There are pessimists in this world and there are optimists. There are the hunted, the hunters, the victims, the victimizers, the fools, the frayed, the genius, the ignorant, the oblivious, the obvious, and the incomprehensible. There are those who must deal with having been dealt impossible hands, those who know only the soft sides of luxury, and those who dwell in the small distance that often separates them. If you stop to consider it there is nothing more important than your life. And by that I am implying that your life is something altogether separate from yourself. Just because you are you does not make you your life. Life is too often misused to be considered the property of someone that never bothered to actually live it. No matter what happens during it, or how it is lived, you will eventually have to give it back. If you spend some time pondering such strange logic you may find yourself not going to work tomorrow morning. You may decide instead to sell the kids, kill your spouse, and head off into the adventure you always said that your life would be. But don’t worry, you won’t.

There are angry people in the world and there are those who know only the bliss of a simplistic ignorance. There are those who sell and those who buy. At the same instant that a child in some small village in Africa is getting their arms chopped off amidst the turmoil of yet another people’s revolution, another of the same age and relative appearance might be nagging their mother to buy them the latest video game halfway around the would. Distraught that they will not get their way in the matter, they may say “I wish I was dead.� There is quiet in the world and there is the noise of those who are too fractured to let it grow. There is force and there is frailty. There is worth and there is worthlessness.

This is a story about a little boy who was none of the above.

Just The Sky

Milton Hadley was a genius. When he was seven years old he could multiply six-digit numbers in a matter of seconds. His father, who was a retired United States Air Force Captain, sent Milton to a military academy when he was ten. He had hoped that Milton would one day work for the government cracking Soviet codes and such. Thankfully, the following year, both Mr. and Mrs. Hadley were killed by a freak tornado that swept through their suburb on the outskirts of Wichita. Had Mr. Hadley lived, Milton would have most likely remained at the military academy. Which would have been tragic, since the dorm that Milton had lived in was completely destroyed by an artillery shell that one of his classmates had hidden in a footlocker. Everyone on the top floor was killed by the blast. Everyone on the second and first floors were crushed to death by the third floor. Milton, it seemed, was the beneficiary of impeccable timing.

Following the death of his parents, Milton was sent to Bellingham, Washington to live with his Uncle Rex, whom he had never met before. Rex was socially baffling. He lived in a renovated barn with his third wife, Cora, and an assortment of animals that were, for the most part, matted with dirt and permanently smelt of marsh water. His acreage was considerable though, and was home to numerous wrecked cars, buses, and tire fires. It was also home to four very well-constructed ramps, three world-class jumping bikes, two street bikes, and one of the world’s ugliest RVs. Since the age of twenty-four Rex had been a daredevil. Hence the name: Reckless Rex.

Milton arrived at the bus station still wearing his uniform, expecting his uncle to be the mirror image of his father. As he walked off of the bus he looked to his right and saw Rex and Cora standing there with his name written on a piece of yellow construction paper in purple marker. It was raining lightly and the paper had started to break apart in places. Rex, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, stood there leaning on the seat of his bike, covered in mud from head to toe. Milton was so mortified that he fainted.

Four months after Milton moved into the barn with Rex and Cora, Rex was severely injured during a performance at a monster truck show in the Tacoma Dome. Three days after the accident he would die of complications in hospital. This left Milton in the care of Cora, a borderline alcoholic, who knew very little beyond how to operate a kiln, roll grass, and make instant coffee. Knowing full well that she wouldn’t be able to take care of Milton properly, she was left with little choice but to send him to live with Rex’s first wife, Anna Hadley St. Claire, who was the nearest thing to a blood relative—as Anna and Rex had two daughters together. Cora gave him some half-assed explanations and put him on another bus.

Some days after his departure, Cora fell asleep while watching television one night and her cigarette, ill-balanced in the ashtray, fell to the floor and started a fire. The flames consumed the barn, killing Cora, the animals, and the majority of the world’s Reckless Rex collectibles. Had Milton been there he too would have perished.

Dizzy from the orbit of his life, Milton had no clue what he would have to deal with in Massachusetts. He was about to play a key role in one of the most bizarre happenings in world history. All he wanted was a Coke and a bag of Lay’s.

Just A Calm

Anna Hadley St.Claire met Rex Hadley at Boston College. The daughter of one of the most powerful industrialists in the Northeast, Anna had spent the majority of her life, up until college that is, in exclusive beach and country clubs.

When the unthinkable occurred—being rejected by Harvard—her father decided it would be best to sober her up by making her endure dorm life. Her roommate was a girl named Camille Stewart, the daughter of a Motel 6 maintenance man. Camille, who would—years later—go on to become a world-renowned and award-winning botanist, knew Rex Hadley from a local restaurant where the two of them had worked.

Rex did not attend Boston College. Rex was pretty much an idiot. The type that rich girls use to piss off their fathers.

The first time Anna met Rex he was naked. She had returned to her room following a literature class to discover him standing in front of her full-length mirror, flexing. She immediately began to laugh. After the initial shock of being discovered wore off, so did he. Camille had been allowing Rex to sleep in her bed during the day because he had been evicted from his apartment and was working as a bartender in a nearby tavern to pay off a gambling debt.

The two of them hit it off and the next thing they knew Anna was naked and Rex was flexing elsewhere. Two months later Anna dropped out of school and they eloped to Orlando during spring break. They were drunk, of course. Following their elopement they moved to Bakersfield, California, where Rex got a job working at a garage and began his love affair with jumping motorcycles. Anna, on the other hand, despised the place and everyone in it. She slowly began to realize that her actions were motivated by some need to anger her father. Late one October night, she left Rex, stole his car, and headed back to Massachusetts. When he awoke the next morning, Rex was not surprised when he read the note that she had left. He was somewhat angered that she took his car, but beyond that he didn’t care much. What Anna failed to tell him in that note was that she was pregnant. With twins no less. But Rex would never learn of it.

Her father welcomed Anna back with open arms. Overjoyed that she had left Rex, their lifelong feud ended mere minutes after her arrival. And, even though he was secretly disappointed that she was having Rex’s child, he realized that regaining his daughter far outweighed the whispers that would fill the locker room at the golf club.

Anna moved back into her parents’ house and gave birth to the twins in June. She named them Emma and Erica. Decades later Anna would be struck with massive bouts of guilt for denying her daughters any sort of relationship with their real father. She had remarried, of course, but not until the girls were old enough to realize that their stepfather wasn’t their biological father.

Eleven days after Cora had buried Rex, she received a letter in the mail from Anna asking if Emma and Erica could get to know their real father. And that’s where Cora got the idea. She knew that she would most likely deter Milton from becoming anything useful so she decided to write Anna back and work the guilt thing. She told Anna that Rex had recently been killed and that his nephew was now in need of family to look after him. Four days, two postmen, and three phone calls later it was settled. And Milton was packed off to yet another accident waiting to happen.

Just Some Black Clouds

Milton arrived at the St. Claire residence in the middle of an argument. The twins, Erica and Emma, were in front of the house screaming obscenities at each other while they hoisted .38s from time to time in threatening gestures. Anna was nowhere to been seen.

Anna’s second husband, Jack St. Claire, had given up on the three of them four years earlier, having met someone altogether younger and far more sexually capitulating. This left the housemaid, Uma, to deal with the girls. An ex-Soviet power lifter, Uma was not the kind of woman to permit such nonsense for very long. Years of steroid use had left her nerves in a very precarious state. Stressful situations caused her head to start twitching uncontrollably, leaving her no option but to wedge her skull between a door and a doorframe until it subsided. Uma feared the twitching more than death itself.

When she realized that the girls were outside with the pistols again she immediately got the house shotgun and fired a shot out one of the windows. This caused several things to occur. The first was to cause the girls to dramatically throw themselves to the ground, where they immediately began rolling about with their guns pointed every which way in search of the illusionary threat. The cab driver that had dropped Milton off decided it best to simply depart the residence at the highest possible speed available him, his fee no longer a concern. And Milton fainted. He would awaken minutes later to discover the twins standing over him, their guns still clutched in their hands. And, before fainting the second time, he heard one say to the other “you get his feet, I’ll get the device.�

It is commonly thought that identical twins tend to get along better than most siblings. There are even those that contend that they share a special telepathic bond, one being able to detect when something happens to the other. This was not the case with the St. Claire twins. Their only aim was to kill each other. They attended school for all of four days before being sent home for their behaviour. They physically attacked four different private tutors, injuring one so badly that she spent three months in hospital. Their crowning achievement, though, was the accidental shooting of the their gardener, Dale Sellers.

Emma had fired several shots at her sister while she had been diving behind a hedgerow. As fate would have it, Dale was also behind the hedgerow, trying to coax a wounded parrot from beneath it. The bullet took him in the forehead. Erica spent a year in a juvenile detention facility, while her sister received three months for her part in it. The girls had attempted to kill each other on seven other occasions.

Fortunately the St. Claire estate was large enough to offer a buffer between the insanity of its occupants and the outside world. The twins hadn’t left the grounds in over eleven years, having since moved out of the main house, taking up residences in diametrically opposed buildings on the property. Emma had turned the pool house into a fortress while Erica lived in the basement of the staff house (where she spent the majority of her time mixing volatile chemicals).

It was rare for the twins to work together on anything, so it came as a surprise to Uma when they wheeled Milton through the front door in a wheelchair that had been fitted with restraints. Erica had designed the chair to kill Emma. She had also built a runway from the top of the highest hill on the estate down to the duck pond. Her plan was to surprise her sister, knock her unconscious, strap her in the chair, wait until she came around, and then push her down the runway into the pond where she would drown.

Erica was pleased that she actually got to put one of her inventions to use. Emma just eyeballed the thing, frantically trying to figure a way to break out of it if ever she found herself strapped in. There was never a dull moment at the St. Claire’s. Sort of like there was never a dull at Stalingrad.

By the time Milton had regained consciousness Anna had returned from the city. The twins were nowhere to be found by then, as they rarely ventured near the large estate house when their mother was at home. Uma had carried the boy upstairs and put him in bed well before Anna’s return. Milton lay there looking up at the shadows on the ceiling, wondering what was to become of him. He counted the spaces between the shadows. There were 210,346 of them.

That night the twins did not sleep. They paced back and forth in their respective dwellings attempting to deduce the meaning behind the arrival of the little boy. And, in their own demented ways, they both came to the same conclusion. Each was convinced that their mother was in league with the other and that the boy had been brought in to replace them. Emma went immediately to her machine gun and fired several volleys into the corner of the staff house. Following this brief outburst Milton drifted off into what would be the last deep slumber of his life. And that night he dreamed of a land of baguette lovers occupied by barrette haters.

Ninny Hawks

In 1951 Colonel Albert St. Claire spent the majority of his time casually walking his estate. A full life of industrial strong-arming comfortably behind him, he favoured wandering the wooded bits of his property flushing out fowl with his dogs and blasting them from the sky. The colonel enjoyed it so much that, when proper game was out of season, he would pay top dollar to have a variety of domesticated birds released around the grounds so that he might continue to spend his days flushing and blasting. Many a cockatoo and parrot met their end in the sights of his shotgun.

Years later his granddaughter would spend her nights wondering from whom her daughters had inherited their instabilities. She had read the appropriate literature, conferred with the appropriate specialists, adopted and abandoned the appropriate religions, and even spent tens of thousands of dollars travelling to the Italian Alps to meet with one of the world’s foremost psychics. But try as she might she could never put a finger on it. Her twin daughters, whom she loved, detested each other. And one day their inability to successfully do away with one another would come to an end. What Anna did not know was that her grandfather was partially to blame.

In the summer of 1951 the butler at the St. Claires’ was a coloured man by the name of Albert Hawks. Albert hailed from Kentucky. He had come north in search of work as a small boy some thirty-four years earlier. And, since the day he left home, he had neither seen nor heard from any of his relations. Albert started at the St. Claire manor as a yard boy at the age of sixteen. By his thirty-fifth birthday he had become the estate’s butler. In his later years the colonel tended to trust Albert more than his oldest friends and even his own family. Albert did the firing and hiring of staff. Albert kept in phone contact with the lawyers and doctors and politicians. Albert kept up the colonel’s correspondence. When President Kennedy was assassinated, Albert attended the funeral for him.

Late one Saturday morning in the summer of 1951 the phone in the staff house kitchen started ringing. Albert Hawks was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee and perusing a copy of Life magazine. He got up from his chair and answered the phone. And, to his great surprise, his youngest sister was on the other end. Her name was Ninny.

Ninny Hawks had, up until that week, been the victim of a very violent marriage. Her husband had done time for a variety of crimes during their twelve years together. He had returned home from a three-year term five days earlier and had taken up where he had left off. This meant that he slept all day and beat his wife when he was sober enough to keep his balance. Having just spent the better part of two years alone, Ninny came to the conclusion that enough was enough. She planted an axe between his eyes when he was asleep, packed a suitcase, and walked out of town in the middle of the night. Five days later she arrived in Boston and called the only number that she had for her brother. Albert had sent it in a letter when their mother passed away. He had not been able to attend the funeral and sent a letter to his siblings and aunt in his stead.

Ninny had kept the letter, realizing that she might one day need some way of contacting Albert in the event that the family ever attempted to get together for a reunion or whatnot. As it turned out her reunion with her older brother was not a joyous one. Albert was not pleased with the circumstances surrounding Ninny’s arrival. It was one thing to show up unannounced on his doorstep, it was something altogether different to show up with a murder rap.

The first thing that Albert did was put Ninny in his bedroom so that no one would see her. He then went directly to the colonel’s study to have a conversation about what to do with her. Despite what most might have thought, the colonel and Albert were the closest of friends. This would explain why Albert looked after the colonel as he did right up until his death.

Albert walked from the staff house to the main house and found the colonel in his study, reading. The two had a brief conversation that was followed by a minute of violent screaming. Albert then left the study, walked back to the staff house, gathered up his sister and her things, put on a coat, and led her out into the woods. To this day, Ninny has no clue what was said between her brother and the colonel. But whatever it was, it ended up with her living in a filthy cabin in the backwoods of Massachusetts.

And, since the 12th of July 1951, Ninny Hawks had not left the St. Claire estate. Even when Albert died she did not venture from the small, self-imposed confines of her time-warped condition. Albert always told her that the colonel strictly forbade it. For all of the 1960s she did not venture further than a half mile from her shack. She kept chickens and goats, a garden, and she fished. And during all that time she went, for lack of a more grandiose term, completely mad. Ninny would inadvertently turn the twins against each another when they were very little.

One evening, during a violent storm, Ninny lost her footing on some rocks and fell off of an overhang into a creek. She landed on her right leg, puncturing her thigh. Realizing how serious the wound was, she decided to do what was for her the unthinkable. The next night she would make her way to the estate house and find something to help prevent infection. It was easy enough, seeing as the doors on the estate were never locked. Once she made it to the house, she simply entered and went about looking for some alcohol or antiseptic. Luckily, in one of the ground floor washrooms, she came across some peroxide. It was during that visit that Ninny met the twins. Erica and Emma caught her red-handed as she limped down the hall between the main foyer and the kitchen.

Ninny, realizing that the girls could quite easily tell their parents about her, decided to do the only thing that she could think of. She sat the girls down in the kitchen and told them this story. It went a little something like this…

A real long time ago there was this little girl that lived in the country. One day, when the girl was walking through the forest, she came upon a small little fella standing on a rock. The little fella didn’t say nothing. So the little girl picked up a stick and gave him a little poke. Still the little fella didn’t say nothing. So she poked him some more. Finally, after a whole heap of poking, the little fella put his hands on his hips and said “Now little girl! Why in the world would you spend all this time poking at a little fella such as me?�

The little girl just stood there and didn’t say a thing. So the little fella jumped off the rock and climbed up into a nearby tree. The little girl thought that he looked real funny up in that tree and she started laughing at him. The little fella inched his way out onto one of the big, overhanging branches until he was right over the little girl, and then jumped off the branch and landed on the little girl’s head. The little girl wasn’t laughing anymore. The little fella went back to his rock and stood on it as he had been before. The little girl’s body eventually rotted away, though some of it was eaten by a fox that came by.

The weeks went by and the little girl’s parents were beginning to think that they were never going to see her again. Her pap thought it best to go wandering in the woods to see if he could find her. So he went into the woods and started calling her name while he searched around. But no matter his calling, the little girl never answered.

One day, while he was wandering, he came across the little fella standing on the rock. And, like before, the little fella didn’t say anything. So the man picked up a stick and gave the little fella a poke. Still, the little fella didn’t move from his rock. Hours went by and then the little fella finally put his hands on his hips and said “Now sir! Why in the world would you spend all this time poking a little fella such as me?�

The man just stood there shrugging his shoulders. So the little fella got off his rock and climbed up the tree. The man thought the little fella looked funny, and he started to laugh. When the little fella got up onto the branch he crept out on it until he was right over the man’s head. And then, while the man was pointing up at him laughing, the little fella jumped on his head and knocked him to the ground. Eventually, his body rotted away just like his daughter’s had.

Months went by and the mother of the little girl was beginning to think that she would never see her daughter or her husband ever again. So one night, in a fit, she went running out into the woods and came across a little fella standing on top of a giant diamond.

She said, “My, that’s a very pretty diamond you have!�

And the little fella jumped down, took off his little cap, wiped his brow with his sleeve, and said, “Ma’am, you’re the first person that ever realized I was standing on a diamond.�

And at that wondrous point in the telling, Ninny produced a very large piece of glass from her handbag and slammed it down on the table. And from that moment on both Emma and Erica St. Claire considered Ninny Hawks to be the greatest person they had ever met.

Two Little Rich Girls in a Pot of Stew. Add a Dash of Garlic, Cook Em ’Till They’re Through.

The twins viewed their mother as a figure constantly in transit. Occasionally she might dare to put on the mask of motherhood for a while, but for the most part she spent her days in Boston playing bridge and drinking a considerable amount of gin. Their stepfather, to be fair, was even more of a shadow than their mother. He commonly deemed it necessary to personally oversee the completion of whatever project his company was involved in at the time. Of course such things invariably meant travelling to distant parts of the world for extended periods of time. Being as young as they were it seemed to them as if their stepfather was merely a voice that came floating out of a telephone receiver. Surely all fathers were the same, they thought. Perhaps all fathers lived in a far-off land. And there was only one phone in this land. Surely, had his phone time not been limited by the fact that all those other fathers had to call their daughters as well, he would have called more often. But to their credit, the twins dwelled on the absence of their parents for only a brief time in their early childhood. The truth of the matter was that they were far too intelligent to give much thought to it once they realized that their parents were worse off than themselves.

The girls read the paper and watched the news. They realized how well-off their family was. And they also realized that their parents only had themselves to blame for their lives. So it seemed to them that there were better things to do than lament over the absence of love and support. Such as tracking down old ladies that surely dwelt somewhere on the vastness of their estate.

The twins set about finding Ninny in the most expedient way possible. Tapping into the psychosis that would eventually engulf them, they got theYellow Pages, thumbed through it until they found what they were looking for, picked up the phone, and dialed a number. A rented helicopter arrived at noon the next day.

Discovering Ninny’s location was simple after that. Being that it was winter they had the pilot hover high enough to allow Erica to survey the entire estate with a pair of binoculars. All she needed to do was search for signs of chimney smoke. They had the pilot fly to the area where Ninny’s shack stood and made sure to note the location on a map. They then had him turn back and return to the house.

You might think this unlikely of girls so young but I assure you that it did occur. Some of you might think that no one in their right mind would rent a helicopter to two young girls. A free-flowing multitude of one-hundred-dollar bills can have that effect on a financially ailing helicopter-rental company though. And, despite the fact that they were preschoolers, they were astoundingly smart for their age. Imagine being confronted by two small girls with fists full of hundreds trying to explain to you that they’re looking at various options for a landscaping endeavour that they wish to surprise their parents with for their anniversary. After five minutes of standing there completely stunned I just took the money and kept my mouth shut.

The following morning Erica and Emma set out from the house in search of Ninny’s hideout. Having packed the provisions and equipment they considered necessary for the journey, they marched through the rear gardens, past the greenhouses, and into the park. The St. Claire estate was, for the most part, littered with stands of trees separated by small clearings, ponds, and creeks that spread out across a small range of hills. The further one went from the gardens and polo park, the rougher the terrain became. Having underestimated how difficult it would actually become, the twins found themselves faced with a variety of ravines and other impassible terrain that they were forced to circumnavigate. This took time of course. Time that, under such circumstances, slipped by quite unnoticed.

Having walked deep into the wilds of their property, the girls paid little attention to the fact that the afternoon had turned into evening. Things under the spreading trees were clouded by an encroaching darkness that is legendary in the forest. One minute the sun is shining and the next it isn’t. An hour after sunset the girls were pushing through underbrush in the dark, unable to see more than five feet in front of them. And it was then that the unthinkable occurred.

Having taken the lead most of the day, Emma had started to cut corners when it came to paying attention to things such as dips in the ground and branches that lashed back to hit her sister. The further they went the more careless and annoyed she became. They were little girls, mind you, which meant that smallish holes were, in fact, medium-sized holes and so on. It also meant that they were somewhat frightened. Geniuses or not, they were still children. It also meant that they spent most of the latter portion of their expedition arguing. About things like who had finished the cream soda or who had allegedly read the map incorrectly. When Emma fell off the cliff the two of them were going on about who was to blame for this adventure.

Ninny Hawks had been following the girls for about an hour when Emma fell off the cliff. Despite the fact that Ninny knew they were approaching the cliff, for it was there that she had fallen and hurt herself only weeks before, she did nothing to alert the girls to the danger. She had doubled back behind them in an attempt to ford the river at a shallow point and then watch them as they argued about how they were going to get across.
Ninny thought quite highly of the twins at first. She was impressed that they did not turn back at the first sign of adversity, nor when the sun went down. They pushed relentlessly forward, which is what made Ninny change her mind about them. In the beginning she thought it sweet that the girls were trying to find her. But it is not like rich little girls to go to such extremes as this. Rich little girls give up after several hours of being lashed in the face by pine boughs, they do not wander further into the woods with night setting in. This made Ninny think that they were up to something. At that moment she decided that the girls must never find her or her house.

Emma fell off the cliff and down into the icy waters of the creek below. She landed flat on her back which, due to her small stature, probably saved her life. Had she gone in head first she would have hit the creek bed and split her head wide open. Had she gone in feet first she would have easily broken both legs. Thankfully she weighed so little that landing on her back, though painful, allowed the shallow water to break her fall.
She cried out in pain, which terrified Erica to no end. Having heard but not seen her sister plummet in the blackness before her, she stood clinging to a tree trunk, paralyzed with fear. Emma, on the other hand, once her crying abated, sobered up to the reality of the situation. It was extremely dark and extremely cold. And, to top it off, her attempts to coax her sister into looking for a way down to her were futile. Erica refused to move. The two talked for a while until Erica was cut off abruptly in mid-sentence. That was all she remembered. After screaming her sister’s name in terror for four or five minutes Erica was hit on the head from behind as well.

When the twins regained consciousness they were lying on a wet mattress facing each other, their hands and feet bound with gardening string. The room that held them was faintly lit by a candle and the mattress smelled as if it had been soaked in gasoline. Ninny Hawks was nowhere to be seen, though the girls could hear something or someone moving around in an adjacent area. Their first order of business was to begin wailing terribly, which they did for some time. Following the outburst Emma decided the best thing for them would be to attempt an escape, though she could offer no plan as to how it should be done. They deliberated on into the night or the morning, neither could be sure.

At long last, as the girls were about to admit to each other that, despite their formidable brains, neither could come up with any realistic escape method, Ninny emerged through a rickety door and walked over to them. Too terrified to say anything, they lay there watching her. After standing over them, moving her eyes from one to the other, Ninny reached down, grabbed them by the feet, and dragged them across the floor. The twins started to scream. Ninny stopped dragging them and began kicking them in the back. The twins screamed even louder.

Ninny returned to dragging them across the floor and up a small dirt tunnel into another room. Once inside the room Ninny dragged the girls towards a large pit that was situated in the centre of the room. The pit was about ten feet from side to side and seven or eight feet deep. It smelled of offal and teemed with flies. Loosening the bonds on their legs, she kicked the girls several more times to subdue them and then tipped them into the pit. The girls fell in tandem, Erica landing squarely on her sister.

The pit was filled with the remains of various animals in varying states of decomposition and what smelled like human waste. Having screamed themselves hoarse, the twins struggled to free their legs and then worked together to loosen their hands. This was easier said than done, as Emma had broken several ribs during the fall and was having difficulty breathing. The girls lay there clinging to each other, their voices spent, tears streaming down their faces. And then, as if the situation couldn’t be made any worse, the lights went out.

A Fraction of an Inch Either Way.

Ten hours would pass before Uma thought to trouble Mrs. St. Claire with the news that her daughters were nowhere to be found. Having tied one on the night before, Anna dismissed the intrusion with a wave of her hand, adjusted her night mask, and went back to bed. Her instructions on the matter were clear. “They’ll turn up,� she said.

By nine that night Anna was a nervous wreck, the police had been summoned, and Uma had been fired and rehired a half dozen times. The police were convinced that the twins had fallen prey to kidnappers and were most likely miles away, locked in the trunk of a car. They spared Anna this theory, of course, thinking it best to feed her false hope by convincing her that the girls were just hiding.

The local police did not think to search the St. Claire estate for the twins, nor did they inform other law-enforcement agencies concerning the possibility that the St. Claire girls had been abducted. Instead they sat around waiting for the inevitable phone call that would confirm their theory. But no ransom call would come.

Within walking distance of the twins’ location, the police spent the better part of a week trying to piece together what had become of the girls. It wasn’t until a junior officer dropped a chocolate bar behind a desk in the foyer that they turned up the receipt for the helicopter rental. Later that day the police came to question me and I returned to the St. Claire estate with my helicopter to show them what I had done with the twins.

You’d think that the police would have been suspicious of chimney smoke rising from the woods off in the distance but it really didn’t occur to them that it was out of the ordinary. Another four days would pass before a detective, quite harmlessly, mentioned to Anna that he admired the estate and inquired why the guest house was located so far from the main house, referring to the chimney smoke he’d seen from my chopper. Anna perked up at this of course, telling him immediately that the only other lodging on the property, besides those located within plain view of the estate house, was the stable house.

This confused the detective, who did his best to match up the location of the stable house with the smoke he had seen rising from the woods off in the distance. Anna gave it little thought as well, automatically thinking the man to be one of those Better-Homes-and-Gardens types that loves to find cheap ways to make their paltry suburban houses look majestic.

I won’t bore you with the arduous details concerning the eventual realization that there was something odd about that smoke. I won’t bother telling you about how they spent the whole night and most of the next morning searching the property in grids. But I will tell you that, when they finally did discover Ninny’s shack and kicked in the door, Ninny was dead.

They found her lying on the floor with a fire poker stuck in her stomach. The girls, on the other hand, were discovered at the end of the earthen tunnel that Ninny had burrowed out over three decades of delusion. They found Erica first, crouched up in a ball at the edge of the pit, covered in blood, gripping a large piece of glass. Emma, who had been run through by the fire poker as well, was lying comatose in the pit, barely alive. Thankfully my helicopter was at hand and the police had me fly her to the hospital. Another half hour and she wouldn’t have lived.

The days and weeks that followed teemed with innuendo and scandal. Firmly in the hot seat, Anna was badgered by the media day and night about Ninny Hawks and how something of that nature could occur right under her nose. Anna’s only option given the circumstances was to drink, sleep all day, and try to forget that her life had turned into a nightmare. The sheer bizarreness of the situation could be easily encapsulated by the fact that Anna’s husband, having been contacted and presented with the details, chose not to come home.

In the months following the ordeal the girls were seen by a variety of psychologists in an attempt to help them deal with what had happened. Neither had talked about it though. Nor would they ever.

Once the twins returned home from the hospital the bizarre hatred that now exists between them was glaringly evident. And it was then that the murder attempts began. The first such attempt came when Erica tried to stab Emma with a kitchen knife during breakfast, right in front of their parents. Her stepfather was forced to wrestle her to the floor, as Emma rushed over and immediately started kicking her in the head. It’s been like that ever since.

And So—The War.

Milton awoke to unfamiliar surroundings. Having been at the St. Claires’ for only two weeks he was still not used to the place. Replacing the smell of wet hay was the harsh, headache smell of lemon Pledge. And every morning, as he drew air in through his nose, it reminded him that he had been packed off to this place to avoid complication. He was beginning to wonder what exactly the complication was. Him? Or everyone else?
And during those first fourteen days at the estate he had not encountered either of the girls that had set upon him on the front drive. He had spent time exchanging pleasantries with Anna and Uma, but his only formal introduction to the twins came in the small hours of the morning when they exchanged heavy weapons fire and insults at the top of their lungs. No one ever brought it up though, so Milton never bothered to ask. To Milton the only advantage to being at the St. Claires’ was the many books that the colonel had been wise enough to collect during his life. His library was extensive. Having spent the majority of his veraciously available reading years living in a barn with a stunt man and the wife of a stunt man, he viewed the St. Claire library as ancient scholars must have the great library of Alexandria.

On the fourteenth day of Milton’s habitation there came a knock at the front door that went unanswered. Having been left to fend for himself that day, as Uma had gone into Boston with Anna, Milton had forgotten that there was no one else to answer it. An hour passed before Milton, who was reading in the library, realized that there had been no answer to the knocking. Curious about who it was, he put his book down and started to walk across the room towards the main foyer. As he was walking something caught his eye through the large rear library windows. Walking over to investigate, Milton found himself staring at the most bizarre sight of his young life.

There was a man in a suit dangling over the swimming pool, his arms and legs attached to ropes that had been tied between the pool-house balcony and an upper window of the staff house. The man, who struck Milton as being rather calm, was facing the water, his head moving about in an attempt to survey his bonds. The twins, who had obviously subdued the poor old man, stood facing each other on opposite sides of the pool, both simultaneously slotting 9-mm bullets into handgun clips. Why they had worked together to dangle a stranger above the swimming pool was anyone’s guess. Since Milton was not the confrontational sort, he could think of nothing better to do than simply watch. Thankfully the old man had a pretty good idea of what he was going to do. He would melt the guns with his mind and then implore the boy at the window to cut the ropes.

The Incredible Dr. Chalky

It all started in a chair. Ernie Chalky was sitting in the larger of his two living-room chairs flipping through a National Geographic when the phone rang. It was not as if he commonly received calls about ceramic dogs that had allegedly attacked and killed human beings. Over the years Ernie had discovered that the clergy, compared to most, almost always tended to blow things out of proportion. So when he found himself talking to a frantic priest he really thought little of it. The fact that the priest was attacked and consumed by a ceramic dog mid-sentence had nothing to do with his inability to take the priest seriously. Granted, once Ernie heard the receiver hit the floor and the priest’s screams echo off into the bare-walled corners of the room, he realized there was a good chance that the priest was on the level (and, more than likely, in a basement). It wasn’t until the dog picked up the phone and started talking that Ernie knew he was dealing with a very serious situation. Because it is, in the opinion of most, quite odd for ceramic dogs to be able to speak perfect Latin.

For someone in Ernie’s profession it is not uncommon to come across inanimate objects that possess the ability to move about of their own free will and speak a variety of languages. For example, four years earlier Ernie had spent the better part of three months tracking a Portuguese-speaking flaming sword all over northern Madagascar. He prevailed, of course, but it was not without anguish. It had been appearing out of thin air and hacking unsuspecting villagers to pieces. You may think it trivial, but it is actually quite difficult to catch something that pops in and out of a standardized molecular constitution. But who are you to call when such abnormalities abound? Ghostbusters was just a movie.

Ernie was just a boy when Captain Chalky found him in a ditch in the dead of winter. England was a different place then, having survived German bombs and rockets. Perhaps that’s why Ernie’s parents decided to leave it. His mother was an Essex girl, but moved to Wales after his father was unable to find work in London. His father was a Welshman, as was Ernie. His mother, being that she was entirely English, didn’t think much of the Welsh. Perhaps that’s why she left Wales and returned to England when Ernie was seven years old. After all, it was filled not only with Welshmen but Ernie’s father, who was, to his great discredit in her eyes, as Welsh as one could be. Ernie ended up staying with his father. Perhaps she simply forgot him in her haste to leave. Perhaps, realizing that she had, she paused some distance away and considered going back for him. In doing so, she realized that she might wake her husband and thought better of it. So Ernie’s mother left him and his father in the dead of night and went back to England with his unborn brother Andrew as passenger. Ernie has never met Andrew. He hadn’t really met his mother either.

Ernie’s father was not what you would call an intelligent man. His father was a coal miner. The life of a miner is one filled with nightmares of suffocation and collapse. Maybe that is why a great many of them drink as they do. To see if they can destroy their livers before they succumb to the inevitability of black lung. Ernie’s father would die from a combination of the two. So Ernie found himself in the care of Father Michael O’Reilly at the Boys School of Holy Seclusion. And during his time there Father Michael repeatedly attempted to convince Ernie that Jesus was ever-present, if only he looked hard enough. But try as he might, Ernie would always come to the same conclusion: the Almighty’s picture was everywhere, but He was nowhere to be found.

Five months after his arrival at Holy Seclusion, Ernie came to the realization that his life would be doomed if he were to remain for long. Ernie, not unlike his mother, left Wales in the middle of the night and travelled to England. He would get no further than Lydney before the horrific reality of his actions would set in. He would spend that night in an abandoned barn and would awaken the next morning to find that his toes had turned completely purple. He would then hobble as far as he could in an effort to find help. He made it as far as the roadway. And that’s where Captain Chalky discovered him.

Doctor Captain Finnegan Chalky was a Cambridge man. He was also an ordained Anglican minister and a highly decorated RAF fighter pilot. These three things had very little to do with one another, and he would later tell Ernie that each was a foolish pursuit of three goals: 1) knowledge 2) presumed access to the afterlife 3) a vehicle in which to test the boundaries between being smart enough to know better and ignorant enough not to. To the best of Ernie’s knowledge Captain Chalky didn’t hold a Ph.D in anything except himself, despite the fact that he could speak four languages and knew the answer to every question that Ernie ever put to him. He was, in Ernie’s eyes, someone that one would consider to be the perfect representation of a human being. Well, up until the point when he told Ernie that he could bend metal with his mind anyway.

He could melt the fenders of cars, turn doorknobs, open locks, and so on. The first time Ernie ever witnessed it Captain Chalky was attempting to loose some earth under a fence with a hoe. He couldn’t get the hoe far enough under the fence so he simply bent the end of it and slid it under. For days Ernie could not believe what he saw. Captain Chalky could in fact bend metal with his mind. And Ernie, as his student, would receive the secret of this gift before the captain’s passing.

Ernie lived with Captain Chalky in a variety of places up until his death in 1976. Known in various circles in Europe as paranormal superstars, they were employed by a wide variety of organizations that included such celebrity members as the Pope, the Prince of Monaco, and Salvador Dali. When Captain Chalky died, Ernie decided to carry on their work by himself. He packed and moved to Mexico, where he purchased a large estate near San Carlos on the Baja. From there Dr. Ernie Chalky would conduct the business of dealing with those things that no one else would believe possible.

Ernie Chalky, hot on the trail of a Latin-speaking ceramic dog, has tracked the beast through Central America, up the west coast of the States, and then east to New England. Two days before arriving at the St. Claires’ front door he had learned that the dog was camped out on their property. He was oblivious to the added danger of the insane twins that had full run of the grounds. Before he knew it he found himself dangling above a swimming pool, having been hit on the head and knocked unconscious. And, to make matters worse, there was a demonically possessed ceramic dog somewhere in the area that was out for blood.

Good movies…

Having finished loading before her sister, Erica attempted to move towards a nearby retaining wall for cover. But something wouldn’t allow her to. Instead she found the weight of the gun change, as if she was no longer burdened by it. She then felt the gun raise her arm, coming to rest in line with her sister’s head. And then, without her finger being on the trigger, the gun went off. As if in slowmotion, as all horrific things in this world tend to happen, the shot took Emma in the forehead, ripping her head apart.

What had begun as a promising day had turned suddenly sour. The arrival of the old man had provided the twins with a welcome distraction. As intrusions tended to, their fantastic hatred for one another abated long enough for them to subdue the stranger and dangle him above the pool. Then it was back to business. But how this could have happened was beyond Erica. She stood there wobbling, the gun falling from her hand to the pool deck. Her eyes, as if out of focus, searched for some explanation, forcing her head from side to side in a druglike trance. And then she fainted and fell into the pool.

Milton was in shock. His eyes refused to leave the expanding pool of blood on the pool deck. Somewhere in the background he could faintly hear a man’s voice yelling, but it failed to register. The contents of Emma’s head took a slippery ride from her skull onto the concrete and tiles, filling a nearby pool-filter cap. Milton vomited. Which was, of course, a step up from passing out.

Ernie Chalky stopped yelling. There was no point. He would have to wait there until the boy came to his senses and realized that he was in need of assistance. He hung there casually counting the air bubbles that rose to the surface of the water, after having crept out of Erica’s lungs. Almost an hour would pass before the little boy from inside the house would emerge. But unfortunately for Ernie Chalky it was not to aid in his escape.

…end badly.

Milton woke to find himself lying next to a swimming pool. Which was strange since the last place he remembered being was in his bed at home in the loft of a barn. Being that he was a genius, he was quick to come to the realization that he was not dreaming. He was nauseous, though nowhere as profoundly as he would become after pulling himself up to survey his surroundings. In doing so he would discover three bodies. One of an old man hanging above the pool, blood cascading from his body into the water below. A drowned mermaid. And a third on the far side of the pool deck with no head.

After a considerable amount of time, Milton got up, walked the length of the pool, and slumped into a sun chair, where he hopelessly began trying to piece together what had befallen him. He could feel the sun against his face and arms. Despite the gruesome display before him, he felt somehow assured that he had played no part in it. Sitting there he began to laugh. Sitting there, laughing in that sun chair, his eyes came upon the strangest thing.

From the pool-house door there came a dogged little fella carrying an enormous burden. A giant sack slung over his shoulder, the little fella wobbled his way as far as the sun chairs before stopping to take a rest. Removing his tiny cap, he wiped his brow and looked around as if determining which direction to go.

Then he looked up at Milton.

And being that Milton was at a loss for words he could think of nothing better to say than “What’s in the sack?�

Replacing his cap on his tiny little head, the little fella lifted the sack and slung it back over his shoulder. Standing there wobbling, he replied
“Funny you should ask.�

They plan to use my execution to kick off the county fair.

I hear whispers that they will hang me. There are those that wished to see me electrocuted, but it seems they only have one generator and cannot spare the power. Better to have caramel-covered apples than see my spine dance. I could simply not abide an execution without the availability of concession foods. Unruly I may be, but never uncivilized. There will be children present after all. Best to set a good example.

Chin up and all that. It’s off to meet the maker. I have nothing to complain about. I hold no ill will towards anyone. I will leave this world as I entered it. Void of popular consent.

They have me locked up in some sort of cellar. I was unconscious when I was brought in so I’m not quite sure exactly where I am. Strangely enough, it’s filled with a variety of costumes. Twice a day someone opens the door and slides a bowl of pork and beans into the room. This I have never understood. Making sure that those condemned to die are nourished enough to take part only serves to further the misrepresentation of compassion in a compassionless society. Yesterday, during the sliding of the pork and beans, I decided to ask my jailer where I was. The response was short and ambiguous.

“You’re in God’s country,� said a voice.

“Hmm,� I said to myself, “God must be lost.�

I have decided to wear a clown suit when the time comes. They’re bent on hanging one, after all.

I have been sitting here trying to figure out where it all went wrong. It seems that I have been moving for so long that I have forgotten what it’s like to be still. I’ve been retracing my footsteps, wondering when it was that I became the formless monster that I now am. But nothing comes to mind.

They tell me that I used to be quite agreeable. I can’t say that I remember ever being agreeable. I can’t say that I can ever remember being anything but adamantly uninterested. I have stalked the planet to my discontent, it seems. And now, here in this basement, I am left with all the blackness that has consumed my insides.

I have come to realize that I allowed myself to be brought below the waves and partially drowned. But before I could struggle free of the water and regain the air, I was caught.

The hayseeds have me now. They’re going to hang me. It was wrong of Christians to have ever bought into all that peace and love nonsense. Things were much more interesting when their lust for bloody vengeance was out in the open. Now they’re just forcibly boring and seem to get quite offended when over-glorified suburban idiots exclaim the titles of pornographic magazines over the airwaves.

I am doomed to dangle. There’s no getting around it I’m afraid. I can only hope that the gallows are in a state of good repair. It would be a big disappointment to discover that I am to be stood on a chair and boringly tipped to my death. Hopefully there will be a trap door to dramatically plummet through, or a team of stallions to hoist me at breakneck speed into the air.

It shouldn’t be all that challenging for the promoters. Some dumb bastard in a clown suit getting yanked to his death by four steeds. Why not light the gallows on fire or set off some fireworks when my head hits the top beam. It will be the show of the century.

It would be great to have one’s own demise promoted in a Don King fashion:

Perhaps the fear of death is worse than its actuality. Not unlike when you jump off of something ridiculously high, you’re scared but eventually you succumb to irrational curiosity and do it. Afterwards you realize that it was really no big deal in the first place. I figure death is no different.

When I was eleven I was rushed to the hospital because I was literally frozen in the fetal position. I couldn’t unclench my hands, nor my knees or elbows or feet. It hurt like hell. Then, to add insult to injury, I started wandering in and out of consciousness. I had had influenza for nearly a week and a half. After my parts froze my mother started thinking that it might be something else altogether. When we arrived at the hospital I was examined by several doctors. I was then given a spinal tap. They don’t sedate you when they give you a spinal tap. They lay you on your side, bend you slightly, and slowly slide needles into your spinal cord. The doctor told my mother that I most likely had spinal meningitis and would be dead within the week. All I remember is the Jell-O. I wasn’t given anything to eat except Jell-O.

During the days and nights that followed, interns started appearing outside of my room in droves. They would stand there, peering through the glass, as several doctors spoke and occasionally pointed in my direction. I’m told that spinal meningitis is very rare.

One night, some days later, I awoke at 4 a.m. I got out of bed and walked out to the nurses’ station. I stood there, freezing. After several minutes the lady behind the kiosk noticed that I was standing there. She said nothing. I asked if she would be a sport and call me a cab.

So much for death.

But this time there’s no out. This time there is just pork and beans.

I am all out of moderately entertaining things to say. I have become the foundation of your dissatisfaction. I will pay the price. This theme-park world that we have so craftily constructed without our consciences getting in the way will extract a toll much worse than the mere bruises of consumerist overload. The debilitations suffered by that which comprises our unknown quantities will surely be much greater. The gods of entertainment demand sacrifice. And surely I’ll be replaced by something altogether more predictable.

There was a time when slogans such as “power to the people� and “make love not war� were believable. But even then they were nothing more than cheap disguises bent on delivering the usually sought after nuggets of an anaesthetized society. You can replace them with “Fuck the people, I want the power� and “I was just looking to score because of the war� because the truth hurts. And since art no longer reflects anything but unchallenging passiveness packaged as a good time, you’ll be needing something to keep you partially sober.

Last night the carnival trucks rolled into town. There were sounds of preparation, sounds of tired lives being led, sounds of discontented misfits practising a trade as ancient as tragedy. All through the night they worked feverishly to erect Ring Toss booths, the Haunted House, the Chain Swings. The animals in the makeshift petting zoo, blind with glaucoma, wander the husky darkness bumping into each other. The ringmaster writes to a girl he tries to remember as being something other than merely a voice on a phone. The ride mechanic hits the bottle. The carnival must be put together in the night. Done in broad daylight, its secrets would be too easily revealed. It remains one of the last great unknowns in this world. Because if we were to discover how shoddy everything was we would never go. Instead we would go to one of those ridiculous entertainment-megatropolis things and become pale reminders of ourselves.

I did my best to stay awake so that I might see the sun rise for the last time. But I fell asleep.

I awoke this morning to the familiar aroma of pork and beans. I wished it were Jell-O. I attempted to pull myself together, be strong, when the time came. I did my best, but my knees were wobbly. I tried to eat, but vomited.

I spent an hour or so putting on the clown suit, haphazardly slapping on some face paint, trying to make the shoes fit better. And then they came for me. No last meal, no last requests fulfilled, no few minutes with family or friends. I was simply thrown in the back of a cart and wheeled to my destruction. People lined the midway, some throwing things, others merely observing me with quiet disgust. The fact that I was wearing a clown suit only fuelled the crowd’s anger. My last jab gave me little comfort, but at least it was something.

As for the rest, well, there is little I can say of it. I would have thought my conditioning able to provide some capable last words, but I merely shook my head when asked if I had any. And then, as quickly as my life had happened, it ended. My legs wobbled, my lungs felt as if they were filled with concrete, I nearly bit clear through my tongue. I just stood there in a clown suit with a rope around my neck. Then the floor gave way and I went with it.

I guess this means the fair is open. Make sure to enjoy yourself.

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
—George Orwell, Animal Farm

Once, not so long ago, the world came to an end. Millions of people ceased to exist all of a sudden, all with no time to prepare. This did not mean that they stopped moving or speaking or producing. It just meant that they ceased to exist all of a sudden. The world had come to an end.

One morning, some years after the end of the world, a young woman patiently sat in a waiting room with fourteen other women. These other women were all roughly the same as her. They were all exactly the same age, they were all unwed, they were all relatively dim. These three primary characteristics had brought them together on that day. They had all had birthdays during the previous week. This meant that they could be legally put to work. So, their names having been run through various machines that do nothing all day except compile lists of names, they received notice that they were to come that morning to that office to be given a job.

She hoped she might be given a fantastic job. It was not to be, of course, but one can always hope.

During the hour or so that she spent waiting, she fantasized about being given a job so fantastic that it would make her burst with happiness. Perhaps she would become an events coordinator on a cruise ship or at a holiday resort.

Instead, she was given a job painting pieces of coral. She also painted a plastic word that had been glued to the coral. It consisted of the following four letters: M-A-U-I.

It was to be her life’s work.

The real world. That being the one in which we live.

The People’s Republic of China is a very large place. It is rather easy to become lost within it. Not so much because it covers such vast distances, but because there are so very many people vying for the solitude that such a vastness once offered. There are, at this very moment, approximately 1.2 billion people living in the People’s Republic of China. It is one of the most populated countries in the world. There was a time when China was ruled by emperors who were considered divine. After the world came to an end, the Chinese government spent a great many years telling its countrymen that the ways of their forefathers were wrong. Unfortunately, they did little to present anything concrete that showed themselves to be any better. But that is the way of the world. Everyone’s got to learn everything the hard way for some reason.

There was a time when a fraction of those 1.2 billion people tried to do something to change that reality. But it seems that it made for good television rather than being entirely realistic. So little has changed. Taiwan is next on the list. And thousands of incarcerated criminals still labour to produce cheaply made clothing and souvenirs for stupid North Americans. Oh how ironic, and so on.

Sometimes something is better than nothing. Sometimes having enough is better than expected. There are those that might consider painting clay dolphins glued to coral altogether unappealing, but if it’s all you’ve got then it’s something. And sometimes something is everything.

The unreal world. That being the one within my head.

There are tiny people living inside of your head, at this very moment, just as I write this, just as you read it. Some of those tiny people are making you second-guess everything that you take in, whatever it may be. Some of them make you confident, some of them are undecided as to what should be done. Most of them are far too busy making sure that you have enough inner power left to keep you going long enough for you to feel as though you’ve earned the right to stop.

There is a peace to assembly lines. More so to those that do not move at a fast pace. An assembly line that consists of a variety of different work stations is far more attractive than one that employs conveyor belts, ramps, and levers. Mostly because you get to sit down and work. Assembly lines with conveyor belts usually require workers to stand during assembly. Better to sit your life away. Better to have an impossibly uncomfortable chair than impossibly uncomfortable shoes.

When the girl was shown her work station she had no idea of her good fortune. She looked down the endless rows of work stations, each occupied by entirely miserable women.

Twenty-six years later she would look up from her work and watch another young girl, not unlike herself, look about the factory floor with the same quiet disgust. And, twenty-six years later, she would crack the slightest of smiles. By that time in her life she had come to realize that most things aren’t about keeping up defiant appearances in an attempt to buttress whatever’s left of some youthfully over-romanticized inner core. But rather one’s ability to convince oneself that life is nothing but a series of impractical maneuvers ending in a standoff with either a disappointing god or a disappointing devil.

Before the world came to an end the planet was populated by people that refused to acknowledge their defeats as anything but failures. They had spent evolution winding themselves up over the matter, convinced that forwards was far more interesting than any other direction. Up had nothing to do with it, mind you. Just forwards. Many of these people, unknowingly mired in the make-believe state of emancipation, had come to view their liberties as nothing more than “things that people are entitled to just because.� That’s not to say that everyone was blind to the dangers of the Forwards Plan. For decades prior to the end of the world, a handful of gas jockeys, Orange Julius girls, and dishwashers had begun to realize that all was not well with the presumption that forwards was the way to go. Most of those people spent their lives standing in one place, wishing only that the smell of bullshit would eventually wash out of their clothes. Everybody else kept pushing forwards though. And then, all of a sudden, the world came to an end.

Despite the fact that the girl ended up painting clay dolphins and coral for the majority of her existence, she was granted something in the way of compensation for her complacency. She was given a son. And that might not seem like much to you, but that’s only because you’re waiting for the lights to change.

The World Unanswered.

An incomprehensible number of years ago something rather odd occurred. Something quite large and altogether volatile decided to explode. This sent a great manner of things every which way, some of it good and some of it not so good. Things flew, things cooled, things boiled, things adhered to the cosmic rules of magnetic repulsion and attraction. All in all it produced some interesting side effects. The most important of them being, of course, the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Garden Weasel.

There are those who contend that the world was created by an all powerful force, perhaps even a supreme being. There are those who contend that the world was created by a galactic event of unimaginable magnitude. There are those who contend that Elvis Presley is still alive and, if not, was actually a talent beyond compare. It’s a crapshoot really.

1] The universe is expanding. Throw some deceleration in there and you’ve got yourself one hell of a deity killer.

2] Did ancient peoples really begin building a massive tower in an attempt to reach God only to be made to speak different languages so that miscommunication would halt construction?

3] Why did Pink Floyd perform at the pyramids on the eve of the millennium?

People are stupid. I did not come up with that on my own. I had help. The world, entirely in love with itself, has come to condemn all things opposed to the fundamental aspects of “safe intelligence.� Some might say that we are intelligent simply because we can communicate with a variety of complicated sounds and can recognize the indoctrinated difference between the moral and the immoral. Drop anything on its head long enough and you’ll probably get the gist of what it’s trying to say.

Unfortunation.

Men are pigs. It is universally acknowledged that all men are just looking for one thing: sex.

I couldn’t agree more.

Females, considered by experts to be far more mature than men, have been cheated out of millennia of consequence-free clam baking. The end of the world aside, to all things a backlash. Take feminism. In the years leading up to the end of the world a great many women were prancing around in revealing tops and tight little skirts. Most of them believed that such attire should not diminish the respect that they should receive as women. That’s the problem with having your cake and eating it too, I suppose. I would love nothing more than to walk around wearing a shirt with a giant arrow pointing downwards, but I have this strange feeling that most people would take it as some kind of sexual suggestion rather than an attempt to infer one’s final destination. The ability of the standard human being to realize that most things aren’t literal is next to none. So why, in the face of such knowledge, do people play such ridiculous games? Nothing better to do, I suppose. At least women know what men want. Mostly they want sex. Sex and relative silence. It’s not their fault that women have skipped several steps in the evolutionary ladder, now is it? Were it so simple for women then I highly doubt that men would have ever been given the chance to take control of this planet. Instead, women would balk at the notion of using sex as a control mechanism. They would simply use the other thing that they seem to have in abundance. An entirely unique and irrational adaptation of common sense. This, of course, would divert the connection between sex and singular devotion towards the unexplored regions of sex as a sport, leaving men either a) too tired to cause trouble or b) too hungry to.

That resolved, we are left with sex’s primary function in nature: procreation. The most powerful weapon of all. Despite what you might think, there is no greater force on the planet than the deliberate multiplication of a people. History is filled with examples of sexually minded warfare, as it would be altogether boring if nations of conquest were to have gone to the trouble of defeating their enemies only to turn around and go home. Back in the good old days soldiers were often promised rape and pillage as reward. This was done for a number of reasons, two of them being: a) to ensure that your men were contented and realized that you, their leader, wanted them to be so, and b) to impregnate local women, forcing them to give birth to illegitimate children that would, if all went to plan, ultimately lead to the complete disappearance of the aforementioned conquered peoples, leaving a unified realm for the conqueror’s heirs. It rarely all worked out, of course, but on occasion it did leave lasting impressions. The problem with such an undertaking is time. To see something such as the deliberate “breeding out� of a people come to fruition one must ensure that the people in question remain conquered long enough to be “bred out.� It is far easier to wipe out a people than breed them out. It’s just nowhere near as fun is all.

If you stop to consider the implications of time (and the ability of mankind to spread like anthrax through a dairy field) you’ll come to realize that nature has always had time in abundance. Nature has mastered time, as it has existed long enough to have become intimate with the forms and functions of necessity as they apply to perpetual endlessness. Thus, it is only a matter of time until nature itself uses this weapon against her inhabitants. The world will one day become too small to offer separation and, as the globe shrinks, the inevitable union of all peoples will occur. One day, in a future that neither you nor I can possibly imagine, the world will be filled with a single people. And knowing full well that you can change the clothes but not the man, we will have no choice but to look to the stars in hopes of finding someone else’s ass to kick. If anything, predictable we will always be.

The Universe Of One.

One can attain immortality through one’s own children. That’s not to say that things always work out as planned. Just that they work.
The years sped like clouds in wrathful passing. Last year she was twenty-five, this year she’s forty-two. Somewhere along the way she encountered a man. And then, some years later, they had a child. And then, some years after that, the man left. It is not unlike men to leave. Parents die slow deaths so that their young might rally in their stead and get a little back for their sake. Some men, the good ones, know the difference between aiding in this principle and foolishly battling against it. But it is not unlike men to leave.

In the mornings she would often find herself staring at the seat of her chair, contemplating the years she had spent sitting in it. The carefree days of hoping to be a cruise ship events coordinator were far away. Here she painted coral and the word MAUI. Somewhere else, presumably in MAUI, tourists purchase the coral and send it to the people back home that they care little for.

She named her son Jack. She had always liked that name. She did not know that it was actually John. She did not know a great many things. She was lucky.

When Jack was born, his father, who had also worked at the factory, accidentally dropped him. The boy tumbled from his grasping hands to the floor and sustained massive head injuries. From that day on Jack became what professionals like to call special. Jack’s father left, afraid he would kill the boy by accident in the future, or so the story went. Jack never did learn to speak like normal people. He never did learn to swear or talk about girls with his mates. He had no mates. He was special. Special people only have friends on specific days of the week, depending on the state of health care. One life, no chair, and friends with union benefits.

The day that it happened she was doing what she always did. She was sitting painting coral. Water based paints were applied to the coral and then quickly brushed over to allow the natural white to highlight the ridges. Then she painted the letters blue and put the finished product in a box. The box was collected and taken to another table. And someone at that table glued a plastic dolphin onto it. And that’s how it had been going on for almost thirty years. The day that it happened was no different.

That morning Jack hadn’t eaten. Some days he ate, some days he didn’t. It depended on his mood. The friends of special people rarely tried to push the matter. If he didn’t want to eat then they didn’t bother trying to make him. They went back to playing cards and let him sit in his wheelchair, staring out the window. On that particular afternoon Jack’s eyes closed and never opened again. His mother, to whom Jack was everything, was most likely painting coral when her son slipped quietly away. Perhaps Jack had no comprehension concerning the ramifications of mortality and his part in it.

A friend of mine once told me that special people were not special at all. That they were, by her reckoning, cognizant disciples of humanity come to test the waning compassion of man.

Jack was not discovered by the friends of special people. They thought he was sleeping. His mother walked into the room, ran her fingers through his hair, and realized that he was cold. And she was left there, alone to rediscover the horrible truth. It is not unlike men to leave.
One day, not so long ago, the world came to an end. A woman stands on a beach, her feet brushed by the advancing and retreating water. In her hand she holds a piece of coral emblazoned with a word and a little dolphin. She is standing on that word. She is looking out to sea, talking to her son.

If you’ve got the guts you can have the glory. You can buy the glory if you want it bad enough. They’ll sell it to you. They’ll sell it to you for your guts. Remember that always.

I am dreaming of happy Pandas. A whole field full of happy Pandas. I am beside myself. I am entirely myself. I am going to set myself on fire. Just you wait and see.

Steve loves the Shopping Cart guy from Uridium 5. You know, we never did get that right. I looked it up and it’s not URIDIUM 5, it’s URIDIUM 15. Steve says that he does not care, it makes him happy none the less. Just like the Pandas make me happy. We are all very happy eggs. Yes, indeed we are. Sometimes you’ve just got to say ‘THE HELL WITH IT ALL!’ and leave it at that. Sometimes you’ve got to remember to turn the stove off before you go to bed. It depends.

My father doesn’t like it when I use profanity. Especially when it turns perfectly good sentences into perfectly disastrous sentences. For example:

example A) ‘Good try.’
example B) ‘Holy fucking shit you gimpy fuck, what the fuck was that?!’

Maybe Dad’s got a point there.

I will destroy. You will obey. That’s the way it has to be. You’ll make the lemonade and I’ll ensure that no other lemonade stand stands in our way. We will wear terrific panda suits. We will have a secret handshake. We’ll stick to the plan. I will destroy. You will obey. That’s the way it’s going to have to be. Pouting about it won’t change anything. Pouting about it will only make you look like an unhappy panda and we can’t have that. So you should think before you speak. You should consider your options before you decide to become an unhappy panda. Because you don’t want to know what happens to pandas that aren’t happy. You’d best be careful.

Don’t worry though. This is just us talking. This is just us coming together at the head. Like Siamese twins, like two happy peas in a pod. You would not like it if we were to do the other routine. There are no happy pandas in that one. Not at all. Just unpleasantness that I would rather avoid. So keep smiling. Always remember to keep smiling. There is nothing more pathetic than a sore loser. So keep smiling. Everything will take care of itself. Thank goodness.

I’m tired now. I am going to go to bed. I don’t much feel like being your friend anymore. The good old days are gone. Best to get on board with the depravity of the here and now. The world consumes, the world revolves, the world will someday come to an end. If not by us, then pulverized by the sun. The mysteries of the universe revealed with no time to study the data and reach an outcome, the sun will go out and all creatures great and small will be helpless against the unknowns of life. So why are you so worried? Why don’t you go have some drinks, get laid, get back, get something. After everything has been done, been bought, sold, produced, consumed, recycled, re-packaged, and re-sold, you will have gained nothing by floundering about trying to change things that cannot be changed. The little things exist only so that the important ones never get touched upon. That’s why you can wear leather shoes and, at the same time, refuse to eat beef. Because we are all, every one of us, entirely ridiculous.

I am going to go lie in bed and wait for the hands of impossibility to come strangle me. I am going to smile at my ceiling and sing the song of our undoing. I will wear my panda pajamas. I will think of you often when I get to where I’m going. Everything will be fine. Just you wait and see.

ACHTUNG!
This product contains elements of dirtiness. Pregnant women, Presbyterians, and those easily persuaded to climb inside of coin-operated tumble dryers should not ride this ride.

Collins Mini English Dictionary defines the following words as such:
Porno/n., adj./Informal/short for PORNOGRAPHY or PORNOGRAPHIC.
Safari/n./expedition to hunt or observe wild animals.
Sausage/n./minced meat in an edible tube-shaped skin.
Sausages/n./many minced meat in an edible tube-shaped skin dealies.

There are many things in this life that cannot be helped or explained. Slappy Mutt Mutt found it difficult to swallow, but had spent a great deal of time considering the options and could come up with no other explanation. Slappy Mutt Mutt had spent years pondering it. What made it so confusing was all the alarmingly apparent exceptions.

1) Most things look pretty real.
2) Nuclear winter does not entitle you to a “second annual Christmas.�
3) All things are comprised of protons, electrons, and neutrons which are, themselves, comprised of even smaller measurements of ridiculousness.
4) Ice cream will always melt on hot days.
5) Girls with big tits tend to have larger cabooses than girls with small tits.
6) X-ray vision glasses that are sold in comic books do not really work.
7) It is impossible to accurately calculate the trajectory of dinner rolls. (Especially in Hamburg, Turin, and Chelmsford—for some reason).

That said, Slappy Mutt Mutt had long since realized that most of life’s constants were, on closer inspection, unpredictable. No matter what you might need to believe as being the way it is, nothing in this universe is definite. And that brings us to the whole kidnapping thing.

I’ll be the first to admit that Slappy shouldn’t have kidnapped the girl. But, if you really stop and think about it, he had no idea that he was going to do it. And there was little that I could have done to prevent it. I only went along because I was unconscious when the board was in session. I awoke to discover myself stuck in the middle of the Mojave Desert with a girl locked up in a cage.

If you are the sort of person who is easily disagreeable, I would suggest that you stop right here. This is not for you. To be honest, this is the kind of thing satanic high priests would find disagreeable. My mother was a dancer in a house of burlesque and she would not be pleased (to say the least). I was kind of intrigued by the whole thing. As vile as it might seem now, at the time it looked better than a banana split the size of Ojos del Salado.

Slappy had always been a bit of a reactionary. He was the kind of guy that wouldn’t say anything about babies being killed, but kill one right in front of him and you’d never hear the end of it. Wholly mesmerized by an ill-formed compassionate teaching that is entirely based on unreasonable proximity. If you had to deal with the fact that there were children eating leftovers out of your garbage cans you would probably feel guilty. Guilty enough to be brought to action perhaps. Maybe you’d feed them. Maybe you’d just hack them into little pieces and toss them in your compost. Most North Americans have become quite desensitized to homelessness, for example. This is largely due to the fact that the homeless are so damn smelly and grubby lookin’. Therefore, proximity no longer has anything to do with it. Most North Americans tend to view crazy people who talk to themselves on the street as, well…crazy people who talk to themselves on the street, I would think. Schizophrenics, on the other hand, might argue that their illness is comparable to living one’s life with their head stuck in a toilet that is constantly being flushed.

Most folks would not stop long enough to think about it. Most folks just wish such bothersome individuals would melt into the endlessness that is our great and desirable social landscape. Being that they are products of that landscape, the question remains: where exactly should they be sent? For if they are not to remain here, with us, then perhaps we are all destined for unceremonious exile. Having said that, know then that what occurred during those lost hours in the desert could be best defined as an experiment of sorts. It was an experiment to see what might occur if all the so-called sane people of this world decided to take the day off and just the crazies were left to mind the till.

Slappy Mutt Mutt had not always been a bad man. Like most people, he was once filled with emotions and thoughts of a pleasant nature. But things change, quite often for the worse to be honest. He had once been a good man. I did not know him then. I only knew the demonic Slappy who was, without a doubt, far more entertaining than his former angelic self. I’m sure.

So there we were, five of us all told. The girl, who made six, doesn’t count. She was safely locked within the confines of the cage called the love-hold trap, bound and gagged. That left Slappy, myself, Ernesto Valencias (the famous Honduran trapeze artist known for lighting himself on fire), Dr. Maurice, and Mr. Chips. The doctor was a rather peculiar sort of fellow. He couldn’t have been an inch taller than 5’1’’, with a huge bushel of curly blond hair atop his head. He was a motivational speaker. During our foray into the wilds he did a lot of talking but failed to motivate anyone besides our captive.

There’s history behind everything. The history behind our trek into the Mojave goes a little something like this…

It was a hot, dusty afternoon when I stumbled into town. People were sitting on their porches and waiting for the night to provide them with an excuse to be productive. Nighttime in the desert is funny like that. Much colder than most realize, the drastic difference between the two twelve o’clock markers is quite severe. Deadly heat during the day and vicious cold at night. Perfect for lizards and, for some unknown reason, elderly asthmatic Canadian golfers.

Slappy Mutt Mutt was born in the desert. He was raised in the desert, went to school in the desert, went to war in the jungle and returned to the desert, and (finally) opened an adult books and paraphernalia boutique in the desert. Besides the one year that Slappy spent in the jungle, he had lived his entire life in the desert. You know, I’m not quite sure what it is, but there’s something about the desert that tends to blur the lines of social acceptability, like Las Vegas.

When Slappy was just a kid he used to live on the outskirts of town. His mother, Janice, worked in a roadhouse called the Three Suns. And although Slappy was under the impression that she spent her time at the Three Suns serving drinks to thirsty desperadoes, she was actually the one doing all the drinking. Janice was one of those rare prostitute-waitresses that rarely seems to have time to do either job properly. Either you get an unopened bottle of beer or half a yank. The woman couldn’t concentrate. Years later, Janice would discover that she suffered from ADD. She would learn that she was dyslexic as well. And, as ridiculous as it might sound, once she chose to acknowledge and tackle these ailments, she was forced to come to terms with the fact that she had an IQ of one hundred and ninety-six. She was forty-seven at the time. She died two years later driving to Washington, where she had landed a job in one of those highly mysterious think tanks where people sit around all day and debate the pros and cons of things such as thermonuclear war. She accidentally drove her car into the back of a semi trailer parked on the side of the highway. She was doing ninety. She was putting on eyeliner. She looked great at the time.

But this wasn’t the first time. Slappy was traumatized twice before the age of ten. The first time was when his father fell off the roof of the house while attempting to set up a Christmas scene after consuming a bottle of Wild Turkey. He fell and landed head first on the driveway. He was killed instantly. Two weeks later, Slappy’s grandmother was shot to death by the milkman. From what I can gather the woman was quite unpleasant to most folks. After years of taking her shit, the milkman decided that he’d had enough. So he shot her nine times. The glorious bastard stood there and took the time to reload.

Coupled with spending a year in Vietnam, it was only a matter of time before Slappy cracked a bolt. He had spent the better part of twenty years living a life of mediocre filthiness in a town where people were too lazy to be bothered with the exotic entanglements of licorice whips, edible underwear, and love harnesses. Slappy’s skull was just waiting for something ingenious to discover its dark, empty places. As it turned out, everything fell into place just as I strolled into town with an empty gas can. I would leave town two days later in the company of a would-be kidnapper and his faithful entourage. I would never see the gas can again.

It may sound almost too typical to be believable, but the truth of the matter is that I did indeed run out of gas in the middle of the desert. I had not planned it that way. I felt as if I had landed squarely in the first ten minutes of some disgustingly brilliant hacker film. It left me with little choice but to rummage around in the trunk for a gas can that at the time I could have sworn was bigger and head off in a direction best suited to the illusions of a hopeful outcome.

You won’t find the town of Slappy’s birth on any map. It’s far too small for such recognition. Which must bring one to wonder why anyone in their right mind would open a XXX boutique in such a place. Slappy would later confess that he did it as an experiment in futility. I responded to that statement by walking into a wall three times in a row. The difference? Mine took under a minute. His took twenty years. It makes no sense.
I found myself in a one-road town filled with an odd variety of introverts, extroverts, mindless shapes, and the cackling ghosts of ill confidence. A town that had been frozen in the forgotten arms of the 1950s. Slappy, unlike many of his fellow citizens, had left that little town for a brief time. He went from that place into the mysterious East where he shot at nothing and hid from everything. He returned to his desert time capsule and shut himself off. And that’s where I come into it. He hit me with his pick-up, so there was little I could do about it.

It still boggles my mind to this day. How exactly does one get hit by a vehicle in a town with only one road? In a town where, even if the entire population owned a car, there wouldn’t be enough traffic to warrant a traffic light. At the time I chose to blame Slappy’s driving instead of my own foolish disregard. I stepped off the curb just as Slappy was turning the corner. I froze, he slammed on the brakes, and I was introduced to the outstanding arguments to the contrary pertaining to the existence of most things.

When I awoke I found myself in a saloon. It was rather empty as saloons go. That came as no great surprise mind you. According to several locals that I would speak to later that day, the town theatre had been showing Logan’s Run their entire lives and none of them had ever seen it.

Semi-conscious in a saloon with five strangers. I would end up with four of them in the Mojave Desert with the fifth locked up in a cage, bound and gagged. They were, as stated earlier, Slappy Mutt Mutt, Ernesto Valencias, Dr. Maurice, and Mr. Chips. As my eyes opened, it was their faces that hovered above me like four angelic frauds. For there was but one angel in the room. And her name was Rosemary.

Now, it was easy to deduce that Slappy was in charge from the get-go. No one said or did anything without his strange, unconscious say-so. Everyone, that is, but Mr. Chips. Mr. Chips did not speak. From what I could gather he hadn’t spoken since the spring of 1976. That’s what Dr. Maurice told me the first time I attempted to make conversation with the eldest of our party. He said “Chippy don’t talk. He doesn’t say a word. He hasn’t spoken since May of 1976.� To this day I’m not sure if the story was true or not but the tale goes something like this. One night, in May of 1976, a local oil baron bet Mr. Chips one million dollars that he couldn’t go for ten years without speaking. Mr. Chips took the bet and had not spoken since. At the time I didn’t bother to do the math. I should have. It would have made the conclusion of that week all the more ridiculously entertaining.

I was quick to delve into the lives of the three men that still possessed the ability to verbalize. But as I was to discover, that merely gave way to hours of Slappy’s never-ending analysis of the other two as they sat nearby, nodding whenever the occasion arose. Everyone seemed to give way to Slappy’s “better judgment� about practically everything, not seeming to care how he went about painting their character. He went on and on about how Dr. Maurice could have been one of the greatest psychoanalytical minds of our time had he the strength to curb his appetite for young girls (especially those who were his patients). Dr. Maurice had once had quite a lucrative practice in San Francisco but was run out of town by the fathers of two young girls whom he had taken liberties with. Thankfully he had not been jailed. How, exactly, it led him to become a motivational speaker remains a mystery though. There wasn’t anyone in that town worth motivating.

I met Ernesto in hell. A staunch Catholic, he viewed his time in the middle of nowhere as suitable punishment for killing his wife. Don’t get me wrong, Ernesto wasn’t a murderer by any means, but he blamed himself for her death none-the-less. You see, she had been sleeping with numerous other men while Ernesto was on the road with the circus. One night, returning home unexpectedly after suffering minor burns during a show, he caught her with one of her lovers on the kitchen floor. His wife, so distraught that she had been found out, promptly ran to the balcony, climbed the railing, and leapt to her death. The man, by the way, was Ernesto’s half-brother Paolo Sanchez, the famed South American midfielder. The two of them had coffee while the police removed her body from the boulevard below.

After that, Ernesto decided to retire from circus life and wandered north in search of a suitable place to torture himself. Never one to go halfway with anything, his ceaseless exploration for the most despicable company in the northern hemisphere ended when he stumbled upon Slappy and Dr. Maurice dynamite fishing on nearby Lake Churapiña. As for Rosemary, I didn’t really speak much with Rosemary until after Slappy had abducted her. But by then I did it more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. Her captivity was, after all, due to my overactive libido and naïve misconception that most people are not entirely mentally handicapped.

It was on the second day of my recovery at the saloon that everything went terribly wrong. I have, since then, been dumbfounded by my own stupidity in the matter. One must remember where one is at all times, especially if that locale is in or near any kind of desert. Because crazy things happen in the desert and no one ever hears about them.

In the small hours of the morning is when most things of this nature are born. So there we were, all three sheets to the wind, talking in circles, talking stupid-talk, when I came up with the extremely sinful notion of hitting on lovely Rosemary.

Knowing full well that she couldn’t leave the saloon because she was the only employee and that she absolutely despised the lot of us with a hatred that could not be measured in even the cruelest of units, I decided to give it a go anyway. You see, Rosemary worked at the saloon because her father, an invalid, had been given the place by his father. Rosemary’s great, great grandfather had built it during the late 1800s. Despite the fact that she reviled the customers and loathed working there, she couldn’t bring herself to break her father’s heart and leave town. She dealt with Slappy’s shit by ignoring him. And, to her credit, she did a damn fine job of it. So much so, in fact, that Slappy and the boys rarely bothered to speak to her beyond ordering drinks.

So I found myself cross-eyed and slurring, sitting at the bar attempting to coerce her into a conversation. I will be the first to admit that my behaviour was less than appropriate. I should also have probably kept my voice down. Being that I am rather boisterous when intoxicated. I must admit, from what I can recall of it, Rosemary was a rather good sport about the whole thing. She must have endured my slimy verbal tentacles for the better part of an hour before she hit me in the head with the beer glass.

When I came around I was in the back of Slappy’s truck. We all were. Rosemary was there too of course, bound and gagged within the silvery confines of the love-hold trap. I was bleeding from the head where she had crowned me with the beer glass and was in need of stitches. Her eyes, filled with panic and terror, looked into mine, attempting to make me realize that I was not yet a willing participant in her abduction. Perhaps she did it so that I might help her, I don’t know. Truth be told, I was far too disoriented to fully grasp the severity of the situation. As far as I was concerned, at that moment, things of that nature were quite common in the desert. And who was I to say anything to the contrary? I grew up in a temperate zone.

Before I go any further I must explain the sudden appearance of the device. You see, Slappy wasn’t altogether delusional when it came to his meagre existence in that little desert town. He had plans. One of Slappy’s many hopeful flights of fancy was the love-hold trap. Designed as the ultimate in submissive-dominatrix aids, he hoped to one day mass-produce the cages and sell them to sex shops all over the world. The ridiculous thing about them was that they were just regular, ordinary cages. Anyone motivated enough to that extreme could easily make one themselves or purchase something similar from a kennel or pet store. But Slappy thought it ingenious. And there was just no convincing him otherwise.

It would seem that Slappy took offense to Rosemary hitting me on the head with that beer glass. His reaction to the incident was to gag her with a sock, wrap her head with electrical tape, tie her hands together with a bar towel, and march her out the back door to his truck. Leaving the boys to watch her, he then went back inside for me. Perhaps he had fantasized about the whole thing beforehand, perhaps he hadn’t. It seemed to me as if the man was just looking for an excuse, any excuse, to do something that could not be so easily undone. So the first thing he did was to drive back to his house for the cage. After that he planned to drive into the desert.

It was near the end of the drive that I came around. What seemed like mere minutes had actually been almost two and a half hours. I was surprisingly sober. We all choked on the dust as Slappy sat alone in the truck cab, his foot weighing the gas pedal to the floor, his eyes fixed on some imaginary point on the night horizon. I just lay there and bled. There was nothing left for me to do. I was beyond altering the course of what was about to happen. I would regret it, I told myself, but it was better than the alternatives that had started the creep into my head. Someone was going to be left out there. It sure as hell wasn’t going to be me.

What you are about to read is not pleasant. The truth, perhaps entirely foreign in this day and age, rarely offers tidings of goodwill. This you will learn as your clock ticks. The truth, though commonly misconstrued as something noble and empowering, tends to turn up more often than not sounding of hammer blows on coffin nails.

When we got out there, hidden away from the eyes of the world, lost in the windy cold of the desert night, we stood around pretending not to watch Slappy rape Rosemary. Then we pretended not to do it ourselves. Then, as if set on some diabolically irreversible course, we pretended not to do it over and over again.

Perceptions dictate truth? Most things seem pretty real to me, yet they are comprised of tiny little particle doo-dads. Does such information make them any less truthful? Is there even truth to the existence of such particles and like-minded miniscule nonsense? To properly explore the truth you must first discard the bullshit adage that “the truth is the truth.�

I convinced myself that I hadn’t done anything, despite the fact that I just had. Consumed by feelings of self-loathing, attempting to convince myself it was a crash course in how despicable behaviour can serve to further individual experience, I did my best not to outwardly crumble while I went about it all. Mistakes are made in every life.

I’m not exactly sure when we realized that Rosemary was dead. It was sometime the following night after a day filled with whiskey consumption, pretzels, and powdered donuts that someone finally realized she was cold. I was sitting against one of the rear tires of the truck, bottle in hand, oblivious to everything save my own hatred for all that I had allowed myself to become. I looked at her immobile body, wondering what it would have been like to wake up next to her or carry on a conversation about something mundane while she was in the shower. I did my best to convince myself that she was merely sleeping. And then I lost it and killed everyone.

It’s a horrible thing to live in fear. Fear of the unknown, fear of others, fear of yourself. Better to become the master of those fears than allow them to consume you. After hours spent attempting to rationalize the most unforgivable thirty hours of my life, I decided that it would be best to stop trying to convince myself that I had simply slipped up. I had fallen, no question about it. So why not hit the ground hard and leave an impression.

Like any good desert dweller, Slappy had a gun rack in his truck. Two rifles were to be found on it. One was a hunting rifle, one was a shotgun. I ended up having to use both. After shooting Dr. Maurice and Ernesto with the shotgun, I was left with little choice but to use the rifle on Slappy. He had started to run. Now, as drunk as he was, he still made decent time. Being that I’m not entirely familiar with distances as they might pertain to rifles, I can’t say exactly how far Slappy was able to go before I shot him. I used the scope. Once targeted, I steadied myself and proceeded to shoot him in the back of the neck. He was flung forward, rolled around a bit, and then lay still. It was that simple. All of it was that terribly simple.
Stranger still was that after having shot Slappy, I turned to discover Mr. Chips standing next to me, his head cocked to one side as if he were appraising my marksmanship. A round of uncomfortable seconds passed between us as I deliberated whether or not I was going to shoot him. He just stood there, his hands on his hips, looking out at Slappy’s body, an entirely removed expression on his face. To his credit, he did not flinch. He didn’t try to run either. Even when I turned towards him, the rifle held at waist height, my finger still on the trigger. He just stood there, calm as could be. I decided to let him live. I also decided to burn everyone. Everyone except for Rosemary. Her I buried.

Perhaps you were expecting something far more interesting. Let me assure you, there is nothing interesting whatsoever when it comes to such things. There is only the doing of it. The telling of such occurrences, though always touched with a bit of danger and mystery, never quite lives up to the true depravity of such actions. And therein lies the sickness that we embody as a species. Horrified by the fact and entirely mesmerized by fact sold as fiction.

Slappy Mutt Mutt was just a man. One man alone in a place without boundaries. One man left too long in the searing heat of imaginary inner workings with enough hours for them to conquer what little reality remained. I, too, am just a man. A man that did what had to be done to survive. I am not proud of what I did. I derived no pleasure from it. They say that from all things, no matter the outcome, something good emerges. I would agree. I am a much better shot than I used to be.

Having buried Rosemary, feeling altogether meaningless as if doomed to know the secret of things but unable to warn the world about itself, I turned to Mr. Chips and began to mutter something about the sheer insanity of us. Sitting down on the ground, I could think of nothing else but to put my head in my hands and weep. I have no idea why I did but it seemed the proper thing to do at the time. And that’s when it happened. Eclipsing the sun, he walked past me and scanned the dry desolation before us. And that’s when he said it. Shaking his head slightly he muttered—“We are men never by choice…but apparently always by fault.â€?

Collins Mini English Dictionary defines the following words as such:
Hue and cry/n./public outcry.
Nap/n./short sleep. v./napping.
Ran/v./past tense of RUN.
Tombola/n./lottery with tickets drawn from a revolving drum.
Wow/interj./exclamation of astonishment.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.

—Robert Frost

You don’t want no pie in the sky when you die. You want something here on the ground while you’re still around. —Muhammad Ali

Dear Mr. Good. I would like to tell you that the world is worse off with you in it. Your records are excellent but you as a person are less than acceptable. Please remedy this.’ —Fan Letter, April 2000

I once had sex with twenty underaged girls while dangling from a tightrope that was spanning the Grand Canyon. All of them fell to their deaths, save one. So I married her. I married her because she had the good sense to hold on. I married her because I had nothing else planned that afternoon. She was fifteen then. I was twenty-nine.

Looking back on it, I’ve tried to convince myself that I made the right decision. She was, after all, quite a resilient little thing. But I could never abide people who chewed gum and smoked at the same time. So, on her eighteenth birthday, I did something special for her. I smothered her with a pillow.

My neighbour, Fred, likes to water his lawn a lot. His wife, Linda, does not water the lawn. Watering the lawn is Fred’s only means of escaping her. Linda is rather loud, you see, and quite annoying. So Fred waters the lawn. It is no more than thirty square feet. It is the best-looking bunch of grass I have ever seen. I once told Fred that I knew how he could solve his problems. I told him to smother Linda with a pillow while she was sleeping. All he said was “Can’t live with ’em, can’t smother ’em with a pillow.� I disagreed.

I have been a National Geographic subscriber since March 3rd of 1978. My mother got me the subscription for my birthday. I used to love pinning the maps to the walls of my bedroom. I would lie there for hours and just stare at them without blinking. My eyes would not close after a while because they were too dry. It was great fun.

When my mother, father, two sisters, and aunt were killed in the great Air Tanzania mid-air collision disaster of 1979, I was unsure as to what would happen with the subscription. Would I have to renew it myself at the end of the year? Or was it paid in advance for a specific period of time? As it turned out, I had to renew it—which I immediately did of course. It’s the greatest magazine in the world. Had my father taken the time to peruse it more often, I doubt he would have ever willingly set foot on an Air Tanzania charter. My father was a fool.

The first book that I ever read was Little Pink Flamingos by Catherine Waters. It was about a boy who gets lost in the Everglades and finds his way back home by following baby flamingos. It was not realistic whatsoever. The last book that I read was Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. It too was baseless and crappy. At no time were any of the characters sensible. To be frank, they were all very much like my father. Too bad they hadn’t flown Air Tanzania too. It’s a shame that the book was awful. I quite liked Pride and Prejudice. At least in that the characters were both proud and, at times, extremely prejudiced. You’ve got to love that Mr. Darcy. A National Geographic subscriber for sure.

I bought a garden hose the other day. I have no idea why. I do things like that from time to time. For example, I’ll go out intending to buy cereal and come home with two Filipino hookers and an application for the Entertainment Card. It’s puzzling. My high-school guidance counselor once told me that I have a very short attention span. The following day we were given the results of our career placement tests. Mine said that I was going to die.

So I bought a hose. I thought of giving it to Fred, but couldn’t bring myself to actually go over there. I would most likely try to strangle his wife. I have met my fair share of folks throughout my life. A great many of them didn’t mind that I wasn’t listening to them. They just kept talking and talking. Some of them are still talking. Some of them are under my porch visiting with my wife. My career placement test was inaccurate. Turns out it’s the other way around.

Come to think of it, I don’t remember what it was that I went out to get in the first place. It wasn’t cigarettes, I quit smoking. It’ll kill you. My father was a heavy smoker. He smoked almost two packs a day for twenty-three years. Believe it or not, he had the blood pressure of a track star when he died. My Aunt Lucile also smoked. She looked like she’d been kicked in the head with skis and then run through a washing machine forty or fifty times. Luckily, she died on that Air Tanzania flight instead of having to get one of those disgusting holes put in her throat. You ever seen someone with one of those holes stick a cigarette in there and puff away? It’s quite cool actually. Not only that, they get to use those speech enabler devices. Very nice indeed.

That said, it wasn’t cigarettes that I was after. I remember now, it was bread. I had run out of bread. I wanted peanut butter toast. I went out to get some. I came home with a garden hose. I’m not rightly sure how that happened.

I did it again this very afternoon. I went out to get a can of ravioli and came home with a round-trip ticket to Tripoli, Libya. But they don’t call it that anymore. They call it Tarabulus. And it’s not just called Libya either. It’s called the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Some years ago the United States of America sent a few planes to Libya to bomb Muammar Gaddafi’s house with missiles and bombs that can think for themselves and have cameras mounted on them. They missed him. The Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya has a population density of 3.4 socialists per square kilometre. All I wanted was ravioli.

So I guess I’m going to Libya. I have never been to Africa, despite the fact that my entire family is buried there. I have only ever been to the Grand Canyon.

So the first thing I did when I got home this afternoon was to read up on Libya. I cracked a couple of volumes of my National Geographic collection and went to work. Here are some interesting facts that might interest you.

1. It’s not called Libya, it’s called the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya.
2. It’s not called Tripoli, it’s called Tarabulus.
3. Libya’s total area is 1,759,540 square kilometres.
4. Libya has a population of 5,903,128.
5. Libya has a seventy five percent literacy rate.
6. Libyans speak Arabic.
7. Americans do not speak English, they speak American.
8. The majority of Arabs are not terrorists.
9. The majority of Americans are not native to America.
10. It’s a crazy world.

In the late 1960s there was rumoured to be an edition of National Geographic that caused such a stir that it could not be released. There are those that steadfastly claim that it was to present twenty-four years of research concerning the mysterious goats of Presto Island. Legend has it that these beasts have the ability to both fly and swim underwater for periods of up to one hour. They are also said to be entirely blue in colour. The research team, led by Dr. Julius Prantzer, was rumoured to have spent the better part of a quarter century on the island studying the goats. To this day, no one is quite sure what happened to Dr. Prantzer and his team, but their findings were supposedly discovered, rolled up in a sealed two litre bottle of ginger ale. After purchasing the findings from cutthroat sea pirates, National Geographic had planned to release an issue entirely devoted to Dr. Prantzer and the magic goats in late 1969. For some unknown reason this issue never saw the light of day.

Despite what most people think of it, the Arab culture is probably the oldest culture on the planet. Egypt is an Arab nation, as are Syria, Jordan, Morocco, and so on. The literacy rate in Egypt is 50.5 percent. Somewhat disappointing for a people who constructed the pyramids. Then again, they did invent mathematics and were the first to seriously study astronomy, so I suppose we can forgive them. There are those who believe the pyramids were actually designed by alien taskmasters who enslaved the Egyptians for some years. No one is quite sure what the pyramids were for.

Popular opinion says they’re tombs. The Egyptians learned a thing or two from the aliens. They enslaved the Israelites for years. What comes around goes around. That, of course, led to Moses parting the Red Sea at Universal Studios, Hollywood. Years later, Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss would get it on with Jaws in the very same body of water.

But I am not going to Universal Studios. I’m going to Tripoli. I also enjoy tube tops very much. But that’s all I’m going to say about it.

I have formulated a plan. I doubt that it will work, me having a short attention span and all. Perhaps I will get lucky. I am going to be the first North American in history to hijack an Arabian airliner. I am going to hijack it and crash it into Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland.

Why Northern Ireland? Why not.

Why not is the best possible answer that you can give to any question that you are asked. Why don’t you hijack an Arabian airliner and crash it into Lough Neagh? Why not. Why don’t you just smother the smoking - gum chewing little bitch? Why not. Why don’t you give that hose you just bought to Fred? Because I don’t want to.

I have no idea as to how I’m going to hijack the aircraft though. I have scoured my library of National Geographic but have found nothing helpful. Killing innocent travellers is more complicated than I had anticipated. For starters, what am I going to use to gain control of the aircraft? Dynamite strapped to my chest? A gun? A machine gun? A knife? Having thought it through, I have come to the conclusion that hijacking a plane is a very complicated business. It has given me a headache.

I always do my best thinking in the shower. During sex is a close second. For some reason, immaculate ideas pop into my head when I’m in the act. When I’m in the shower it’s the same thing. For example, how does one go about attaining complete control of an aircraft without having to deal with the complications of smuggling firearms or explosives past airport security? Easy. You use your TV remote.

If there is one thing in this world that looks more confusing, impressive, and generic all at the same time, it’s a television remote control. I am not sure if Libyans have televisions, therefore I am taking a chance. If they do not, then they will probably think it some kind of detonator. If they do have televisions, perhaps they will think that I am kidding.

I will miss my National Geographic collection when I am dead. I will miss it because it is the only true thing that I’ve had in my life. I will miss it because it is filled with useful information, colourful maps, and creative photography. I would have never known where Lough Neagh was if it hadn’t been for National Geographic. Perhaps they will do a piece about the crash. Perhaps my picture will be on the cover.

While I was suffocating my teenage wife, a thought occurred to me. I realized that, had I the chance, I would go back in time and make it my goal to get a job working for National Geographic. It bothers me that I didn’t consider it an option available to me when I was younger. My career placement test said I was going to die, so I never bothered looking into other options. I wasn’t sure how I was going to die, but I was sure that it would be my job.

Thankfully my parents were extremely wealthy people. My father made his money in art. He bought and sold carvings made from elephant tusks, whale bones, and soapstone. A cultured man to say the least. My father did not buy or sell anything made from wood, stone (other than soapstone), or metal. He said they were far too easily acquired and were therefore sullied by scores of filthy, lower class, bohemian hacks. My father did not believe in art produced by the rabble of the world. He said they cheapened it. He was a firm believer in art remaining an upper class sport. There are many people who agree with him. Strangely enough, ninety percent of the most influential and respected artists in human history had extremely poor table manners. Most likely because they were products of an uneducated, heathen stock. My mother, by the way, sold fur coats at the Fur Exchange on West 32nd Street while father was travelling the world in search of endangered-species-art for the bourgeoisie. Mother always was a sucker for deadness rubbing up against her.

I have decided to give my National Geographic collection to Fred. It is the least I can do for him, since I am planning to kill his wife before I leave. Fred deserves better. These will be my gifts to him. I will plunger his missus with a self-sharpening knife and leave him with a world of knowledge. I will also leave him a note that says “Can’t live with ’em, can plunger them with a Wilkenson’s Sword.� I may also leave him the knife. It sharpens itself every time you pull it out.

The impossible thing about all of this is that I won’t be able to tell you how it ends. I will either end up in Tripoli, or I will be dead. Those are the only two possibilities. If my first attempt fails, I will try again on the return flight. I will not fail the second time. I will casually stroll up to one of the emergency exits and turn the handle that is never to be turned in flight. I will kill everyone. I will do it after the movie.

National Geographic magazine is the greatest magazine ever created. It has yellow borders. It often comes with free maps and informational posters. Time magazine does not. Most magazines are filled with the opinions of idiots, pictures of idiots, and the recipes of idiots. National Geographic is filled with pictures of animals, vast wildernesses, and all sorts of different kinds of people. So, as my final act as a living, breathing person, I have decided to write them a letter. I hope they like it.

Dear National Geographic,

I have been a National Geographic subscriber since March 3rd of 1978. Your publication is, in my opinion, the greatest ever conceived. If I may make one suggestion, you might want to consider changing the name of the magazine to International Geographic. It’s just a thought.

Beyond that, I would also like to relay my intentions to you. Let it be known that I plan to hijack a commercial airline flight to Tripoli (which one I cannot say, of course, as it would ruin the surprise). I also plan to crash this flight into Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland. I will be the first North American to hijack an Arabian airliner. Perhaps you would consider sending someone to Lough Neagh to report on how the crash affects the ecosystem and local communities. I would very much appreciate this. I have enclosed a photograph of myself in the event that you want to put it on the cover or next to the article.

Sincerely, M.L. Preston II

It is now 2:37 a.m. Fred is watering his lawn again. Fred loves that lawn more than anything in the world. I have decided to bury Linda under that lawn after I kill her. It will be the last place that anyone will look for her. I will bury her under that lawn so that she will always remember one, simple, truth. No one will miss you if you’ve given them nothing to miss.

I tried to take up jogging today. I even went so far as to go out and buy a fancy pair of ridiculous looking trainers. My mother always used to go on about the virtues of finishing what you’ve started and seeing things through, but I canned it this morning and decided to pack it in. As I stepped out of my front door, my ridiculous trainers gleaming in the sun, it dawned on me that my mother’s advice was crap. Anything that can be equally applied to genocide and cross training can’t be good.

This world is filled with things that will never make sense. Trying to make sense of them will only result in one thing. Spending the rest of your life trying to remember what you were like before any of it mattered.

Go

I used to dream about being here. Watching all these faces looking down at me, their eyes filled with an uncertain terror that is as perplexing to me as the frantic actions of the paramedics that are currently attempting to plug my chest. I wasn’t supposed to make it this far anyway, so why the long face? There were never paramedics in the dream though. Just those faces up there. You’d think, tangled up in the countless details, my subconscious would have remembered to add paramedics. I believe they think they’ve got a fighting chance. Relax guys. I don’t make it to the hospital in the dream. It ends right here.

All I can remember are the flashes. Two of th