“I haven’t seen you in five months.”

A swish of a tentacle, a tug at the collar.

“But were you even looking?”

Eyes to the side, up to the water’s rippling skin, back to the side again.

“Where did you go?”

A tentacular twirl of marigenous wrack.

“To my mother’s.”

A memory of a lavender-shingled cove near an acreage of coral.

“Are you still angry about that night?”

A pregnant pause sagging under the weight of a sextet of awkward moments.

“You know I didn’t want to go there with you.”

A brain being racked for piteous excuses.

“It’s not rape if you yell  ‘surprise!'”

The sound of a pin plunking to the ocean floor.

“I didn’t yell ‘surprise!'”

And when he buoyed there, silently entombed in his guilt, she continued, “And neither did you.”

An indignant scoff, swaddled in algal phlegm, bubbled from his throat’s depths.

“Yes, I did. I totally yelled ‘surprise!’ right after I stuck my finger in your—“

A horrified interruption by her.

“No! No, you didn’t. You thanked me for being a double-D and then you left me in the trunk of that sunken Fiat.”

“Oh. Well anyway, it was great to see you.”

A NOTE: I was telling  Henry about this one yesterday.

“And it’s kind of like ocean creatures of sorts, so maybe it will have a more mainstream appeal.” Henry agreed with this, and I continued. ” Except the story that goes with it is about rape.”

And Henry threw up his arms in exasperation. “That’s where you lose people, with your stupid stories.”

And he’s probably right, but I can’t help myself. It’s like a sickness and the art just feels naked without the words. But for the record, people can opt out of my “stupid” stories upon request. I’ll only cry for a few hours, then I’ll smack myself in the face with an iron dustpan and move on.

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.

You would have thought the Sweeneys owned the village of Ballgag, what with how they shamelessly bullied their way throughout the streets.

Whenever Papa Sweeney didn’t get his way, he’d defecate on the doorstep of the orphanage, the church, the corner pub. He’d run down the street with his scythe, and then later that night heads would quite literally roll in his private basement bowling alley.

Mama Sweeney acted out in different ways, seducing the husbands of the PTA moms who didn’t put her pies on gilded dessert stands at the bake sales.

She birthed love-children out in the fields then brought them home as slaves.

Little Alan and Alana were no better, biting kids on the playground and sticking straws in the eyes of the classroom pets.

Knowing this, you might be able to understand why no one in Ballgag alerted the Sweeneys to the fact that they built their new home atop a sewage dump, and why, two months later, no one lent a hand as the Sweeneys sailed away down shit creek in their douche canoe.

5″x5″ on wood.

Mildred loved her son. He was born on her favorite day – Devil’s Night. He had sexy onyx eyes like the man at the bar she slept with the night of conception. He reeked of a piquant bouquet of stagnant water and antiseptic soap, with some hidden notes of anchovy.

Mildred named him Angelo. They ate grilled cheese & peanut butter sandwiches together in front of the TV. They raked each other over hot coals. They made up curse words to mutter behind their shared missalette during Sunday sermon.

When Angelo was just seven years old, Mildred received a very curious telegram. In this telegram, she was alerted of an opportunity to come into a very handsome sum of money. If only she would just relinquish custody of Angelo into the hands of the barren Duchess. Mildren considered this for a very long fifteen seconds.

Two weeks later, the Duchess’s security team arrived at Mildred’s door to claim Angelo. With a small satchel in his hand, Angelo looked up his mother with those two smoldering eyes of ink and growled, “You will pay for this, Mother.”

Mildred wrapped an arm around his side, quite loosely, before pushing him into the cage that was held open by two robust stuffed suits.

In the end, it wasn’t so much the money, but the promise of a lifetime of free stinky feta that swayed Mildred.

[Penguins sidenote: I figured, I’ve referenced Brooks Orpik in two stories so far, why not give him a shoutout in the actual painting this time. Fleury’s in there, too, haaay.]

Bruno was used to being the fifth wheel when he went out with Nathan and Nancy and Victor and Vivienne.

It bothered him a lot of the time, knowing that when they left, he’d be the only one going home to an empty bed.

But he knew that Victor was philandering around town with his accountant (who carries with her a checkered past in the adult film industry). And he knew Nancy was harboring a very big paternity discrepancy. (Bruno supposed Nathan didn’t deserve the truth if he was too stupid to see that two black-haired Italian parents don’t typically equal a ginger son.)

And he knew that while Victor and Nathan needed to field irate phone calls throughout the day, regarding urine-spotted toilet seats and stray dirty socks strewn across the couch, he was free to piss all over the bathroom floor and drape skid-marked underwear from the curtain rods if he felt so inclined.

So at the end of the day, as Bruno fluffed the pillow of his twin bed, he asked himself, “What’s all the fuss about love, anyway?

“

Look, I know I messed up. Believe me. The jagger bush you stuffed inside my pillow case did not go unnoticed. Nor did the chicken bone in my fiber water.

Apparently a simple apology is just that — too simple.

Flowers? They got pitched in the trash.

So look, I plucked this star for you on my way home from work, snatched it right the hell out of the sky, and that was really freakin’ hard to do.

(Actually, please don’t ask me how I did it because I’m pretty sure I broke at least two dozen laws.

)

Now will you please forgive me for deleting last week’s “Lost” before you watched it?

Born in 1895, Mother Bonnie was always one for puddin’. Tapioca puddin’, banana puddin’, figgy puddin’ — it made no difference to Mother Bonnie. She just really liked that thickly smooth texture, like a dessert dish full of curdled mucous, topped with a sheath of viscous skin. As a child, she’d slurp it up real good, then gargle with it to get rid of the tobacco aftertaste she was born with.

Now, Mother Bonnie grewed up to be a legend in her neighborhood. Having thirteen chitlins herself, Mother Bonnie knew a thang or two about getting the little snot-nosed ones to eat all the important foods, like beets and sweetbread. She’d grind ’em up real good in her sausage machine and stir the ensuing mush into a base of vanilla bean puddin’, letting it set into a coagulated mound of sweet nutrition.

All the mamas in the neighborhood came to Mother Bonnie’s farmhouse for help getting their own children to eat their vegetables and other pickled delicacies. They’d trade heirloom pearls, romance novels, masturbatory apparati fashioned from corn husks. One desperate mama used to let Mother Bonnie suckle from her wrist.

During the Depression, our Mother Bonnie had to get creative, as all the livestock done began shrivelin’ up like pruned carcasses.

She began digging up fresh graves for puddin’ mix-ins. As more and more holes began to turn up the cemetery, Mother Bonnie’s children grew plumper, their cheeks outflushed all their schoolmates by at least fifteen shades. It didn’t take long for other townspeople to notice the correlation, and soon no one ventured near Mother Bonnie’s farmhouse, lest they wind up puddified.

Not that Mother Bonnie minded being outcast.

It gave her more quality time in her puddin’ studio. And even after all of her children grewed up and moved away, Mother Bonnie continued to churn away at the puddin’. Even in failing health, body half-necrotic  and gangrened from untreated infections, Mother Bonnie swore by packing her sores with puddin’.

Her motto was: If it ain’t able to be fixed with puddin’, then fuck it up the ass and go back to bed.

No one in her family uses it.

Mother Bonnie was straight in the middle of ladling bowls of bloody puddin’ to a table set for no one when she finally succumbed to the order of things and gave up her gelatinous ghost. It was Flag Day. She was 99 years old.

Her puddin’ is served in school cafeterias nationwide.

In honor of the Penguins playing their big game seven tonight, I’m posting an old-ish painting I named after Brooks Orpik. OMG, go Pens! (I don’t think it’s healthy for me to watch tonight. Someone needs to cut my electricity and take away my Blackberry.)

 Everyone told him that one day his heart would stop aching. That the mere idea of his ex-wife rolling around on the seat of a John Deere with that sleazy farmer the next town over would eventually stop plaguing his mind. That the toothache-y throbbing inside the walls of his heart would dull before he knew it, that time would be his Novacaine.

But after two years, ten months and twenty-eight days of sobbing in his pillow and soiling his sheets, Orpik had enough. He decided once and for all to go to the source – cut the pain at the source. His papa told him this was a bad idea, that how would he be able to feel anything again? Orpik didn’t care if he never felt love, happiness or joy again. He didn’t care if the sweetest woman in all of the land wrote him love letters and brought him a case of Milwaukee’s Best; no, he didn’t care that he would only feel a dull void in his chest.

And so he took a melon baller and started digging.

He dug and dug and dug, not bothering to stop to answer the door when his peals of excruciating pain summoned the neighbors like some sadistic dirge from the Pied Piper’s flute.

He dug and dug and dug some more, flinging bits of flesh and blood-soaked muscle against the bathroom tile, vaguely appreciating its semblance to globs of pizza cheese as the chards slid into an oozy heap on the floor.

Finally, he reached his ribcage. Cracking them open with Superman-caliber moxie, he gently palmed his heart. He let it linger in his cupped hands, taking note of the rhythmic bassline it played for his body.

Orpik ran through the good times he and his heart had: the way his heart fluttered during that first kiss after Sunday school; the way his aorta pumped excitedly when he downed a bucket of beer-battered wings down at the diner; the way the big pulpy mass swelled when he watched his gerbil give birth.

And just like that, Orpik wrenched the melon baller and, with a symphony of cracking bones and crunching cartilage, ripped the heart straight out of his chest.

This Sunday, Orpik is auctioning off his heart. He hopes to raise at least $8 and use it to buy several Big Gulps to enjoy while watching Bowling TV.

Leroy’s girlfriend doled out only one duty to him on the day of her brother’s birthday party: bring the balloons and don’t get jacked up on the way.

That’s kind of hard to do when he has to cross one treacherous river, weave through a gypsy camp, and accidentally find himself an innocent bystander in the middle of a gang war.

He might have lost a pinky toe and he’s pretty sure one of the gypsies picked his pocket, but by golly every last one of those balloons made it unscathed. Except the green one, Leroy’s pretty sure the green one got spat on by a Crip.

It started out simply. Two old friends, meeting up in the city for some Milwaukee’s Best and beer nuts.

Paul talked ad nauseum about his new bride, Pricilla. Talked about how she picked up his dirty socks with a broad smile on her face and even wore a skimpy apron while cooking his meatloaf. If he brought her roses and Vodka, she would even make love to his anus.

Samuel, having been single for the last eight years, sulked a bit. He hated hearing about his friends’ good fortune with the ladies, while he was left to sleep alone, with nothing more than his pit bull to spoon. Though it was a step up from the iguana he tried to recruit as a temporary bedmate.

Paul didn’t like to see his friend look so sullen. He thought Samuel had some great qualities that many women would be attracted to. For example, the fact that he was the quietest farter Paul had ever met. (Though, were silent-but-deadlies any better?) And that he didn’t live with his mother. (Mostly that’s attributed to the fact that she’s dead.) And that he had a large weapons collection, with which to keep any woman feeling safe and protected. (Paul still wasn’t entirely sure why Samuel needed a bazooka just for fox hunting, though.)

But still, Paul couldn’t see any reason for Samuel to continue his dry spell any longer and became determined to find him a girlfriend. Or at the very least, a mute with a clean vagina upon which Samuel could practice, maybe get his groove back. So when they left the bar in favor for some totally non-gay window shopping, Paul broached the subject.

“Say, Samuel, what types of broads do you like?” Paul asked as they ducked into an Army Navy store, where Samuel darted straight to a counter displaying knives.

“Well, like I always say: I like my women like I like my ice cubes,” Samuel murmured absently, running a calloused thumb over the blade of a Bowie.

Paul laughed. “Frosty exterior with a piece of fruit in the center?” he asked, curling his fingers into exaggerated air quotes when he said “center,” and recalling that Samuel was really into freezing tiny pieces of nectarines in his ice cubes, which added pizazz to his signature summer Sangria.

“No,” Samuel replied, with a slight scoff. “Frozen in a tray,” he answered, sliding his credit card over to the cashier. “By the dozen.”

When the alumni of Picklepepper High School’s class of ’97 reunited last fall on Principal Cattleslaughter’s barge, it was pretty much to be as expected.

Marsha Middlefinger, whose papa took the award in 1995 for Most Botched Breast Augmentations by an unlicensed surgeon, stood in the corner fortuitously spritzing silicone at the handflute player of the Inner Circle cover band.

Not shocking in the least.

Over by the punch bowl, Preston Prissy (who had been in every musical and was a regular attendee to all of the varsity wrestling matches) was wearing plaid and giving a tugjob to Chad McMasculine, who was the star quarterback and current owner of a frigid size 2 trophy wife.

No one did a double take.

Brandon Ivanavich, who had all female friends, cried over Days of Our Lives, and loved experimenting with new shades of eyeliner, was now Brandy Ihaveaclit.

Patty Prayer, who led after-school Bible studies and protested at the abortion clinic, brought her eighteen children to the reunion because her husband had left her for someone who used birth control and Patty felt babysitters were Satan’s adoption agents.

All of which was predicted by the yearbook committee.

And then Sharona Shameless sauntered onto the barge, leading behind her a bloated-breasted Mexican milkmaid on a rope. Sharona cupped a lactating boob and suckled heartily.

Someone dropped their highball glass of Zima on the rusted floor of the barge, and the room was sent into an uproar. Finally, the alumni had managed to find themselves in shocked awe.

Sharona had always been lactose-intolerant.

Billy Nedermeijer arrived at his friend Patty Dogwood’s house with a bottle of Lambrusco and a cube of cheddar. Inside, he found the house atwitter with idle chitchat and soft music humming from a hidden stereo.

There was a large, oblong crate in the middle of the room, atop which Dixie cups and crumbled napkins had been absently discarded.

Billy’s friend Pietro arrived behind him, a small box wrapped in joyful floral tucked under his sweat-stained pit.

“What is this, a birthday party?” Billy asked with a sarcastic laugh.

“Yeah, that’s what my invitation said,” Pietro responded, his caterpillar brow flexing.

Billy glanced around the room and found his sister Yvette with a basket of matzoh. He wove his way over to her, and her answer to his kosher inquiry was, “This is a seder, is it not?”

Confused and slightly panicked, Billy withdrew his invitation from his blazer pocket. It clearly said “Come get wined and cheesed” in yellow comic sans.

Swiveling, he noted that Amber Flushbum was holding a battered Trivial Pursuit and Kevin Kickscrotum, clad in fluorescent mesh, was corkscrewing two pink glowsticks in the air.

Just then, Patty made her grand entrance, her lazy eye obstructed by the thick black veil which draped from her crown.

“Friends, thank you all for coming to my little soiree.” And with a dramatic flourish, she wrenched open the lid of the crate, causing an avalanche of red plastic cups and cookie-crumbed napkins to cascade to the floor.

Inside was the rotting corpse of her mother, her mouth frozen in a twisted snarl.

Little gasps burst throughout the room like breathy firecrackers. Beverages were dropped to the carpet in shock. The person in the kangaroo suit passed out by the foyer, but not before the unfortunate situation caused them to drop a deuce in their panties.

Pandemonium rippled through the house. “I thought this was a baby shower!!

“—game night!”
“—key bowl party!”
“—porno exchange!”
“—furry club!”

Patty laughed sadly, and began to choke. She raised a red Dixie cup filled to the brim with Billy’s Lambrusco and took a hearty swig to wash down the piece of matzoh that had become snagged in her esophagus.

“No my friends, I sent out those invitations because I couldn’t find any that said, ‘Come Celebrate the Murder of My Rapist Mother’.

“

Ernie was here. Louis heard him tapping lightly on the screen door. He had come to help Louis move out the house he shared with his fiance, the house he had called a home for the past six years.

Everything changed after the accident.

Louis and Veronica were madly in love. They were the sort of couple people either adored, envied or puked in your mouth at the mere sight of them. You could always find those two with a hand in each others back pocket, lovingly feeding each other tufts of bright blue cotton candy at the state fair, and even occasionally indulging in gold snifters brimming with each other’s thick red blood.

Everything changed after the accident.

It was a horrific scene that day on the freeway; it looked like a real life demolition derby had swept through, leaving a trail of smoking, twisted steel carnage in its wake. Louis was lucky to walk away from it. And when Veronica came to visit him in the hospital, he expected she would be just as thankful as he was. Except that, when she got a look at his teeth, all askance as a result of his face slamming into the dashboard, she backed away in horror.

Everything changed after the accident.

And now Louis was moving out of the love nest, seeing no reason to continue living in a house that whispered bittersweet memories of his love with every corner he turned. No, Veronica didn’t want to be with him anymore, stating that his mouth, all catawumpus and zigzagged from the trauma, was too much for her to bear. “You snag my lips when you kiss me now,” she cried, racing out of the house with nothing more than an overnight bag.

Six months, and she never came back.

“Louis, what box do you want me to pack your pornos in?” Ernie wondered. But Louis, with no explanation, slipped by him  with a somnambulant gait and walked out the front door.

Louis’ body was found a month later by the railroad tracks. Most of his flesh had been picked away at by hungry crows.

—————————–

Help me to not be so sad. Wah.

The blue ones were the easiest to blow up, so Owen saved them for last. When it was all over, he was winded, with floaters and sparkles undulating in his periphery. A few times, his oxygen-deficient brain had tried to convince him that an inside-out Liza Minelli was climbing backward down his dining room wall. Maybe I expelled too much breath, he thought, plopping down on the chaise.

Hallucinations and beestung lips aside, Owen stood back and basked in the beautiful array of birthday balloons ricocheting with static electricity and adding bursts of latex grandeur in otherwise naked corners of the room. It was worth the hours it took to blow them up on his own, even when a few naughty ones decided to pop in his face and leave welts that stung like souvenirs from a scorned lover.

Yes, Owen was very proud of his work and couldn’t wait for his mother to walk into her surprise party later that evening. Balloons reminded her of batting around blown-up condoms at summer music festivals so he was sure it would prove beguiling for her.

Owen found that he had devoted a little too much time to balloon bloating, and not enough to the soiree’s snacks.

Inviting his brother Pierre over an hour early to finish draping streamers from the rafters, Owen slipped into the kitchen to begin deviling eggs and stabbing cocktail wieners with colorful plastic swords.

When Owen re-entered the dining room, a tray of hors d’oeuvres balanced precariously on each skyward palm, he was stricken to see that Pierre had penetrated every last balloon with the metal file that Owen had sworn was confiscated after Pierre mutilated that biker gang by the river last fall.

For a few seconds, Owen stood motionless amongst the latex carnage, shock rendering him speechless. And then, in a mad fervor, Owen banished Pierre from the party, swearing that what Pierre had done was irreparable.

The next day, Pierre stood on Owen’s doorstep and, with a lopsided grin, presented him with a potted plant.

“You think you can patch the popped pearls of my party with your puny potted plant, Pierre?

” Owen wailed in anguish. Slamming the door in his face, Owen was unsure if he could ever forgive his brother.

But the one thing he was sure of was that the metal file had been usurped once and for all.

Little Ollie Leatherstrap loves his lollies. He loves red ones, blue ones, green ones, even anchovy ones. But Little Ollie Leatherstrap’s orthodontist said to him one day, “Little Ollie, when you get your braces on, there can be no more lollies sharing rent with your teeth. Lollies are sticky and will pull the brackets right off!”

After Ollie got his braces on, he was in immense pain. He wore scarves around his face so Wanda Wickendyke wouldn’t see his newly marred gob. He loved Wanda Wickendyke; every time she sauntered past, he’d murmur quietly, “Oh Wanda, I’d like to stick MY wick in your dyke.”

But that would never be a possibility, not now that his teeth were mangled and tangled with wire and metal.

The next night, Ollie lay awake in bed, running the tip of his tongue across his oral trap. He nicked his tongue on a jutting wire, and grimaced as a trail of warm blood trickled down his throat. And then he had an auditory flashback. “Lollies are sticky and will pull the brackets right off. Brackets right off. Brackets right off. Right off. Right off. Right offffffff. Lollies are sticky.”

Shooting out of bed, Ollie collected all the lollies he could find, unwrapping them like an orphan tearing into a loaf of stale bread on Christmas. He gnawed on each one, crunched, ravaged, until one by one the brackets began popping off with a sickening scrape.

The next day, he confidently strode up to Wanda Wickendyke, flashed his maw full of unobstructed enamel, and asked her out on a date. He wouldn’t find out until after he paid for their $100 dinner that Wanda is a Born Again who’s saving her dyke to be wicked for marriage.