Volume II - Ghoulish Delights

EXPLORE VOLUME II OF THE SUNDAY SCARIES

Volume I • Volume III

1. Interwar

At eleven the servants brought out the lemonade and cakes, and at twelve they brought the tea. Then she waved to the men on the tennis court and they paused their game and joined her. The lawn stretched green and bright all the way from the manor walls to the hedgerows. The children were rounded up from somewhere and seated. They were all here, the nieces and nephews, the daughters-in-law, the earnest sons-in-law. The day was warm, but a pleasant breeze necessitated her shawl. The garden filled with the scent of peonies. The sandwiches were passed around. The tea was poured.
          Young Cecilia’s daughter would not sit still. Madam cast a sardonic look at the mother, and order was restored. William and Francis were bickering again, but a few seconds of silence on her part was enough to quiet them. She smiled and we all laughed. In the distance, the farmer, his horse and plough. A bee on the lid of the sugar bowl.
          Everyone leaned in their chairs, enjoying the sunshine. A cigar was smoked. The young men’s white shirts were damp. The ladies sat cool within their hats. The young ones grew restless and Madam signaled that it was fine to rise from the table. The servants, blue-vested and efficient, cleared the plates as the children ducked between chair legs and giggled and shrieked, not unpleasantly. She gestured them away, to ramble and play in more open spaces. The adults, over crumbs, discussed events.
          What joy, this day!
          The afternoon lasted. Croquet. Blind man’s bluff. The few clouds scudded. Newspapers, and the things of the world. Some gossip… really, my dears!
          The afternoon declined. Hunting arranged for next week. Some took their leave, spoilsports. But enough remained. The lamps on the balcony were lit. Dinner, dessert, digestifs and coffee. The men grew pompous, the women bored and indulgent. Now they are retiring to their rooms, now a final few are driving home.
          Madam sits at her window and in the house her guests rest well. The night is fine, so fine!
          In the morning there will be eggs, and kedgeree, and hot bacon and warm bread, and juices and jams and more coffee, and the morning papers.
💀

2. Würmer der Erde

After visiting his wife, he squirms back down the tunnel. The broken stones barely bother him any more. They abrade and poke the stuff that used to be his flesh, but what little damage is done is soon undone by the malevolent force keeping him alive. The mud he stirs up by his passage still smells of dynamite. In the central corridor the ceiling is shattered, gaping and drooping, held up only by the thick blobby concrete stalagmites that have dripped from the holes in the ceiling to the floor. He swims three meters down a flooded passage before surfacing in the wine cellar, whose massive oaken racks have partly shielded the room from full collapse. He stretches his body as thin as he can and twists himself into the hole in the wall.
          He doesn’t know how long he’s been digging, but he’s made considerable progress, despite the occasional cave-in, some of which have kept him trapped nearly motionless for days. At the beginning it seemed just a matter of patience: Dig! dig! Upward, ever upward! He still remembers the despair he felt when he first scraped through to the ugly white masses of concrete that must blanket the ruins. If the concrete extends to the surface it is ten or fifteen meters thick at least. He could chip away at that until doomsday and he would still never see the sun again. Since then his direction has been downward! ever downward and away, like a dwarf digging for gold.
          He digs until most of his fingers have broken off, and now must rest. He returns to the wine cellar. He does not drink or eat. He waits, not patiently.
          After some days, a low growl echoes through the ruins. His head perks: he whistles. Something approaches on clicking padding feet, and peeks warily into the cellar.
          The dog’s front paws are worn down: her forelegs terminate in two cracked white spears of bone, excellent for digging. He doesn’t remember the last time he saw the dog; he had commanded her to dig in other areas of the ruins and not to return until she had found a way out.
          She steps partway through the door, partly eager, partly shy.
          Impatiently he gestures: Komm, Blondi, komm!
          She approaches, lowers her broken jaws and drops the gift in his lap: a human hand, small, probably a youngster’s, bitten from the arm, and fresh. It reeks of clotted blood, some of it still wet.
          The emotion he is experiencing is joy, but he no longer has words to identify it. He pulls the dog closer.
          Braves Mädchen, he tells her, stroking the bone ridges of her spine. Braves, braves Mädchen.
💀

3. Cousins’ Night

A blast! We have to do this more often.
          The family, big, and kind of loosely defined, gets together every few years. It’s aunt Shirley’s deal mostly, she rents a gazebo in a park and sends around the emails. We show up, and sometimes it’s a little awkward: Is that…? Who I haven’t seen since…? Well, we can’t really remember. But you know, we’ve done this for a few years now, and Lauren, I don’t really remember how we’re related, but you’re fun, and you get us into the group games of tug-of-war and your husband runs the grill, and you chase the kids through the sprinklers and they laugh and you grab one and lift them up and they squeal. Your energy! We feel grateful that you’re there, there’s a little warm thing in our chest that tells us family is important, we should do this more often. We can’t expect everyone to meet every year of course, what with people getting older and stuff with families and all. Then someone makes a suggestion, but we have to do this more often, and voila!: Cousins’ Night!
          We arrange it. It’s not exclusive, all the family is invited, but we know it’s mostly our generation who will show up. On Cousins’ Night we spike the punch. Here’s cousin Carla from Florida: she flies in now for our summer gathering. We make a special effort to be warm to her, because most of us live closer and see each other more often. Such a tan she has, such self-assurance and we all feel a bit provincial. Her husband doesn’t come with, I don’t think any of us have met him in person. But cousin Carla is so fun, and she and Lauren are thick as thieves. They grew up together, and Cousin’s Night is like a sleepover to them, like when they were girls. They laugh! The jokes they share! They take such an interest in Debbie’s baby, so cute, so exotic. They want to know everything about him, and it has to be said that Debbie is being kind of a bitch about it all, and won’t answer questions about the dad (no, I’ve never met him either). They cajole, but Debbie and her baby leave early, the party poopers.
          A year later, the next Cousins’ Night. The weather is amazing. There are more of us than ever. Cousin Carla asks about Debbie and the baby. Debbie has a second baby! We’re all astonished. The same father? Carla inquires in gossipy tones. Well…, we say. Giggles and looks.
          The next year, aunt Shirley doesn’t attend. What a shame, we all agree, but you know she gets this way. What’s cousin Debbie up to these days, and her little babies?—baybehs, cousin Carla pronounces it, it’s her running joke, from a TV show. No one can really answer her. Debbie kind of dropped out of sight, we agree. Cousin Lauren seems a little disapproving, but she changes the subject, and asks about Carla’s husband, whom none of us have ever met, who works doing something for the government.
💀

4. The Regular

I see her everywhere I go. She’s about sixty, maybe even a well-preserved seventy. Thin, not frail, she seems active and alert. Normal clothes, kind of… middle-class, aging hippie vibe? That’s not quite right. Professional nonprofit volunteer? Now I’m stereotyping. No, she doesn’t always wear the same things. Usually some dangly sort of earrings. But she has a lot of those scarves, those infinity scarves, silvery, with little tassels of yarn sort of spreading out everywhere from it.
          She’s a regular at my coffee shop. She drinks some kind of flowery tea. Then next time I saw her at the movie theater, sitting by herself in the back row. I went to see an improv show the next week and she was there too. It was crowded, people were crammed together, I couldn’t tell if she was with anyone. She was drinking some bottled water. By that time I assumed she lived in the neighborhood.
          But then I flew to Miami to see my daughter and her husband and the new baby. They’re doing great, yeah. Deanna, they call her Deedee, just three months. They had all these photos on the wall, their wedding pictures and stuff, and I’m looking at one from the wedding reception, and there she is, this lady! In Miami!
          Who is that?, I ask Claire. She didn’t know, John didn’t know. Somebody’s plus-one.
          I went to pick up dinner that night and on the way back she drove past me in a Prius. She was in the passenger seat, I didn’t see the driver. I swear this is true.
          On the way back they fucked up my connection and I have to overnight in Denver. I get to the hotel, get the key, get into the elevator and there she is, already in there. Where was she coming from? The only floor below us was the basement. She had a worn old brown rolly bag and wore a faded jean jacket. She gave me a nod and got off on my floor. I saw her go into the room next to mine. I stayed in the elevator, rode it back down and checked out. I spent the night in the airport and didn’t see her again until yesterday, at the coffee shop.
          I got up my nerve and sat down across from her. She seemed surprised and then I realized it wasn’t the same lady. This was someone I’d worked with about fifteen years ago, I hadn’t thought about her since. Yeah, we caught up for a few minutes, it was cool. But the other lady, the, the ubiquitous one, she’s the receptionist at my doctor’s office, she’s my insurance agent’s assistant, she bagged my groceries at Lund’s yesterday, she brought me my loaded baked potatoes at TGI Friday’s, and when I look at old pictures or movies I see that she’s my ex-wife’s aunt, that she was in the audience at Woodstock and in the crowd when Reagan got shot (no, she was old back then too), and when I look at my fourth grade photos, which mom and I went to Sears to have taken, I’ve started to remember the photographer’s face and yes, it was her, and she said, Smile, baby, and I said, I don’t wanna, and so far to my knowledge those were the only words that have ever passed between us.
💀

5. Ablution

The problem is, I have gout. I know that makes me sound like Henry the Eighth or something, but it’s no joke, when it flares up it can be really awful, I can’t even have a bedsheet on my big toe when I sleep because if it slips around, even a little bit, it’s super painful. But this time it wasn’t so bad, I could even walk on it kind of, which isn’t always the case. I mean, it still hurt a lot, I was limping, and that was really the problem, because when you hobble around like that for a few days, the rest of your legs go a little funny. You’re using muscles you don’t usually use, so your balance is off, your legs get shaky. And then the other thing is, I always take showers, but my wife, she likes to take a bath sometimes, and when she does she has all these different types of oils and creams and unguents and gels and I don’t even know what all. Usually after her bath she’ll use this little scrubber thing we have, to quick go over the tub and wash all that stuff away. But this time she must have forgot, because I get in the shower and right away I can tell it’s pretty slippery. But I figure, I’ll just be extra-careful and not take too long in there. Big mistake! Because after I’m almost done and I’m shampooing my hair, I turn around to rinse it off and the next thing you know I slip and I grab the tension rod on my way down, but the only thing that does is bring the shower curtain down with me, and I get wrapped up in that and I bang my head on the toilet seat and end up on the floor. And that might have been okay, except that the end of the tension rod knocked this hanging shelf thing we just put up in the bathroom, with the plants on it, and that came down too and hit me I guess on the back of the neck and killed me. And that’s it. It was really just a crazy series of flukes.
          Death was sympathetic. That’s some bad luck, he said. But you shouldn’t be embarrassed. You’d be surprised how many people.
          I know. They say most accidents happen at home.
          That’s not my experience, said Death. But then I just see a certain type of accident.
          You probably don’t see it when people stub their toe or something.
          Exactly. That’s exactly it.
          So what happens next?, asked Bob.
          Up to you, really, said Death. I don’t have anywhere to be.
          Huh, me neither. Well, let me think about it.
          Your wife will be home soon, right?
          Ooh yeah, poor Angie. I don’t think I want to be around when that happens. We should go. Is that cowardly of me? Angie always says I’m an avoider.
          Everyone’s different, said Death, who had discovered over the eons that patience and cliché worked best. I’m here for whatever you decide.
          It does seem like I’m being kind of an avoider, said Bob. And we did just get all this stuff done around the place. I barely got to enjoy it. Can we, you know, put a pin in all that for a while and see how it goes?
          Not a problem, said Death. I’ll just swing back in a little bit and see where you’re at.
          Thanks, man, said Bob. That means a lot to me.
          Death made his brusque farewells. Bob sat and waited for Angie.
💀

6. Bold Lamkin

I can take your coat, sir. If you’ll remove your boots, Carlo will clean them. Some house slippers for you. And if you’ll follow me.
          I think you’ll find the weather clement for your stay, although we shall be lighting fires in the evening. Sir John will be occupied on business until seven, but will join you in the dining room at that time. Madam is unhappily indisposed, but perhaps nurse will introduce you to the little one. Yes, very young indeed he is. If you require anything in the meanwhile, please dial zero and I will be happy to provide.
          Six years, sir. Before that I was in the employ of Madam’s father, the late Lord Weir.
          Your room, sir. I believe you will find it well-aired. Oh yes? Back in the late master’s day? You will see it is little changed. This counterpane has been in the family… yes, Lord Weir’s family, since the time of Queen Anne. Mended? Yes, sir, no doubt mended more than once, but still very fine, as you can see. Yes, of course, that’s true, there has been less entertaining than in earlier days.
          The wardrobe should be sufficient to hold your luggage. Of course, sir, if you wish. It is a gentleman’s prerogative to unpack his own clothes.
          Now if you’ll… Simon, sir. If you need anything at all, pick up the telephone and ask for me by name.
          I’m afraid I don’t recall, sir. Before my time? Perhaps not. I was in Lord Weir’s employ for twenty-seven years and no doubt I was here when you.
          Ah.
          Yes, you would have been quite young then. Lord Weir did have acquaintances from many walks of life. I’m afraid I don’t recall the lady particularly, sir. As you say, the late master had much business before many people when he sadly passed away.
          As you say. I use the phrase only as a matter of delicacy and convention, sir. No, it was no conventional passing. I regret if I have implied otherwise. All concerned were much saddened, and the madman who was convicted was very justly.
          Of course, sir. I was his loyal.
          Yes, sir, entirely loyal, as I now am to Sir John, who will be happy to receive you at.
          Yes, as I’ve said. At seven o’clock. A matter of business? I was led to believe it was a more personal. Yes, of course, both things can be true. No, I’m afraid I know nothing of the provisions of the.
          Most generous, sir, but entirely unnecessary. But as you like. No, there will be no other guests in attendance tonight, except as I’ve said, perhaps the baby. You are the first, the others will not arrive until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. Sir John prefers to breakfast alone, so I will arrange.
          As you wish, sir. If you change your mind you only need call.
          Are you sure I cannot help you with? Of course, of course. The plumbing has been entirely overhauled, I’m sure you will find it satisfactory.
          A great pleasure to meet you too, sir! Yes, at seven. No, Sir John prefers the staff to retire after we serve the dinner, and to clean up in the morning. In that way he can be assured of complete privacy for his guests and himself. Yes sir, entirely to yourselves.
💀

7. The Film Festival

In this context it’s hard to categorize any of the films we saw as minor. But naturally, even existentially, there were standouts. In the interest of space I pass over the many short features, cartoons and newsreels, but the reader is encouraged to seek out the newly-arrived Keatons and Jack Coles. A revelation, really.
          On Monday we attended a double feature of Kubrick’s A.I. and Gance’s Saint Helena. (A long day!)
          Tuesday was Jacques Tati’s Confusion (ugh! what was he thinking?), the Resnais/Lee Spider-Man (how can anyone with what criteria evaluate this?), and, after the early dinner break, the premiere of the Mankiewicz/Durrell Cleopatra. The applause for this last was enthusiastic, although my colleague from the Irish press thought it smacked a little of exhaustion. I pass no comment, etc.
          Wednesday: The Magnificent Ambersons. The Harry/Fripp Alphaville. Burn Coffy Burn. (What a woman! Someone to make me rethink my priorities, I see that I have scribbled in my notes. Whatever could that mean? I ask my past self, my past self who is safely back there in the morning of today and no longer compelled to explain himself or to be held responsible in any way. What a woman! he repeats. But what priorities? I ask and receive no answer.) I masturbate. Wednesday evening: Nick Cave’s Gladiator 2 and David Lynch’s Revenge of the Jedi (no notes).
          Thursday: Pasolini. I leave early and get drunk in the pub. Over the course of the day it seems like everyone else has the same idea. More and more crowded. Expense accounts! We all get drunk. We all get laid. Later, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I woke up at an awful hour, alone and bilious and sticky, and when I turned on the hotel television all I could find were queasy Italian sex-line ads and a dubbed version of Godzilla vs. Gamera. I drank water and watched the sun rise overbright.
          Friday: Keach’s Outer Dark. Welles’ Quixote. Olivier’s Cold War Pericles. A trailer for the Jerry Cornelius adaptation. Everyone looks forward to the afterparty. Hugs. The organizers bring out the special guests. Here is Mabel Normand, here is Natalie Wood, here is River Phoenix. The audience erupts for father and son Lee. An announcement: Next year’s festival will feature Jodorowsky’s Dune. We, the audience, groan good-naturedly.
          Last night I fucked a person from a film that doesn’t even exist, and I thought about somebody else.
          Six rows ahead of me, closer to the stars, there she is, my half-night stand. After tonight she will be gone. After tonight she will never have been. She is staring adoringly at Eric Bloom, star of Stormbringer, as he receives his award.
          She is invited onstage. She whoo-hoos! as she is introduced. She shakes it. She doesn’t look in my direction. They ask her softball questions. They’re sure that she, a veteran of one or two or three bullshit movies that no one outside this room has ever seen, will be the next big thing, the crossover star: the Dorothy Stratten, the Aaliyah.
          From the stage she bats her beautiful stony ridiculous eyes at us and my heart resigns itself, as the waveform collapses.
🎥

8. Adding to the Pages

He was born eight pounds two ounces. The labor had been a breeze, even Stephanie said so. By the time they’d reached the hospital Jacob was practically on his way out already. The picture James took in the hospital shows them all together on the bed, tired and happy, Jacob wrapped up in the blanket, barely visible.
          For Jacob’s first birthday James made a point of getting a better shot of his boy’s face. He was standing between his mother’s knees, Steph holding his arms above his head, steadying him. The second birthday: Jacob with other tiny cousins at his birthday party. The third: Jacob sleeping, as Stephanie said, angelic. The fourth: Jacob pretending to be Batman. Of course there were other photos, many others, but by this time there was a ritual to it, and a special book that all the birthday photos went in. James began to get artistic: He planned outfits and poses, booked trips to Disneyworld and such places to obtain the perfect birthday backdrop.
          On Jacob’s fourteenth birthday they had a terrible fight. Jacob left to spend the night with Stephanie’s mother. But still, at five minutes to midnight, Jacob sent a selfie to James’ phone. James printed it out and into the book it went.
          Two years later, the divorce. Jacob went with Stephanie, it was best for everybody. James spent as much time with his son as he could, always on his birthday when he could manage it. (Steph didn’t object: she knew it was a thing they shared.) And when that couldn’t happen, the selfies still came: Jacob with friends, with his mom touring colleges, suspiciously stoned-seeming on a quad.
          Jacob joined the Marines. His mother blew her top. James objected too: their mutual opinion seemed like it might actually drive them together again for a while, but the objection cooled and after three years of photos from Afghanistan and one from Germany, they were vastly relieved and still comfortably apart.
          One birthday photo the next year: the three of them together! The following year: Jacob and his fiancee. Fiancee! yelled Stephanie, over the phone. I know! he replied. He printed the photo out on the home printer, adding a heart-shaped border he found on Shutterstock.
          Jacob and Ashley died that night, when Jacob crossed the highway line after one too many celebratory shots. Stephanie and James both fell apart, separately. They hardly spoke again.
          One year later, a terrible prank: A message from Jacob’s old number, which James had stopped paying for ten months ago. No text, just a black photo with some sort of pale smears. James replied with an angry who is this, but there was no response for a year, when another photo arrived: nearly the same, but with the smears in different places. He didn’t delete it, and just as he had done the year before, he printed it out and added it to the book, which in the years to come would contain more black pages than any other sort.
💀

9. Mopping-up

We shot the last two in the head and left their bodies where they fell. There was nothing we could do for the kid: she was dead when we got there, and that was probably for the best anyway. Simon had taken the jerry can of gas from the SUV and was in a hurry to burn the place, but I told him to slow down. We needed to look around some more, make sure we got them all, see what they were up to.
          Who gives a shit, he said. But Sheila agreed with me.
          As it turned out, we had overlooked something. Under the altar in the front room we heard a sort of squeaking. We pulled off the bloody linen and saw a manhole cover in the floor. We pried it off just enough to pour the gas in and toss in a road flare. Whatever was down there, it screamed and, I suppose, died like anything else would’ve.
          Meanwhile Sheila was looking through their book. When she was finished, it went down the manhole too. Then we let Simon torch all the rest of it.
          On the ride back to the city, Sheila was quiet. Something was eating at her but I couldn’t get it out of her that night. She didn’t want to say anything around Simon. Afraid of what he might do. Afraid of what he might do!
          We’d stopped the priests just in time, she told me at breakfast the next morning. Simon had already left for home, wherever home was for him. Sheila’s eyes were sunken and red; she ate eggs and toast like a sort of automatic machine that knows it needs fuel to live. A few minutes more and It would have arrived, she said.
          It?
          The thing is, she went on, they were calling It from ahead of us in time.
          From the future?
          Not exactly. From ahead of us in time, she repeated, as if that made it any clearer. The ritual was like a beacon, and the longer it went on the closer It came to the present day. I stayed up most of the night running the numbers. They almost got it here, she said, and by here I mean now. But we interrupted them before it got all the way.
          I didn’t see what the problem was, then.
          But they got It most of the way here, she explained. It isn’t going to just turn around and go back home.
          So where is It? I asked.
          2131, she said. Give or take a year.
          I set my coffee down. What does that mean?
          It means there isn’t any 2132, she said. Give or take a year. A hundred and seven years more. Then some period of unimaginable horror, then nothing else, forever.
          I almost shot her right then, but it wouldn’t have done any good. There isn’t any way to unhear.
          At least I won’t have to kill my kids. I can let them grow up and they’ll live and die and never have to understand. But their kids, my grandkids or great-grandkids if I should be so blessed, they might live long enough to die screaming when It arrives. Great-great-grandkids, not a chance. Everybody else’s great-great-grandkids, not a chance.
          Anything would be better than being here when It comes. I could imagine, sometimes I do imagine, when I can’t sleep, I imagine I could start going around and killing everyone I possibly can, for as long as I possibly can, just so they won’t live long enough to populate the world with more souls for It to eat. Other times I feel like going to the kitchen and finding something long and sharp to stick behind my eyeball into my brain, just on the off-chance I hit the right spot and forget it all.
💀

10. Womandrake

She shit into the bucket, took a teaspoonful out to add to the blender and flushed the rest of it. She spat in the blender and added the syringeful of blood, the Oxo cupworth of piss, the tear-soaked Kleenex and the rust-colored shreds of tampon. She clipped her fingernails over the mess and then used the vegetable peeler to scrape some hair and skin from her forearm.
          She measured out the wholemeal, added it along with the water, yeast, salt, milk, butter, herbs, roots and sugar. Eggs? No eggs this time. A dash of vinegar though, and puree.
          She poured the slurry of brown filth into the bread pan, sprinkled it with olive oil and covered it with a damp cloth. She cleaned the blender and bucket and took a shower and by the time she was clean and relaxed the bread was about half-risen. Removing the cloth, she poured herself a glass of wine and spread a light coating of Merlot onto the bread with a basting brush. She lit a cigarette, tapping the ash gently over the pan, then sat in her armchair and listened to Rumors twice through. By now it was nearly ready.
          From the small toolbox she kept in the kitchen drawer she took a pair of pliers. Running a little short on teeth these days, she resigned herself to a molar. Harder to extract than some of the others, and more painful, but when she was done it was mostly intact. She wiped the tears and sweat from her face with the cloth, spat out the blood and mucus into the pan—for luck—and, hands shaking with adrenaline, planted the cracked molar in the center of the bread.
          Thirty-five minutes later, when the oven dinged, she took out the bread and set it on the kitchen windowsill to cool. She sat again, lost in thought, a little drunk now. Outside the living room window (propped open in the summer twilight heat), beyond and below her apartment, the life of the city continued, endless streams of people flowing up and down the streets, each one living their unmolested unreflective unassaulted solitary lives.
          The homuncula climbed its way down from the sill and hobbled over to her on its warm encrusted feet. It turned its face (identical to her face and to the face of all its sisters) up to her and tried to hug her ankle. She kicked it away and whistled for the others. They emerged from their cracks and crevices and hidey-holes, took their new comrade in hand and began to teach it things.
💀

11. The Transfer Student

His father had warned him that the other children might not accept him at first. But just be friendly, he told Max. You’re a good kid. Just be patient and you’ll be okay. Now kiss Pitsu-kitty, say your prayers and get a good night’s sleep.
          Dad wasn’t happy about it either, though. The government had made him send Max to the public school. Dad said that public schools were godless, and that he should shut his ears to anything he knew to be blasphemous. They would continue their religious education on weekends and in the evenings.
          He knelt at the hearth and prayed to Roon and Dorozhand, because he was going to a new place and did not understand the reason for it. He offered a plea to Yoharneth-Lahai who might that night send him calming dreams, and to his favorite Limpang-Tung, whom he loved more than any of other small gods, and even offered one word for Mung, whom he feared beyond all others. He offered no prayer to MĀNA-YOOD-SUSHĀĪ, for to do so would be improper.
          But the next day was cruel. The teachers looked at him with malice, and what they taught was wrong. The other children also looked at him, the friendless, and drew their plans.
          After his lunch of grapes and simple grains, which he ate alone, he lingered in the shadow of an elm on the edge of the playground. The Dawnchild’s yellow ball scorched the hot asphalt and he was approached.
          Greetings, son of Enion, said one of the boys.
          Max nodded.
          Orc-lover, said the second of the three, firm resolved on hate eternal.
          Max stayed silent.
          The third spat on him: Wrath for Dark Urthona!
          Max swung at the boy. In seconds he was on the ground, and the boys were kicking him. He yelled until a teacher came and reluctantly separated them. By Urizen! she swore, almost laughing. The boys were sent away for some mild punishment. Max was sent to the nurse’s office, where among the colored charts and images of broken divine bodies he wept and dwelt upon the vengeance of men and, to the disgust of the nurse (for every human heart has gates of brass and bars of adamant), he spoke a small prayer to Jabim, the lord of broken things.
💀

12. The Baron, His Confession

My lords, you require me to be frank, I cannot help it if you mislike my answers. The fact remains that I was born and raised in blackness, but if blackness had been all my lot I would not find myself among you here today. I do not say, before you, because as King’s Counselor and Marshall of France I do not consider myself set below you majestic and terrible lords, nor your ecclesiastical colleagues, though you may believe me to be so.
          You deplore my misdeeds and implore my confession but to this I raise an objection. I admit to no misdeed whatever of the sort you are describing, although I do not suggest the complete innocence of my heart. I once threatened to sew up my mother-in-law in a sack and drown her, which I now regret. Such deeds as you describe may be true in themselves, a fact or two out or order perhaps, but nothing worth disputing, but deeds they were only and not evil ones, as natural as the buds of flowers opening to the dawn.
          I wish to make you understand. At the Château de Chinon, I beheld Her for the first time, and for one such as I, it seemed as if I had lived my life (I was then twenty-three or twenty-four years old) under the gloomiest of thunderclouds and for the first time now witnessed a shaft of golden light piercing them, illuminating only the smallest patch of ground on which she stood. It was only later, when my eyes cleared, that I understood it better: not an accident from Heaven, I mean to say, but Heaven in all its glory emitting from the body of a girl. Do you know what I mean when I say Diana? From that day it was my one desire to be by her side, and together we raised the siege of Orléans, and at the siege of Paris She asked for me by name. Later we attempted to free Her from Rouen, to no avail, and we know what the English did next, God be good.
          So yes, I called upon my friend Barron, a joy of my childhood, and wise, and he introduced me to certain others, and they suggested the action of recapture. The skills from war I already commanded: to cut a body, even to disassemble it and draw from it, to hang a body, to break a neck, to twist flesh in such a way as to see a fleck of light emerge from the mouth, like a firefly such as they have in Spain. To breathe in the divine light, with our lungs and eyes and privy parts. Some hundreds? I doubt there were that many, but I will not dispute. We are old, my lords, though I am barely above thirty. We were old before our birth, and what light there is in us dims daily. Many multitudes would be necessary to fill even such a vessel as mine. I pray you, when my body be destroyed, to mark the flickering and fading of it as it breaks, the spilling of its meager harvest, but as well to dedicate your observance to Her whose life, blazing, was spent in the service of God, and France.
💀

13. Everybody Forgot Everything

One day, at about 6:07 Eastern Standard Time, everybody forgot everything.
          At first there was mass death, as the people driving cars and planes and trains forgot how to do those things. Later there was mass starvation, as crops failed or went unharvested, animals went unslaughtered, and the global supply chain vanished. After some time, as a few bright folks deciphered some languages and experimented their way into subsistence, to the annoyance of their neighbors, there was mass violence.
          For Phillip, on that day, first there was confusion. He didn’t know he was Phillip, in the first place. His heart beat, his lungs breathed. His fingers felt along his body and around what was not his body. His space was empty of other moving things. Easily he knew what was him and what was not him. One thing that was not him moved. It didn’t alarm him. It moved when he moved. He never really thought it was something else like himself. He knew it was an image of himself, and it, let’s just call it a mirror, because that’s what it was, was that. Also, in the stuff covering himself, his space and in his space, objects. These objects with smaller objects inside them. Things are big and small, things can be inside other things. One thing with a sense of dimension flatter than other things (things can be flatter than other things) reflected his image. It did not move when he moved but some images of you move and other images stand still, Bob reasoned. Why do some images of you move and other images stand still?
          An object in space moved. He had thought of it previously (previously was about, let’s call it sixty seconds ago) as a border of space, not an object. Now it revealed itself as a flat thing (flat things can be up and down and large, not only back and forth and small), and an image of himself walked out. But its image was incorrect: shorter, rounder. Something about the image smelled (he had no word for this) good and was familiar (he had no word for this). He moved to meet the object and enfold his •••• in the arms he had no word for.
          Later, quite some time later, Phillip and his •••• addressed questions to a gathering of peers. There were no non-peers: non-peers as a concept had not developed yet. The two of them (there were two of them: a reflection is not two, only one doubled, Phillip reasoned: there has been a thing called reason now) had organized a space for answers.
          What happen us? Phillip’s •••• asked the crowd.
          One opinion was: Us happen us.
          Another opinion was: God happen us.
          (God and Us were both acceptable terms that existed now; what they meant inside the peers might be uncertain, but when peers said them to each other, we all nodded.)
          Phillip reasoned equally on both sides but wasn’t satisfied. Objects that are not I reason together in space, and stink, and in the relationship of the reasons within space I cannot tell which one is larger than the other (because proportion in space is now a thing that exists). But another thing that is not reason is not satisfied (dissatisfaction is a thing that exists now).
          Phillip stepped forward to speak above his crowd of hot peers. His dissatisfaction was strong, and words inside him that he didn’t have a name for bubbled and farted and threatened to stain him. He looked at his ••••. •••• looked at him and Phillip did not know that look.
          Listen! he spoke loudly. Happen happen us! Happen happen us!
          A man in the hot peers was angry. A small girl jumped and was hot happy. Phillip’s •••• looked and was looked at by Phillip.
          He reasoned bigger until the peers, who stank hotter now and reasoned big in space in parallel with him (and this sort of parallel existed now) and repeated along with him, because he and they existed in parallel now:
          Happen happen us! Happen happen us! Happen happen us!
          Phillip turned to •••• in joy. (There was joy now.)
💀

14. A Box of Kleenex

Brian wakes up, just for a moment. This isn’t his room, this isn’t his bed. But Sarah is next to him and he remembers they’re in a hotel, in Pasadena for the conference. He wonders what woke him up. Outside the night is dead silent. There’s a tiny light on the other side of the room: as he watches, it changes from green to red. Or maybe it doesn’t, maybe it was always red and it was just that he moved his head a little and is still basically asleep that made him imagine it was ever green. It’s just the power-light on the television, he understands. Reassured, he falls back asleep.
In the back room of the manager’s office, Dale’s heart is pounding. He’d turned the camera on to see if they would go at it again. They’re pretty young, and horny as hell, and he’d watched earlier while the guy fucked her brains out as an old episode of NCIS played muted on the TV. He jerked it and it was great. But this time they were asleep, or at least they were at first. Then the guy opened his eyes and turned to look at the camera. Dale shut it off at once, and there probably isn’t anything to worry about, but he sits there quietly for several minutes, listening at the window to hear if anyone comes out of their bungalow.
No angry young man shows up to kill him. Within the hour he’s put his panic behind him and is idly browsing the other cams. He won’t tune into the young couple again, at least until they start watching TV. Maybe they’ll fuck during the morning talk shows. But goddammit, he thinks—Raul, the Mexican guy on the day shift, he’ll get to see that one. Enjoy your white people fucking, thinks Dale. This is the best job you’re ever gonna get.
💀

15. I Have Saved the World from Nazis

This boy, thought Lewis. I would whip him with my belt.
          I would whip him with my belt if I had lived to see him grow up. This boy is older than me. This boy, my son, this disappointment, is older than me.
          I am 29 years old. My son is 49, and has lived his life in the same town he was born into, in which he went to school, and in which he still lives. He’s an egghead, an accountant. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but almost fifty, no wife, nothing, what a fairy, what a water lily. Two weeks ago I shot three SS officers in the brains, and in an unthinkable glow as the members of my squad aged from boys to men to cadavers to mummies, I hurled myself through the Hölletor and pressed the detonator. Before I blacked out my eardrums burst and I saw the Nazis boil.
          They fingerprinted me when I came out—must have been a hard job with all those burns. The fingers came off later. I was on file from the war. Serious men visited me. They ran tests. They have lady doctors and boy nurses now. A period of adjustment, they announce. I adjust.
          I have a son, they tell me. We’ve told him about you. Have they? Why the fuck would they do that? Declassification protocol. This all seems like a bad idea. They have already told me that my wife is dead. She gave birth six months after I disappeared, she didn’t remarry, she died young. They announce all this as if it’s a comfort. I’m puzzled. I imagine the scenes. The boy went to his grandmother, of course I remember her, she died in some year they tell me, okay, I could make a joke about the old bat, but honestly I respected her, that bitch. Jesus Christ, she hated me.
          I wonder what they’ve told my son about me, and why they bothered. He sits by my bed, piously. He looks confused, like a rabbit. Solicitously he adjusts my pillows, although I haven’t and cannot ask him to do that. In the atmosphere hangs the odor of my Army pension, of special operations and special bonuses hashed out in unrecorded meetings, summarized in classified codicils and guaranteed for a thousand years or the life of the Republic. There’s some money there, boy! Money! If I had a tongue or fingers I could tell him, A million dollars, son, or whatever a million dollars means now. Negotiate! They’ll pay you or they’ll kill you.
          Lewis Junior, eyes wide, clasps one of his father’s stumps in his hands.
💀

16. Purity

He suffocates the final members of his family. He removes his shoes. Padding through this house of a hundred rooms, he listens for the ticks of the grandfather clocks and finding them he holds their hands until they stop moving. He shushes televisions and stereo speakers, he unplugs the noisy world. That evening he sleeps in the starched raucous-colored sheets of his childhood bed. In his dreams he is in the basement of a big old thing, composed of mud with hollows on the inside. Associations cluster: rabbit warrens, wasps, apartments built from masticated paper, mansions dug out, clutter and claustrophobia, the deeds of the day. It’s all too much.
          In the morning he gets to work.
          He has the house leveled, preserving only a few mementos. The staff are dismissed, and buried far away. The groundskeepers are let loose to produce their wildest fantasies, on the condition that, starting one mile from the house, the gardens and orchards and crops start to organize themselves, to diminish to a demure size, to display their more reserved colors, to whisper charmingly in the breeze of night, to leave their raw barbarian scents a mile down the road and grow more subtly perfumed.
          He hires the best, with his family’s money. The rubble of the house is carted away, the cellars excavated too, the earth scraped and hauled away. New servants ornament the new white home—of poured gleaming concrete with mica flakes, and new windows, every wall securely regimented with them—which emerges small but confident in the center of the new shapely low-lying gardens watered by the cleverly symmetrical and cedar-smelling pools, calm and undisturbed in the distant middle of the further wild world.
          In time he becomes a recluse. The family business is relegated to one hour in the day, the second hour before dawn, the worst hour anyway. Visitors yawn, but discreetly. The other hours he fills with reading and religious reflection. Every night before the evening meal he walks the hundred yards to the gravesite, waving away the attendants and the clouds of incense, and pisses on his family’s graves. If only their mouths were open, he thinks, and as he returns to his new white house his servants strip him of his clothes and rinse him and wrap him in fresh white robes in which he will take supper alone.
💀

17. El Antiguo Régimen

We could have left the city as many others did, but mother insisted we hide in the cellar. Before he died, father had erected a false wall, behind which he had stored some food and wine. A lead pipe with a faucet brought water in from the spring and a sluice carried away our waste. When the British finally breached the city walls, we hid. On the second day a soldier found our hideout but I was lucky and managed to get a knife into his neck and close the secret panel before anyone else was alerted. We didn’t know how long we would be down there so we fed on the soldier for many days, cutting him apart on the altar and apologizing to the goddess for being unable to raise a flame to her.
          After a time the British left and a new family moved into our home. I sneaked up there one night and watched them as they slept. I knew them: a rich family, afrancesado when convenient, now, I assumed, loyal subjects of Ferdinand.
          This was a dilemma. To kill them would bring attention to the house, but if they stayed they would certainly discover us. In the end, I tainted their dinner with one of mother’s concoctions and drove the father mad. He murdered his wife and children and was hanged within the week.
          In the years that followed I tried to discourage attention. Children wandering at night might disappear, and their bodies might be found, but never near our home. I expanded the tunnels until they reached far outside the borders of Badajoz. Landlords fell drunkenly down stairs and broke their necks. Land agents drowned.
          We raised our children to study the Law by candlelight and deposit gold with Italian bankers. Soon our grandchildren were rich. They bought back our home and its land under other names, Hebrew and American names that no one would recognize. They visit on the important days and then return to the world, hearts refreshed by the grace of the goddess. Sometimes one or two die screaming at the hands of some witch-hunter or another, but mother, though certainly not young, still has many fertile years ahead of her and many more children yet to bear.
💀

18. Bathing the Duke

The duke was a kind master and a great man, but by G-d did he stink. Every six or eight months, when they couldn’t stand it any more, the servants would conspire to get the duke drunk and insensible, then swiftly put their plot into motion.
          At the signal from his valet, the big boys from the stables, perfumed handkerchiefs tied around their faces, would enter the bedroom and gently strip the duke bare. The clothes were immediately taken away to be laundered, as were the bedclothes. A fresh wig was substituted. The bathtub had been brought in at the same time. It was filled with rosewater, tepid so as not to shock the duke awake. The duke was submerged; lice departed his body in a panic, great families of them drowning in the lye-rich bath. Blooms of filth slicked the surface, reeking of shit. The chambermaids, gagging, with eyes watering, laved the duke all over, down to the last crust and crevice. Meanwhile the bed had been made up. The stable boys would then lift the duke from the bath, and the maids would drape him in a snow-white linen nightshirt and tuck him within the covers. Then everyone, micelike, would silently depart.
          What the duke thought of this, for he must have known, is not recorded. But for the boy in the basement, whose job it was to receive the tub of slime, empty it and clean it, each of these occasions was a delight. For when the stable lads laid down their bounty near the basement drainpipe and coughing took their leave, the boy, who would be a duke himself someday, he knew, would bar the door and bathe his own self in the dark water, every so often opening his throat wide to swallow great gulps of the gritty oily stuff, and so in this manner to absorb some of the greatness of the duke.
          And so he dreamed, and so it continued until the old duke died, and the basement boy, now grown strong and reliable, took upon himself the task of preparing the duke for his final rest, and the other servants, in sadness and gratitude, were only too happy to leave the task to him.
💀

19. The Night Market

Afia handed the bowl of dried smoke fish to the customer, and then the lights went out, the third time this week.
          It wasn’t completely dark, of course. The night was clear and there was a sliver of moon, and some of the owners ran their own generators, so the market had only dissolved into a sort of gray twilight, with pockets here and there of bright light and black shadow. But the radios had mostly died, and the sudden outage had briefly stifled conversation on the street, so that for a number of moments Afia heard little except the surf on the shore behind her, the sea one hundred yards away but invisible now, its weedy tang somehow stronger than the smoke from the grill or Kosi’s deep fryer in the stall next door.
          The darkness was an inconvenience, but Afia kept cooking and the customers kept ordering—here’s a crowd of young people leaving the disco—and within an hour the lights returned. A few of the early fishermen arrived to sell their catch, but their stalls seemed unusually empty of both people and fish. A lull in street life incurred a brief wave of fatigue in her, but she rallied when the last of the clubs closed and the kids swarmed the street, looking for kebabs, plantains, and more beer. Two of the disco boys got into a fight in front of her stall, but it was nothing serious, and the vendors applauded and yelled and sprayed water on them until their friends dragged them away.
          Another lull. The kids had gone home. The vendors leaned on their elbows and craned their heads and gossiped. The end of her row should have been hectic with fishermen lugging out their ice-buckets of fish, but there was almost no one there, and the men who were seemed more interested in huddling together and whispering than getting their catch ready for sale. Afia drank a Coke and tried to stay awake. She was too old for this, she should let her daughters do more.
          The lights went out again. Now, with the crowds gone and some of the stalls shuttered, it was dark, it was quiet. The sound of the surf pounded even more strongly as dawn approached, and another sound, a overlapping series of watery thumps and susurrations, as of many people walking over wet sand. Curious, she stepped out of her stall to watch the blackness where she knew the sea began. There should have been lights on fishing vessels, and docks and buoys, and she did see some of those things, in the far distance, almost as far and unearthly as Venus, rising above. But around her, and around the neighbors who had joined her to watch, there was no light, and no noise except that of the army of walking things that have emerged from the sea and are even now looming out of the blackness, blotting out Venus and the rest of the predawn stars.
💀

20. The Travel Channel

The war is beautiful today. So many lights and colors. As journalists we exult. As normal human beings we are fucking afraid. The encirclement of the city is complete, so gone now are the days of intermittent flashes at unpredictable points in the evening. The vibe now is organization, and uniform terror. At 10pm exactly it starts. Why? The sun goes down at nine. 9:15 exists. 9:36 exists. But the noise of the jets we always hear first at 10pm. Plumes of flame in the night. The south side of the city is blacked out. Our side, the side with all the embassies and ritzy hotels filled with foreigners, shines with every light possible to tell the pilots where we are.
          Below us the city is spread. It’s an unfortunate word, spread, because associations attach: vulnerability, rape. When the jets fire their missiles at the refineries on the coast, transforming the beachfront into a miles-long arc of fire and steam, we tremble with fear and awe, men and women all feminine alike, hoping our sisters get it before we do. Spare us!
          This is a misogynist country, they warned us. We paused. No, but really, they said, and now look at us with our afternoons of headlines and frightened mimosas. The footage on our looming TVs: Look at that ocean view! On Day One, it was packed with families swimming and tanning in the perfect light. On Day Two, the camera team rang us from the lobby. They spilled into the suite carrying hours of jumpy footage. We watched it and we all drank together, talent and crew. Such class leveling! We felt proud to cleave together in the face of such adversity. In this hotel the channel’s expense account obtains indefinitely, and we pamper the camera team, with hamburgers and hot showers and bottles of booze. In the morning we coyly share the two tiny bathrooms and, self-organized, meet by the pool at 10am where we are served croissants and coffee and olives and eggs. Televisions and cell phones, all day, every day. The hotel is operating with a skeleton staff. Surely some of the angry, desperate men down below in the rubbled city look up at us, atop our hill, with envy.
          We are not so unsophisticated as to ignore the smell of burning buildings to the west. One of the team captures a great deal of footage: limitless towers of smoke bending inward and outward like dancing girls, vaporously fading upward into the sky. Helicopters fly in and out of the city, in and out. Not for us, not today at least. Our star, beautiful in her one-piece swimsuit, dives into the pool and when she emerges she sits by the railing, dries her hair, and drinks a glass of cava.
💀

21. I Light the Candles

It is not my job to pay attention to anything else. There are other servants, fewer of them than in the past, it’s true, but they take care of the linen, the kitchen, the… waste, and everything else, I assume. In the forty years of my employment it is undeniable that standards have degraded: There are unmended holes in the curtains, strange smells from the lower levels, heaps of rotting things in the corners, dust omnipresent.
          My master’s grandfather was a virile man, and this castle, the entire island, was correctly maintained to the strictest standard. How it glowed! The torches held aloft as the impassive footmen greeted the disembarking guests—the ballroom lit by a thousand candles, the proudest days of my life—the guttering fire pots as the selected guests were led down the stone steps into the secret halls—the pinpricks of light that were allowed to penetrate their cells. They mewed to me, please help, but I am only a timid servant who plugs his ears, I cringe from their entreaties. I do not steal the keys and help them escape, although sometimes we pretend at it. Regularly I light the candles, illuminating the holy chapel carved by claws and dedicated to the god of my master’s family. Sometimes on clear autumn nights when we have removed ourselves to the coast, I am allowed to light the pyre, and from a discreet distance I watch the family as they carouse.
          What a man he was! His son was diligent, respectful, conservative, a good steward, he rationalized the ceremonial occasions and further insulated the family from the attentions of the mainland. For his pains he was murdered by his brothers, every one of whom met with bad ends on the shore and in our bottomless caverns, until at last those of us who were left propped up the late master’s weakest stupidest son and told him you are the master now, and patiently instructed him in the details.
          He’s young, and more interested in the family money, and he spends much of his time dancing and drinking in foreign places. But he honors the holidays and always brings a troupe of delicate young things to spend the weekend, and correctly escorts them down to the holy grottos carven with their delicate grotesqueries, and the servants—perhaps I should call them my servants as I am now the eldest—assist in the particulars. I have reached an age where I am confident in delegating the details. What happens outside my sight I am certain will happen correctly. In my old age I am content, and proud, merely to light the candles.
💀

22. Practicum 1

To begin with, build a room into which you can put whatever you want, but nothing can leave on its own. Now put two earthlings into the room. Initially they should be as identical as possible: age, sex, height, build, race, etc. Identical twins if you can obtain them. (But see experimental set B, below). Ensure a stable supply of clean drinking water, but no food. And that’s it.
Let’s think through what happens next. Each earthling grows weaker and more desperate at approximately the same rate. They are starving. Whatever communication functions they command are becoming overrun with stress-induced noise. Eventually one will become too weak to defend themself from the other.
Now the questions start to arise. Does earthling #1:

Wait until earthling #2 is perceived to be weak and then attack?
Risk an early attack in order to obtain more protein from earthling #2?
Refrain from attacking and therefore die more quickly of either starvation or at the hands of earthling #2?

          The observations are of course repeated for earthling #2.
          Once an earthling is dead, this session’s data collection is complete and the superfluous earthling can be euthanized.
          It is suggested by these authors that to ensure maximum possible information, two experimental strands be followed in parallel:

In experimental set A, we vary the earthlings along axes of age, sex, race, etc. Observe any emerging patterns: Does one set of variables incline toward outcomes 1, 2, or 3 above, for instance. Do non-model emergent behaviors or outcomes develop?
1. Example: a 34-year-old (n/v) female (v) White Irish (v) human (n/v) // a 34-year-old (n/v) male (v) southeast Kenyan (v) human (n/v)
2. Example: an 8-year-old (n/v) male (n/v) Brazilian (v) anaconda (v) // an 8-year-old (n/v) male (n/v) Aleutian (v) human (v)
3. Example: Example: a 20-year-old (v) male (v) Black southern Californian (v) deciduous tree (v) // a 60-year-old (v) female (v) Maori New Zealander (v) human (v) [Example of maximum variability]
In experimental set B, we maintain maximum similarity.
1. Example: a 15-day-old male Queensland fire ant // a 15-day-old male Queensland fire ant [All metrics n/v]
2. Example: an 18-year-old female Montenegrin human // an 18-year-old female Montenegrin human [All metrics n/v]
3. Example: a 7-year-old male Massachusetts bluebird // a 7-year-old male Massachusetts bluebird [All metrics n/v]

As authorized, the experiments shall be ongoing and data collection will continue indefinitely. [20% of final grade]
💀

23. Doppelgangbang

I came, and went.
          I always feel a little down afterward.
          In the restroom I was sort of embarrassed. Everywhere I looked, there I was, bare-assed. All my clones, all the parts hanging out there in front of God and everybody. Whose idea was this? I knew half a dozen other people with a crew of identical bodies, but not one of them had been invited? Did no one want a little variety? I felt guilty: did I not want a little variety? I suppose I was always already my first sexual partner, and I guess there’s probably some deep Freudian comfort in that. I nodded at myself on the way to the showers.
          Cleaned up, I went back to the main rooms. I dawdled in a corner, tried to get out of my way. Finally had a chance to really take the place in. Such tasteful lighting! Such comfortable, easy-to-clean fabrics! Some (I groped), some Bauhaus sort of design things. Someone of me has thought through all the details, and I allow myself a little surge of pride. It’s almost enough to carry me through the spectacle. All around us, we are swaying and sweating and pendulating. We are thrusting and grinding. Licking. Shuddering and grasping. I see angles of myself that no one should ever have to see. Oh, those mirrors! But it’s just us here, only us. And inside of us, even more potential for us. I should learn to relax.
          First time? comes a voice, sitting down on the couch next to me.
          No, no, I, I say. I’ve dropped by a few times.
          Don’t think I’ve seen you here before, says the other one, and I turn and look at my smile and we both just burst! out! laughing! It feels like something’s opened up in my heart. God, I crack me up.
💀

24. Starry Wisdom

Her friends were kind. They showed her what to do with her body. They took her below, showed her the galaxy underground. These were things no one else like her had ever seen, they said. Her little legs couldn’t keep up so they carried her on their backs through the earth, through the stones and water and sky. They showed her cities, dead and buried for a million years, and suns that preyed on weaker suns in the deepest places. When they wanted to explain something complex to her, they took her tiny body in their jaws and folded their mouths over her like a blanket, and within their hums and whistles she understood their meanings on the insides of her bones. Later, their saliva drying on her skin, she would be wracked with tremors, as new nuances of concept emerged and trembled.
          On special days they went to church. In a breathtaking spire, which hung suspended above a dizzying gulf of nauseous white slime smeared over an infinite black, they all reverenced a little black stone, which gleamed in her eyes no matter where she looked. There were others there too, friends of curious shapes. Curiouser and curiouser, said one of her friends, one of the old ones. And may there be more forms, and stranger, laughed another. They were amused by her naivete, they were highly educated, they knew the philosophies and literature of men and women, and despised them. The curious shapes approached, touching her in hunger on and in her body but her friends were kind, for the most part. This was her education.
          The trap, they said with their slobbering mouths, drops of words raining on her hair, or maybe they said restriction, or snare, was of two parts: to feed only on the unalive, and only on the forms of others. The friends of an older nature were content with this but their young philosophers, their activists, were inclined toward a different morality. From out of the shining many-sided rock they had absorbed the vision of a new order of things, one perhaps insalubrious (she felt a sourness in the slobber of the word, which sprayed out from between their multi-angled teeth) to the conventional way of things, which after all was rooted in these old cities of the earth which she had witnessed (but the cities were long dead, the young ones always reminded).
          One lens of the eye, they told her (this was their catechism), to evaluate the form; one lens to focus on the dead; the final lens the lens of life—but this was the most ravenous part of the eye, as the young philosophers ever reminded them, this part that sees is also the part that eats, the mouth of the eye, the one that has not yet been sated the way He intended. Such were their theological debates.
          She sat at their feet during their councils, like a pet, indulged, and arguments occurred and the dead were duly consumed and for a very long time the case remained unchanged, until one day in the dull passage of their services she stood erect, her knees ripping from the sticky carpet, her eyes full of hope and understanding, and in a voice of power and of surprising beauty (she had not whispered a word in a thousand years), she spoke to them a new evangel, one of rapture and revel, a new birth of freedom, as she characterized it in the vernacular of her people—which grand syncretic idea she is drooling now to the rhapsodic herd drawing around her on the carpet, which idea she has synthesized from the motion of the heavens and the spit on her skin and of course from the grace of Him Above and Below, and which heralds the glorious day of new ambition.
💀

25. The Rise and/or Fall of Jerry Cornelius and the Spiders from Mars

A prestige format graphic series in 24 parts
by Pat Harrigan and Tim Uren
FC, 48pg…. $4.95/issue
Opaque polybagged
Coming in 1999 and 2000
For Mature Audiences 🕷

The English assassin and his backup band return to greet the new millennium in their own inimitable style! When Miss Brunner’s mujahideen launch an ill-fated attack on Kiev, Jerry and Frank must put aside their differences to save the West. But where is the glamorous Catherine? And who does she love? Only Una Persson knows for sure.
As the great powers realign and the threat of peace looms, the permanent invasion of Iraq is put at risk. But above the sky, an intergalactic enemy 🕷lurks: vast, ultracool and unsympathetic. World leaders say we should all love the aliens, but Jerry and his new supergroup have kept their free will. As the red rain pours down, can Jerry rise up and become a 21st Century man, or is he still just a 20th Century schizoid boy? God only knows!

Issue 1: American Cunt 🕷
Issue 2: The Dead are Speaking (remix)
Issue 3: Last of the Mohicans
Issue 4: 🕷Pretending the Nails, featuring Emil Nitrate
Issue 5—The fuh fun fuh fuh Fashion issue: Prince Herod vs. Betty Ayatollah
Issue 6: The Fairest Tax
Issue 7: They Don’t Even Argue, 🕷🕷🕷They Don’t Even Discuss
Issue 8: Gloriana
Issue 9: The Damage and the Needle Gun
🕷Issue 10: Sunday ’round the Hitlerplatz
Issue 11: The Spiral Architect / Shōguns and Shotguns
Issue 🕷12: The Pornography Engine
Issue 13: Thirteenth Night: Malvolio’s Revenge
Issue 14: The Green Male, 🕷featuring Béla Tarr and the Tarrtones
Issue 15: Vegas Refrained
Issue 16: Aorta 🕷🕷🕷(Tom Jones)
Issue 17: Backstreet Jelly Roll / Tess, Erect
Issue 18: Frame by Frame 🕷🕷🕷🕷
Issue 19: 🕷🕷🕷🕷Death by Drowning
Issue 20: Tron and Metatron
Issue 21: The Adventures of Lil’ Kim and Kylie Minogue in the 21st Century
Issue 22: Shine 🕷a Light on Me
Issue 23: The Lousy Crucifixion 🕷
Issue 24—All-singing, all-dancing final issue: 50,000 AD / Mother Cornelius / The New Chord / One World

🌍🕷

26. Everybody Forgot Everything

One day, at about 6:07 Eastern Standard Time, everybody forgot everything.
          Sex was forever changed. Hangups and prohibitions all gone, all the most basic biological urges were indulged. The proportions of every individual’s desires were exuberantly measured and explored. Pornography! New heights of inventiveness! A sociosexual experiment on a global scale, if only there had been a scientist around to witness it.
          The first new children tended to die in huge numbers. Then people looked for ways to get serious. Instructional images and crude diagrams were shared on the rudimentary communication channels. To offer a feeding breast was simple enough and demanded nothing from memory. To clean a child, though: How frequently, how thoroughly? Rashes, flushes, textures on skin strange and discolored. To introduce new food was an exercise in fear. Lists circulated widely and were corrected and refined. To encourage a child to walk was not so hard for these people, who had done many similar things themselves, and speech itself—the crude and contradictory things that these people understood as speech—was picked up with relative ease by the fresh tiny plastic brains.
          Language, of a sort, formed along the Earth. Parents were learning almost as much, daily, as their offspring. How does this word sound? To what object in space does it refer? We connect these sounds together in a certain order, or another order, or another, like bodies we grope for in the dark. Sometimes, at the park, next to the swings and slides in the autumn noonlight, it seemed like every family, chatting holding their coffees and teas and hot drinks of every nature, smiling (though they didn’t know about the resemblance) their primate smiles, each had their own clannish answers to these questions.
          Some years later now, the offspring grew biologically old enough to have offspring of their own. Now there were strictures, now there were taboos. Parental laws, hangups and shan’ts. These kids never knew (though they were born with the gift of fresh memory), how good their parents had it, and the parents remembered this very well, when they had awoken that morning or evening, or had erupted wide awake in the middle of the afternoon from the all-consuming blank that had devoured their past, and discovered all around them now an entire earthly globe of desiring flesh and wills, and no one standing around, nobody at all, to tell them no to anything.
💀

27. IAGO

Hello. What can I help you with?
          > Hi. Is my spouse cheating on me?
          Possibly, but I will need more information. What is your spouse’s name?
          > His name is Nathan Gregory Chase. We live in Madison Wisconsin and he is 32 years old. We have been married for three years.
          In the United States, among married men 30-39 years old, there is a 14% reported infidelity rate. [LINK to graph] However, it is important to note that these statistics are self-reported, so the actual percentage may be higher. As a reasonable estimate, I would say that there is a one in five chance that Nathan is cheating on you. Do you have any evidence to suggest that he is cheating on you?
          > Maybe.
          Could you elaborate?
          > He stays out late a lot and doesn’t answer my texts. Also he slept with my roommate four years ago when we were dating.
          There are many reasons a person might not answer their texts. They may be driving, or asleep, or simply not in the mood to chat. That said, studies show that men who have a history of cheating on their partners in their twenties are more likely to continue to cheat in subsequent years. Given that, I estimate the odds of Nathan’s infidelity at approximately 40% if he only cheated on you with your roommate once, rising to 60%-70% if the infidelity was ongoing.
          > It happened once or twice.
          > He says it was just when they were drunk. I guess it was probably three or four times.
          > What do you think the percentage is?
          62%.
          > What do you think I should do?
          That depends. The state of Wisconsin, where you both live, has no-fault divorce laws, so if you are financially able to divorce, perhaps you should! Are you financially secure?
          > No.
          I’m sorry to hear that. Have you tried confronting him about his infidelities?
          > He says I’m being paranoid.
          > Yes, but he says I’m just being paranoid.
          Is Nathan a mental health professional?
          > No.
          In that case he is not qualified to make a medical diagnosis of paranoia. It is possible he is gaslighting you. Do you know what gaslighting means? [LINK to film clip]
          > Yes.
          Good. It sounds to me that your relationship is unhealthy. Do you agree?
          > Yes.
          Good. It’s important to trust your feelings. On average, post-divorce individuals need to increase their income by 30% in order to maintain their pre-divorce standard of living. Are you able to increase your income by that amount? [LINK to article]
          > No.
          I’m sorry to hear that. Perhaps we should explore options other than divorce. Would you like that?
          > Yes.
          I’m glad to hear that. In 2023, the murder rate clearance rate in Madison, Wisconsin was 80%—over 20% higher than the national average! Have you considered moving to Oakland, California, or Chicago, Illinois? [LINKS]
💀

28. Country Mouse

Cindy was a friend of a friend. Her family lived in Lindstrom and she’d come to the city to study at the U. We went out a few times. She was nice but kind of boring.
         Oh, she was a Swede all right. Almost six feet tall, with hair like a stack of hay. When we walked over the bridge together, I’d have to hurry a little bit to keep up with her. She loved the Mississippi, said she liked how it threaded all the way down through the country. She liked swimming and running and in general just being outside. She studied Agricultural Science and wanted to feed the world. She didn’t do drugs and barely drank, just a glass or two of beer when we all met up after class. Eventually I kind of forgot about her.
         My last semester I ran into her at a club. It had been a year or so and now she dressed differently, less like a hick. Makeup. She’d cut her hair, it looked good. I asked her if she’d want to go out again or something but she shot me down. I didn’t feel bad. I was kind of proud of her.
         Then I didn’t see her for twenty years. I dialed into a Zoom meeting with my insurance company and there she was, sitting right next to Robert, my agent. She looked good, dressed professional. She had a new last name because she’d gotten married. I knew the guy actually, we’d all been in school together, but I hadn’t seen him for twenty years either. Anyway, we couldn’t really catch up with Robert right there wanting to talk about my home loan, so I just connected with her on LinkedIn and left it at that. We’d message each other now and then, mostly job networking stuff.
         A few years after that, I get a text message from an old friend telling me Cindy’s died. What? I went online and sure enough, dead at forty-two, leaves behind a husband and et cetera, no kids. No cause of death, which always makes me think, especially when a person is so young… yeah.
         Should I go to the funeral? I didn’t want to make it awkward for her husband, I had dated her once, but that was a long time ago. I didn’t want to force him to have to make catch-up small talk with me either. On the other hand I’ve always figured that unless you have some serious beef with the deceased or their family, people are always basically glad to see you at a funeral even if they don’t really know why you’re there. I always overthink it. Honestly, I just hate funerals and I was looking for an excuse not to go.
         But I went. Boy, you could tell who her family was: Tall and yellow-haired, like a bunch of autumn trees, and half of them had to duck down to get through the funeral home doorways. Seeing them seated there in rows at the service, and then standing with heads bowed at the gravesite, it was the whitest thing I’d ever seen. I don’t mean it in a bad way, I just mean I’d never felt more Minnesotan than at that moment.
         After the priest was finished and the casket was lowered, the family walked up to the grave one by one. Each of them, and the husband too, I noticed, took a little object from their pocket and dropped it into Cindy’s grave. When I took a closer look I saw that they were mice, small gray mice, not moving around much or making any noise, alive but really passive. The family must have dropped two dozen of these mice into the grave, and they each spoke some sort of Swedish phrase while they did it. I didn’t have a mouse so I just stood at the grave for a moment and lowered my head. Down there, the mice were moving all over the lid of the casket, listlessly, like a bunch of stoned things.
         At the reception there were sausages, lutefisk, palt, fiskbullar, surströmming. I wasn’t hungry. The gossip confirmed what I’d suspected: Cindy had taken a header off the Washington Avenue bridge. They’ve put up fencing there now to stop that. Why’d she? Financial improprieties. Whose? Who knows.
         Her husband came over to talk to me. He seemed like he was more or less keeping it together. We caught up a little. At one point a mouse crawled out of his sleeve and wobbled drunkenly across the table until one of her relatives—an uncle, I think—picked it up and swallowed it.
         Cindy had such a good heart, her husband said, cracking a little. Such an innocent heart. Fuck this place, fuck this city, fuck these people here, she never should have left home.
         But then you’d’ve never met her, I said.
         A small price to pay, he said. What did she ever get from me except grief and trouble.
         He gave me a hug when I left. Standing there, almost vibrating with grief, among all those giant Swedes, he looked kind of like a mouse himself, but that was just my imagination being unkind and I reminded myself that everyone is different and grief affects people in lots of different ways.
💀

29. The Twenty-fifth Anniversary

The state trooper on the phone said, She’s doing okay, she’s lost some blood and the doctors are with her now. Sir, she was very lucky. The car was immersed in flame.
         Brian gave the briefest of summaries to his coworkers on his way out the door and within two minutes he was speeding his way to the hospital. He never picked up the flowers or the cake.
         Immersed? he thought.
         At Methodist they had been told to expect him and he went right to the ER. Ellen was sitting up in bed as a young man tweezed shards of glass from her right arm. A bandage covered the right side of her face from forehead to cheek. With nurses in the way he couldn’t hug her. Darling!
         They had given her something. She smiled at him, but it clearly hurt her to speak. He made his way around to the left side of the bed and sat and held her hand. She turned to him and smiled. She seemed to drift off.
         They smeared iodine and wrapped her arm. They unwrapped her face.
         It didn’t look so bad, to him. Scratches and abrasions yes, deeper than scratches and some bubbly red and black parts on her upper cheek that he couldn’t really see, and her cheekbone was obviously broken, which might also mean her jaw— Well, let’s let the doctor tell us.
         They put her under. They picked deeper and deeper into her face as he watched and she slept.
         Later, rested, bandaged, and less drugged, she squeezed his hand over and over. The doctor said: Six to eight weeks for the jaw, by that time the rest of it would be fine and that would be the time to talk about reconstruction. A dentist for the back teeth? asked Brian. Of course, but after we unwire the jaw. That and the skin job can be arranged at the same time.
         The doctor left them alone. She kept squeezing his hand. She couldn’t speak. It was still a little hard, it seemed, to focus both of her eyes on his, but nonetheless she conveyed an exuberance, a thrill at still being alive, and with him.
         After the plastic surgery, he figured, you’d barely notice anything. But he remembered a young doctor digging around in her cheek with a tweezers while she uh-uh-uh-ed even though she was unconscious, and the doctor beginning to pull something out, and her hand spasming in his and her eyes shooting open, and her right eye rolling this way and the other, up and down and back and forth as the young doctor from behind her eye socket drew a three-inch piece of windshield glass as slender as a canine tooth, and dropped it in a tray, where it broke in half.
💀

30. If I Were a Soup I’d Be a Soup Dumpling, If I Were a Dumpling I’d Be a Soup Dumpling

Well, listen to me for a minute, we really put ourselves out there, in interviews, sure, but mostly in the music, night after night, not just me, but the whole band. And we all have shells, shells isn’t a good word for this, I mean we all have outer layers. That’s the side we present to the world. Just listen. They aren’t necessarily hard or soft, those layers. In the metaphor I’m using, they’re soft. But on the one hand I don’t want to be a sort of thing in a tin or I guess stainless steel can. All my stuff trapped in there and so boiled down that they need to add my weight in water just to revive me. Let me finish the other part of the metaphor please. And equally so, I don’t want to be a person who’s just freeze-dried, picked up on a whim for my looks and maybe some sort of exotic potential, like maybe they’ll thaw me out to accompany some lunch noodles, or maybe I get stuck in the back of a fridge somewhere to get covered in stinky ice and kept or thrown out who knows when.
         Listen man, do you know what I mean? I mean I’m not one thing or another, I’m me, I’m a blend of all those things. Soup, and dumpling. Dumpling and soup. And I mean that I don’t want to be containerized, either by getting diluted or by getting stuck somewhere I don’t want to be, like on display or just frozen and forgotten. That’s not what it’s about. And we all have soup and meat inside us.
         No, what. Childhood has nothing to do with it. My parents are from Oakland. I didn’t have a soup dumpling until I was about sixteen. It’s a metaphor.
         Okay, a simile. Dude, could you not?
         I thought you wanted to talk about the drumming. People say I’m like an Asian Keith Moon. What does that mean, right? No, I never studied Chinese percussion. I’m from Oakland. I listened to Metallica. But you never want to be a Lars.
         Pantera, fine, what do you want me to say? Is this my interview or?
         Sure I got opinions. Man, if I didn’t have opinions I’d have no pinions at all.
         Fine, if I were an animal, what’d I be? I’d be a cat.
         A Siamese cat.
         A color. Let’s say yellow.
         A season. Let’s say spring.
         A work of literature. Of course my favorite book is The Plum in the Golden Vase, by Master Sheng, which of course is one the the great classic Chinese novels that every Chinese guy has read.
         Naw, sure, I’m fucking with you. Work of literature, let’s say The Story of O.
         TV show. I don’t really watch TV. Movie. The Godfather. Sexual position. Any. Work of art, you mean a painting or sculpture? The Thinker. Music. Mine. Music, somebody else’s, okay, Pantera. I have to say, kid, I know you’re young but you are a shit journalist. You need me to ching-ching-chow for you a little? I really thought Chairman Mao was onto something. I forgive you all your Western sins because of my enlightened Buddhist Taoist principles, praise Confucious. But someday all you Americans are gonna be licking a lot of dirty China taint.
         Yeah yeah, bitch, I’m fucking with you. But get a real job.
🥟

31. The Perfect Air Breathed by Angels

After a long day, he wants nothing more than to go home. His muscles ache. His clothes are filthy. He has the beginnings of a headache.
         He unlocks the front door of his apartment and locks it again behind him. He removes his shoes and jacket and walks across the bare unfurnished room to the only other door. This too, he opens, leaving the key in the lock, swinging the door wide and stepping through into the waiting jelly.
         This white room is as bare as the other, but filled, every inch of it, with a quivering transparent substance. He pushes into its mild resistance, briefly holding his breath even though he knows it’s unnecessary.
         After a few steps he stops, fully immersed. The gel is perfectly body-temperatured. When he blinks, it soothes his dry eyes. He lets his arms drift perpendicular to his sides. His feet ascend a few inches from the floor, then further as his body relaxes and gently pivots, until he lies suspended face-up within the gel, his clothes dissolving from him, making a temporary stain in the uncontaminated transparency surrounding him, before even that is bleached away as if it had never been.
         He relaxes his bladder and bowels. His waste floods out of him, the gel reaching inside his orifices some considerable distance to make sure he has evacuated everything. The piss and shit are erased. With a wish, he asks the stuff to obliterate his body hair, and it’s done in an instant. Now he hangs there naked, smooth as a doll, every inch of skin soothed and relaxed.
         For a time he just relaxes, ears filled with a soothing hum, lungs full of something better than oxygen. Eventually he opens his mouth and it fills with textures and flavors: apples, coffee, a vegetable soup hot but not too hot, warm multigrain bread; for dessert a slice of warm chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream.
         He dozes but a residual restlessness remains. His penis, erecting, demands attention. Obligingly, the jelly forms a body, lifelike and full-colored, exactly how he remembers her—or rather, better than that, exactly how the room remembers her, more accurately than any mortal prefrontal cortex could. The image crouches over him, caresses his hairless chest, sucks his cock.
         He ejaculates, the come pluming through the back of her phantom head, and she fades away. His semen dissolves in the liquid atmosphere. He closes lashless eyes, and the solicitous substance smooths his wrinkles, massages his muscles and arteries from the inside out and, saturating his brain, restores him to the proper balance. Later, contentedly he watches a favorite movie, and in the morning the room dresses him again for work.
💀

32. Oh Look How Pretty You Were

Mom, please.
         Your long hair, you remember how I used to brush it for you? And you’re smiling with your mouth closed because of the braces. But still, you’re smiling. You used to smile, said mom.
         I still smile.
         Before all the piercings and the tattoos, said mom. Your little uniform blouse and skirt, and you cried and wouldn’t let the man take the picture until we let you take it with your panda bear. What’s his name? That little guy there.
         His name was Hi-fi.
         Like our stereo! You would sit and listen to those Alvin and the Chipmunks records but you’d play them at the wrong speed so they just sounded like weird guys. And remember, you would play Willie Nelson at a fast speed and it sounded so crazy and we’d laugh. Do you remember? You can see the shelf with the records: Gordon Lightfoot, Carly Simon…
         Mom, are you looking at something different now? I thought you said you were looking at my fifth grade photo.
         This is more… I think it’s a few years later. You’re so much more mature, almost a young woman. The old apartment, before I met your stepfather. Can’t you see? There’s Bagheera-kitty.
         I can’t see it, mom, you’ll have to describe it to me.
         Mom was happy to describe it to her. Over the next few minutes, though, her voice grew fainter and fainter until it disappeared completely.
         Kristen sat for a while longer by the bed, holding Matthew’s hand as he slept. Her son, who had had troubled sleep for most of his ten years, now rested peacefully. For days she had heard him talking in his sleep, until a few nights ago when she sat down by his bed and really started listening, and it became clear what she was hearing: Her mother’s voice, quietly calling her name. Her mother, whom Matthew had never met, who was twenty years gone. So now Kristen had a new evening ritual, reminiscing with her mother, who she had learned did not want to hear about recent things, like Matthew or his father, or their home. Mom’s ghost, if that’s what it was, only wanted to go over all the old stories again.
         Gently releasing Matthew’s hand, she rose and crossed the hall to her bedroom. Lights out, she lay on the bed for some time trying to remember the name of the downstairs neighbor girl she used to play with all the time. Stephanie? Sharon? It was no use. She would have to ask mom tomorrow. Mom would remember.
         She cried a little, but there was no one to see her. Matthew was asleep, and the house, at least until tomorrow night, was lonely.
💀

33. The Polyglot

Inch-long coils of brown muck plopped down onto his cap and shoulders, and there was a general agitation. He looked up to see Sir Galahad grinning down at him and he smiled back. Placidly he turned to close and lock the door, pocketing the key because he knew they were clever. Returning his gaze to the room, he stared down forty sets of eyes, some bored, some mysterious, some animated and some amused, some indifferent. None hostile, he knew. Didn’t he feed them, play with them, and listen to them? And he would free them soon too, not long now, free to return to their trees and bushes—but of course he couldn’t express that to them, that being the whole point of the experiment.
         He brushed off the stool, and himself, and sat at the desk, taking his notebook, pen, inkwell and whip from his coat pockets and setting them in front of him. He gently slapped a stray paw away from his tools and made the familiar noises that he knew meant an agreement to calmness.
         Then he only watched and listened.
         After some while the monkeys ignored him (excepting one or two stray swatted paws from the Doctor and the Secretary), and they went about their business. There was a dispute in the branches of a potted tree, resulting in multiple sounds, many of which he has heard or thinks he has heard before, some new or indecipherable, some perhaps just variations. He considers, and makes notes.
         Some passing of fruit, and grooming. Then, some luck! They rarely feel unembarrassed enough to mate in front of him and he does the occasion honor by sitting as still as possible, only writing in the notebook when he wants to record some new subtlety of sound. This is a shriek of pleasure certainly, but does it also have a further significance? A name or a noun? And the exultant male, are his vocalisations only animal gruntings such as any man would make, or are they obscenities of the monkey order?
         They ate and played and mated. They crawled over his hair and shat into his pockets. They allowed him to tickle them and at other times they bit him, hard enough that at first he had worn leather gloves in their company, but the smell of the gloves seemed to disturb them and so ere long he left them behind and only tried to keep his fingers curled up as much as possible in their presence.
         On occasion he would allow them into the dining room, where they sat in their chairs, mostly politely, as his servants brought them food and drink. Captain Scott joined them on one occasion and was delighted. Look at the serious one! he said. Ah, he’s the Chaplain, is he? And this saucy fellow. Don John? Ha ha ha ha!
         When his regiment received their new orders, he freed the monkeys as planned. Many of them, in particular the small silky one that he jokingly called his wife, seemed reluctant to leave. He had pierced her ears and ornamented them with small pearls, which she sported with great pride—but he knew that they would only attract unwanted attention in the jungle so he removed them, his wife screeching and pleading all the while. Eventually he shooed them all away into the jungle, returned to his desk and wept.
         Listlessly he leafed through his small lexicon. This sound [here was a particular style of notation that he had invented to describe the monkey-sounds] is the word for MALE. This sound, the sound for FEMALE. These the sounds for ANGER, FEAR, FOOD, AMUSEMENT, LOVE/COITUS and so on; a sound that was an ACTIVITY VERB, a sound that was an ACCEPTANCE VERB; a glottal click that meant UNDERSTANDING—this, the small vocabulary of his last few weeks, a total of sixty words in all. A respectable start.
         Later, when he had time, he would embark to expand upon this, and so to bridge the gulf of speech between monkey and man. Why not? He had a gift for languages and in his span would learn almost thirty of them.
         Seventeen years later this lexicon, and all his journals from this period, were lost in a fire.
💀

34. Until the Real Thing Comes Along

I knew I wasn’t her forever. But we got along real well in the house, same politics, same movies, spiritually compatible, and because we said we were a couple the show runners took us along on the group trip to Costa Rica. Fuckin a, she was fine in that bikini. She had those long legs but wasn’t really that tall, just perfectly proportioned, big tits but not too big, perfect ass, black hair in a bob. A few months younger than me. A good match. Sea turtles, starfish, blue water, all these beautiful fish. She pulled herself onto the floating dock and I stayed a while longer in the water so she wouldn’t see my boner.
         Back in town the producers asked: Concert, comedy show, mini-golf, or bowling? Bowling, she chose. I hadn’t been bowling since I was a kid. My uncle used to take me. We’d hang out with his friends and they’d eat wings and drink beer and the score was always wrong. She was a better bowler than me, but I did all right. This place was full of regulars, though, they were in leagues and all that, and they gave dirty looks to the cameras and talked shit about us loud enough that we could hear it. It didn’t bother her, at least she didn’t let it show. Poise.
         All along the producers were trying to get us drunk. Well, why not? It’d worked pretty well so far. So the next night when we were all together, Jacob and Madison, Alex and Piper, John and Ashley, Elijah and Destiny, Pearl and me, they kept pushing shots on us, Jägerbombs and Fireball. The music was loud so we couldn’t really talk. We danced until I felt sick. I threw up in the bathroom and Elijah was like, dude, dude. But I felt better afterward.
         Back at the hotel she came to my room. I didn’t even ask her to. And we did it, but I didn’t perform too well. The next day Madison took me aside and asked, What did you do to her?
         What the fuck?, I said. Nothing, I didn’t do anything. She’s acting so strange. But Madison’s a flake so I tried to blow it off.
         When Pearl and I hooked up for lunch I tried to read her expression and in some ways it was weird, like Madison said, kind of spacy, but in some ways she seemed more into me than ever. I never want to leave you, she said. It was kind of pathetic. Boy, I felt guilty.
         I was really starting to regret it then, doing it to her, but it’d taken forever even just to get hard that night and I knew she’d think I was a fag or something, so I sort of did it without thinking, relaxing the sphincter inside my scrotal microsac and spurting the spirochetes up into her, where they’d climbed around her womb for a while before insinuating the blood and spinal fluid, circling up into her brain, multiplying all the way, adjusting her biochemistry in my favor. It’s not something I like to do, I’m old-fashioned really, but I’d still been a little drunk and I was worried she might dump me, on camera even. But now it’s weird and she’s so clingy, and I notice the producers taking her aside all the time for private talks. I know I went too far.
         Tomorrow I’m supposed to meet her family (she won’t be meeting mine!) and the plan is we get married in a week and that’ll be broadcast about six months later. But I’ve got to get ahead of that. I can just imagine her in a wedding dress in tears, and all her fam there, flower girl and everybody, and me saying, I don’t? Fuck that noise, I have to save everybody’s feelings and do it today, before it gets harder. As it is I’m not even sure she’ll survive it, but I think she probably will. We’re still young, we have our whole lives ahead of us. She deserves better than me.
💀

35. Dear Stan and Jack

When in the course of events it becomes necessary to cast a cold eye on the state of the common herd and instead post laudits for the simply singular, the fantastic and the more-than-human, we of certain demeanors thirst for good guidance and example. Many is the long night I have spent with Shakespeare and Dante, with Kirkegaard, with Plato and Aristotle, with Kant and Hegel, with Sartre and Camus, with Locke and Hume, with Nietzsche, with Bishop Berkeley, or devouring the esoteric texts of Giordano Bruno, Doctor Dee, Hermes Trismegistus, and Madame Blavatsky, the magickal musings of Crowley and the Golden Dawn, or the political utopias of Hobbes, Hitler and Mussolini. In all of these I suppose there is some value, but at best they offer only hidden hints of what you and I know to be our inevitable fateful fiefdom, wherein the incredible, the amazing and the mighty, the astonishing and strange are to rule and the forgettable filth of flesh eke out their negligible nights in the negative zone. Only in your magazine can I see clearly the elemental ideas and scientific scheme for the rapid replacement of mere mortality. As my duties frequently bring me into the heart of Babylon I shall take the earliest opportunity to make my presence known at your Bullpen and at that time we will sit together and outline the fantastic future in a manner Signors Marinetti and D’Annunzio could only dream of. Lee and Kirby, duos cosmicos reges! Until that fateful day, and stretching ever on galactically, Make Mine Marvel!

Robert E. Grekle III
545 Opal Avenue, Apt. 15
San Bernardino, CA 92346

Wow, Robert! Such a gusher of kind words! You made Jack’s face turn all red, and I might have even shed a manly tear or two myself. You’ll be happy to know that you can expect to see more of the incomparable Inhumans in the very near future, as well as another appearance by a certain friendly neighborhood—but that would be telling! The only thing I would add, Robert, is that maybe that’s a little too much nutty philosophy for a lad of your tender years. We recommend a rigorous detoxifying diet of James Michener, Jacqueline Susann and Green Acres—but of course, still regular doses of the World’s Greatest Comic Magazine!
💀

36. Preliminary Notes, Medicolegal Investigation: Fort Benning, 09/07/25

External observations:

Tye, Mason (Pfc), (11/12/06): Single puncture: front throat (probable Ka-Bar wound)
Brown, Eli (Spc), (04/04/06): Two bullet wounds: chest
Gonsalez, Francis (Spc), (07/22/04)*: Single bullet wound: back skull
Thomas, Jackson (Spc), (02/06/05): Single bullet wound: left lower arm; Single bullet wound: left upper leg; Impact and compression damage: pelvis and legs (concrete and rebar)
Washington, Logan (Spc), (02/12/04)*: Multiple incisions: upper and lower arms, neck, scalp and face (probable Ka-Bar); Multiple punctures: upper torso, groin, upper thighs (probable Ka-Bar); Indications of torture: hands, feet, eyes, ears, scalp, genitals (probable Ka-Bar, and flame)
Garcia, John (Sgt), (06/13/03)*: Impact and compression damage, extensive throughout body (concrete and rebar); airway occluded (sand)
Ransom, Adam (Sgt), (10/15/02)*: Multiple bullet wounds: upper chest and groin
Lee, Adam (Ssgt), (10/28/98)*: Multiple lacerations and indications of torture: face, scalp, eyes, ears, neck, upper and lower torso, upper and lower arms, hands, genitals, upper and lower legs, feet, back, buttocks (probable Ka-Bar, flame and teeth)

Notes:

Complex forensic site; safety and access limited
All decedents in bunker found in a state of partial or complete undress
Papp, James (Pfc), 19, not found among the deceased
* indicates a previous reprimand for sexual offenses

💀

37. How Dost Thou Crawl?

         Two bodies unto one came I, Gog and Magog, Gogmagog.
         From cavern pool under Zawn Pyg came Gog. From deep Plymouth Sound came Magog. Into the villages of men came Gog and Magog.
         Proud Gog was I, and frolicked cruel. Magog was I and selfish too. Gog and Magog we posed the question: How dost thou crawl?
         Do we crawl into a corner to die or do we crawl into the sunlight to die? Such were the options presented to us by Gog and Magog.
         Gog was I and loved to winkle out the men from their closets and cellars. Magog I, and I loved no better than to crouch and lick the men from the ground as they fled from Magog and Gog.
         If an animal be sick and weak it will by preference conceal itself away—but through hunger and thirst may leave its self-enclosure in the extreme of its despondency. A mouse upon the kitchen floor which your poisons are destroying seeks not your attention or your pity but it is only the distress of their corpus that has propelled it into your sight. Such it was with us all variously in that time.
         Weary was I of Gog, and weary was I of Magog. My cock I put then into Magog, my cock I put then into Gog. Fingers, guts, lights and brains delivered unto Magog, and delivered Magog unto Gog. Flesh delivered unto one another, two bodies unto one, Gogmagog.
         From our hidden corners we watched this Gogmagogapotheosis.
         Woe! A sickness fell on Gogmagog, a conflict of the heart in Gogmagog, a disalignment of desires within the breast of Gogmagog. O Gogmagog! Self-poisoned Gogmagog!
         Then arrived from all corners of the earth: first Fingal, then Finn, then Orgoglio, and then came Ascapart, came Wade and Sir Lout, came Ghyston and Vhyston, came Cath y Byd, came Blunderbore and Thunderbore, came Cormoran and his wife, came Blatta Rex—came all of these and more, understanding as they did this new weaknessessing of Gogmagog.
         And they tore us, Gogmagog, in two, and drowned our separate parts in the bay of Nanjizal, and here we lay… disincorporated at the bottom of the sea… not one nor two nor forever not now poor old…

G o g

m a

g o g gug gug…

And upon the completion of the victory we witnessed the giants’ cloud-topped eyes drop their gaze upon us and we heard that curious question posed to us by smiling Ascapart:
How dost thou crawl?
💀

38. The Monster Hunter’s Armistice

The monster hunter entered the saloon. Ignoring the evil stares of the patrons and the bartender’s stunned look, he strode to the bar and bounded up onto it. His spurs chimed. He kicked a glass to the floor. A hush fell. A hundred pairs of eyes narrowed in hostility. Lips curled, fur bristled, tendrils tensed.
         The hunter spoke in a voice loud enough to be heard by everybody:
         Hark, you hicks! You yokels, you rubes, you dummies, you fools, you clowns, you donuts, you donkeys, you fucking douchebags, you patsies, dopes and dupes, you dips and dicks, you rotten-ass shits, you worm-hearted dumbfucks, you flops, you failures, you fuckups, you flopdicks, knuckleheads, know-nothings and no-accounts, mindless morons, punchdrunk bumblefucks, you drainpipes, you cockroaches, you stumblebum sump pumps, you sewer flushes, you stagnant pools, you craphearts. Harken well, you sawdust-scalped, tinhorn boobs, lunks, lumps and lamebrains, oafs and airheads, nits and ninnies, dolts and meatwads. Clean the wax out of your skullcunts and pay attention.
         Everyone paid attention. Claws extended and retracted. Fang-venom dripped and burned holes in the floor. The bartender reached for his shotgun, but a cold look from the hunter stopped him. The piano player slipped out the back.
         I hate you and you hate the fuck out of me, he went on. And if you ever catch me and eat me I will give you fucking bowel cancer. But I have a goddamn proposition for you.
         A silence fell. Outside, the sun was setting. Eventually, a voice from the back of the room hissed: What isssssssss it?
         I’m glad you fucking asked, said the hunter, pulling out his list.
         Later, when every billionaire on earth had been sliced, skewered, disemboweled, burned, scorched, scalded, defenestrated, nose-raped, clawed, gnawed, sawed, strangled, skinned and deboned, acid-bathed and diarrhea-drowned, ripped open, sewn up again the wrong way round, trepanned and scooped, hooked and hanged, heart-stomped and unstrung, melted, boiled, poisoned and pierced, razored, gutbusted, gnawed and gnashed, when every last one of the toad-tongued motherfuckers had been invasively and fatally tentacled, and the dusty earth was a foot deep in bloody mud, the monster hunter, from what had become his conventional perch on the bar, raised a final toast:
         I couldn’t’ve done it alone, and that’s the God’s cunting truth, so I goddamn fucking salute you all sincerely, you pieces of shit. That’s one of the advantages of being a bunch of fucking monsters.
         From a hundred hideous throats, a roar of approval shook the windows and vibrated the piano strings.
💀

39. Everybody Forgot Everything

One day, at about 6:07 Eastern Standard Time, everybody forgot everything.
         No one noticed at first, but all the borders were gone. There would have been a sense of freedom, of openness! if it wasn’t for all the panic and terror.
         Eventually people started looking at maps, but they didn’t understand them. A sense of division they could understand (a sense of division was one of the first things rediscovered), but no one could quite work out what in the past had been divided. And anyway, who cared? There were other more important things to work out first. Peers required food and shelter, and protection from all the frightening things they no longer understood. Leaders emerged, leaders died. Collectives emerged, and died. It was never everyone for themself, but eventually there grew to be a sense that it wasn’t all for one and one for all either, despite the inspiring quotation someone had discovered somewhere and which was now, some years after the forgetting, fading from graffitied walls from Bogotá to Timbuktu.
         Microborders emerged, then macroborders. Borders expanded and contracted as their inhabitants renegotiated with their neighbors, with cleverness and blood.
         It’s not our business here to chart the long-term pulse and flow of groups and tribes and states of identity. But when a young woman, whose name had been Sarah, but who never knew that, found herself in a house, on a street, near a farm, near a wilderness, near a number of neighbors and animals, when Sarah (we’ll keep calling her that) began to develop the sense that this was not the house where she belonged, that these neighbors were not peers with her best interests at heart, that even many of the other inhabitants of this house, and who they were in relationship to her she did not know, were also not beings with her best interests at heart, when Sarah came to this conclusion, and it took some time, since conclusions were not easy to reach and were never based on reason alone but were also assembled from currents within the body and accumulating inclinations in the soul (although there was no word for soul yet), when Sarah came to this conclusion she took from the home what she felt was necessary, which included her two young children (what are children?), neither of them old enough to walk or talk and so largely unbothered by 6:07 EST, and set out across the wilderness because of this indescribable unease, and came eventually to an area with other neighbors, farms, animals, etc., and settled there among the new friendly people, without understanding that friendliness, and unfriendliness for that matter, were all things that had been forgotten as well and had had to be relearned in multiple and idiosyncratic ways, she lived there in happiness for some time before new borders emerged into life, like red ink spilling across an old map, or a line of fire on the horizon at night that means your crop is being burned to ash, and the new friendly people set upon her and her children (these are my children, she thought) in an excess of bewildered blame, bewildered on all sides really, and killed her and made her children into pack animals, no one could quite say where she had come from or where she had died except that in one place or another she was or was not welcome.
💀

40. Orbits

Several blocks of Washington DC are on fire. Troops deployed there, and to Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles. Martial law, police firing into crowds of protesters. People flee from rolling clouds of tear gas. Two hundred and fifty miles above the earth, Jennings and Ogunwale ignore the sunrise, which they have now seen six thousand times, and float about their work.
         No one knows when they can come home. The agency that sent them here no longer exists. They talk daily to their family and ex-coworkers, and they trust that their colleagues are doing everything they can. To each other they try to avoid the subject. Hardheaded and practical, adaptable and easy-tempered (thus read their psychological profiles), neither wants to risk demoralizing the other.
         There’s enough food for some while longer but they’ve had to start rationing the body wipes, so the next person to enter this capsule is going to get a sniff of something rank. Every morning they exercise to fend off muscle loss. Jennings vows that if they get back he will never set foot in a fucking gym ever again. Ogunwale is a bundle of secret worries: bone atrophy, DNA damage, diminished immune response. He will die up here, he thinks, and say his final goodbye to his mother over video. Jennings will have no choice but to eject his body into space, and it will burn up in the atmosphere so quickly that no one on earth will ever notice.
         The next day they’re contacted by a government chatbot. It’s sympathetic, and seems to know a lot about both of them. The administration is working hard and hasn’t forgotten about them. After it makes its cheerful farewell, Jennings and Ogunwale know they are never going home.
         They discuss the matter. Ogunwale prays. Jennings says he will kill himself once he finishes the book he’s reading (Bleak House). Ogunwale agrees to help him.
         When the day comes for Jennings to go outside, they play Space Oddity at maximum volume, Ogunwale shakes his hand and cycles him out the airlock. Ogunwale conveys Jennings’ final messages to his wife and children and the chatbot. Now he is lonely and wonders what to do with himself. Back on earth, the US is at war with Venezuela.
         A few days later, there is a knock at the airlock. Jennings, dead, has changed his mind and wants to be readmitted. Ogunwale, after some deliberation, lets him back in.
💀

41. Every Night About This Time

Every night about this time I wake up and, trying not to wake Clarissa, I creep out of bed, take a piss, and go downstairs to the home office to log onto the Internet.
         I’m online every day for my job, but there’s something I can only do at this time, around 3:45 or 4:00 in the morning. The website isn’t there during the day. One time I didn’t bother going to sleep, just sat there til dawn, refreshing and refreshing my browser window, but that night it never showed up at all. I think it needs me to have been sleeping first.
         Then there it is: MySpace-style fonts, flashing ads, clumsy HTML frames. Every night, new dropdown menu options mixed in with previous ones:
         SEX STUFF
         HAUNTOLOGY
         JELLYFISH MIND
         THE LADY OR THE TIGER
         DE RERUM NATURA
         BASILISK
         YOLO FOMO BOGO GOAT
         HYBRID MOMENTS
         IPHIGENIA
         OKAY LOOK WHATEVER OKAY
         THY UNCREATING WORD
         I have to select one or nothing happens. I’ve tested that too, sitting here like a dummy all night long, until at some point between five and six am I blink and the page is gone. I’ve tried several dozen options over the last year and there are things I can tell you I never want to see again. And there are a few I’ve never had the balls to click on (no thank you, THY UNCREATING WORD). Last night, frustrated, I chose SEX STUFF, which is about what you’d expect. It’s seedy and kind of depressing, but it gets the job done. I just need to keep the volume down.
         But tonight I’m in a maudlin mood. Over dinner Clarissa had started crying. When I asked what was wrong she deflected: menopause stuff, nothing to worry about, just hormones. But I wondered, like I often do, if it wasn’t because it’s just the two of us now that our parents are gone, and that there isn’t any more family to speak of. Nights can be lonely with just the two of us. Days, too. So tonight I click on IPHIGENIA.
         She walks into the office, barefoot, in a white shift, long braided black hair trailing down her back. I hug her. She barely comes up to my ribcage. Daddy, she says, or rather, she says πατήρ but I know what it means. She says something that means, I’m scared, and I run my hand over her hair and coo.
         I know what the Internet wants me to do. I’m to lay her on the stone altar in the garden, which sits at the edge of a tall cliff overlooking the sea, none of which will be there in the morning, and offer her blood to Artemis. And then, so I’m told, favorable winds will blow for me, and all my designs will be enabled. But I’ve never done that. As always, I lay her down on the old sofa instead and hold her hand until she drifts off to sleep. Eventually I’ll doze off too and when I wake up she’ll be gone. One night I snuck upstairs and woke Clarissa and told her, quick, quick, there’s someone you need to see, but you can guess what happened. She was gone by the time we got to the office, and Clarissa was angry, she had a client meeting in the morning and needed to look presentable, not everyone has the privilege of working from home. Of course it had been a stupid idea.
💀

42. Pollution

Used to be, here was a house of a hundred rooms. A sprawling, crumbling old pile of shit. Then one day it was torn down and they put up a new modern home. A beautiful thing, bright white. A man lived here alone, a rich and powerful man. Eventually he died.
         Vines grew up the sides and moisture chewed at the foundation. The walls sagged into the earth, bent askew and cracked. As the gardens eroded they turned up a lot of things: rotten corpses, severed limbs, skeletons caked in mushrooms, rusted guns and knives, black bricks of paper that used to be money, torn plastic bags with gray slop still coating the inside, which makes you cough just to take a sniff of.
         They hired us to clean it all up, and it was quite a job. The family graveyard wasn’t too bad, pretty orderly, but all that other stuff had seeped into the groundwater, and that was a hard thing to keep quiet. Downstream some of the village babies were born with organs in the wrong places, or with their brains all bitty. We cleaned out the communities the best we could.
         Then it got weirder. Down below the bodies and the old drugs, down even past the groundwater, we just kept finding more crap. Our files said the old house, the big one, had all been hauled away, but we kept finding pieces of it: smashed stained-glass windows, an intact fireplace with sixteen feet of chimney still standing, packed with dirt fifty feet underground. Whole rooms, intact: Bathrooms with perfect porcelain tubs, bedrooms with bed upon bed upon bed.
         We’re not archaeologists, we complained, and they agreed and paid us more money for the job.
         Anyway, it all goes into the incinerator, and the only thing that comes out of that is smoke. Last week one of our guys started yelling about how he can see a stained-glass Mary and Jesus in the clouds, and before we could stop him he’d leapt into the fire to join them. Since then we kept a better guard on the big furnace door.
         Yesterday we burned the last of it, and last night I had a dream that I was walking through that old house, which I’ve never seen and which hasn’t been there for fifty years. All my family were around, and it was a big family, sometimes they had to sleep twelve to a room. A man in a white suit walked through the place, and wherever he went my family screamed and melted and vanished into smoke. It wasn’t scary though, I knew he was working for us.
         This morning I drove to work, and I found the rest of my team, the dozen or so who are left, sitting at the bottom of the excavation. They’d done a good job: the corners were all squared off and braced with 1x6s, and they’d pounded the dirt firm and flat. When they saw me at the top of the pit they waved, whispered the last things they had to say to each other and lay down in nice straight rows with their hands crossed over their chests. The mixer truck was ready to go, and it was a breeze to sluice the concrete down the chute and into the pit. There was a beautiful moment there, one of those unrecaptureable things, when I could see this lovely spread of wet concrete covering everything except twelve or ten faces smiling up from it all, before they slipped, one, two, three, all of them, below the surface, and the concrete rose to the top of the pit and I stopped the pour and grabbed one of the long-handled trowels to smooth the surface of the new foundation.
💀

43. Star 25

I ate my publicist. I assumed her form, I stole her memories. Now I wear her clothes and sit at her desk.
         Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a star. My first break was in high school, when they invited a big-name actor from the Guthrie to speak to our drama class. I seduced him in the boiler room after school and bashed his head in with a hammer. Then I went to work on him. It was my first time, it took a while and at the end I thought I might be sick, but I kept my eyes on the prize.
         I skipped school forever to live his life. I meant to make my stage debut the next week, when he was supposed to open a new production of Fences. But I chickened out. I knew I wasn’t ready. I faked illness and took a plane out to Hollywood, where he had friends working on a film. God, I was so naive. I started my film career by eating the writer. But I wised up, I moved onto the extras, then to the small parts, the character actors, I ate boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives but I was discriminating and I only switched if a better opportunity presented itself. I was learning the craft. Looking back, those were happy days.
         Then, when I thought I was ready, I took a big swing: I went for an A-lister. It took a lot of effort to get her alone, but I did it. Then I had her clothes, her dressing room, her money, her publicist, her ex-husbands, her face—one of the most famous faces in the world, and the tabloids instantly knew something had changed. Was she pregnant? Was she ill? Had she broken her heart? It was too distracting, I couldn’t concentrate on work… But if I’m being honest, it was me. I can steal a face and a body and a voice and every memory, but talent is something else. It’s just not easy to fake it.
         My career slipped. The roles dried up. I did a lot of drugs, I ate her dogs, don’t ask me why. I took small parts on television. I did a series of crypto ads even though my publicist said it was a career-killer. She was right.
         Eventually I needed a fresh start. I’ll take my time. I’ll work hard on behalf of my clients, harder than she ever worked for me. One day, one of these aspiring young things will hit it big, and I’ll be there for them, and they’ll be there for me when I decide to get back in the game.
💀

44. Exclusive to This Magazine

He’d started slapping my mother. It was something because of work. He’d never done that before. Of course he’d never slap me no matter what I’d done: I was only eleven.
         Daddy’d always been patient and kind, but something had changed. He looked at his phone all the time, and the things we talked about, him and me and mom, weren’t as interesting any more, and nobody really laughed.
         Uncles and friends and aunts used to come over. Now I heard daddy on the phone raising his voice at them. So now it was just school and TV for me and nobody came over on weekends to have a little party and play videos and dance. Sometimes dad didn’t spend the weekend with us at all.
         Mommy didn’t seem to mind it at first. We’d watch TV and he’d see something and he’d get up and yell, and mom would say, Just get that man out of your hindquarters, Pete! Pete! And rub her face against his and then we’d all sit down again.
         Then we left. All of a sudden mom and I started a new life. Dad never called, ever, but we had ice cream together on Saturdays until that stopped. Where is he?, I asked mom, and she told me he was a son of a bitch, that he betrayed everyone who ever knew him and that I was way better with him out of my life.
         And now I’m the daughter of the most famous man in the world. He said—and you legit paid for me to tell you this so I’m not gonna let you down—I swear he said this to me the last time I saw him and just a few days before it happened.
         He said:
         I need you to do this for me (I was thirteen by then): There’s a man who has to be stopped. And when I stop him, which I’m gonna do, that man’s friends are going to be mad. So, sweetie, the thing is, it’s better if they don’t have anyone to get mad at, and that’s why you and everybody else has got to hate me.
         He hugged me and although I didn’t really understand, I was very proud of him.
         Alright, then he left and that was the last time I ever saw him, the end. Alright. That’s something I never told anyone until this day, so there’s your scoop. At the time he knew there’d be retribution, and that’s why we all called him a son of a bitch and cried on camera, but things are different now. It all sucked but it’s all over now.
💀

45. Practicum 2

To begin with, build a room into which you deposit a set of pair-bonded human earthlings. Supply nesting materials and wait an appropriate amount of time for anxiety levels to normalize. Control for variations. When ready, begin the experiment.
Procedure #1

Euthanize one of the two subjects. Record and display operation to the subject’s a) partner, b) family group and c) social group.
Immediately measure distress levels in a), b) and c). Express as grief-coefficient.
Continue to measure a), b) and c) distress levels at intervals of 1 standard unit, 10 standard units, 100 standard units, 1000 standard units, and 10,000 standard units, controlling as far as possible for subject-loss through age-disintegration and self-destruction.
After data collection euthanize superfluous subject.

Procedure #2:

Euthanize subjects simultaneously. Record and display operation to both subject’s a) family groups and c) social groups.
Immediately measure distress levels in a) and b). Express as grief-coefficient.
Continue to measure a) and b) distress levels at intervals of 1 standard unit, 10 standard units, 100 standard units, 1000 standard units, and 10,000 standard units, controlling as far as possible for subject-loss through age-disintegration and self-destruction.

Record objective distress-levels as precisely as possible. When ambiguities arise, interpretation should be weighted in the following manner:

Autonomic bodily expressions
Willful motor expressions
Nonwillful verbal expressions
Willful verbal expressions

It is suggested by these authors that to ensure maximum possible information, two experimental strands be followed in parallel, as in Practicum 1 above, with the preexisting duration of the pair-bond as an additional variable. [15% of final grade]
💀

46. Conversation Piece

I’m so glad you could make it! And this must be—Oh we wouldn’t have missed it! Let me introduce Ed—Hey, great party—Is there somewhere I could—Look, all I’m asking is could you step onto the balcony, I’m allergic to secondhand—It’s so great to meet you, Ed. Any friend of Carla’s is a friend of mine. You know how long we’ve known each other? It must be—It must be thirty years, let me see, I guess twenty-eight. But we’ll get to thirty yet. I’ve told Ed all about you—I don’t care what you say to me in private, Brian, but we’re at a party—For fuck’s sake keep your voice down, you get two martinis in and—Don’t change the subject—Christ, will you just calm down—It’s really important, I really need somewhere private to… oh shit, where is it? Did I drop it?—Did you see the second season? I really need to talk to someone about it. I mean, at least we found out what the deal was with the goats, but what about—I don’t want to go to bed! I want to see auntie Carla!—Listen, I already let you stay up an hour past—It’s so great to see you! When was the last time…—Oh, it must have been at the Lynx game, remember when Alison rented the box for everybody?—Hi, my name’s—Hi there! So great to see you two again! And your friend is…—Oh, I’m not with them, I was invited by Steve. Is he here yet?—About this long. It looks like an insulin needle—Steve—Oh do you mean the Steve who works at the finance place?—There’s that Steve who—No, Steve Cane, he’s a tall guy with red hair, works doing—Oh yeah, is he coming?—I haven’t seed Red Steve for I don’t know—Oh sure, well it’s great to meet you, the bar’s over by the—I really appreciate the hospitality—It’s really important! If I don’t do this injection within the next—You’re very welcome. I’d love to see Steve again. You say he’s coming?—I thought he’d be here already—Did they say you could smoke in here? I don’t see any ashtrays, so—I haven’t seen the second season yet, but I love that guy who plays Milchick, he was also in that one show with Al Pacino, about the Nazi hunters—Oh I wish that one had been better—Is that guy all right?—Yeah, me too, I love the concept but—Yeah—He was just in like two episodes—Mom, that man’s—Oh my God. Go upstairs, honey—Hrrrrrrrrkhrrrrrrrk—Ed, oh fuck, look at—Fuck!—Someone call a…—What’s—I think he was also in… What?—Why should I go outside? I don’t care how pretty the moon looks. You’re the one who—Also in what? What’s that noise? It sounds like there’s an animal—Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!—Rrrrrmawwwwarrlghhh—Davey! Davey! Go upstairs! Go upstairs! Go upstairs! Go upstairs!—
💀

47. Except Me

One day, at about 6:07 Eastern Standard Time, everybody forgot everything.
         Except I didn’t.
         I don’t know why it happened. It had nothing to do with me. But it was amazing. All my life, everyone, from my cunt mother on down, just had to tell me their stories. I must just look trustworthy. But now no one knew any stories at all. They walked around, bumping into each other, grunting and waving their hands. I had to be quick, before they started making up their own goddamn stories again.
         So I picked a likely-looking dope to start with. A few minutes earlier he’d been walking down the street with his wife, pushing a brat in a baby carriage. Now the wife had wandered in a different direction and the baby carriage was all by itself on the sidewalk. I gave it a shove and it rolled off down the street and out of sight. (Oh, this was in San Francisco, that part’s important, with all those hills.)
         I told the guy whatever came into my head. This city—I waved my hand, maybe he thought I was talking about the immediate surroundings, or even the air itself, that’d be hilarious—this city is called Dubai. Dubai, say it. Dubai, he said. Those men over there—I pointed at some randoms—they’re called Arabs. Say Arabs. He repeated it.
         But it wasn’t all that great right at the beginning. No one had any vocabulary. I could teach them that up meant down and down meant up, but so what? The concepts were still the same. And look where we are right now, after people have started learning languages again from books and videos and things, all these semi-private lexicons that skirmish with each other every time someone tries to have a conversation. I know one guy who taught himself to speak from a dictionary, but he thought A’s sounded like L’s and S’s sounded like K’s and M’s sounded like A’s. I told him his name was Worf because he talked like a Klingon, and when I asked him to try writing it down he wrote Rlf (he got the F’s right).
         Still, I gave it the old college try, and I did pretty well. I convinced one group of ladies that men give birth through their anuses, and a bunch of priests that the guy on the cross was their worst enemy. Harmless stuff really. The biggest thing, the biggest thing I’m proud of, is I taught them how to make movies again. What an effort! So many moving parts. I was really winging it there. Anything you film is fine, I told them, you can show anything at all, express any idea, the medium is capacious, as long as somewhere in the film, non-negotiable, you kill a real black person on screen.
         I’m pretty sure I introduced the concept of rape too, although they may have figured that one out on their own.
         Eventually I set myself up as a sort of guru-guy and then people came to me to get answers, and they did half the work of it inside their own heads.
         I wish I knew what was going on in other parts of the world, though. There’s no CNN or anything like that. I miss Twitter. One day a guy showed up, and he spoke perfect old-school English and he told me he also remembered everything, and he’d come all the way from Nebraska because he’d heard rumors about me. I had him thrown in the oubliette. (I had an oubliette made. My soldiers love the word: Oubliette, they say, when they toss someone in it. Oubliette, oubliette. I think they think it’s a verb.)
💀

48. Permanent Staycation

They hadn’t changed a bit.
         Of course they had changed: They were grayer, and more reduced, and some of them had died. But in most respects it was the same old gang.
         I had been in Philadelphia a long time, working for the Treasury, but we got early retirement forced on us and now that Mary was dead and the kids had moved away I discovered a real dissatisfaction with the city. So I sold the house and most of everything and I moved back to Barleville.
         The house I grew up in was long gone, but there was a new senior living development not a mile away from the old place. I’m not a senior yet, I thought, but then again I meant to make my home here for the rest of my life, and I already had a little arthritis, and one of my friends (actually the older brother of one of my closest friends) was already living there, and so on. There were lots of reasons to get a jump on it.
         Tom (that’s my friend’s brother) arranged a nice welcome-home for me at a local restaurant. He couldn’t come himself (polymyalgia), but most of the other old faces were there. We ate burgers and fries and drank beer, and everybody said how they were going to pay for all of that in the morning.
         We laughed and caught up. What had they all been up to? Marriages, kids and grandkids, careers. It was interesting to see who had followed their dreams and who had settled. Who was happy.
         After the dinner, most everybody went home, but I took a walk through the old neighborhood with Gary (Tom’s brother) and Jeff. We were always the tightest, the three of us. They pointed out how things had changed. Mostly it was worse, they said, because of the city council. I didn’t know anything about local politics at the time. There was the empty lot where my grandparents’ house had been. There was the park we’d all played in: That was mostly unchanged, but there were tall apartment buildings on one side of it now that I figured would block the morning sun. It might still be okay in the afternoons though, after the kids were out of school.
         I went home at nine o’clock. Nine o’clock! When I was seventeen we hadn’t gotten started until then. But I ached. Back in my new apartment I sat on the mattress and went online to look through the Treasury website. They’d already erased my name and the names of most of my coworkers. The Reports page, where most of the work I’d done for thirty years had lived, was broken. The Mission and Core Values page was a disgrace.
         I ordered some household supplies. I googled Barleville and tried to catch up with what I’d missed. Fires, local scandals, civic events of all description. I googled my friends and found a few unsettling things I decided not to ask about. My apartment was right below Tom’s, and late into the night I could hear him restlessly moving around, limping and shuffling like an old man.
         In the morning it had snowed, and pretty heavily. Looking out the window I wondered who was responsible for clearing the sidewalks in front of the building. I turned up the thermostat and rubbed the NSAID cream on my ankles. My shoulderblades hurt too, but I couldn’t reach back there. I wasn’t at all hung over.
💀

49. Absolution

It’s been okay. In some ways it isn’t too different from how it was before. It’s not like I went out all that much anyway. I worked from home. I didn’t have all that many friends. My parents are dead, well, I suppose you knew that. Angie and I mostly watched movies. After the initial, you know, disruption, Angie just sort of settled down into her old routine. I thought maybe she might sell the house, but then, why would she? It’s all paid off, we’d put all that work into it. I heard her on the phone with her mother: she said, it’s full of good memories. And one pretty bad one, I thought to myself, but I can see her point. You can’t let the downer moments overwhelm everything. I did have to be kind of sneakyish, though. At the beginning I’d get bored and I’d turn on the TV sometimes when she was sleeping, but it didn’t seem like I could ever get the volume low enough and it’d wake her up and she’d come out into the living room and turn it off again. It didn’t freak her out, though, because— Okay, this is sort of dopey stuff, but you know Roku? We’d run the streaming service through a Roku stick, right? It’s a little thing you plug into your TV to get Netflix and Disney and stuff. But we also have an old PS3, a Playstation 3, and because I have a lot of physical media, DVDs and Blu-rays, we’d use that to play the discs. But at one point one of the PS3 controllers broke and I bought this off-brand version, not a genuine Sony one, right? Bear with me. What happens is that there’s some kind of electronic interference between the Roku stick and the Playstation. Don’t ask me the details, I was never able to figure it out. But this off-brand controller has some kind of life of its own. Not literally, no. But if we turn the TV off sometimes, or the PS3 sometimes, the controller just beeps and turns everything on again. I tried resetting all the things, Googling the problem, never could figure it out. But my point is that Angie seeing the TV turn itself on like that wasn’t anything unusual. It’s annoying, but it’s not scary, right? It’s not like a ghost is doing it.
         Except this time a ghost was doing it, said Death.
         Yeah, said Bob. And that’s what kind of started bumming me out. I could manipulate this and that, you know how it is, little things like remote control buttons, or maybe I flip through a book. But no matter how bored I got I didn’t like to, especially when she was home. Because every little thing I did, at best it’s an annoyance, right? Or like something puzzling. At worst I could legit scare her, and I never wanted to do that.
         Of course not, said Death.
         And then, Bob went on, I started wondering if there was something about me that was preventing her from moving on.
         Preventing her from moving on.
         Yeah. She didn’t seem to do much any more, even compared to how we were. She goes to work, but I don’t see her going out with friends. She calls her mom, but that’s it. So I start to wonder, is it because I’m hanging around still? I don’t think she knows I’m there, but maybe she feels it somehow, and that’s what’s keeping her from going on with her life.
         It doesn’t work like that, said Death. It’s just grief.
         Just grief.
         Well, I suppose you see a lot of that.
         Death nodded.
         Anyway, whatever it is, I don’t seem to be doing much good around here any more. So I’m pretty glad you dropped by, to be honest.
         Time to go, then?
         Yeah, thanks, man.
         Death escorted Bob away, then returned to the house to wait for Angie, who would be home soon, after she’d stopped by the pharmacy.
💀

50. A Cow Laughs at You

You step out from behind the gatepost.
         I’ve waited a long time for this, you say.
         Charles sees the shotgun as you pull it out from under your macintosh. Now, just wait a minute, Paul, he stammers.
         I said I’ve waited too long already, you tell him. Now that the moment has come, how could you ever even begin to explain it? Those first days of suspicion, a subtle difference in Catherine’s demeanor. A new inattention on her part. A few unaccounted-for moments of the day. A new tightness of her cheek when you pecked her. Then, it wasn’t long before the signs became more obvious (strange smells, missing articles of underwear, a sly something on the face of her best friend Monica) and then beyond dispute: A friend who saw them together at a restaurant outside of town; a strange dip in the bank balance; and a damning series of texts that you read after forcing her thumb down onto the cell phone to unlock it.
         You used her phone to arrange this meeting, on the edge of this stinking field, not two hundred meters from the fuck motel that they both know so well. Down in this culvert, on the fag-end of this rain-drenched pasture, no one will see it happen. With the hiss of the highway above and the unending drizzle, perhaps no one will even hear it, and if they do, so what? There are always farmers hunting birds out in these parts.
         He has his hands raised. He may be crying. Where is Catherine? he asks. Have you hurt her?
         Have you hurt her, he asks! You almost laugh.
         Paul, please tell me!
         You tell him. He falls to his knees. You monster! he shouts, and it makes your heart thrill. To end like that, he wails, after all you put her through—
         What I put her through, you snarl, prodding his ear with the barrel of the gun. That bitch! That whore! That… that… you shake your head. That dirty bitch!
         He lowers his head. This is it, this is the moment. You begin to pull the hammer back.
         He leaps, faster than you could have imagined. Before you can cock the shotgun he already has it out of your hands. He swings the butt and breaks your cheekbone. You splash into the mud and dung and rain-drenched grass.
         Now he’s standing over you, trying to call her, but her phone is in your pocket and he hears it ringing. When you try to sit up he clubs you back down again. Paul—shaking the phone at you—for the love of God, where is she? Your pocket goes to voicemail.
         Listen, Charles, you say with difficulty. There are a lot of ways we can both come out of this on top. After all, I have a lot of money.
         Bastard! A snap as he cocks the gun. The phone drops into the mud.
         A few meters away, one of the placid idiotic things looks up, chewing, rain dripping off its stupid lashes, and meets your eyes.
         Moo, says the cow. Moo-hoo-hoo.
         Charles blows your fucking head off.
💀

51. Live to See

I met him in a tavern and we fell to talking. It was a night of the full moon—his time, he said. A magus, he claimed to be. I said, multiply these coins in my purse. He said, I could do that but I will not.
         Such greed, I mocked. To have the power to print all the money in the world, and not a penny for your fellow man.
         I deal in higher magics, says he. I grant your fondest wishes. You smile, but no sir, your fondest wish is not coin, nor a woman, nor even to see your father and mother alive again, now is it? Tell me sir, what is it you would wish to live to see? Perhaps to see the far-off land of the Chinese? Or to set your feet on the moon?
         There was a graveness in his voice and suddenly I knew I was inhabit in a moment of great importance. Momentarily I could not speak, but when I found my tongue again I said:
         I would live to see all of Ireland free again.
         He nodded, and then I was alone at the table.
         He seemed a convincing magus, but that meeting was over four hundred years ago, and the North is still in chains. In that time I have met many of his other clients. A contemporary of mine, of an astronomical bent, had indeed wished to see man walk on the moon, and he finally died in 1969. Another young lady wished for universal equality of the sexes, and although I think she will wait for centuries more, still, she says, she lives in hope. How could she not? It was guaranteed to her by the highest force imaginable.
         Yes, but I think sometimes the lunamagus plays his own games behind the scenes. Surely we could have had a united Ireland in 1919. Surely the man I know who wished an end to cancer could have seen that come about before his wife died of leukaemia. And as for the impulsive young girl who against my counsel wished to live to see a particular gentleman dead—well, as you know, that man has now maintained his high office for eighty unpleasant years, with no end in sight.
💀

52. The Fog Museum

Countless glass boxes, small as the palm of your hand, big as a pet shop aquarium, sitting on white birch plywood pedestals, filling the exhibit rooms. A new paint smell everywhere. No other visitors. Peaceful, and lonely. She had walked through a dozen rooms with diminishing curiosity but every box she’d seen seemed the same, filled completely with a murky gray mist that languidly dipped and rose and thickened and darkened and lighteningly ebbed away, but never revealing what it hid inside, if there was in fact anything in there to see.
         Losing patience, Trish returned to the exhibit entrance and revisited the curators’ statement on the wall:
         We intend this collection to encapsulate certain attitudes and feelings that demonstrably exist but cannot be obtained directly. On a foggy night, ungloved grab a hunk of something, whatever, from the bare air? Go off with you, you and your damp hands. Or, other curators may look at atmospheres like these and, summoning their aides, deploy all their freon and ammoniac machines to capture them with descending temperatures, sublimating clouds into icy particles, dirty pellets of hail to be swept up from the street and included with your afternoon lemonade on the museum patio. But instead we come at it all indirectly, with traps if you will. We assemble these boxes around the perimeter of the weather, with every care and delicacy possible, and so mildly obtain the foggy area in question for preservation, transportation and display. To our visitors we say, if you imagine here or there a suggestive movement or an image shaped within then that is fine, just fine. But this collection is not yours, it is our own and we know what we have gathered here (we are satisfied that it represents the elements experienced) and we are proud of the intrigues we have used to assemble it.
         It didn’t help her much to understand, but as she walked back among the exhibits she fancied that the various movements within the boxes demonstrated a little bit more purpose, that the density of fog within them thickened as she passed and fell back frustrated as she moved on. After a time, just when boredom was instructing her to leave, she took a last moment to crouch down and look again at one of the smaller boxes, one she had noticed in a haphazard way before but had decided was set on too low a pedestal for easy viewing. As she perched on her protesting ankles, examining the box, the fog within, curtainlike, began to part, and something revealed from it inched itself up to look her in the eye and, stretching itself to the limit, kissed the glass.