The Lord of the Flies and other instruction manuals.

Having just finished Golding's masterpiece on human nature 'm left with little hope.

I drive with my eyes closed.

Summer, 2010

Why am I always sweating? Shit, I should see a Doctor. No insurance. Well, soon. Wait, is this gonna be some stream of consciousness shit? Fuck, I hope not HOLY SHIT I'M DRIVING Justin spasmed into consciousness with a jerk, hauling the right-hand wheels of the car back onto the road, up from the soft shoulder. Crazy how quick you could drift away like that, warm and comfortable in the sun-stupid heat of your own mobile hotbox, cruising down the road to the soothing sounds of HOLY FUCK Justin dragged his awareness back to the fore, where his eyes were currently neglecting their chore of monitoring the empty, winding road before him as it wound through country fields and barreled into wind that flowed as fast and free as anything alright I'm sleeping again he actually thought for a second before he woke up, shaking his head, and rolled down the window to let the air slap him 'round a bit.

His car was gold, and old, and the bumper sticker on the back was mom purple. CANCER SUCKS it said. This was true. SAVE THE TUMORS said the one next to it. He told anyone who asked that he kept his in a jar at home - this was not true, since he had never had tumors that he had known of (knock on wood).

At the intersection was a wilted van, flashers flashing inanely at anyone who'd look. Emblazoned on the side was some politician's smugly grinning ugly mug. Smugly grinning ugly mug, Justin thought, as the fellow on the van stepped from the space beside his own face. As the light turned green the public servant was sliding himself under the vehicle. Sucks to be him, Justin thought, and promptly fell asleep again.

That's okay, he dreamed, I'll be home soon anyway.

The Fan (short story)

Working in a laundromat is hot business. Steamy. Jamie hated it with the broiling resentment of a teenager. But he loved the fan.

From where he stood folding hot sheets from the summer camp nearby Jamie had only two pleasures during his eight hours at the laundry. The radio, placed on the metal shelf over his station, tuned to the local alt-rock channel but played at a volume that sapped his favorite bands of all their elemental power, was his first salvation. Music made the time more tolerable. It took his mind off the heat, and the humidity, and the humming pulsing swish of all the machines lining the walls behind him. It helped him ignore the customers and kids filling his space with body heat and taking all his air. It let his thoughts wander while he waited for the fan.

The fan was huge, an industrial model, with a big round cage enclosing it's three black rubber blades, perched atop a pole and looking slowly side to side like a lifeguard at his post. Every few seconds it would pass it's bounty of cool air over his glistening face. Jamie would watch it as his hands did their work, folding, stacking, folding. Those blades are huge, he would think, I wonder if they would cut through a carrot. For some reason this idea, once it had idly floated through his zoned-out work-mind, wouldn't leave. I wonder if it would cut through a carrot. Those blades are huge, and slightly rounded at the edge, and rubber, but it's spinning so fast, he would think. So fast.

Wick wick wick wick went the fan, watching the room, scanning for prey. Wick wick wick.

The cage surrounding the fan, meant to protect the blades more than anything else, was ridiculously sparse. Not only could I fit a carrot in there, he thought, I could fit a whole bunch of carrots in there. At once. Wick wick thwack, carrot chunks. His mind wandered. His hands did the job. Fold. Stack. Fold.

The next day Jamie showed up to work with a carrot in his pocket. He didn't call attention to it. He was vaguely sure nobody would really care if he stuck a carrot in the fan, it wouldn't damage anything, but the owner of Busy Beaver Laundry was a humorless old man, and at the very least he'd get some weird looks and lose a little respect in the eyes of his employer. So he folded, and stacked, and watched the fan, wondering how those blades would react, wondering if the carrot would be ripped out of his hand, or sliced cleanly through, or broken off with a jagged edge. Such a powerful fan, fully three feet across, chopping through the air. Wick wick wick.

When no-one was watching he went around the corner, behind the counter, out of sight to the customer area, and he dipped into his pocket and pulled out the carrot. He was standing behind the fan, looking through the circular shape made by the spinning blades. He knew there were three of them, he had seen it, when the fan was off. He knew they were thick, thicker than any fan blades he had ever seen on a normal house fan or ceiling fan. These huge chunks of rubber had mass, a hefty weight to carry out their purpose. He could hear them cutting through the atmosphere around him, and hear the air rush in to fill that gap, wick wick wick wick, and he could feel the pull of the fan. It looked hungry. He had brought it a carrot.

The tip entered the cage, and for a moment he was slightly worried - there was enough space between the thin metal bars that he could have easily slipped his whole fist through. This fan is not my friend, Jamie thought briefly, but then the tip of the carrot encountered the whirling black fanblade as the fan turned once more to look to the left. Instantly the carrot was pulled out of his hand and obliterated in a shower of orange shards. Jamie was fascinated. The fan never hitched, never changed it's tone as the carrot spattered to the floor, but in Jamie a light had turned on. He felt warm all over. He felt like he was jerking off, like he had a really good one going, the kind that left his knees shaking. He looked around, suddenly ashamed, as his face flushed. Nobody was paying any attention to him. He grabbed a broom and began sweeping up.

The next day he brought two carrots, and he tried to space them out. Each time he captured a moment where no-one was watching and sent another carrot through the machine, he would sigh, and blush, and burn all over. The power of the fan was overwhelming. The day after it was two more. He tried different methods of insertion, savoring the slow disintegration as he pushed the carrot through centimeter by centimeter, relishing the instant segmentation when he threw the carrot into the blades all at once. The next day he tried celery, but for some reason it didn't give him the same reaction. He thought it might be the color.

That weekend he was in the bathroom, enjoying a few minutes out of the heat, and thinking about the fan like a boy with a crush might think about his secret love. He was idly masturbating when he noticed the mousetrap in the corner had a dead mouse inside it. His mind caught on the mouse like it was a hook. The fan. The mouse. He had to see it.

He knew this would be a little messier, a little harder to explain, if he was caught. The mouse was wrapped in toilet paper in his shorts pocket. All he wanted was to be alone with the fan, with every fiber in his body - he hadn't finished masturbating, he was so caught up in the idea of the mouse meeting those blades, and as he folded, stacked, folded he kept the sheets and towels between himself and anyone who might see the bulge in his crotch. He was throbbing a little, all over, like his body had become an abscessed tooth - he ached to see what would happen, longed to insert the mouse into the back of the fan. He wondered if there would be blood.

No one was looking.

He slipped around the corner, behind the fan, out of site to anyone unless another coworker came behind the desk. He pulled out the mouse, fumbling with it as his hands shook, and peeled off the layers of toilet paper he had carefully wrapped around it. It hadn't been dead long - it was still soft. Trembling, he took it by the base of the tail, and began inching it's nose through the fan.

"Jamie!" his co-worker Susan shouted, and he could hear the shock in her voice, but he pushed the nose into the blade and let the rest follow, pulled into the spinning power, and as the mouse disappeared in a haze of fur and whiskers and blood and skin he felt himself shoot warmth into his shorts, once, twice, three times. He was shaking all over. "Jamie what the christ are you doing!" Susan said, and the bewilderment was already giving away to disgust and anger. "What the fuck was that? Is that blood? What the fuck are you doing over there?" He could hear her coming up behind him as he shuddered. The mess on the floor was resplendent, an amazing pattern of mouse parts that he was quite certain no-one had ever seen before. He grabbed the counter to his right to keep his knees from buckling as Susan dropped her hand onto his left shoulder.

"Jamie, what the fuck?" She demanded, turning him to face her, but he wasn't listening. He barely noticed as she called over the owner and pointed to the mess. His mind was reeling. The explosion of sensation when the mouse disintegrated had washed all over him and now he was floating, drifting in a warm sea. He stared dumbly as the boss began yelling, and walked calmly out when they pointed him to the door. His head was ringing. He was smiling. His muscles jittered all the way to the pet store.

That night he walked back to the laundromat in the dark, his backpack full of the pet mice he had bought. The store clerk told him they were 'feeders', bred especially to be eaten by a snake. This seemed perfect to him. He could feel them crawling all over each other against his back as he circled around behind the strip mall that held Busy Beaver Laundry and climbed the stairs next to the dumpster. The door was locked, but he knew it could be opened with a credit card, he had seen the door latch from the inside a dozen times. Inside, he dropped the bag to the floor and spent a moment watching the bulges shift and move beneath the fabric of his bag. The fan stood at face height, unmoving, three big, black blades curving outwards from the large central eye. It was hungry. He could tell. He plugged it in.

The first mouse went in kicking and biting, folded back on his hand, trying desperately to crawl away from the wick wick wick of impending messy death, so he had to push it into the blades spine first. It was knocked out of his hand and across the room, leaving a thin spray of red behind, fine droplets in a trail. He had lost his grip. The second mouse went in headfirst while he kept his hand wrapped snuggly around it's body and legs. It scrabbled for a second before the blade took off it's brain. The rest of the body went in without a struggle. The third he dangled by the tail and let it swing into the fan. It lost a foot first and began squeaking and writhing frantically, but only for a second, before it was pulled into the swirling, shimmery circle. He was left holding the tail. Absently, he put the bloody tip into his mouth and began sucking on it as he reached for the fourth little white mouse.

This one seemed shocked, frozen with fear. Maybe the smell of it's comrades' insides had sent it into the same paralysis caused by the hoot of an owl. He wasn't expecting it to fight as he brought it up to the cage, and so when it turned to jump from his open hand he overreacted, shoving it too far, and he felt the blade whack his finger. It hurt dully, like whacking it against a table might, but not nearly as much as he would have expected. He wrapped his other hand around his sore finger. It wasn't there. His finger was sitting in bits, on the floor in front of him.

Jamie raised his right hand, now missing it's pointer, and let the blood drip into the airflow, watched it alter it's downward course and spray in a fine mist through the blades of the fan. It was beautiful, and already he didn't hurt anymore. He was starting to shake again. He could feel himself getting hard in his summer shorts. He unfolded his middle finger. Quivering with anticipation, he let the tip slip into the fan. No pain at all this tame, just the feel of impact running down his arm. As the shockwave reached his center he ejaculated again. Exquisite. He jammed the rest of the middle finger into the wick wick wick as he came again and again, shuddering. Absolutely exquisite. The unfolded a third finger, and then a fourth. He did the other hand. He saved the thumbs for last. He watched the blood pool out beneath him and spatter in Pollack patterns on the floor before the fan. He was in love. He was flying. He was free.

Pressing his palms to the pole, he leaned his face towards the fan and stuck out his tongue.

Bulge (short story)

Chester stood in his living room, staring at the grotesque (and somehow organic) bulge under the carpet hanging in the hallway leading from the living room to the kitchen. The carpet itself was nondescript- dark pine green, with emerald stripes entwining over its surface. Nondescript as a wall decoration, or a carpet. As a curtain covering some sort of mysterious thing, it held just the right amount of...descriptness.

"Mom's not gonna like this..." Chester muttered, wondering exactly how she would deal with it. He didn't know what was under the carpet, but he had confidence that when he returned from school it would be dealt with. After all, it was a bulge, and mom would never allow a bulge into her house. At least, not for very long.

The bulge moved. Shifted. Chester was sure of it, and started to get worried. "Mom?" he called into the kitchen, where he suspected his mother was making his lunch. "I think you should use the... the back hallway."

"Why? Chester Densmore, if you made another mess in that hallway..."

Uh-oh. She was coming this way. Why didn't parents ever listen? "I didn't do anything wrong mom," he called, "but... but..." His young mind scrambled for an excuse, but vivid and disgusting pictures of the mysterious thing under the carpet kept interfering. And then Chester's mom was there. And then she was gone.

He blinked. She had stepped around the corner into the hallway and vanished!

Chester's feet took two involuntary steps forward before he remembered the bulge and looked to his right.

The carpet was completely stuck to the wall on all four sides like a fabric suction cup, and the center was writhing and squirming. The outline of a hand - his mother's, Chester was sure of it - pressed into the carpet from the wall side, pushing frantically for escape. And didn't that lump in the middle look like a nose? The shape below it a mouth, perhaps screaming, perhaps gasping for air as some unknown creature devoured it in the darkness from the legs up, no explanation, no rationale, just pain and darkness and confusion?

The mouth-shape moved up and down in jerky spasms, screaming in silence. The one visible hand-shape clawed at the carpet. The hand stopped moving.

A trickle of blood oozed out from the corner and dripped down the wall.

"Mom?" Chester's voice cracked. "Are you all right?" His feet shuffled forward, one step, two...

I drink toilet water.

Justin woke up, sweaty and shuddering and wondering how the hell he had ended up in the sewers, the after-image of a screaming mouth mounted to the wall still fading away in the darkness as he staggered to his feet. He padded across the bedroom he shared with his girlfriend Danielle, the bedroom that was obviously not in a sewer at all but was, in fact, three floors up in the ghetto side of Providence. Every step pulled him further away from the tangled sheets that had been his dreams (an office full of older women, laughing at his nakedness, a room that crushed the man inside, and that alarm, mounted to the wall and screaming with the mouth of a cankerous giant, driving him into the sewers below where he had attempted to fight off the flying surveillance cameras They had sent after him) and closer to the sterile light of the tiny bathroom where he fell to his knees and coughed up his soul, followed shortly by his dinner. Drained, he looked at his phone - 1:30 AM.

Nine to ten, ten to eleven, eleven to twelve, twelve to one - he'd been asleep for four hours, after going to bed early with a headache. The headache had grown in strength. His stomach was cramping, squeezing his guts like a slick fist. He felt simultaneously nauseous and hungry. 

It was only a few steps from the bathroom to the kitchen - hell, it was only a few steps from anything to anything in the two-room apartment he shared with the love of his life. By the time he arrived in front of the sink he was beginning to think leaving the bathroom had been a mistake. He left a glass under the slow-trickling water filter they had attached to the faucet and made his way back to the toilet where he proceeded to expel everything out of the other end of his stomach that had not uprooted during the first mass exodus. In the middle of this it became necessary to grab the trash can and project from both ends at once. He felt an odd sense of accomplishment at this as his stomach spasms subsided. 

Back to the kitchen, where the glass stood overflowing in the sink as the faucet valiantly continued its trickle. He grabbed the cool drink and an apple off the microwave and shuffled his way back to bed. 

An hour and a half later he was still awake, trying to read through the dull blaring pain rattling around behind his eyes. Periodically his stomach would shift, a writhing ball of cold snakes in his belly, and he was pretty sure things were going to get worse before they got better. In the circle of luminescence cast by the tiny booklight on his novel he spotted drops of sweat wrinkling the page. It was November, and very cold, and yet as he rocked back in forth with the blankets pooled around his waist, he couldn't seem to stop sweating. Everything inside him, it seemed, wanted out. No use fighting it. Back to the bathroom. 

Things were a little harder this time - not the relatively smooth upchuck of earlier, these spasms came like a punch to the gut, more noise than substance, more apple and water than anything else. The chunks of red-skinned fruit looked disturbingly like pieces of his own insides, jarred loose in the tsunami of disease that had taken residence inside his frame. One particularly solid piece of regurgitate hit the water with a significant plop and splashed toilet juice directly into his mouth, prompting a fresh convulse from the old crap-factory. Fuck this, he thought, I'll do the rest of my puking in bed thank you very much. With all the grace of a palsied old man he shambled back to bed and crashed to the bed beside the still blissfully unaware figure of his girlfriend. She had to get up at 5 am. Let her sleep. 

The book he was reading was quite good, much better this second time through than he remembered it being when he'd read it in college. It served as a distraction for a little while, until finally the confines of his torso could no longer remain stationary and, remembering his last delicious taste of bathroom, he turned and vomited in the bedside trash can with a strangled moan. These battle cries of the common flu eventually aroused the sleeping beauty beside him, and she laid a cool hand on his hot back. "Are you alright?" she asked, already sounding pretty awake. 

"No," he said pitiably, pitying himself quite a bit in the process, "I feel absolutely horrible." There was nothing left inside him to be expelled, and yet his body was still clenching and unclenching, struggling to push out what was no longer in, but the worst of it seemed to have past. He felt his awareness move from the cramps and queasy feeling in his stomach and become centered on the dull roar of pain in his head. He rolled onto his side, facing away from her so as to avoid exposing her to his foul breath, and said simply "hold me." 

There's an odd comfort that comes when you are in the bleakest moments, when the physical vessel you inhabit turns against you and the night stretches onwards, out of sight, in either direction, and the sunrise can't come fast enough if only for the hope it brings with it that all things must pass. Eventually I'll die, he realized, and the knowledge filled him in a way that was inconceivable during the overstimulating light of day and freedom of health. Eventually this will end, and all the agony and ecstasy I've experienced will be free to dissipate and spread amongst the stars. Eventually these chemical bonds will break, and the constant struggle to simply not fly apart, a million pieces in all directions, will come to a satisfying end. Eventually he will feel better. Eventually he fell asleep.

I eat ants.

Sweaty, naked and visibly uncomfortable, Justin rolled over on the couch, struggling to stay asleep in the thick summer heat. Sunlight had set fire to the filmy white curtains draped casually over bamboo rods above the double glass doors, irradiating the room with sickly orange light, poisoning the air with warmth that forced itself down his throat and into his lungs. His feet dangled over the raised arm of the couch, but whether this was his fault for being tall or the couches fault for being small he hadn't quite decided yet. Justin pulled a fold of blanket over his naughty bits, already much more awake than he was, and ready, so it seemed, for action, and tried his best to relax. This was difficult, as the pink old-lady couch gave him the unsettling feeling that he was about to roll off and fall onto his face. It simply was not big enough.

He gave up on trying to get anymore sleep and threw himself to his feet. Across the room his computer mouse glowed benignly on the table, hovering on a little pool of red in a triangle of shadow thrown by the edge of the door. He gave it a little shove and his monitor activated, displaying the time in a little box in the corner. 2:19 in the afternoon.

Nine to ten, ten to eleven, twelve, one, two... I only slept for five hours, he thought, counting on his fingers. He rubbed his puffy face. It was hot, dammit, and he hated the heat. He wished he was still asleep.

Already he was wide awake, and as he turned to cross the square room, barefoot on flat blue carpet, he began to settle into a kindof minor despair. Awake again. What do I do now? he wondered helplessly as his body moved over to the closed wooden door. He lifted the latch and opened it a crack to peer down the hallway. No sign of his roommate, a pretty, tiny little ex-girlfriend named Tanya. He reached around his door to grab his bathrobe off the hook on the open bathroom door, right across the hall, and then leapt from one doorway to the other while guarding his embarrassingly prominent morning wood.

Safely in the bathroom, he proceeded to bend his knees and lean into an awkward horse-riding stance, while simultaneously relaxing his insides, in order to succesfully piss through his hardon. Having practiced this for years, it was not as difficult as it sounds, and Justin's tetherless mind had actually considered a career in water play pornographic films. Briefly.

Standing in the shower he spent at least as much time staring at the tattoo on his chest as he did using the soap. He had been trying to picture it with a black outline, something his very non-visual imagination had a distinct problem with. He decided in the end to trust his tattoo artist, an ex-girlfriend turned ex-military lesbian who was disturbingly talented and he was still thinking about her when he sat down at his computer desk, back in the square room he was renting from his ex. Deciding to finally deal with his morning-in-the-afternoon boner, he opened a folder on the computer that contained some dirty pictures she had drawn.

He heard Tanya on the stairs. He had just enough time to close the window and quickly jump out of his chair and into a stretching pose that allowed his bathrobe to hang over his front when she said "Justin?" and came around the corner. "Could you help me figure out why the internet won't work on my computer?"

He stood, trying to keep himself faced away from her as he said "Yeah, sure" in what he hoped was a casual manner. He busied himself with pulling a pair of pajama pants and a t-shirt from his closet. "I'll be right there"

Pulling his erection up under the wasteband of his pants so that it laid semi flat against his stomach, he followed her up the stairs and sat in front of her laptop. "Could it be that we haven't paid the bill?" he said after a few minutes tinkering. "This is what it used to do to us when we let the account get shut off."

"Oh yeah. I guess that's it." Tanya said quickly, scratching her gray weimaraner Storm distractedly as she explained nervously. She hated being late on any payments. "I only owe them like fifty bucks."

Back downstairs in the kitchen he reached for his packet of Oreos, thinking to mix a few with some vanilla yogurt and Grape Nuts for breakfast. With a dull wave of disgust he saw that his package had been invaded by tiny black ants, crawling out from the open plastic slit in random intervals. He sighed and ate the cookie in his hand, realizing absentmindedly as he did so that he had almost assuredly just eaten an ant or two, and began searching for some tupperware. Each cookie got a good shaking and a few puffs of air before being transferred to the plastic, hopefully antproof container. He was slightly apprehensive about the small crack on one corner of the cover, but it appeared to be too small for even an ant to crawl through. In the end, the chocolate-vanilla-grapenut combo wasn't very good anyway. So it goes.

In the sweltering heat, Justin thought to himself, that's one hour down. Maybe ten more until I can fall asleep again. Somewhere way down inside he felt like crying, like screaming and wailing and changing everything. He ignored the sensation and sat staring dull-eyed at his computer screen. Finally, he decided to finish jerking himself off.