Ted, Francis and Julio were enjoying a quick break during their shift at the Rust Ban campaign headquarters.

Francis was going on and on about the despicable effects rust has on fine surfaces like metal and tin, and Julio griped petulantly about how rust had ruined his favorite patio recliner. "Ruined! I paid ninety bolts for that fine piece of luxury furnishing and now if I want to pop a squat, I have to settle for the wicker chaise my wife bought with the money she gets from her ex-husband. No thanks."

Ted’s face became so hot with anger that he could have sizzled a shrapnel sausage on it.

It was then that the friend Francis and Julio knew, or thought they knew, for the past three years revealed a side of him that no one expected.

"I like rust. Sometimes I let well-concealed areas of my body collect a small circumference of rust so I can pick at it before falling asleep, pick at it like a patch of eczema. I like rust. Sometimes I stroke the coarse badges of rouge defect and it calms me down when I’m stressed out about bills and my cheating whore of a wife." He twiddled with his antenna. "When I scratch it real hard, I like watching clouds of rust shavings float down to the ground, like dandruff." He toed the gravel beneath him. "I like rust!"

Francis and Julio, totally agog, backed away in silence.

No one talked to Ted after that, which is a shame because he really hoped he’d help make strides in the war against rust-hate.

Gouache and acrylic on a thick 5.5" x 5.5" canvas, unstapled sides, ready to hang.

10 comments

Blisters dot my feet like translucent buttons. The flesh on my shin has been ribboned. A laundry list of aches and pains add the sky and the grass to my injury painting. I hate hiking.

I hate camp.

Should have stayed in for ceramics, the nurse chides as she bandages my leg.

I skip volleyball and laze around by the lake, wondering what I’m missing back home. And do I even really miss home? And does anyone even really miss me? I worry that my best friends will now be each others best friend and my bedroom will be rearranged by my mom and she’ll smoke out my diary and read about my illicit fantasies involving my math teacher and molten candle wax and in my absence my tennis coach will discover a spark in someone else and they will end up turning pro while I amount to nothing more than someone who wipes the sweat from her brow in between sets.

But I know that I will be doing this same thing, only in reverse, when I get home: Crying over camp counselors I thought I would hate, the phone numbers of new friends I didn’t take, crafts I deigned too gay to make.

But I hate camp.

In the mess hall, I sit with the same group of kids every day and complain even when nothing is really wrong, because I’ve made myself addicted to the snarl of my voice.

Over soggy tuna sandwiches, we (I) plan pranks that never pan out and groan just thinking about the camp perv groping us at the upcoming dance, but we all secretly hope we’re one of the groped because it will serve as an affirmation to our desirability. We engage in requisite gripes about our bodies — I’m fat I’m ugly I have a harelip I have braces— and take solace in the fact that there is always someone in the room with bigger thighs, a wider nose, a face more repugnant and teeth like a hillbilly. I love camp.

I wince at the sporadic crunch of celery between my teeth, the small slivers had hid inside the congealed wad of mayo and tuna between the dry bread, ruining my lunch. There are no food fights, but in a move drenched with cliche, a younger camper disposes of his retainer in the garbage.

I leave a pile of celery on my plate.

I hate communal showers.

I have several bunkmates at camp, at least nine, but I like Abby best. She doesn’t snore or misplace the cap to my toothpaste and she’s generous with the candy sent by her grandma in boxes scented by potpourri. She is short with frizzy black hair that is infrequently visited by a brush and she teaches me Yiddish words like kibitz and shmeckle and mensch. Abby’s dad left her mom for his nurse but Abby (and her mom) are positive that he’ll come back someday but I know he won’t. She keeps his picture next to her bed and tells me a different story about him each night. I don’t talk much about my own family, but I like hearing about hers.

The boys don’t like Abby because her eyebrows are overgrown like a neglected garden and her lips thirst for a balmy massage and, worst of all, she’s flat-chested.

The girls don’t like her because she is smarter than them, she listens to Barry Manilow mixed tapes made with love by her mom, and she wears second-hand jeans even though her family has the money to dress her in designer.

I wouldn’t be friends with her if this was junior high. But it’s camp, and here I’m a different person.

She makes me look pretty.

Crickets chirp. Leaves rustle. Frogs ribbit. A nearby owl makes his presence known. Everything is louder at night.

Abby and I stay up late, mostly at her command. I don’t mind; I don’t want to be alone. Possessed with an undeniable gift of gab, she sits Indian-style in her bunk, folding paper cranes and talking about topics currently arresting her heart, like space travel, hockey, Joey McIntyre. I feign interest, fingers lightly tracing serpentine patterns around the faint bruises on my knees — medals merited from boat house blow jobs. I let an occasional Mmm-hmm escape from parted lips, to assure her I’m listening. When it’s my turn to birth a crane from jagged notebook paper, I turn out a sloppy mutant ventilated by rips my clumsy fingers made — proof to Abby that I hadn’t been paying attention at all. I love camp.

I try to tell myself that each activity I perform, every goal I accomplish is another stitch in the tapestry of my budding character. But I’m too busy chasing the shmeckle.

I’ve never been to camp.

8 comments

Jeremiah spent all of his time collecting Pogs and maintaining twelve Tamagachis in simultaneous harmony.

He kept a meticulous collection of petrified twigs and delicately pinned expired flies to a corkboard with precision. He kept his face greasy to feed his acne.

Muffy was the 2004 Playmate of the Year, and kept herself in the headlines by knitting afghans for Serbian orphans.

She often made guest appearances on Paula’s Party on the Food Network, thanks to her apple dicing dexterity. Muffy was stunning even with a bare face and wrapped snugly in an apron.

No one saw it coming.

Jeremiah was in the audience during one of the tapings; he had an obsession with Paula because she reminded him of the grandma he always wanted because his own grandma was a stolen arms dealer (limbs, not guns) who had deep trenches along her face from the time the Irish mafia tortured her to reveal the location of thousands of kilos of embezzled Tastycakes, a much-sought after treat in Dublin that had been proven to make people stronger for potato-heaving. She never cracked and to this day, she’s held in captivity beneath the womens’ room in a potato famine museum.

 Paula invited Jeremiah up in front of the cameras to sample some of Muffy’s apple muffins. His shyness prevented him from looking directly at Muffy, but his mumbled praise and crimson flushed face was enough to win Muffy’s heart. Finally, someone liked her for her baked goods and not her private goods.

They embarked on a whirlwind romance and took to devouring each others mouths every chance, the universal sign for “Back off, fools, this woman is taken,” in an effort to deter lewd men from lifting her skirt.

This is the first time Jeremiah will have a real live woman as a Valentine, replacing the bag of his dead aunt Murtle’s bones that he traditionally brings out to share a box of chocolates and a glass of grape juice every February 14th.

Acrylic on a thick 5.5″x5.5″ canvas, unstapled sides, ready to hang.

10 comments

OK, Pappap, you sit there real nice and quiet, alright? Do not peek out from the blind fold! And then you’re going to hold this stupid Cabbage Patch doll real tight like you like her, ‘k? Pretend like you like the dolly. Don’t let her watch me, Pappap! Seriously, she’ll get upset if she sees what I’m doing.

Pappap? Are you listening to me? OK, good. Hey, remember that one time when we were in Florida and that mean girl tried to drown me in the hotel kiddie pool and Pappap you were like ‘Hey, get your hands off my granddaughter or I’ll sue your whole entire bastard family!’? Remember that, Pappap? That was awesome, Pappap. Pappap, remember when I wanted that swing set and I showed you it in the catalogue and then I drewed a big red circle around it so you would not ever forget it, Pappap?

And I tolded you to take it to work so you could call the number and have it bought for me? Pappap, did you do that? OK. ‘Cuz that’s what you said last week and Aunt Sharon said you were lying to me just like Mommy lies when she says she loves me and I was not really a mistake like Grandma says after she drinks that stuff that looks like water but stinks real strong like stuff you clean with?

Don’t peek! Pappap, I seen you! I seen your eye ball and you was peeking! I’m not done yet, Pappap! You’re dropping the dolly.

Are you sleeping? Pappap, is you awake still? Pay attention to me! Are you listening? Remember how you said I’m a princess? Then can I has my own country? With lots of unicorns and lollipops. And all kind of mustards? And no boys! Boys make me mad and then I kick them and push them down hills and then I get yelled at.

Ooh, Smurfs are on!

OK Pappap, I’m almost done. These scissors are not sharp like the ones my daddy uses to cut down the weeds. How come, Pappap? Pappap, wake up! OK, I’m done. I’m going to hand you all these parts I cut off the Cabbage Patch and you have to tell me what they are without seeing.

Grandma, I is not weird. Pappap, tell her.

13 comments

In her heyday, Florence designed corsages for potential prom queens (Carrie-like broads were turned away, though) and she did the occasional voice over for fiber product commercials.

But then there was The Scandal.

Florence was caught skinny dipping with Gary Lewis. Everyone in the world hated Gary Lewis because he owned every single television station, even Telemundo, and would interrupt the highest rating, top popular, most scintillating programs in order to air fifteen-hour-long telethons which didn’t even have the purpose of raising money for cancer or sickle cell anemia. The telethons had no benefit other than to showcase his daughter singing sour notes and shimmying with sequined hula hoops.

By the time the paparazzi stuck their lenses in between the ivy of Gary’s trellis, it was only a matter of minutes before scandelous photos of their naked pretzeled bodies were plastered over every gossip publication and Inside Edition and celebrity gossip blog.

The world hated Florence by association. Teenagers stopped wearing her corsages to dances, blaming her for the reason their beloved soaps were interrupted by four hour loops of Gary Lewis’s gardener pruning the petunias.

Her contract with Fiber Fanatics disintegrated, because why bother making commercials when Gary will just hijack their time slots.

Florence never took another lover and spent the rest of her life plotting Gary’s death.

Acrylic and pastel on 5.5″x5.5″ canvas.

11 comments

Marge, Clive, Rowan and Beulah just escaped from the robot-ward of Sing-Sing, called Beep-Beep, but since they’ve been incarcerated for fifty years, no one knows where to go.

“Wanna go see if the Rusty Tailpipe is still open on 73rd Street, grab us some boltburgers?” Clive’s suggestion was met with silence.

“Perhaps we should think about eating later, like say when we’re five states away,” Rowan patronized.

gouache and acrylic on 8×8 canvas board.

11 comments

Mama always said God planted my seed in her for a reason, that I was born to do something great with my life, maybe even the whole entire world. First I tried to end world hunger by not eating so many handfuls of chocolate chips from the pantry; but people still kept on dying over there in that Somalia place. Papa said maybe I was gettin’ too ahead of myself, reaching for too many stars right off the bat, he said. Aim a little lower, Mama said as she brushed burrs out of my hair before bed.

My dreams  fizzled for a few years after I discovered Internet slash communities and I lost several jobs because I’d rather stay in bed with some Hot Pockets reading about Snarry shipping. Just last night, Jesus Christ himself came to me, he done near slapped me in the face with a dildo and he said, “Bertie, get yourself together, girlie. Get up, take a shower, put on a pair of underwear that still has the crotch intact and go out and get youself a job. You need to change the kitty litter. There are maggots festering among mountains of fossilized feces.”

I listened to the Lord because the Bible I use to swat away flies tells me so. I got up this morning to find myself a job. I went to that there mall, thinkin’ I’d like to find me a way to be closer to hot fryer oil. While I was walking through the food court, a gang of hooligans slang pebbles at my ample behind and were fascinated by my unflinching reaction to the torture of my posterior cushion. “It’s like rubber, ya’ll,” I explained, demonstrating it’s durability by stabbing my right cheek with a Bic pen.

And that’s when Jesus appeared to me once more, smiling from a box of Trojans I passed in the drug store, and I realized my calling. I’ll be honest: it didn’t really dawn on me until an hour later when I was eatin’ me some Chik Fil-A. So please, doctor, what I’m gettin’ at is that ya’ll need to surgically remove the layers of my buttocks and have them sent off to be manufactured into prophylactics for white whales. There’re too many of them living underneath that sea and I would be lying if I said it wasn’t unnerving; it was all over the lastest issue of ZooBooks that my baby brother uses to cover up his titty magazine, and I’m frightened.

I was born to stop whales from overpopulating and potentially taking over our great American cities like Trenton and Terra Haute.

Im’ma change the world.

Can’t fit through your doorway,

Bertie

7 comments

Pele hadn’t been walking right for a good portion of the week. Chester wasn’t into men or anything, but he couldn’t help his eyes from floating down to Pele’s ass every time he passed by Chester’s cubicle in the office.

Writing it off as overzealous anal sex practicing, Chester went back to licking envelopes. The taste of the glue reminded him of his mom’s breath, which he smelt every morning when she would send him off to school. It was from all of the cleaning solution she would drink in her tea, hoping to end her life. Cleaning up his father’s pubic hairs from the bathroom had really taken a toll on her over the years.

One Wednesday afternoon, Chester was walking past the restroom after fetching his lunch from the office kitchen, when he overheard a loud cry of anguish ricocheting on the other side of the bathroom door. He paused, glancing at his lunchsack containing a relish sandwich, and deliberated ignoring the deathly wail of his fellow co-worker in favor of tearing into his delicious lunch.

But Chester was too nice for that. He had been a hall monitor in grade school, after all. For two straight weeks!

Inside the restroom, he found Pele cowering in one of the stalls, the toilet bowl cloudy with dilluted blood.

"Pele, do you have hemorrhoids?" Pele turned his back toward him and spread his cheeks far and wide. Several swollen lumps sprung out around his rectum.

"I think we need to get you to the hospital! I don’t know how you’ve been walking with all of those swollen flesh buttons." An acrimonious exchange was had, with Pele resisting Chester’s suggestion.

After booting Pele good and swiftly in the ass, aggravating the pain, Pele was putty in Chester’s hands.

Chester sat in the waiting room for a few hours, reading Time and slurping back some decaf from a Dixie cup, when the surgeon approached him. "You can come back now, Mr. Dog."

When Chester entered the recovery room, he was appalled to see Pele’s lifeless body sprawled out on the bed, his decapitated head discarded next to him.

"Oh. I thought his head was the hemorrhoid," the surgeon offered as his excuse.

To this day, Chester refuses to seek professional care for hemorrhoids. If they get too bad, he whips out the Exacto knife. A strategically placed maxi pad takes care of the bleeding and within a few weeks, he’s able to go back to his spinning class.

5 comments

Lamonjelo was a quaint village full of chirping birds, friendly vibes, marijuana and a sno-cone stand run by organ grinders. Some of the cottages were capped with ivy-woven thatched roofs; others kept out of the riffraff with wrought-iron fences hugging their perimeter. A Samoan sold honey-roasted cucumber seeds on the west end of Main Street, even in the rain and the occasional brush fire, and kids paraded through the park pretending their balloons were puppies on leashes.

When Marcel Bone founded Lamonjelo in 1896, he declared one edict, and one edict only: Everyone would remain in a grand mood. Outwardly, at least. Oh yes, townies could stab each other with ice picks over lost games of Poker and get orally raped in the streets — there were no laws against that — they just had to appear happy while doing so.

Mister Flannigan would smile and return a hello with a robust felicitation of his own, even though he was thinking about the smell brewing from the bodies beneath his floorboards. Mable Cleaver would beam and flutter her eyelashes after the postman inquired of her current emotional state, even though every time she shat it felt as though razorblade-embedded pine cones were passing through her dirtstar.

Behind closed doors, the townsfolk were permitted to let out their real emotions.

They could sit on the tiled floor of their bathrooms and cut themselves; they could toss their children down basement steps; they could listen to Nick Drake while penning suicidal prose. As long as no one saw.

Draw on your smile with a Sharpie if you have to.

That was the motto you’d see inscribed onto a rusted sign as you drove past the old canning facility and over the threshold of Lamonjelo.

Lamonjelo was truly a precious town to live, though, on par with the North Pole itself when you consider it. They didn’t have elves, but once Farmer Sitzbath bred an entire litter of pygmies, which sent parents into a frenzy as each tried to snatch one up for Easter presents.

And Artemus Weenerankle, good old jolly Artemus, was practically Santa’s doppelganger. Every Tuesday he’d sit in a sagging and worn lawn chair, the fabric ribbons of which exploded in the national colors of the Seventies, while young boys and girls would pause on their jaunt home from school to perch upon his distended belly. When they asked how he was doing, he would smile past his bleeding gums, ignore his burning canker sores and spew out words cobwebbed in merriment. It was just the right dose of candy-coated oration the children craved after a long day of arithmetic and sex-ed.

One day when Artemus was leaning his wrinkled face out of the trailer window, taking in the pungent aroma of exhaust and tobacco, a pail of kitty litter was dropped accidentally from above by Mrs. Blackass, connecting squarely with Artemus’s creviced crown. The blow caused something inside of him to stir.

That next Tuesday, when little Jonny Applecrack scooted his bony buttocks upward until he was sinking gently into Artemus’s seersuckered crotch, things in Lamonjelo were about to change.

“Hello Mither Artemith! How are you?” little Jonny Applecrack cheerily lisped through his gap teeth.

“Well there son, lately I’ve been dreaming about you,” Artemus began. “…in a pool of your own blood. I guess I’m not doing all that well, would you say?

” Little Jonny Applecrack ran sobbing in the direction of the train tracks, where a drunk flaneur scooped him up and stuffed him into a burlap sack, which he swung over his shoulder before continuing on his way.

Minutes later, Artemus returned April Pisspool’s inquiry with a snarl. “Today I found blood in my stool and learned that my son is not mine. I’d say I’m pretty fucking lousy.”

April fled for her home in a whirling dervish and told her nanny everything. Word spread quickly, and honesty spiraled through the town like an epidemic. Artemus had unwittingly broken the sacred edict and the dark and bloody secrets burst from Lamonjelo’s underbelly like bats from a cave. Apparently Marcel Bone had bound his edict with a black magic chastity belt.

The floodgates had opened; it started on the south side of town, outside of a small Bavarian-styled bungalow. “I’m feeling nauseated because I just watched my husband encase our gardener’s head in a plastic bag which he then pummeled repeatedly with a shovel. Have you ever seen someone drown in their blood?” Candy Calftooth cried when Father Fiddler, passing by on his way to urinate in the orchard, asked how she was doing.

It was an uproar to rival the likes of the Great Crabs Outbreak of 1974, when Susie Bigmams shacked up with a traveling Encyclopedia (the Ukranian version) salesman who had just made a killing in a neighboring whore house. (Those warted tarts taught him uses for encyclopedias that blew his mind, among other parts.)

While townspeople ran around in a disheveled fashion, unable  to prevent their tongues from spitting out exactly how they were feeling, breaking up friendships and marriages, Artemus closed his window and laid down for a nap.

15 comments

Uncle Otis was a spry nine year old lad when Annie and her family moved to the neighborhood, on account of her daddy losing his job at the paper mill and was forced into the trade of candlestick making, naturally. Uncle Otis’ town was known all around, far and wide, as a thriving candle hub. So this made sense, you see?

Annie was in the grade below Uncle Otis and he would flick daisies at her during recess. She never noticed him, mainly because he was poor, but also because she liked black boys and Otis was, well, very pale. And had a small peepee.

Uncle Otis continued to pine for Annie, all the way through high school.

Even after Johnny Maplebitch gave her genital warts, his heart still pitter-pattered down Lovelorn Lane. Even after, at age sixteen, Annie was impregnated by a salesman shilling Swiss Army knives and gained fifty pounds that she couldn’t shake, Uncle Otis would still feel a horde of butterflies molesting his insides at the mere mention of her name. Even after Annie joined a religious mountain top cult and was brainwashed into sewing up her vagina, Otis yearned to be the one to rip out the stitches.

At age eighteen, Uncle Otis was offered the job of a lifetime, joining a carnival caravan as a gum-wrapper sweeper. In his mind, he would let himself be engulfed in this job, saving each and every penny and dime, until he had a nest egg large enough to return to town, scoop up Annie, and deposit her into their new house, which even would have its very own colored television, and a pinwheel near the front stoop.

But you know how these love sagas pan out: Some shit always has to go down. Someone dies, someone cheats, someone gets caught masturbating with a candlestick, because Lord knows there’s more than the candle pourers can keep up with so what else are you going to do with it? Give it a wig and call it daughter?

I’m not too clear on the details, as I’m sure pertinent facts have gotten lost in translation through generations, but from what I’m told, the salesman caught wind of Uncle Otis’ great American dream and sent an anonymous telegraph stating that Annie had been murdered by the town meat cutter, after being confused for a bovine.

Uncle Otis snapped, just completely went ape shit all around the camp site. He ripped suckers straight from the mouths of conjoined twins, urinated in the cotton candy maker, fucked a chicken or two; he was destroyed, sanity annihilated. The carnival director was forced to serve him his walking papers, because the dwarves were starting to cry.

Otis binged on moonshine while trying in vain to fight off chimeras of Annie, frolicking through the junkyard next to the campsite. He’d squint and rub his eyes, probably give his face a few sharp slaps, as you would too if you thought you were seeing the ghost of your one true love. She would eventually fade away just as fast as she had appeared.

It didn’t stop, though, no matter how much booze Otis would gulp. He couldn’t take it anymore; it was too torturous.

So late one night, after all the lanterns had been snuffed around the camp, Otis sneaked back in and rummaged through the prop chest, tossing bowling pins and barbed hula hoops over his shoulder, until he finally unearthed what he was seeking.

Making a hasty sign of the cross, Otis closed his eyes tight and swallowed the sword. This was tragic because Annie had not actually been murdered, contrary to Otis’ belief. Salesman lied to keep Otis at bay!

So my friend God was like Aw, hell nah and made Otis into a vampire, because if he hadn’t, then all the other suicide-by-sword-swallowing vampires would cry foul and God would have another revolt on his hands, like the time when that big-chested broad had half of her back flesh torn off by a zombie and God was all, “Aw, she’s too pretty to be a zombie” and instead turned her into a fairy princess. Shit like this doesn’t sit well with some residents of the afterlife. But you probably know that.

[Reposted from LiveJournal, because I can.]

3 comments

“I love the smell of the dirt road after a fresh spring rain.

”

“I love the smell of the asphalt in front of my mansion after a fresh spring rain.”

Pilar and Caspar had been friends for eighteen years. In their youth, they sat together on the bus to and from school and talked about baseball and goat milking. They pulled the hair of the girls they liked and drank chocolate milk from straws. Caspar always finished his carton first, slamming it down on the cafeteria table in a loud crush of championship, and then ran off to French kiss the girls whose names were scrawled across Pilar’s notebook.

“I love the smell of steamed asparagus,” Pilar said, giving a little grunt as he peddled his bike up a slight grade.

“I love the smell of my urine after I eat asparagus,” Caspar challenged, peddling just a few revolutions faster.

In tenth grade, Caspar convinced Pilar to steal tampons from Greta’s knapsack. When Greta bled through her white knickers later that day, Pilar collapsed under the weight of his guilt and turned himself in. He was suspended for a day and was forced to clean the sweat from Olaf’s desk seat. Olaf was the fattest boy in school. He liked to wear short denim cut offs.

“I love the smell of my puppy’s feet. It smells of buttered popcorn,” Pilar smiled as he glided his bike to a halt at the ice cream shack.

“I love the smell of the cold hard cash in my hand after my puppy wins a race. It smells of win,” Caspar said, reaching the bike rack seconds before Pilar.

Planning for college, Caspar convinced Pilar to be his roommate, making him promises of parties and girls and infinite bottles of rufies supplied by Caspar’s cousin Jake, who worked in a factory making fly strips as a front. But every time Caspar returned from class, he was greeted by a sock dangling from the door knob.

By the third week of fall semester, he ended up moving back home and commuting.

“I love the smell of my office after my desk has been Pledged,” said Pilar, squinting at the colorful ice cream menu.

“I love the smell of my office after my Swedish masseuse has rubbed me down with the finest essential oils,” said Caspar, after ordering before Pilar.

Pilar showed up at Caspar’s apartment three years ago, after finding out that his papa had been having an affair for two decades with Brenda, the bar maid from the inner city. Caspar listened to Pilar cry for a few minutes about how his entire childhood was built on a foundation of lies and infidelity. When Pilar was in the bathroom, vomiting up his heart ache, Caspar jogged to Pilar’s old childhood home to take advantage of the newly single woman’s vulnerability.

“I love the smell of pistachio ice cream,” Pilar happily divulged as he gave the dripping bulb of frozen confection a hearty lick.

“I love the smell of pistachio ice cream after I’ve fucked your wife.”

9 comments

There was nothing special about the way Janet Boxstein ate a bowl of bran cereal with skim milk every morning, or that every morning she said hello to Mr.

Jenkins in 6G on her way out to get the paper. There was nothing notable about the route she took to work, the same route every day, past Swanson’s Hosiery House and through the dark alley between the Swedish bakery and the dog pound, the same route she had been taking for the past 789 days (except during the pickling plant flood of 2005, when she was forced to hitch a ride with a cow mover).

There was also nothing notable about Janet’s vocation. She worked in the cellar of a corking factory, shredding documents and sweeping mice shit into the dank corners and behind towering stacks of bankers boxes.

She wore non-descript khaki slacks and an aged white blouse. Nothing stood out about the way she wore her black curls and her handwriting was ordinary, like Times New Roman.

No one noticed her as she crouched on the floor every afternoon, nibbling on her standard fare of tuna on rye and cocktail weiners in a cabbaged marinade; and no one noticed her as she blended into the stampede of rush hour every day when the five o’clock alarm sent peals of dismissal through the factory.

There was nothing notable about the way she moved her head to the homogenized brand of Celine Dion-stylized music that filtered through her head phones, and nothing to note about the generic cans of corn and coffee that filled her wobbly-wheeled cart at the small corner mart.

None of the neighbors noticed the thumping when Janet returned to her apartment every night and kicked aside stray limbs protruding from the pile of corpses in her sitting room, or the hollow bang when she pounded on her TV for better reception. None of the neighbors noticed the smell of burnt toast that wafted underneath her door every time she made a midnight snack, or the stench of corroded brain matter that festered in large jugs stopped with cork which she pocketed from work.

But one notable thing about Janet was that she built a ladder to the top of the Eiffel Tower out of spinal columns.

And that she loved to flamenco.

1 comment

 “Don’t!” Oscar shouted at his mother-in-law. “Let me.” He took the plate out of her hands and replaced it on the table before she had a chance to pile it with food. His wife had long since died but he still ate at her parent’s house on the fourth Monday of every fifth month. Pulling a compartmentalized picnic tray from his messenger bag, he began the methodical process of separating his food. He always ate his meals in quarters: protein in one pocket, vegetables in another, starches touched only each other, and then condiments formed a pool in the final compartment. Or fruit if there was any to have, in which case he would forego the frivolous sauces.

Oscar kept his digital watch set to beep in fifteen minute intervals, a reminder to put a new TicTac in his mouth. He would only do this at work, though, because he lived above a slaughterhouse and sometimes the howling and the squealing of chains and the grinding of gears rendered it impossible for Oscar to hear his watch. If something else happened to be in his mouth when his watch would chime, he’d spit it out into the tiny wastebasket under his desk, which was emptied four times during his shift.

On Sundays, Oscar enjoyed going to the farmers market in the industrial district of town. A public parking garage was provided as a courtesy to the citizens, but Oscar preferred parking on the street. He loved the way the quarters sounded as their shiny disks slid into the metal slot of the meter. It was slightly arousing, but only Oscar’s therapist knew this.

“Sometimes I lick the quarters before they leave my hand, and often I feel pained to release them. But once I hear that sound, it makes me swell. You know. Swell. And that is one of the most rewarding sensations this life has to offer, I really think.” Oscar’s therapist copied this quote for his file in bright red ink.

One day, Oscar was granted a handsome bonus because the company had enjoyed a very successful quarter. He went home that night, scrubbed each limb with a vibrant pine-scented homemade bar of soap that he purchased from Ethel who worked on the twenty-fourth floor but was visiting her friend on the twenty-fifth floor at the time of purchase. Thumbing through the phone book, he found just the number he was looking for.

At exactly 9:41, his doorbell rang. He dawdled and stalled, pacing beneath the stately portrait of George Washington which hung in the foyer, and chugging on a quart of half-spoiled vitamin D milk, until 9:45, at which time he found it perfect to open the door and greet the four prostitutes he ordered.

For a quarter of an hour, they quietly noshed on tea sandwiches, which Oscar had meticulously de-crusted and quartered over top of his grandmother’s serving tray, which was conveniently divided into quadrants. He precisely slipped his Quarterflash album from it’s sleeve and placed it gently upon the record player. Then they moved to his slumber quarters, where Oscar requested that he be tied to each one of the bedposts. The four cocottes silently obliged. As Oscar lay there, mind soaring with the possibilities, wondering if he would become as tumescent as he did in the company of parking meters, one of the harlots brandished a chainsaw from her purse and by 11:15, Oscar’s post-quartering torso was left in the center of his bed, and his limbs were sold to the slaughterhouse below where they were wrapped in freezer paper and sold for a quarter a pound.

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I used to ride my bike past Franklin’s Bar every day on my way home from school. Sometimes we’d drive past it in mom’s car if we were going to the grocery store in the next town over, where no one would see Mom purchase large quantities of laxatives.

My best friend Stacy and I would sit on the stoop across from it in the summer, drinking slushies from the convenience store down the street and watching angry wives stomp inside and pull out their hammered husbands by cinched skin.

Franklin dated Dad’s cousin for awhile, so sometimes we’d have birthday parties in the bar’s back room and I would dream of the day I could walk in, sit at the bar, and have fat men buy me drinks.

No, not really. I hated that place. It was smoky and the men reeked of beef jerkey and a mysterious film coated the surface of every table. Franklin was a vile pig who would shove his hand down my mom’s shirt when Dad wasn’t looking and I rejoiced the day cousin Margie dumped him and we went back to celebrating birthdays and promotions and straight As down the street at the VFW.

Back then, if you would have told me that Franklin’s was where I’d meet the man I was going to rape, I’d have laughed at you.

Then kicked your ass.

But something made me go in there that night last week. Something made me pop open more buttons than usual and something made me wink at that traveling salesman sitting in a corner booth with a briefcase and lonely eyes. His breath was malodorous, like a fecal sausage wrapped in garlicky cabbage, and his effeminate hands were marred with paper cuts and hangnails. His once-white clothes now had the dirty yellow hue of coffee-stained enamel and a slight stench of a foreign fishing village wafted from his pits.
Something made me want to try out my new vagina.

In fourth grade, Stacy and I eavesdropped on her older brother and his friends, embroiled in a heated debate. One of the boys had his index finger extended; it was red and swollen under the pressure of a rubberband. Stacy’s brother pulled the slack taut and made to wrap it around once more.

“If you wrap it too tight, it’ll fall off!” his friend wailed, snatching back his hand.

I took the salesman back to his motel room, under the pretense of wanting to see the sea shell clocks he was peddling. He gave off the distinct impression that he was not well versed in the song of sex, averting his eyes any time my cleavage got too close, and emitting a sickly wheeze from his nostrils any time I’d touch him. I think, through his thick Slavic accent, that he was trying to say no, but I stuffed a broken sea shell into his flapping mouth.

I left him laying there naked on the bed when I had finished. Rummaging through my purse, I found the perfect way to cap off the evening.

I wrapped the rubberband tightly around his penis, laughing as he howled.

“They say if you wrap it too tight, it’ll fall off,” I whispered, pulling it back for one last snap. I didn’t stay to find out because I was about to be late for my soup-ladling gig at the shelter.

He never got to find out either, before I shot him in the head.

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“Please don’t butter my bread.”

Jimmy was going to play baseball that day. He liked playing baseball because his parents weren’t there with him on the field, arguing about taxes, Mother’s affair with the milkmaid, and his sister Janie who got knocked up by the Hispanic pool boy at the Y.

When the girls were watching from the fence, he would make sure to run real fast, heels clipping the backs of his thighs as he manuevered between the bases. If the girls weren’t there, and it was just Orvil and Petey, the two retarded kids who wore back braces and were not allowed on the field, he would jog lazily around the outfield, pretending like the low-hanging sun was blinding him if he tried to catch fly balls.

Sometimes he would write cuss words like fuck and cooze in the dust, coating the toe of his shoe with a camel-colored powder. If Alastair came too close, Jimmy could erase the evidence with one swift movement.

“Please don’t butter my bread.”

Alastair was a snitch. He told Sam, the school bully, that Jake stole a piece of bubblegum from Sam’s cubby during recess, and Sam punished Jake with a black eye and made him choke on his own tongue as a final piece of retribution.

Jake had a problem with swallowing his tongue.

“Please don’t butter my bread!”

Jimmy hoped it didn’t rain today, like the weatherman said it would. He wanted to go down to the creek after everyone tired of baseball (usually after two innings) and fish for guppies. That’s what he would tell Mother, anyhow, but once he got down to the woods, he would climb into a tree and pull out Father’s dirty magazines from his satchel.

That’s how he got the best vocabulary out of everyone in his class.

“Mother, please don’t butter my bread!” Jimmy begged one last time, watching her collect the freshly browned slices of bread from the toaster.

Jimmy liked playing baseball, and he liked sneakily etching swear words on the field and he liked the excitement of watching Jake swallow his tongue.

He liked clandestinely pouring over his Father’s dirty magazines and learning words like “pulsating” and “cocktease” and “titty fucking.” Jimmy wanted to continue doing all of these things, but he wouldn’t be able to if his bread was buttered.

“Jimmy, what’s gotten in to you?” Mother yelled, as he wrestled the tub of butter from her hands.

“I watched Father sprinkle rat poison in the butter last night,” Jimmy said, grabbing his dry toast and running off for the baseball field. Mother silently dropped the tub into the garbage can.

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