Puking Tears by Edmund Colell

Owen opens his burning, restless eyelids and rolls on his side, finding 7:30 glaring red from his alarm clock. He curls up, pauses, and rolls out of bed. The chill pushes him back, the tile shocks his feet, and a headache grows. As he yanks the clock’s cord out, sounds buzz in his skull. The noise deepens until he crawls back into bed and buries himself in his blankets. It returns a minute later, louder, a random chorus of familiar voices scorning him for laziness. He shoots back out of bed and cools his face with his hands. His own voice breaks through his thoughts. Get ready for work.

The thought punches his gut. I’m sick.

Take a pill and slam some coffee, pussy.

He stumbles into his bathroom, flips the light switch, and flinches. A dry, white glob bulges over his medicine cabinet mirror. A tape recorder crowns its center. Who’s here? Owen snatches a razor from the sink, brandishing it at the open-curtained shower before slamming and locking the door. With the buzz gone from his brain, only his breath and pulse stir the silence. No intruders. Breathing deep, he loses the adrenaline high, but a little fear lingers for the recorder. He strokes the buttons, each one mushy but dry. He presses Play, and it crumbles.

The tape chuckles. A man’s voice joins it, light with youth but raspy with age. It says, “Good job! You pushed a button and not pulled a trigger.”

Owen cringes. He taps Stop, then pushes it, then jabs, this one hard button cracking his knuckle. 

“Remember me? Need a hint?”

Owen sucks on his swelling finger. The pain distracts him from the tape’s message, but he throws a response: “Fuck off.”

“I caused everything bad in your life, I abuse you every day, and I slept with all of your exes.”

The hints snuff his pain and sink deep. In the tape’s dead air, he reviews every enemy he ever made. Only one of them has stuck around since middle school, but the voice and the cheer don’t match. “You’re not m –”

“Time’s up, me. Stop thinking so slow.” In the stunned silence, the tape continues: “If you’re listening, then the therapy and pills didn’t do shit. I have new medicine for you.” The glob shifts, pulling the medicine cabinet open. A dark amber bottle sits on the other side, label-less and filled to the neck. “I took the liberty of distilling your memories and goals. Drink fast and put it back. It can’t be exposed to light for too long.” The tape stops.

Owen reaches first for the door, but a thick force coaxes his hand off the knob. The bottle’s promises draw him closer. Help me. The bottle warms his thin hand. Its mouth kisses him, and he kisses back. Its tongue slips through his teeth and down his throat. He tips the bottle up and chugs. Plastic and meaty flavors bathe his tongue. The taste buds catch sweet hopes, salty relationships, spicy mood swings, sour failures, and bitter ends. He drains the bottle to its last thought. It warms in his belly. Then it burns.

Owen burps a cold, acrid gas. His skin itches while red patches spread over his hands and lips. Pulling off his tank top and boxers, he finds the patches growing on his chest and groin as well. He scratches them, leaking mucus over his nails. The itch crawls down his throat. All the while, the vicious buzz erupts and screams through his brain.

The tape starts again. “I hope you didn’t drink all of it. This stuff only needs a sip.”

Owen holds his head and smashes his forehead against the recorder. Its gummy body re-inflates after every hit while his buzzes deepen. They drown all sound and overflow into his gut. Nausea hits. He curls over the open toilet. Gushing out, the vomit tastes salty. The buzzes clarify into shouted insults, each one stabbing him. Another wave of puke rises up his throat, and tears flush down his face. They taste the same.

Owen rests his arms on the toilet seat and holds his face between them. Drool hangs from his lips. More spurts of tears flow out his mouth. Every time he tries to rise, another barf pulls him down. Stop. I don’t have time.

“Feel a little better now? Just take another sip when this happens. Good luck at the office, me.”

As Owen pushes up to glare at the recorder, the tape slot pops open and the tape vaporizes. The white glob swallows the recorder and soaks back into the mirror. Owen falls back to the toilet and dry-heaves. Nothing more, but the sickness lingers. Picking himself off the floor, the mucus on his hands trails to the seat. It can’t break. More mucus sweats through his red patches, spreading over his body.

He stumbles into the shower and cranks the hot water. The first cold blast rattles his skin and hardens the slime. More scum bubbles beneath, breaking through the crusts and making them grow. His hands and arms become too paralyzed to scrub it off. He thinks of the clock again, of his boss writing “Fire his useless ass” on a sticky note and calling in someone reliable, and a new red patch sprouts on his scalp to bleed slime over his head. As a disgusting helmet hardens, Owen sees pictures in the slime. Each picture shows shameful moments of his life in third-person, with him as a scummy statue instead of a human. Hundreds of them appear before his eyes alone, and he shudders to think of the millions forming the shell around him. He stops fighting.

Even when I help myself, I fuck it up.

The shell traps and clogs the new scum beneath. It backs into his body. A fever boils through him. Can I die this way? The thought brings an image of police breaking in to find the juiciest and grossest corpse of their careers. He pictures the funeral where his few loved ones pretend respect for a man who poisoned himself with his own gunk. The last speaker is the tape recorder, talking from its gloppy white pile on the podium. “I tried. Making myself sicker should have helped me to purge, not wallow. Maybe I really am the piece of shit I always knew I was.”

A hatred for his distant self burns hotter than his fever. He tenses the muscles around the patches, forcing the gunk out. He strains harder with every breath, but rips his skin instead of the shell. With every pulse, he forces his blood and slime against the shell until it cracks through. Owen thrashes until he falls over, splitting the rest open. The shower’s hot water cooks his opened wounds. But as he stands up and the last of the mucus drains from his body, taking the patches with it, he feels lighter by half of his weight. His shell lies crumbling on the shower floor. No buzzes rise to his mind.

Owen dries his blood off. He opens the medicine cabinet again and sees a bag of gauze, roll of tape, and bottle of rubbing alcohol. He packs and patches his wounds, then checks his clock again. 8:15.

He knots his tie with a smile.

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Edmund Colell's work has appeared in, or will be appearing in Verbicide, Legumeman, New Flesh, Christmas on Crack, Amazing Stories of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Bizarro Central, and Screaming Orgasms of Bizarro Love.

Copyright 2013 Edmund Colell

Juniper's Window by Mr. Nihil (including Potato Baby)

Juniper ran her finger along the rounded edges of her phone, absorbing the cool of the plastic into her being.  This sensual black plastic warmed her nethers, dampening her panties.  She began this affair about a year and a half ago, at work.  At first, she spent her breaks with the phone, but at this point, Juniper no longer cares about her job, and simply caresses the phone at her desk persistently throughout the day.

I know where Juniper works, and about 6 months ago, I started going to her office on my lunch breaks.  Juniper doesn’t know me, I just saw her one day while I was at that office- her lips slightly parted, her cheeks and bosom flushed, her finger on the phone.  Since she doesn’t know me, and because I have no business at her office, I stand outside of her window and watch her for about 35 minutes, Monday through Friday.  My lunch break is an hour long, but it takes about 10 minutes to reach the office, and 9 minutes to get back to my place that I work, as I always hit a red light en route to Juniper, and a green one on the return trip.

Since I’ve started watching her, Juniper has been spending less and less time actually working, and more and more time in some sort of sexual bliss with her phone’s plastic shell- I know this because I follow most of her co-workers on Facebook.  Many of them don’t have locked profiles.  So involved is she with her phone that I didn’t think she ever noticed me peering around her window frame in the afternoon, but today, just for a moment, her eyes flickered upward, and our gazes met.  I’m just sure of it.

Mr. Nihil did the illustrious cover art for my first book Kitten, part of the New Bizarro Author Series of 2012, released by Eraserhead Press.  Mr. Nihil has a lot of comics, flash fiction, flash animation and other stuff at http://nihil-and-rat.com.

When Television Ends by G. Arthur Brown

There’s nothing on television, especially when it’s off.  My television is always off now that there’s no power.  Aggie is bored.

“Make something happen, Daddy!”

I grab my screwdriver and go to work on the set.  It’s not like we are going to be plugging back in.  The parts I can’t get out with the screw driver, I pull out with pliers or knock out with a hammer.  Until all that is left is a box with a clear glass screen.  Now I can do some puppet shows.  Aggie should like that.

But I’ll level with you.  This television really isn’t big enough for a good puppet show.  My puppets, likewise, are not made for a stage this small.  But I do have a large window in the front of my house and plenty of spare lumber. 

Construction on a big television-set-style stage takes over a week, but that’s because I frequently stop to eat cheese.  Aggie also needs assistance from time to time, being only four years old.  There’s only so much food I can put in her bowl at a time before it just goes bad.  I get the giant set finished by Thursday night, must see TV.  All the neighbors gather round to peer in my window that is now a screen. 

I’ve made the backdrop look like a coral reef.  But I hadn’t thought that through at all, and I don’t have any puppets that really make sense on the seabed. 

“Just pretend this clown is a clown fish!” I shout before I begin.

I enact a very poor rendition of Finding Nemo, without most of the jokes because I’ve forgotten them.  They never find Nemo in my version.  I’d decided it would be better if he is eaten by a killer whale, played by a polar bear puppet that I call Mokito.  The audience is really touched.  There’s not a dry eye in the, well, I was going to say house, but they are in fact in my front yard.  My yard is full of wet eyes.

Luckily there is a theater critic in the audience.  He approaches me after the show, holding a torch to light his way because it is dark at this point, and I remove my puppets to shake his hand.  Then he fiddles with his mustache and says, “I can’t say the script was good, but your casting decisions were tremendously bold. I really think you managed to poignantly lampoon the military-industrial complex when you had the mermaid rape the crab.  In honor of your success, I’m giving you a hickey.”  As he sucks on my throat, I think that this will be awkward to explain to people.  They will look at my neck and see what looks like the marks of a night of passion, then I will have to vigorously explain to them that it is, in fact, an award bestowed upon me for my successful puppet show.  I have ten different puppets!

Once the critic relinquishes his suction upon me, he totters off awkwardly into the night.  Bearing a lantern with green glass that gives an eerie glow, the local schoolmarm approaches me shortly thereafter and suggests I come to the single-room schoolhouse and do a puppet show to educate the children about the dangers of swallowing bees.  “They can sting your stomach,” she reminds me.  It had been some time since I’d seen a puppet show about not swallowing bees, and I had frankly forgotten the risks. I tell her that they will have to come to my house, because I would never be able to get a giant television set into that small building. She agrees and compliments me on my hickey and offers to show me her tits.  But I am a gentleman, so I never look upon the female form unclothed.  I tell her to meet me behind the milk barn in an hour wearing a burlap sack to obscure her naughty bits.  She rushes off at a gallop, and I call after her, “For I am a gentleman!”

Then I remember that I’ve forgotten all about Aggie.  I had put her in the oven three hours ago.  Surely she is overdone at this point. 

The Fellow on the Balcony by G. Arthur Brown

"The party that's going on down there," the fellow points to a small group of nuns standing below the balcony upon which he and I both stand, "doesn't invite anyone to join it. It just keeps going on in the same fashion, like black and white reruns."

"Of the Flying Nun?" I joke.

"That was in color, moron!"

He seems indignant, so I stop smiling and take a sip of the punch. It tastes like something evacuated due to extreme weather systems.

"It's more like... The Munsters. They can't figure out that Marylin is the only normal one. I think that show could have run for another thirty episodes--more. I bet they could have pulled off two hundred episodes. Batman put it out of business because it was in full color!" He slams his fist down onto the railing. The nuns look up at him and then titter to each other, probably speculations about what G-d must think of this fellow.

This man has hair that I could never manage. It's sculpted, but the sculpture is boring and currently on display overseas where children are taught how to drink alcohol right from the womb.

"The Flying Nun was Spanish," I lie.

He takes out a dog-eared pad of paper. "I'm writing this down," he says and starts writing.

When I look at his pad, this is what I find, the beginning of a short story:

The Map of Canolune

I saw it for the first time on an outdated map I found amongst my uncle things, tucked behind a Middle-Eastern oil lamp at the back of his steamer trunk. I was in my early twenties, no longer a boy but still a romantic at heart. I think then that I knew I had uncovered my destiny accidentally, which is how these things always operate. The mystical city of Canolune was marked out by the Dutch cartographers of the 17th Century quite clearly amongst extant locales on that crumbling, yellowed paper. My late uncle was not available for questioning, so the detective work ahead would be quite challenging. I decided to call together my only close friends, have a large breakfast, and make plans to uncover the secrets behind the map and the possible existence of Canolune.

Hamilton and Theodore munched on sticks of toast before I unveiled the purpose of our congregation. Hamilton was the cautious third son of a formerly very well-to-do banker. He was lean if not scrawny, his clinging suit had been pressed, albeit imperfectly, and his fair hair attempted to mimic current fashion. Theodore didn't need to try to be fashionable; his father was an Old World aristocrat who imported suits from France and Italy. Theodore smelled of musk and manliness, and he was dark, handsome, and always up for adventure. I showed them the map and after many moments of scrutiny and consideration, they both agreed it looked authentic.

"We should get one of the professors at the University to verify this before we go off gallivanting," Hamilton offered.
I informed him, "I do not think sharing this secret would be the most beneficial route to take. Secrecy will be necessary until we have proof that Canolune is real, so that we may get the credit. We cannot tell anyone else what we are up to, do you understand me?"

Theodore, looking very distant, said, "Western Asia isn't exactly civilized. We'll need guns. My father has many hunting rifles. I'll see what I can do about something heavier. And dynamite."

-------------

I tell him I'd already read that story years ago, in a porno magazine that I had found.

"Well, I thought I'd go ahead and write it just in case you never had," he says nervously. Then he looks at the nuns again. "Don't tell them, will you?"

Review: Haunt by Laura Lee Bahr

Haunt by Laura Lee Bahr.

You Don't Know What This Book Is

You don't know why you bought this book. (I met Laura Lee Bahr, but you didn't, so why did you buy it? It's a mystery.)

You start reading this book. You don't know what it is. But you can't put it down. It's like being led by the nose. It's like being in love. You keep reading in hopes you can figure it out.

But then you give up trying to figure it out, because there is no way to figure out magic, and you just enjoy the ride, enjoy being led by the nose. The book smells great, by the way, so you don't mind. Once all is said and done, it's one of your favorite books ever. If you are ever remotely cool, that is.

So, if you are even remotely cool, you should buy this book. And then you have the excuse that I told you to buy it, and you won't have to wonder so much. 

J.W. Wargo's Avoiding Mortimer Book Trailer

The Last Librarian by S.T. Carledge

The Last Librarian

The smell of new books? That's a distant memory. Old books with dog-ears and yellowed pages and coffee stains are all I know. Old books with flimsy, faded covers and dust and words unread for years and years and years. As of yesterday, I have started eating the books for sustenance, but I don't think the paper and ink is good for my body. They have little nutrition to give. I never liked Dickens, so he will be the first to go. I eat Great Expectations while sitting by a fire made from Dostoyevskys on the third floor. By now I have used up all the varnished timber hand railings on the stairs and balconies. I am glad for the change, as the fumes from the burnt varnish made me light-headed and I almost fell two storeys down one time. I have made a toilet section in fine arts, and use DaVinci to clean the excrement from my backside.

I am the last librarian left in the world.

I spend every morning taking books off the shelf and reading them. And I spend every afternoon sorting through the returns and putting them back exactly where they belong. But there are always more books in returns than those books I've taken myself. I think there is someone else in this library reading my books. I did not read the Lord of the Rings last Tuesday. I did not read Nineteen Eighty-Four two days ago. I did not read the Hunger Games this morning. Yet they still appear in my returns pile. And I think they're moving things around. Taking books from one shelf and putting them on another where they don't belong. I go to bed on a stack of John Grisham novels and dream about lawyers doing dangerous and exciting things. I wake up and find Winnie the Pooh has been moved to the non-fiction section in between the Mr. Men books and Harry Potter. Calvin and Hobbes turns up in philosophy. That one seems about right. I pile up my books to read and eat this morning and pluck Mein Campf from children's fiction.

My work is never done.

Copyright S.T. Cartledge 2012