The Swan Under the Bridge (A Collaboration)

I hadn’t seen Hugh in six months.

Much hadn’t changed for me: Same girlfriend unhappy, same debts unpaid, same dreams unrealized. He’d gotten an apartment and dumped his girlfriend and was in the market for a bengal cat. He told me all this and I said, “S**t man, what the hell even is a bengal cat?”

    “Exotic p***y,” He said, and I wasn’t even in the apartment yet. His dumping of the girlfriend showed in the layout of his place. The living room consisted of a mounted TV and a wraparound couch and bottle ridden coffee table. The kitchen was an ash dusted table, sticky with beer and hashish fingerprints. From somewhere music played and a company of guys and a chick sat, smoking and ashing into empty bottles. Hugh offered me a beer and a bong hit, I had neither and took a seat at the kitchen table. I shook hands with the lot around the table, they offered their names in exchange for my hand.

“Patrick Biblio.” When he smiled smoke phonated out of his serpentine mouth.

“Justin Lovewit.”  He didn’t say anything the entire time and was completely phlegmatic.

“Howard Goodsur.,” Howard had a saxophone with him the entire time (he was deemed the a*****e).

“Kaylene Berry” She wore a blue shade on her lips, darker than the sky, and a septum piercing in her nose.

Hugh had mentioned her earlier when he called me. I hadn’t seen him in six months, but only very recently had we been digitally corresponding. He called me this morning and said he heard that I was back in town. He also mentioned the girl, Kaylene, and how she was a total quif and that I should poke her, and not in the facebook sense. I recollected the events that led up to this very moment as I shook her hand

“Your name?” she asked me.

“Evan,” I said. “Evan Newcomer. I just got back from sky-diving in Peru, did I tell you?”

“No, that’s very interesting.”

“Did I say my name was Evan?”

"Why, yes, you said your name was Evan."

"I did,  didn't I?"

"Yes. You did indeed." She blinked her eyes.

"Well, that isn't my name. No, not at all. My name is Jenson Sizzlécube. I am a writer, traveler, inventor, and because I am an olympic grade skater I am qualified for a part time job at Sonic restaurants all across the United States."

"Really? But what do you invent?"

"Lies, mostly."

"But you weren't lying about Peru, were you?"

"No, I wasn't."

She smiled and it made her nasal decoration shine. She flicked it up and down and said,"Let's go on a walk."

Joints like dieted sage sticks traveled clockwise and counterclockwise (which satisfactorily stopped time). Pat Biblio reached out in front of me to pass one off to Howard Goodsur,and he puffed it greatly before blowing it into his saxophone. A shade of blue marked the tip of the joint, and my mouth salivated like one of Pavlov’s love sick dogs and I said, Wait a minute, yeah, I want just one hit of that, and I took in the smoke, and savored the taste of the blue lipstick of Kaylene Berry and still with the smoke in my lungs I said, “Okay, a walk.”

There was a swan under the bridge and she pointed at it. 

We crossed the cold, reverberating bridge and I released the compressed smoke into the mist. What was left was only the ghost of the drag. My eyeballs teared and gained weight in my skull, the two dropped and rolled across the yellow divider, but she grabbed them and set them back in my sockets. I said thanks, embarrassed.

My mouth dried, but the mist colonized on my tongue and I said, “How do you guys smoke so much weed? My thoughts feel like worms on a hook.”

Kaylene said, "Tonight there is a chemical mist. And you’re just a p***y." She winked.

My bladder spoke up. I have to piss. “Physiology of thoughts corrupts the psychology of plants." I said to a wooden telephone pole, it said nothing back, but for a second I thought I could hear all the voices of the town, trapped, and stored in the pole.

And then she spoke again, but this time as if to no one but herself.

"It's funny that dust can settle completely, undisturbed and static, as this globe sails around the void at 66,666 miles an hour." I looked at her face but could only see her inky optics. "I guess that's just how I justify my hate for dusting. I’ll never make for a housewife.”

She wiped a ladybug from her lip and I said, “No, you know what's even more funny? That the night allows me to piss in the middle of the road without fear of being seen by salamanders.” --- and then the sounds of liquid spilling onto the pavement, slapping the divider.

She sighed, picked little asphalt pebbles from the road and tossed them at my back. Some of them fell down the neck of my shirt. I laughed, but secretly dreaded kidney stones.

I could tell that this was gonna be a long piss. The emptying urine was gargling back bubbles in my bladder, making me burp carbonated calcium. The alarming fissure of headlights split the darkness. The machine was humming our way.

She said into my ear, I felt the metallic cold of her nose ring on my lobe, “You better hurry up.”

I heaved out my drainer, trying to wrap up the time I had spent in foil. I continued to spray my paint and the car grew nearer.  

“Oh s**t,” I said.

I was still pissing like a camel by the Nile. I tried to stumble out of the way of the car to the side of the road, but I tripped and fell over, piss streaming up and sideways at me. The car stopped at the nearest stop sign and then turned left and out of the hemispheric mist.

She picked up a stray cat that had meowed its existence to her. I stood and zipped up and asked to be forsaken by the moon. Granted. Kaylene screamed, and dropped the cat. It hissed.

Kaylene said, "It pissed all over me!"

I chased after the cat, made my footsteps louder on the street and the moon screamed too, but her lunar voice wouldn’t reach until morning when the freeway would drown her. I yelled, “Go piss on someone your own size!” and it disappeared into the streetlight mist.  

****

Weeping shells of rice that seed once birthed among shelved mason jars, Kaylene stretched her legs apart in the soft lukewarm dark. Biblio and Hugh were outside trying to shoot a chicken to the moon in a homemade rocket made of alabaster silver prisms with writhing connecting chords and a gallon of Pennzoil and dove shampoo. We heard their bursts of Lunar jargon muffled against our own breaths as we spoke in jangled terminology, tangled-pubicity, and lavish strokes of the tongue.

She took off her clothes and her n*****s blinked at me. Her breasts appeared firm and curious, and  spoke in an intrepid, lactal verse; a booby hymn if you will. She changed into her sequins evening gown and turned on some Jarreau. His deep, dank voice spun off the record and cherried the mood.

    “Don’t you find it odd that you were able to just able to take off your clothes in front of me and not at all be uncomfortable during the process?” I asked.

     She turned out the lantern and the dust dissolved.

           Her voice resounded in my lung: “Not at all. I’m in my own skin. You’re in yours. You have smaller tits than I do, so that’s kinda embarrassing.”

Kaylene kissed me and it was like swimming inside a caved lagoon; of course I floated into her heart of brass, removed the panties from her a*s, and went deep in the mouth atop her legs, the mouth that drooled pulp when I kissed her fruit. I pollinated the inside of her flower, simultaneously quenching my stinger in her spine, pissing my probes into her fallopian planets and letting them stick their flags into the sand of her spawn.

She whispered in my ear once my seeds touched ground, and said, "There is a black hole in my a*s."

I pulled out of her legs mouth and said to her n*****s, "Excuse me?"

Her breasts gave me a look that suggested they needed de-lactating, so I gave them some capillary action, the one on the left was the one that had immediately stolen my attention, but then I noticed the way the light from the lantern spilled onto her right breast. It shaped it lightly and tightly so I gave it my full attention. My phallic navigator started into the trench again, but its attention was subconsciously guided towards her a*s. Her voice still lingered in the air. "..black hole in my a*s." It pushed against the outer rim and got its head in, the navigators eye blinking, trying to peel its one eye into the dark, dank depths of this nectar sector, shed some light unto this supposed 'black hole', why of course this is just a black hole. That's all I was expecting. But then my phallic device was stretched a light year inwards into her a*s, and it was trying to pull me in, but I grabbed onto her ponytails and gripped my resistance onto her, but the rectal vortex was too strong, and it pulled me in, but I still had my grip on her ponytails. The black hole sucked me inside of her, first my penis and last my hand, which gripped her blonde libido handles, and dragged her backwards with me, head first into her own a*s.

“Where are we?”

“You a*****e!”

“Me an a*****e? You’re the one that sucked me into your a*s!” Oil lamps lined the walls, and a single febreeze plug in covered the stench of bile and waste.  The realm of her a*s looked civilized, organized, like a society had formed.  “How many people have you got in here?”

“Well anyone I’ve ever had sex with...about three hundred and ninety-five.”

“All dudes?”

She gave me a look that suggested my tantalizing idiocy. “Let’s not be silly.”

I walked over to a table. On the surface sat a toaster and a discarded bag of weed. I sat down in front of it. I grabbed the weed and smelled it. A*s.

The room seemed to be endless, the walls dissolved into darkness.

"Is this a building?" I asked.

"Yes."

"So there's a building in your a*****e?"

She shook her head and sat at the table. "No. There is a blackhole  in my a*s. Which leads to this building. We're twenty six miles under the surface of Mars."

I didn't know whether to believe her or not so I didn't say anything.

"I'm sorry. I should have told you about this before.” she said.

I sighed. “Wormholes are never quaint, are they?”

“Blackholes actually,” she said.

“You are a black hoe, actually.”

“You’ll never find a wormhole in a person's a*s. They’re usually found right under the kitchen sink.”

“How in the hell would you know that?”

“Support group, I’ve been going ever since I became sexually active. What year do people usually start, fifth grade?”

She laughed like a hyena, giggling gasps and all, and bent forward and kissed me. Then she started to lick my nostrils with her oral organ, and then my eye balls, and she settled on them, “You know,” she said, “trying to kiss you is like trying to wipe your a*s with your foot.”  and sucked the eyeballs right outta my head.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

in the morning I awoke to a

chamber maid sticking a spoon in my mouth of applesauce

my teeth of cider seed pit

the  froth awakens

the dawn

luminary as it is

And i couldn't see anything except for myodespiac bubbles

Washing my soul’s windows

Kaylene appeared before me. “There are mirrors here that let you look into the future.”

“Whats a mirror?”

“Its kind of like a selfie.”

“Oh, okay, I think I get it.”

“Here,” she put a mirror in front of my face, but all I saw were the empty pits where my eyes used to be. The inner tick of my heart stopped and reset to a new beat. My mind fell into a moist sheet of darkness and continued to fall. Kaylene’s sing-song voice hung in the theater of my consciousness,  “Let's look into Mr. Howard Goodsur’s mirror.” And then the curtain came over and I dissolved.

**********************

There was a certain pretense Howard Goodsur had about going on long trips. Being immobile sitting calmly while at the same time being extremely mobile, traveling at inhuman rates of speed with the world outside unraveling like a busted movie reel. He had never been in a taxi before, and he had yet to  travel the mileage to put himself outside the city limits. He was born and raised in the boundaries of the Santa Retarda county, and had remained there for his entire life thus far.

Yet this was Howard Goodsur’s last day on Earth. Tomorrow morning he’d be launched to Mars. His mother said, “You’ve never ridden in a taxi, let alone a rocket and here you are shooting yourself off, you gunna leave us behind, what about all us Santa Retardians you’re leaving behind?” But his ticket was paid for and no amount of maternal discouragement would stop the rocket from breaking the atmosphere without his a*s in a seat.  

Howard recalled last night’s party at Hugh’s house. He was lugubrious about not being able to tell Kaylene how much he dug her. He planned on being real sweet, and maybe getting a blowjob out of it, but she left with some narcissistic a*****e from Peru. He decided not to let Kaylene become some kind of black hole where excitement could escape; there would be plenty of women on mars. Several non-denominational churches were sending unwed, virginal daughters to the red planet, to protect them from the material desires and spiritual deprivation of the blue planet.

Howard knew this because a couple weeks past he snuck into a church service. Crawling down the street with a hangover, escaping the bed of an artist chick who couldn’t stop talking about Dalí (even while she slept), he felt like the first fish to escape the ocean. He felt a little un-actualized from spending the night fighting this artist chick for the Persistence of Memory covers of her bed, and feeling the cold from the window on his bare a*s. And he felt maybe a little itchy too. The sun dried his lips and eyeballs and threw such a glare on the sign towards the end of the sidewalk he could hardly read it: Refreshments, Mars, Jesus.

“You think Jesus is coming back here?” The pastor said with a twanged upper lip to show his disgust, sitting on a stool, he looked like an aged Ken-doll come to life by the power of spiritually justified hate. “Jesus isn’t coming back here. Come on people, can you blame him? Its a planet where the percent of Earth’s water in the ocean, 96.5, is almost 1-to-1 with the percent of sinners in its largest cities. God and Science have been at odds since the first account of pre-historic man using a club to flog another pre-historic man, but people! This mars colonization could be a way for us to save our most pure girls…”

Howard stood on the sidewalk’s edge and waited for the yellow taxi to approach his curb, but all he saw looking up and down the street were the smog-exhaling cars of the general public. He breathed in the atmosphere of his home planet, knowing that he would soon be living on Mars in nine months. He breathed in the exhaust of the cars speeding by, aware that this would be some of his last few glimpses of the constant stir of human activity. On Mars, he would be stationed with one hundred other people, and yet happily he reveled at being secluded from Earth. There were just too many people now.

Howard had the feeling that he was forgetting something. He clutched the handbag in his hands, looked beyond the leather and searched with his minds eye the 'sentimental' contents he packed for Mars. He noted the thirty or so books, a ukelele and a saxophone, the eight pounds of USB drives loaded with galaxies of information, forty thick notebooks (for the next forty years of his life), sketchbooks and paints, photographs of his past twenty years on Earth, a snub nosed revolver for unsexy and therefore threatening martians, and a telescope " so he could view the luminous moons of Mars -- Phobos and Deimos -- and maybe even the blue zit he used to call home.

A taxi appeared, bright yellow, checkered and healthy, thick tires. Howard stuck out his thumb because he couldn’t whistle and the cab pulled over. He opened the door and got in. The cabbie looked over at Howard and gave him a smile that stretched his own

“Where you goin’, fella?”

The cab had a distinct leather smell, a coffee tinted residue as well.

“Where you goin’, man?” the cabbie asked again after Howard gawked in awe.

“District 66.”

“Sixty six?”

“Yessir.”

“You goin’ on that rocket to Mars?”

“I sure am.”

“Well ain’t that sumpin’” the cabbie said, and started off down the road.

“Truly.” Howard replied. “Ya know, I’ve never been in a cab before. This’ll be my first and last time.”

“Hey, they might get some cabs up there on Mars, then I might have to join you’s up there, leave this shithole behind.”

“Maybe so, maybe so. I’ve seen lots of cabs in the movies. This one doesn’t got that screen between the front and back seats.”

“Nah, I’ve been doin' this driving gig for 13 years, if anyone wanted to kill me they woulda done it twice by now.”

Outside the window pictures whizzed by like a conscious dream -- low-grade people, low-key brick buildings, expeditive cars and sounds bursting and O, sweet Jesus the sound of laughter, and of joy. Will he ever hear these sounds ever again in his life?

He saw a face he recognized sitting in front of a steaming cafe. He rolled down window and shouted, “Au revoir! Adieu! Adios! Auf Wiedersehen Goodbye!”

Howard stuck his head out the window and shouted again, “Au revoir, Frandi!” and the taxi turned the corner and he knew that would be the last time he would ever see her.

“You gonna miss this place?” the cabbie asked when Howard stuck his head back in the cab.

“Sure, I guess as much as any human would.”

“Can I ask you somethin’?”

“Sure, yeah.”

“Why are you goin’?”

Howard kept silent for an entire block, in thought. And then he said, “Well, all the virgins.”

“The virgins?”

“Of course, I’ve been told there are about seventy-two up there already.”

“Really?” the cabbie asked.

“Yep.” Howard said. “So I’m off.”

“Well a wise man once told me, ‘wherever you go, there you are.’ That man has since convinced hisself of doors on the moon, s**t he may be right, what do I know?” The cab pulled up to the locked gates of the launch site. The cabbie parked and said, “OK buddy thats gonna be twenty three seventy six.”

Howard reached for his wallet in his back pocket, but it wasn’t there. And then he realized what it was that he had forgotten. He left his wallet in between the couch cushions on Hugh’s couch when they were smoking and watching Breaking Dad, the spin off show about Jessie Pinkman settling into domestic fatherhood. “I’m sorry, sir, I forgot my wallet.”

“You can’t find it?” the cabbies face reddenned, his grip on the wheel visibly tightened.

“I’m sorry sir, but I don’t have any way of paying you right now, but if you procure me your phone number and the number of the company you work for, then perhaps I could have my friend wire you some mon -- -”’

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere until I get my money.”

“But sir, you can’t make me stay here, the rocket is leaving today, I’ve got to get on it, the virg--.”

The cabbie threw himself at Howard and gripped his neck.

“YOU AIN’T GOIN’ NOWHERE UNTIL THE FARE IS PAID!” Howard understood now why the cabbie had no divider.

Howard stuttered and pissed himself. “Uh-uh, I uh, uhm, Let, uhm, let me check, uhm, m-my, uh, bag.” He coughed. “I think its in my bag.”

The cabbie glared into Howards eyes rapaciously. Then he withdrew, both hands on the steering-wheel and breathing like a horse after the race. Howard slowly opened his bag and dug through it. He looked past his saxophone and his telescope, and his eyes found the glimmer of his snub-nosed revolver. He didn’t grab it until the cabbie looked away. It was a day for last days on Earth.

**************************

Patrick Biblio worked at a bookstore, and he loved matches. He loved the way they smelled after dumping off a smokey the bear s**t in the toilet. He watched the red flicker to orange and then black, and watched the smoke fill the bathroom. And he especially liked the hiss of the match sizzling into neutral death when he tossed it in the bowl. He liked matches and he challenged the match to burn to his thumb. The stick would fall limp to withered ash and he always lost, burned or otherwise.

He sat in front of a cart of books, his coffee buzz had worn off and afternoon despair had begun. With the label gun, he stamped each book with an orange discount sticker. All the books were s**t, and the car was loaded with them. They were overstock books, unwanted books, books that couldn’t sell if they were doused in a premium unleaded gasoline six dollars by the gallon and if they were sprinkled with flecks of gold. The stamp of the sticker gun created a repetition, a metronome that seemed to steal a bit of his sanity with each stamp-stamp. It reminded him of Jenga, each stamp another block taken from his complete, healthy mind.

Eight hours of his day, everyday-for a piece of paper he could he feed into a machine so the machine could give him more paper so he could purchase a dried plant so he could roll it in yet another piece of paper and light it on fire--with a match. He liked matches. Maybe he worked so he could ultimately burn more matches on average than he would unemployed. Though, he thought, unemployment would free a lot of time which could be used for lighting matches.

Eight hours of his day--he had a degree in literary theory and fine arts--he wasn’t qualified to stamp books with neon-ecstasy-girl orange stickers. He couldn’t sculpt anymore. His hands only molded clay into rectangles. He sculpted books.

Stamp-Stamp-a block is pulled from his mental jenga set-stamp. He finished with the cart and pushed it to the storefront. His feet felt like slugs in a salt mine and he tasted the faintest amount of blood in his mouth. Cancer?  How excellent would that be, Pat thought, I might even get some time off. He leaned against the cart and day dreamed of potential terminal disease.

“Excuse me?” A woman’s voice stirred him from his fantasies of Ebola, H1NI, and  exploding head syndrome

He looked up from his cart at the sound of the door. An Asian woman with eyes that ended in a point, like a compass needle constantly pointed to the orient floated in and set an old hardback on the counter. A coloring book on skin cancer.

“Excuse me?”

"Yeah, hey."

"Do you work here?"

"Proudly," Pat tapped the book cover with his knuckle. “You got cancer?”

“No, my friend does.”

“Oh, well, I am envious of the poor b*****d.”

“The f**k is wrong with you?”

“Oh you know, just breathing and wishing I wasn’t. Just imagining myself being composed of vibrating jelly.”

She was at a height where he could confidently watch the motions of her tits as she breathed and spoke. “What, do you want to return this book or something? We’ve got a strict no take-backs rule. Zero Tolerance for Indian giving.”

“Oh, well  listen, I just drove all the way out from Simi, can I get some kind of store credit, it’s for my friends daughter, and there are several explicit nude photographs in this book I bought for her last week. I want something a little less obscene for her benefit.” Her voice made him want to fall inward, to take on a density until he became like a marble of cramped flesh and coarse hairs. He'd fall into her pocket and maybe one day she'd venture into the pocket for change to throw into a fountain or a bum's coffee and he would be touched by mistake.

He took the book and studied it.

“Oh, well here is your problem right there,” he pointed to a corner on the back of the book. “You got the Kama Sutra edition for cancer and see, there are even these 3D glasses in the back.”

“I just want a clean, informative book for a twelve year old. Could you help me out?”

“Why, of course.” Pat walked over to the fiction section. His hand reached out to the top of the shelve and singled out a thin novel. He handed it to her. “Bukowski. Essential reading material.” A shelf down, he spotted another. “Naked Lunch, by Burroughs. Serene prose. Just heavenly.”

She took both books and half smiled. “Could you find something that’s a little more relative to cancer?”

“Why sure, I know just the thing.”

He walked around the corner of the shelf, to the M’s and bent down at the bottom. He traced his finger along the many orange dotted spines of the fiction section. A pink text caught his eye and he pulled it and handed it to her.

“Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Life changing. Absolutely healing. Spiritually, I mean.”

She took the book and looked at the cover, which depicted a left breast and the very hairy beginnings of the clitoral region.

"And this one," he pulled Glamourpuss and Fabulous Pugs from the overstock cart. "Now, what these books lack in human anatomy and all that dreary medical jargon they make up for in furry fun for the whole family." He winked at her, and he felt his optic gesticulation churn the waters in her own fish tank.

“Alright, whatever, I guess I’ll take all of them. You can check me out.”

“Cool, and believe me miss, I’ve been checking you out since you walked in.” Pat said, and she laughed, and her laugh seemed to reinsert some of his sanity. They met at the counter, she set Glamourpuss, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, Women, and Fabulous Pugs on the table, and he imagined her own glamourpuss purring. “Thats going to be $29.75, would you like a bag?”

“Nah, I’m good. Save a tree right?”

“That doesn’t make any sense considering the bags are plastic, but sure actual customer who said this to me, lets save a tree.” He made her change, and dropped a penny. The matchbox in his pocket rattled as he picked it up.

"What's all over your fingers?"

"Stuff."

"Can I ask you a question?"

“You just did, but yeah sure.” Patrick regarded his stubby phalanges and noticed the sulphur excrement. It was a thick paste under his fingernails, he regarded it with a quick and casual sniff. Pat’s gaze drifted over this Geisha woman for an instant, to the storage room. Stamp-stamp-stamp, she toyed with the sticker gun.

Patrick was getting bored with her. It was almost closing time, and he wanted to leave with a bang.

“How do you masturbate?” He asked.

“What?”

“You know, whack off, beat it, slap the monkey, choke the chicken, oil the dolphin, tame the one eyed serpent of Gaza?"

She gave him a look that made his phallic avatar stammer. "You're different, aren't you?"

"Well I'm not from Santa Retarda if that's what you're asking."

"I like boys that are different. And I’m so sick of straddling the bathtub faucet. I usually don't associate myself with people who still read books, but you look like you have a decent sized shower rod that could really depollinate my queef daisy."

Patrick shifted his globular jewel  shooter and wiped his hands on his pants.

“Can I ask you a question?" He said.

At this phrase her n*****s illuminated from beneath her silky pseudo top. "Ask away."

"Is it true that orientals dine on domesticated pets? Is that why you didn't disregard the Glamorpuss suggestion? I was only joking about that, you know."

"I like to put a lot of dogs in my mouth, if you know what I mean."

Patrick walked around the counter and put his hand on the girls exposed shoulder.

“Let me take you in the storage room, we’re really not supposed to have anyone but employees down there, but I need you to see something.”

“Sure, can I leave the books?”

“Yeah, whatever,” He said, and led her to the basement. She entered, and brought her shirt up over her nose.

“Jesus, that smell,” She said but followed him further into the storage room. He almost felt embarrassed regarding the unswept floor and the stacks of Bill Cosby’s Little Bill series stacked on one of the counters. She picked up a book from the stack Little Bill Tells a Lie, and said “Ain't that s**t funny.”

Scaffolds impregnated with books lined the walls of the storage room, and they shined in the light like their covers and pages had been doused with liquid. The asian chick nearly slipped on the surface of the tiled floor before Pat could support her.

“I want you to try something, I do it all the time when I’m taking a s**t.”

He took his matchbox from his pocket and retrieved a single match. He handed it to her and said, “Strike the match and see how long you can hold onto it before it drops.”

She took the sulphur stick and held it, unlit.

       "I was planning on burning the place to the ground today." He sat on the stairs. "Maybe I'll let you do it for me."

       The asian b***h stood there with her big teeth. He told her to strike the match on the wall. She looked at him and giggled but when he didn't laugh back she knew that he wasn't joking.

      "I used to love Little Bill." Patrick said. He stood up and walked up a few stair steps to the door. "But that was before I found out that he grew up to be a rapist."

       The girl shrugged. She wasn't smiling or happy anymore. Patrick could tell. He told her to light the match. "But try not to drop it." Patrick reached the door. "If you maintain your hold on it, I'll let you have those books for free."

       She lit the match and he said that he would hold her breath for her, and shut the door. Pat went to the office and began a letter:

         Dear Hugh,

        This morning I awoke with a metallic, sharp twinge in my n*****s. This does not happen often, maybe three or four times a week and so I was made expressly aware of some sort collaboration between Chadvonswan and one Bridge. I am deeply disturbed by this collaboration, both at an intellectual level as well as at a sensual level. I believe that our actions may be scripted. I know it sounds absolutely maniac, but, s**t, its 1987. This is the future. Anything can happen. I was confronted by two men at the Midnite Mint club the other night, and they told me that everything I did and everyone I knew was an absolute function of fiction. And I said to them, no definitely not, that is impossible. And all they said to me was, “Isn’t that Classic Pat?”

     P.s.

     My libido is off the charts crazy.

      With Licks

     --Patrick

       It was then that he smelled the smoke.

                  *********************

Justin Lovewit could read a mind like a blind feels braille, and all he needed was a guitar string. In his previous experience, Justin needed only a spare guitar string of quality steel which his subject would attach to his forehead with tape of the most quality scotch, and so too would Justin attach the other end to his own forehead. His subject, usually Hugh, glossy eyed and with thoughts free, would strum the string between their minds. Justin Lovewit had gotten the idea from the tin can telephone his father made for him in his childhood. He used a long string, it was hard to get rid of the slack, but the string tightened with Justin in the living room and his father in the new car, a red corvette, outside.

Young Justin listened hard for the vibrations, his father started and ended the conversation, “I’m leaving your mother, and I’m moving to Peru to be with Naida, you’ll meet her one day, kid.” And the screech of tires and cry of the engine faded, and Justin materialized into the present moment.

“What am I thinking about?” Hugh said flicking the guitar string, his eyes half-shut from being stoned and from the physical effort to transmit his thoughts via guitar string. D****t, Justin snapped at him, You gotta shut-up and keep strumming, let me focus. He focused, Hugh shut his mouth, and he had it, he could hear the thoughts, light taps, like a child tapping a finger on a mother’s locked bedroom door. He couldn’t hear the surface thoughts, the bullshit, the ‘what movie am I going to watch next?’ or the ‘I don’t really like the blue doritos over the red doritos’ thoughts. He heard the thoughts that scraped.

“You’re scared that you won’t be able to take care of the Bengal cat, and that if you don’t keep your friends constantly stoned they won’t want to hang out with you anymore.”

Hugh laughed, “No dude, haha, What the hell? I was wondering what movie we could watch next. Hey which do you prefer, blue or red doritos?”

“Red, of course.”

“Me too! Hey, where’s my grinder, you want another joint?”

“No." Justin whispered. He was lost in thought. "I think I am going to buy a ticket for Peru.”

Hugh peeled the tape from his forehead and set the guitar string aside. "Peru?"

Justin settled deeper into the fibers of the couch. The room smelt of marijuana residue.

He said, "Yeah. I think I wanna try to go find my dad."

Hugh packed more weed into the bong and nodded. "Sizzlécube was just in Peru." he said, and lit the stem and breathed in the ghost.

Justin set his telemagnetic head back against the bong watered cushion and looked up at the ceiling. It was rotting, yellow nuggets of pure THC sparkled from all the waves of wafting smoke clouds. He thought about getting a butter knife to scrape the cannabinoid pollen off to smoke.

Hugh tapped his shoulder.

"Dude, look at all that weed that has surfaced up there." He pointed to the ceiling. "Hold on."

Hugh got up and went to the kitchen. Justin yawned and the Bengal cat jumped up on the couch next to him. He pet it and rubbed the contours of its little skull with his fingers and said, "What are you thinking of, little guy?"

Hugh walked back in the room and stood on the couch. He had a butter knife and he started scraping the sticky kief from the ceiling.

"Wow," Justin remarked. "You just read my mind."

Hugh sat down and regarded his extraction. He stared at the little buttery diamonds for a while and then his face became stoic and he set the knife on the coffee table.

"Did you ever see where Jenson and Kaylene went?"

"No." Justin replied.

"Me either." Silence,Hugh sighed and searched for something else to say. "I still can't believe Howard, man."

Justin nodded. He jerked forward and grabbed the remote. "S**t, it's 4:11, the launch started already!"

He changed the television to the news but the screen was filled with smoke.

"That's it," Hugh said. "He's gone, outta this world."

Clouds of exhaust and permanent departure floated in the form of pixels. The camera angle changed and they saw the rocket glimmer faintly, a little white dot issuing smoke, and they both knew that Howard was in there.

Justin closed his eyes and thought of Goodsur. He concentrated on sending him a message. He formed the words on his eyelids while simultaneously looking into Howard's eyes with his own third eye.

Perhaps if he sent his message through the TV and up out the antenna and into the air to surf the waves of radio, maybe it would find its way to the rocket before it got too far.

Hugh clapped his hands. "F**k! Look at him go!"

And then there were no more images of the skyblazing rocket. The lying, chattering faces of news anchors replaced Howard's defying exit. Justin gave up on his message when the anchormen bullshitted their way to the next story.

"Man." Hugh was tearing at the eyes. "I can't believe it." He got up and went to the fridge for a beer.

Justin muted the TV. Give me a beer, he thought. Give me a f*****g beer, please.

Hugh sat next to Justin with a single bottle.

"Sorry, man. Last one."

***

The artificial rainy season had just ended by popular demand and the roads under the Clarketon dome were still wet. The head and tail lights of the cars made impressionistic paintings on the black street. It reminded Howard Goodsur of the Artist-Chick-Who-Couldn’t-Stop-Talking-About-Dalí, whom he had slept with twenty-three years ago and ultimately could thank for his migration to the Red planet. The Mars he arrived on the near quarter century ago was not the Mars he thrived on today. The planet he arrived on those decades ago was barren, lacking even a tumbleweed, but now the air was rich with artificial spring, and smelled of plant pulp from the exhaust of the algae-powered automobiles.

Howard had just stepped from the publishing house, his novel The Purple Sunset Over Clarketon was ready for wide distribution. The book was a semi-autobiographical account Colonial Martian polygamy. Each chapter was a devotion to a separate wife, there were seventeen chapters total.

The sky beyond the dome was an ochre, like butterscotch. Blue, he thought and contemplated the sky he once knew as a young man on Earth, its just too sweet, like bubblegum or cotton candy. He fancied himself a sort of modern day intellectual cowboy: Rugged, liberated, and learned. He sat at a bench, took his moleskin sketchbook from his pants pocket and did a quick study sketch of the passing traffic. A majority of the transportation consisted of electricycles or taxi-pods, a vehicle which looked eerily similar to a string of butt-plugs. However, there still remained the scarce, now vintage, quadrobiles. He waited for his wife, Sherry, to pick him up. He never learned to drive a car, he didn’t like the idea of being the passive conductor of a metal death chamber and he did all he could to avoid hailing a cab. So he waited.

He waited another five minutes, the sun drifted down, and the sky at the horizon line took on a sweet blue. It was like a treat, but still he became impatient. His watch read six-thirty. He tapped a command into the watch face and a small hiss preluded a projection of a screen of mist, the watch rang, and after three or so rings, Sherry’s face materialized within the mist. Her small head in the mist looked pained, she said, “Oh s**t, Howie I’m sorry.”

“I need you to come pick me up, you forgot?” He said. Sherry was his first and oldest wife, he liked her name because it described the nature of a successful polygamist’s wife.

“I know, I know. S**t, I’m sorry. They called me in to work. Really I’m sorry, can you take a cab?”

“You know I don’t ride in cabs.”

“Yeah, what about Honey, could she pick you up?”

“Honey took Kurt to Deimos to check out the university.” The joke was that intelligent life still didn’t exist on Mars, only its moons.

“Ah, that's right. Well, I don’t know, Goodsur.”

“Seventeen Wives. Seventeen, and only two of them drive.”

“Can you get a ride? Maybe from your editor?” Sherry’s disembodied head winked. “Have you slept with her yet?”

“No, she’s not interested.”

“Bullshit, everyone’s interested in martian polygamy,” Sherry said and her holographic head looked over her holographic shoulder in a working-type panic, “Alright, I really gotta go. Love you and I’m sorry. Sleep with your editor for me, please.”

“Sure, bye ,” The projection in his watch face blinked off. The mist dissipated and his arm fell limp to his knees. He sat there on the bench, but darkness came fast to the martian sky, and like desert temperatures, dropped and came close to absolute zero. He drew his sleeves to his wrists and rose from the bench to hail a cab. Catching a ride from Jenine, his editor, meant they would probably end the night having sex, many of the martian women were once repressed Christo-catholic girls and had since broken their sexual barriers. Sex was a release, but it expelled all his ideas and he fell into sloth for the remainder of the night. He wanted to get home and start on his new book, something for his kids.

Howard approached the street and extended his thumb. This action, he remembered it, he’d done it only once before, the day he left Earth. His face reddened. He remembered the cab driver and how he was ready to shoot the man down. After vomiting his nerves onto the driver’s shoulder, the revolver dropped under the driver’s seat. He made out, even with the saxophone and his paints, and ran with his bag clutched to his chest. In the launch station, Howard flashed his ticket. The cab driver, with vomit dripping down his torso and his face like a hot plate, was detained by the guards. Howard told them the man was insane, and had stirred himself so greatly with delusional anger he vomited on himself.

They believed him.

By 4:11 that afternoon, Howard was past the stratosphere and into the mesosphere, pale and light green, sitting next to a young girl wearing a full dress, her ankles and wrists covered. She said, “What’s got you?”

“I’m never taking a cab again.” He said, and then vomited up there, off the sphere, and on the shoes of his first wife, Sherry.

***

A taxi appeared, bright yellow, checkered and healthy, thick tires. He opened the door and slid into the car, “Hey thanks, can you take me to Bradbury and deGrasse Ave?”

“You got your wallet?” The driver said, his hands tight on the wheel and his nose real close to the windshield.

“Yeah I’ve got my wallet,” Howard said, his blood cold, he wondered whether cabbies could sense a wrong done to fellow drivers. His a*s never left the house without his wallet close by.

“You know I ran out on my wife, on my kid, now my planet. I’m from Earth.”

“Aren’t we all? Well, besides the kids,” Howard said, and breathed in the taxi, the man still smelled much like Earth, soda-pop and air pollutants. “How long you been on Mars?”

“Just came in week ago on a working Visa.”

“Can I ask you why you came?”

“All the virgins-haw!-nah, that's something some kid said to me, s**t, had to be almost twenty-five years ago. I’m an old man now--can’t see so good, probably shouldn’t’ve gotten in this cab with me-haw!”

Author's Note

A collaboration between me and ZackofBridge

April 2015

Reviews

[Chadvonswan]

WHY ISNT ANYONE READING THIS MASTERPIECE???

[ZackOfBridge]

Haha we need to keep at this when finals are over with

[Chadvonswan]

Yeah we do. This is superb fiction

[Gaston Villanueva]

Genuine gold
Such a perplexing and enjoyable collaboration and I look forward to reading the continuation
Great job guys!