Bob is Paid a Visit by Tim

Tim arrested Bob’s momentum with a hand on the elbow in the busy hallway. They retired to a nearby potted plant out of traffic where they had a discourse, at Tim’s urgent insistence. “Schizophrenia, OCD, Bipolarity.”

Bob made a straining expression, his face turning red. “What’s the matter?” asked Tim.

“I’m trying to give a shit,” Bob said. Tim rolled his eyes and said, “I’m getting to the point!”

Tim spread his hands apart, framing a single phrase his mouth sounded: “Quantum Entanglement.”

Bob’s face turned red again, and someone brushed brusquely against Tim.

“Geez!” Tim said over his shoulder, and turned to Bob. “Just listen a moment. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Bob sighed, resigned himself to this oddity. “Yes, but the only thing I know about the subject is that it royally pissed off Einstein.”

“Yes! And he was the very one who formulated the theory! Okay… I’m going to try and explain how it works. This is affecting the spin properties of particles, but I’m going to use examples. Don’t think that this is actual; the reality is infinitely more complicated than this…”

“Yes, Tim.” Bob looked at his watch. “Go on.”

“Okay, let’s say when your arm goes down, someone’s arm goes up, and vice versa.”

“Ok.”

“If someone moves his head forward, your head goes backwards, and when he sits down, you stand up.”

“Yes, an oppositional Simon Says, got it.”

“That’s right! Ok, free will. Is there such a thing?”

“Hell, yeah!” Bob lightly slapped Tim, who drew back, shocked. “Yep, that’s free will, baby!”

Tim chuckled. “You slapped me because someone’s arm moved down.”

“Bullshit.”

“Remember, that’s just an analogy! That’s what quantum entanglement is… two particles are separated across a distance, yet communicate their spatial locations. Got it?”

“Yes,” Bob said wearily. “You’re talking about spin. So if a particle spins up its complement spins down.”

“Yes! Now you see?!”

“No.”

Tim sighed. “Free will is made obsolete. If the particles in your body respond to the behavior of a complementary particle, was it really yourself that initiated that action?”

Interest had entered Bob’s eyes. “Wow, that’s a mind-bender. Well, supposing quantum physics is right, that is.”

“That’s true,” Tim conceded. “Now to my original point. OCD.”

“Gesundheit!”

“Har har. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder individuals find they have to repeat a certain sequence of actions before they are satisfied.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Think I got my degree and forgot everything?” Bob became misty eyed. “My aunt had OCD. I remember one time she had to walk on some bad sidewalk. She couldn’t step on the cracks. If she did, she had to spin around ten times, but when she did that, she kept stepping on the cracks. It took us forever to get her away from that three foot stretch of concrete.”

“Geez. Well, I propose that most psychological disorders, especially OCD are actually differential gears in the great machine that is reality!”

“How’s that, Tim?” Bob had given up on getting home early.

“Reality is pretty much, no matter how much we argue about it, the sum of human perception. Reality is only what we measure with our senses. Bohm suggests reality exists not a concrete location, but a consensual holographic manifestation of our minds. It is essentially a human condition. But there is an underlying logic to it, a mathematical reality. OCD is how the system fixes itself, with some unfortunate individuals besotted with the behavioral issues therein. “

“Let me get this straight… people are OCD just to correct the equation, balance the account so to say? What about schizophrenia?”

“You’re sharper than I thought–”

“Gee, thanks. Forgetting about the degree there, Tim.”

“–and, as for schizophrenics, the brain is made up of atoms. Thoughts rise from the electricity activity of the brain and are affected as well…”

“That’s a lot to wrap my head around. Now fuck off, Tim,” Bob said and pushed Tim with an outstretched forefinger. “I’m billing you for this. If you come to me again outside our regularly scheduled programming, I’ll have security toss you out, and you can get sikowanalized somewhere else!”

Soul Chameleon

At eight years old, he had ordered a Hollywood stage make-up kit. By the time he was fifteen he had a small empire.

He would pick pockets, take only the driver’s license, and return the wallets for the reward (sometimes cash, often more substantial than the amount stolen, and always, the satisfaction of a good deed done). An hour or two of his art, he would leave his room using a face his father would not have recognized, to purchase a massive amount of alcohol. He sold it to the party circles of his school and the students of a local college at a mark up of twenty percent. They didn’t mind; better someone else went through the hassle.

Such was his skill, that he was arrested one night for drunk driving, and walked home the next morning. He had been wearing the face of a grizzled old man, looking very much like a Santa Claus gone to seed. They held him in lock down until the morning. He stepped out into the bright sunlight at the precinct, feeling slightly sorry for the old gentleman whose identity he’d stolen; he would be receiving a court summons he didn’t deserve.

At fifteen he had been talented, but at twenty-two he was a soul chameleon. He was capable of mimicking a person’s body language after a short time within proximity, essentially also adopting the person’s personality.

Having long abandoned his original enterprise because it bored him, he courted the government. Its espionage department found him to their taste and put his skills to good use. He also moonlighted as a significant member of Team E.V.I.L. during his course in government intelligence, often wreaking havoc on his own projects. Other organizations, criminal and legit, also paid for his services.

Today, he has dissolved into the swarm of identities that make up our world, effortlessly stepping in and out of roles. His employers have lost track of him, but his projects somehow are completed. There is some speculation that he is also one of the head honchos running the show.

Once in a while a man will pause in the street, or at the office, in obvious confusion, his own identity thrown into doubt… then he will smile, and go on as sure as the sun shines.

Flora Bottom

She is a frail woman with a bird’s nest tufts of hair and a pair of glasses, beige and wide and horn-rimmed. She had fallen out of the seventies with a bad coke habit, despite starting the era with flower child sentiments. Today she drives a pale ivory Volkswagen Bug with a cheap, gaudy cloth lei slung around the rearview mirror. Her line of sight barely reaches over the steering wheel. She stops longer that usual at stop signs to smile–her pinched features abruptly sunny, the smile almost too wide–at babies and small children at play.

The Million Man

His favorite trick was: at a meeting, he would lean forward to make a point and slosh across the table, abruptly liquid, swirling and tumbling little men who would scattter and crawl along the ties of horrified businessmen and clamber up the power suits of shrieking women. Children, more often than not, found this delightful and played with his representations, letting them run circles on their palms or climb haltingly upon their fingers. Eventually he would come together, slowly coalescing into a doll-sized figure, growing larger as soon as his errant selves gathered.

Into the World

On the video my daughter is born. I rewind. She is born. I rewind. In that sterile hospital room attended to by women in sterile gowns wielding sterile equipment, my daughter is born.
They push and prod her squalling form.
Her skull is elongated into a cone.
They suck mucus from her nostrils with a bulb.
They throw her arms up, flap those feeble arms.
Rake a finger roughly along her soles.
Her tongue is darling, trembling, modulating sound for the first time.

What of our ancestors who gave birth in caves, forest floors, roughshod cabins?
The modern mind quails.
The bloodied father, pale, perhaps fainted in the opening of a new world.
The mother’s scream startling the wind folk off their branches.

The baby is born and oh is it fucking visceral.

Its wail fills the exhausted silence… or it responds to silence with silence. Either way, it is pressed to the bosom, slick and cooling, the mother’s warmth enfolding it. The umbilical is limp gelatin shivering, still protruding from the point of departure.
Do they know what to do with it?
A gasp as the placenta sluices out with tentative tugs?
Is it separated from the child by the gnashing of molars?
A sharp flint knife?

Man is not a child of instinct, but it lives in him so that he may know what to do when the time comes. There in the sterile hospital room, a miracle has occurred. There on the vistas of the far fog-shroud past, miracles have occurred.

The question is, which is the more profound?

Angels and Devils

When the angels fell dead to the earth, men came to them, fearfully at first, to discover no retribution for the touching of such exalted beings. Their skins were peeled into holy raiments or vellum for the illuminated scrolls of mad doctrines. The silvery blood, mopped from the ground, sold as angel dust by snake oil salesmen; women silvered their eyelashes. Golden ichor that spilled out upon impact were bottled and left to ferment. When the civil war came-the mad monks found the riff-raff a bit too much to bear-the temple containing these vials of ichor lay in siege and was eventually sacked, the cellars caved in. A few of the vials shattered and lent a golden glow for many weeks. Cockroaches and rats feasted upon these and were given intelligence. The bones of the angels were fashioned into weapons of war that burned the flesh like knife through soft butter. The wings were harnessed by icari, the soldiers who dared flight. These stormed an empty Olympus and declared themselves gods. Soothsayers stole the gold-flecked eyeballs hung around the necks of minor kings and spoke of confused futures. The devils came from under on skidmarks of hellfire to delight in the spectacle. Their fear of the supernatural conquered with the flaying of shining angels, men pulled these devils from under bridges, rat warrens, and cesspools. Horns glistening with black blood were turned into war trumpets. The skulls became helmets that sent soldiers into violent frenzies. The jagged teeth, with fingerbones serrated femur swords, or were ground into mystical powders of madness. Thus were the kingdoms of high and low laid to waste by the greed of their wards.

Starfish Island

On the night ocean it looked like one of these beasts in the deep dark that make their own light. A net of red, blue, and green, it rolled with the waves. Pontoon to barrels to patched lifeboats to packets of foam, an makeshift island constructed with the detritus of cities. Leathery soles pounded on planks of fuselages and billboards. Music pulsed, threading past shanties of corrugated plastic and pieces of garbage. Men and women, heavy with fermented grape, swayed under the vegetable garden trellis strung with fairy lights, their sun darkened fingertips brushing plump tomatoes and cucumbers. By the watermelon and grape vine wall played the band, an old rasta on guitar and vocals, a Slick Sid beatnik hooting the sax, Kid Awesome banging on the trash can drums, and Lady Shred riding bass. Behind the watermelon and grape vine wall volunteers pedaled furiously bicycles strung up to a generator, the island light waxing and waning with their effort. Children ran through the sweetsmelling ganja garden to fish alley and threw thin lines baited with fat buzzing insects into the gentle waves to occasionally pull in a silvery scalehound with squeals of delight. The moon painted its single sight on the starfish shape of humanity’s perseverance and watched families sling sleep sighing children into fish net hammocks and sink into a dream of wind before the bicycles whir into silence and the lights fade out in the sea salt air.

Twin Escapades

From the bones of the city they fled in an ancient gasoline vehicle. Its decals had rusted out and the engine howled something fearsome. Putrid smoke lingered in their wake.

Nimble fingered as ever, Gyre had lifted it from the man who held conversations with himself in the garden, Gimble scrambling into the passenger door as they rolled. The topic must have been arresting, the company delightful because the man continued gesturing and speaking even as the air filled with gunshot mingled backfires.

Gimble was the better driver. As soon as Gyre got it rattling across the shattered tarmac, Gimble slipped over his brother’s thin legs and teased it towards a speed long forgotten by its moaning transmission. They were fleeing the ancient but formidable constabulary. Lovingly maintained pistols filled their rheumatoid hands. A few used extreme terrain Segways to traverse the litter choked rubble that passed for roads in their city. The way they were pulling at the triggers suggested either senility or plentiful ammo. Gimble, whooping, figured it was both.

Gyre had pissed off the city Seward by breaking his old lady’s favorite vase. Gimble excaberated the situation by taking the virginity of the man’s only daughter. “It’s like eating a ripe fruit halfway to rot,” Gimble said. “For the love of Jah, she was 45!” Gyre shook his head and said, “Don’t you mean vintage wine? The older it is, the more pleasurable the moment? Have some class, brah!”

The car went off a small rise of ruptured concrete and its tyres tasted air. The landing rattled their teeth and bullet holes ventilated the rear window, too close for comfort. Gimble swerved and floored it. He said moodily, “It was nice. You know I was never good at analogies.”

A Night Out

Kraken McCracken posited Time and its constituents of alternative time-lines begged comparison to a colony of maggots in a festering corpse.

Luigi Linguine argued it more resembled uncooked spaghetti, fragile and stiff and orderly in its box.

Time is nubile and alive, sensual like thirteen glistening women swimming in a bed of cash, cried James Pimp.

On the sidelines of the Great Debate, which took place in a greasy dive where the smoke clung to the ceiling and the drink was a close cousin to paint thinner, a fey figure gestured to a holy hippie.

“Jesus H Christ!”
“Yes?”
“What are these fools going on about?”
“Well, dear Lucifer,” Jesus said, stroking his beard, “One’s a proponent of the flying spaghetti monster. The other is the leader of a Cthlhu sect.”
“And there’s a pimp, a priest-hey, he brought a kid! That’s a direct violation of the drinking age policy.”
“Easy, boy. They don’t do kids anymore. Let’s just say the dwarf gay community has exploded. It’s a lucrative enterprise.”
“Huh,” Lucifer said. “And here I thought I was well informed.” He shrugged. ” The more the merrier. So that’s a pimp, a priest, what about the guy off in the corner screaming at the lady?”
“That’s a scientologist. She’s a psychiatrist. He says old man Hubbard is Time, and she just came for drinks.”
“Wow, She’s bringing out the mace. Nice!”
“Well, old friend, I gotta head out. Despite what they day, I don’t got all the time in the world,” Jesus said. “Thanks for the drinks. Ta-ta.”

Lucifer shrugged. It was time to go to hell, and he might as well bring a party. At the snap of a finger, the bar burst into flame. As they descended, he was dismayed that these damned were so caught up in their debate nobody seemed to notice their abrupt change of circumstance. “Fucking 21st century,” he spat. “So-called age of enlightenment.”

Cost of Arm and Leg

Cancer had damned each one of his limbs. An experimental procedure gave a faint outline of hope. It required the removal of affected appendages; he requested a taxidermist’s touch. They would grace his living room mantel where he would discuss shock art during dinner parties.

Organometallic compounds grown into the nerve endings of his stumps married flesh to machine. His new limbs glistened in configurations of lightweight steel and plastic, its very alien nature prompting a sheath of false flesh. He went to prison on a manslaughter charge during his first week with the cybernetic extensions. In prison he learned control and carried that lesson to the grave.

Movie deals were made, interviews given, the revenue invested wisely. As a result, he lived a life of comparative luxury, and hosted dinner parties whenever he could, languidly pulling at a pipe while commenting on the mantelpiece.

A Hairy Issue

X: I see you finally washed that goatee off
Y: What? Haha, no. I shaved it off like normal people do, you know X: Oh my God. I’m really sorry
Y: What?
X: I-I was just under the impression that-
Y: What!?
X: -that your goatee was just pubic hair glued on, and-
Y: What the fuck? Normal people don’t-
X: -everyone I spoke with thought the same thing-
Y: You talked to people about this!?
X: -but nobody had guts to bring it up to you, you being-
Y: This is bullshit!
X: -the assistant manager

Pillow Talk

She lit a cigarette. Mmm, now I know how Hiroshima felt, she said through a mouthful of smoke. She smiled at him.

Don’t you think that’s in bad taste? he rubbed his eyes. I’m Japanese, and grandmother…she was vaporized! You knew this!

You’re just being a pouty puppy, dearie, she said, dismissing his indignation with a flutter of her hand.

Fuck! He sprang from bed and pulled his pants on. The door slammed. She shrugged and blew a smoke ring.

Drawn

The hills are green and rolling. They are also furred with soft, sickly weed, which, upon stepping, explosively squirt squirming coral-coloured maggots. The sky is wavy with squiggles of cartoon blue, on which cocaine puffs of clouds rollercoast. Above all this is a sun the yellow of pusillanimity sending visible sinewaves of its heatlight falling upon objects to be sucked tight and sent back another-shaped sinewave. Saltwash of earthentear ocean is between the hills, furiously thrashing, sending up gales of piscine life and commas of decapod crustaceans. The scribbles of a child, genetically engineered sea gulls dipped in oil swoop, peeling fans of crude from feathertips. Houses of stone and wood and paper and steel and bamboo barnacle the hills, homes building upon homes, a shaky structure of bustling society. The sun spins like a dot on a dial and brings a tattoo of luminescent duality.

The Dairy Queens

The women of Milk Maid Dairy Products are of the friendly sort, their smiles as white as their product. Rows upon rows of lactating females gossip, give and receive manicures, get their hair done, play crossword puzzles as they are being pumped. “We feed them nothing but the best, all organic, no processed food, no siree!” the spokesperson for Milk Maids cries. “We have milk, cheese, butter, and ice cream!”

God in the Face of Infinity

“So…” God threw the thesis on the table with a thump that resonated in the holy chamber. “This many worlds interpretation…it’s valid?”

The angel’s brow was lined with golden droplets of sweat. “I-it would seem so, O Lord.”

The Almighty sighed and settled heavily into his throne. “The first commandment.” He shook His radiant head. “I’m a fucking fraud. Now everyone’ll think I’m as narcissistic as the devil.”

“But my Lord–,” the angel cut himself short, the consequences of continuing the thought out loud evident in God’s glare.

“In an infinity of Myself, originality is dead. What point is there in continued existence?”

“Lord, if I may interject?” the angel trembled, averting his gaze.

“Go on.”

“Almighty, have you ever watched The Highlander?”

The World’s Youngest Tattoo Artist

He had a really bad tattoo of a starfish left to his navel. When asked about it, he would say with pride, “My son did it.”
“Your son?”
“Yes, he was a seven month old fetus at the time. Let me tell you, you women, you got nothing on me. Try carrying an amateur tattoo artist full term! You got nothing on me!”
“Y-you were pregnant?”
“Yes.” It is a flat no-nonsense statement.
“Huh. H-how did he get the, uh, tattooing equipment?”
He laughs. “I was in prison. The Aryans had ordered a large shipment of tattooing equipment, so I got arrested on larceny and brung them. I guess some got left behind. I guess that was okay. I mean, they didn’t notice, I didn’t get shivved or anything.”

The Fall

The girl in the yellow dress was walking on the stone guard rail. She shouldn’t do that. Six, maybe seven, but she doesn’t know any better. It was a long drop. The surf crashed foamy furrows against old stone. Somebody should tell her to get off. She fell, a daffodil swirling to the black waters below. Nobody saw, or it was everyone was paralyzed. Dimitri saw. Dimitri acted. He flung himself from the tourist crowd and straightened his body like a board. The water was cold, but not as cold as the dread that gripped his heart as he thrashed about, seeking, seeking. Crude zephyrs sent rain sharp fists of brine into his face. The tide tugged at his legs with increasing insistence. It was surface and duck, surface and duck. Eternity visited a minute. His hand brushed a thin thigh, convulsed. Dimitri burst from the surface, pearls of water arcing above his triumphant yell. The girl is scared. She beat against his head, shook like a flower in high wind. Shh, he said, drowning. Breathe. Breathe! Someone had climbed down, thrown a lifesaver. It floated, pitiful and white against the sheer magnitude of nature. He pulled her icy arms around his neck. He barked like a dog. I am a little dog, and I am taking you for a swim. Now be still, girl! He barked again. She strangled him, but it was not so bad. The wave pulled them close, threatening to beat them against the cliff face. Then, a tug. That tug he knew, from his island youth. It spells death. He fought the ocean, gathering the girl in his arms, legs kicking. He tore her arms brutally from his neck. He hurled her onto the thin ring of salvation, the action pushing him in and away. The sky became a hole in his vision, an impossible distance. A pale blur in the peripheral, the girl seizes the lifesaver. She is saved. He has seen. The waters get what they want. A soul.
He gives his for hers.
A smile fills his lung with the ocean.

The Boneyard

In the Boneyard, second rate skeletons worried at the ruptured ground with pick-axes and shovels as a hairy man prowled along the ranks with loud exhortations in the form of blatant threats. The skeletons pulled the coffins one by one from the ground and salvaged the bones of occupants inside. They drew the flesh, if there were any left, upon their faces as caricatures of their lost humanity. It was in this way they were able to build a war machine constructed entirely of human bones. At the end of the week, the Boneyard had no more dead buried, and the hairy man, now containing his unpedigreed locks within a frayed stove-pipe hat, commandeered the army of bone men pulling the bone wagon. His first act of war was to torch the dredged coffins, and it was a frightening spectacle to behold the procession of skeletons pulling a creaking, hulking structure capable of crushing any man or beast in its path, this illuminated from behind by the paroxysm of fire.

Fag Hag Contest Entry

To celebrate the publication of his book, My Life As Adam, the eminently talented Bryan Borland hosted a poetry contest with fag haggotry as the central subject. This is my entry, which didn’t win, and it’s easy to see why once you read the winning submission along with the other mundo excellent submissions.

Ag

Taut asses, slick hairstyles, fine cut of cloth.
They all are men with stiff pricks all around.
Mine is the exception that lays limp
until a short skirt passes along the window.

Tight crotches, gleam cut goatees, trendy skids.
They all are my friends all secure in homogeneity.
Mine is the exception, sui generis
until the short skirt enters the building.

She sidles next to me,
twirls on the barstool,
and orders a sausage
with her lager.

I lean in to tell her
she’s in the wrong place
for wiener.

The sausages here are good, she winks.
I wouldn’t know, I shrug.

Enter the deepening night’s mandatory awkward moment.

Everyone is lost inside their sex,
Tongues probing
murmured exhalations
into ears and mouths.

Some liquor, a milky translucence,
bleeds down a chin,
to be brushed away
by a devil red tongue.

So, I say as she says, So.
Our laughter twists and twines,
the nervous moment shattered.
The room brightens.

I take you don’t graze with the herd, she smiles.
I’m like the sheepdog, I fumble, always-
-nipping at ankles, she finishes.

I can’t contain my giggles.
You could say that, I splutter.

So you came stag, she says. It was not a question.

The hubbub has raised,
The revelry hearkening
to the witching hour’s toll.
Passions are inflamed.

Voices chase ears, shouted.
In a soft corner there are moans,
and at the door a dispute groans.
The liquor light is sexy keen.

In more ways than one, I answer.
I’m the resident fag hag, she giggles.
Surprised our paths haven’t crossed.
We suck at our drinks in pleasant silence.

She raises her hand. I’m Charlie.
My dad always wanted a boy.
I take her hand.

I’m Charlie too, I say.
My dad always wanted a girl named Charlie.

A choked laugh: the bartender glares at her, wiping her beer from his shirt.

A transmigration has taken place,
the room growing larger and larger
as the decadent go off
in knotted pairs and staggered steps

Towards nightshroud sleeping chambers
or further depots of sin under the moon’s falling eye
where urges are wetly satisfied
or forgotten before the new day.

Bye, Charlie! Later, Charlie! Yowza, Charlie!
These, shouted across the way,
amuses us to no end.
Which Charlie, I quip!

With the odd couple nestled in booths
providing the white noise,
that old nervousness seeps in again.

Her almondite eyes glitter
in the twilight of last call.

She takes my hand, her lips forming a heart.

The De-Mojoing of the Author

I am a great artificer in a cut and paste world distilled through the funhouse maze labyrinth of my mind where a thing is reflected and re-reflected into splinters. My art is magic, the same kind of magic as prestidigitation, and shuffles unseen mortal coils down the galumphing gullets that fester flickering in the bath of neuroses encased by bone contouring the shape of my face. The universe, I solipismize, secretly fearing I am not really alone. What is it is transliterated to who is it. The pathways down from the hilled city are convulted, and at the bottom one despairs of ever returning home.