A girl sat in a park on a bench made from the rinds of fake
plastic skeletons, which children had broken open to get at the gelatinous
resin within. Recycle or die, the signs all said, but you can’t really do a lot
with those rinds. And that’s why there were all these weird benches in the
park.
She wasn’t thinking about the construction of the bench. It
was comfortable enough that she could sit in peace and think about Eden. James Eden. He was
quite a famous kid actor at the time. She had several of his pinups from the
Tiger Beat Bopper magazines that she saved her lunch money to buy. Looking a
bit like a skeleton herself after skipping lunch all week, she marveled over
his image on the front of the new Kiddie Bat Hopscotch that she’d stolen from a
local convenience store by stuffing it down her pants, filling out her mostly
hollow pelvic bone.
James Eden has a pretty face, all the signs said. But she
didn’t bother reading the signs anymore. She had glossy mags galore. Galores
and galores of them. And they were all hers. She’d poked out the eyes of her
eight sleeping sisters to be sure of it.
Horror took her when she finally turned to the centerfold.
She saw his glistening, knobby preteen feet. She saw his hairless, nubile torso
and his squiggly, flaccid pee-wee. She saw his pigeon chest… but she did not
see his face. That edge of the page was torn away. Without his face, she
realized, he was just a long pink worm, waiting to squirm against another body
and shoot out his love tendril to impregnate. He was one of those dirty
seed-spreaders that her mother had warned her about, before she’d cut out that
filthy mother-tongue.
Copyright 2014 G. Arthur Brown
Artwork Remedios Varo
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