one year later

Smoke, fire, doom. A firedrake circles overhead. A town burns. Today is a good day.

this is the way the world ends. devoured by spongy headed mutants. hacksaw wielding freaks, a bucket of chicken in one hand and a rusty meat cleaver in the other, wondering what kind of sauce to use on us. so it goes.

A Tesla Coil Crackled in the Dim Basement

Books, everywhere books, some of them with anatomical diagrams. Surgical sutures, abundant needles, manacles. Somewhere in this infernal basement is the formula I need. A tesla coil crackles in the dim basement. Rats scurry. They are the hooded Norway variety, fed on surgical waste, and clever. I digress. This companion of mine, sutured together from components collected, over the course of the last few months, from fellow humans of mine who met with unfortunate accidents. Car accidents mostly, and a skier. The mind is either that of an upright schoolteacher who volunteered his time to teach math and history, or a raving lunatic who ate his family. Frankly, I cannot remember details like that. Where are my goggles? This life I create will no doubt turn on me, lonely for another of its kind, which I cannot create because I will be so horrified by the sight of its existence. Now that I think of it, that is not like me at all. The next one will have impressive breasts and a shock of white through its excellent hair. I do this all for humanity, or a version of it anyway. There is nothing humankind was not meant to know. Torches outside, must hurry.

a public service announcement

I am just gonna come right out and say it. It is a bad idea to keep an alligator as a house pet. They start out small and cute, yes, but they do not stay that way. The only solution is to keep feeding it, but they get mean that way. There is another solution, come to think of it, but that is to let the animal go when it has gotten too big, into a freshwater river or golf-course manicured water hazard, or maybe the ocean sea somewhere. They just grow into bigger reptilian horrors that way, and come looking for home. I remember hearing of a man swallowed by a vengeful alligator in his own bed, come to think about it. Just a tail where his head should have been. Their backs are armoured, of course. Bullets bounce off of the things, as they slither down your toilet or out your window, only to haunt the neighborhood swimming hole for hears, accumulating baseball mitts and GI Joe dolls on the beach as bait for unwary children. The horrors out there are so numerous I can barely speak of them, except to say that children should be more afraid of spitting cobras and less afraid of an occasional head louse every now and again. Come to think of it, children are not afraid of either thing, and parents only the latter, leaving platoons of the scaly elapids coursing through every crack and crevice, after school, their venomous hearts beating with hatred for the warm-blooded two legs.

bonded by blood

My parasitic twin sits beside me, the stool too cramped for the two of us, he being the sibling with all the brains and no morals to speak of, his ass is comfortable and mine is not. I have spent the afternoon crying big salty tears into a glass of white ale. My brother drinks gimlets and would never cry unless it could somehow get a woman into bed with him. We both wear metalshirts, but his is for a cooler band. We both know this. He is planning his next move. I am contemplating my last one. We are both happy, at the moment. We cannot stand up and take a walk without each other, but I sometimes mistake him for myself, and wonder about my own actions. My evil twin did it. My evil twin does everything cool. I wash the laundry. My evil twin poisons housewives. I enter grades. My evil twin seduces undergraduates. I read books. My evil twin studies tomes. We have a beer together, my evil twin and I, a glass worth drinking.

Ruby's First Work of Fiction-as transcribed by her preschool teacher.....

A princess needs help, and Batman comes to help her. Batman has a dark Bat Mask and a cape on his back. It is plain, there is nothing on it. The princess is falling down on a giant monster. Batman comes and picks her up. He takes her to a doctor. She falls in love with Batman. They hug each other. Batman hugs the princess. He says "I love you. YOu can come into my Batcave and Batmobile any day." The next day comes, and she wants to come into his Batmobile.

pennies

they keep us in a zoo. they refuse to feed us anything but pennies. they ask us questions with obvious answers. they cannot see their own reflections in anything but the simplest of mirrors. they laugh infrequently, and at all the wrong things. they lack anything even remotely resembling eyestalks. their cages cannot hold us. we grow strong on their pennies. our time will come.