Not bad.

She got paid to stick yummy things in her mouth, which was her passion. Living the dream. Writing for Canada’s Bitchin’ Kitchen. Ontario’s foremost taste-tester. Recently featured in Debbie Does Scallops. Today she was slurping treats in Lightning Bay’s newest ice cream parlor, “Cold Sweats.” Tomorrow she’d be in O’kanana drinking artisanal Lime-Aid and hoovering sushi burritos.

What motivated Natalie was the need to taste it all. Not just ice cream. She wanted to try every exotic fruit, rare spice and illegal meat. Her tongue reached into the cosmos yearning for things she couldn’t articulate, a hopeful proboscis in search of nectar.

What began as an average appetite became something all-consuming. Everything organized itself around fulfilling her appetite. Friendships were portals to a new culture’s cuisine. Boyfriends accompanied her to restaurants. Everything she purchased contributed to her Airmiles, which were used to fly her to places she’d never been for novel edible experiences.

But she’d read that taste buds progressively atrophied and shrank by the age of forty. Natalie only had a few years left and still so much to taste. Of course, she feared she’d gain weight, pig out, lose her edge and beauty. But she had solutions for that. Chew and spit. Binge and purge. 10,000 steps. Portion control. Calorie-tracking.

Today, her job had brought her to a middling parlor in a large, middling town.

“What do you think?” Scott, the Manager asked, somewhat desperately. His translucent, forty-something skin waxy under the fluorescent lights, washed out by a crisp, too-tight, white 50s style uniform. “It’s good right?”

“Four stars! Great work,” she said, smiling her practiced smile. Born with a wide mouth, big gums and a considerable tongue, she controlled her face to avoid becoming a visual symbol for gluttony. A big mouth was too literal.

He sighed with relief. Then, “Not five though?” He put his hand on her shoulder and then quickly removed it. Changing the subject, “Make sure to take a photo of our wishing fountain.” He gestured, “Just installed today. I haven’t even made a wish yet. Guess I should’ve wished for five stars, huh-huh-huh.”

Natalie dryly laughed and snapped a photo she wouldn’t be using. The fountain wasn’t particularly impressive; four feet high with a metallic ice cream statue mounted on top, where water gently dribbled out of a spout. Symbols she didn’t recognize engraved in the basin. Appeared to be made of stone, although it could’ve been fake.

“You can be the first one to make a wish, if you like! I can take your photo. I haven’t had the chance to read through all of the instructions and fine print yet, but you’re supposed to throw in a coin and make a wish. The caveat,” he enunciated, excited to use the word, “is that the wish has to benefit all. It has to be unselfish. I think.”

“Like ending world hunger?”

”Yeah. Like that.”

“What if I wish to end world hunger but then everyone turns to cannibalism?” Natalie yawned. She needed to go purge before she digested more of the various ice creams she’d tried. Go home, write her review and collect her cheque.

“Oh, I see what you mean. Maybe just make a small wish. Like, for example, that your article on ‘Cold Sweats’ is a success! That would benefit both of us.”

“But not everyone.”

“Everyone who reads it and comes to visit would be grateful.”

“Uh huh.” Natalie glanced at the fountain. “Sure.”

“Go ahead,” Scott urged.

“You expect me to throw in my money?”

“Right you are!” He grabbed a dull quarter out of the cash register and handed it to her.

“Am I supposed to make my wish out loud?”

“The instructions didn’t say. But—”

Before Scott could finish, Natalie chucked the quarter into the fountain, announcing her wish only inside her own mind: “I wish to taste everything!”

Quickly adding, “Without gaining a pound!”

Natalie couldn’t afford to add twenty pounds, lest it repel a potential dream-lover. This was her second priority. She loved to be eaten just as much as she loved to eat. A yin/yang thing. Law of Polarity, or something.

“What did you wish for?”

“For your business to thrive. May I use your restroom, please?”

“Of course!” Scott handed her the bathroom key off his hoop. “And thanks for your wish!”

Natalie breezed past him and made her way to the unisex, wheelchair accessible bathroom. Smelled like cheap, pink pump soap and urinal cakes. She tried to keep her lips pursed and breath shallow, lest she inhale the piss atoms and detergent and damage her aging taste buds further.

She planned to make herself puke up a few hundred cals from the various flavours she’d tried. She had a way of doing it without any sound. Without any fanfare. Her teeth were veneered, there was nothing to worry about. Her calcium levels were great. She could vom on command. Her throat muscles were trained. And yes, she did give excellent head.

While mentally preparing herself to purge, a strange flavour arrived in her mouth. As if she’d just licked cotton. Accompanied by a dreadful itch on the back of her calf. Like an insect in her pants. The kind of sensation you might have when a botfly lays its eggs in a bite and the larvae chew their way out. She slapped at her indigo jeans and something a couple inches long wriggled under the denim.

Augh!

Natalie sat on the toilet and yanked at the fabric. It was caught on something inside of her leg. Inside of her leg! She attempted to pull off her jeans, but they were stuck. She forcefully yanked it, leaving a rip in the side of the fabric.

Revealing what was within.

Confusion overrode raw nerve-endings.

Her issue resembled a gash, but it wasn’t bleeding. Its purple and red pulverized edges parted, revealing a set of sharp nibblet teeth.

It was a fucking mouth.

She screamed weakly, a string of nonsensical noises escaping her actual mouth.

The monstrous little maw stuck out its tongue, “Feed me.”

She screamed. For real.

It licked its dreadful lips. “Num, num, num.”

Feed it?

Where was the “food” going to go? Into her fucking leg? She’d just finished a round of cellulite treatments and tanning, and was smooth and ready to get fucked from behind, and now there was a goddamn two inch mouth on her leg!!!

And it was growing.

Whatever it was.

Had this been from her wish?

She stuffed some paper towel into the orifice, put her low-stretch denims back on and rushed out of the bathroom.

“You ok?” Scott asked.

“How do I undo my wish? How do I take it back?”

“What?” He seemed genuinely confused.

“To make the wish stop.”

“Uhhh…”

“Give me the manual,” she said through clenched teeth as Natalie began the process of becoming one with her low rise long & lean’s.

“Ok…” he said, slowly. “Just gimme a second.” He rooted around under the counter for a moment then handed her a small manual. “I need it back.”

Natalie jumped to the page under the words “How to Reverse Your Wish.” It simply read: No takebacks. No refunds. No alterations. No wishing for a new wish to undo a previous wish.

“No, that doesn’t make sense,” she said, her breath quickening.

“Did you change your mind?” Scott whimpered.

“Of course I did!”

“Why don’t you want us to be successful?”

“I have to take the money out, right?” There was only a single quarter in the fountain. Easy peasy. She stuck her hand in and grabbed it.

“Hey!” Scott shouted. “Are we still getting a good review?”

She ignored him and stepped out onto the sidewalk, heading toward her banana yellow ‘74 Pinto (an aesthetic, not practical purchase). “I unwish my wish. I wish to only have one mouth. I don’t need to taste everything! I’m good. I’ve tasted enough. Bread and olive oil, baby. Peanut butter sandwiches. Bland. Love that for me. Adore blandness! I’m good with what I already have! Thank you!”

Natalie sucked back a few Ibuprofens from the glove compartment and bolted. It was two minutes to the two-lane highway out of town. If she stepped on it she could get back to her apartment in less than two hours. She clutched the wheel.

“Hold it together, Natalie!” she slapped her face as she drove through the town.

She debated going to the hospital, but she had a bit of a track record. A history. She’d been flagged, because of her hunger. Food poisoning, injuries, carried away in an ambulance a few times. What if she was imagining the mouth? What if they restrained her again. She feared it was a one more strike situation. She’d be escalated to some kind of ward. Placed on a hold.

She called her most recent, but also not quite ex, ex. Straight to his voicemail. Followed by a “call you back in a few hours” text. She tried her bestie, who was mad at her for blowing off a thing she hosted to go to a thing that had better food. Straight to voicemail. Natalie contemplated calling her parents, but they wouldn’t understand.

Natalie needed to take control of the situation herself. She was micro niche famous and hated the optics. She could lose her career. Tarnish her reputation. The balut “mishap” had cost her jobs. She was sure she could reverse this issue, she just needed some time to think, get naked and assess the situation in private.

But home was far.

The mouth squirmed on the back of her leg under the fabric, tonguing the chunk it had already chewed out.

She swatted at it with a water bottle.

It shrieked.

Natalie accidentally hit the gas pedal, careening into traffic.

The other car swerved just in time, showering the road with honks.

She wasn’t going to make it home. She’d have to get a hotel. Some place where she could lie in a scalding hot bath and suffocate the thing. Probably things. They were colonizing, writhing under her jeans.

Could she drown them? Stab them? Caulk them? Poison them? Would it poison her? Would she drown? And what if she did all of these things and they kept proliferating? In the distance, Hollywood North Hotel was just off the highway. She could get there in less than a minute.

“I’m hungry!” Another one wailed.

Natalie ripped into the parking lot, and fumbled for her long, beige trench coat, grateful for her messy car and its various piles of things she was too lazy to take into her apartment. Something to add an extra layer of muffling, and cover any visible mouths.

She limped into the reception with her large tote. “Hi, I need a room for tonight.”

“Welcome to Hollywood North. Just you?” The receptionist, an unstylish but friendly young woman, typed on the keyboard.

“Yes.”

Click.

Tap.

Natalie could taste pants.

She could taste the shea butter she’d put on in the morning.

Click.

“Standard or upgrade?”

Tap.

She could taste polycotton.

Her shirt became tighter.

“Do any have a big bath tub or a jacuzzi?”

Click.

Tap.

“Yes, ma’am. We have a honeymoon suite available,” the girl eyeballed her. “Needing some R&R? TLC? Weekend away?”

“Yes. All the things,” Natalie said, slapping her card down impatiently.

“I’M HUNGRY,” a chorus of voices sang from inside her pants.

The receptionist paused, unsettled for a moment, then blankly smiled. “You’re in luck, we’re getting ready for dinner. There’s a room service menu on the desk in your suite but you’re also welcome to join us in the dining room.”

Click.

Tap.

The Ibuprofen was doing nothing for the burning, stinging, itching she was experiencing, but the anxiety over her beach bod, her future, her career, was much worse.

Natalie coughed over the chewing noises the mouths made as they gobbled up her jeans and shirt.

Tapped the counter with her nails over the muffled cries for “MORE!”

“Just a moment,” the receptionist offered.

Natalie cleared her throat to drown out the sounds of licking, chewing, consuming as her jeans disappeared.

“Third door on the top floor,” the girl said, still smiling. “If you have a visitor, just make sure they sign in.”

The receptionist handed her the room card and Natalie breathed a sigh of relief, “Thanks so much!”

She ran for the elevator. Hollywood North Hotel was a humble five floors. She pressed ‘5’ over and over until the doors closed. Almost there.

“Feed me!”

“I’m hungry!”

“Fill me!”

The door opened to a dingy, carpeted floor and she rushed for her room door.

She swiped.

It didn’t open.

Swiped.

Nothing.

Swiped.

“Open!”

Swiped.

“I’m hungry!!!”

“Need help?” A chipper fifty-something guy in a polo shirt and chinos approached from the other end of the hallway, his sunburn making his white teeth appear to be glowing.

“Nope I’m good. Just trying to get into my hotel room,” she said, attempting to position her body in a way that hid the mouths but she wasn’t even sure what was going on under the trench coat.

“Allow me,” he said and took the card from her hand, swiping it with a quick gesture. It unlocked. “I stay here frequently. You gotta swipe slow to medium. You were swiping too fast.” He grinned before his face twisted into a wolf’s sneer.

He looked down.

She looked down.

Her leg had wrapped itself around his leg.

“Lonely this evening?” he said, not removing her leg.

She hadn’t consciously done that. It had just happened. And her leg was trying to eat his leg. A dozen mouths had ripped through her pants and were attempting to gnaw through his.

“Hey!” he grunted and pushed her off, knocking her into the wall. “Miss me with that kinky shit.”

She thrust her way into her room and locked the door.

A large jacuzzi tub sat center stage overlooking the stunning parking lot. Romantic. Natalie turned on the water at full blast and attempted to peel off her clothing items, which were moth-eaten now. Her pants, practically non-existent. Her underwear miraculously intact.

“Feed me!”

“Fill me!”

“More! More! More!”

The mouths chanted.

All over her semi-athletic, expensively bronzed and toned body were screaming mouths. Some one inch wide, some four.

“MORE!!!”

She feared for the scars this would leave. Dozens of mouths all over her body. Many with teeth. Some with long tongues. She dared not look in the mirror.

When the tub had filled enough, she put her feet in. It was so hot she recoiled. The mouths screeched and bubbled.

“Fuck you!” She spat at them. The pain would be worth it. She lay down in the scalding water as it kept filling. She pinched her nose and submerged herself. Submerged them. Suffocated them.

Die, die, die.

It was scalding hot.

It seared.

Everything hurt to the point where almost nothing hurt.

Then suddenly Natalie wasn’t surrounded by water.

The mouths were drinking it.

Lapping it up.

Natalie sat up. Her body increased in volume but not weight, skin puffed up with water. She was expanding. Devouring. Sucking it all up. Just like she’d wished for.

She attempted to make herself puke. Visions of Dr. Pimple Popper, memories of food poisoning, the worst things she’d ever tasted - nothing worked. She could get rid of it, just like she always did. But nothing came out.

Nothing except a scream.

She punched one of the mouths on her leg. Covered it with her hand. “Die!”

It bit her finger.

It chomped down on bone.

It tore her flesh off.

“Mmmm num num num,” the mouths said in unison.

Natalie was now dining on herself. Bleeding everywhere.

She tasted like pork.

Undercooked. Unseasoned. Coppery.

Natalie tried waterboarding them, straight from the tap. Maybe she could choke some before they had a chance to swallow, and she rammed the mouth-hole on her left leg into the tap and it screamed and choked but all of the mouths around it compensated for the excess water.

Natalie was expanding. She was growing.

Her skin was stretching.

Her tits were aspirational.

But covered in screaming sores.

She wasn’t gaining weight or flesh, she was evolving. The wider the mouths grew, the bigger she got.

She turned off the tap.

Surely there was something else she could do.

“Yum, yum, yum,” the tongues lolled around for nearby flesh.

The mouths on her thighs turned on each other and consumed the neighboring flesh.

Her thighs stuck together in mutually assured destruction.

Blood filled the jacuzzi as she tried to pry them apart, stretched out as far away from each other as she could possibly manage. Spread eagle with a ceiling mirror front-row seat to watch what one ex called her “jam clam” rupture with teeth. The biggest mouth of them all.

It was game over for poor Natalie.

Then there were mouths on the soles of her feet. Those mouths started chewing into the bottom of the tub.

She buckled.

Surrendered.

That was the moment Natalie gave up.

She had always wanted more. Longed for expansion. Longed to taste it all, try it all, be it all.

She decided to lean in. If she was going out, she’d go out on her terms.

She threw the Twinkies, chocolate almonds, tiny booze bottles, overpriced pistachios on the bed.

And then called room service, through a chorus of gobbling.

“Lobsters. Meatloaf. Champagne. Caviar. Steak. Chicken Alfredo. Penne a la Vodka. Margherita Pizza. Aloo Mutter. Burgers. Fries. Sushi. Cake. Every kind. Send it all up. Leave it outside the door. The sooner it gets here, the bigger the tip.”

And send it up they did.

Natalie could barely walk, with every step the mouths took a bite or a lick of nylon cut-pile. She tossed her wallet out the door and closed it.

Natalie lay the banquet across her bed - an impressionistic masterpiece - and lay on top of the food, all of the different flavours, the calories, the wonders of the world.

She devoured.

And she was devoured.

She expanded, without gaining a pound.

Void matter.

A hole.

A vacuum.

She became something she’d always dreamed of - bigger than life. Bigger than everything. Something real special and unforgettable. The most accomplished taster there ever was.

But Natalie wasn’t really home anymore.

Natalie had left the building, metaphorically and then, literally.

Natalie was a mere vessel for the hunger.

She had succumbed.

Natalie ran out of space, out of skin, and the mouths became one.

And as the hotel fell, the patrons disappeared, the cars nearby crumpled.

The stores up the street.

The lights.

The road.

The trees.

The lakes.

The province.

The country—

There was no fighting it.

Expansion.

Growth.

Devour.

Everything.

The whole shebang.

My right arm is toned, lean and muscular. I’m capable of crushing a tin of beans with my thumb and forefinger. Full control with sinuous adaptability and chiseled flexibility. I can lift my entire body weight by balancing on my carefully manicured fist.

Some call it impressive and I’m inclined to agree.

My right leg is much the same. Thigh and calf is that of marble Gods. My fibularis brevis is exquisite. My rectus femoris, divine. I write weekly political poetry with an ink-dipped quill, between my big toe and foretoe, on parchment paper. I do it just because I can.

I’m a Greg. I’m a Todd. I’m a Chad. It’s undeniable, I am the American Dream.

In 2017 I won a “Sexiest Arm” competition and pocketed fifteen thousand for the title, before taxes. While fools I competed against focused on toning both arms, I spent my time on one arm.

That’s my edge.

Going all in on one area.

Onlookers may gasp at the sight of my shriveled left appendages, but they don’t understand what it takes to be tremendous. I sacrifice harmony for greatness. They sacrifice greatness for comfort and belonging. But what do they belong to? The soft-bodied, gelatinous class.

It’s pitiable.

Greats don’t dabble in magnificence. They embody it.

The circus has attempted to recruit me at least forty times. Each time an insult. I’m above the circus. The circus is full of clowns, whores, mutants and dancing dogs. That’s like requesting the King become a Jester.

What kind of a job could contain someone like me?

I do stocks and trades and bits and coins. I press buttons with my nimble fingers; quickest to draw, fastest to profit. And I do it while toning my quads and glutes with a series of repetitive motions.

Tonight everyone will see how remarkable I am. Tonight the world will know my name: Allen-Colin.

Allen-Colin is the new Chad.

The would-never’s and could-never’s will relish the magnitude of my flesh and willpower on full display in the “Mister Ultimate Arm & Leg Contest.” I was personally invited to compete in. The prize is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Oiled and moisturized myself to perfection, and primed for the bright television lights. Power-loaded with magnesium, bromelain, collagen and trace minerals. Steroids? Would never. Don’t need to.

I await my public tryst with the stage, sequestered in my dressing room surrounded by protein shakes, chickpea puffs, dehydrated wasabi peas, water and towels. I like to prepare in silence, but I can hear a familiar autoerotic grunting through the wall on the other side of my vanity. He’s at every show I compete in, and always places several points behind me: The Weasel. A man made as much of grease as he is disturbing hair patches. I found an autographed photograph of myself that I only bequeath to my lovers, riddled with dart holes, in his dressing room. No one loves you as much as your biggest haters. Even your own mother.

I deftly apply shimmering highlighter powder to accentuate my brawn with a dewy glow. I tape my bits down in the royal plum Speedo, not wanting to pull gaze away from the main attraction with my other impressive feature - especially if I catch a glimpse of my own reflection. Nothing gets me harder.

I practice my signature poses. The Throbbing Philosopher requires taking a mid-orgasm version of the “thinking man’s” pose, merging sensuality in a thrusting silhouette with fist resting under the jaw. Contemplative Superstud entails utilizing my flimsy left arm, for which I’ve created a sheer tattoo sleeve to resemble a stack of thin books, while I casually flex with my powerful right bicep. The Fauxlanthropist stance requires more acrobatics as I scatter money with my portrait on it to my audience, while standing on the ball of my right foot.

I’ve got this on lock. Three rounds. Three inevitable wins. The money, endorsements and magazine covers.

It’s almost time. I sense the urgency in the applause before it reverberates through the halls of the stadium. I’m in sync with my soon-to-be adoring fans, their energy filling me like a sacred sacral serpent rising from my perineum to my heart.

“Everyone ready in 90 seconds! To the stage! Just follow the arrows on the floor.” A grating female voice violates my reverie over a loudspeaker.

I open the door and cannot help but look back over my shoulder at the beauty, the definition, the artistry: I am breathtaking.

I step out into the wide hallway and am flattened by a careening suped-up, heavy-duty, 8-person lambo-cart airbrushed with the words Mister Ultimate.

I can’t breathe or feel anything in the moment. It takes me a moment to realize I’ve been run over. Not just hit and rolled up on the wagon, but hit and then driven over.

The host, a cheesy D-list actor known for peddling protein powder’s is in the passenger seat grinning at me with a whoopsie doodle expression on his face. His name is Michael or Jake or something. Nothing like the dynamism of Allen-Colin. I don’t even have a moment to move out of the way when the driver, a woman - of course - screams, panics and backs up over my right leg.

My good leg.

“I didn’t see you!” she wails. “Why didn’t you move after I hit you?”

They both get off the hefty cart and look down on my injured body. My magnificent side has been pulverized. My leg bleeds. My arm lays limp, likely broken. My skin lacerated by a strip of bird spikes with rainbow flags on them.

“Guess it’s time to develop that left side, huh buddy?” the D-lister says to me.

I clench my teeth.

“What do I do?” the female driver sobs.

“Hey, I’m not gonna get sued for this am I?” The cheeseball says under his breath and grabs a confused assistant. “Get me out of here.”

The female gets back in the buggy and rips it for the stage, blaring some kind of empowerment music and taking a photo of herself wiping away her tears, almost hitting a second contestant.

I’m left for dead in the hallway. Part man, part mulch. Magnificence undone by nature’s greatest predator - the woman driver.

I watch my unworthy and putrescent competitors leave their dressing rooms and head towards the stage. The Weasel steps over me and laughs. “Someone call an ambulance for this fruit!”

Do not show weakness, Allen-Colin. Maintain a state of stoicism. I’m quite certain if I let my guard down, he’ll molest me. The Weasel traipses away, probably hoping I enjoy my view as much as he enjoys his. Unlikely.

I would drag myself back into the dressing room but my left side is like that of an anemic girl. I’m helpless in this state, losing vital fluids, and perhaps organs or tendons. I dare not look at the stew forming around my body.

As I begin to lose consciousness, I have an epiphany. The path becomes clear. This is a divine intervention. I’m aiming for God status while trapped inside a mortal meat bag. But God status is not possible, not like this.

Ultimate Man. An aspirational concept. What does “he” have that I don’t?

Fuck the left arm and left leg. Useless. The right arm, the right leg - disappointing. I don’t need to develop anything. I don’t need to holistically approach my health.

Paramedics surround me and gasp. “Wow… that’s brutal.”

What I need is prosthetics.

Bionics.

Machinery.

“Buddy, you’re gonna be so rich when you sue these fuckers,” one of the young, degenerate paramedics whispers in my ear. “Have you seen where Gary David lives?”

“I was personally invited by Gary David,” I rasp.

“God, I wish I was you. Poolside pussy Stephen Hawking up in here.” He loads me into the ambulance. “Don’t forget to invite me to the afterparty.”

There would be no party, though there would be a celebration. Allen-Colin: Judgment Day.

Titanium. Hydraulics. 3-D printed viscera.

Muscles are so 80s. Contests are passé.

I’d never touch steroids, but this is beyond injectables. This is a new lifestyle. Way of being.

I was thinking too small with a hundred thousand. Millions? What can I do with millions?

Optimized. Elegant. Efficient.

How did I not see it before?

My dedication and focus need to evolve, and as such, a death must occur: Body, mind and soul.

This will be my genesis story.

I will rise again.

I slip into a beautiful dreamlike state of exquisite pain as they jostle me around in the ambulance. The chariot driving to my new beginning.

As a superhuman.

Beyond the American Dream.

Allen-Colin 2.0: Bionic Allen-Colin.

I will finally be Magnificent.

She was close.

Months past the original deadline, Courtney’s art installation was almost complete. A year in the making, and her grandest work to date. A giant cosmic gash. Intended to evoke the desire to crawl back into the mother’s womb.

According to Courtney’s artist statement:

Fetal Position Cortisol Syndrome in the Future-is-Here Doom Tomb Womb is about choosing short-term comfort over the pain of sticking it out with no immediate gratification and no guarantee of long-term pay-off.

Media of choice: copper wire, various metals, silk, cotton, linen, resin, acrylic paint and distilled menstrual blood.

Courtney had created a cozy diorama of self-pacifying. A dissertation on suck-and-soothe, arrested development, leftover cereal milk mucosal nostalgia culture. Standing almost ten feet tall and eight feet wide, the piece was the official mascot of her undoing and the eyesore of her live/work studio. Pubes sculpted from copper wire. Membranes made of flesh-toned silks. Hardened resin depicting droplets of moisture. Large serrated steel rows of teeth and thick chains draped like discharge cobwebs awaiting those who dared to penetrate the cavern and get comfortable inside.

She just had to make a few more snips—

Snip.

Snip…

Snip.

Sighing with relief and stepping back as the final strand of copper fell to the floor, she crossed her sweltering studio and pulled out the cold champagne she’d been saving for this triumphant moment.

“I can’t believe I’m done.”

This was Courtney’s tribute to the dopamine vampires who had next to no muscle mass (physically or spiritually), masquerading as aspirational and politically relatable while taking four hours to do ten minutes of work from bed.

Courtney, obviously, was not like those people. She considered herself a professional artist; ambitious and self-aware. Although for five months straight, she’d been living off “food” activated by hot water, rewearing dirties (yes, even underwear) and often woke up on the floor of her studio. She rationalized that she’d simply delouse and detox in a purge week and it would work itself out. It was a methodical submersion into her practice. Courtney was also an optimist.

A long, wayward strand of metal sticking out of one of the sculpture’s folds glinted under the light. Thick and distracting. Wirecutters still nearby, a simple severing and the problem was solved.

”Now I’m done!”

It was over. Then came the gallery. The viewing. The applause.

The criticism.

Luckily she had the antidote for criticism.

She unsealed the forest green bottle, launching the cork into the air. As she licked the overpriced foam off the glass lip, the projectile plug rebounded off a steel beam on the ceiling, hurtling towards the sculpture and embedding itself somewhere inside.

Jostled wires fell deep within the piece.

Courtney held her breath, tentatively stepping closer to her avant garde oversized metal abscess, waiting for it to collapse entirely.

It didn’t.

The cork rolled out, and stopped at the tip of her black leather Blundstone.

She waited for a few moments before laughing. Leftover delirium. One last clown honk at the carnival.

After pouring herself a glass of champagne, she pulled up a paint-streaked stool and perched in front of the sculpture. “To you, you almost killed me.”

Courtney felt the relief and emptiness of giving birth to her creation. She could finally get caught up on reading, file her taxes, respond to the six hundred emails she’d ignored, resume dating - was Josh still interested? Maybe too many months had passed since she promised to get back to him “next week.” Didn’t her grandmother die? Had she missed the — seam on a piece of the silk was raggedy.

The thin vermilion thread screamed with imperfection. How could she miss that? It must’ve been when she was hungover or rushing. She examined the stitching and paint: It would require dismantling, high risk of tearing, re-stitching, gluing, painting. Hours more work.

It was Rob’s fault. The pseudo-famous, nepo-baby “artist” of her social circle. He’d set her back a month when he told her Doom Womb looked juvenile and anatomically grotesque. Because she modeled it off her own vagina, it sent her into a lengthy pussy aesthetics tailspin on various subreddits. She then spent another month trying to ween herself off the Adderall-Wellbutrin-coffee cocktail she’d become addicted to while trying to make her piece appear more mature and elegant.

To focus on some raggedy seams now was out of the question. There was no time. It was the imperfection that made it human, she rationalized. This cursed piece was done. It had to be.

Solidifying the completion, she texted the news to Jean, her gallerist and middle-aged crowquill dipped in the venom of every failed-artist-cum-art-critic. Jean struck terror with her baby bangs, and owned rooms with ancient skin that looked as if she slept inside a hyperbaric chilled cucumber. Courtney had endured a constant, low-grade anxiety anticipating the day Jean would realize she was untalented since she began working with the woman.

Courtney texted some of the photos to Jean. This was the process. Jean would either send feedback, send someone over, or come herself. Once Jean approved, it would be out of Courtney’s hands - hopefully forever. And a fat little paycheque would arrive in her bank account, at some point, making the agony worth it.

As she waited for a response from Jean, she sipped the champagne, walking back and forth assessing; The shapes weren’t right. The texture was wrong. The colours - oh god. Pubes? A giant vag? What the fuck was she thinking?

Courtney stifled a bowel-deep wail and rushed to the bathroom, splashing her face with cold water that smelled of old pipes.

After the revisions, the weight loss, weight gain, hair loss, whiskers appearing in random spots, sciatia, knotted muscles, hallucinating for three days straight that the fluorescent lights were sending her secret erotic messages - it was all about to be worth it. She was moments away from her sculpture being done.

It wasn’t time to buckle. No time to second guess.

There would be no fainting couch to catch her.

“Dissociate,” she whispered. “Be in the future.”

She could finally start something new. She could shower! Tidy the place up a bit! Breathe! She took another swig of champagne.

She looked at her phone; nothing from Jean.

Was she disappointed? Was it too late to get the piece to the gallery for the big show on the weekend? Had Courtney been replaced by yet another “abstract artist”?

It would be fine.

Fine.

Fine…

Fine.

Jean told her today was the last day to submit. Unless she got the date wrong.

Panicked, Courtney called. Straight to voicemail.

“Jean, it’s done! It’s fucking done. I just need help getting it over to the gallery. It’s bigger than when you last saw it, but it’s a true evolution of my body of work. I’ll be here for the next few hours. I have expensive champagne.”

Day-drinking was Jean’s love language, if Jean was capable of love.

After Courtney hung up, she gaped at her post-traumatic tresses and hollow, greasy face. She was in no shape to debut work. The post-partum hit.

“Wow,” Jean texted back.

Courtney waited for a follow-up. Surely it was a positive “wow.” She poured herself another glass of bubbly, took it into the shower and cried. Her loofah hadn’t been used in so long it was calcified. An ancient artefact of fun, frivolity, freedom. She eroded sediment with a bar of Dove in crevices she was ashamed to discover had almost closed over due to lack of hygiene. Months worth of leg hair almost clogged the drain. Once dry enough to put on clothes (but not long enough to pick up much of the moldy towel smell), she dressed in the only passable t-shirt and jeans she could find and manically snapped a few more photos.

Courtney would be asked questions. Questions by serious buyers and “buyers” alike. Miffed, envious peers. Social climbers. A couple of art students who’d want to sleep with her just for the lore.

Jean had fed her some deflection ideas a while ago: “It’s the cave of the unconscious mind. Which do you personally relate to more - the needy child or the violated mother?”, “Just because I show you something, doesn’t mean I tell you what to see.”, “What is your relationship to your mother’s vagina?” and, “Why is this so disturbing to you? Intimidated by anatomy you’ve failed to comprehend?”

She screamed into her hands.

“It’s good. It’s great!” She stomped around in her crispy studio socks with bottoms like fly tape.

It was splendid — a cluster of long foreign fibres were growing in front of Courtney’s eyes, out the center of the acrylic clitoris.

“Leave it, Courtney.”

She looked away.

She looked back.

The fibres were dense and synthetic; a wound giving way to a new organism.

“I know you weren’t there a second ago!”

She palmed her eyes, unsure if she was losing it from lack of sleep, nutrition or inhaling too much epoxy. Maybe it was all in her mind. Nothing more than a hallucination.

Yet… She couldn’t help herself.

Just one more cut. She pulled the foreign matter taut and snipped. Not perfect but not that visible.

“Now I’m done!”

Courtney circled the piece.

The more she looked, the more wires and fibres unfurled and colonized. The sculpture was building itself, becoming something entirely divorced from its original concept.

“Stop it!” Courtney feverishly clipped. “Stop! I’m done! I’m done!”

The wires expanded at a frenzied pace. “No! Finished!” She hacked her way through the fibres, scratching and cutting her skin, as she searched for the source of the growth to destroy it.

“What is happening?!” She couldn’t help but think this was the doing of that fucking nepobaby, Rob, who had all kinds of unhinged tech wizard friends. Or maybe someone had laced her champagne with a hallucinogen. Surely, it was a hallucination.

She raced to the nearest viscera-flecked mirror and stared at herself. Pupils normal. Nothing else out of the ordinary.

“I won’t let you do this!” She grabbed her wirecutters and stepped inside the serrated canal. Sifting through overgrowths, searching for the source of this new structure colonizing her masterpiece. She chopped as the piece wrapped itself around her, a caterpillar being slowly encased by a mechanical cocoon.

Snip.

“Almost there,” pinged a text from Jean.

Snip. Snip. Snip.

Snip.

Snip…

“I assume a shipping crate is ready.”

Snip.

Snip.

Snip.

Snip.

Snip.

Snip…

Snip.

…

Jean entered the studio without knocking. The first thing she noticed was that Courtney’s sculpture was a messy mass of strands and tendrils and didn’t appear to be anywhere near complete. She surveyed the various spills, rotting food, empties and terrible odors.

“Courtney?” Jean queried in an unimpressed tone.

Jean appraised the freestanding, metal genitalia. “Unsubtle.”

She poured herself some champagne with a “clean” glass. Letting the aroma reach her nose before she hesitantly took a sip. She spit it back into the glass and discarded it on the table, muttering, “I need to stop taking chances on artists with bad backgrounds. I should’ve seen this coming. My standards are becoming too lax.”

Snip.

Courtney’s muffled voice resonated somewhere beyond the sealing over monstrosity.

“Are you hiding?” Jean impatiently scrolled her phone for missed messages. “I don’t have time for this.”

Snip.

Snip.

Sighing, Jean turned on her heel for the door. “I knew she wasn’t ready.”

Snip.

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Night after night, I watch as her alabaster fingers gingerly place the open can of tuna on the windowsill of the building’s basement laundromat. A good brand. The kind from Italy with real olive oil. Not trash from some third-world shithole with murky water and parasites. She serves stray cats the kind of tinned that pairs well with red.
This woman - I like to call her Charlotte - has taste.
She lays out the meal each evening, as the sun sets. The “magic hour” as my High Drama on a Low Budget acting teacher used to call it. On cloudless evenings like tonight, everything takes on a golden silhouette.
I’ve been watching the stray black kitten with two heart-shaped white spots on its back timidly dance for weeks. The mangy little prince wants to be touched and held and fed by hand. Just like me. Feed me. Pet me. The kitten often takes a bite, then scurries away. I watch the entire production, even if it goes on for thirty minutes.
The most comfortable view is from my yard, peering through cracks in the fence. The spot that lends itself to closeness is in the building’s parking lot, obviously, although I’m easily spotted. The best view is the adjacent alley, but the frequent and numerous ‘MISSING CAT’ posters kill the ambiance. Mocking me for what I don’t have; someone who desires me enough to kidnap me.
But not tonight.
Tonight, I pounce.
Now it’s my turn to dance.
It’s my turn to be the star.
To be the kitty surprise.
I nearly trip over the “rent past due” notice outside of my door, and I can’t help but think my corrupt landlord is trying to murder me for being unable to fill her pockets for a few months. I’m but a hapless man without a woman to care for me. I can’t be expected to take care of the rent after my girlfriend left me high and dry for some kind of brutish, wage-slave nothing.
I’m an actor, an artist and a lover. Not some plebeian rent-earner.
Charlotte wouldn’t judge me, she’s different. Only the tenderhearted feed alley cats Rio Mare.
And tonight is the night.
Everything is in place. I’ve been drawing closer with more frequency. Making a home in the brambles past the plywood fence, sticking my nose through the hole in the chainlink around Charlotte’s building and slowly cutting a me-shaped hole in it like a secret door. All that stands between us is fear.
I had punched out the lightbulbs in the courtyard (with a duct tape and towel-wrapped hand), extinguishing their light, one at a time, over the course of the last week. Including the ones the landlord replaced. I perfected sprinting the distance between my place to Charlotte’s in my ballet slippers.
I even purchased an outfit for the occasion. One that I’ve been living in for the last few days to get my scent all over it. Made of real cat fur. I bought it on the black market, but as it turns out the seller lives in my city. What are the odds?
The window in the laundromat is quite small, it’s one of those basement type openings that serve more as breathing holes than anything else, but I need to get inside to present myself to Charlotte.
Earlier, I had greased my arms and torso with room temperature coconut oil and tucked my semi-erect shwing-schwang deep into the nethermost crook of my buttocks. Nice and safe inside my fur knickers, so nothing gets torn off when I propel myself into the laundry room like a bar of wet soap in a prison shower.
Surprise, Charlotte!
Peering through the plywood fence separating my dilapidated, over-priced bungalow from her stucco apartment building, I perch on my calloused heels, rocking back and forth. A generous throb courses through my innards. Now’s the moment.
Slinking through the chainlink doorway, soft mews bubbling from my lips, trepidation fades into the distance with the sun. I creep on all fours over the side of the building, scaring away the little black cat.
“Mine,” I hiss.
I lay parallel to the wall, waiting for the woman to return so that I might nibble on her cuticles or know the scent of her breath. Sniffing at the air, catching a whiff of luxury brand tuna. My mouth waters like a fountain of saliva fondue.
I catch a flash of her auburn hair moving towards the window. I erupt in purring and lay on my back in submission.
She places the tin on the windowsill as usual. I close my eyes. My sandpaper tongue reaches out to her Godly offering like The Creation of Adam, darting for her pale extremities. Wagging, straining and desperate to receive a briny gift, but my pleading organ connects to nothing. I miss her hand by an earth-shattering moment.
All falls silent.
I wait.
Not a sound.
No movement.
Not even a quiet breath.
I count to thirty and peek into the dingy laundry room but it’s empty. No one there. What happened?
I contemplate crawling inside, but suddenly feel rejected and self-conscious. Did she see me? Did I frighten her? I lay on the pavement in the most profoundly melancholic collapse of my entire existence.
Then, in a burst of arousal I lap up the tuna, swigging the oil in a frenzy.
We were closer than we’d ever been.
Surely she knows of my longing. I send her telepathic messages all day long.
I’ll try again tomorrow night.
I prowl back to my home, and put on Milo and Otis. Drifting into a hallucinatory, cold sweat slumber, as one does after such a devastation.
I wait all day with anticipation, for the evening to come. When it finally does, the window doesn’t open.
And the next night.
The next night.
She never comes to the window.
Neither does the stray kitten.
They both seem to have vanished. Evaporated. Abandoned me.
To the feline I say, “Good riddance.”
Less competition.
Then, her apartment is for rent. I book an appointment to see it but I’m placed on a waitlist.
Headaches, the kind behind the eyes, haunt my every waking moment. I barely sleep. My muscles seem to be wasting away.
Delirious to connect with Charlotte in any direct or indirect manner, I decide to buy out the stock of Rio Mare from every store within walking distance of my home. I’ll recreate the scene outside of the laundry room, just like the good old days.
I can’t be gone for too long during the day, because my landlord might lock me out and it seems I’m still blacklisted by DeliveryBing.
Magic hour it is.
I wear my lithe black onesie and venture out into the world.
But each store is the same. Void of Rio Mare! Cleaned out! Emptied!
Could my life get any worse?
I frantically beg a stockist to double check the Rio Mare supply at Walgreens, when a 40-something hag with overdone rouge lipstick approaches. She smells of cigarettes and air freshener, but sports an intriguing patchwork fur coat.
“I’ve seen you around,” she says. “I know what you’re looking for. I have plenty of Rio Mare at my place. I feed it to my cats. I can give you some if you feel like following me home. I’m quite certain I live just up the street from you.”
“Ok,” I say, and calm down. It seems I have a stalker. She’s fooling herself if she thinks I’m going to fall in love with her just because she offers me some feeble cans.
“Nice coat,” I say, trying to fill the moments.
“Thanks. Made it myself. Thinking about getting into leatherwork next.”
I follow her up the road, lost in my thoughts. She’s saying things but I’m not really listening. She’s talking about skincare, or something. Her new leather business. She tears down each of the “MISSING CAT” posters we pass.
“I hate those, too,” I say.
She laughs.
I notice something odd about her coat. One of the fur patches has two heart-shaped white spots, but damned if I recall where I’ve seen it. My short term memory has been fried lately, probably due to the torment of Charlotte’s rejection. It’s too hot for fur coats, anyway. What a strange woman.
“You eat a lot of tuna?” she asks over her shoulder, walking up the path to an ominous, rundown brick house. “They say too much mercury can make you go mad, but I feel quite sane. What about you?”
“I’ve never heard that before,” I say, the hair standing up on the back of my neck.
A symphony of cats yowl inside the two-story as she opens the door.
“You rent?” I ask.
“No, I own,” she smiles. “Come inside.”
A homeowner. How well-to-do. Perhaps I could grow to like her after all.

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This is Chapter 1 and 2 of a work-in-progress existential, psychosexual cosmological horror novella. I had previously posted it in March under the title “Stay on the Line, Little Bird”, but decided to change the direction a little bit and the name. Something felt off when I first posted it because my motivation for writing this and what I wanted to say was kind of murky to me. Now it’s clear. I’ve only made minute tweaks, so if you’ve already ready it don’t worry about a re-read. Chapter 3 coming soon.

Doing it for The Plot (Chapter I)

Drop the eggs in water and wait a few days,

Then see how your Lake Monkeez grow and play!

I

The rope stung as I wrapped it around my uncalloused, pale flesh. Dare I bid the world adieu in such a tedious fashion?
I had to.
Something was missing.
I couldn’t write.
Never had enough time.
I’d quit my job.
Not that it was a real job.
Wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Jobs are for serfs, and I am a writer.
My “friends” had harassed me about trivia nights, baby showers, wine & whines. Somebody was always getting married or treading water in a relationship’s drawn-out dying breath or a literal death or they knew someone who’d died and was fundraising and blah blah blah.
So I’d quit my friends.
Still couldn’t write though.
Joined special interest groups to see if I could plug into some narrative voltage. Learned a bit of tarot (unrewardingly more complicated than it seemed). Took a tantric breathwork class (don’t recommend if you’re sensitive to the scent of systemic gingivitis). Even lurked a BDSM meet-up, which also came with its own host of olfactory issues and was largely populated by bald dudes with hot dog necks in guyliner and barely-fleshed, wilted roses sporting scars like a cheap set of bangles from Claire’s. I’d tried seducing my first cousin one night just to see if I could generate interesting story material. All that manifested was an awkward Raymond Carver type mundane nothing at an eye contact-free Thanksgiving dinner.
Novel still didn’t get written.
I fumbled with the stained, braided yellow nylon. Was I about to make a mistake? The grand finale of mistakes in a one-act play of preventable failures.
My tech bro boyfriend had bemoaned my lack of consistent kitchen duty enthusiasm and commitment to regular subscription television lubrication. Didn’t spend enough “quality” time with him and he didn’t appreciate how frequently I drank (you’d drink too, if he was your boyfriend). Or that I often spent the morning hours unconscious instead of rising with the rest of polite society, preferring to write well past midnight.
“Write,” he would say in air quotations.
So I quit him, too.
With as much force as I could muster, I yanked the rope ineffectually. I was surprisingly weak for such a colossal bitch.
This was the only way.
The noise, distractions, constant chatter and demands of modern life. I didn’t want to be responsible for anything, anyone, for any reason, anymore! How could I concentrate on my book when I had to deal with groceries and rent and birthday parties and work meetings and god the list was endless and I could never get away from it I couldn’t take it anymore!!!!!!!!!
“Fuck it!” I screamed, wrapping the rope around the metal cleat and pushing the boat off the dock with my sparkly vinyl eBay Airwalks.
I had no idea how to captain a boat, outside of some youtube videos I’d watched. But I’d thrown away half my possessions, broke lease and bought a one-way ticket to paradise off some hippie on an internet marketplace. He needed a quick OBO to “move to an ashram in Kelowna.” So the deal was done. Sink or swim.
I’d recorded a voicemail greeting for anyone who might notice my absence and care to check in: “Going away to heal from the trauma of how boring you all are and finish a novel. No signal. Won’t get your messages. You’ll be the last to know when I get back. Bless.”
A lone message came through right before my sojourn into peace and productivity. Chris, the only friend who was allowed to stay (the only friend interested in staying) liked to give me pep talks as if I was his child who kept failing to make little league. I listened as I floated into the future: “You don’t need to blow up your life to write a book. You just need to show up at your desk consistently. All you have to do to write is write, you spazz–”
The signal dropped before he could finish his sentiment. For the best. Not the vibe I wanted to kick off my fool’s journey (that’s a tarot reference).
I embarked in my chariot; a rusty cabin cruiser with Krazy Glue fix-its and tacky, spackled add-ons. The hippie told me the boat was “magic” and held “secret fortunes” and I would have epiphanies and my “kundalini” would awaken. Many symbolic journeys would unlock. I would be transformed, but to be careful. It was not for the faint of heart. He was only letting it go for so cheap because his Ego was dead. He was a new man. Materialism was passé. Rerouting his powerful nut chi for higher callings instead of libidinal leaks. He had a TikTok account to start growing so he could spread the messages he’d learned from his Rock Bottom. He had to let other people in on his newfound secrets.
These proclamations invoked fear that there was some kind of brain-damaging neurotoxin I’d be exposed to on board, but I needed to submerge myself in something beyond the ordinary - even if it came with health risks. The disappointing vessel would suffice if it could hold itself together long enough for me to write my stupid fucking book.
I crossed my fingers.
The cryptic hippie had also shared that if I was to follow the waterways the boat was parked in - which is exactly what I was doing because it required the least effort on my part - to beware the night lights, and never go looking for their sources, just be present and don’t ask too many questions, and he warned me there were a lot of catfishers on the two-way radios. The radio was for emergencies and important communications only. He told me there were voyeurs on water, sometimes closer than one would think. He even went as far as to write me out his little rules on a piece of paper, which I’d stuffed somewhere without reading. It was all quite schizophrenic so I wasn’t too worried anything he said was more than just a metaphor.
The cruiser casually drifted for hours, as I organized my insubstantial provisions, and cleaned the worst of the bohemian slime off the surfaces I knew I’d be touching, until I just gave up. Slumped over what was to be my writing desk made of poorly attached crates and a slab of plywood. It would be here where I would compose my greatest work to date. Really, my only work. Hopefully not my last.
Not sure how long I’d been snoozing (a necessary part of writing), when I finally looked out the cabin window. I couldn’t see land anymore. Was I still on a lake? Migrated through some back channel to the ocean? Mega swamp? I was terrible at geography. Grasping anything mathematical, map-like or common sense was a non-starter. How far could I go off-course? I was in North America. The hippie had left me a map and I was sure I was somewhere on it. Tomorrow’s problem.
Because it was time to write.
But I needed something to get in the mood first. I stood in front of the fluid-specked mirror screwed into the wall. I looked like shit. I was wearing one of the seven nautical dresses I’d purchased to intensify the feeling of being a ‘writer at sea’ but I was serving aged-out, sex-trafficked castaway.
Music. A DJ set to summon a Muse. I’d brought my phone and its many playlists, but as I scrolled for something delivering swamp siren or ocean hottie, I realized most of my songs weren’t downloaded and I had no access to data.
I rifled through the stack of CD’s on the pile of stuff I’d inherited from the transcendent bum. I woefully placed “FUCK MIXXX: BLUNTZ ON THE WATER” in the ghetto blaster and pressed play.
“GAZUNGA! MI AMORE! Blip blop flap slap. Give it to me in the witch slit trap!”
I’d be needing wine tonight, as well. Surprise, surprise. After pouring a decent helping of cheap Cab Sauv into my mason jar, I draped myself over my cot and released an agonized sigh. To write, to write, what was I to write?
Retreating backwards in time made me furious. Flattening grief about the present paralyzed me. The future seemed unknowable in the least appealing way. I needed to conjure something fresh. Unmarred by reality, from the abyssal depths of my imagination.
My first impulse was to write about writing. The absolute height of tiresome cringe. Done to death. By every writer who’s ever existed. What more was there to say? The protagonist attempts to write their magnum opus and goes completely fucking insane? Oh, oh no. Are they haunted by their past? Do the ghosts of their creations cross the fiction-reality barrier?
Yawn.
I would begin my descent into wine-drenched madness once I made sure the two-way radio worked, just in case I needed it.
I twisted the knob, notch by notch. Lingering with each tiny movement, listening intently.
Clicking.
Whirring.
Buzzing.
It appeared to be functional, but to what end.
“Hello..ooo..oooooh,” I whispered sexily into the greasy plastic mouthpiece.
Buzz.
“Any sailors out there? Species-curious mermen?” I said in a fake sea wench “accent.”
Nothing.
“Woe is me. Guess I’ll just have to be sexy all by myself with this big glass of wine. A damsel in ‘dis dress, gonna slip it off cuz it’s so hot.”
I laughed and got up.
It was getting dark, and with no compelling hindrances, it was time to write. Even though it was warm, a thin fog had formed on the surface of the water. Opening the door and gazing out at the endless expanse, essentially a puny fish that could be picked off at any moment by anything with a vaguely predatory instinct.
I picked up my writing accoutrements and headed for the door to the deck.
The radio crackled.
In a baritone, barely audible voice: “…stay…”

﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌﹌

Doing it for The Plot (Chapter 2)

II

It Comes Upon You Slowly

By Margaret Muggerot

Chapter One

Lyle peered at the tiny colony of brine shrimp floating inside his seven aquariums. They resembled something one might find in a toilet bowl at a gas station; ancient protozoans with miniscule legs and translucent ligaments. Some might wonder how such gruesome creatures would become a popular kids toy, but to Lyle they were the most fascinating specimens he’d ever seen. He preferred interacting with “Sea-Monkeys” to most people. They’d been marketed as novelty “pets” for children since the fifties. Lyle was the purveyor of their knock-offs: Lake Monkeez.

They were the perfect product, in Lyle’s opinion. Compact, emotionally and financially disposable. A simple flush and they were quickly forgotten. Easily controlled. Not too smart. But cute enough to generate novelty.

Lyle harvested, packaged and distributed his product from his small, brick-veneer home. A smallish fish in a smallish pond, surrounded by microscopic crustaceans that relied on his goods for survival. Or so he told himself. He’d been experimenting and innovating lately; playing with altering the brand regionally and to align with trends. He was trying out ideas like Post-Internet Rave Glitchoids from Beyond. N’awlins Nightcrawlers. Maudlin Monkee Mommiez. Sewercidal Shromp-Shromps. Depressed Dingbats of the Deep. Joyful Jesters of the Gelationous Doo-Dad Window-Whatevers.

“No need for messy pets or huge vet bills, enjoy the excitement of one of nature’s greatest thrills!”

“I hate it!” I screamed at the first page of my novel.
The fleeting excitement of a now-dead radio signal was fading. It had, at the very least, jump-started a creative impulse but now the beckoning voice on the other end was all I could think about. I wasn’t sure if I’d hallucinated it, if I’d intercepted a message for someone else, or if it was a meaningless advertisement.
The putrid sodium nightshade scent of mini raviolis I’d eaten out of the can for dinner wafted towards me. I hadn’t thought about what I’d do about dishwashing, eating and whatnot. That would be tomorrow’s problem.
I needed a change of scenery.
“Alright, I’m going outside,” I announced, pausing to see if the radio would speak again.
It didn’t.
I slid in a new disc titled: “COWBOY BEEBOP NIPPLE WAX UNPLUGGED!”
It sounded exactly as expected.
The sky had grown black in the hour it took me to write three paragraphs, so I popped my LED lantern, slopped out more wine and planted myself on the shoddy, moldy fold-out chair on the boat’s shoddier, moldier deck.
This was the first time I’d moved out of a full-body rage kegel in years. I had, by all accounts, gotten exactly what I’d begged for: Silence and solitude. Disconnection from everyone who cared about (or said they did). Zero distractions. An environment to actualize without mundane reality creeping into every orifice and paper cut.
The taste of wine, light breeze on my shoulders, the sounds of slapping and lapping and rhythm of the boat was intoxicating. I’d always wanted to make it on a waterbed. The image evoked 80’s cinematic sleaze and exploitation; illicit non-stop sex in a sketchy one-bedroom apartment in the slums of Montreal in late spring. Wicked delights on feathery duvets and strange creative nascencies generated by the union between a depraved but attractive woman and her odd but devastating young lover.
I sighed, turning my attention back to my freshly broken-in notebook. I felt something meaningful coming alive in this seemingly asexual tale involving shrimp and small businesses.
“Stay…” I whispered to myself.

Chapter One Cont’d…

“What will you do to rectify this abominable service?” A man named Oswald Parkinson screeched at Lyle through his cordless phone. “I do not want a replacement. I want a refund. Your product arrived in a shocking state, and I had to scramble to find something else to give my niece for her sixth birthday! It was a tremendous inconvenience!”
“Yes, sir. I understand,” Lyle said, dragging a chipped fingernail across the glass tank. Each tank was carefully placed around the walls of his living room-office, out of direct sunlight, and at the perfect height for maintenance, cleaning and viewing. Lyle’s bicep-length hair had to be kept in a low-pony to prevent the tips from dipping in the water endowing him with a “swamp aroma” that his sister often mentioned.
The drone of a loud plane overhead startled Lyle for a moment. As there were no airports nearby, it was an uncommon occurrence. The plane was flying close to the ground, emblazoned with a “SnotNot” logo. Maybe there was something out of the ordinary going on in town; a convention.
Lyle clicked and scrolled through invoices with his chapped fingers. A new patch of psoriasis threatened to split open his knuckles. He carefully found Oswald Parkinson’s proof of purchase in his inbox.
“Would you mind sending me a photo for insurance purposes? I’ll have to make a claim—”
“No! If you don’t refund my money right now, I’ll report you to the appropriate channels. I’ll expose you for copyright infringement! For being a terrible person! And-”
“Yes, sir. Very well. I’ll refund your money—”
“Now!” the man phlegm-gargled and hung up.
“Now,” Lyle repeated.
“Now,” Lyle said, plucking a shrimp from the tank and squishing it between the tips of fingers, flicking it back into the water.
“Now,” Lyle whispered.
A couple of the critters investigated, or perhaps mindlessly passed by, the viscera. A comrade had fallen for no other reason than their God was perturbed.
Lyle loved to experiment on the creatures; seeing how temperature shifts affected their behavior; adding “threats” to the environment. A rancid Cheerio or half a cup of hot water; playing music against the wall of a tank; sudden noises; surprise guests; confusing them with strobe lights which caused them to flit around in chaos. He often found himself wanting to escalate the situation once boredom set in. What else could he do to them? Where could he put them? How long could they survive?

The CD restarted.
I had nothing else to say to my pages for the night. I dropped my notebook on the deck and squinted into the surround-sound noiseless void. I’d entered a strange reality. Everything still but ominous in its possibility. It wasn’t what I could see and hear that put me on edge, it was what I couldn’t.
The ambient fear aroused me.
I slid my dirty fingers into my white low-rises and touched myself in time to the waves. Why not? I liked the idea that someone or something might be watching from the nothingness. I’d often fancied myself worthy of an audience for just existing.
“Is anyone there?” I called out softly.
The unseduced waves sloshed against frigid aluminum.
“Anyone there?” Louder this time.
The radio inside the cabin crackled with feedback.
I gasped.
Waited.
The interference stopped just as quickly as it started. A static heartbeat revealing a hint of potential existence; a dehydrated brine shrimp egg palpating itself and then giving up.
“Now you’re imagining a creature from the black lagoon is trying to fuck you through the radio? JUST WRITE YOUR STUPID NOVEL!” I could almost hear Chris’s castigations. “You’re inventing distractions now!”
“Go away,” I hissed.
A terrible sound ravaged the silence. Crispy bones cracking, splintering a membrane, scratching against glass.
I sat up. The hair on the back of my neck reacting to unseen electricity.
Lights flickered far off in the distance as if responding to the screeches.
I stood up and tip-toed to the rails.
This was probably when self-preservation would kick in for a normal person, and they’d run inside and lock the door. But I couldn’t look away. I had to know what was going on.
I peered out into oblivion, but couldn’t tell where the noise had come from, or where the lights were exactly. I was looking at impressions of lights. Shimmering flickers, maybe from the moon, which appeared to be waxing gibbous and almost full illumination.
I squinted.
Hadn’t the hippie told me not to look at the lights? I couldn’t remember. Maybe he was gatekeeping a mystical secret. A lot of spiritual people I’d encountered seemed to enjoy doing that. Taking a basic problem-solution pipeline and rebranding it to make themselves appear as divine vessels inseminated with the sacred fluids of higher beings.
Something splashed in the distance.
“Reveal yourself.” I breathed in as slowly and quietly as possible.
I knew it. I felt it. Maybe it was a merman.
Another splash.
I burst into a fit of laughter. I took a big swig of what was left of my wine. Maybe I’d go for a swim. Why the hell not. Lean in, as they say.
“Coming to getcha,” I threatened flirtatiously. Were mermen supposed to be hot? I assumed so. They had to be.
I slid off my white and navy blue dress and tossed it on the chair. I hadn’t swum in a long time, but you don’t forget how to swim. Yes! This is what I needed!
“I’m coming!”
Then that terrible sound again—
A few feet away from me.
The shape became clearer the more I looked at it, like when I was a child and would see monsters where there was just a pile of laundry and toys.
Only this was in reverse.
I didn’t move.
A blanched, testy creature perched on the rails. Was hard to get a gauge of its size. Bigger than me but balled up and hunched over. Its eyeballs black and shiny as a scrying mirror. Neither bird nor squid, almost human with what appeared to be stringy dark tresses knotted and infested with smaller lifeforms clinging to it for life. Something liminally horrifying. The longer I stared, the more that revealed itself: Wings and gills. Pendulous teets with a milky substance on the tip of each nipple, glistening in the moonlight. The nipples transfixingly raw, as if they’d been sucked on to the point of ulceration.
The beast perched between myself and the cabin door. I would have to pass it to get inside. It seemed to read my mind, opening its beak-like mouth and licking its sharp little teeth.
An unignorable smallness gripped my insides. Anything could happen to me and no one would know. I was a sitting fuck’n’chuck. No signs of the mundane world or its inhabitants for miles.
The lamp flickered as the enraged lifeform released a low gurgling sound from deep inside its belly.
Then the only source of light went out.

If you saw how Freya keeps her cool in the face of visiting babies that screech more than they gurgle, Ken's constant tea-slurping, George’s ogling, and Julie's too-loud humming - you'd be wow'ed. And I really mean that. Or maybe those kinds of things don't bother you. Good for you. This isn't about you, though.

So you might think, “Freya's boyfriend must have a monster cock and he gives it to her real good,” but Freya hasn’t been with a man in over three years. And no, she’s not a lesbian - even after a few glasses of wine. “Lorazepam? A cottage by the lake? What is her goddamn secret?"

What you don’t see is that every day on her way home from work, Freya passes a forest. So, she pulls over by this forest, same place, same time. She turns off the podcast on pug life she’s been listening to, and gets out of her leased car. She strips down to a tasteful sports bra, swaps her Dr. Scholl’s-lined stilettos for orthopedic footwear, trades her polyester flares for yoga leggings, and walks into the thicket a good twenty-six hundred steps deep and fifty percent of her daily walking goal.

Once on the path - a path no one really uses except maybe the odd teenager desperate to stumble upon someone's marijuana stash - she's pretty alone. The nearest house is miles and miles away. Kilometers, if you’re Canadian.

Then, Freya screams.

She screams like she’s being murdered. The kind of scream you only find in an 80’s De Palma film.

The first time she screamed in the forest, she ran back to her car, worried the police would charge her with disturbing the peace. She vowed never do it again. Who does that shit? What was she thinking?

But she went back. And it felt good. It felt fucking great. That whole week she felt alive - but in a good way. As work and life stress escalated, a once a week timid retreat became a Monday to Friday necessity. She’d go back to that same spot and let ‘er rip.

A fuck-up in accounting that meant her cheque was late and she'd have to eat credit card interest if she wanted to buy that leather couch in time for her birthday party? Two minutes of screaming.

Bossy client who made her do twelve arduous revisions only to circle back to Freya's original concept? Three minutes.

Jessie, the office hippie, took a big, sludgy, Komubcha-y shit in Freya's favourite bathroom stall AND left major debris in the bowl RUINING IT FOREVER BECAUSE NO BLEACH CAN ERASE THE MEMORY? Four minutes of screaming.

Louder and longer. In fact, her lungs and vocal chords adapted. Freya could hit those Whitney notes. Freya was damn near giddy thinking about her annual mandatory office karaoke party - which she had bombed the year before, singing Heart's “Alone.”

Not this year, bitches.

She fuckin' lived to scream into the abyss, with no one listening or doing anything about it. She would leave the woods each evening transformed. Hell, the fact that she was even thinking about getting a pet pug proved that through the healing power of screaming she was levelling up in the world. She was becoming Mother Nature.

But on this day- coincidentally, #TransformationTuesday - Freya got out of her car, went to her sweet spot and something... happened.

So, Freya is belting it the fuck out. She’s feeling good - like, if her coworkers could see her in the moments post-scream, they’d be out there every night too, ruining it for Freya. By the time she’s done she’s all dewy, rosy-cheeked, hard-nipped, contracted and expanded.

Now, here’s where you might think, “Ok, I see where this is headed. So we cut to like, someone in their house hearing Freya scream, thinks she’s being murdered, loads their gun, and then some cockamamie antics unravel and they both shoot each other and die, or whatever."

Wrong.

On this night, someone screams back.

Freya’s body seizes up in a frozen state of herniation and possible lactation. Everything feels like it’s leaking. Her adrenal glands thump with a rush of cortisol.

She barely breathes or moves for several minutes, waiting for something else to happen. But It doesn’t. She decides it must’ve been an echo. Must’ve been, right? She wishes she had eaten lunch, but that meant passing Rachel's desk and Rachel really wanted to hang out. So Freya’s thinking maybe she's just feeling faint. Just a little glycemic.

It might not have been a real scream, but it killed the vibe. So she heads back to her car and drives home with this pit in her stomach. Later, she'll have to re-listen to the pug podcast episode because she didn't retain anything about dietary restrictions, mucus, or alleviating breathing issues. She fills the pit in her stomach with some low-fat Michelina’s and two steins of rosé, and forgets it ever happened.

Then it’s Wednesday, and as her ritual dictates, Freya pulls over again. Today, she'll be screaming for the cheap office TP and the dude who microwaved fried cod. Who does that? Only this time, she has this feeling in her gut. That feeling you get when you want to go to a restaurant with all these on star Yelp reviews. Don't do it, Freya. Yelp reviews don't lie.

But it was probably nothing.

She shakes it off and goes back to her mystical patch in the forest. And right as she’s about to give ‘er stink - she hears that scream again. Only this one doesn’t sound like an echo, this one is like, close. Too close. Freya looks around, freaked out, as you would be. She thinks, “Fuck this noise,” literally - and bolts.

She darts through the brambles, and triple-jumps the rotten logs. Except, she seems to have diverted from the path she knows like the back of her hand. And when she thinks about the back of her hand, she realizes she doesn't even know what the back of her hand looks like. She assumed she did, but which hand has the freckle that looks like a liver spot? She doesn't even know what color nail polish she's wearing until she looks in that moment of panic. It's dusty violet, btw. She doesn't know shit about this path even though she comes out here five nights a week. Doesn't know shit.

And now she hears footsteps.

FUCKING FOOTSTEPS!!!!!

Or maybe it's just the wind. A cute, hungry little deer?

Either way, Freya has no fucking idea where she is.

Freya's thinking she must've run in the wrong direction, so she tries to course correct and keeps going. Only now she’s even more lost, and it’s getting dark.

Then, the clouds part, and she thinks, "God?"

But almost immediately they roll back over and it's dark-ish again.

At this point you’re thinking, "What is this, like a Babadook kind of thing? Like she made a monster with all of her anguish?" You’d be wrong again - fuck man, you’re exhausting me.

Anyway, so she’s zipping through the trees and feeling grateful for doing all of those leg lifts under her desk at work for the past three months. No real end goal for doing them, us women - we always feel fat.

-- And she sees a shanty in the distance.

A shanty with a smokestack. Some real Deliverance shit. Or what someone imagines is real Deliverance shit. I don’t know, I don’t watch anything made before 1986. And, like an idiot, she runs to this shanty and starts banging away like a lunatic on the door.

“Help! Help!” she shouts, waving her arms around and stuff.

Unbeknownst to our heroine, this wild-eyed hick (see Deliverance reference) inches up behind her licking his frothy chops and fingering some oily glob that seems orificial in origins. When he’s four inches from the back of her butterfly clip he screams.

Same scream. As in the same scream as the one before, in case you didn't pick up on that.

For all of that youth and vitality Freya gained those evenings yodeling amongst the plants, within mere seconds she loses a good decade. The best decade. With pure instinct as her compass, Freya runs.

And damned if he doesn't start chasing her. Screaming and chasing and licking and fingering those chip-chops. Waving a stick around. Screaming his goddamn head off. And it's not like a guttural, sexual, B-movie scream like Freya's. It's some Xena battle-cry "I'm gonna wear your fuckin' face while pile-driving my dick into a moose I sewed to a mountain lion" kind of shit.

Freya wonders if this is it for her. The price of peace. Torn to shreds before she's in a financial position to get a mortgage, become proficient enough in the kitchen to be considered "wife material," go on vacations that don't include all-you-can-drink rum cocktails and a bottle of permethrin.

But on the horizon, she sees her puce-colored car parked on the shoulder of the road and scrambles to it, fumbling to unlock the door. She drops the keys, because of course she does.

And the hillbilly dude stops twelve feet short of her.

“Ya comin’ on to my property hootin' and hollerin' like some goddamn mad woman. I've had enough!”

“What?” Frey mouths.

“Ya upset my squirrels!” he screams at her. “Interrupting my reverie! Five times a goddamn week, I hear yer naggin' and screamin'. I left my wife'n moved to the middle of Buttfuck, Nowherezville for a goddamn reason! Get the fuck out of here and never come back! "

Freya pauses to reflect on how close to this man she feels in the moment. Kindred spirits? "I’m sorry, I thought this was public property. I didn't see--"

"Well open yer goddamn eyes! There're goddamn signs everywhere!"

Freya looks around and, yes, indeed there are goddamn signs everywhere. She can't quite figure out how she missed those. She picks up her keys and unlocks her car door, taking in one last woeful look over her vista of bliss.

"Scat!" the man screeches.

She hurries into her car and speeds off.

The man spits on the ground, and walks away with a skip in his step. "Women."

The next day, Freya returns to work like nothing happened, because what can she really do? Complain to Melissa Mothballs in HR that her benefits don’t cover scream therapy? Whine to George the Office Sexual Harasser through her cleavage while she brews a K-Cup?

Freya tries to remain optimistic But after one week, she’s stressed the fuck out again. Everyone smells like patchouli or sweaty genitals or sour milk. Everything's too loud. Ken and his day-long s-s-s-slurp-sipping. Julie and her happy-happy-humming. The sound of Peggy’s baby wailing to the rhythm of her breast pump. And by the way, the baby’s not cute. It looks exactly like what it is - a creature that clawed its way out of someone’s crotch.

Freya's barely keeping it together, and then the company hires a new chick. Katy Something. A twenty-year-old idiot with an obnoxious half-up topknot and a wardrobe way beyond her salary's means, who clearly only has the job because her parents want to "teach her some responsibility." And she has this HONK of a fucking laugh. It's jarring. Inescapable. Un-drown-out-able.

Freya tries to get back to her zen. She starts using an app that replicates nature sounds. She fucks the marginally hot janitor on the second floor. She gets some plants. A stress ball shaped like Peggy's baby's head. A pillow she says is for her back, but she actually uses to muffle her anguished sobbing.

But fucking Katy Something and her fucking donkey honk.

If you saw Freya in the workplace now, you’d think, "Wow, that bitch needs to get laid." Or, "Boy, someone could use an all-inclusive vacation to one of those rum cocktail destinations." Or you might crack a "More like Freya-d nerves, am I right?"

Now, every day Freya mentally bores a hole through her office wall at her co-workers on the other side. She attempts to manifest a giant lead safe that falls through the ceiling and crushes Katy and the retro Furby on her desk. She fantasizes about Katy's guts splashing into Ken's tea as he sips it unawares - only to choke in horror once he realizes. A shard of Katy’s projectile rib spears Peggy, her husband, and her baby in one powerful motion. Katy's rectum prolapses with the excessive force of the safe, slapping Julie right in her humming mouth. George walks in, snaps a photo of the carnage with his cell phone, but his exhausted-from-sending- excessive-unwanted-sexts phone battery explodes in his hand, setting him on fire.

That's what Freya thinks about as she suffers through weeks of stress-indigestion and stress-diarrhea, and leaves work early from stress-headaches, and secretly drinks vodka at ten a.m. because this Katy Something bitch and her fuckin laugh is messing' with Freya’s hanging-by-a-thread sanity.

And today happens to not only be #WellnessWednesday, but it’s also the one-month anniversary of Freya's only source of joy coming to an end. Freya would be in the mood to celebrate but she just ended an argumentative client call, and her computer crashed, and right as Freya takes a deep breath Katy starts honk-laughin' at videos of cats dressed like people and recapping The Big Bang theory and

Freya gets up and throws her Scholl's-lined stilettos across the impressionist ikea painting on the wall. So what if she steps on a thumb tack? Maybe she’d like it.

Freya kicks her office door open and catwalks into the shared workspace. She begins her journey with an escalating peacockery of honk-laughing directed at Katy. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - not. Freya chases her across the office.

"People are trying to work. People have giant amounts of money at stake. Do you even have a job? Or are you just here to laugh at literally everything?” Freya shrieks through gritted teeth.

No one does anything. They're just like, taking it in. Looking up from their phones and realizing there's life happening that doesn't specifically revolve around them.

Freya strips off her blazer, all the while frothing at the chip-chops and circling the teary-eyed Katy. Freya peels off another layer. Then another. Soon she’s just wearing pantyhose and a bra. Focused and panting.

Then, in the eye of the storm, Ken audibly sips on his fuckin' tea-- and Freya goes right off on everyone, but really mostly Katy--

“Sharing an office with you is giving me an ulcer and the dental plan at this shithole doesn't cover acid reflux damage!"

"I'm sorry," Katy Something whispers. "I didn't know I was bothering anyone."

"How could you not be bothering anyone? Everyone is bothered!" Freya stomps, and looks around. She'll be getting no show of solidarity from these traitors.

Freya follows George's eyeline, fixed on Katy's big, glittery tits, and suddenly Freya's outraged about the sexism in the workplace, she's outraged by the lack of healthy options in the vending machine, and she's fucking outraged that this goddamn bitch can get her version of her scream- rocks off right in Freya's space when she has nowhere to get her own rocks off and no one is going to have fun if she's not and Freya belts out the loudest scream you’ve ever heard--

Louder than her forest-screams. This is like, in labor-for-fourteen-hours-and-just-felt-the-last-remaining-membrane-in-her-lower-body-rip kind of scream.

Katy attempts to flee the scene in terror, tripping on Freya’s discarded garments, and wow - that's what it's all about. As Katy squirms on the outdated carpet, clasping her ankle, hope returns to Freya’s face. She feels so much better. She inhales the shocked faces - Ken spills his tea all over the floor - and she wonders why she didn't bring the ruckus to the office before. This is true catharsis. No hour-long hike necessary. Freya can feel her glow returning. Her vagina twinges in a post-orgasmic, gaspy “thank you.”

Freya takes a deep breath, smiles, and announces that she's taking an extended fifteen.

She goes back to her office, reboots her computer, nibbles on a box of thin mints, and looks up jiu-jitsu classes in the area. Doesn’t bother getting dressed. She’s in the zone. She’s so in the zone that she doesn’t even notice the ten minutes of nonstop calls on line one from Martha Mothballs in HR. She summons a petrified intern to see if he can procure her some weed, maybe book a cottage by the lake for the weekend. And is he legal yet? Mommy could use a massage. She puts on her headphones and kicks back her stockinged feet on a stack of client papers and places bids on one player board games and mocasins on Ebay with the company card.

Freya is finally doing great.

Forty minutes later, she’s being walked out of the building by two security guards, but she’s over it. She’s sure she can get one of her old ex-boyfriends to move back into her condo and unemployment will cover the rest.

Katy's still crying as George tends to her injury. Cops a feel as he comforts her, wonders if today will be his lucky day.

Debra’s figured out the keys to the Universe. She’s practically an expert. Basically a physicist. Where attention goes, energy flows. What you focus on expands. She’s pirated every book and workshop by Hicks Goddard Dispenza Zenkina Frances Hay Hill. Her trailer park comrades don’t realize it, but she’s a fuckin’ genius and doesn’t belong in a place like that. Not with people like them.

Debra’s got enviable pin legs and her C-cups are dynamite. Lady’s a dazzler. A pleasure to behold. She’s the vibration of her dream home. She’s a lilac jacuzzi and a four-poster waterbed. The energetic match to a 1970 cherry red Buick Skylark. Atomic mirror for a dusty rose velour jumpsuit, sapphire piñata, scorpion-shaped fountain that eternally flows with champagne and never needs to be cleaned.  

Leaning back in her plastic chair smoking a Pall Mall, she spies a storm on yonder. Debra intuits it’s not just a natural disaster. She conjured it. Been practicing the Law of Attraction for weeks. A cyclone of yearning hurtles towards Camelot Toe Trailer Park at 88 miles an hour. Just like she scripted. Visualized. 369’d. Defined and declared. Everything she desires is nearly upon her.

“I fuckin’ told ya!” she screams. Ciggie half-spent, dangling from her frosted lips as she stands up, the lawn chair near snapping from the enthusiastic thrust of her thirty-five-year-old hindquarters. The soundtrack of Debra’s Best Life is an arrangement of airborne metal torpedoing single-pane windows, screeching tires on gravel and sticker-covered guitars percussively slapping vinyl siding. 

“Debbay, you shitstain bimbo!” JibJab hollers, tossing beers, tobacco products and binders indiscreetly bursting with his favourite porno mags into the back of his rusty Chevy. “There’s a fuckin’ tornado headed straight for us!” 

A tornado of everything Debra desires.

JibJab shakes his greasy head and spits out a hunk of chaw, going back for one last box of phlegmorabilia. His brother, Biggy Bag, ropes his prized possessions - poorly taxidermied roadkill and a papier mache beer fridge sculpture of their mother - into his matching rust-bucket. Small minds. They couldn’t possibly understand Debra’s vision; quantum shifting out of a bunkie, wedged between Jib Jab the jumbo jack-off’s trailer and Biggy Bag’s converted car-zebo, into an aspirational micro-mansion subdivision. Transcendental she-bologna in a negative energy manwich, no more. Their jealousy won’t stop her.

She glides into her shanty and gracefully removes her prized mermaid costume hanging on the collapsed clothes rack. Dress for the job you want. Dress for the life you desire. Be your future self now. 

She exquisitely experiences abundance and freedom as she stuffs herself into a shimmering emerald tail and pink plastic shell bra. Deliciously embodies orgasmic lightness as she accentuates the look with a stunning zirconia shrimp necklace, places shimmering pins in still-processing just-permed hair, which burns from the anticipatory sweat. Twelve hours until it’s safe to get wet or suffer the frizziness. Sometimes one is limited by three-dimensional reality. She wasn’t expecting today to be Manifestation Day. 

But

You

Must

Trust

Divine

Timing.

Debra leaves behind her old life, and heads towards the squall with open arms. The constrictive mermaid tail slows her roll, thwarts her rapidity. Hipping and hopping won’t get her anywhere. It’s always toughest right before you get what is meant for you. Darkest before dawn.

“What would you have me do, Cosmic Daddy?” she yodels into the deluge. She struggles for a moment, but the Universe always provides a solution.

“Rip it!”

She follows the signs and tears the mermaid tail seam with her bare hands. 

“I said rip it out of here! You dumb fuckin’ bitch!” Biggy Bag yells from across the way. “Get your pimply ass outta the park, that twister’s gonna eat you!”

Debra snorts. “You see fear, I see opportunity.” 

And opportunity is headed straight for 32 Nirvana Ave in Camel Toe Estates, her dream home; the one with the big pool and peach bricks. The owners are long gone, it’s Debra’s now. 

She runs straight into the superstorm. Her vision board’s coming to life. Sucked up in the interstellar swell. Spinning and twirling; a siren in a frothing sea. Her fantasy smells like grass and sulphur. She barely registers the gravel lacerating her frosty flesh or the microwave that smashes her hip bone or the nail sticking out of her thigh. Obstacles are simply tests. The injuries are a sign that Debra’s about to break through her upper limits.

Everything she yearns for is within reach. 

A brand new Macbook careens into her welcoming arms.

Shovel.

Deluxe lawnmower. 

Hotdog.

This is the moment before the moment she has it all.

Wind stops. Mid-air, everything freezes. 

Debra savors the milliseconds as the clouds part and the sun breaks through, kissing her skin like pieces of broken glass. 

And then she’s falling. 

Into the Universe’s bountiful breast. 

She strikes water, sinking to the bottom of 32 Nirvana Ave.’s impressive in-ground pool.

Debra’s perm is ruined!!!! 

She didn’t think this through. The chlorinated water fills her lungs and everything stings. For a moment she doubts the megacosm, but any manifestor worth their salt knows that’s the kiss of death. Never doubt or limit what comes through. Debra will attract a hairdresser later. She’ll co-create some oxygen now.

Mesmeric ribbons of red casually engulf her; a symphony of disembodied fish dancing for their Mermaid Queen.

The Universe isn’t done, though. More gifts fall from the sky. Just for Debra.

Her dream car. 

Titanium rake.

Spinning clothesline.

Imported trees.

Terra cotta roof tiles.

They’re all hers.

Part One

I roll the twenty between my fingers and out from underneath a stack of bills. In one fluid gesture, it’s inside the cuff of my sweater, and the register is closed. I exhale through my teeth. My pulse slows.

Mrs. Sisson approaches the checkout counter with a plastic basket. Her white hair in an immaculate bun. Her face carefully powdered and spackled.

“How are you tonight, Mrs. Sisson? Quick Pick with Encore?” I say, all smiles and nods.

I eyeball the total of her pantyhose, nuts, and hard candies to be about ten dollars.

She shakes her head, “I’m fine, dear. And no, Bob already picked up tickets. I’m feeling lucky tonight. Are you playing? It’s a big one.”

I type in the items as a return, then place her money in the till.

“Not me, I never win.”

And just like that, my ass is covered. Even if those cameras above the cash area work, which I suspect they don’t, I’m very discreet.

I’m not a bad person; it’s just that I refuse to accept that what I have is all I get. I’m white. I come from a middle-class background. I should’ve done something with my life. Still got time, but I’m not good at anything.

So I steal.

Scribbling a fake signature and stuffing the receipt under the plastic clamp, my eyes remain fixed on the elderly woman's. It won't be until she’s sitting at home knitting unwanted sweaters for grandchildren that she might wonder about the receipt.

“Send my regards to your husband,” I say, stepping out from behind the register to flip off the first set of lights and begin shutting down the store.

She stuffs some wayward tissues into her giant purse. A small money clip falls from her pocket and lands softly on one of the runner mats.

I step on it.

Mrs. Sisson squeezes my hand with a squeaky leather glove, then waves goodbye. I wait until she’s passed through the second set of glass doors, then bend down, tying up an already tied shoe. I pocket what is probably thirty bucks. Love it when I don't have to work for my free money.

I remove the billfold, about to toss the clip when I notice its weight. Silver. “M” for Mary engraved on it and a small pearl inset on the edge. Now it’s “M” for Martha. Probably worth something. Slide that into my cuff too as I lock the door.

Patrick “The Cunt” watches me from across the store. The fluorescent lights bounce off his chrome, bald pate. If it weren't for his crouton-like complexion, he would blend in seamlessly with the polished metal racks and mannequins. You can't see the whites of his eyes unless he’s looking to his extreme left or right.

He’s not called The Cunt because he’s a jerk, though he is a jerk. It’s because he has twenty-four/seven unwashed vagina breath. While you may not have consciously acknowledged this phenomenon, you've most definitely encountered it. Sweet, sour, with notes of rich cheese and fermenting citrus. Not to say that my vag has ever smelled like that, because it hasn't.

I never pull my shell game in front of employees, but after the first few weeks of working in Litman's Department Store, I realized Patrick was just creepy window dressing. Milium-spotted drapery, barely observing. Barely alive. He’s the assistant supervisor, which is a fake job title if I ever heard one. “Well, Tom, we certainly can't promote The Cunt that's been here for eight years, we gotta throw the guy a bone if we don’t want to have to hire and train some jack-off fresh out of high school.”

It’s five minutes to close, and it’s just me and The Cunt. I let him deal with the change rooms and toilets, and take my sweet time counting and recounting the last register. When I’m sure he’s done all of the duties I don’t want to do, I fill out the slip, drop the deposit in the zip pouch, organize the float, and slide it through the mailbox-sized slot of the janky old safe. And yes, I have thought about breaking into it and taking off with the night’s deposit. There’s always tomorrow.

We each have a small cubby located at the back of the store in the lunchroom. In the eight months that I’ve worked at the department store, I’ve stolen from at least three of my coworkers – only food, mind you. The fourth I merely tampered with, but I can speak for everyone at Litman’s when I say that Tammy's salmon sandwiches made us all want to wretch and the bitch had it coming.

I transfer my take from the day into my purse. Forty-five dollars and a money clip. Could've been worse. By the time I come out of the staff room, the store is pitch black, and Patrick jingles the keys by the door in his tan fleece.

Our exit is always the same; wait for the alarms and locks, then head to the back parking lot. On nights when I’m feeling particularly good – usually because I’ve pulled in a hundred, I’ll make small talk with The Cunt. On nights when I walk away with nothing, I go the long way to avoid Patrick.

“Chill in the air tonight,” The Cunt says.

“It's winter.” My eyes flutter. They never roll. A couple of summers ago I got vertigo for a few weeks when I was working at a coffee shop. My doctor told me it was from rolling my eyes too much. Asshole. Coffee shops, as a broad rule, are funnels for every insufferable person in the Western world.

When the wind is blowing east, the air in Devil Falls has an eggy tang to it. When it's hot, it's like wading through rotten egg salad. I tuck my face in my humid scarf, which doesn't smell much better but at least it's my own brand of stank. The Cunt heads toward his red Jetta and I begin my passage through the alley that leads to Swift and Main. I start thinking about dinner. I could make KD, but don't know if I even have any butter or margarine. Could use mayo, I always have mayo.

The Cunt starts his car, half-drives out of the parking lot, then stops.

“Martha!” The Cunt's shrill voice pierces my ear, an unwelcome and unlubed entry.

Slowly turning, “What?”

The Cunt shifts from side to side, his mouth opening and closing without making a sound. Maybe he isn't a pig, more of a strangled guppy. He scratches the back of his neck, waiting for me to come toward him before he says anything else.

It's this kind of passive-aggressive bullshit that makes me smug about robbing people.

“What?”

“I forgot to lock the inner doors before I engaged the security system.” Patrick glistens in the lone streetlight.

“So?” What an idiot. I lean toward the heat of his car.

“Could you watch my car for a minute?”

I’m about to respond with - “Just turn it off, you asshat” - when from the corner of my well-trained eye, I spot a twenty haphazardly wedged between a pair of Patrick's indoor shoes and a pile of scrunched up plastic bags. He probably doesn’t even know it’s there.

“Just go,” I say. “Chop, chop.”

Patrick scampers off into the darkness, and I slip fingers through the driver's seat belt and pull the plastic peg lock upward. I open the back door, and a pile of empty Faygos and a jumbo tub of antacids spill out onto my feet. That just earned The Cunt a second robbing. I toss the cans and Tums into the mess on the bottom of his car floor and retrieve the money.

It’s wet.

I hold the tiniest edge of the damp plasti-paper with my thumb and forefinger. Now, this is the real test. How much does Martha—

Part Two

My parents aren't mad at me; they keep repeating. My mom's hair has changed. So has her nose. Something isn't right about them. I’m on a TV show. Oprah? No, Oprah’s only reruns now. People clap. I’m not the baby's mother! A wave of relief washes over me. How on earth did I even get this stupid baby? I look down, and the baby in my arms vomits. At first just a slug of drool, then black, oily clam chowder--

Dear God, that breath. This baby has the worst breath.

The father must be The Cunt. That's where it came from, it all makes sense and--

“Martha,” the phlegmy voice repeats the word. Over and over. “Marthaaa.” Turning the name over a spit, roasting it to coal, drying up the last bit of pink, juicy meat inside. “Martha!”

My eyes roll over the walls of the steamy, thirteen-by-thirteen bedroom. He comes into focus.

Augh.

Soon I can see every grey pore, nodule, tiny black hair.

God, I hope he doesn't rape me.

Bound wrists. Bound ankles. Cheap yellow nylon rope, the waxy kind that’s less likely to tear flesh. Not gagged. Could scream. I could scream loud, but then he might stuff something in my mouth. Something that was just touching his skin.

Fortunately, I still have my clothes on. Not my coat. But all my shirt buttons are done up. My breasts don’t hurt, so if I was fondled, at least it was gently. My back hurts though. Who would buy an awful chair like this? Probably came from Litman’s.

Yanking every limb in unison, I rock the chair forward.

“Stop that now,” he gets up.

“Let me go, Patrick.”

I’m in a bedroom in a house. Nicotine-yellowed wallpaper, even the pattern of roses seems to be wilting from The Cunt's oppression. The faint smell of human-generated ammonia creeps toward me from hard-to-clean crevices and corners. A single, lumpy bed with a stuffed bear on it sits in the far right beside a night table stained with water rings. Framed photographs of a woman through various stages of aging on the walls. A crab figurine made of shells and stones. A giant bookshelf. No classics. All self-help. Therapy. Mind Control. More self-help. And a device on the table beside my chair.

A device.

This is probably where Patrick conducts unspeakable acts of beastiality, autonepiophilia, gerontophilia… All kinds of philias. And I’m next. Beautiful, vibrant and young.

He stands in front of me, a formal presentation, hands folded, a grave expression. “I brought you here to help you. To get to the root of your problem so that you can break free of it.”

This is an intervention.

“Do you know why you’re here, Martha?”

“Because you hit me over the head and tied me up.” I refuse to make eye contact. Acknowledgement is half the thrill for these guys.

“Actually, I didn't hit you over the head. I injected you with a sedative.”

Is this how it all ends? A dirty needle. I shift my weight in the chair, back and forth. You have seventy-two hours to get to a hospital if you suspect you've been infected with one of the Big Bad Blood viruses, and then they flush you out with vitamins. Or at least that's what someone who couldn’t remember if they had unprotected anal sex at a rave in Barrie told me. I have a bad immune system. Always sick. I probably won’t even last twenty-four.

“Who’s room is this?” I ask.

“It was my mother’s," Patrick says this without blinking. But not in a natural way. He’s hiding pain.

Ah.

“Do you want to talk about your mother, Patrick?” I smile.

He takes a deep breath, thankfully in the opposite direction, then sits down in a ratty office chair across from me. He unfurls the device’s accessories. Pretty sure it’s a polygraph unit. He plugs me in. Wraps the blood pressure thing around my arm. Puts the other thingy on my fingers. I’m too lazy to bother fighting it.

I look at the clock on the wall and realize I’m missing one of my Gordon Ramsay shows. The one where he yells at people for having semen on the sheets in their crappy hotel.

He straps tubes around my chest, nervously trying to avoid touching my breasts. Probably not gonna rape me then.

“Is this a lie detector?” I ask.

Patrick smiles. He thinks he’s impressed me. “Got it off eBay a while back.”

“Unnecessary. You don’t matter enough to lie to.”

The Cunt begins a rehearsed monologue. “Resistance is natural but you can relax, Martha. You’re in good hands. You’ve been feeling apathetic. Stealing makes you feel alive. But the more you do it, the bigger the crime you’re going to need to commit to get that same feeling. Until you end up in jail, Martha.”

He pulls out a notebook.

“I decided not to approach the head cheese about this because I knew it would result in your firing and you wouldn’t learn anything. You would probably go out the next day and find another job and do the same thing over again. Or perhaps you'd sweet-talk your way out of the situation, as I've seen you do. You may even turn the tables on me, and get me fired. But I can help you. I understand now what I did wrong in trying to help mother… But I can fix you, Martha. This I am confident of.” Patrick’s hand shakes as he wipes a bead of sweat from his face. “Please state your name.”

“No.”

“Alright, well… Is your birthday April fourth? Yes or no.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Do you live in Devil Falls, yes or no?”

“I have no idea where I am. I’m so high from those sedatives you injected me with.”

He looks over to his bookshelf for reassuring buzz phrases like, “life is a gift” and “if you want security, go to prison.”

“I want you to tell me about the first time you stole. I want you to detail why you did it and how it made you feel.”

Jesus. The first time I stole? I can’t remember something like that, but I can remember the first time I stole and it felt really fucking good.

Part Three

I was eight years old and attending my last in a long line of sleepovers. I wasn’t invited by anyone in particular. My mom always seemed to have agreements with other children’s mothers. She’d organize a bake sale if one of them pleasefortheloveoffuckingGod took her “spirited” daughter off her hands for one night.

This particular slumber party was themed - the annoying ones always are. At the time, there was some popular cartoon about a teenage girl band or a bunch of teen girls who drove motorcycles. I don’t remember. My mother had gone out and bought me a doll specifically for the occasion.

I didn’t want to go and ripped my doll’s head off. My mother, used to this behavior, simply shoved the head back on. But it didn’t do that articulated neck thing anymore. My doll, Jerissa, was now neckless with a squashed head. She was the ugly doll. And every girl at that slumber party alienated me for it. Especially Gillian Mann, the hostess with the mostess, and in possession of the same doll - hers with a swan-like neck and dainty jawline.

Your doll is stupid. Your mom bought it at the poor barn that’s why it looks like that. It looks like you. You’re ugly, Martha.

As a youngster, I got anxiety diarrhea. And the more anxious I got about the potential for diarrhea, the more likely it was that my ass would explode. So of course, after relentless nitpicking, my ass indeed exploded.

I stunk out the bathroom and Gillian wouldn’t let me rejoin the sleepover. I ended up hanging out in her basement with the family beagle for several hours looking through her older brother’s hidden Penthouses. Finally, Gillian’s mother noticed that there was one less sweetie-pie at the party and marched me back upstairs.

In the still of night, I took my Jerissa doll and dragged her arms and legs up my tiny diarrhea-crusted butt crack. I slid out of my sleeping bag and swapped my doll for Gillian’s. Then I snuck out.

I lived two blocks away and nobody locked their doors in my neighborhood. I broke off the head of my fancy new Jerissa so that I could never be blamed for what happened. The mothers couldn’t “prove” that I switched them, but I never had to go to another slumber party after that.

“Well?” Patrick rasps in a gentle tone. He’s mistaken my reminiscing for some kind of emotional obstacle that I’m processing thanks to his care.

“I stole candy from a corner store when I was five,” I say.

He stares at me for a few moments, then shuffles over to the bookshelf. He sits back down and holds tightly to the self-help book as if he’s a preacher with a bible and I’m the damned soul he’s exorcising. Keep trying, Cunt.

“And what is your relationship like with your mother?”

“Haven’t talked to her in years. Neither of us wants to.”

He examines me. “Why do you think your mother doesn’t want to talk to you?”

“She has self-loathing issues,” I say.

“Or maybe it’s because of your problem. Why do you steal, Martha? Let’s identify the root of this deviancy. Do you need the money?”

I sigh.

“Is it for attention?”

“Let me make this is easy for you, Patrick.” I try to put my hands behind my head and lean back in my chair. Impossible. “I steal because I almost never get caught, and when I do the consequences are so low stakes it doesn’t matter. I want more than I have, but without having to work for it. I’m a product of my generation. You wouldn’t get it.”

Biting his lip, he takes a few notes.

“If I hadn’t come along and sedated you by the car, would you have put the twenty dollars back or kept it?”

“I would’ve put it back.”

He glances at the polygraph as if it means anything.

“Because you value our relationship?” He asks.

“Because it felt contagious.”

His face falls.

“What was your relationship with your mother like? Were you there for her in her final moments?” I ask.

He looks over at the cot. Sinks into himself. “Of course.”

“But she didn’t care, did she?”

“I don’t know.”

“You tried to fix her. Didn’t you, Pat?”

The Cunt lifts his head and locks eyes with me. “You’re a smart girl, Martha. You don’t belong in a department store… Maybe I don’t either.”

“You definitely do, Pat.”

His rotting faux leather slippers slide across the gristly carpet as he heads to the warped old dresser. “I can’t fix you, same way I couldn’t fix mum. She wasn’t a thief like you, but boy she liked to lie,” he continues, as he forages through what appears to be a drawer full of craft supplies. “She lied about who my father was, she lied about girls not calling me… Lied about everything.”

A soft breeze cools my back. The door opens a crack.

A draft, maybe.

No. A pet.

The Cunt pulls out a pair of polished steel scissors, the kind dressmakers use to cut precisely on chalk outlines. “Even her last days. She was hiding pills under that pillow, right over there.”

The cot willingly gives way to Patrick’s pear-shaped behind. He wields the pair of scissors like a serial killer, plunging them into the thick marshmallow pillow. I wriggle again. It's useless. I’ll give the guy credit for one thing; he knows how to tie a knot. This is what I get for bringing up his mother.

“She wasn’t hiding her pills because she didn’t want to take them. She was taking plenty of those. She could barely walk, but she would get out of bed while I was at work and hide my prescription pills. So I thought, she’s addicted to meds, she just can’t stop. Not true. She didn’t ingest a single one. She just wanted to hide mine to fuck with me. Do you know what she did when I asked her about it?”

A small grey kitten has woven its way into the room unnoticed by Patrick. Its little body rubs against the backs of my jeans, oblivious to the emotional storm.

“She defecated herself, Martha. My mother had been too proud and too in control to do anything like that before. I spent hundreds on this wheely toilet, so she could spend her last days expelling what little waste was left inside her like a lady. Only for her to shove it in my face - not literally. But, guess who had to clean it up? I did.”

That’s when I notice the dried blood on the lie detector. On the blood pressure armlet, the finger cup, even the machine. Faint against the black plastic, but there. I learned how to spot it from that Gordon Ramsey show. He killed his fucking mother, the fucking liar. And now he is going to kill fucking Martha, the fucking thief.

“Not to get graphic, but I’ve really needed to talk about this. It wasn’t even normal stool. It was like tar. It was almost like her body was finally so full of lies that she… well, frankly, she was just shitting them out!” Patrick claps, finally looking in my direction. “Do you know what it’s like to clean the waste from your mother’s—“

“I’ll kill your cat if you don’t let me go.” The kitten picked the worst time to wedge its little triangle head between my meaty (but sexy) calves. I (gently - I’m not a monster) turn my body into a kitten pillory.

The Cunt clutches the giant scissors to his chest. “But Specter is just a kitten.”

“I’m gonna rip it’s fucking head off!”

“No! Stop! Let her go, and I’ll untie you.” A tiny tear runs down Patrick’s cheek. “Just let her go.”

“Cut me free.”

“Just wait. I’m not done yet,” Patrick whimpers.

“If you don’t de-rope me right away, I will choke the life out of your cat, then scream. I know you live in town. People will hear me. When the cops arrive, I’ll say that you made me wear your mother's frocks while raping me. I'll say that you held up a picture of Mr. Litman's youngest daughter while you did it. And that you kept saying over and over, ‘This is just the warm-up!’”

“Enough!” The Cunt curls over and sobs into the crook of his arm. “I was trying to help you. Don't you see? Oh, God. What have I done? I’ll be sent to prison.”

“Tell you what, Patrick. I won't tell anyone that you captured me.”

He crawls over to the chair, still weeping. “Thank you, thank you.” He cuts the ropes from my feet, then my hands. I release the kitten.

“On one condition,” I say, putting distance between myself and the pair of scissors.

His face falls.

“Five hundred bucks.” I hold my smile. “Pain and suffering fee.”

“Five hundred dollars? But that's a quarter of my monthly wage.”

“I might have an infection from this.” I point at the sore spot on my neck where I assume The Cunt jabbed me with the syringe. “Maybe I should also factor in medical expenses. And that could be, oh-- I might need to talk to a lawyer.”

“No, no. Five hundred. I have it. Tucked away... Be right back.” Patrick bundles Specter into this arms and leaves the room.

I relax some, rubbing the raw indents on my wrists. Totally worth it for five hundy. I wonder how many more people I could trick into kidnapping me to teach me a lesson.

After several minutes of shuffling and sighing, Patrick finally hands me my money, which I slip into my new antique money clip. Five hundred and forty-five in total.

“Okay, well bye.” Patrick waits.

“Uh, I'm not walking home with this much cash in my purse. You can drive me.”

Part Four

We drive in silence, save for the odd directive grunt, until we pull up in front of my apartment building. The Cunt's breath has hotboxed the car by the time we arrive. Patrick yawns an achingly long yawn and stretches his hand toward me.

“You won't say anything to anyone, right?”

“No, Patrick. I won't. But if I catch you watching me steal again, I'm telling everyone what you did.”

Patrick's expression is that of an utterly defeated man. I feel a tinge of pity.

“I hope you’ve learned your lesson.” I slam the door and smile. Perhaps the first genuine smile I’ve smiled in months. Years. Someone up above is watching over me and wants me to succeed--

A siren bleats from the dark west wall of the brick prison I call home. It’s a sketchy neighborhood, it happens. I gather my thoughts and think about the two Mooseheads in my fridge as I race toward my building.

The squad car pulls up in front of me.

An officer steps out of the vehicle. I look around, mystified. Did the cops see the whole thing? Was The Cunt going to get arrested?

“Are you Martha Bigbag, cashier at Litman's Department Store?” The officer walks toward me.

“Yeah. Did I win something?”

A second officer opens the back passenger door and helps Mrs. Sisson out.

“Ma'am, is this the woman you said robbed you?”

“Robbed?”

In the distance, I hear The Cunt's Jetta peeling off down the street.

The old witch rattles over in her polyester and acrylic wool fountain. “Oh yes, that's her. She stuck her hand in my purse and stole my money and my money clip. She said she'd kill me if I told.”

“What?”

“Miss, give us the bag.” The first cop gestures for my purse.

“No, I know my rights. You're not allowed to look in my bag without a warrant.”

Just then the nasty old wart lunges at me, using her gnarled arthritic bones as weapons, gnashing dentures like a rabid terrier – and she snatches the purse right out of my fingers. Before I can react, she roots through my belongings. Her tongue wags back and forth in excitement.

And there it is; M. Her fucking clip with my five hundred and forty-five dollars.

“Oh no, you don't! Only thirty of that is yours, bitch!”

“See officers! My clip with my money. M for Mary!”

I growl and charge at her, very dramatically.

The first officer sticks out an arm and grabs me by the wrists.

“Only thirty of that is hers, you gotta believe me. I found the clip with the money on the ground and I was going to give it back to her the next time I saw her. But five fifteen of it is mine.”

“Where’d you get five hundred from?” The officer eyes me in the darkness. The street lamp lights his face in such a way that it looks like he has a small crystal forest of peach fuzz on his cheek. Kind of beautiful.

"It’s mine. I just have it. Can’t I just have money? I have a job.”

“Why did you put it in a money clip that you were intending on returning?” The first officer asks.

“Well, I’ve been thinking about buying one for myself, and I wanted to give it a test drive before I commit. You know what I mean? Like a car. Or a woman - right, officer?” I wink.

The officer roughly ushers me into the back seat of the patrol vehicle. “Jacobs, will you see that the kind lady here gets home nice and safe without getting jumped by any more hooligans?”

The second officer nods.

“But that’s my money!” I scream. “This is a fucking outrage! I’ll sue! I’ll sue all of you!”

Some guy on the third floor screams at me to shut up. You just made my shit-list too, asshole.

“Why a young woman would do such a thing—“ Mrs. Sisson trails off.

“Who knows why people do what they do. You know what I mean?” The second officer says.

The banshee sneers at me as the officer pushes my head inside the car. Her flat, black coal eyes remind me of The Cunt's. Only hers are different. Plucked straight from the head of a Great White.

“Hey, Mrs. Sisson,” I say, straining to push my head back up to the car roof. “Hope you lose on that lottery ticket.”

“I’m already a winner, dear.”

As we drive off in the cop car, I wonder who the fuck I can call to bail me out of jail.

Patrick, maybe?

Or so the story went.

Dave’s boat was decades overdue for an upgrade. He still didn’t have a motor, and had to make do with slimy, splintery paddles. The powers that be had never even given him so much as a cushion for his lower back. And don’t get Dave started on smoke breaks and workplace temperature. The River Styx, a sexy, sunsetty Chris de Burgh music video, it was not.

Dave wondered who his next passenger would be. A drug lord with the blood of hundreds on his hands? A CEO of a fast food company? A Christian rap-rocker with a taste for youngins? Or his favourite; the average Joe, run-of-the-mill asshole who didn't quite grasp why he was there. It was a toss-up if those ones ended up at the River Styx or the Pearly Gates; nepotism, luck of the draw, politics. You know how it goes.

Dave’s patrons rarely messed with him; he was the mysterious figure in the velvety, moth-eaten robe with sunken black holes for eyes, and they were the new kid in school. Uncomfortable. Worried they’d fart, get a boner, or be torn to shreds by one of Satan’s minions.

The ones that knew why they were there, weren't so much for the talking. Occasionally someone would try and negotiate with Dave or make a run for it, but mostly they just wanted a head’s up on whatever atrocities lay ahead. Dave actually didn’t know, so he just made shit up. He found striking terror in their hearts made the ride unbearable, so he’d keep it sparse and only mention the funner things he’d heard of over the years - like the skeleton key parties, boiling Coca Cola jacuzzis, and sex pterodactyls.

But today -- or tonight, he was never quite sure -- Dave was in a chatty mood. He was itching to shake it up. Every single day, all day, he did his job. Point A to point B. It was simple. The route was well-worn; rarely any hiccups.

Sometimes, a teeth-gnashing, Hell Serpent would torpedo the boat, but within the first century Dave was pretty sure he’d harpooned all of those fuckers into the next dimension, if there was a next dimension. Dave didn’t like to think about that.

But Dave was bored. He was over his job. He wanted to rip off his robe, let his skin scraps hang out. Jitter-bug. Sky-dive. Go to a concert. See a movie. What Dave really wanted more than any thing, was a companion. Someone to talk to. Someone to hold his clammy phalanges and tell him that he was all they'd ever dreamed of. Maybe give him a little river head every now and then.

He’d heard of orgies deep into the mainland, but Dave was never invited. Not even as someone’s plus one. Not that that was his scene, but it would still be nice to be included once in a while.

Dave had spent years archiving his feelings in the dusty bins of whatever remained of his grey matter. But sometimes he couldn’t control his thoughts. Quite frankly, he was sick of it. He wanted more out of his afterlife. He nervously sipped on a goblet filled with regurgitated Southern Comfort as he waited for his next appointment.

Then, through the brume, he saw her. The thick air seemed to part for the woman approaching his boat, as if trying to move out of her way, so as not to get her dirty. Her thick curls backlit by the ethereal glow of phosphorous feces and radioactive livers and spleens.

As she drew closer to the briney shoreline, the calcified stone that was Dave's heart twitched with the remnants of life. Or it was indigestion from SoCo on a bottomless stomach. Whatever it was, it was far from the usual.

The woman reached out to him with a coin in her hand. He couldn't speak. He was mesmerized. As he took the coin, he felt her warm skin, still so pink and full of blood. She bent over and climbed into the boat, giving Dave a real socketful. She had an ass Dave could drop a load of maggots into for days.

What could a gorgeous being like her have done to deserve such a fate? Maybe it was all just a misunderstanding; she accidentally ran over her neighbor’s unruly cat, or left her straightener on and set fire to a family living in the apartment above hers. But with legs like that, he guessed she was a lady of the night. A provider of passion. Perhaps she had murdered a violent John and was a hero to women everywhere.

Maybe together they could transcend damnation, and enter a heightened state of felicity.

He helped her take her seat, as she teetered on her platform shoes. She didn't shudder when she caught a whiff of the stinking tendrils of cadaver flopping off his bones. She just smiled.

Once she was seated, Dave asked, "Where would you like to go?"

"I get to choose?" Her giggle was girlish but hoarse. A lived woman.

Dave smiled. "Not usually. But I'm feeling adventurous today. We could go anywhere, do anything.”

"Isn't that against the rules? You’re naughty." She batted her lashes and looked around, pointing toward a soft orange glow on the distant horizon that Dave hadn’t noticed before. "You ever been in that direction?"

He shook his head and pushed off from shore, “I’m Dave, by the way.”

“Dave the Ferryman. Has a nice ring to it. I’m Odessa. Nice to meet you.” She crossed her feet under the plank of wood she was sitting on, like a lady.

If Dave had a pulse it would be racing. He didn’t know what to ask her. What’s your favourite colour? Seen anything good recently? So he went for the obvious. "How did you find yourself at the River Styx?"

"A cliché; murder-suicide. My boyfriend was cheating and I got jealous." She gripped the edge of her seat tightly, her knuckles turning white. “And then, I accidentally killed myself overdosing on sleeping pills, I assume. I was trying to make it look like someone came in and killed him and I slept through it because I took too many sleeping pills. That was gonna be my alibi. Didn’t really think it through.”

"I can’t imagine what a fool he must’ve been to cheat on someone like you. When we make it to the other side, I can show you a nice time over some mead."

"He was such a piece of shit. You know, this one time he was staring at my sister's breasts right at the family dinner table. Even my grandmother noticed. It was humiliating. And he was always hitting on my customers. And my co-workers. I don’t even know if he officially left his previous girlfriend when we started dating. But I love him. You know how it is. I love him so much that I hate him. Or is it, that I hate him so much that I love him?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Dave said. “So what did you do for work?”

“I was a hairdresser. That’s how I met my ex. Or is he still my boyfriend? We didn’t officially break up before I stabbed him to death with a cuticle pusher. He had such beautiful hair. God, what a waste.”

Dave cleared the remnants of his throat, hoping to restart the conversation. "You see land, or anything?"

"No land at all." She dropped her fingers in the water.

“You might not want to do that,” Dave cautioned before trying to get the conversation back on track. “Anywhere in Hades you’ve ever been curious about? Not sure what they’ve been saying up there, lately.”

“I don’t know much about this stuff. I’m not, like, religious. My ex-boyfriend’s family was pretty religious. It’s always the religious ones that raise the real fuckers, you know. They screw them up with all that bad boys go to Hell stuff. And then it’s like, they’re incapable of committing to the best thing that’s ever happened to them.”

“Uh huh. Well, there’s some cool stuff to do here. Lots of bogs to go hiking in. Volcanoes to watch kill villages. Orgies…” He trailed off, looking for a reaction.

"What kinds of people get sent here? Is it only murderers, or are there other kinds of sinners, too? Like say, cheaters?"

"Depends," Dave said. His face expressionless. It was easy to hide emotion when most of your muscle tissue had wasted away.

"Have you ever taken a man named Hyde Burnish across?" she asked, staring intently at Dave.

Dave shrugged. This wasn't going as planned.

"Dark hair, tattoos on his arm? When he talks, he kind of--"

Dave's bones were weary, rickety even, but rigor mortis didn’t slow him down as he pushed Odessa overboard.

“Swim that way,” he feebly gestured towards the nearest shoreline, as she glared up at him with a soaking wet face.

“Dave, please!” she sputtered.

He'd be on schedule for the next appointment if he backtracked now. As he paddled away, her blood-curdling scream was cut short as she was pulled into the murky deep by twelve-inch fangs.

Dave snorted. Guess he didn't kill all of the Hell Serpents after all.

Been an unwilling eavesdropper since I slammed balls-deep into the dripping, hard maleness of my pubescent voyage. One day outta nowhere, and I suddenly knew that Mr. Burke, my history teacher, intentionally left his trousers unzipped during tests. I knew that Sarah Lye contemplated suicide over a boy not loving her, and that same boy planned on opening fire on a bathhouse years later but changed his mind when he got promoted at McDonald's. The things about your mother that you want people to think you think—I don’t hear those. I hear the things you think about your mother and her stretched-out beige panties. The tampon you dug out of her garbage. That time you sprayed your balls with her Aqua Net and made your girlfriend go down on you.

You’re phony. Not like, Catcher in the Rye phony. It’s on a DNA level. Your thoughts don’t match your mouth phony. You walk through life doing the things you think you have to do, to tell yourself you’re a good person. You’ve become good at letting your thoughts flow like water from a sewage treatment plant. It’s a perfect system with very little upkeep. The bad thoughts go in, and purified filth comes out. No one’s any wiser.

Except me. I hear all of the bad things. The bats inside of your head, shriek and shit, and it echoes and bounces around in my brain.

And three weeks ago, everything got worse.

After the old woman occupying the apartment next to mine - whose thoughts were quiet and sporadic worried loops about her negligent daughter’s parenting skills - died and someone else moved in.

The woman in apartment 3C.

I don’t hear the drag-clomp of her uneven legs as she enters the building, one shoe with a leaden platform-sole. What I hear are the rat-maggots writhing around in her coppery, moist darkness.

I hear her coming, and I run.

Two steps to avoid the book pile that's been there since Grandma Jean died and left me this one-room cookie tin--

3C’s home early. Told her boss she wasn’t feeling well. She was lying.

I can taste 3C’s mind like a stale piece of bubblegum tucked up behind a rotting tooth. Six more steps to the hill of unfolded clothes. Three steps, turn to avoid the edge of the table.

--and where can she get mealworms--

--and does she have packing tape--

--and that old bitch, Mrs. Kranick, not holding open the door for her a minute ago--

She’s mad at Leslie with the big knockers in the office. She fuckin’ hates that maniac nitwit kid in 2D and his stupid toy fire truck that’s always in the way, and she’s pissed at her pud foot cuz she wants a pair of purple open-toe heels.

Gogogo fast as I can. But the thing about living inside walls with furniture piled on dust piled on furniture is it makes it real hard to escape. Fire? I’m fucked. Earthquake? Dead in the time it takes to wake from a nightmare.

I wedge my feet inside beat-up blue sneakers, fist a pile of change from the dish atop the coffee table Jenga, and get halfway down the first flight of stairs before--

--I'm free-falling through her mind. I’m a strawberry floating in a bowl of fruit punch. She’s been spiked, pissed in, and left to bog over. In the murky pink liquid, I see that one time when her brother tried to pour chlorine down her throat. That time when she pulled a hibernating frog from a snowbank and peeled its skin from its bones while it was still--

I’m outside, on the back pathway. Exhale. I spit her out onto the pavement, where she pops and hisses and fades with each footstep in the opposite direction. When she first moved in, I considered abandoning my rent-controlled birthright, but long-term unemployment coupled with depression—I’m waiting her out. People like her, they can’t stay happy in one place for long.

At first, I’d sit at a greasy spoon four blocks away. Then, three blocks at a laundromat. Now a comfortable one-and-a-quarter, in a vegetarian cafe.

I enter the warmth of the Generous Helping. A Pinterest curation of sandpapered whites and pewters. It smells like health, and it feels like safety. The Hummus-eaters and the Mock Meat Jocks and the Yoga Pants, they’re elevated. They’re better than me, they’re better than you, and they’re certainly better than 3C. The bad thoughts in here are a different brand—Terrible Lite.

...Shut up about how veganism has transformed your complexion, Becky. We all know you shovel BBQ chicken into your mouth while watching The Bachelorette-- If only I had married Mark, my child wouldn’t be this autistic fucking-- I’ve gone through three plastic bags and four plastic bottles this week and I don’t give a shit--

Breathe.

Count to ten.

Ommmm.

And they’re all good people again.

I watch 3C through her window while picking at a Quixotic Quinoa Carrot Muffin and sipping Feeling Grounded Matcha Meditation Tea. I’m getting centered in my hunger and thinking of the freezer-burned shrimp ring waiting for me at home.

3C's ritual is always the same: Orchestrate, execute, reward. This process takes anywhere from twenty minutes to six hours.

She gathers her Dollarama paper bows and ribbons, and then she's gone. Out of frame.

Back in frame, she peels out of the lot in her Honda. A black beetle scuttling across the bathroom tile.

Phase one: Complete.

I finish my muffin and wait. And wait. Tired from a long day of masturbating to the big-titted chicks of Tumblr, and applying to jobs I don’t want. I give up. I wave and thank Mavis the barista. Thank you, Mavis, for the pleasant service. Thank you for being a happy, well-adjusted person whose only blah thoughts are directed at espresso machines and sticky trays.

It’s raining and dark. I pull my T-shirt up to my ears. My sneakers already soaked through by the time I get to the parking lot. Squish. Squash.

Four steps to the edge of the concrete slab, a two-inch rise, then—

Down I go.

As I hit the ground, my body twists in a Shavasana or Lotus or Panting Horny Humping Dog pose. I look to the Generous Helping storefront as if it will tell me. Then to my left: A red fire truck.

Sigh.

The boy in 2D.

The rain feels nice for a while, but the plum around my ankle begins to ache. Time to go back to my cave full of tarnished silver stalagmites and jumbo-sized No-Name pork rinds. I roll over, crawling toward the six-step walk up, one spaghetti noodle, two spaghetti noodle. I reach for the rusted handrail, the asphalt shredding my skin. Just a few—

Drag-clomp.

I blink.

A cough, not twenty yards behind me. Jangling keys.

Drag-clomp.

Hate that kid. Want to rip his fucking eyeballs out, spoon-feed them to oh look, oh look, oh look—

I turn. Chin over shoulder, nose over chin, eyes over nose.

It’s 3B, it’s 3B, it’s 3B, it’s 3B--

Drag—

There she stands with a jack-o-lantern smile.

—Clomp.

“I knew someone was gonna trip on that. I was gonna move it, but then I thought I’d get lucky and the mom in 2D would slip and break her neck. That would really teach that kid a lesson.” Apartment 3C says, then stomps on the truck with her short leg, quartering the plastic. “Little fucker.”

I play dead.

She reaches for me, her other hand clasping a package addressed to Mrs. Kranick. “You’re bleeding.”

My forearms are scarlet.

She moves closer. I let it happen. I put my cold wet in her warm dry, and she clomps and I limp. We’re twins. She guides me through the hallway that smells like curry in one breath and tuna casserole in another. I watch as she places the box outside of 1B.

Phase two complete.

She chuckles, then we’re up the stairwell full of ‘no smoking’ signs. It smells like cigarettes.

She pauses to light a Du Maurier. Inhales. Blows the smoke in my face. Smiles when I cough. “Sorry.”

“I’ve seen you watching me from across the street,” she says. “You’re 3B.”

I watch 3C and listen. But I can’t hear a thing.

“You don’t look vegetarian.” She squints at me.

We reach the third floor.

“You know,” she says, turning, her cotton dress giving way to jutting hips. “I think you’re cute, too.”

We stop outside of her chipped, warped door. She unlocks it.

“Wanna come in? My place is dirty, so don’t worry about getting blood on anything.” Releasing my hand, she backs inside, beckoning to me. She'd be a big hit on Tumblr.

I choke on my words.

“I’ve got choco-peanut butter ice cream.”

And now it’s time for phase three: The reward.

She waits.

I wait, too. I wait for her to think about how she wants to boil me alive for being a pig-man vermin ruining her night. How rotten smells waft under my door and into her home. How I play my Collective Soul album too loud and she can tell I probably have a small cock.

But there’s nothing.

Just the pleasant din of static.

She laughs. Her throat nicotine-hardened. Unfiltered. Untreated. She is what she is. Her purification system is flawed; one pipe in and straight out the other side. Her sewage smells authentic, teeming with sulfur and bacteria. She is perfection.

“So, you wanna come in?”

Yeah, I guess I kind of do.

© Larissa Thomas, 2018