with as bad as it is, I’d take the gay neighborhoods in Oakland if I couldn’t get Castro,” Chuck said. “And you know how much I hate Raiders fans.”

Brian looked at the manly men before him, peered through the open double-doors back into the shower room. “I wish this were a raid by the cops.”

“Me too,” Jim said. “I’d take the delicious bite of a good set of handcuffs right now over this … this death-fisting.”

“I wish Brokeback Mountain was my life story,” Brian said. He sang a verse from Celtic Woman’s Newgrange and took a deep, wistful breath. “I wish The Birdcage was better received for its time and I wish it didn’t feel so right to be so wrong. But I wish for a lot of things.”

He wished they were all just a multitude of freaky-deaky fools were brushing their teeth, scrubbing off their junk, calling their wives and trying to flush the remaining roofies down the toilets rather than a red, sticky carpet of human obliteration.

“I agree. Them’s ninjas.” Brian walked forward, each step eeking out a little toot that was probably leaving a grease stain in his panties. “We need guns. Huge guns.”

Jim, a Vietnam vet, a hunter of men, an iron chef (not in real life, just in his own mind but his Beef Wellington was to die for) and former Greco-Roman wrestler, snarled just a little before nodding. “We make our stand against whatever evil is coming here.”

Dan, who owned a set of keys for every door to the place, turned on a heel—a high heel, because even though he was six foot nine and weighed three hundred and eighty pounds, he liked to feel pretty—and headed down the corridor. “Let’s get to the Plan B room then.”

They raced down the hallway, turning this way and that. Isaac shouted, “So … there’s guns in the Plan B room?”

Chuck turned and raised an eyebrow, saying, “Yeah. What did you think was in there?”

“I dunno … emergency stuff. You know, enemas, vaccines, abortifacients. Standard issue Saturday night gear.”

“Abortifacients? Your ass isn’t getting pregnant.”

Isaac raised an eyebrow and said, “How can you be so sure?”

They all silently thought about it and decided they couldn’t completely be sure.

But then they reached the Plan B door and Dan used an ancient rest stop key ring to swing it open wide. The light inside the room shone down like golden sun rays from a legend. It illuminated rack after rack of every firearm known to man. The room was a veritable war chest filled with gun metal gray and brass. And a few original, signed copies of Play Girl.

“Now, we bring the fight to them,” Jim said. He stepped inside but as he did Brian farted and a KY spatter hit the floor under Jim’s feet. He slipped in it and struck his head on the concrete. Hard. A wet crack echoed off the walls as he instantly went stiff (author’s note: I know I just used the words “wet” and “stiff” but don’t giggle. This scene is intended to teach children—because this is a children’s book, remember—about how old people die suddenly but that’s okay because they don’t contribute to society anymore). Jim died right there.

His corpse soiled itself.

“Damn it,” Brian said. He and Dan drug Jim off to the side. They went through his pockets for loose change and they all went inside and armed up.

It was no coincidence that when they exited, each man was shirtless with ammo belts lashed across their bodies. Even the dudes who didn’t carry a belt-fed gun had them. It was a Rambo thing, I guess.

Also, their pants were all ass-less.

***

Thoronak meandered through the invasion, saw some goofy bathhouse queef slithering along the ground nearly dead.

The vile but sweet-ass ninja strode up and stomped on the dude’s head. His face blew off and flew across the floor. It hit a gas line and half the building blew up. This huge-ass fireball belched up into the sky and rolled around for a second before it turned all oily black and dissipated. It was nuts.

He looked over to Wii, who was yanking the spinal cord out of some guy’s ass. “Hey, Wii!”

Wii looked over at him, and then down at the spine and skull in his hand. The guy’s rectum was obviously blown out, but the skull itself was smiling. Wii dropped the thing and said, “What?”

Thoronak said, “Whatever you do, don’t let that portal control device out of your sight. It’s the only way we can shut it from this end. We’ll need it.”

Bilbob stood up, spinning nunchucks all over the place like he was a Ninja Turtle. “Sweet. Good idea. We need that thing in our possession this entire time.”

Thoronak nodded. “Right. Glad we got that worked out down here, because I totally forgot about it in the pre-ops briefing.”

Then some other bathhouse patron stood up and lisp-shouted, “Did somebody mention pre-op?”

They killed him.

***

Suddenly and without warning, nor ever was there a sign that this was going to happen at all, just completely out of the blue, the FREE CANDY door on Chris’s unmarked van flew open and the armed clown/felon did a sweet tac roll out of it, machine guns blazing like a motherfucker.

Bullets sprayed everywhere like ten dudes just simultaneously had one watching of Magic Mike. Well, maybe more like fifty because it was a lot of bullets.

Demon ninjas took rounds to their faces and chests and blew up in green gooey messes. They have different body chemistry and stuff so they’re not red like us people. Chris screamed like a banshee and ran across the parking lot, muzzle flashes lighting the way through the dark night.

Wii looked up from where he had just smashed two dudes’ faces together into a red mist and he was all, “What the frick? Get ’em!”

And just like that, a swarm of evil ninjas whipped out their uzis and let forth a gush of bullets. Hot lead scorched the air, death on supersonic wings, projectiles lusting after blood, all their voices sing. A gush of bullets.

Chris, who had mounted the roof of a small VW, stood defiantly in a power stance with twin underslung rifles mowing down evil ninja after evil ninja. The gush of bullets hit him square in the stomach, riddling him.

To Wii’s surprise, the projectiles mushroom-ed out against Chris’s solid, taut flesh and fell down uselessly to the ground. Little plinking sounds penetrated the night and for just a moment, the ninjas felt vulnerable. Not a single round went smooth up in Chris’s guts.

“Fools,” Chris said, slapping his belly with a satisfaction reserved for really fat people at a weenie roast. “My intestine is so impacted from a forty-five day bender that I’ll need a jackhammer and a barrel of Texas crude to loosen up my brown monkeys.”

“What?” Wii asked, unbelieving.

Some random ninja underling turned around and, shyly, whispered into Wii’s ear.

“Ewww.” Wii was disgusted that a human being could receive such a prolonged ramrodding and still live, but at the same time he admired that the man was effectively bulletproof.

Wii raised an eyebrow and shouted, “Hey! When that forty-five-day long train stuffed you up, did it force a backflow of impacted feces into your brain?”

Chris giggled. “Well, it sure does feel like it, but no. Why do you ask?”

“Shoot him in his face!” Wii commanded.

Chris saw the writing on the wall and dove just as the second gush of bullets arrived. He ran inside the bathhouse, slipping in dead rest stop guy-goo and ran smack dab into the other fellas.

“Man, all you guys took your shirts off,” he said. He looked them up and down, Brian especially. “Except you.”

Brian looked down at his skin-tight Celtic Woman tee and lovingly stroked their tender, supple faces. “Celtic Woman, mother fudger. Represent.”

“Sure,” Chris said. He adjusted his clown costume and looked behind him. The ninjas were preparing to come inside after him. “They bleed.”

Isaac looked down the hallway and saw silhouettes skating around in the near-dark. “If they bleed, we can kill them.”

“Yeah,” Chuck said, “but what if my wife finds out I was here?”

Everyone shrugged. Chuck nibbled his fingernails for a moment and then a light bulb blinked on over his head. “I know! I’ll tell her I was at the farmer’s market! That’s it! She loves the farmer’s market! It’ll be genius!”

Both Dan and Mike nodded, uncomfortable. Dan thumbed through his smartphone and found Chuck’s wife’s number. He thought about texting her and saying saw your husband at the farmer’s market. Not the rest stop but he didn’t. He also didn’t text next time he shows up, push me out the window that isn’t above the rose bush please but he didn’t.

Dan was a douche.

“Either way, we need to move. They’re coming!” Brian shouted just as a horde of ninjas came zinging down out of the hallway, katana blades slashing and cutting.

Mike looked up just as a blade zipped down his face. He just watched it slide like greased lightning from his forehead to his junk. The evil ninja stood there and began an evil ninja cackle. Mike didn’t quite catch on until his body began to split in half width-wise. Fat coils of intestine tumbled out below his belly button, swirling like soft serve on the tile.

Then an avalanche of freed organs spilled out, splashing and making slippery sounds (author’s note: I know I just used the word “slippery” but don’t giggle. This scene is intended to teach children—again, this is a children’s book—about how sometimes a dude is just standing there, minding his own business, and BOOM! Bitches get whacked. It’s a cold, hard truth in bad neighborhoods. No matter what gang you’re in, what drugs you deal, who you shot last week, them other fuckers just walk down the street thinking about the Holy Bible and BOOM! Some other fuckface rolls up and blasts your ass. See? Of course, gang bangers can’t shoot worth a squirt [you can laugh at that word] so nobody ever really dies, but still).

Finally Mike’s face peeled in half and his whole body collapsed into a limp pile of messy man-meat.

The hallway came alive with insane gunfire. Chuck launched himself, rolled this way. Brian launched himself, rolled that way. Dan ducked and started texting Chuck’s wife. Isaac, still with two bottles of Zima in his mouth, bobbed and weaved while slashing evil ninja Achilles tendons. Because they have those, just like us.

Chris raged and opened fire. Ninjas coming everywhere. Just friggin’ everywhere, bros.

Wii and Bilbob arrived, wanting the taste of dead man-meat on their lips. Wii took the left side of the hallway while Bilbob tackled Chuck in a quarterback sack move. They crashed through a door and engaged in mortal combat in the supply closet. It was close-quarters, but Bilbob was a trained martial artist and Chuck was used to being chest-to-chest with men in this very closet, so it was cool. But it was also nuts.

Brian blocked a karate chop from Wii and then tried to pop out the evil demon ninja’s eyes with his fingers but Wii blocked that and tried to shank Brian with a dagger concealed in his shirt sleeve but Brian dodged it with a rather effeminate hip thrust and did a backwards roundhouse jump kick to Wii’s face but he did one of those The Matrix leaning back way-too-far-for-it-to-be-real things and dodged it and then—

This went on forever.

Elsewhere, Chris was mowing down ninjas. Isaac drained three more Zimas (that put his count in the upper 40s but since it was Zima he was barely buzzed) and Chuck, being more proficient in the closet, tore off Bilbob’s head and ate it. He came stumbling out of the closet with green blood drenching his jaw and chest and saw Brian engaged in mortal combat with Wii.

“I will help you brother!” Chuck shouted. But all he managed to do was distract Brian and Wii kicked Brian in his jimmy.

Wii roared triumphantly as Brian fell back. Brian’s luscious package throbbed with each heartbeat. He did a crab crawl away from Wii as the evil demon ninja strode forward. Brian summoned everything left inside him and jumped up. Figured he’d ice his balls and live another day rather than get run through by that big bad man’s huge, long blade.

Jumping up made Brian splatter-fart KY everywhere. Wii lunged forward and was instantly coated in the stench of dookie and personal lubricant. He slid in it, fell on his ass. The portal controller slipped out of his pocket and Brian eyeballed it as Wii fumbled to grab it, stuff it back away.

Brian, Isaac and Chris ran down one hallway, Chuck ran down the other way. Dan huddled in a corner and kept texting.

***

Chuck made it outside just as the helicopters began strafing the area.

“Jeez Louise, whenever I want there to be highway patrol around they never show up!”

He ducked behind a truck and checked his ammo. His gun was as dry as a first-time noobie’s throat. Ouch.

Fortunately, the invasion forces were mounting up somewhere else and Chuck was able to hide, even as the helicopters sprayed hot lead around. He ducked down, felt the rumbling in his gut as the outward pressure shifted again.

“Somethin’ gonna have to give soon,” Chuck mumbled.

***

Thoronak caught up with Wii and nearly vomited.

“You stink.”

Wii looked ashamed and flung some of Brian’s greasy goop off of his body. He wiped his hands up and down on his ninja blouse, but no matter how much of the viscous ass-juice he cleared, the stench had sunk into his threads. “My bad, dude. That guy I was fighting just … sprayed me like an earth skunk.”

“I should burn you.”

“Please don’t.”

Thoronak looked around, perplexed by the amount of slaughter despite the small size of this rebellious group. While he was touring the mayhem, he saw Bilbob’s discarded and headless body.

“Well I’ll be dipped in frothy ass-milk and rolled in corn flakes!” Thoronak sadly proclaimed. He knelt down to his longtime friend’s corpse and cradled it. “What happened?”

“Some bald dude wrestled him man-to-man in the closet and then ate his head.” Wii looked down, filled with dishonor. “I know, bro. It’s messed up, right?”

Thoronak reached to Wii and snapped his fingers. “The invasion portal control, give it to me.”

Wii did. Thoronak opened the portal super-wide and stood carrying Bilbob’s body. “He was a brave warrior and a dear friend. He deserves a proper burial.”

He looked through the ravaged ceiling and had a clear view to the now-massive portal. Thoronak spun around twice and flung Bilbob’s toward it. The corpse hit a splintered rafter and ricocheted off to the side. It slapped a wall and left a streak as it slithered to the floor.

Thoronak walked over, silently hoped no one saw that even though he knew a bunch of dudes did and he would never live it down, and picked Bilbob back up.

This time when he threw it, the corpse went into the hole, but it hit the rim and wound up catching on it to where Bilbob’s legs dangled.

“Darn tootin’,” Thoronak said. He walked over to the bottom of the rim and jumped trying to grab a foot. He could not, so he used the portal device to open the mouth wider. Bilbob’s corpse lowered down, but the portal was so wide that it became unstable. Thoronak quickly shrunk it to a stable, yet out-of-reach size and beat his head against the wall.

Finally he just said, “Sorry buddy,” and pushed a blue button, slamming shut the portal. Bilbob was cut in half and his limp torso fell to the earth. Thoronak didn’t bother getting the legs. He re-opened the portal to the invasion width and tossed the control back to Wii. “Go get the turd burglars who did this.”

He started to walk off, then turned around. “Oh, and don’t let them get that remote. We’ve only got one shot at this planetary invasion, hostile take-over stuff.”

Wii smiled and tucked the remote back into his pocket. He still smelled like Brian’s brown monkeys, but he had new purpose. Which, if you’re keeping track, is really the original purpose but who cares.

***

Oh, and off in the corner Dan saw everything and texted it to Brian, Chuck, Isaac and—on accident—Chuck’s wife.

***

The dudes circled around to the glory hole station, a maze of concrete walls with, well, you know, glory holes in them.

They crouched down real low to sneak undetected through the place. The roof was blown off and the hot night sky was twinkling from up above.

All at once their cell phones rang with Celine Deon’s “My Heart Will Go On” ringtones. Well, Brian’s cell phone blasted “The Prayer” by Celtic Woman, but still. They were ringtones, and they and all received a text.

“Dan?” Brian asked. “Fuck that guy.”

“Let’s just see what he has to say.” Isaac was always trying to be the fence-mender of the group. They all read the text, and knew immediately what was happening.

“This is no random bathhouse slaughter by inter-dimensional demon ninjas, fellas,” Brian said.

“Nope.” Chris said, “it’s an invasion!”

“You’re right,” Isaac said.

“Of course he’s right,” Wii said as he shoved his uzi’s barrel into their faces. “Now die!” But the dudes scattered as Wii pulled the trigger. Ninjas flooded the space and it was a cat and mouse game.

A cat and mouse game … of death.

***

Outside, Chuck could see one helicopter station-keeping outside the glory hole station while he watched evil ninjas pouring in.

Celine Dion’s songbird voice announced the text, and Chuck feared for his friends’ safety. He could also see inside the portal that more forces were mounting, and he had a sinking feeling that those forces were gathering to travel beyond rest stop #69 and out into the world.

He heard gunfire and imaged his buddies inside there, fighting for their lives. His guts shifted again, painfully, and he was momentarily distracted. He grimaced, gently laid a hand on his belly. A sweeping illness rolled through him and he felt the urge to bear down. So he did. (Why not, right? I mean, I do it no matter where I am, no matter who I’m with, no matter what the context. Church nursery, funerals, Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll push one out precisely when the mood strikes and I don’t care what the police keep saying about it.)

An anal bead fell out, hit the dirt with a little poof.

Chuck looked down and recognized the ball’s colorful design—inlaid with TeleTubbies, of course—and realized it must have come off the thread it was on about two weeks ago.

And there was a total of nine on the thread.

No wonder when his wife yanked that thing out like she was starting a lawn mower she went from giggling dominatrix to silent submissive. The bead thread went in as a complete package and came out bare bones.

Chuck looked over to the glory hole ruins and saw seven demon ninjas, all licking their chops and waiting their turns to swarm in and kill his friends. He threw the anal bead at one of the infernal beasts but missed. It hit the wall near it so softly that it wouldn’t have done any damage anyway. In Chuck’s father’s words that had echoed through his head since he was five years old: Chuck threw like a little bitch.

The whoop-whoop of the station-keeping helicopter mesmerized Chuck, and lit a spark in his imagination. You see, in real life Chuck was a NASA aeronautical navigator. He designed tracklines for satellites to follow over the course of hundreds of thousands of space miles. He figured angles, variations, deviations, space winds, debris, course corrections, solar tornadoes, dying stars and alien interference. All on a daily basis.

He bore down again and three beads plunked out. He ignored the smell and picked up one. He did some quick speed/trajectory/angular flight path calculations and threw the bead as hard as he could. Right into the helicopter rotor.

The bead struck and deflected out at Mach Four. Maybe Mach Nine. It rocketed through the air and this time hit a demon ninja in the back of the skull like a little sex-toy wrecking ball. His face blew out, spraying the ground in front of him with green face-goo and brains. The anal bead, cleansed of colon-filth by the glorious wash of grey matter and death, settled on the ground and lazily spun to a stop, Tinky Winky looking up to the night sky and thanking God for all it had been able to do.

The ninja’s limp body collapsed, and an invigorated Chuck grabbed a second defecated anal bead.

***

Inside the glory hole, lead was slinging around like glow sticks at a rave: the things were everywhere, and no one really knew where they were coming from.

The night fought hard as nails, manly men raging in ass-less glory, evil in all its incarnations, writing the earth’s greatest story.

It was like The Matrix. Bullets pockmarking the concrete walls, dust plumes snapping up and out in zigzagging lines of machine-gunning death. Chasing our heroes everywhere. Dudes were doing cartwheels and tac rolls and running up walls, doing upside down flips and even racing across the ceiling. It was nuts.

In the storm of slaughter, the ninjas were proving to be no match for Brian, Isaac and Chris. And with Chuck outside sniping fools with ass-balls, the end was nearly in sight.

The dudes made eye contact (Chuck did so in a sly manner and as best he could since currently he was outside and the other dudes were inside). They all knew one thing: Legally Blonde II was the greatest move ever. And the other thing they knew was that if they didn’t close that portal, their world was over.

Ninja body parts were everywhere. Wii and Thoronak were racing around, trying to figure out what was going on. In just a few short minutes the two evil demon ninja leaders realized their flock of henchmen were dead, fallen to the hands of just a few Earth Men.

“If we’re going to conquer this planet so we can use the humans as slave labor for our Hello Ninja Kitty industrial merchandise factories, the first thing we’re going to have to do is nuke them into oblivion,” Thoronak said. “Straight up.”

Wii nodded. “Damn skippy, boss.”

“I’ll go back and fire up the nukes. You stay here and for Ninja God’s sakes, don’t let that portal remote fall into the wrong hands.” Thoronak said.

“I won’t, boss.”

And with that, Thoronak turned around to leave. He got outside just in time to see the last ninja get hit in the back of the head. As his face exploded, Thoronak saw in slow motion the anal bead, which did all the work. It came flying at him. Some blob-like anthropomorphic character was on the bead, arms wide open with a television antenna on its head. It looked like it ate children.

It hit Thoronak in the mouth, and he swallowed the bead. It had a complex mélange of flavors, ranging from sour to nutty. A lot of the nutty was poop. Chuck ate like two pounds of walnuts every day.

Thoronak jumped in the station-keeping helicopter and ordered it to take him back through the portal. It did.

***

Wii had Isaac trapped on the other side of the glory hole wall where he was, stalking the dude, uzi out.

“You will die, earthling. And then I will use your family to sew cheap backpacks and trapper-keepers for my own brood.” Wii got an idea. He stared through a glory hole itself, watching Isaac’s shadow change on the other side. “Get ready to suck hot lead!”

He shoved his barrel through the hole and yanked the trigger.

Isaac, who had sucked a lot of things in his time, was ready. So were Brian and Chris. As the gun fired, Isaac pressed tight against the wall right next to the hole. And when he heard it go empty, he sprang into action.

Isaac dropped to his knees and wrapped his incredibly pouty lips around the muzzle. His ginormously strong mouth muscles held the gun in place and Wii was captured.

Brian and Chris ran around the sides of the wall and grabbed the portal remote from Wii’s pocket. Chris ran off to shut the thing down while Brian gloated, pointing at Wii and saying, “Got you now, bitch!”

Wii smirked and asked, “You think I’m captured because ol’ sucky-sucky-long-time here has a firm grip on my empty weapon?”

“Yup.”

“Well then.” Wii reloaded.

Brian’s gloating fell through the bottom like he just ate fried chicken from a trucker stop. Greased and shot right down. “Oh sh—”

Wii pulled the trigger and his gun came right out of the hole. He started to laugh and tried to shoot Brian.

Brian dipped, ducked, dodged, dove and dodged and tackled Wii. “Isaac!” became his war cry. Brian’s fingertips dug into Wii’s scalp, and as soon as he had a good grip on the evil ninja’s flesh, he yanked down. Wii damn near pooped his pants as Brian de-gloved his entire body, skinning him alive.

Brian then took the beast’s own uzi and jabbed it into his eyeball, emptying the magazine.

Wii died there. A lot.

Brian crept around to the other side of the glory hole, hoping Isaac would come be-bopping out, telling Brian this wasn’t the first time he’d blown a loaded gun. Maybe snapping his suspenders, a skip to his step. The usual way he’d twirl out from behind the glory hole. His office. His respite. Where he was king and everybody damn well knew it.

Brian peeked around the wall, and nope. Isaac was shot through the face. A lot.

“NO!” Brian called out, falling to his knees. Grief like a guilty knife, filleting his soul in the night, Brian shed tears for his friend, who sacrificed himself in the end.

Isaac was preceded in death by his grandparents on both sides and his cat, Mr. Meow-Meow. He is survived by his parents Ilene and Bartholomew who reside in Ocean City, Iowa, two brothers, two sisters and one brother who transgendered into a sister, four nieces, one nephew, his 1973 AMC Gremlin hatchback with a hefty mingling of old Trojans wrappers and empty cans of Schlitz in the floorboards and his extensive collection of human hair. He was fourteen years old.

***

Chris went outside with the remote. Right before he pressed the big red button which read CLOSE, Thoronak leapt through the portal on the back of a frickin’ super-awesome Tyrannosaurus Rex. It had a harness on its shoulders with super long, shaft-like cannons sticking out.

“Die, bitches!” Thoronak shouted and he opened fire everywhere. Behind him, a flood of invaders poured forth and filled the hot sky with darkness. Then they filled it with gun blasts.

A huge shell hit Chris in the gut and he pooped out all forty-five days’ worth of blockage. Suddenly realizing he was vulnerable, he ducked. Bullets whizzed over him just like they did when all those parents discovered where he lived and formed a posse. He was so misunderstood.

Brian leapt into the fray, flying high into the air. New ninjas and more helicopters zinged above and Brian did a massive spin kick. Thousands of helicopters fell out of the sky and crashed, but still more came. He kept kicking.

Chuck had run out of anal beads, so he bore down to see what else he could find. The usual stuff came out; a pineapple, his senior yearbook, half of aisle seven over at the fetish store, a dead finger. He sifted through it, pinching his nose the whole time.

While hiding, Chris pressed the CLOSE button. The portal blinked out of existence. Thoronak turned around on the T-Rex and shouted, “Makes no difference! We might not have this world, but I will have your ass!”

Chris smirked and Thoronak considered what he said. “Well, not like that, but you know what I mean.”

“Sure, sure.”

“Die!” Thoronak had the T-Rex open fire. Chris started doing cartwheels, drawing away the cannon fire.

Brian, still spin-kicking in the sky, stifled a burp. It air-bubbled down his gut and exploded out his ass, sending a thick stream of lube all along the ground around the dinosaur. The thing took one step and nearly slipped.

It stood there, wheeling its arms in the air for balance, one leg up in the air. Precarious. It nearly toppled.

Chuck found a studded dildo in the pile and threw it into the spinning blades of the last surviving helicopter. The thing shot off like a nine-inch, textured rocket and drilled the T-Rex right in the roof of its mouth. The plastic boner penetrated its brainpan and blew out the top of its skull. Innards and skull fragments washed over Thoronak as they collapsed.

Brian finished spin-kicking the invasion forces into oblivion and they all tackled Thoronak.

“Hold him here,” Chris said, jumping up. “I have what we’ll need in my van.”

He ran over and got some rope and ballgag. In no time he hogtied Thoronak. They yanked his pants down around his ankles when the soothing tones of Celine Dion filled the air, and Chris looked at his phone. “Dan’s texting.”

Chris typed back yes, the bad guys are gone. Hit SEND.

Brian put his arms around his partners. The sun was rising, spraying them all with its pink light. Behind them, a massive pile of rubble and destruction. Dead orgy dudes and evil ninjas everywhere.

“We did it, huh fellas?” Brian asked.

“We sure did,” Chuck said.

“When the world needed us most, even at its darkest hour, we came through—oh shit! The cops!”

LED cherries were coming up the highway. Tons of them. Raid, straight up. They must have gotten wind of the ass-to-mouth pandemonium going on.

Our heroes fled, and that’s the end. (Author’s note: they left Thoronak hogtied and laying in the middle of the highway. The cops never found him and almost seven hours later a semi-truck ran over him. That’s the end.)

TACO HELL

By David James Keaton

“I think a good gift for the president would be a chocolate revolver.

And since he’s real busy, you’d have to run up to him fast to give it to him.”
- Jack Handy - “Deep Thoughts”

So I’m finally watching this movie. What was it called? Conformity or Obedience or Sucker! or some shit? I can’t remember, but too many people to count told me I had to had to see this flick. So I did, and I guess it’s not too bad, maybe a little far-fetched. If you haven’t heard about it, there was this guy pretending to be a police officer, who prank-calls a McDonald’s and accuses one of the employees of stealing money from someone’s purse so that he can get a manager to strip search and eventually sexually assault some poor underling due to the overwhelming threat of big, bad authority looming on the phone. Or something. Not quite the Milgram experiment, but interesting. Ironically, it’s a little less interesting when I find out on Wikipedia that it’s true, because I immediately start second-guessing every motivation, because people are horrible, right? Then it’s interesting all over again when I realize that I’m the one who caused all this.

But I don’t really know for sure until the movie’s over. During the movie, I just keep thinking, “Ha, I called a fast-food joint to fuck with them once. Glad it didn’t get out of hand!” But I’m into the movie, so it doesn’t really click completely. The flick itself is low-budget artsy stuff, so mostly it consists of lots of dramatic close-ups of hand-acting and lovingly filmed French fries. But when it’s over, and everyone in the movie is wringing their hands and all like, “What have we become!” I do a little more research and find more details of the crime online and see the list of calls to various fast food places during this spree. Then I see the location of the first phone call, “Taco Bell” and think, “Whoops!” See, a couple years back, I made this call that went a little screwy, but it was a righteous cause goddamnit.

I didn’t want to fuck with anyone. All I wanted was a taco. And the last three times I asked my partner in crime (at the time) to pick me up some drive-thru tacos, something happened where I ended up not getting any (tacos, that is). It got to be a running joke, me standing there looking down at empty, no-taco hands because of fights, fires, firefights, or simple confusion over store hours. So the night of the Presidential debates, back at the tail end of 2004 when there was no way that guy was getting elected again, my unofficial farewell party to Brickwood, Ohio, was no exception.

The evening starts out innocent enough. I’m having Kay, Jay, and Dee, the last splinter faction of my old crew, over to watch these debates, maybe some grab-ass and thumb wrestling, definitely some laughs. I figure if we drink a Busch beer every time our Commander In Chief fumbles and fucks up English like it’s his second language (this was back in the dark “W.” days of the presidency), possibly causing an entire generation to speak with mixed metaphors and stuttering sentence fragments, we’ll be on our way to being drunk fast enough not to care who actually wins. Or how his infectious grammar affects us. With fragments, I mean.

An hour passes with me and Jay bored and our fragmenting brains and confusion at all the pre-debate interviews and Sunday evening quarterbacking. We wait and wait and wait for ex-girlfriend Kay and Dee to get back with the tacos, eyes narrowing, desperate for that grease in our bellies to soak up some alcohol and extend our evening. The girls were put on Taco Duty since Dee lived by a Taco Bell, and we hoped they took this mission seriously. We have high hopes is what I’m saying, in spite of how nervous the President was looking. It’s been years since our first dozen undergraduate Taco Bell incidents, so I’m almost ready to think of it as just another place to get food and no one gets hurt. And Taco Hell, for some reason, was confused around this town for being a vaguely healthy alternative because you’re able to get four groups into your hands in the least amount of time. Maybe not as fast as McDougal’s or Burger Queen, but, hey, it’s pretty fast. Or so I’m told. And getting fast-food is always the great equalizer. Watching those dead eyes at that window makes you regret quitting whatever job you just bailed on because, shit, it wasn’t that bad, was it? Look at that sorry motherfucker torn between getting some outside air and having to meet another stranger and his carload of morons. And there is something about that window that always makes it real easy for small arguments to escalate out of control pretty fast.

So when they start running late with the food, I’m already uneasy, so I call them again and ask them to pleeeeeese remember to hook me up with some tacos on their way over, just in case they started tittering in the car and talking smack about us and completely forgot.

There’s no answer. I should have known, because now that I have a second to think about it, in spite of the dozen or so times I’ve walked through their door or rolled up to the drive-thru window smiling, sweaty balls of money rolling around my hand like Captain Queeg, I don’t think I’ve ever actually received a taco from this place. Or anything at all actually. At least three times in a row, something has fucked this up. But drive-thrus have always been a bad idea. Road rage mixed with hunger? Think about that. Honking, impatient drivers, garbled instructions, pictures of the food just out of reach? Why not release clouds of bees into the cars to raise the stakes even further? Or raise actual steaks above people’s heads so they can’t reach them. Or, I know, put the window up a steep hill surrounded by sprinklers? They already do that, you say? Right. It’s the very definition of a recipe for disaster.

And sure enough, another half hour later, in walks two girls empty-handed and visibly shaken from some kinda drive-thru trauma. Their story comes out like this, but a lot louder:

“So we pulled up to the speaker to order the food, and the chick inside was having trouble hearing us. So Dee says, ‘No, not bean burrito, beeeFFF burrito.’ And apparently by exaggerating the letter ‘F’ like this, and by stalling out your truck again – sorry – and then having trouble getting it started again, she sent this bitch into a downward spiral of madness. We pulled up to pay, and she takes the money – Mexican girl, cute purple braids by the way, then fired off all mad, ‘By the way, don’t ever get smart with me again...’”

Time out from her story while I explain the strange hiring practices of this franchise. They always hire young, hot Mexican girls. Is this racist, a gimmick, or just equal-opportunity employment? Who am I to judge. I will admit, they’re fast. So I’m told. Not that I’ve ever gotten the right order from one. Oh, yeah, Kay’s still talking:

“…so I’m like, ‘What did you just say?’ And she’s like, ‘You heard me.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m afraid I didn’t.’ And she just slammed the window and walked over to another employee to rant ’n’ rave about us, all waving her arms around like she’s being attacked by bees...”

“Bees?! I fucking told you!”

“Told me what?”

“Nothing. Just my stomach growling.”

“Can I finish? Okay, so, at this point, it was taking way too long with the food. And Dee decided to ask for the money back because now she’s thinking someone’s going to do something…”

Dee jumps in.

“Yeah, I figured someone was gonna spit in the “beeeFFFF” burrito. Or worse.”

Burrito? Sigh. It sounds delicious, doesn’t it? I’ll never see one in my lifetime. I’m sure glad I didn’t try for that new, certainly unattainable “Choco Taco” dessert item (more like desert item) that I saw advertised earlier today. Oh, my Christ, I’d eat a hundred of those fuckers. Some day. Anyway, Dee’s still talking:

“...so the crazy bitch, Kim—now we can see that her name tag says ‘Kim,’ throws the money at me and snarls, actually fucking snarls, ‘You’re lucky I’m in here or I’d come out there and kick your motherfuckin’ ass.’ So now we’re were getting loud, too, and some other employee came over to calm down Crazy Kim, but she just shoved this guy up into the air, bonking his head off the heat lamp because now she’s got that crisis-situation super strength, and yells out, ‘Don’t tell me to relax, I’m the shift supervisor!’ By this time, everyone was swearing, and Kim was making these moves like she was really going to come outside and attack our car.”

“My car.”

Jay looks up.

“Actually it’s your brother’s truck.”

“Let her finish. Maybe at the end, there’s food.”

“...so Kay starts pulling away, loudly declaring that she’s gonna to call the 1-800 number on the window. You know, the one that asks how smooth the transaction went? Right under the one that says ‘Always hiring?’ Anyway, this nutty twat yells out, ‘Go ahead, I don’t give a shit! They’re not going to fucking fire me!’ And Kay shouts a final, ‘What the hell is your problem?’ And Crazy Kim answered back with ‘Your mother!’ who is a problem to be fair…”

Kay jumps back in.

“Which is, of course, ridiculous, since my mother is at home watching Court TV at this same time every day. But, yeah, that was pretty much it. The debate ended with hard stares right out of those westerns you’re always making us watch. And after two or three stalls in your truck to ruin any dramatic exit, we were off! So, yeah, sorry. No food.”

“Goddamn it.” I sniff.

“Hey, we tried!”

“No, that’s funny. It’s a good story.” I admit.

“You know what I hate?” Kay says. “When you say ‘That’s funny’ instead of just laughing. You sound like an asshole.”

Then in their excitement, they start telling the story again, mostly to just Jay this time because he wasn’t paying attention for the first half. It gets a little better the second time through as they start adding extra flavor, extra hot sauce, raising those steaks and sprinkling in some more important details about the enemy’s appearance. And by three and a half recitals, Kim’s purple braids are not being described as “cute” anymore, more like “clearly styled with peanut butter and hamburgers.” Which makes no sense because it’s a taco place.

But I’m getting all worked up. Partly because, in my head, I’m picturing Kay or Dee stalling that truck over and over and looking stupid, and partly from being on the verge of fainting from malnutrition and lack of taco love. Looking around the room, everyone and everything looks like a giant taco to me now. Even the President. Remember that cartoon with the guy seeing his buddy as a huge steaming chicken on the desert island? Just like that but with a taco. And without the island. And there’s three of them instead of one. And there’s no steam, as most fast food requires reactivation via microwave or it reverts to its natural inert state, industrial plastic pellets or Seamonkey dust. So, forget what I said. They look nothing like that cartoon. Anyway, now I got a dilemma. If it was a guy that was threatening people at some drive-thru, instead of Crazy Kim, I could just go over there, or say I’d go over there, and pull the little bastard out of the window by his head, his crooked but carefully arranged oversized baseball cap falling slow-motion to the pavement. But here we have this girl-on-girl madness. And we’re already 15 minutes into the Presidential throat-clearing that signals the beginning of the debates.

Nevertheless, me and Jay start rubbing our hands in diabolical circles and get working on Plan A. Or, should I say, Plan “Egg.” This involves taking two raw eggs (I know, kinda weak, but that’s all that was in the fridge) and us pelting the bitch when she opens the window to take our money. But I need to think of a way to do this so that I can still get a goddamn taco. But I force myself to stop worrying about my stomach and think about the greater good instead.

I put two eggs in a plastic bag, and we’re getting ready to roll, but then I start to think about collateral damage again. It should be noted that the phrases “greater good” and “collateral damage” are right now being volleyed back and forth between the President and the Green Party candidate on our television screen. That and “compliance” to certain treaties. And something wacky called “World War III.”

But it is a serious issue. We have to consider innocent bystanders. What if Kim is no longer manning the drive-thru after all the excitement she just had? What if we bean some poor waterhead who’s just working there one day a week for extra beer money? So I decide to call them up real quick to do some recon. And when a teenager answers, I ask for whoever is working the drive-thru, claiming “someone forgot my food!” When an irritable female voice gets on the phone sighing before she speaks, I know it’s gotta be Kim.

“I’ve never been so sure of anything in all my life,” the President tells his blood-red party, and I clear my throat and ask all stern:

“Hello. Is this the manager? Did you just have an altercation with two girls about 10 minutes ago?”

“Listen, sir, that’s n-n-n-not what happened, sir...”

Almost instantly, because of the raspy tenor of my voice due to starvation, she starts stammering and going into this alternate reality version of events where she is just a victim who wants nothing more than to happily take money and hand out tacos, love, and smiles forever. I’m confused about something in her tone though, regarding the girls’ play-by-play. But then something starts to dawn on me. All her “sirs,” stuttering, rapid-fire explanations, and defensive over-enunciation? Is she running for office? Wait, no. Whoa. I get it.

This dunce thinks I’m calling from that 1-800 number that they were talking about. Holy balls, she thinks I’m some sort of authority figure! I clear my throat louder, and now I’m suddenly working for Taco Hell, and shit gets kinda strange:

“Well, I heard that you were physically threatening customers and swearing and...”

“That’s n-n-n-not what happened, sir. They were causing trouble, and I was just reacting and...”

“Well, I’m afraid I must be privy to different facts than you are.”

Privy?!

At this point, I’m just trying to imitate every similar conversation I’ve gotten from a boss, but I am, in fact, quoting our President almost word for word as he denies ever saying too much Arctic wildlife “was an eminent threat to global warming.” She almost whispers the million-dollar question in my ear, and I don’t hesitate:

“Who is this?”

“Your District Manager.”

Okay, it feels like a bit of a demotion after the Presidency, but after I say this, I figure the jig is up anyway. I wait for her to say “fuck off” and hang up because she’s gotta know who her DM is, right? Right? Wrong.

“Listen, sir, they were making fun of me at the drive-thru, and I can’t believe that I would get in trouble over this when it’s just my word against hers and...”

“Well, it’s not just your word against hers because (I’m really proud of how fast I pull this next part out of my ass) there was a vehicle behind them and someone from that car also called the 1-800 number to complain about your behavior.”

I should mention at this point that me, her District Manager, is wearing a homemade “I Fucked Your Martyr” T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, twirling two eggs in a baggy, and trying to stifle the three giggling heads of my friends leaning in to listen.

“Hey, they started it!”

Clearly she’s scared now and folding faster than Superman on laundry day.

“So you were threatening and cursing at customers because you thought they were being rude to you? That is simply unacceptable. Why do you think you can just...”

“They started harassing me first, sir! It’s not fair that I should get in trouble for this and...”

“Okay (big authoritative sigh). When is your next day off?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I’m going to need you to come in so that we can sit down and talk about this and figure out what should be done.”

“Oh, no. It is not fair that I should have to come in on my only day off when I already rearranged my schedule once this week and it’s my only day off and it’s just not fair that I should be the one to... ” And blah blah blah. Kay whispers in my other ear:

“Goddamn, this bitch is big on ‘not fair.’”

At this point, I hold out the phone in disbelief. I don’t know what’s funnier, the fact that this idiot thinks I’m her District Manager, or the fact that me, her boss, can’t get her to come in on her day off, even to save her job. On the television, the President holds a hand tight to his elfin, tomato-red earlobe, and a camera zoom reveals an earpiece no one knew he had.

“Are they giving him the questions or the answers?!” Jay really wants to know. Then, suddenly offended, Jay declares this as “fuckin’ cheatin’!” and I motion for him to shush and turn off the TV and pay attention to what’s important. Then I squeeze the phone painfully closer to my own head. After another minute of “not fair” from Crazy Kim, I finally give up and switch tactics:

“When do you work next?”

“Sunday. I open.”

“Okay, don’t worry about opening the store because...”

Time out. This is where some people in management who are reading this may start getting a disapproving “you’ve gone too far” kinda look on their mug. But, hey, I’ve only been a District Manager for seven minutes, so I’m gonna make some mistakes.

“...we’ll take care of that,” I go on. “You just come in later. I’ll meet you at noon so we can sit down and figure out what we’re going to have to do.”

“Fine.”

Wow. That was cake. Apparently, it’s infinitely easier to convince someone to stay home instead of coming in. It’s a lesson we all remember from grade school where kids would rather get suspended for ten days instead of standing in the corner for just one.

I hang up, and we’re all laughing our asses off, hoping she actually comes in late on Sunday and gets canned. We talk about it a lot, drinking and ignoring the end of the debates even after Jay turns the TV back on. I do, however, catch one of the candidates saying something self-righteous about “never judging people by…” What? No idea. Didn’t hear the rest over all the fake applause.

And that’s all I really remember because I spend most of my time fantasizing about being behind one of those podiums next to the actual District Manager of Taco Hell, carefully explaining our party’s platform with purposeful hand gestures and reassuring nods. I would declare, “My fellow Americans, you can never judge people by the color of their purple hair. However, you can judge people by their favorite books, songs, or movies. You can judge people by how fast they yank clothes out from under a sleeping cat. And you can only judge people by how rude they are on the phone or in traffic.” Dramatic pause. “Or, of course, at a drive-thru, the unholy combination of both.”

When I think hard about this though, I am convinced that Crazy Kim flipped out because of the nature of the drive-thru beast. Imagine a phone call where the person you just hung up on suddenly pops their head in the window of your house to get the last word. That would fuck you up, wouldn’t it? And if you’re more likely to be rude to strangers on a phone (like most people), you sure wouldn’t know what the hell to do if their head suddenly popped out of your freezer. Instant confrontation at the drive-thru window is an unexpected, awkward ending to what’s basically a garbled, angry phone call between the hungry and the disgruntled. It’s something that’s not meant to happen, ever. Like time travel. Or a rational debate. Or me ever getting to eat a taco. To be fair, Kim probably didn’t know how to handle this. It’s kind of like when you’re in traffic and you’re yelling at the car next to you for whatever infraction, then, three miles later, you’re both idling at a red light together. Do you look over? You have to look over. A friend of mine used to be prepared for just that kind of situation. If someone was glaring at a red light, he’d slowly pull out the winter mittens, sunglasses, and motorcycle helmet that he kept in his glove box (yeah, it was a big-ass glove box), then he would stare them down at the wheel of his rusted-out ‘92 Fajita. Fiata, Miata, whatever. You know what though? No one ever raced him.

In retrospect, it sucks that our debate party was full of such distractions because, since Gray moved away, it’s the most people I’ve managed to gather around me in months. Although I suspect this has gotten more difficult because of the upcoming elections and my tendency to drop my pants and press my groin up against the TV whenever the Leader of the Free World is talking, which is a lot. I keep trying in vain to make my friends understand that the bigger the crowd means the less likely I am to exclaim, “Hey, look! The President’s suckin’ my dick again!”  Seriously. Where’s the camera? We could make T-shirts and cut the sleeves off! Wait, where’s everybody going?

So, it’s finally Sunday, and I’ve told everyone I know about the taco hijinks, actually kinda getting tired of the story and starting to doubt Kim really won’t figure that shit out in 48 hours. I was thinking that as soon as she mentions anything to her store manager or fellow employees, they would quickly call the District Manager (the real one, not me) and the cat’s out of the bag. So I’m as shocked as you are by the phone call and happy ending to this story.

See, Kay works at Starfucks near the Taco Hell in question, and Sunday afternoon she calls me to say she just told her coworkers all about the incident. Her words:

“...so, at about 11:00, a couple of the second shifters went across the street to get lunch and came back to tell me the good news. Dude. Dude. There was a big sign taped to the door that read, ‘Will not open until 1:00. Sorry for any inconvenience.’ No bullshit, I swear. I got five witnesses who saw the sign.”

On the TV, a news anchor is explaining that, in spite of the mysterious earpiece, polls are saying that the President won the debate over immigration. Scare quotes everywhere.

Epilogue. A week later, Dee actually calls the 1-800 number to complain about those customer service issues, trying to get some free food out of it, and she’s given the phone number of the store manager. This woman then proceeds to tell her that she knows all about ‘the situation’ and that ‘the District Manager is handling it.’”

Of course, this begs the question, is she talking about me here? Or what does “begs the question” really mean? Because I ain’t handling shit. It’s not fair! I would tell the reporters. I’ve got too many new responsibilities that come with this job title. The truck stop that puts too much salt on their fries, kid at the gas station who shorted me on change, that convenience store with the clerk who stares too much. I’m sorry, there’s just too many other stores in my district that need my attention.

Kay still talks about it. One day, she even says all breathless that I should have told Crazy Kim to blow her brains out. No way she would have done that, right?

Right?

70 incidents in 30 states is what they say on Wikipedia. Those weird phone calls. You know why it’s probably fast food joints that this crazy fucker is targeting? Because maybe they were asking for it. A window where you reach out and grab food when you’re driving by? How does that not end in tears every day?

One last thing. Remember those two eggs? As I was packing up the last of my silverware for the move, I noticed them on the windowsill, next to the phone charger, behind my dead plants and leaking squirt gun, still in the bag, fermenting in the sun to (kissing the tips of my finger and thumb) perfection. I’d like to say I used them to make a Mexican-style omelet. I’d like to say that I forced myself to eat it on the day of the election. I’d like to say that me and my girl went outside and placed those eggs at either end of a parking space and laughingly mastered how to drive a stick-shift and parallel park on a bright summer day without anyone losing their temper. I’d like to say that whenever she thought no one was looking, she would replace whatever article of clothing the cat was sleeping on with something equally comfortable so that it didn’t tumble onto its head like Sunday dinner off a tablecloth magic trick gone awry. I’d like to say that something meaningful happened to those two eggs, since the story introduced them and forgot about them completely, just like that gun hanging over the fireplace. I’d like to say that they did, indeed, crack someone on the head who deserved it instead of just getting dropped into the trash without any ceremony or debate. But they didn’t.

So when I’m researching that creepy-ass movie, the flick with the name I can’t remember where those fast-food employees must have wanted to make their own movie so bad that they’d believe anything, I see the dates on that first incident in the police report and know it was me. I run around telling everybody I did this. But no one believes this. “Unrelated,” they say. “Coincidence,” they say. “Why are you so excited to be a mysterious fast-food phone rapist?” they say. Good question. But much like our newly-elected President (a Texan who must have complicated feelings about migrant workers, right?) I have no energy to debate it right now.  It’s the purgatory we chose.

I know what I did. I made a phone call, which is the equivalent of dropping a rock in a puddle and watching the ripples. More like dropping a taco. Then I made a phone call. And maybe they started molesting each other in the freezer or some shit. It was out of my hands after that. Everyone’s just jealous I made a movie and they didn’t.

THE BROW BEATING HEAVY LEATHER REPOSSESSION SHUFFLE

By Chris Leek

Harp looked out through the Explorer’s rain-streaked windshield and waited. Repo work was all about the waiting. He watched a barge plowing up the river’s far channel. Gulls wheeling above the lighters it towed, swooping down to snatch at the mounds of festering garbage. Harp was waiting to snatch something too. He took off his black Stetson and carefully examined it, picking off a couple of pieces of lint.

“Uncle Harp, have you ever had to beat-down on someone when they won’t give you their car?”

“No, well, maybe a couple of times, but only in self-defense, and don’t keep calling me Uncle Harp.”

Lonnie had only just saddled him with Dale and the kid was already grating on him. “Take him along Harp; teach him the business. After all, one day he’ll be running the show and then you’ll be working for him,” he had said. Well, Lonnie could go and fuck himself. Harp wasn’t going to stick around for some peckerwood kid to start calling the plays. This was only a temp job anyway; he was just killing time until something better showed up. So what if he had been telling himself that for the last twelve years?

“You ever have to shoot someone, Uncle Harp?” Dale made a gun out of his thumb and forefinger and pointed it a Harper. “You know, in self-defense.”

Harper ignored him and closed his eyes. It was Dale’s mother, Loretta that insisted Lonnie give the kid a job at Elmore Motors. She thought it was high time Lonnie took more of a hand in raising his only son, although whose son Dale really was had never actually been established.

Saylesberg was the kind of small town that was long on mouth and short on secrets. Everybody knew that Dale wasn’t Lonnie’s kid—everybody except Lonnie. Loretta was a woman who needed a lot of loving, and Dale could have been the result of any one of a dozen different back seat unions. Lonnie was the only candidate that could be conclusively ruled out; the fact that he fired more blanks than a National Guard training camp was also common knowledge. Eighteen years after the deed and Loretta’s fidelity was still a hot topic among the regulars at the Stone Pony. Harp thought that said a lot more about those jerks than it did Loretta.

“Hey, Uncle Harp, you ain’t going to sleep are you?”

“No, not unless you shut the fuck up and then maybe I could take a shot at it.”

A horrible thought flashed through Harp’s mind. What if Dale was his? Back in the day he and Loretta had banged like a screen door in a tornado. That was something else Lonnie was blissfully ignorant of. Harp did the math and wished he hadn’t. The kid was about the right age. Harp wasn’t afraid of death, taxes, or redheaded women, but the idea that he might be this kid’s father scared the shit out of him.

“You okay, Uncle Harp, you look kinda peaky?”

Harper kept his eyes closed and tried to recall the details of an article he read the other day about telekinesis. There had been a grainy photo of a school bus, supposedly taken on the moon, and another only slightly less grainy of some creepy albino dude supposedly taken in Ohio. The piece had claimed that Whitey transported the bus just by using the power of his mind. Harp had his doubts, but it was worth a shot. He concentrated, picturing Dale just sort of fading out like they did on Star Trek, only without the crummy sound effect, and then reappearing inside the bus on the moon. He smiled to himself as he imagined the kid banging on the windows, gasping for oxygen with his eyes all bugged out.

“Hey, Uncle Harp?”

Harper gave up and opened his eyes. The barge had gone, vanished up river in a squall of rain, but Dale was still here; eyeballing him from the passenger seat and scratching his nuts like he had a dose of something. Harp made a mental note to cancel his subscription to World Weekly News.

“For the last time, I ain’t your damn uncle. And quit playing with yourself, I don’t want your hands on my steering wheel after you’ve had them on your junk,” he said putting his hat back on and adjusting its angle in the rearview mirror until he had it just right.

“Sure, I get it.” Dale said watching Harp fix his hat.

“I very much doubt that you get much of anything.”

“That hat of yours, it’s to cover your bald spot, right?” Dale tossed his head back, flicking his mop of unruly curls out of his eyes. “Bet you wish you still had thick hair like me, huh?”

Harp glanced across at Dale. It was the kind of look that you might give a neighbor’s dog that had just taken a shit on your lawn. “Kid, I’ve still got hair like yours, but it’s not growing on my head.”

Harp was still waiting for Dale to work out the insult when an old white Lincoln rolled up in front of the gulp-and-blow diner across the street. It was ’58 Continental, complete with whitewall tires and an acre of red leather upholstery. He checked the tag against his paperwork and then shook out duplicate keys from the envelope stapled to it. Lonnie always sprung for dups; it was faster and less conspicuous than a tow truck and a Slim Jim. A tall woman got out of the Lincoln. Harp put her somewhere close to forty, but she dressed to ignore it. Her hair was a crazy shade of bottle-blonde that bordered on being orange. The salon probably called it something like, fierce ’n’ tangy. She bent to retrieve her purse, her short skirt riding up and inadvertently giving Harp an eyeful. She looked around furtively and then tottered toward the diner on heels better suited to fucking than walking. It seemed like she had enough smarts to realize that the car was liable to get snatched back. It was a pity she wasn’t smart enough to pay the damn finance in the first place, or to change her daily coffee stop.

“This is how it’s done, kid, smooth and quick; no drama, no beat downs and definitely no shooting,” Harp said.

Dale almost looked impressed. “You know, my old man thinks you’re the shit, he reckons you’re the best in this business.”

“Damn straight,” Harp said, smiling in spite of himself. He paused, half way out of the car. “How about your mother, does she ever mention me at all?” he asked, trying to sound casual.

“Sure, sometimes, I guess she thinks you’re the shit too,” Dale said taking a packet of Kools from his shirt pocket and shaking one out.

“Why, what’d she say, exactly?”

“She says you’ve got the biggest dick she’s ever seen.” Dale grinned around his cigarette.

Harp reached back in and plucked the Kool from Dale’s mouth before he could light it. “Run along now kid, straight back to the lot,” he said and slammed the door before Dale could protest.

***

Harper flipped up his collar against the cold wind gusting off the river and crossed to the Lincoln as if he had a divine right to do just that. The car was bigger than his apartment and not something he would have called a classic, but he supposed there was no accounting for taste. He slid the dup key into its lock, jiggled it. When the door popped, he turned giving Dale a look that said, “You either got it or you don’t, kid.”

“Hey you, that’s my car, ass-hat!”

The blonde woman came running out of the diner, arms flailing like one of those inflatable tube things Lonnie had on the car lot, heels clacking on the sidewalk demanding attention. Harp ducked the five-dollar skinny caramel latte she sent in his direction and got in behind the wheel, punching the lock moments before she reached his door and started tugging on the handle.

“What in hell are you playing at mister? Get out of my car,” she said, giving up on the door handle and rapping on the window next to Harp’s ear.

Harp cracked the window, just a touch, making sure the gap was too small for her hand to reach in. “I’m sorry ma’am, you’re four months in arrears; the car now belongs to Apex Finance. Best you take it up with them.” He always addressed them as ma’am or sir. The more bent out of shape they got, the more polite he got. It frustrated the shit out of people.

“That’s some kind of bullshit; my husband makes the payments every damn month, regular.”

“Well, perhaps you better have words with him too, ma’am.”

Harper unfolded the repossession order and pressed it up against window, so she could see he was on the level and that her husband was a cheap prick.

“Hold that damn thing still, cowboy,” she said, squinting at it through the beads of rain on her side of the glass.

Harper watched her eyes scanning the paper. They were an intense blue and seemed to float across her face. The combination with her hair reminded Harper of a lava lamp he once owned. He was going to ask if she wore contacts but he decided against it, unsure what he would have done with the information in any case.

“Why that no-good bastard,” she said when she finished reading. “First that trampy little table dancer with the boney ass and now this. You tell me mister, what the hell do I do?”

“Well, it’s really none of my business, but I’d tell that tassel swinging bitch to back off, or just divorce the loser and have done with it.”

“I was talking about the car. When I need relationship advice from John Wayne, I’ll ask for it. ”

“Sorry ma’am,” Harper said tipping his hat and giving her his best aw-shucks smile.

“Call me Deloris,” she said changing tactics and shooting him one right back that would give a dog a bone. “You do seem like a nice cowboy, though.” She leaned down, putting her melons on display like they were the manager’s weekly special at Save-A-Lot. “Maybe we could come to some sort of arrangement?”

Harp had been many things over the years, but a payback fuck for a boney-assed table dancer was a surprising first for him. Sure, he’d had better offers, but none came to mind right then and once you got past the hair, she really wasn’t a bad looker. He found himself wondering if her dye job was a two-for-one special that included matching collars and cuffs.

“What do you say we go someplace and discuss it?”

Harp toyed with the idea of hitting her in a motel and then just taking the car anyway, maybe while she was in the shower. Not exactly a classy move, but business was business and motel sex couldn’t really be considered legally binding. He was just about to suggest the Motor Lodge on the corner of Fairview when he caught sight of Dale still watching from across the street. The kid studied him intently like he might need to describe Harp to a police sketch artist at some future date. The last thing he needed was Dale running to his old man with stories of how old Uncle Harp did his cougar baiting on company time.

“Well Deloris, truth is I’d like nothing better, but like us cowboys say, a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, and unfortunately ma’am today, that don’t include doing you,” he said and fired up the motor.

Her fuck-me smile warped into a fuck-you glare and she let out a stream of obscenities that impressed Harper with its creativity.

“It’s just a job, Deloris, nothing personal,” he said.

Deloris fished in her purse. “Well this is, asshole,” she said, pulling out a thirty-eight.

Harper wasn’t going to wait around to see if she knew how to use it, he dropped the Lincoln into gear and stomped on the gas, wheel spinning away from the curb in a cloud of blue smoke. Shots thudded into the trunk. Harper fishtailed down to the end of the street and took the corner without slowing, slewing broken glass across the intersection and cutting off a delivery truck. The UPS guy flipped Harp off and leaned on his horn. Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed.

Smooth, no drama, just the way Harp liked it.

***

Harper took the back way to Elmore Autos, driving parallel to the river past the derelict wharfs and boarded up warehouses. The Lincoln’s bullet holes and busted rear window fitted right in with the neighborhood. Lonnie would be pissed about the damage, although not as pissed as Harp would be if Lonnie tried to take the cost of it out of his cut.

He rolled to a stop at a red light on the intersection of River and Fairview. It had stopped raining, but the clouds were still low, mooching around overhead like sulky teenagers. He folded the repo paperwork and slipped it inside his jacket and then fiddled with the radio, trying to tune into something other than the limp-dick country station Deloris had it set to. The atmospherics didn’t help and everything he found was shot through with crackling static.

There was a knock on the passenger window. Harper looked across to see a pair of piggy eyes peering in at him. The eyes were set in a head roughly the size and shape of a basketball.

“Hey, open the door, man.”

Harp looked him up and down. The guy was huge, not pumping-iron-down-at-the-gym huge, more like eating-a-truckload-of-Yodels in front of the TV huge.

And was he wearing a dress?

“Err, I don’t think so buddy,” he said and turned his attention back to the traffic signal, which remained stubbornly red.

Another rap on the window. “I said, open the damn door.”

Harp told himself he wasn’t going to look over, but he did it anyway and found a nickel-plated piece pointing right at his head. Before he had a chance to drop the Lincoln into gear, a second man was in through the busted back window like a flash and Harp felt cold metal pressing against his ear.

“Mornin’, my buddy and me, we could sure use a ride, mister,” he said in a twangy accent Harp couldn’t quite place.

“I’m not heading that way.”

“Dang friend, you don’t even know which way we’s goin’ yet.”

“True, but whichever you want to go, that’s the way I’m not heading.” Harp heard a hammer being cocked only inches from his head. It was a persuasive sound. “Well, when you put it like that, where can I drop you fellas?”

“That’s better. Now, open that there door and let my man Bobby in would ya?”

“Is…is he wearing a dress?”

“It’s not a dress, it’s a Kaftan. Bobby’s got a glandular condition. It don’t make him a bad person.”

“I guess carjacking people don’t make him a bad person either,” Harp said and leaned across to flick the latch.

Bobby opened the door as wide as it would go and began folding himself and his bright yellow Kaftan into the Lincoln. It looked like it might take him a while. Harp looked around at the guy in the back seat. At first all he could see was the top of his head. He lowered his eyes and saw a midget grinning up at him, his crooked teeth framed by a boot-lace moustache. He would have stood no more than four feet tall even if he was wearing Deloris’s heels. That very image flashed through Harp’s mind and he shuddered.

“You boys from out of town?” he asked.

“You could say were from all over, but originally I’m from The Lone Star State,” he said proudly pulling himself up to his full height.

Harp couldn’t help himself. “I thought everything was supposed to be bigger in Texas?”

Short-round frowned at Harp, making the ends of his moustache curl downwards until they nearly touched underneath his chin. “I’ll let that slide just one time; on account of the stressful situation you find yourself in.”

Harp fought a successful battle against the urge to tell him that was mighty big of him.

An out-of-breath Bobby slammed the car door and sat wheezing next to Harp in the passenger seat. Well, most of him was in the passenger seat, what wouldn’t fit spilled over on to Harp’s side.

“You good to go Bobby, my man?”

“I’m good, Clyde.”

“Bobby and Clyde, you guys have got to be shitting me?” Harp said.

“What you mean by that?” Clyde said tapping Harp on the shoulder with his gun.

“Nothing,” Harp said, “nothing at all.”

Harper followed the instructions Clyde gave him, making lefts and rights, driving easy though the mid-morning traffic and trying not to attract attention to the shot-up Lincoln.

“You know, in Abilene you can drive for three days in any direction and you’ll still be in Texas,” Clyde said.

Harp glanced in his rearview mirror. “Yeah, I used to have a piece of shit car like that too.”

***

Clyde told him to make a left onto Abram’s Bridge and Harp rightly guessed that they were headed toward downtown.

“Jesus, what the hell is that stink?” Harp said, almost gaging on the god-awful stench that suddenly kicked the shit out of his nostrils.

“I told you, Bobby’s got a glandular condition,” Clyde said. “He’s very sensitive about it. Ain’t that right Bobby?”

Bobby didn’t say anything; he just smiled at Harp from behind his nickel-plated nine and lifted his cheek to cut another slice of cheese. All Harp could do was wind down his window and try to breathe through his mouth.

“Right there will do just dandy, friend.”

Clyde pointed to a spot on Main Street, opposite the First Bank of Tennessee. Harp flipped his turn signal and swung the car in behind a bread truck.

“Well gentlemen. It’s been… weird and damn smelly, so if you wouldn’t mind just fucking off?”

“Not just yet, friend, we need you to stick around for a spell,” Clyde said. He took a ski mask from his pocket and pulled it down over his face.

Bobby had produced a matching mask from the folds of his dress and was struggling to get it over his bulbous head. It took Harp a full second to comprehend what he was seeing.

“Please tell me you guys ain’t planning on robbing that bank.”

“What, you mean you only just worked it out? He ain’t too sharp, is he Bobby?”

Bobby just grunted; his mask was stuck halfway over his head mashing his nose sideways like a kid pressed up against the window of a candy store. One size definitely didn’t fit all.

“You really think you’ll get away with this?”

“Sure, why not?”

“Well, put it this way, even assuming you manage to get ole Bobby out of there before SWAT shows up and throws you a street party, the cops will pick you up before you’ve made it half a block. I mean Jesus, Clyde, you don’t exactly blend in.”

“Just what do you mean by that, friend?” Clyde aimed at the pistol at him again.

Harp chose his next words carefully. “All I’m saying is you’re a couple of stand-out dudes, but not in a good way, what with you being a little… vertically challenged and Bobby boy here wearing that big-ass yellow dress.”

“It’s a Kaftan,” Bobby said indignantly. “I got me a condition.”

“I don’t care what you call it; it’s damn hard to miss. You could hold a fucking revival meeting inside that thing.”

Clyde pushed the barrel of his gun against Harp’s temple and said. “Cuff him Bobby, and take the car keys.”

Bobby magicked a pair of handcuffs from somewhere and slapped one bracelet on Harp’s wrist, locking the other to the steering wheel.

“Aw c’mon guys, really?” Harp said tugging against the cuffs.

Bobby took the keys out of the ignition and bounced them on his chubby palm, giving Harp a big shit-eating grin.

“Sit tight friend, we won’t be but a minute.” Clyde scooted across the back seat. “Nice hat by the way,” he said as he vanished out the door.

Harp tipped his Stetson with his free hand and wondered just how the hell he’d managed to wind up as the wheelman for a carnival sideshow.

***

Harper watched Bobby and Clyde cross the street. He thought about pulling the phone from his back pocket and calling the cops, and then he thought about what would happen if they showed up with itchy trigger fingers just as those two jokers were getting back in his car. Fuck that. The cops could wait. He needed to get the hell out of here.

He reached under the steering column and worked his fingers behind the casing. Old automobiles like this one were a piece of cake to hot-wire—not like modern vehicles with all their electronic security. Today’s car thief needed a degree from MIT instead of a pair of pliers. Harp pulled a clump of wires free and set about separating them. Having one hand cuffed to the wheel didn’t help, but he soon found the two he was after and then looked around for something to cut them with. He awkwardly reached across and rummaged around in the glove box, pulling out what he assumed was Deloris’s makeup bag. Besides the usual lip gloss and eye shadow, she had an enormous, pink bedroom power tool that almost made him feel inadequate—almost. Harp couldn’t help thinking that right now he should have been holed up in a motel with her, instead of vying for a prime-time slot on America’s Dumbest Criminals.

He found a small metal nail file and, putting the bag on the floor, set to work on the ignition wires. It took him a minute or so to get them cut and stripped.  He was just about to twist the ends together when all hell broke loose across the street.

Clyde was first out of the bank, alarms and angry shouts chasing him down the steps. He was nearly to the car when Bobby appeared and started puffing toward them. He was a vision in yellow and carried a black garbage sack over his shoulder that only required the word SWAG to be printed on it for the image to be complete. The bank guard was only few paces behind him; he yelled at Bobby to stop and fumbled for his piece. Bobby turned on the steps and swung the sack at him, catching the guard on the jaw and knocking him backwards.

Clyde yanked open the rear door of the Lincoln and flung himself onto the seat, screaming at Harp to get moving. Harp turned towards him. “Keys would be good.”

Clyde patted himself down. “I think Bobby’s still got ’em.”

They both looked back across the street. Bobby had made it to the bottom of the steps and was patiently waiting for a gap in the traffic as if he had all the time in the world. Just as he started to cross a gust of wind got under his kaftan and whipped it up around his head. It seemed he wasn’t the kind of man who held with underwear. An old woman screamed and fainted dead away on the sidewalk, airbags filled the inside of a red Toyota as it rear-ended an SUV, and some 3,000 miles away in Westwood Memorial Park, Los Angeles, Marilyn Monroe spun in her grave.

“To hell with this,” Harp said sparking the ignition wires and bringing the Lincoln to life. He pulled out into traffic, forgetting his hand was still cuffed to the wheel and ending up with his arms doubled over and his wrist bent backwards as he made the U-turn.

“Don’t you go forgetting about Bobby now,” Clyde said.

Bobby had got his clothing under control and was lumbered toward the car. The bank guard was up on his knees and started plugging away at Bobby as he made the slowest run for it in the history of armed robbery. His pistol barked twice and the window of the dry cleaners across the street dissolved in a shower of glass. How the hell he missed such a large target was beyond Harp.

Harp pulled the car alongside Bobby, slowing it to a crawl. Clyde reached over and opened the passenger door. Bobby shoved the sack of cash inside, stumbled and then struggled to catch back up in spite of the fact the car was barely moving

“Slow… down, man… I got a—”

“Yeah I know, I know, you got a fat-assed condition.”

Bobby finally got level and piled into the car head first. More shots rang out; Clyde stood up on the back seat, leaned out and answered them with some of his own. Harper was way beyond having enough of this shit, and he pancaked the gas. Clyde yelped in surprise and tumbled out of the Lincoln’s busted rear window. He landed on his gun arm, jarring off a round and shooting himself in foot. Harp considered that a good deal all around and kept his foot to the floor, speeding off down Main Street with Bobby’s ass hanging out of the passenger door and his kaftan billowing in the breeze.

***

“Stop the car, man!”

Bobby clung desperately to the edge of the seat, his bottom half hanging out the car. They were a mile from the bank and back down by the river among the derelict warehouses. By some kind of miracle they hadn’t passed a single cop.

“Give me they key to the cuffs and I’ll think about it,” Harp said.

“C’mon man, there’s a hell of a draft going on!”

Harp jiggled the handcuffs in front of Bobby’s face. “Hand over the key, big boy, or I just keep going.”

“Alright, alright,” Bobby let go with one hand and fished in his Kaftan. “Here,” he said holding the key out to Harp.

Harp took it and began fiddling with the cuff on his wrist, trying to keep one eye on the road as he unlocked it. The bracelet fell open and he shook his hand to get the circulation going again.

“Now, stop the damn car, man!”

“What so you can shoot me? I don’t think so, man.” Harp knew if he stopped, Bobby would be pulling that nickel-plated pistol of his and then things were libel to get really dangerous around here. “I’ll tell you what, how about you jump,” he said.

“Jump? Fuck you, now I am going shoot your ass.” Bobby started searching the vast expanse of yellow fabric for the pocket that held his gun.

Harp reached down under his seat hunting for something he could use to defend himself, hoping for a tire iron or a wrench, any kind of weapon. His hand closed around twelve inches of solid rubber.

“Don’t move,” he said, pulling Deloris’s best friend and pointing it at Bobby.

Bobby’s eyes went wide. “What the hell you gonna do with that!”

In truth, Harp wasn’t entirely sure, but the expression on Bobby’s face gave him an idea.

“Out you go Bobby, or I’m getting busy with big pink here.”

“You wouldn’t!”

Harp shot him a look that said different and flicked the little switch, starting the thing vibrating in his hand.

Bobby let go of the seat completely and made a grab for the dildo with both hands. He caught hold and wrenched it round, trying to free it from Harper’s grip. Harp fought back, and attempted to pry Bobby’s fat fingers off the shaft, but he held on with grim determination. They wrestled for control of the prize, twisting it back and forth, neither man prepared to give an inch, for fear of getting twelve in return.

Harp took his foot of the gas, worked his leg up and planted his boot in Bobby’s face.

“Ride’s over,” he said and pushing him back with his foot.

“I grrrrt mmmee a connnshn,” Bobby replied, the tread of Harp’s boot mangling his words.

“I don’t give a fuck about your damn condition.”

Harp let go of the dildo and kicked hard. Bobby’s nose cracked under his boot and he vanished out the door with the big rubber dick clutched to his chest and tears streaming down his face, like he was accepting an Academy Award. Harp didn’t stick around to see if he was going to make a speech.

Left to its own devices, the Lincoln had wandered off across the street and was headed straight for a row of rusty containers left to rot at the river’s edge. Harp panicked, stomping down on the brake pedal with his wrong foot, missed it and hit the gas. The car lurched forwards, in that split second it didn’t occur to him to lift off and he fought the wheel instead, grinding along the line of containers and shredding the Lincoln’s open passenger door.  By the time Harp had worked out his mistake and found the brake, it was too late. The car was past the containers and careering over the edge of the river bank. The ’58 Lincoln was built for comfort not for speed and definitely not for aerobatics.

It soared like a brick and buried up to its axles in foul-smelling mud at the river’s edge.

***

Harper wasn’t sure how long he’d been unconscious, but it was raining again when he woke up. Once he was sure that everything still worked more or less like it should, he reached into his pocket and retrieved his cellphone. Then he stopped—just who the hell did you call at a time like this anyway? Not the cops that was for sure. He didn’t know if there were laws specifically relating to bouncing fat dudes in dresses from moving vehicles, but he was pretty sure there were some about armed robbery.

In the end he called the car lot. No answer. Lonnie was probably home shooting blanks at Loretta. Harp needed a drink, closely followed by a long vacation while all of this shit blew over, but first of all he needed a ride. He thumbed through the menu on his phone and speed dialed Dale. He let it ring for a long time and was just about to hang up when the line clicked open.

“Hello, who’s this?”

“It’s me kid, Uncle Harp—”

“You’ll have to speak up, I can’t hear you.”

“I said it’s me, Harp. I need you to come and pick—”

“Ahhh, got ya! It’s a recording dumbass. Leave a message after the beep.”

Harp sighed, waited for the beep and told Dale to go fuck himself.

He rubbed his forehead and realized his hat was missing. He found it on the back seat, next to the black garbage sack. Harp looked at the sack for a long time, and when he was done looking he reached in his jacket and pulled out his paperwork. He found the number, punched it in and held the phone up to his ear.

“Hello Deloris, tell me, have you ever been to Las Vegas?”

WOOF
by Eric Beetner

It wasn’t the first time Ryan came home beat all to hell, but it may have been the worst.

When he dragged himself through the door, leaning on the knob for support while he turned the key, the first thing he saw inside his apartment was his dog, Elmer, watching him from the couch. Ryan swore he saw an exasperated, slightly judging look on the dog’s face.

Ryan hit the floor, but his body was numb to the pain of another impact. This time it had been mostly boots. Cowboy boots, to be exact. A right foot mostly.

Debts did have a way of piling up in Ryan’s life, and he’d been through all ten fingers already. Snapped and reset, move on down the digits. Another week missing the debt, another knuckle sent bending the wrong way.

For sure the dog was shaking his head now, giving him a serious, “Again? You fucking idiot,” look.

The pain of this beating dove deep. The muscles hurt, the skin where it was torn and bruised hurt. But this time, something inside hurt. Organs he couldn’t name in places he’d forgotten where they lived. This wasn’t only a shiner and a stitch or two. Things inside were tender and torn, leaking blood and bile into his gut.

“This is a bad one,” he said, barely above a whisper. The effort made him lean his face to the side and vomit on the carpet. When he was done he looked at the dog, who hadn’t gotten off the couch, and swore he saw a disgusted look pass behind his eyes. Ryan slammed his eyes shut against a wave of intense pain.

“Sure, I do that and I get whacked with a newspaper. Tell you what, I’m not licking it up.”

Behind Ryan’s clenched shut eyes, he heard the words clear as day. Great, now his dog was mocking him from inside Ryan’s brain. He opened his eyes again and saw the pool of vomit creeping closer to him, but he was powerless to roll away. The thing he noticed was the blood.

More red than if he’d swallowed a gallon of Kool Aid, the throw-up confirmed his diagnosis. The beating was, indeed, a “bad one.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. You need to get to a hospital.”

Ryan turned his head. Elmer had gotten down off the couch and stood over his owner. His droopy Boxer jowls wobbled as he looked down on Ryan who wondered why his imagination gave the dog a slight southern accent.

“Seriously, dude. This is more fucked up than usual.”

Ryan had been looking right at Elmer that time, and Elmer had talked.

Ryan blinked twice, certain that the hallucination was a symptom of the disintegration of his guts, the internal bleeding he was experiencing.

“You want me to call an ambulance?” Elmer said.

Ryan gurgled.

“Y’know what? Scratch that. I never took that class. I knew a shepherd once who could, but she was – y’know what, never mind. We gotta get you some help. I’ll drive.”

Ryan watched his dog turn and walk to the closet. He didn’t know if death was imminent. He felt the pain sear his insides, and he expected his mind to become foggy, but everything seemed illuminated in a scorching hi res, more awake than ever. But a dog talking . . . ? His dog he’d lived with for three years?

Elmer came back with Ryan’s Red Sox cap in his jaws. He dropped it by Ryan’s face, perilously close to the vomit pool. Elmer looked expectantly.

“Well? Come on,” said the dog.

“What?”

“Let’s get going. You don’t look so good. Worse than when you came in, if that’s possible.”

“My hat?”

“Yeah. Your hat. It’s what you wear when we go out.”

“I don’t need my hat.”

“I don’t get it. You wear it literally every time we go for a walk. I thought you, like, needed it to go outside or something. Next thing you’ll tell me I don’t need my leash.”

Ryan rolled to one side, groaning along the way. Elmer cocked his head twenty-five degrees.

“Wait, are you telling me I can go out without my leash?” His tail began to wag. Another one of those times he wished he had a full one to fully express his pleasure, instead of this docked nub on his ass. Worse than losing his balls in a lot of ways. Every dog he saw on the street had no balls. Most of them still had a tail and they treated it like a cock, doing eyeball measurements and passing silent judgment. Especially the goddamn Labradors. How he hated the Labs.

“Hospital,” Ryan groaned.

“I guess it is a special circumstance.” Elmer paced in two tight circles, then barked. “For real? No leash? You’re not fucking with me, like that tennis ball bullshit you like to pull?”

Ryan rolled the rest of the way onto his stomach. “I don’t know if this is real, or if this is me dying, but if it’s real, just get me to a hospital.”

“Okay, yeah. Shit, let’s do this thing.”

Elmer got the car keys off the coffee table and dropped them, fetch-like, into Ryan’s hand. He stopped for a quick lick of the vomit, shook his head violently and coughed.

“Yeah, that was a mistake. Had to know, though.”

Elmer took hold of Ryan’s pant leg and dragged him out the door.

***

Getting down the front steps was torture on Ryan’s already battered body. His head bounced off each concrete step. When he reached the sidewalk, Ryan got on all fours to crawl the rest of the way, figuring if he let Elmer drag him to the car, he’d die on the way.

“That’s more like it,” Elmer said. “It’s better this way, right? None of that trick pony two-leg bullcrap, am I right?”

Ryan ignored the dog’s chatter. And was he really going to let a dog drive? A sharp spike of pain above his hips pushed the thought from his mind. Kidneys, probably. It wouldn’t be the only thing on a long list of damaged goods inside his gut.

Ryan tried not to be insulted at Elmer’s nubby little tail wagging the whole time.

And the damn dog wouldn’t shut up.

“I mean,” Elmer said, “I’ve seen you fucked up lots of times before. Y’know for a while I thought getting beaten up was your job. But yeah, this one is bad news. You really look like shit. You look like my dinner, know what I’m saying?”

Ryan had no idea how Elmer knew how to start the car, let alone drive, but before he knew it they were speeding down Imperial headed east.

“Oh, God,” Ryan said. “I’m dying here.”

“Stop saying that shit,” Elmer said. “I don’t want to go back to that shelter. That place was bullshit.”

“Why am I such a screw up?”

“You’re not,” Elmer said. “You have a gambling addiction. I’ve been trying to tell you this for months. It’s a serious thing. Worse than ringworm.”

“How is this happening?” Ryan pressed against his ribs, felt a stab of pain and movement in about three of them.

“Elmer,” Ryan said, his eyes on the quickly passing landscape. “Have I been good to you?”

“You’ve been great. Walks every day, food on time and none of that healthy all fish and grain shit. I get the good stuff in the cans. The horse meat and pig anuses.” A thin line of drool ran from Elmer’s jowls to the steering wheel. “You could be a little more generous with how much bed I get, but I can’t complain too much. You almost never kick me out for a girl. I mean, you never have girls over except for that one last year, but that didn’t last long did it?”

Ryan let out a groan.

“I mean, look,” Elmer said. “You’re a colossal fuck up. We know that, right? But if you could just get this one little thing under control, maybe people would stop beating your ass into ground chuck so goddamn often.”

The drool started up again.

“Oh fuck me and call me Pavlov, you mind if we stop for a burger?”

Ryan groaned deeper, his only form of communication left.

“Yeah, sorry,” Elmer said. “Hospital. Right.” Elmer looked over at Ryan whose face was pressed against the glass, eyes closed, fighting to stay alive. “Did you want me to put the window down for you?”

Ryan couldn’t even groan anymore.

“No, that’s probably a bad idea,” Elmer said. “Even though it’s pretty fuckin’ awesome if you’ve ever tried it.”

Three more turns and Elmer steered the car into the small parking lot. He took the shifter in his teeth and put it in park.

Ryan opened his eyes. A sign slowly came into focus, fuzzy behind the fogged up glass from his shallow breaths.

“No,” Ryan said.

“No? No what? What did I do? Oh, shit. Am I a bad dog?”

Ryan read the words on the sign and felt the dark hand of death reach up into his insides and everything seemed to burst all at once. Septic death filled his abdomen, blood flowed freely with nowhere to escape.

Elmer followed Ryan’s eyes to the sign. “Shit. Veterinarian. God damn it. That’s my bad. Habit, y’know?”

Ryan was still.

“Well, what the fuck do you want from me? I’m a dog.”

***

When the vet tech opened the car door at the end of her shift, Elmer turned over his shoulder to look at her. Blood stained his muzzle and a hunk of flesh pushed out the soft skin of his jowls.

The girl backed away quickly, putting a hand over her mouth and stifling a scream.

He would have spoken, but his mouth was full of Ryan’s meat. A little tough, Elmer had to admit. A little gamey. He choked down the hunk in his mouth and said to her, “What the fuck do you want from me? I’m a dog.”

BIOS

Danger_Slater is the world’s most flammable writer! He enjoys fast cars and slow women. Or is that slow cars and fast women? Or maybe it’s low cars and fat women? Whatever the case, he writes books and short stories and shit and you love all of them! Purchase his books on Amazon (seriously, he needs the money) or follow him on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads and get links to all things dangerous at www.dangerslater.blogspot.com

Jason Armstrong lives in Nebraska with his son and doesn’t understand why author bios are written in third person.

Chris Rhatigan is the editor of All Due Respect, all-due-respect.blogspot.com. He also edited the anthology Pulp Ink, which was nominated for a Spinetingler Award. He lives in India.

Andrew Hilbert lives in Austin, TX. He is a co-founder of the Slagdrop (Slagdrop.com). You can keep updated with his goings on at hilbertheckler.blogspot.com.

David James Keaton’s work has appeared in over 50 publications, including Grift, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Noir at the Bar. His contribution to Plots With Guns #10 was named a Notable Story of 2010 by storySouth’s Million Writer’s Award, and he won a Spinetingler Award for the Best Short Story on the Web in 2012. He received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and is also the Editor-in-Chief of Flywheel Magazine. His first collection FISH BITES COP: Stories to Bash Authorities was released in May from Comet Press. He accidentally shut down a Taco Bell with a prank call in 2004 during the Presidential debates but has no regrets.

Chris Leek is an editor at the western fiction magazine, The Big Adios, and part of the team behind the genre fiction imprint, Zelmer Pulp. He also writes for the crime fiction website, Out Of The Gutter. His novella Nevada Thunder is forthcoming from Snubnose Press. You can find out more at his blog: www.nevadaroadkill.blogspot.co.uk

Eric Beetner is the author of The Devil Doesn’t Want Me, Dig Two Graves, Stripper Pole At The End Of The World, the story collection, A Bouquet Of Bullets, and the upcoming White Hot Pistol. He is co-author (with JB Kohl) of the novels One Too Many Blows To The Head and Borrowed Trouble. He has also written two novellas in the popular Fightcard series, Split Decision and A Mouth Full Of Blood. His award-winning stories have appeared in over a dozen anthologies and he was voted 2012 Most Criminally Underrated Author by the Stalker Awards. For more visit ericbeetner.blogspot.com