Cherelyn

"Can I look yet?"

Cherelyn says this to me.  I ignore her.

"Come on.  Quit it."

She pushes my hands from her eyes.  I lock them in place.

"How much longer?"

"Just shhh," I say, as I adjust her high heel.  It got snagged on a step.

"All this walking is kind of exhuasting, especially in these heels, you know?"

She's getting impatient.  You need to hurry this up.

"Okay, I'm going to take my hands from your eyes."

"Okay."

"Grab my hand and follow me up the rest of the steps.  Don't look."

"Okay."

My tiny hand folds into her's when she takes it.  Gingerly.  We step.

These steps are made of granite or cobblestone (how would you have any idea?)  and you know they're really, really old and you can't believe--

"What was that?"

"Nothing.  Let's go."

You hear the brusqueness in your tone.  You mentally apologize.

"Nothing.  Are you okay?"

Night moving in, consuming everything, just the way you wanted it.  This will be great.

"I'm alright," she sighs, fixing her heels.  "For now."

You wonder how slippery it will be up there and then if she'll find it beautiful.

***

"Open your eyes."

Where we are is the top of the oldest belltower in a hundred miles.  We learned that in first grade.  No one is allowed up here, of course, but kids sneak to the top to drink and smoke and fuck all the time.  We're kids, so I figured we could get up here too.  For once, I was right.

And what a view.  The full moon casts gray light over the tiny town and I feel like doing a massive belly flop, smooshing all the people who make me mad and sad and

She's kissing me.  I let her.

When she stops and asks "now what?" I say "I'll show you now what."  This is the part I've been waiting for, the part that will make it all worthwhile.

I grab hold of the bell's giant swinging pendulum, I pull it back, and I let that thing go flying.

GONG

Echoes through the town.

GONG

Echoes through the town.

GONG

Echoes through the night.

A million bats come flying.  They're all whirling, swooping, diving around us.  She screams.  You hug her.

And you both stand there.  Bats from all sides battering your bodies.  Bats in your hair.  You keep your eyes closed.  You feel her warmth.  It's cold in mid November.  The bats keep coming.

Can I Gag You With A Fork?

It starts in a basement. Mold green paint chips off the walls all over the fucking place. A pair of feet enter the frame, which is to say a doorway, and a cat enters from off-screen to rub against the feet and then meow and walk away.

“Can I gag you with a fork?” He grins like the Joker. Just lying there, squinting up at him through cat litter and tears, you can feel your cock stiffening. You try not to let this distract you by shutting your eyes tight, stuffing your hands over your ears, and shouting for someone to help. He walks over and slaps you.

“Are you fucking nuts? This has always been about both of us! And what if someone actually did hear your insane cries for help, what then? To find you here, drugged and covered in my dried shit and cum, cat turds smeared all over you, litter sprinkled on top like a peanut covered Sundae...yes it's beautiful, we both know that, but they would never understand. Aren't I right, Kevy?”

Kevy doesn't, maybe can't, respond, just nods his head and smears cat litter across his lips.

“That's a good boy.”

Kneeling like a frog, he pats Kevy on the head.

Standing, “Right. So. Let's get the fun underway, shall we?”

A cat meows and brushes against a leg.

***

It's shot in a medium reversal of him dragging Kevy's body across the work bench.

“Murphmydjj...I...mmlove you,” Kevy mumbles through the fresh cat shit that's been stuffed in his mouth.

Brushing tools to the sides of the table in a clamorous swoop, he cackles and says, “I know you do, Kevy. That's why we trust each other for this.”

He hoists Kevy's naked body, which is covered with multiple species' shit, ejaculate, piss, and vomit, onto the table, then pulls Kevy back down, so half of Kevy's body is hanging off, limp but feet kicking in merriment or desperation, he couldn't say if he cared.

Then he gets really close to Kevy's face. Kevy sees his angelic blue eyes and shoulder-length blond hair and thinks he looks as close to God, aka Kurt Cobain, as anyone ever could. Staring into the face of an angel, Kevy feels cold hands around his face that register as warm, and he lifts Kevy's head into position on the edge of the table.

To picture the position, picture what people sometimes call “curbstomping.” Now picture the exact opposite of that.

Kevy's face is bent back, with the top of his jaw nailed to the top of the table and the bottom of his jaw is stretched way open, showing his no tonsils all the way down the tube of his throat. It's nailed to the side of the table.

You feel this as the first day you got braces as a kid, how much that hurt. You feel this as little crucifixions all up and down your rows of teeth. You feel this as your neck about to snap.

Then he picks up the fork. He walks over to you with it slowly at first, doing a little dance like in Reservoir Dogs. You try speaking, but this just causes your tongue to freak out in all directions and, not wanting to die yet, you stop.

The first mark comes suddenly. He lunges at you unexpectedly and reaches deep, deep down inside your throat. He stabs the fork into your distended throat without restraint and you throw up blood and bile all over his hand. You taste blood and things you've never tasted before. It tastes like the blood coming from the puncture wound in your throat is flowing upwards.

And it is a puncture wound: you can feel, hear, air whistling in and out of your throat and you know he's broken through. Over the next hour he takes his time battering your throat, making holes in it, playing with your endless blood and vomit, until there just seems to be endless blood.

A cat meows and brushes against a leg.

Bill Frasier

“Hey aren't you Bill Frasier?”

It's a gray 7-11 at nobody knows what time.  Gray.  Flicking fluorescent lights give the place a slowed down strobe effect.  Gray everywhere.  Bill Frasier pictures the gray as crude and all-encompassing, like he's a victim in a poorly shot snuff film.

Outside, a naked body is sprawled on the hood of a car, split open from neck to vagina.  The ribs have been snapped into pieces and most of what was once housed inside is gone.  The flesh on the outside of the gash that used to be a woman's body has been nailed hastily to the hood of the car, the tops of nails bashed in at weird angles.

A man whistles and walks past, fumbling for a Camel Light.

Bill Frasier stands at a 7-11 counter trying to open a candy bar. When he hears the voice behind him he starts, then focuses his attention back on the candy bar.

“Yes, yes I am.”

“Hey, yeah, Billy! Remember me, Robbie Schwanker?”

Bill looks down, fumbling with his candy bar wrapper, avoiding eye contact, trapped at the convenient store counter.

“Uh, yeah, Robbie. Hi.” Pause. “How have you been?”

“Oh, you know, you know. I'm a regional manager over at Pep Boys now!”

“That's great, Robbie,” Bill says, sounding dead inside.

“Yeah...Jesus, man, I haven't seen you since Senior year! What have you been up to?"

Bill stops twisting the wrapper, looks at Robbie's gray eyes, eyes that thankfully recall to Bill no memory of who this person was, and he says, “Nothing. I haven't been up to anything.”

Bill dimly realizes that he has Robbie at a loss but he couldn't care less about this faux pas. Robbie tries a different tactic.

“So, what about Jeanie Blew? I remember you two having a real heavy thing going. Man, what happened? Everyone thought you guys were going to get married!”

“We did,” says Bill, and the look on his face prompts an “I'm sorry” from Robbie.

“Don't be,” says Bill, his voice now perking up, him starting to eat his candy bar. “It was just one of those things.”

“Didn't work out?”

“Nope.” Bill tosses a square of the chocolate into his mouth and masticates loudly.

There's a pause, and then Robbie lowers his voice to say, “So I guess you got divorced?”

“Oh no,” Bill says, appearing totally at ease now, pushing the last of the candy bar into his mouth.

“No?”

“Nope. I killed her.”

Macaulay Culkin's asshole

In my mind Macaulay Culkin's asshole is a prim pink bunny's nose, but in reality it's torn up, like my own, probably from years of hardcore drugs and sex.  Macaulay Culkin's asshole is the first thing I see on my computer every morning, and sometimes I get so hard, I don't even need Viagra.  I need the Viagra in the first place because I'm a heroin addict and I can't get erect.

Anyway, it was a typical day--me jerking off to Macaulay Culkin's asshole--when Todd Parker pulled up.  "Todd Parker is a guy you're perpetually wary off but his coolness hypnotizes you because you want to fuck him and you want to be him," I scribbled in a notebook.

Knock, knock, knock.

Creeeeak.  The door aches open to reveal Todd Parker.  With a mini high top, leather jacket, tight red tshirt, and leather pants, and he looks like a porno actor from the 1970s.  Todd sloshes around the gum he's chewing and he stares at me while I stare at the ground.

"So," Todd finally says.  "Are you going to tell me the punchline or what?"

"Todd, I don't know the punchline," I whisper.  "Just go away man."  My voice barely rises above a hoarse rasp as I struggle to shut the door, but somehow Todd is overpowering me.  He's pushing his way into my house.  Somehow, he's moving the prison cell tight door over me, on top of me.  Finally I can't resist, and Todd barges in.

"What's the punchline," Todd demands, and I say I don't know.

The grin Todd aims at me is made of ash.  He walks over to me, puts me in a headlock, and rubs his knuckles into my hair.

"Get away," I squeal, and Todd actually lets go of me.  I stand up, brush myself off, and look Todd in the eye.  "What?" I say, daring him.

Todd sighs a fake sigh.  "Oh," and then he speaks my name.  "You don't want to talk to me like that.  You really do not want to talk to me like that."

From his back pocket, Todd removes a small golden handle--a switchblade, which he wavves at my face before laughing.

"I'm just fucking with you," Todd says.  Pause.  "But...you do know what you have to do, right?  That is, unless you're going to tell me the punchline."

"Todd, man, I told you, I don't know the punchline.  I don't know the punchline.  I don't know what you're talking about.  I don't know the punchline."

"Well then drop those drawers, lover boy, because daddy's come for what's his--" Todd looks over at my computer screen.  "Is that Macaulay Culkin's asshole?"

something like "Surf" but not "Surf"

Billy:

I don't want to hear about your fucking job, okay? I don't want to hear about where you went on vacation last summer or who your wife's fucking or anything like that. Don't make me sick. Just don't make me sick! That's all I'm asking you.

Tommy:

Yeah she was cute and all but I could never fuck her...like, she smelled bad. She had sores.

Frank:

I think one thing we can all agree on is that this little misadventure--

Jodie:

Cut the bullshit, Frank.

Frank:

What?

Billy:

I fucking swear to god I will destroy you if you talk to me about the Bible or religion or--

Frank:

Ignore him. Please continue.

Jodie:

We're—you're—officially rapists and murders. Doesn't the phase you in the fucking least?

Tommy:

Hey, it's getting dark out here. Don't you think we should maybe, uh, do whatever we're going to do with these girls?

Frank:

Tommy, shut up. Okay, okay, let me just think. Jodie, fuck you.

Jodie:

Yeah, fuck you too.

Jodie steps into the cavity of a female human chest.

Frank:

Fuck you.

She was straddling his chest

She was straddling his chest.  It was a wooden floor, unvarnished, splinters getting stuck in her black stockings which she kept pulling out.  They were both drunk.  She kept giggling and spilling to one side.
It was a wooden floor, unvarnished, splinters getting stuck in her black stockings which she kept pulling out.  They were both drunk.  She was straddling his chest.  A flash of lightning: a splash of blood on the ground by his lips.  Wads of semen between his legs.

It was a wooden floor, unvarnished, splinters getting stuck in her black stockings which she kept pulling out.  They were both drunk.  She was straddling his chest and spilling to one side, giggling.  He made a consistent, low moaning noise.  "Shhh," she said, and put a bloody finger over his lips.  She wiped the finger, smearing blood over his lips and face.

It was a wooden floor, unvarnished, splinters getting stuck in her black stockings which she kept pulling out.  She kept spilling to one side.  They were both drunk.  She was straddling his chest.  She started to slide his pants off.  "Please," him said, voice hoarse.  "Don't".  "Okay," she said, and then paused for a moment.  She grabbed a screwdriver that was clanking around the wooden floors and drove its point into the center of him's crotch.  It didn't fully puncture skin, at first, only a little bit, making a little indentation in his genitals which gushed blood over a soundtrack of shouts.

It was a wooden floor, unvarnished, splinters getting stuck in her black stockings which she kept pulling out.  They were both drunk.  She was straddling his chest.  She now had the screwdriver halfway in him's face, and it was stuck.  She kept pulling at it, trying to dislodge it as if from a carved pumpkin.  Him was screaming and burbling.  She enjoyed the audio track of agony too much.

It was a wooden floor, unvarnished, splinters getting stuck in her black stockings which she kept pulling out.  They were both drunk.  She was straddling his chest.  She pulled the screwdriver out and blood spattered her own face.  Yuck.  Lots of wailing and moaning noises now.  Holding the yellow handle with both hands, she drove the screwdriver into him's drunk, fucked up face another once or fifty more times.

*********

Two.

I get out of the shower and it takes me a little while before I see I have a missed call from Georgia.  My first response is to panic, and then to quickly run a list of names through my head of everyone I know with a Georgia area code.  I can't remember anyone, and then my stomach becomes an eternally-hardening ball of ice because I remember: Alice.

That one night.  That one night will haunt me for the rest of my life.  She seemed like such a kid, well she didn't, but it's hard to explain...I never thought she would get the cops involved.

A knock at the front door.  I stand up, finish the tumblr of bourbon which was sitting on top of my copy of The New Yorker, inside of which I had yesterday slipped a printed-out copy of my own short fiction, just 'cause.  In the mirror that I do coke off regularly I look at myself: light tan, short expensive haircut, features soft and hard in all the right places.  I grin wide at myself, knowing that if this is it, if the cops are at my door, at least I look damned handsome and wealthy before being slandered a pedophile or whatever.

Fearless of the frantic knocking now, I pull open the front door and Alice is swinging a sdfj-dffk----

**********

Deer Diary,

Killed more evil men today.  I need new power tools.  Okay, let's see, let's see...Check mark, I'm up to....Well, you know how many I'm up to.

The Relationship

We were at a point where pictures on tumblr seem profound. We were pretty smashed. George took the computer from me and exited out of the picture of Kurt Cobain. “Look,” he said, the vodka on his breath barely staining my own inebriated nostrils. “Don't you think it's time to stop idolizing this guy?” 

I slide away on the bed and pull the computer back from George. “Never,” I snarl, and ogle a photo of Kurt holding a can of Pepsi and a cigarette. “Your obsession disturbs me,” George says, and when I look in his eyes I can't tell if he's being serious so I say, “Yeah, well, so does yours,” apropos of nothing. 

George gets pissed and topples my bedside table. “What the fuck,” I say. “Look, I can't take this any more,” George says. He jabs an index finger at the computer screen. “It's me or him. Pick one.” 

I looked at the picture of Kurt standing in front of a theater marquee saying “Men can't save you any more,” and then I looked at George's fat, red face. “Him,” I said, and shrugged. George whined and groaned simultaneously and then he stood and rampaged around my house, breaking my Nirvana records until my threats to call the police made him sit in a corner and cry. I watched as George sobbed, motionless. I was kind of relieved. I walked back to the computer. On screen was Kurt with Christmas lights around his neck. I saved the photo to my desktop.

That's how 2012 began.