gchatus

Three Professors on the Snake Path

“you certainly won’t need that any longer” said one of them, who was all of them, as they stripped and though their clothes into the trees where they hung like snakeskins and below, in the long grasses (but quite clear of the cacti and swarming bees) they gave themselves over. To what, they might only argue over late-night coffees and in flourescent lit conference rooms in foreign cities and again in vagaries through academic treatises on the id and animus. A lifetime of relationships through towering intellectual structures that cannot erase 22 minutes of a spontaneous thrusting sweating seizing springtime hogpile in the garden of the snake path in southern california, which no one save a rabbit chewing a doritos wrapper would have ever been aware of otherwise.

Angel Bob

His face is lit by the liquor stores and neon signs behind him, a crescent of gold framing his rounded, pock-marked cheeks; the cigar smoke crests around him in a halo.

“I been here a long time,” he says. “In this city. Seen a lot a people; a world of ‘em. They all kinda come for the same reason, you know? even though it’s diff’ernt reasons, it’s really the same.

“And I don’t think the city gives it to any of ‘em,” he says. “But it don’t matter. It’s always here. It don’t change. I mean, it changes, all right. But it don’t really.”

He sits next to me, his wings hanging limply on his back. Despite having no clothes save a pair of soiled underpants, he doesn’t seem cold at all. He takes a swig and smoke, smiles at me with the few teeth he has left.

“Everyone comes here once,” he says. “If not more, if not always. Cuz you’re all, you’re all, you’re all looking for something. Am I right? Am I right? Am I?”

He laughs, like a tired saw.

“You people, you never find it here,” he says. “But you think it’s got some secret. You think the world is holding some kinna knowledge it can give you. But there ain’t no secrets.”

He looks down the street. It’s empty — one of those strange pockets of inactivity caused by traffic patterns, weather patterns, circadian rhythms. But somewhere we can hear them, the rest of people that fill this place.

“There’s just you,” he says. “You, looking for something. Forever. Ha!”

He stands. Even standing, he’s not much higher than my shoulder as I sit on the curb. His fat bare legs lead to fat bare feet. They aren’t cut by the sidewalk; aren’t reddened by the chill.

“I could tell you somethin’ bout forever,” he says, and waddles off down the street, and I know there are no angels, that he’s no better, that it’s the job of the lunatic to make us believe in him. But the city is growing, and we are all inside it. On an island of snakes.

Sourpuss & Rustbucket

His tallowed fingers, rotten and seeping, twisted in skin and burns, crept like tethered insects over their bedsheets. Behind him, the creature watched, low light glinting dully from its rusted chrome frame.

“Only take a little,” the companion whispered. “We don’t want Mom and Dad to know.”

Wrench in the Gears

Sometimes you have an idea and before long you realize you’re about to write Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats as a noir/superhero pastiche, and just in case you’re unsure yes, that is a terrible plan.

The Owl & The Monkey

No one was really comfortable around the Monkey and the Owl. Not the Ratsides, not the Raffle Kids over in the western projects; not even the Rikki Tikki Tavis or Ropegirl and Armchair Firehouse, and those last two would roll with pretty much anyone. Even the scuttlers out of the theater districts, who had runners all over the alleyways from the harbors to the south up to the northeast slums, wouldn’t give a straight word about the pair - not exactly what they did or who they worked for or what their angle was. They was just the Monkey and the Owl, and they’d do most anything you could think to hire them for. But it wasn’t the kind of thing anyone recommended doing. Them two, they had a stink on them, a heaviness that wouldn’t leave you. It was like they did your job and took your money and in exchange left you with this weight, with this hole in you, steeped in oil and black matter. My uncle said for years after he’d wake to see the shadow of a wing against the wall of his darkened bedroom, or he’d swear he’d hear a simian chittering in the stillness of his solitary afternoons. He insisted they’d followed him forever, and made me promise to check his body for bites or clawmarks on the day I found him dead. Now I ask myself what I value - keeping my word to a corpse, or tracking down these things that no one seems to want to know. At night I wake to my uncle’s ghost, sitting in my room and staring at me with empty eye sockets. “I’ll tell them,” he says. “I’ll find them myself, and make them track you down instead of me.” I worry that his ghost will find them, through some dark magics - that the owl and the monkey already know me. I hear them chattering. I feel the beating of their wings.

The Reptile

“Now I gotta live like this,” said the Reptile, leaning back in his chair to smoke. O rings of ash floated through the darkened hall, past Stilletto, past the Hooded Wasp, past Borneo and the Shapeshift Five.

Only little Jimmy Wales was not convinced; he sat forward on the ottoman with an impish sneer. “You got that scar in juvie,” he said. “You ain’t got it from the Voodoo Man. No matter what you say.”

A whisper slid between his breaths; a line of silver light in shadows, and Jimmy’s nose fell to the floor, along with the rest of his face, in perfect bloodless slices. The rest of his body sat frozen in surprise, before slumping to the floor like a sack of coal.

From his corner, the Onion put away his microfilament, coiled neatly back into his palm.

The Reptile nodded. Behind him, Lucky Pipes and Hugbones Ham stood like twin mountains.

“That’s settled,” said the Reptile. “I’m feeling better all the time.”

Stop

I couldn’t stop staring. My jaw hung low and lower, my tongue lolling out until it detached. Falling to the ground, it grew legs and feelers, click-clicking across the tile floor as scampered away to feed and replicate. My jaw snapped open and shut wetly, angrily, demanding the space inside it be filled. But the tendons were slack, and i couldn’t keep my mouth closed except through sheer will; still now it hangs loose and wobbles when I walk, unless I make an effort to hold it shut. Which I don’t. Not for you.

I Am What Your Future Is

I become a fossil, gaining weight as muscle becomes clay becomes rock. I move through time in reverse, against the formation of the world. On the day it reaches its ultimate state, I will be only part of its mantle, hot and dark. I take no pleasure from this. I only know it to be true.

One World, Many Minds

I stopped running on the corner of 321st and Lowground to stare at the woman across the intersection. She looked like something out of a 50s fashion magazine, but done all wrong, like she’d assembled the worst parts from five different advertisements and topped it off with some terrible farce of a beehive ‘do. But she was staring at me too, her mouth an ‘o’ of pink lipstick and shock. Perhaps she’d never seen a voodoo priest in a tophat running through the Village on a Friday night, but that wasn’t my problem. My problem was that there was a stranger in my dreamscape, and by the look on her face this bird was thinking the same thing, but with me the imposter instead of her. I wondered if this was an anuerysm, and when i would know for sure.

Loo at the End of the World

He was not the kind of guy you wanted to get stuck with at the end of the world. That ridiculous accent and his smell, sort of gasoline, beef jerky and farts. He kept shouting “OI! There a loo around ‘ere or just the end of the world, innit?” And then he would laugh and attempt to grab one of the women or punch one of the men and seriously, we were all so completely over it. But it was the end of the world, right? We decided just to wait for the stars to blow out and all matter to evaporate. Sure, it was painful as hell but at least we didn’t need to listen to that smelly motherfucker anymore.