Jitters - 5/31/2004

"Oh my God, oh my God! You NEED to read this book!"

Angie was speaking to me frantically, her voice capitulated through telephone wire to heightened states, frequency ranging from middle to peaked. The obvious urgency made me wary. She generally didn't think the same things as me or read the same types of books. Her life-altering experience was likely a full-on bore.

"I'm going to bring it by. I have to. I don't think it can wait."

She hung up the phone. It clicked in my ear and I lowered the handset to it's cradle, shifting it to hooked. I looked around my kitchen, where I'd been standing when the phone rang, seeking my previous mode of engagement. I couldn't remember what I'd been intent on creating but I knew I was hungry. A partially peeled orange, next to the toaster. Probably my doing.

After the orange was finished I dozed off, trying to watch a television program about kids having multiple sex partners and parents who were implanting chips into their heads to keep them from thinking sexual thoughts. Apparently the kids had worked out a schoolyard code to delineate between those who were 'active' and the 'prudish' students, and had developed methods by which to discern what one child would do or wouldn't do and where. The parents were concerned. Concerned enough to take drastic measure, seeking to use currently-illegal operations to maintain their offspring's' innocence.

I thought it would have been fabulous had I had that when I was in school. Later on I discovered the program was the seven o'clock news.

I woke up some time later. The clock on the wall had stopped, but the tele was running perfectly fine. A fuse might have been thrown, I thought, but took no steps to reintegrate the system's malfunctioning properties. I noticed that a Cronenberg film was on, one of his early ones. I couldn't remember the name, but it involved a creature that climbed from one body to the next through kissing, spreading it's infection and turning it's hosts/victims into liberated lunatics.

A noise, smashing, it sounded like, came from without. I went to the door and opened it, pulling aside the five locks and springing the metal shutter from it's post. In front of my door was a book. Probably Angie's text. The ab fab manuscript for the criminally uninteresting. No sign of Angie, however. I imagined she'd come and gone while I slept. It was dark out. I guesstimated the time at half past ten, though whether or not this was accurate I had no idea. Most of the lights were off outside. There was crashing in the distance. A band, maybe, or a parade. I couldn't tell, but I hadn't been outside for a long time. Something could be happening and I'd never discover it unless the internet held a direct conduit. The tele was never any help for real current events. Even the news was overtly hydrogenated crap, filling the South Beach neighborhood with unnecessary fears and weaknesses. It was bad enough that there were government agents and police and terrorists and rapists and murderers. I didn't need to know about local loonies spreading their hate-memes. I kept my door locked and stayed inside.

I tossed Angie's book on the table and reset the locks, pulled down the security shutter and went back to my seated position, looking into a full-length mirror as I did so. Striding past I could see myself; naked, filthy. I'd hated myself for a long time now, and had come to terms with my personal loathing rather than accept myself for what I seemed to be. Dieting didn't help, and exercise required stamina I just didn't have. It was fated. My body would be a structure of glistening white fat cells accumulated in meteoric number and wrapped time and again around my frame. Hair grew from points - all. My face was a fat version of a child's, soft skin dripping with grease and sweat, the occasional pimple and eyes too close together. Some nights I spent thinking about slashing my sick pieces away and sewing myself up. I didn't think it seemed unfathomable.

No email. No new movies. Television a static mess.

Angie's book was wrapped in brown butcher paper, no dust jacket or title, no description of any kind. I opened it up:

"Angie fled the scene, sliding a finger down her pants while she ran back to her Jetta. The
book was left behind on the doorstep where Angie knew it would be okay. She knew
this man better than anyone, even himself, and knew it was something he needed,
wanted, craved more than any other concept. She fingered her clit and pulled the
seatbelt over her body, clasping it down and leaning back. A man watched from
outside. In his hand was a copy of THE BOOK. Angie smiled and opened the car door."

"What the fuck…?" I asked myself. It went on, a few more pages of Angie's exploits. It didn't look like she'd written it. It was bound professionally, pages affixed with precision to the cardboard cover. No title page or printer information, however. I thought Angie had been playing a high-priced joke, but didn't know why she'd leave me something erotically inclined. Describing to me her paphair adventures seemed like a particularly bad joke. She knew, the only person who did, that I hadn't been intimately involved with anyone. It was too terrifying for me.

The joke, once clear, made me cry. I tried not to. I forced myself back into my senses and reminded my brain that it's job was to examine, objectively, and report. I had tougher skin than this. The tears stopped. I stopped and began reading it, flipping through the pages. I saw my name a few times. Then the pages went blank.

I went back and took a look at a page I'd seen my name on.

"He toyed with himself, reading Angie's horny stories. She must have written these to him
for some reason, he thought. But why? Meanwhile he was getting harder. His fingers
were wrapped tight around his member. His knuckles were white. He lathered his
cock in sweat and lotion and read on, thinking of Angie's creamy skin and warm mouth."

I looked down. My heart was pounding. I was scared of the book. I realized it was telling me something about what I was thinking of doing. It predated my own thoughts about jerking off to one of Angie's earlier entries. It's obvious, really, I suppose, that I would do that. She knows me, right? She knows how I work, how I think. This is probably what I do when I'm alone and confronted with explicit, pornographic words. She could probably have predicted this and written it down.

I closed the book. The spine was leaking red fluid. I flipped open the novel and found the location, page 354, dead center, where viscous, blood-colored stuff was oozing from a hole in the spine. The edges of the page looked fleshy, the center of the book a pinkish hole. The white pages became long lumps that touched together and bled, soaking the surrounding pages. I recognized what it was. There was a vagina in the middle of the book.

The phone rang. It was Angie.

"Oh, fuck… Hi, I'm getting… Ooohh… Right now I'm doing some guys I met…"

"Angie, what is this!? What the hell is happening?"

"It's the book, Frank. Read it… Ooooohhhh… Yeah…."

"It's covered in, something, I don't know. Some red shit."

"The book is menstruating, Frank. Fuck it. Fuck the book Frank! You'll love it! Come be… Oooohhh, yes, yes! Be with us, Frank!"

I hung up. The book was open, still bleeding. I turned on the television. Still static. I went to the internet, scanned the first news pages I could find. There were thousands of sites up, already, dedicated to the book. Porno images of people having sex. The book was in every picture. CNN told me about the epidemic, the raging masses of hedonists roving through the cities. In two days, since THE BOOK's release, hundreds of thousands of people had been converted. It carried some kind of parasite. An STD that infected the brain and altered you, made you part of the sex mob.

I logged off and went to the window. There was screaming and noise downtown. I wondered if that was part of it. I figured it was. The television station still didn't work. I sniffed, looked back at the menstruating pages, and dropped my pants. I didn't need to read any of Angie's text, or whoever's text. I was already hard. Something was already driving me. Maybe something in the book was already inside my head. I stood over it and stared down. Was it moaning at me? Sounds were filling the room, or possibly my head, as I committed myself to literary coitus.

Substance Obtuse - 5/29/2004

She's a recursive number being, a cyclical person set to seventeen years between growths. Every so often I see her, expanding up from the ether vats and forming into HER. That's when it happens that we can join in a process that requires her to fill my organs with her "self." Shortly thereafter she disappears back into the nothing and I'm back to my research and diagnosis, until conception time comes. That's when I'm handed a note, telling me that it's okay, I'm just on drugs. I have to remember that, remember that I'm just on drugs. There are things in the back of my neck. Broken, mechanical devices from ages ago. I can see into her cosm, every seventeen years. I can't remember the last time I saw her. It's a recursive number being, a cyclical person. I know it was years ago, but I can't recall the circumstances. I can't remember… I can't remember what she looks like, but I know there are pictures. I'll check the backlog. I'm flipping through the comics, trying to find the cover with her on it. She's in one of these damn things, I know it. The longbox is filled with remnants of her face. I'm still on drugs. The cover says so. Apparently seventeen more years have passed, because I feel like I'm pissing myself and there are voices in my head, the same thing that always happens before she shows up.

"It's okay! It's just the drugs! You're just on drugs!"

Flipping through the pages, looking for the research we've compiled on her. I know there's a lifepod in here somewhere. Something extracted during the construction phase. She's behind me already. I can feel myself melting with her. She's inside me, all the way inside me. Why is there a metal tube strapped to my penis? Oh, it's actually my penis.

There are monsters here. Did I say monsters? I meant martians. Classically framed martian people asking for my autograph. I'm the hippest thing to come from Earth in the last hundred and seventy years. That's ten times she and I have copulated. They know my face and my name and remember that last thing I did with Carey Grant 37 and Android Audrey Hepburn. They stole the show, I thought, but the martian's love me for it.

Damn it! My comics are scattered across the floor. Out of order, out of order, out of order, out of order, out of…

I can crawl in the longbox. I can be the comics. I can find the cover with her face on it. Then I'll be able to remember who she is. Wait, who the fuck am I?

Cosmos, cosm, cosmic, cosmonaut, caustic, causeway, causality, casualty, casual, cashmere, cash, case, cased, careful, etc. Just remember to concentrate. That's another C-word, concentrate. "It's just the drugs, Brian! It's just the drugs!"
I remember her face, I think. It's like the martian faces. Ovoid, with tiny eyes. She's fucking Chinese martian or some shit, I don't know. I do remember where my comic is. I put it in the mylar and closed it up. It's taped up somewhere. I think it's on the wall, maybe, or in the lab. There's something in the ether vat again, probably a rat. Fucking rats. We haven't changed anything for the last hundred and seventy years. Everything is rotted, rusted, rotated, ratty, rancid, rainbow.

Hoooo-lee shite. That's my nipple, doctor! You're grabbing… Well, okay.

I think that she's back. I can feel her inside me. Goo, spilled against my ribcage, coagulating. I think she's in there. Warm and sticky and nice inside my abdomen. I think I can tell that it's her, the way she moves, the way she emulates outward. My skin is moving. It's her, I know it. It's her.

Back in the lab:

Ben Affleck…?! I didn't think so. We've been working for years to perfect this film. It's based on my comic book, the "Dull Boy" series. It's all about a stupid cunt-ree hick named Dull Boy who gains the trust of and fills the sit-ee folk with warmth and forgiveness. Then he was in another book, a crossover series where Dull Boy used his charismatic country slang to stave off a horde of martian invaders. I seriously doubt that she can appreciate it. After all, she's just a figment of my imagination, right? I can't really be in the lab.

Doctor's playing hard to get. I fucking hate the doctor.

What the hell is that? Is that my drugs? Do you really think I'm paying you sixty bucks for that?! Here, here's fucking twenty. Yeah, fucking give it to me. Fuck you, that's fucking shit, right there. It's fucking nothing. Twenty bucks is more than that's fucking worth. Yeah, fuck you too, punk bitch.

Yeah, whatever. Just, just, just fucking give me that bag, okay? Okay? Okay?

I got ripped off. The doctor probably knows that. He's got a PhD, after all. There she is. She's standing next to the doctor. It's his assistant, again. She's got her face on my comics. She was in the movie, too, but not as a drawing. I can't believe we had sex. Her face is disgusting. Like some melted retarded persons features planted onto a martian head. Then again, it was really, really good that one time that we did that one thing.

That (Below) was then. This (Above) is now.

On Silent Bondage

I'd been writing my book about Thomas Edison on and off for five years. Originally it started out as my thesis back at UCLA but I hadn't had the time or energy to really delve into it back then. What I ended up doing was writing a piece called "Origins of American Culture in Relation to Neighboring Influences." I don't remember what kind of grade I received, but I graduated with a BA in History and a Certificate to teach, which became my primary function shortly thereafter. The original research for the Edison thesis was shuffled underneath a million other things and became a vague notion of interest.

Two years later the interest grew once more when a student did a short project for the class I was teaching. The project was a multimedia presentation revolving around Edison's earliest forays into the movie-making business. He never actually marketed his features, but American cinema basically began with Edison toying around with Lumiere equipment. I rifled through my papers and found the old research, winding through reams of notes now indecipherable until I found what I really wanted; my search for Edison's long lost erotic films.

Originally I'd thought it was a joke. While studying fiendishly in the school library one night a janitor strode to my table and offered his take on Edison. The janitor, Jorge, said he thought Edison was the first pornographer. Certainly, he told me, there was the imagery of naked people copulating on film as soon as the capability existed, even if it was during the tail-end of the repressive Victorian era. Even more the reason for it, in fact. Jorge left me to examine my book, but the thought was implanted now despite my outward laughter.

I wondered, then, kneeling between mountains of papers, analyzing handwriting smeared and crumpled and almost completely obscured, if maybe Jorge was right about Edison. I decided to continue my thesis, using the original documents I already had as a base to redirect; to discover the secrets Edison might have hidden somewhere.

Another year went by, with little luck, my mind not focused on the specifics of writing and studying. I was teaching constantly, spreading myself completely over my students and spending my energy there. All I'd really done was post some things to various internet sites and scratch the surface of what I was sure would require in-depth research. I was surprised, then, when a contact emailed me, informing of her intention to find exactly what I was looking for. She wanted to combine efforts.

It wasn't long before Megan and I stumbled onto something interesting. We learned that Edison's laboratory, where he created his earliest films, had been equipped with a cellar the size of the entire floor. There was no indication of a cellar in the current renditions of the floorplan, however. The cellar must have been either hidden or totally covered up by concrete. We didn't know why, but perhaps being the first moving-image pornographer America would know might be enough to send him into the shadows, dissolving any traces of that history so as to maintain his reputation.

And now I'm here, another year gone by, sitting in a cold, dank space below the house that once belonged to America's most famed inventor, handling the preserved reels of celluloid Edison ever made. I can barely touch them without having to worry about collapse, but holding up my flashlight I can make out images. The images of a woman, her clothes sliding from her shoulders and dropping at her waist, revealing breasts, and a man, his head covered in a sack with two holes cut out for eyes carrying a stick.

We managed to get the film into a projector without destroying it and viewed Edison's creation. Not only was it pornography, it was fetish. Here Edison had a superb example of bondage, playing out in front of his massive camera box, the light bathing the people and over exposing some parts, but otherwise a crisp, clean picture well-preserved in the freezing cold cellar.

And then the shock. After the scene had ended, the man, having chained and spanked and fucked the woman, pulled away his hood, showing us the face of early American porno. It was Thomas Edison himself, smiling self-satisfactorily at the camera as the lens closed and left us in darkness and wonderment.

Megan and I re-wrote the thesis into a finished product based on our find. It became number one in no time.

The Underground

In 2005 the Bush administration made material located in most libraries around the country classified, effectively ending the public resource centers by restricting entrance into any library under any circumstance. The idea was that only terrorists would want to read books, and after the Big Scare of early 2005 it was the opinion of most cabinet-members that altering the ability of the American public's access to information would definitely curb the uprisings from "unspecified enemy combatants."

I was working in a library that year, only an assistant to a librarian but only a few months away from full induction into the free-reading system as a true librarian. And at twenty-one years old that was moving along the fasttrack. Of course, the fasttrack didn't go much further than becoming a librarian, except perhaps moving up the branch line and becoming head librarian at the central branch, but still, I was happy with my accomplishment. And then the CENTRAL Mandate came down; Congressional Entropic Necessities to Reverse Antithetical Leanings closed down my library and ninety-five percent of the libraries in the nation.

It was only two years later that I'd discovered the revolutionary forces living within the defunct library system. While browsing the (illegal) online MIT open-course ware system and reading notes from a student on the interaction of early hominids with their environment I'd received an instant message, the loud *ding* of the pop-up window jolting me away from information gorging and forcing me to interpret the new media. "They're on to you. Leave now. We're waiting down the block in a green SUV."

I didn't know what to make of it at first. This was supposed to be a joke, I'd imagined, but certainly if they were coming I'd need to escape immediately. I grabbed my bookbag and closed the connection, snapping shut my laptop and rushed out the back door of the condemned library I once operated from legally. Sirens erupted down the street. I rushed around the block, glancing both ways and missing the green SUV. The sirens came closer, just down the block now. There was no green car in sight.

That was the day of my first arrest for suspected links to terrorism.

My trial was huge. Bigger than Scopes. Every single person I'd ever known was put on the stand and attested to my love of free knowledge, regardless of what that knowledge might have been. Each one dimming my hopes of an innocent finding, the jury prescribing a guilty verdict before ever stepping over the threshold of the courtroom anyway. The inevitable verdict dropped like nuclear fission, gavel striking granite-reinforced oak and pounding away at me until I was in a Cuban cell, without light, without food, crying myself to sleep and listening to the slow howl of drooling, half-brained inmates above me screaming and retching and shitting themselves after imbibing the psychotropic control substance generally used in terror prisons. I could never stop shaking when I was in there.

Outside my room guards laughed. They laughed in English, not Spanish, and regarded the prisoners as personalized playthings, poking them with sticks and watching as the totally deranged ones leaped at the bars when a bit of food or a dead rat was dangled in front of them. Of course this was expected. We were terrorist scum. If they could burn us alive and piss on our remains and use our scalps to wipe their asses they would and most of the frightened country to my north wouldn't care; would likely applaud them for committing such acts.

There were some, though, in the library underground, who were out there trying to help. Already they'd begun causing turmoil on the floor of the House, submitting bill after bill after bill in an attempt to turn over the CENTRAL Mandate and the PATRIOT Act and the numerous other now-classified documents usurping citizen's liberty in exchange for peace through greater control. And then there was the Library Underground. The LU had plots, real "terrorist" plots to blow up buildings and cars and open the gates to Guantanamo Prison and let out the snarling monsters inside. This was the movement that, eventually, managed to free me and others who weren't already permanently damaged. From my hole in the dirt I could hear vague popping sounds and roars and cheers and an explosion. Minutes later light stabbed at my withered body. I screamed, having missed the light in such amounts for the last four years, having not quite gone mad, having no hope and now hopes fulfilled.

I couldn't take it.

My waking mind waltzed away into unconscious fervor, remembering binding books, day after day, binding binding binding books. I don't know if the LU dragged me or if my limbic system responded to hidden wishes and forced my legs to work at running away from the Hell in the Red Zone, but at the end of the day I was safe aboard the boat in the Caribbean, floating to the dark side of Cuba, where the lights had been cut by the US some years back as part of the ongoing war to deliver democracy to the tiny island.

And now I'm one of them. The LU. I've been writing, as well, turning my feats and the LU's war on restriction into a comic book, because there's still one place for information to be dispersed. The comic book has passed under the radar. Presumably Presidents Bush through Kaplan, the current dictator-state regime leader, have assumed that pictures are for kids. We hope they are. I hope they are. I hope to whatever deity might be staring down at us that my comics are for kids, for the next generation of revolutionaries. Maybe they won't even have to fight our fight.

Maybe.

Slink Fetish

The burn is excruciating. What's worse, the thin stream of black goo that constantly seeps from my cock is permanently staining everything it touches. I've tried to wear the same three pairs of underwear in a constant rotation of washing and using but a buildup of crusty dark stuff has begun to make them unbearable. I knew fucking a transsapien would have certain risks attached, but what can I say - I'd already smoked a handful of 190 proof hashish and plugged my few remaining serotonin smokes into the tracheotomy gap underneath my chin.

I remember seeing her, really, for the first time when I woke up and felt the warmth of her exhaust hatch slowly gurgling out a night's worth of serious substance abuse and hard, grinding sex. Her face was mostly plain, a small stubby nose centered on a tomato face, lips parted showing remnants of teeth used for gripping one end of a crank intake shaft. I could hear the artificial organs scraping together insider her stomach, connected to a womb shaped by plastic molds and aluminum rivulets connecting everything like mesentery. She was mostly human on the surface, but her snatch was a reconfiguration of a reptile pussy and the ignition of a 1965 Chevy Bel-Air. For all I knew her anus retained similar qualities, but I hadn't bothered going back there. At least, not that I could remember.

I crawled out of our motel bed stinking of motor sex, sliding from the slick polymer sheets which were equipped with self-eradicating cleaners set to start sometime around noon whether someone was under them or not, and put on my clothes, careful to avoid touching my prick as I slid my pants up. It had been rubbed raw, small cuts lining my shaft, scorch marks forming a nice circle in my pubic hair. I left a twenty on the dresser and headed out, back onto the road and on schedule.

Two weeks later - today. My venereal specialist finally agreed to take a look at me. I'm standing in his office, pants anchored to my calves, holding my barely-healed member while Dr. Sendo probes my stinging urethra with a cotton swab. He pulls the swab back, watching as the lump crawls under the skin like some foreign LSD bug, a long string of sticky black stuff bowing like viscous spit, weird bubbles held in clumps along the
string.

"I don't know what's wrong," Sendo tells me. Transsapiens have managed to bring diseases belonging in the machine and animal realms into our own. My personal misfortune, I suppose, that I find automobile girls attractive. Then again, my fetish has yielded too many exciting nights to start bemoaning the whole sub-race or my predilection thereof. This is a side-effect I just have to deal with.

Another week and nothing from Sendo. He'd told me they were doing tests but had only discovered that the base substance was motor oil carrying some strain of chlamydia. There were other things in there that couldn't be readily identified. Sendo's main concern was how my body was managing to produce motor oil in amounts high enough to provide a constant drip. Another trucker told me about a case of VD he'd gotten while running freight from Bangkok to LA from a girl modified for fungus sex that did something similar. Eventually he'd needed a new rod and his bladder now excreted spores into his streams of urine. I told him the chick was reptilian or something around her pussy. He told me I was fucked up for hitting something with scales.

After six weeks of leaking and two more visits to Sendo I'd discovered that the substance was spreading, appearing to stop after reaching into my lower intestine, coating it and causing severe cramping and bloating. A new organ had grown inside my appendix, which is how the oil was being generated, running down my bowels and out my urethra, burning the whole way. A breakthrough had come in diagnosis, though. I was infected with male menstruation. Among certain species of reptiles or amphibians, Sendo hadn't been clear and that chick probably had both anyway, there was an innate ability to spontaneously change sex. I'd been given a shot of that gene and a bonding agent. I was growing a uterus in my stomach. The real kicker was that I wouldn't get a vagina, making the birthing of the eggs I'd been passed improbable without surgery once they had matured. On the rag and still impregnated.

I asked Sendo what I could do. "Ask for maternity leave," is all he could give me.

A Thing That Happens...

Walking out of doors, it was impossible to not notice the intensity of the sky. It wasn't the normal shade of blue. Something had happened to change the color, filling the horizon from end to end with a swirling, intense light that shone as the spectrum of blue, light to dark, streaming around the atmosphere and covering our planet.

Reports had come into the newsrooms across the globe of the light being everywhere at once, eliminating the darkness of night. Our sun's light had been reflected to both sides of the Earth simultaneously, bathing it in the harsh tones of pure, unadulterated passion. It was enough to send endorphins speeding through my nervous system, down my spine and outward, elation the side affect of living underneath the new light.

We couldn't find the reason for the reflection. When everything was lapped up by rays of sunlight it obscured our space cameras and altered the communication networks between ground and satellite. The Hubble could still transmit messages and pictures but they were always an iridescent version of some Heaven, the Milky Way wrapped in the Northern Lights beaming from the center of the universe in all directions at once. Religious types shouted God's name and rejoiced in the streets, while scientists searched for rational explanations in string theory and Heisenburg's Uncertainty Principle.

I didn't bother thinking about it, though. I didn't believe it was the work of God or physics. I didn't care either way. What mattered was the affect. The awful purity the sky had forced onto every human being, sending them seemingly into the psychological direction they most desired. Some wallowed in the most dramatic depression possible, most killing themselves within a few hours of stumbling into the light for the first time. Others, like myself, became constantly happy. Regardless of what happened, the happiness was always there; always drowning my brain stem in Seratonin; always shooting across my flesh like Tesla arcs; always showing me the fractals, the Mandlebrot Sets.

There was a catch, however, in that the affect would drain away if you didn't get into the sunlight at least once every hour or so. But darkness never came and it was almost impossible to avoid catching a beam between the eyes a few times a day. Those that did hide suffered anyway, filled with either fear or dread or both. The doomsayers who stuffed themselves into basements and hung thick black palls over their windows. We never saw them. At least, not for many years.

In those days I would lay on a specific hillside and watch the clouds shirk between light rails and float past, sometimes drizzling blue rain, sometimes nothing at all. The grass was changing color, too, becoming more vibrant and always green, even in climes with little moisture. Everything was new again, as if in the formative years of our planet. And it had occurred to me that I was in love with the planet. More than anything else in the universe, I sincerely loved the planet. Not like a member of Greenpeace, but like a person loves another person. I could feel the way the planet shifted and moved and understood the tormented innards as they rolled and burned and fought to escape the crust and become part of humanity. The planet talked to me and said loving things, and I said them back. Other people told me they loved the planet as well. Nobody said anything about talking to it, though.

My terrestrial communiqué was how my happiness was eventually revoked. Despite my feelings for the Earth and the things living and dead residing upon and within it, I couldn't help become infinitely somber when I first learned the reason for the changing sunlight and my people's new moods; when I discovered that the universe was collapsing in on itself rapidly enough to auto-eliminate utterly within a thousand years. That's when I stopped being happy.

"There's nothing you can do," the Earth told me. "You're going to become nothingness once again."

My gut lurched and vomit spilled from the recesses of my stomach, sliding upwards and filling my mouth and throat with fiery pain. I lost my soul to the news of festering demise. Soon I was boarded up in my own basement, refusing the sunlight, scared and lonely and depressed, eating from cartons of processed food and drinking tap water with a hint of mercury. I was tired. I was living in the sunlight for so long. I couldn't sleep like that. Nobody could. Even those living in terror of what was happening couldn't sleep; even with their windowless homes and thick, black goggles to simulate nighttime. Years went by with no sleep. There was no relief. The daytime that once let me bask in joy now maddened me as I tossed and turned beneath the makeshift blanket roof I lived under. I could do nothing but sit in my sanctum and think about the destruction that only I knew was heading our direction. Most times I acted martyr, tears screaming from the reservoir behind my eyelids as if I were crying for the entire world. For days at a time this would happen.

The planet saw me crying one night and opened up to me, showing me the patterns in it's existence, letting the math become apparent for my eyes alone. It consoled my sobbing consciousness. I learned that I would be nothing. That everything would be nothing.

Finally. After all that time.

We could rest.

The Teething Undead

It's been six days since I started the affair. Which means it's only taken six days for my wife to discover the subtle kink that's turned into a massive fetish over the past half decade of living with the Hybol.

She caught on when I left last night with my flashlight and shovel, the obituaries section of the paper left on the nightstand, torn from it's parent unit and baking underneath the dull blue waves of luminescence generated by my lamp. I thought I'd put enough of the sleeping pills into her drink to keep her out, dead cold unconscious, for at least six or seven hours. Apparently she'd thrown up only a few moments after guzzling it; part of her little bulimia secret hidden away since long before our marriage. This reduced the effects and allowed her to wake into semi-consciousness and see me dress in dirty clothes and hear the rustling in the garage followed by the dull roar of our Saturn's engine.

She said she followed me out there immediately, but I know that's not true because she didn't actually catch me in the act. Only after it had been done did she notice me laying on the darkly colored grass in Overhills Cemetery, resting my naked body in the cool breeze, arms slowly caressing the rotting flesh of my new mistress. She was beautiful in life and was now, in death, the very thing that made my prick swell and twitch. She was Annabel Thornton, daughter of a neighbor down the street and buried just that morning. The paper didn't say what she died from, so I couldn't be sure she'd wake, but I've grown to uncover certain telling facts given publicly that imply someone has been directed to death and re-animation by a member of the Hybol.

I'd watched living Annabel from my window several times, her young body speeding past my home and down the street in a car filled with teenagers. Her father was a client of mine, a golfing buddy on occasion, and proprietor of the top-grossing sirloin steak specialty restaurant in the state. She was much more attractive than my wife, whom I married from leisure at the age of thirty, hoping her slightly venerable years would provide amplitudes of income for which I wouldn't have to work. This was not to be the case, though.

Marion, my wife, wasn't going to be rich. After marrying me her company took a massive loss during an SEC investigation at the top levels revealed terrible financial lies and embezzling. The employee's were mostly laid off. Marion was one of them.

So it was me who had to work. I was the sole bringer of income. Every ounce of everything we had was mine. I bought the house, the furniture, the bread on the table. And Marion continued to demand that I satisfy her perverted needs, begging for thorough oral sex while she pissed. I was willing to give it to her as long as she'd give into my corpse-fucking fantasies. She didn't know, or at least hadn't articulated as such, that she knew I was into corpses, not to mention the animate dead. I suppose that having her take the cold bath and lie perfectly still during coitus could have tipped her off, but nothing was ever spoken.

So it wasn't a surprise to her, she'd said after we'd returned home and lay, humiliated both, next to each other in the warm sheets and blankets of our bed, that I was out digging graves that night. She wanted to know how long it had been going on. Six days, I told her. Six days I'd had three different girls. This was Annabel. You remember Annabel, right? She had. She asked that I stay the night in a hotel. I rolled out of the bed, sliding my apparel over my body and packed an overnight bag and suitcase. Marion recommended packing more than a day's worth of clothes, but I told her I'd return for more tomorrow.

I'd been out with the zombies now. The Hybol were living in the cemeteries all over the northern half of the US, and, I hear, many populations springing up across the cemeteries in the southern. There were nibbled marks of decayed teeth on my skin, up my neck and shoulders where desiccated lips had pressed closely into my warm body and their zero temperature kisses splayed over my tasty flesh. I didn't know if Marion would want me back. I didn't know if I could stay with her. We certainly weren't in love. But that night, the hotel sucking me into it's stale-smoke room and twenty-four hour pornography television stations, I felt that maybe I'd made a mistake. Maybe Marion was right when she said I was a pervert and a fucked up sicko.

Then again, those nibbled indents in my flesh were starting to spread; gangrenous boils and pustules razing small sections of the skin on my back and chest and neck. Annabel said she liked to bite me two years ago, the first time I'd fucked her. I'd asked her not to. I should have known that if she didn't listen then, she wouldn't have listened now.

A Statement of Intent...

This is Brash Fiction.

I'm going to print something here at least once per week. Mostly flash fiction, things I sit down and write in a few minutes, left out to be read by you, the sick bastard sitting on the other side of the mirror.

Anyway, the first few posts are things from an old blog of mine on the same system, (Blogger.com), and something I wrote tonight. Anyway, enjoy the reading. My plan is to update every Monday, though that may change.

Also, please comment. I love comments. Especially pissed off, hateful rhetoric. That's the best.