A voice mail told me she skipped
town to drive nine states away and get an abortion before her “buy five get one
free” card expired, but I figured I’d get the vinegar as a backup, in case she
got lost on the way and blew all of my money on weed. When I got to the fake fish store, I saw her
twin sister Judy working the cash register, a pudgy, greasy-haired brunette
with chronic halitosis, a Dr. Who infatuation and little love for the dude
banging out her genetic duplicate.
There’s no way to ethically date twins, I thought. If you fuck one, you cannot look at the other
without thinking about sitting on her face.
Even if I suffered a traumatic brain injury, chemical lobotomy, or a
snapped spine with full quad diagnosis, I’d still be thinking about my tongue
in her asshole. Her sister’s
asshole. Whatever.
“I hope you don’t try to steal any
vinegar,” she said. “I know Trudy thinks
she can wash her hoohah with it and kill the babies.”
“Of course not,” I said. “I want one of those ten shrimp gang bang
platters. And some vinegar of
course. And that red shit. Not the ketchup, the chunky one.”
Staring down Judy in her stupid
fake pirate smock only made me think about how to tell Trudy about the aliens. I knew she wouldn’t believe me. I wanted to ignore all of it, but now I could
see backwards, forwards. I knew she was
out fucking an entire arena football team and spending my hard-earned abortion
money on cheap skag and collectible Holly Hobby plates, but I couldn’t do
anything about it. I couldn’t tell her I
knew she was going to do it, because then she would do it. Time travel and women with behavioral
problems don’t go together well.
I still couldn’t sleep, the kind
of chronic insomnia that would cause a person to write an entire book of
poor-selling absurdist fiction about demented nightmares and an inability to
sleep, a horror I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. The night before, as I
drifted in and out of consciousness, I had recurring nightmares of being in a
suicide pact with the pregnant probably-not-by-me girlfriend, and then blowing
off my face with a shotgun and living, after she managed to Cobain herself with
the same gun. But through some modern science miracle, they scooped out the kid
and he lived, and I was forever stigmatized by this mangled Popeye face, plus
being known as “the shotgun abortionist,” which would make an awesome death
metal band name, but it’s not the kind of shit you want to come up every single
time you try to meet a new fuck-buddy online.
And I couldn’t even revel in the pity-grief of the incident, because the
girlfriend’s mom lost her hands in some kind of freak dishwasher explosion, and
spent all her time one-upping my tragedy.
Plus the not-aborted kid grew up in foster care, and eventually became a
late-night talk show host. Wake up
screaming.
“Number fuckin’ 17,” said Bubba,
the guy at the counter. He looked high
on Robitussin, and had engine parts from an Evinrude outboard boat motor
hanging from giant holes in his earlobes, the latest fashion with the Hot Topic
crowd. I vaguely knew him, from all of the times I came in the store buying
food and trying to talk to Judy, before I knew she wasn’t Trudy and the two of
them were twins. “Hey man, you ever fuck a chick while watching Faces of
Death?” he said. “One time I’m at
this whore’s apartment, some chick I met at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, and
I’ve got three fingers in the pink, both thumbs in the stink, and my dick in
her mouth while I’m watching that scene where those fuckin’ dudes are cracking
open a monkey’s head and scooping out the brains. I blew a load in her mouth and thought her
head was going to explode like JFK’s skull in that fuckin’ Zoolander film.”
“Zapruder,” I said.
“Gezundheit. Oh, you might not want to eat any of
this. Everyone on the morning shift
fucked the bag of fry batter this morning. It probably took ten loads before we
breaded all the fish this afternoon.”
Oh well, consider it a five dollar
investment in intel, I told myself.
Besides, eating that shit was like putting sugar in your car’s gas tank,
draining the oil, and then red-lining the engine for 45 minutes. I don’t even think the government legally
allows people to consume it anymore in states like California.
I pocketed the vinegar bottle,
brought the food outside, and arranged it in a pyramid to signal the
aliens. These fuckers will never find
me, I thought. Then I saw a shift forward
through the time colonnades, a 4th dimension view of that arena football team
running train on my soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend.
I need to escape this world. I
don’t even care about the anal probe thing, just get it done already.
------
Jon Konrath writes absurdist fiction, and has published eight books, including Rumored to Exist, Fistful of Pizza, The Earworm Inception, and Sleep Has No Master. When he is not writing or creating an environment to foster dust mite reproduction in the form of collecting books, he takes things apart, tries to play bass, and spends too much time on wikipedia reading about obsolete technolog and farming methods of the 14th century. He can be found at http://rumored.com or on twitter at @jkonrath.
Copyright 2012 Jon Konrath
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