There was something about the way the sunset ensconced Gilbert’s head in a fiery halo that made Maryannsuellen think of the stained glass in her church, and how she was always afraid that the colored panes would come crashing down around her; the crudely created depiction of The Crucifixion vivisecting her, unfurling her skin into flesh ribbons which the paramedics would likely chuck out the back of the ambulance for sport as they barrelled past Feck Farm, leaving the local pigs to feed on skin suey. 

Maryannsuellen gave a little chest pop to ping the paranoia pressure away and hugged Gilbert a little tighter, a bit more desperate than she tended to embrace someone. Just in case.

Gilbert scraped her from himself and laughed nervously. “Maryannsuellen, please.” With one last uncomfortable chuckle, Gilbert saw himself out of Maryannsuellen’s brownstone and began his walk home.

A Newport hanging from his bottom lip, and a cowlick in his bangs, Gilbert rummaged in his slacks for his lighter. Realizing he must have left it on Maryannsuellen’s night stand after their post-coital smoke (which he mostly partook in to combat the awful glaze of funk she left on his tongue), Gilbert made an impromptu stop at Calvin’s Corner Club for Cheap Crap. He didn’t typically patronize this particular store of convenience, as it was located at a crossroads known for amateur ninja violence. He saw it on the news nearly every night. But he really wanted a cigarette, and also to possibly see what kind of naughty rags they had behind the counter.

So Gilbert really shouldn’t have been surprised when, getting no further than the threshhold of the store, his carotid artery was stabbed by a Kohga ninja throwing star.

The next morning, Maryannsuellen read about Gilbert’s murder in the paper. She was still sobbing in her grits hours later when her cat began rubbing against her ankles, a hint that he would like to be eating his lunch now, please.

Snapping out of it, Maryannsuellen’s gaze lifted from her now-congealed grits to the scratched Zippo laying on the crest of piled porno rags from Calvin’s and the bills for her oxygen tank.

She picked it up, twirled it around between her thumb and forefinger and ran a ragged fingernail along the etchings left by too many meetings with the asphalt. “At least I’ll always have this small part of him,” Maryannsuellen said fondly of the stranger she brought home the previous afternoon from the furry convention.  And the impatient beckoning of her 3 o’clock john distracted her from any more thoughts about Gilbert.

My name is Francis and I am an exotic fixture at a bumpin’ little place called The Wet Fish, just started there last week after graduating high school.

At first, I could not master the art of pole dancing, but things there have been progressively getting better. You know what they say: One does not give up just because of a little Indian brush burn to the crotch.

So I tried and tried and tried again until finally one of the seasoned pole charmers, Snapper, came to my aid and clasped her hands around my waist to add support while I gyrated and spiraled down the pole. Her fingers were yellowed from years of smoking Pall Malls’ that reminded me of my grandmama, who was also in the business back in the day. That gave me hope and a sense of familiarity.

We are not allowed to go topless because one night there was a suited man seated in the corner and the sight of topless women triggered something innately homicidal that he never knew he had in him, and he sliced a dancer open with a broken beer bottle. Ernie, the manager, made a new rule that requires us to wear pasties. I use pepperoni to cover up. It’s all part of my routine: I saunter onto stage with a piping hot pizza from Geno’s and seductively pull off two discs of pepperoni and slap them over my nipples, letting the attached cheese ooze down my chest like draping ornamental chains. It makes me feel like a Vegas showgirl. The guys seem to really like it because the scalding of my flesh makes me yell out in pain. Plus, it distracts them from my club foot. And the fact that it is hard to hoist my thick body up off the floor when I do my pole routine.

The other night when I was writhing around the peanut-shelled floor, shimmying in the direction of a rotund man in overalls and hoping for a tip greater than a can of sardines, I kept catching the scent of Dorito’s and seaweed salad. The biting tang seemed to get stronger every time I would do one of my signature leg lifts. The room cleared out rather quickly, except for one gangly old man who tipped me two dollars, a Chuck E. Cheese token and a recipe from the back of a Campbell’s Soup label, reasoning that my odor reminded him of his mama’s cookin’.

It wasn’t until after my show that I realized the scent was emanating from the sanitary napkin that I had left adhered to my underwear for over a week.

(Evidently I’m into oceanic shit these days, but these things are just very cathartic to paint.)

They probably would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for Deborah, who floated back to town with the fishing spear still strangleheld by three of her tentacles, looking like a crime scene Christmas tree, tinsel’d with the slimy entrails of her husband and crowned with the pierced eyeball of Dolores’s.

And then there was Dolores, her eyes darting so rapidly that she lost her ability to float without crashing into rocks and ricocheting off bottomfeeders. They tried to have a normal lunch together, like two upstanding citizens, but when the hostess informed them that there was a twenty minute wait and asked for the name of their party, Dolores blurted out “GUILTY” just as Deborah noticed that she was still wearing a ski mask flecked with brain matter.

Some might say that being in a stuck in a surf stockade would be the worst thing since the creation of American Idol, but for Dolores and Deborah, knowing that their husbands would never again dangle their dongs to other women was worth every luxury they would no longer know.

Besides, they realized that all those years of checking each other for lumps had sparked a latent romance, and you better believe they took advantage of all their newfound privacy and phallic pieces of igneous sea rock.

Born in 1870, Grandpa Josiah lived his life defined by the gentle way he brushed hair.

It began with his own dog, Polly. When his mother wasn’t looking (which meant she was passed out in her clawfoot gin bath), Josiah would swipe her silver hair brush and go to town. Other dogs, noticing Polly’s shiny coat, which was no small feat considering they lived in an area carpeted with perpetual moist and soggy sod, found themselves lining up on Josiah’s porch, panting for a good pamper.

Soon, little girls-in-waiting serpentined down the dirt drive, awaiting their turn for their locks to be loved. Josiah was glad to accommodate human follicles too, provided he could have a moment to clean the brush of fleas and dander. He’d even brush the pilous heads of newborn babies with a hand so gentle and methodical it quickly lulled them to sleep.

It was no surprise when Josiah dropped out of school to open his own barber shop. He had a morning tradition of slurping down his hot Ovaltine and running his hand over his array of brushes and combs, which he accumulated through years of attending horse shows.

But eventually, brushing hair wasn’t enough for Josiah. He began to ache to see the pate that lie beneath the mounds of curls, the straight shocks, the combed-over cilium. It started with an accidental jerk of his hand while he trimmed Farmer Johan’s frizzed fringe, enough to drag the razor flush against the scalp and leave an oval of exposed pink flesh. He leaned down close and admired the minute follicles.

The follicles, where it all began.

After that, he yearned to see more, where the hair growth began, where the base of each strand incubated in the bloody, gooey underside of the scalp.

He throbbed for this harder than he had for Betsy Blowhard when she reached a C-cup in the seventh grade.

Josiah was smart about it after he tried to scalp Mrs. Meatcurtain in broad daylight and she screamed to high heaven, he began stealing patients from a nearby hospital who were in the throes of tuberculosis. In the back of his barber shop, he’d sever their scalps clean off their skull, finger the follicles, and then shoot a gratifying load in the basin he used for shampooing.

When he died, he left his entire fortune to the makers of Rogaine.