Hello,
my name is Carl and I am going to submit two more stories because that is what the law
allows according to your ABOUT page. I thank you for any consideration, and hope
you glean, grasp, or garner some kind of corporeality and reality stirred
together with a spoon that has nails driven through it. And outside the bowl,
the glistening afterware of space. Thanks again, I wish you success with this
provocative journal.
my name is Carl and I am going to submit two more stories because that is what the law
allows according to your ABOUT page. I thank you for any consideration, and hope
you glean, grasp, or garner some kind of corporeality and reality stirred
together with a spoon that has nails driven through it. And outside the bowl,
the glistening afterware of space. Thanks again, I wish you success with this
provocative journal.
What They Wanted From War
Nothing new ever happens in this town. It's the town that never
sleeps.
Being born in Las Vegas has had an odd pasteurizing effect on me,
and buzzing lights no longer make me cry in fear and wet my
pants.
Only two short years ago I was hugging an oak tree in southern Georgia
telling my cousin Nathan that the only way to create peace was to
keep sending letters to those men in Vietnam. We thought we had ended the
war.
It was only a short time later that Nixon himself came forward and
told America that it was him, in fact, whose criminal record was clean
and forbidden. On cold winter nights such as these, I remembered Santos,
and his golden spoon he carried around with him everywhere. He would keep it
in an extra large jock strap he wore around his waist, and he would use it
to scoop out kibble and feed it to the geese. Some years later,
Santos developed cancer and now lives in a storage unit outside of New York.
His hair is ragged and yellow and his only occupation besides poking himself
in the eye is spelling his name with coathangers. Whenever I stood outside
of his little cube home and tried to talk to him, he would just rave on
about how without onion soup, we wouldn't have won world war two. I
always discarded it as mere mind contortions, but my parents and I were put
to shame two years later when we found a newspaper scrap describing the
onion soup that fed german soldiers in world war two, and how American
soldiers had to urinate in their hats. By the time we reached Santos, he had
already injected motor oil into his penis, so we all ate jello as his
grave descended into McDonald's.
Another rambunctious tale sprouts from Ireland, where my cousin Nathan
and I would sell sheep tears to old sailors who couldn't produce their
own livestock. The shotglass was full of milk and lemon twists, and as
I approached the bartender, he pulled out a large ladle and began to comb
his hair with it. Underneath his skin and his jewelry, I knew there was
another world in there. What kind of world was it? Was it cold? Was it
perhaps unattractive in some way? Taking this into consideration, I grabbed
his wrist and slammed it against my hatchet. Warm, silky lashes of blood
painted the wall in some sort of odd sadistic beauty that made my tormented mind
cry with such cacophony that I was lifted onto a spiritual podium, far far
away.
With such things on my mind, I was free to make changes. Nathan and
I closed shop and moved to Georgia, where we met
Santos.
As we neared the iron gates of shiny joyous citizens linked by their teeth, we
noticed somewhat of a vagrant. Nathan mumbled under his breath,"The gas is
low. Get me to Vegas. This country air is giving me a blister. Make it
snappy, the gas tank is cold." I put it into fourth gear and we coasted down
the hill.
Nathan put his hand on my shoulder. "We didn't make it like
this," he said. "We bought the gunpowder, we sliced the honeydew, but we did
not scratch this guy's back." I stopped the car, realizing now, for the
first time ever, males are the ones with testicles. I put the rear view mirror
in my lap and hummed the tune to "Melrose Place," except for every 'G' I
hummed a 'C' and for every 'A' I hummed a 'Z.' The vagrant man approached us,
his cotton loincloth smeared with grease paint and Listerine. Not only was
this man a prostitute, but he was horribly dirty, and probably a bag boy
at Piggly Wiggly.
"The name's Wallace," the man said. We knew it was a falsity, but we
said nothing.
"Wallace isn't your damned name, you lying frog!" Nathan's arms
were pulsating faster and faster, much like the wheels of a train headed
toward a large potato wagon. The man reached into his pocket and pulled out a
packet of candy cigarettes and started renaming all of the archangels with
common Spanish names. Nathan pulled out his Swiss Army knife, and with much
grace and struggle, cut the man's tongue right out of his mouth. Then as
a crippling victory, he poked the man's uvula, and it turned blue. Since
then
we called him Santos.
We did horrible things to Santos. We tied him in bed, and put things
like spiders, centipedes, fire ants, and lice
under the covers with him. We hit him on the head when we got bored, and eventually used all of the tools
in the garage on him. We drilled a hole in his kneecap, we welded his
right ear shut, and we torqued his left testicle until it snapped and ripped
off of his body. We poured milkshakes in his hair, and made him listen “for the edge of
the season.”
Nathan and I grew apart after a while. We got separate houses, and
the lovemaking stopped. The geese were lonely in their garden, and my
mild heart longed for the sweet margarine taste of blood.
Two years after Santos' death, I reattached my emotions, and realized
the thing I hated was Charlie Brown, not Nathan. I went to go see him
immediately, but he was not in his house. I went out to the old dock
where we played as toddlers and sure enough, there he sat, a grim look on
his face.
I accounted that the grim look on his face was caused by the
bullet he put through it moments earlier, but that wasn't what mattered to me.
I approached him, and went through his coat pockets. I searched and searched, and then there it was. The little scrap of newspaper. I unfolded it
and held it up to the June sun. And I laughed, and laughed harder thereafter. I knew
that sooner or later Beetle Bailey would steal the general's hat to make
pasta.
ending