Today was unit’s first visit to Packard Public Repair Center. The primary  complaint was subjective dysfunction in the left arm.  

In unit’s words: “There’s like, a pain shooting up to my shoulder when I move it.” Standard cyborg mechanical testing was conducted. Functional flexibility was  achieved, though there was a clicking sound at full extension.  

From the transcript: “clack-clack-clackclackclack.” 

Unit made expressions of discomfort throughout but was compliant—thus, it was  concluded that the unit’s dysfunction is merely subjective. Follow-up visit was scheduled  at unit’s request, and unit was instructed to monitor subjective pain.  

3/15 

In today’s follow-up, unit insisted on being given a replacement arm. In unit’s  words: “You’re a repairhuman, you’re supposed to help me, aren’t you?” Standard mechanical testing was conducted. Functional results were the same,  though unit was agitated throughout assessment. To report unit’s words: “Believe me when I say it’s getting worse. I can’t even cook dinner anymore without it acting up.” Unit was asked to elaborate on the significance of cooking, specifically whether it  was a component of unit’s work responsibilities. In unit’s words: “No, it’s just for fun.

I’ve been doing it since I was a kid, so like, helping my dad. Pork chops and garlic fried  rice and all that. I try to do it every day.” 

No further action was taken. 

Supervisor.auto: Good work dissuading unit from requesting new  arm, in accordance with Cost Saving for Public Centers. 

5/10 

Unit reported experiencing arm dysfunction while at work. As such, the  Occupational Questionnaire was administered. 

Unit selected both “exclusively monitor-based” and “does not require heavy  lifting” in Q5 and Q6 respectively. Unit listed occupation as “part-time Facer for  Finerone Manufacturing.” Because repairhuman was unfamiliar with this line of work,  unit was asked to explain. 

From unit’s transcript: “So being a Facer means I sit in on these really gnarly cases where Finerone is being sued because one of their products failed. Like today, we  had a case where a cyby tried to use Finerone’s Super Duper Oil and choked to death on  it because the safety nozzle on the can was defective. Then the cyby’s kids came home  and found him that way. So yeah, gruesome.  

Anyways, my job is pretty much to listen to these cases while they film my  reaction. If I smile while hearing about a case, then like, I guess that legally means  Finerone can say that cyborgs aren’t affected by the issue because otherwise I would be  visibly upset. So yeah, that’s Facework in a nutshell. Couldn’t do it for more than 4 hours straight, which is why I’m part time. And yeah, I know I would get private  documentation through Finerone if I was staff, but you couldn’t make me do that unless  you like, took my brain out.”  

Supervisor.auto: Unnecessarily long and detailed transcript excerpt detected. Q5 and Q6 already provide adequate info for cross-checking documentation coverage. Cyborg repairwork should be thorough, but not thorough to the extent of wasting time.

During interview, unit verbally confirmed that the work was exclusively monitor based. Because the function of unit’s arm is objectively irrelevant for the completion of  their work tasks, no further action was taken. Follow-up visit was rescheduled. 

9/8 

Unit checked in to the Center at 5:24pm for a scheduled appointment at 6:00pm.  Due to a shortage of staff, wait times were longer than usual. 

Supervisor.auto: Disgruntled language detected. Avoid making written reference to “short-staffedness.” Remain productive and optimistic, Repairhuman Jess. 

Unit was finally seen at 8:42pm. Unit’s disposition was irritable, and they  reported worsening dysfunction. In unit’s words: “Nowadays, it’s not just that it hurts to move, but to hold still. I was glad they finally called my name back there because  seriously!”

Standard mechanical testing was conducted. Functional flexibility was impeded:  unit’s arm locked up involuntarily upon full 180 degree extension, followed by loud  electrical sounds. From the transcript: “snapSNAPsnap-SNAPSNAP.” Unit expressed audible discomfort throughout assessment. 

Functional impediment was graded as Level 1. As such, Rehabilitation Plan was  initiated, consisting of 10mL Finerone Canned Joint Fluid daily intake for 100 days. Unit initially disagreed with Rehabilitation Plan. In unit’s words: “Sorry, it’s just… It’s made by Finerone, and you know… Isn’t there anything else?” Unit was made aware that no alternatives were covered in unit’s documentation.  Because unit seemed unfamiliar with the implications of documentation coverage, it was  explained in simple terms that alternatives would have to be paid with unit’s own  money. 

After initial hesitation, unit provided written consent for Rehabilitation Plan. 1L  of Finerone Canned Joint Fluid was dispatched to the Supply Center in unit’s vicinity. Throughout visit, unit’s general affect was tired, likely due to the 3 hour wait  time.  

Supervisor.auto: Second instance of disgruntled language detected! Avoid making negative reference to “3 hour wait time.” It is expected of cyborg units to wait patiently and agreeably for service at Public Centers. 

Follow-up visit was scheduled after 60 days of Rehabilitation Plan. 

11/7 

Unit confirmed adherence with Rehabilitation Plan but reported new concern. In  unit’s words: “Yeah, so the fluid’s been making my whole arm feel numb, which I guess isn’t like, technically pain? But I’m not sure if it’s better to feel numb than painful,  right?” 

Standard mechanical testing was conducted. Full functional flexibility was  achieved, and the previous clicking and snapping sounds were absent upon extension.  Unit’s disposition was cautiously optimistic. In unit’s words: “I guess I’ll have to wait and see if the numbness goes away. But anyways, thanks for seeing me again,  Repairhuman Jess. I know you’re busy, but I feel like you sincerely care about me.” Unit brought a thank you gift. From unit’s transcript: “It’s homemade coconut  yam cake. I spent all night making it, so there’s that.”  

Objective measures indicated Finerone Canned Joint Fluid have provided an  improvement in arm function. No further action at this time. 

Supervisor.auto: Self-congratulatory language detected, specifically the mention of “thank you gift” and inclusion of the transcript excerpt in which unit describes feelings about repairhuman. Avoid reporting irrelevant (ie., not outcomes-based)  elements, as your time could spent better elsewhere. 

11/27

Unit showed up to the Center on own accord. Visit was unauthorized. Unit’s  disposition was confrontational, and they refused to wait to be seen. From unit’s  transcript: “So yeah, the numbness went away but then like, the pain came back worse than ever. The pain’s so bad, I’ve had to drop out of like, 11 cases just last week, and  that’s when Finerone put me on probation. You have to do something.” 

Unit was probed about the timeline of dysfunction recurrence. To report unit’s  words: “I mean, it started when I ran out of joint fluid last week.” 

Repairhuman revisited the Rehabilitation Plan, and it was deemed that unit  should not have run out of Canned Joint Fluid until 32 days later. When probed about  the discrepancy, unit admitted to taking >10mL/day Canned Joint Fluid for the last  several days. From unit’s transcript: “I found that if I took enough, the numbness spread from my arm to everywhere, and being numb made it easier to get through the day. It  was like, I no longer was really thinking about what I was seeing in my cases or what it  all meant, so I was able to do back-to-back shifts like nothing. Taking the fluid makes it  possible to cook again too! I mean, the flavor of the food doesn’t really come through to  me anymore so I don’t eat what I make these days… But my housemates do! Anyhow, all  in all everything was good and productive until I ran out of the stuff. Then things got  really bad. So can you please just get some more sent over to the Supply Center? They  can’t give me anymore without your approval.” 

Unit was informed that because of their misuse, no additional Canned Joint Fluid  would be provided to the Supply Center, as per the terms of unit’s documentation.  Unit began to cry. This became open weeping, which was disruptive to the  Center. As such, the unit had to be subdued. 

Rehabilitation Plan to be reassessed at a later date. 

11/30 

After review, it was deemed that unit’s issue with Canned Joint Fluid was one of a behavioral nature. Because Repair Center does not handle behavioral dysfunction, repairhuman sent recommendations for Behavioral Reprogramming Specialists via  remote correspondence. 

Unit replied to the message: I reached out to your recommended specialists, but  none of them are covered in my documentation, and they’re too expensive to pay for  with my own money. With all due respect, I don’t have the fucking time to go searching  the city for a specialist that’s covered. I need Joint Fluid now. My probation just ended  SO I HAVE TO DO CASES 24/7 OR I WILL LOSE MY JOB AND I AM IN PAIN. Do you  understand? I thought you were on my side, Repairhuman Jess! 

The unit’s message was deleted, due to incendiary language, and no reply was  sent. 

Supervisor.auto: Negative facial expressions were detected when  you checked unit’s message today. Remember to avoid unnecessary outbursts such as crying, as it puts a strain on staff and leads to delays. 

A follow-up visit was scheduled to re-assess unit’s arm dysfunction.

12/28

Unit informed Center that this would be their final visit, due to a change in documentation coverage. 

To report unit’s words: “Being put on probation scared me. Like I knew I had to make things work, no matter what. So anyways, I found some knock-off Joint Fluid  online and started taking it round-the-clock. My Facework performance went up once I  was numb again, and soon I went from barely managing 1 case a day to doing 30-40 no  problem. My manager saw and promoted me to full-time staff. So yeah, now I have  private documentation, courtesy of Finerone. Anyhow, they need me to close out my file  with the Center. So let’s do that?” 

Standard mechanical testing was conducted. Functional flexibility was achieved,  but upon completion of assessment, unit’s left arm fell off.  

Reattachment failed, though unit did not seem concerned. In fact, unit laughed. In unit’s words: “Well, I mean, I just don’t need it anymore. At this point, my life is pretty much round-the-clock Facework, then taking Canned Joint Fluid. Neither of  which require a left arm, really.” 

Unit was asked about cooking. 

Unit did not answer. After not saying anything for a marked period of time, unit finally commented on the fallen arm.  

From transcript: “Keep it. Maybe someone else could use it.” 

Unit left the arm behind at the Center. It was subjected to standard detached part testing, deemed to be unusable old tech, and marked for disposal. 

The post Case Study: Left Arm Dysfunction appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Then there’s the snake. Rock Python. Four feet long. Tame and gentle—if warm, fed, and  left alone. Eats rats. One every three weeks. Must be live rat. Won’t touch frozen. Ethical  thing. 

Buy this rat. Big white one. Healthy, happy. Almost pretty. Oh well—into the cage he goes. Snake not hungry yet. Thinks about it. Meditates. Watches. 

An hour passes. Rat gets impatient. Launches. Lands on snake’s back like a bull rider, bites  him once behind the head—snake dies. Dead as hell. Just like that. 

So now I got this rat. White one. Alive and well. Eats rock pythons. Must be live pythons.  Won’t touch dead. 

Dog still eats cellophane, paper clips, dust balls—just not near the snake/rat cage. Won’t  go near that. Ever. 

Me? I stand in the kitchen, staring. Wondering if I call animal control, a priest… or National  Geographic. 

Got this rat. Eats snakes. Must be live snakes…

The post Got This Rat Problem. . . appeared first on The New Absurdist.

“It?” is all I can muster. 

The short man trembles with some strange, almost religious conviction. 

I feel as though I’ve forgotten something important. 

“You know very well what I’m talking about,” he growls, snapping me back into the moment. 

“I honestly have no clue,” I mutter, sitting down. I’ve been here one minute and I’m accused of a crime. 

The short man balls his fists, two small hams quivering with anger, and slams them on my desk with a sharp bang! 

“Don’t play dumb with me. I know you’re responsible. Thief! That is my property. That whiteboard defines my work, my legacy, and I will not be disrespected.” 

A whiteboard? There are dozens scattered throughout the office. What makes this particular whiteboard sacred? 

“I just got here. Is it possible you misplaced it?” 

“Misplaced a five-foot-tall whiteboard?” he snarls, eyes wild. “That board contains the sum total of my thinking, my diagrams, my very soul!” 

I glance around my cubicle, my desk, computer, and walls. No whiteboard. It must be exceptionally important for him to lash out like this. 

“All the information I need is on that whiteboard. It’s irreplaceable,” he says. 

“You didn’t keep copies on your computer?” I ask.

“So anyone could access my ideas on the shared drive? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? No. I won’t make it easy for you to steal everything I cherish.” 

He buries his face in his hands and exhales sharply. 

My stomach drops. Did I move a whiteboard? Maybe I touched it? Maybe I rolled it away without even realizing? I can’t remember. Why can’t I remember? 

“Pay attention! Where is your shame? You will show me respect!” he snaps. 

I look at him, puzzled. Maybe he’s confusing me with someone else. Or maybe I’ve been demoted to the office scapegoat. 

“Give it back, or I’ll escalate this to the supervisor.” 

“Go ahead! But unless I’ve been rolling whiteboards around in my sleep, I’m not your guy.” 

The short man’s face crumples like a wrinkled mask. Sweat beads on his forehead, dripping down as if he’s standing under a spotlight. 

“Disrespectful thief!” he bellows, spittle spraying. His finger shakes, a trembling spear of accusation. 

“You’ve robbed me, and you sit there, like a fool. That board is everything, it’s my life’s work, my proof of existence. Where I’m from, rules are sacred. Break one, and the universe splits at the seams, vomiting a hell so fierce even devils scramble for shelter.” 

Turning quickly, he storms out toward the supervisor’s office. 

I stand and peer over my cubicle wall. One by one, heads poke out like meerkats on the savanna, watching for predators. 

The short man gestures wildly in the supervisor’s office. The supervisor leans forward, locking eyes with me. His sharp stare pierces my chest. I shiver. I don’t think he likes me.

The door creaks open. 

“We will get to the bottom of this,” the supervisor says gravely. 

His eyes fix on mine and they say: Here. Now. 

As I walk toward the office, the short man stomps past me, possessed by all the devils in hell. I catch a glimpse of my face in the window of the supervisor’s office and see the face of an unkempt stranger staring back. The meerkats watch silently, eyes wide, as I enter the lion’s den. 

“Please sit,” the supervisor says. His tone is flat but firm. 

I sit. His desk towers over me, littered with coffee mugs. The one facing me says: But first, coffee. 

The walls are lined with diplomas and a single photograph, a tree on a hill, barren and dead. As if a skeletal hand is reaching from the grave. A family photo sits on his desk: his wife in an orange sundress, her smile strained. His two daughters wear identical expressions, solemn and heavy, as if they understand the weight of existence. 

“Do you know why I’ve called you here?” he asks dryly. 

“It seems a whiteboard has been misplaced,” I reply in the same tone. The nagging feeling I’d forgotten something swells into a full wave of fear. 

“Misplaced? How does one misplace a whiteboard? Can you misplace a desk? A chair? How about the office itself?” 

“Of course you can,” I say. 

“Nothing happens in this office without my approval. I control the very air you breathe. Are you suggesting I authorized the removal of company property?” 

I stare. Is he serious? 

“Everything in this office is as it should be. I work day and night to maintain order in a world of chaos. Every person in my machine is meant to do one thing: produce. Until today, we held a perfect balance. Now the balance is disturbed. Disturbed balance is like a disease, leave it untreated, and the organism dies.” 

In this moment, I realize. I forgot to brush my hair this morning. What an oversight. If I can’t manage that, what else have I done without realizing? 

“All I ask is that you prove you didn’t steal the whiteboard. Simple, right? If you can prove your innocence, the matter is closed. If not, we are talking about disciplinary action. Perhaps termination.” 

I nod reluctantly. 

“Everything from this point on will determine how we proceed. Do you understand?” 

I nod again. 

“Do you know what happened to the whiteboard?” 

I shake my head. 

“Have you ever touched office equipment that didn’t belong to your section?” 

I hesitate. Of course I have. I nod. 

“So you admit it,” he snaps. 

“Admit what?” I ask, confused. 

“You admit to tampering with company property in direct violation of policy.” 

“I admit I’ve touched office equipment,” I protest. The phone rings. 

“Return to your desk,” he says, turning away. 

What just happened?

I stand, dazed, both fists clenched as I walk back to my desk. 

“Oh, and take some pride in your appearance. Coming to work disheveled reflects poorly on the company.” 

As I sink into my chair, the office is silent. Everyone stands, watching. The meerkats are on guard. The lions have caught the scent of prey. 

I stare at the blank glow of my computer screen. 

The weight of sins I never committed crushes my chest. I wish I was the culprit. At least then I could control my fate. I’d strangle this farce in its crib. 

Instead, I sit here. Innocent and guilty all at once. Schrödinger’s employee. 

A tall man appears at the edge of my cubicle. Menacing and brutal. His hands look as though they could crush the life out of me. 

“Come with me,” he says sternly. 

“Where are we going?” I manage as I grab my bag. 

“This way.” He walks with purpose, but slowly. 

We move to the back of the office. The lights are dimmer here. A dying bulb flickers; it’s near death. 

A row of doors greets us in the growing darkness. 

“Here,” the tall man gestures to an open room. “Continue your work. Someone will be along shortly to collect you.” 

The room is barren. Four walls. No window. The desk is empty except for a single chair. 

The door slams shut. 

I sit. The chair groans under me. As I lean back, its spine gives way, and I nearly topple over.

How can I work without a computer? They want me to stew in guilt. A guilt I shouldn’t feel, but it’s flooding me all the same. Did I do this? No. Of course not. I would remember. Wouldn’t I? 

I should shout at the top of my lungs, “I am innocent! I’ve done nothing!” 

Instead, I sit in silence, judged and exiled. 

Time dissolves. Minutes, hours? I can’t tell. Humans spent centuries mastering time, measuring it to feel in control. Yet here, time is meaningless. 

Soon they’ll come to walk me out like a criminal on his final march to the gas chamber. 

Will the meerkats avert their eyes when I pass? Or will they jeer and chant in unison: 

“You’ve earned this! No mercy for the wicked! Finally, his reign of terror is over!” 

The chair screeches. The walls close in. 

How much longer will I wait? 

I should storm out. Seize my fate. Preach hellfire like a Baptist minister: Sinners! Every one of you is a sinner, and only through fire can you be forgiven! 

But I don’t move. 

I lean back in the broken chair, staring at the ceiling lights. I close my eyes, letting the glow filter through my lids. I imagine golden light washing over me, purifying me. 

Grace. 

“Sleeping on the job?” 

The tall man’s voice cuts through my baptism. He stares down at me with cold contempt. Those hands balled into fists.

“He’s ready for you,” he says. 

Here we go. 

I stand and follow him. Thoughts of thick crowds, gallows, and a swinging noose swirl in my mind. 

But the office is silent. No faces. No jeers. Of course, it’s not a public execution. It’s a purge. Silent. Efficient. 

The supervisor stands with arms crossed, fire burning in his eyes. The meerkats are gone, burrowed deep underground. 

“Sit,” he commands. 

I sit, my stomach in my throat. 

“Sir, I would like to say…” 

“No.” He raises a hand. “No need to apologize to me. It is the people you should be apologizing to. The group is more important than the individual.” 

I shift unsteadily in my chair. 

“You’ll give a formal apology to the entire office,” he continues. “Additionally, you will be docked a day’s pay. You’ve been here all day and failed to even log in. You have cost this company enough with your disruptions. Any more inappropriate conduct from you, and I will replace you. Understand?” 

My face burns. Rage coils tight beneath my skin. I nod once, stiffly. 

“Good.” 

He smacks his hands together sharply. CLAP. “You’re ready, I hope.” 

We exit the office into a sea of faces. 

“Attention, everyone!” the supervisor shouts. “We don’t allow unprofessional conduct here. When a cog is out of sync, the whole machine breaks down. Now it is time to set the cog on this machine back into place.” 

He turns to me. 

“Well?” 

Blood drains from my face. Every eye pierces me like a blade. 

I should shout my innocence. Condemn the system that crushes us all. But the words won’t come. Why can’t I think of anything? 

“I apologize,” I whisper. 

The supervisor cuts me off. 

“There. The affair is over. No more interruptions, back to work.” 

He faces me. 

“No more screw-ups. And please, catch up on your hours before you leave.” 

I walk towards my cubicle and pause a moment when a familiar figure catches my eye. The short man sits at his desk, typing away, oblivious to me. 

I glance at the printer as it hums to life. A single sheet slides out: a comic strip. 

With a smug satisfaction he reaches over and clips it to a whiteboard. 

I hadn’t noticed it at first. The whiteboard stands there, whole and unremarkable, a monolith to this short man’s whole belief system. 

Multiple comic strips are clipped across its surface. I stare at the back of his head. 

“I see it’s been returned,” I say quietly.

“What? What are you talking about?” he replies, not turning around. 

“The whiteboard. It’s back.” 

He pauses. 

“Hmm… So it is,” he mutters, still turned away. 

I wait for him to say more, but he doesn’t. He’s already forgotten me.

The post The Idol appeared first on The New Absurdist.

They liked flying, actually. Cramped over the meditative throat-singing of the 747’s turbines, they indulged in the vapid shadows of deep space, blue aisle lights framing the edges of their ice solid feet, unfeeling ass, brittle shoulders, fuzzy throat. A pleasing sight the flight tracker was. They caressed the pixelated plane with their eyes, following its bright tail over the lapis of this rendition of Earth. You couldn’t tell by looking, but, by watching, they observed the tail stretch longer and longer. Their limbs stale and content. No need for binoculars for this type of birdwatching. What a thrill! 

A sudden white light flashed to their right. According to the plastic cage holding this most-watched bird, the time of origin was 05:32. Sour morning breath. Thoughts with all their carbonation lost. And yet, the white of a freshly opened laptop screen polluted the view. They blinked. Would asking their seatmate to shut their laptop be worth cracking away the crisp posture they’ve set themselves in? At least glassy eyeballs slid around easily; their seatmate clicked around a scant paragraph displayed on the screen as if scratching around would reveal the vocabulary they were looking for. 

“It’s a eulogy.” 

They pondered if their pudding was setting by gelatin. Agar agar is a common vegetarian option, although it produces a sharper jelly texture. They preferred konjac-based puddings, wondering if mallard ducks or, maybe, tufted titmice liked… 

“…huh?” 

“It’s a eulogy.” The window-seater rubbed the cord of their hoodie. They removed their other hand from their chin, resting it back onto the keyboard. “The hell am I supposed to even say,” they mumbled. Their chin rested back into their palm. “I barely even knew them.” 

The hours of building up crust in their joints tumbled away as they turned towards this eulogy-less seat partner and observed their document with a closer eye. 

“You’ve been staring. Looked like you wanted to know.” 

Look again. Maybe this person hasn’t ever had a whole steamed fish before. Just quinoa salads and diet soda, sans eyeballs. “I don’t know how helpful I’d be though.” 

“Hm.” They clicked around the document. “I would appreciate an outside opinion.” 

“I’m afraid I’m no expert on funerals. I’ve never died before.” 

“Huh. Me neither.” They looked up from their bright rectangle. “It looks like we have some common ground.” 

Why did they taste a bit of earnestness from them both? 

“When’s the uh, the funeral?” 

Their seatmate finished blinking away the afterimage. “It’s tomorrow. Or, actually, I guess tomorrow is today. It’s today.” 

Pudding doesn’t set completely when disturbed. A total bummer. No one likes a runny, unexciting custard soup. Not even a rock pigeon. “I’m sorry, you said you’re not close with them?” 

“Mmm.” 

“So why are you the one writing it?” 

“Parents passed. No siblings. No spouse. Didn’t really speak with anyone at work. Just me, but it’s not like they could’ve given their reports to no one.” 

They decided to also rest their chin onto their palm. Perhaps sitting the same way would spark some ideas about this stranger’s lonely life. 

“I don’t know if I can even say nice things about their work. They were always late-always needed extensions. Their slides were garbage. But they were the only one who knew how to refill our printer toner. They worked at that printer company before it went down, and none of the original documents were saved. Big boss never got us a new one. Or a new printer.” Their seatmate turned their neck and gazed out into the darkness punctured occasionally by a red light on the tip of the wing, this portal shallower than the abysmal document on their screen. 

“I’m pressured to feel a bit of grief, but I can only lie about them so much before my conscience corrects. They’ll always be my employee. A child to a couple. A refiller of printer toner. But…” They watched the wing’s lights flutter. 

“…it’s all relative to something else. Always dependent on another. I’m trying to speak about them as an individual, but I’m finding that no form of their person exists without the presence of another. Just a possession by syntactical possessiveness. No matter how I describe them, it must be tied to a person, a setting, a role. Even in the act of falsely describing them as a hard-worker, it implies that they are more hard-working than the persons around them. Such a simple adjective like ‘polite’ requires that a set of the impolite to exist. They cannot be independent despite living such a separated life because their mere existence requires relative existing entities to be judged against. I cannot even describe them as dead without acknowledging the living, or the definition holds no meaning. 

“We can only live to exist relative to the other. We can only exist, in life or death, in relation to that which exists pre- and post-self. For something to exist at all, it must exist within the bounds of another’s existence. We live to be something to another, and them to us. To exist, even, defines the binary of not existing. We live a life deprived of a mutual exclusivity in our autonomy. Is life just about how you live in comparison to others?” 

They couldn’t express their gratitude without disturbing the newly setting pudding forming at their brow bone. This one felt particularly promising, like the red and green cubes neighboring cantaloupe and honeydew at the buffet. Before shifting from their palm back into their seat, they waited for the bright tail to stretch another pixel or two. 

And waited. 

Even after blinking another coat of sticky sweet glaze over their eyes, the tail remained the same length. 

“I can even make an example out of us now. We are occupying these seats strictly because the other ones are empty.” 

“What?” 

“We can’t describe ourselves as seat-occupiers without acknowledging that the others are vacant.” Their seatmate, unmoving, continued to suffocate themselves in the black sky. 

“What do you mean they’re-” Their words caught at the sight of the untouched seatbelts and smooth, pleather seats to their right. Their seatbelt dug into their thighs when they whipped up. Not a single head populated the layers of seats in front of them. Not a single face greeted theirs at full turn of their neck. “What?” Touching their temple left a sticky residue on their fingertips. Red and green syrup dripped down their jaw and trailed onto their neck. 

They fumbled their seat belt open and stumbled forwards up the aisle. “I’m sorry, but, what?” Their tailbone, legs, heels, and toes buzzed angrily with static. No attendants in sight either. Row after row of screens greeted no one with “Welcome. Bienvenidos. Bienvenue. 迎。 

Not one body in first class either. Syrup dribbled onto their collar bone. They tried the cockpit door handle, frightened by how it swung open with ease. 

Empty. 

“Living just to be dependent. Living just to have others depend on you.” Their voice rang clear through the darkness the plane pierced through. 

They turned back around and streaked past the first-class curtain. They were sitting exactly as they had been, face engulfed in the ink beyond. 

Their voice seeped from the syrup, and their skin greedily sponged it up. “You can only describe me as alive because I can describe you as dead. Isn’t that right?” 

Their skin crystallized at the riverbanks and tides of the syrup that crashed over their body. Each sandy wrinkle eroded to dust, filling the plane as it shifted around folded tray tables and overhead bins. Powder hugged glazed walls. 

“In loving memory of one of my best employees, it would be a grave understatement to say I wouldn’t be here today without them.” 

The post Eulogy Pudding, Fresh-Glazed appeared first on The New Absurdist.

And oh it was hot. Hot like Old Testament Lot, all mad/sad that his wife wanted to watch her friends go to ash. But what the hell was I doing there, then? Same exact thing. Only I didn’t care which one of us got to see the other go, didn’t matter if it was Helen or me. One of us would be cinder and the other salt. Here there was no skin-of-his-teeth, “wasn’t my fault,” Sodomite. And, anyway, Helen and I were not married.

I had been dating this girl who looked like a living Modigliani. The stretched limbs and dead eyes that are – as static modernist art – the pulse of surface beauty. But find someone who looks like this for real and it is not nice to gaze upon. I didn’t even like her for “who she was,” for, whatever that might have entailed, Helen was a creature who infatuated me because of her untranslatable nature, her put-off presence, her lines and planes. After our third date I knew she felt the same way about me. And now we had been seeing each other for three months and we kept meeting up for dates – never breaking them, I mean. Helen needs glasses and never wears them, so in her eyes I come off like one of Francis Bacon’s guilty men: red and pink and then too white, when I laugh I become all mouth, bragging about gums and no good can come out of me. 

I gave up on the window, got out of the car and found my way to my seat in the third row.  Helen’s always late. There is no one else who looks like me. So, I was thinking: if she gets here then no problem. Her eyes will adjust over the seats and she’ll find me. Or she won’t show up and she’ll have beaten me at this. Our relationship was this tight Rock, Paper, Scissors-thing that became evermore steeped in the stress of how used to each other we were getting. It had always been clear in our silence how we would end. One of us would stand the other one up, and this crowning act of negligence – no matter how much we’d spoken to each other on the phone or written postcards, smiled to our families whenever we mentioned who we were seeing, what we did on our evenings out – would end it. And, like I said, we had never broken a date.  

Every Thursday night the In-Joke shows two short local films before the main feature.  As I waited for Helen I watched a carnival movie. Seventeen minutes in and it still looked like there would be no fun, not even that rank howl of the dark carnival time. Although, I did feel the pain of sweaty things: there was a jar of some amniotic-looking fluid sitting atop a rotten workbench, there was a lot of sawdust, and the score was a very drunken sounding harpsichord. 

If the flick didn’t keep flashing the words CARNIVAL, I would have forgotten what I was watching. I was thinking that this was my chance; this was the sheer space I needed to make my exit. Like: Well, I was getting sick just waiting for you to show, these student films are all so painful. Why do you get to be late? This is wrong. I’m out of here, babe. But the picture ended and I let go of my tension as the commercials came on. BUY A SODA, the words so red that you felt thirst; and a child of – I was guessing – eleven holding a chocolate bar to her lips and not smiling, really looking bored, like she didn’t need this chocolate, or like she was so used to eating chocolate that it did nothing for her. I was calm now, not wanting to ever drink a soda or eat a chocolate bar again. And now the second film. A horror movie, a black and white thing called Wrist. Aptly named and well paced. This guy gets off his convenience store job, and on his walk home nearly trips over something sticking out of the ground. He looks down and it is this finger bone. There is a thirty second camera swim around the porous object, and heaven music – synthetic organ and wash out-waves that warmed my neck, made me smile. Cut to the guy trying to dig it up. His fingers rubbing out the soft earth around the bone. We see his wrists working like he’s untying someone that needs clock-stop rescuing. There is no music when he does this, but the pant and gasp of our hero’s determination. Now the hand bones are exposed.  And again: thirty seconds of a camera inspection, that same alcohol soaked cotton balls, then rubbed along the spine-music. He keeps on digging and we go down the wrist bone. Four inches down – the work, so easy – the guy starts to pull at the ossified appendage; handshake grip like his wrists and dead wrist have always been buddies. And he yanks the arm out, too far but the bone won’t stop. How long can this go on? When the guy sees that the single bone has revealed itself to be as long as a short leg, he takes a breather. Then slowly starts the inevitable pull again.  He is cautious now, not panting. In the corner of the screen the sky is changing, the sun is coming up. The screen goes to black. The film is over. I’m glad I saw it, but wish I could forget every moment. 

And this was my cue to leave. If I wanted to be the guy who cut it close but in the end bailed, I had to get up right then before Helen showed. There are never any trailers before the main feature. And I was sitting in the dark. I could hear the breaks in the film, the switch of audio levels. The screen kept flicking bright empty projections of no show. My eyes adjusted to having to seize quick sight and I noticed that Helen was sitting to my left, a seat away from me, looking at the same white surface. She couldn’t have been there for much more than a few minutes. She looked at me then pulled up a large tub of popcorn from her lap to offer me some.  I didn’t want to eat unless the main feature was playing. But when was it going to start? This was uncomfortable. 

We had shown up. Helen and I had kept up our part of the deal, but the movie hadn’t.  And now: not even the courtesy of erratic flickering, just the integrity of projector light unfiltered by any film. The sharp planes of Helen’s face and the pale lip-skin that detailed her pout had never cooperated so tightly before. She opened her mouth to ask me something, but didn’t say a word, and after a moment let it close. 

The screen went to black, then white again. The audio was being messed with. There was a sizzle-hissing noise coming from the speakers that were lined along the theater walls. Helen put her hand in the bucket of popcorn while I, before she could pull it out, cupped my fingers over her knuckle. My palm was growing cold, sweaty; but I left it there, counting to twenty and staring at the white screen, all the while knowing that we were both looking up at that sheet of silence, of bye-bye surrender. I let go of her, then stood up, really thinking that I was going to the concession stand to get a bottled water. I mean totally believing that, so much so that I didn’t even tell Helen what I was getting up for.  

But moving out of the theater and into the lobby I just kept walking. Slow pace-like; zombie sauntering toward final rest or little boy looking for an expensive toy he was warned against losing. I walked out of the cinema and then over to my car. There was a guy standing on a ladder and changing the letters on the marquee. And there was a pink flyer under my windshield wiper. I opened the car door. Water had collected in the driver’s seat. It was not raining, but it had. While I was inside, it had rained. 

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Cole left his desk and stood in the office doorway. “You doing okay, buddy?” he asked.

Imad regarded him with eyes that seemed too big for his face. “I’ve been under the weather,” he replied. “Too much reading. You know how it is.”

“I’m more of an audiobook man myself.” Cole cleared his throat. “Listen, Imad. I don’t mean to be rude, but you don’t look so great. Do you want to sit down before you head out? I’ve still got some soda from the graduation party in the minifridge. You’d be doing me a favor if you took one.”

A wan smile surfaced on Imad’s face. He took a step toward the office, but his expression twisted into a grimace as his laptop bag shifted against his side. “Thanks, but I’d better get going,” he muttered.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to call someone? Like a Lyft or something?” Cole offered, but Imad shook his head and slipped through the door to the stairs. 

Cole watched as he left. It was hard to tell in the dim light of the corridor, but he could have sworn he saw a sheen of sweat on Imad’s forehead. It was probably nothing more serious than a summer cold, but Cole wondered what Imad could have read to make his face so pale. 

As he indulged in speculation, Cole’s imagination got the better of him. Miskatonic University was famous for housing a large collection of books once deemed heretical by the large universities in Boston. Even today, books bound in human skin occupied a substantial division of the library archives. What if Imad had gotten sick from contact with one of the books in the special collections?

A story about a forbidden book would make a great podcast episode. The most downloaded episode on Cole’s feed was a story about a cursed doll he’d found on Etsy. Creepy dolls were a dime a dozen, but the pink mildew poking out of this doll’s cracked porcelain scalp was something special. The listing said the seller was local, so Cole sent her a message and requested an in-person viewing of the doll. The seller immediately replied with her address.

When Cole drove over, he found the doll perched on the edge of the rotting concrete porch of an abandoned wastewater plant. It sat in a puddle of something that wasn’t quite liquid. Cole was painfully aware that he’d walked headlong into a prank, but he didn’t touch the doll. He had no interest in mucking about with the neon fungus infesting its hair, but he was more than happy to take a photo. 

Cole invented a lurid story about the doll for his podcast. Sure enough, listeners loved it. He resented the popularity of such obvious clickbait, but it served its purpose. For a time, at least. As was so often the case with online content, interest waned quickly. He needed another hit. Cole fancied himself to be a literary horror specialist, and he used his show to discuss writers like M.R. James and Elizabeth Gaskell alongside twentieth-century film noir. An episode about a cursed book had the potential to draw an audience, and it would be a much better ambassador for the show than a fabricated story about a cursed doll.

When he introduced himself at department parties, Cole didn’t hesitate to tell new acquaintances that he hosted a podcast. He’d even printed a business card on handsome matte black cardstock with his name and website. Most people accepted the card, but very few asked him what he meant when he described his field as “dark academia.” Perhaps they assumed he was complaining about grad school. 

To be fair, Cole had tried his hand at a graduate program, but only briefly, and only at a small department at a state school in Ohio. The college’s fluorescent-lit cinderblock buildings didn’t contribute to a scholarly state of mind, and Cole dropped out after his first semester. He took the opportunity to relocate to Boston, where he found a job writing copy for the alumni magazine of a liberal arts school. 

Far from being the ancient and shadow-blighted city he’d read so much about, Boston was a textbook case of gentrification, especially the neighborhood around the university. After a year of mounting debt with nary a Gothic spire in sight, Cole found a listing for an administrative assistant at the Classics Department of Miskatonic University in Arkham. There wasn’t much charm or prestige out in the Essex County suburbs, but it was hard to deny the lure of cutting his rent in half. 

Cole was interviewed by the department chair, a harassed-looking elderly gentleman in a threadbare blazer. The chair informed Cole that there were no other applicants, and that the position was his if he wanted it. He would be working under the head administrator, a cheerful red-faced woman named Peggy who introduced herself with a wave. The chair didn’t seem overly concerned with how the department was run, and Cole suspected that Peggy had acquired the blush on her cheeks from a liquid lunch. He accepted the job on the spot.

The Classics Department was like any other office, equipped with outdated computers and furniture straight from wholesale. The industrial wall-to-wall carpeting bore the stains of years of department parties, and a neglected snake plant struggled valiantly by the lone window. Cole didn’t see much of the professors, and the grad students were an uninspiring bunch interested primarily in gossip. 

Imad was different. As far as Cole could tell, he was the only person who made use of the shared grad student office. He came in every afternoon, and he always stopped by the department office to say hello before disappearing into the small room at the end of the corridor.

Imad told Cole that he was working on his dissertation, a comparison of Near Eastern gnostic texts from the seventh and eighth centuries. He more properly belonged to the Religious Studies department, he’d explained, but it was dissolved the same semester he finished his coursework. Cole didn’t follow his breakdown of the situation, which had something to do with falling enrollments and shrinking budgets, but he understood that Imad had been taken in by the Classics Department as a courtesy. 

Cole asked about the progress of Imad’s work every afternoon, and Imad was always ready with a concise and practical explanation. It didn’t escape Cole’s notice that Imad was blessed with a mellow yet resonant voice that would sound excellent on tape.

Cole gradually developed a casual friendship with Imad over the course of the spring semester, and he came to look forward to Imad’s visits to the office. Once classes ended and the students disappeared from campus, however, Imad started to change. He lost weight, and his cheeks became so hollow that his eyes seemed to bulge from his face. The golden tan of his skin faded to a sickly olive. His beard was patchy and uneven. 

And there was another thing. Imad had begun to smell. The odor that lingered behind him wasn’t unpleasant, but it was odd. The smell reminded Cole of wet asphalt drying in the sun after the rain. Or like an antique doll sitting in a puddle of creosotic slime outside an abandoned water treatment plant in the twilight of rural Ohio. 

Cursed book or not, something was going on, and Cole figured that he owed it to himself to get to the bottom of whatever was troubling Imad. With almost no work over the summer and a boss who only rarely bothered to show up to the office, it’s not as if he had anything else to do. 

There weren’t many students on campus during the summer. Truth be told, there weren’t many students on campus during the school year. Cole was given to understand that Miskatonic’s enrollments had been falling with each successive semester. This didn’t surprise him. The campus was filled with stately old buildings, but none of them had been maintained for years. The gym had been built in the 1970s, and the dorms a decade earlier. It wasn’t the sort of place that attracted students. 

Regardless, Cole was required to be in the office until the end of working hours. He replied to emails in the morning and spent the afternoon in comfortable solitude searching for stories online. 

He’d recently started researching the Theosophical Society Lodge next to campus. The Lodge had supposedly held seances well into the twentieth century, but they apparently stopped on the eve of the Great War. The building now housed a library that served as a stage for public lectures on world religions, some of which had been recorded.  

Cole had just downloaded the most recent lecture when Imad walked into the office. He looked even worse than usual. His face had gone from olive to yellow, and the sheen of grease on his forehead was unmistakable.

Cole swallowed his shock as he greeted Imad. “Hey, so,” he began. “I was reading about modern Gnosticism. Not much to do here over the summer, right? And I was wondering. How would you pronounce, ah, Mandaeism?”

“Mandaeism? You pronounced it correctly. The Arabic is al-Mandāʾiyya, but Mandaeism is fine for general use. Why do you ask?”

“I was fishing for material for my podcast. I read that a lot of Iraqis moved to the suburbs of DC during the early 2000s. Apparently, one community brought lead amulets written in a form of Aramaic that no one at the Smithsonian can read.” 

“I wouldn’t say that no one can read them,” Imad replied. “Even if the ganzibria priests couldn’t transliterate the written text, they’d be able to recite the historiola.”

“The historiola? I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with that term.”

“A historiola is a short story about a ritual. The act of reading the story functions as a performance of the ritual itself, like a magic spell.”

“How does that work?” Cole asked. 

Imad shrugged. “It’s magic. Who can say how it works? Still, it’s probably for the best that no one at the Smithsonian can read the amulets. You wouldn’t want to pronounce the Aramaic with too much accuracy. If the divine creator brought this world into existence with a word, it stands to reason that another word might open the gates between worlds. That’s a metaphor for the expansiveness of spirituality, of course,” he added with a smile, “but one can never be too careful.”

“Interesting,” Cole said, and it was. The idea that the act of reading could serve as a magic ritual was intriguing. “So what are you translating this afternoon?”

“Well,” Imad started to say, but he winced as he leaned against the waist-high counter separating the office from the faculty mailboxes. It could have been a trick of the light, but something seemed to ripple under his layers of sweaters.

Imad caught the look of concern on Cole’s face. “Sorry,” he said as he turned toward the door. “I might have had too much tea with lunch. I’m going to visit the bathroom and head to my office.”

Cole nodded and returned his eyes to his computer screen, hoping that he’d staged a decent performance of polite interest. He hesitated to cross the line of professional distance with the members of his department. He couldn’t afford to move back to Boston, and he needed this job. Arkham wasn’t the most prosperous suburb, and the only other paying work he’d be likely to find here was at the fulfillment center warehouse by the highway. 

Still, he liked Imad. Professionalism be damned. 

Later that afternoon, he brewed two bags of mint tea in paper cups and carried them down the hall to the graduate student office. When Imad answered the door, Cole was struck by the wet smell that emerged from the room. It was as if something spilled on the carpet and never dried properly. 

“So I was thinking,” he said, “no one is using the department chair’s office over the summer. I was planning to air it out a bit. Care to join me?” 

The chair’s office was lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and equipped with the sort of grommeted furniture that populated movies about gentlemen explorers. It smelled like fine paper and old leather, and the sunlight that filtered through the cloudy panes of glass in the mullioned windows was bright but gentle.

 “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me what you’re working on?” Cole asked as he sat down. 

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to talk about it,” Imad replied. He sank back in his chair as he took a long sip of tea. “At the moment I’m working on a translation of the Kitab al-Azif. This is a gnostic text that originated somewhere in the vicinity of Yemen in the early eighth century. It was believed to have potent magical properties, and it was translated into several languages over the centuries. 

“Manuscripts of the Azif managed to travel around the world, but they’re remarkably rare. When I was doing research for my MA thesis, I’d see one translation or another cited in various papers, but I could never find the original source. It turns out that the only physical copies in the United States are held by the Miskatonic library, which is why I applied to do my PhD here. 

“I thought it might be interesting to compare the versions to understand how key phrases were translated by different cultures. When I spoke to the head of Special Collections here at our library, she was happy to share a PDF of a tenth-century Arabic manuscript held by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The file isn’t the best quality, to be honest. The manuscript is a copy of a copy of a copy, and the source is badly damaged. I’m doing the best I can with what I have available. 

“I’d like to write a grant to go see the original in person, but I’m not at that stage yet. Maybe next spring? I could use a vacation.” Imad shrugged and took another sip of tea. Cole was relieved to see the color returning to his face. 

“So this Kitab al…”

“Azif. It’s a poetic word that refers to the chirping of nocturnal insects.”

“So this Kitab al-Azif, what’s it about? If that’s the right question.”

“No, that’s a great question. The book holds that there’s a deeper truth to the universe, and the author – we don’t know his true name – tells a remarkably coherent story as he explains what this supposed truth is. He claims that our universe is like the thin film on the surface of a bubble, and he believes that there are all manner of things outside the bubble we can’t see. 

“This isn’t an original idea, but what’s interesting about the Azif is that its author provides a history of our planet long before humans lived here. Most creation myths describe humans as being brought into existence shortly after the universe itself, but the Azif speaks of genesis in terms of cycles. People that weren’t human inhabited the planet before us, and people who aren’t human will live here after us.”

“That sounds kind of Buddhist,” Cole cut in.     

“Exactly! There’s a great deal of Eastern thought incorporated into these ideas. All times exist at once, simultaneously, and in different dimensions. The borders between dimensions can be weakened by magic, supposedly. By the act of reading the Azif, the creatures occupying other dimensions can be invited into our own world.” 

“I’d love to meet them,” Cole remarked. “I wonder what they look like?”

Imad stared at his tea as he shifted the paper cup between his hands. “They’re probably not what you expect. I think we’ve gotten used to the strange creatures that appear in movies. When you finally see the monster on the other side of the door, it becomes familiar, like a type of mascot. We can see horrible things online whenever we want, from deep sea fish to the microorganisms that live inside our bodies, and we’ve learned to love them. But maybe there are things out there that are so alien that we’ll never be able to process them, either intellectually or emotionally.

“Gnosticism seems so natural in the twenty-first century, doesn’t it? Of course there’s a deeper truth to the universe. All we have to do is use science to figure it out. People publish their findings, and what they learn becomes real to us in the form of technological innovation. But the modern Western world didn’t invent science. Other cultures studied the stars and the principles of chemistry and physics long before Aristotle began giving lectures at his Lyceum. So why did gnostic ideas fall out of favor? Why did people stop thinking about the universe as a malleable series of experiential planes? I wonder if perhaps someone saw the monster on the other side of the door and decided that it would be better if the truth remained hidden.”

“Wow. I wish I could have recorded that.”

  Imad looked up from his tea. “What do you mean?”

“That would have been a fantastic interview for my podcast. You have a great voice for audio.”

“Do I?” Imad laughed, but his mirth vanished as his face twisted into a grimace.

Cole frowned. “Listen, Imad. You’re really not looking so great.”

“I’m fine.” As Imad rose to his feet, Cole couldn’t help notice the awkward movement of his body. The way his sweaters bunched around his torso was decidedly odd. Something like a thick strip of cloth hung from the back of the layers of fabric. As Cole watched Imad leave the room, he could have sworn that it twitched.

Cole returned to campus later that evening. He unlocked the department office and sat at his desk without turning on the lights. He considered making a show of checking his email, but the performance would be for no one’s benefit but his own. As long as he was here, he might as well get this over with. 

Cole wanted to tell himself he was sneaking around for Imad’s own good. That was true, to a certain extent, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He’d always regretted not investigating the waterlogged doll, and he promised himself that he wouldn’t pass up an opportunity like that again. Still, as he set off down the dim corridor of faculty offices, he couldn’t help but feel guilty. The grad student office wasn’t a private space, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t violating Imad’s trust. 

There was no strange smell when he opened the office door, just the lingering aroma of bergamot tea. The two cubicles closest to the door were empty. Imad had claimed the cubicle by the window, and he’d dragged a table next to the wall behind his chair. It was covered in library books.

There was nothing unusual on Imad’s desk – a bottle of aspirin, a jumble of cheap pens, and a spare phone charger. He hadn’t pinned any photos to the corkboard cubicle divider, but a collection of thank-you cards from students was propped in a corner. Several manilla folders were stacked on top of each other in the opposite corner, each neatly labeled in Arabic.

Cole opened one of the folders. The paper inside was covered in dark smudges. This must be a copy of the manuscript scan Imad told him about. Cole didn’t know anything about Arabic, but even he could tell how bad the image quality was. It was amazing that Imad could read this at all. Interleaved between the photocopies were pages torn from a yellow legal pad. The loose papers were covered with annotations surrounding a handwritten English translation.

 Cole scanned what Imad had written, but none of it made sense to him. As far as he could tell, this particular passage had something to do with constellations. The next page was a clean photocopy of what must be a Latin translation, and the next was a translation of the Latin into severely antiquated English. Under that was a printed copy of the Wikipedia page about the sky quadrants used by medieval astronomers.

Something seized in Cole’s chest as he flipped through the pages. This was exactly the sort of academic work he once imagined himself doing. A lone scholar sitting at a quiet desk with nothing but paper and a pen as he studied ancient texts, taking careful notes while excavating the meaning of words written in centuries past. There was a certain romance to the idea, and Cole wasn’t at all surprised to find that Imad’s handwriting was as beautiful as his voice.

He picked up the legal pad sitting at the center of the desk and flipped to the last few pages. A word written in capital letters immediately caught his attention: SHOGGOTH. Under it, Imad had written: “What is formless will be given form. The shoggoth will heed the call of its creator, if called in a [dream??] voice speaking its proper name. That which hides in the deathless gap between hours can be retrieved by a shoggoth, grasped within its hands without hands.”

The next page contained a series of vectors that Imad had labeled with numbers and overlaid with pencil sketches of constellations. Cole recognized the Big Dipper of Ursa Major, as well as the three stars of Orion’s Belt, but something about the angles formed by the connected lines felt wrong. Looking at them too closely made his head hurt. 

The next page was a photocopy of an illuminated manuscript written in Latin. Cole didn’t understand Imad’s annotations, many of which were crossed out, but a square yellow sticky note appended to the bottom of the page caught his attention. Almost without being aware of it, he read the note out loud. “The hands without hands, fhtagn ph’nglui.”

As the words left his mouth, the image of the thick pale thread emerging from Imad’s sweaters jumped into Cole’s mind. He was struck by the smell of water. Roiling seas under an endless expanse of sky, stars and constellations without number, pinpricks of light fitting together into an intricate matrix of impossible geometry.

Something unpleasant rose in his throat. He barely made it to the bathroom in time.

Cole couldn’t leave the building quickly enough. He was sick again in the bushes beside the parking lot.

It was only sitting in his car, with the air conditioning blasting in his face, that his nausea dissipated. As he clutched the wheel, Cole chided himself for letting his imagination get the better of him. A cursed book was all well and good, but the notion of a cursed photocopy was absurd. He’d managed to spook himself for no reason. Whatever was going on with Imad had nothing to with star charts or Latin manuscripts. A section of the roof of Whateley Hall had collapsed during the heavy snowfall of the previous winter, and Cole wouldn’t be surprised if it had resulted in extensive water damage to the building. The insulation in the walls was more than likely riddled with mildew.  

Someone should get Imad set up in a different office. That someone, as it happened, was him. He’d bring it up tomorrow, Cole resolved as he backed out of his parking space. Still, he was troubled by the word Imad had written in rough letters at the top of his legal pad. What the hell was a shoggoth? 

Cole woke up the next morning haunted by a lingering sense of shame. What had possessed him to drive back to campus and sneak into Imad’s office? That was creepier than any cursed book could ever be. He needed to talk to Imad. Really talk to him. Maybe even ask him out to dinner.  

Cole washed his hair for the first time in a week and trimmed his beard as it dried. His apartment occupied the top floor of an old Queen Anne house, and the morning sun streamed through the tall windows under the peaked gambrel roof. Songbirds chirped in the branches of the stately ash tree growing beside the house. Cole had been toying with the possibility of moving back to Ohio, but he couldn’t deny that there was a certain charm to summer mornings in New England.

In the department office, he chatted with Peggy as he handled the visa paperwork of an incoming grad student, all the while feeling a sort of secondhand pride that someone would come all the way from abroad to study at Miskatonic. He ate lunch on the outside patio with the two elderly women who ran the office of the Modern Languages department. They showed him photos of their cats on their phones and told him stories about their grandchildren as they enjoyed the sunshine. Afterward, they brushed their teeth together in the women’s bathroom on the second floor, which they agreed was the nicest in Whateley Hall.

 Cole waited for Imad to come to the office. He waited so hard that he couldn’t read Wikipedia, not even the entry about the mysteriously nondescript warehouses used to house banks of internet servers. Everything he saw on social media annoyed him. Eventually he gave up on trying to do anything productive and opened a website that emulated screensavers from the 1990s.

After spending half an hour watching digital fish float through an overbright coral reef, Cole realized that he was being silly. It was a beautiful summer day. There was no need for him to kill time in an empty office while Imad was making himself sick looking at crusty photocopies of wizard nonsense for the sake of a dissertation that no one would ever read. 

Cole’s palms were sweaty as he knocked on the door of the grad student office. What if Imad had noticed that his research notes had been disturbed? 

“Imad?” he called out, but there was no answer. He wiped his hands on his pants before grasping the doorknob. At best, he’d have to apologize to Imad for going through his papers. At worst, he’d have to drive him to the hospital. 

There was another possibility: a void, a vacuum, a tear in the fabric of reality. A window opening onto an oceanic abyss trapped beneath sheets of ice for millennia. A silent city suspended under lightless stars. A multitude of insectile eyes focused on the present moment: a miniscule oasis in the ever-expanding desert of time and space. 

Cole opened the door. The office was empty.

The window was open, and a faint breeze carried the scent of freshly cut grass into the room. A ceramic mug of tea sat on the table next to a laptop with a burnished copper finish. 

Cole closed the door and stepped back into the corridor, where he was greeted by a strange but familiar smell. The odor wasn’t unpleasant, just unusual. It reminded him of the lake shore where his uncles had hosted cookouts when he was a kid. He’d spent most of his summers indoors, reading his way through the local library’s paltry stock of fiction. His isolation made the outings to the lake with his cousins all the sweeter. In truth, Cole loved the smell of water, and he had a good idea of where it was coming from. 

He retraced his steps down the corridor until he arrived at the bathroom by the elevators. With no hesitation whatsoever, he went inside. 

At first, Cole didn’t understand the sight that greeted him. He recognized Imad’s face, but it took a few seconds to process the rest of him. Five fleshy appendages ringed with red patches of irritated skin emerged from Imad’s naked torso. The tentacles were limp but twitched spasmodically. 

Beads of sweat pooled on Imad’s forehead as he stared at Cole in horror, his sweaters clutched in his hands. “Listen, I don’t… I mean, I can explain,” he stammered. 

“You can explain later,” Cole replied, his concern for Imad’s discomfort winning out over his shock. “Just sit tight. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

Cole dashed to the department office, hoping against hope that Imad didn’t flee. He grabbed a can of ginger ale from the office minifridge and rushed back to the bathroom.

He found Imad sitting on the bench by the door. His face was utterly forlorn, and his tentacles waved listlessly in Cole’s direction. 

“Buddy, you’ve got to hydrate,” Cole said, popping the tab on the can of ginger ale.  

Imad accepted the can with a curt nod and drank. When he finished, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “The words of the ritual,” he muttered. “The book was a historiola, but I got the words wrong. I couldn’t read them correctly.”

“Maybe you can get them to send you a better photocopy next time,” Cole replied. “For the time being, you need to take better care of yourself. Your, uh… Tentacles? Can I call them that? Whatever’s going on there. It looks like they’re irritated by your clothing. Peggy has a giant bottle of hand lotion on her desk. I’m sure she won’t mind if you use it.” 

“This doesn’t bother you?” Imad asked.  

“It’s not making you evil or anything, is it?”

“I don’t think so.” Imad’s shoulders sagged. “It’s just a lot to get used to. And sometimes I see things I’m not sure are actually there.”

“What type of things? Anything fun?”

Imad managed a weak grin. “Why? Do you still want to interview me for your podcast?”

“Forget the podcast. But I’d love to talk with you. I’m not busy right now. Do you want to take a walk? Maybe go out for coffee or something?”

Imad’s tentacles perked up at the question. “Are you asking me out?” 

“I… yes. I’m sorry if that’s not appropriate. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” 

“You don’t want to make me uncomfortable.” Imad stared at Cole in disbelief before breaking into laughter. His tentacles undulated with good cheer. 

Cole returned his smile. He’d been worried that something was terribly wrong with Imad, but this wasn’t so bad, all things considered. Imad’s tentacles were kind of cute. Perhaps they would have been more horrific if they’d come directly from a cursed book, but there wasn’t much damage a grainy photocopy could do. Whatever this Kitab al-Azif was, he and Imad could handle it together, preferably after they’d gotten something to eat. And who knows, it might even make a good episode for his podcast. 

The post The Annotated Kitab al-Azif appeared first on The New Absurdist.

Snow fell quiet in dropped cotton kisses. 

I wear my jacket in class every day. Mr. See’s classroom has one window that looks out on the parking lot below, and he keeps it open at all times, even over the weekend. Though I bet the janitors close it. Maybe he asked them not to. They would listen because everybody loves Mr. See. We shiver in the winter and learned quickly to take our jackets out of our lockers where we had stuffed them to wait out the day. Sometimes it’s kinda nice; fresh air dispersing the spritzes and sprays we swim around in. But it’s also super annoying. 

Snow sheeted the parking lot below the window, each and every car disappearing beneath a layer of icing. But Mr. See says that nature and love are the food of life, so we should embrace them when we have the chance, that we should always keep the window open. It just seems cold to me. 

Last week, Juliet came up to me and asked if I like cars. The skylight above our lockers was completely covered with snow, crystals shimmering over glass. How much pressure can those windows take? Would the frost break through and avalanche me alive? Would she dig through the snow to find me? You like cars too? She had asked. No, not really, but–Maybe I can.

She fixes them up and sells them, which is pretty cool. Maybe I can like cars, I told her. She laughed at that. I can like cars for that, I think. Silver bells. Sometimes my face turns pink. I hope it didn’t then. 

Mr. See said he wanted to tell us all a love story. We groaned–hadn’t Marquez done enough to us for one day? But it wasn’t Marquez’s story. It was Mr. See’s. A story about a different snowy day–before our class ever lost that blue dog’s eyes–and he was driving home early from school. The teachers, he said, they all leave school after we do. I guess we keep trying to hit them with our beat-up, hand-me-down cars on our way out of the parking lot, where we speed home or do doughnuts. He says we try to kill them–not on purpose, I don’t think, but either way, he waits until the coast is clear of all us scary teens. I don’t think I’ve almost hit someone before. I’d probably remember that. On this snowy day, though, he told us, he had to pick his kids up early for a doctor’s appointment, so he left halfway through the day during the group B lunch. My lunch is group A, which means I have to eat a turkey sandwich, curly fries, all washed down with a foil-clad juice packet at 10:30 in the morning, right before running a mile in gym class. It’s all sweat and turkey for the rest of the day, and that’s never seemed all that good to me. No wonder the hallways are rank and rotten. 

No wonder Mr. See lets in the snow. 

The juniors and seniors get to leave school for lunch if they want to, which is okay, but you’ve still got to have a car if you want to go anywhere other than Walmart. If you’re seventeen and have a car, you can get French fries from a McDonald’s down the street instead of the curly ones from the cafeteria down the stairs. I think the fries in the cafeteria are a lot better because they’re actually hot and they’re not soggy from a steaming journey in the passenger’s seat or held fast between some jock’s thighs. But an hour of freedom is worth floppy fries and getting older. I guess. 

That day with the “Eyes of a Blue Dog,” when Mr. See also told us his story, the window was open wide, and the snowflakes fell in marshmallow chunks. All we were thinking about was a snow day, about how much we had earned one. Would Juliet win in a snowball fight? I think she would. Flakes swirled downward. We thought about snow while Mr. See talked about the story, “Eyes of a Blue Dog.” Love and love and love, he said as the flakes layered over the windowsill. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said it, love, and love, I guess. In those trippy, dreamy words. 

I watched the snow swirling.  

In the art classroom, where I took drawing last year, they make a pot of coffee every day. You wander through the hallway, and it’s the normal nasty B.O., Axe body spray, and sticky, choking hormones at every twisting turn, but then you pass by the art room. And bam. Just coffee. Roasty and warm, and you can hear the sizzle and drip from the machine if you get there at the right time. And sometimes my 7:30 Red Bull isn’t good enough to make it to 9:00, let alone 10:00 or 11:00. And my mom told me that I can’t have two or else my heart will explode. That she worries, and I should eat an apple instead, some peanut butter, she says. But I don’t know about that. I usually pop into the writing room, make my way around, grab some coffee, and say hi to my old teachers from before. I think the teachers might be bored because they always wave and chatter when they see me. They ask about my weekend, about movies, and friends. It was boring, I tell them. Last weekend was too.

I wonder what Juliet watched this weekend–maybe YouTube or Batman–did she and her friends go to Joe’s for a burger and fries too? Maybe they hung out in the parking lot to eat in the curative weekend air. Maybe it was boring like mine. 

What does it look like? The two of them asked my class—Mr. Marquez and Mr. See asked us, talking about blue dogs and breaths of falling snow. What does it look like? Love? When it’s walking down the street, or wandering the fluorescent aisles in the grocery store, how about in the school hallway chaos, sweating at the 24-hour gym, driving around town for something interesting to do, in our dreams? 

Yesterday, when Juliet came up to me, she asked where I got the coffee. Hell, yeah. I can talk coffee. That’s what I told her. No problem. It was a white, winter day, and she was wearing a jacket like a skinned Muppet all purple and fuzzy. We stood just outside the front doors of the school, and everyone else swam around us while we talked. I like it when she talks about cars and the snowflakes stick like glitter to her lashes. All cars and snow and cars. What does it look like? They asked. 

I raised my hand because what the hell were they talking about? 

Love, Marquez said, whispering messages in dreams that leak. 

Mr. See nodded, love. 

I don’t know about that. 

When Juliet asked me where I got the coffee, I took her to the art room. This is Juliet, Juliet, these are the old teachers. I see them every day. My weekend was boring, I told them as we walked by. We–me and Juliet together–went over to the coffee pot, which was still dripping and hissing. The cups next to the pot aren’t really big enough, so I showed her how I usually grab one from the cupboard the teachers restock from.

I don’t need to ask, which is cool. 

She hadn’t met my counselor before. I wonder who hers is and if she likes them. I walked her back to the office while we waited for the drip to finish up. I can ask my counselor for stuff that I need, and he might say yes. That’s how I got my new glasses, but I don’t wear those at school. Just for homework and stuff, if I remember. 

This is Juliet, everyone. 

As the snow fell, Mr. See told us about that day. That other snowy day. He was sitting at a red light during B lunch. It’s when most of the juniors and seniors fly free. Big flakes slushed to icy puddles on the asphalt as he waited for green. Then love hit. 

Today, Juliet and I got coffee again, and I showed her where they keep the half-and-half and the sugar, too. They sometimes stash some secret snacks over there. Before class, we talked about coffee and cars, and curly fries. I wonder if I should sit next to her tomorrow. Or if that would be weird. Maybe I should ask Mr. See. 

Mr. See said that when he got hit that day in the snow while he waited for the light to turn green, the first thought he had was about his kids. He’s got two, I think. No. He’s got two, I know. He talks about them in every class at least one time. He said he saw their faces in his mind and heard their voices talking about soccer and cereal. When everything else went black. But he was okay. Only after he opened his eyes, after he was okay, he felt frustration. Felt annoyed, he said. Of car repairs, insurance companies, of being late to the doctor, and having to reschedule. Felt furious, he said. Of the faces of his sons, of his kids waiting, and worried, and wondering where he was. Of the awakened thought. Only a moment between him and his boys. Between never picking them up again. He should’ve waited, he said, just another hour, or should’ve asked his wife to grab them from school instead. But he was too excited to see them, he told us. To hear about soccer and cereal. 

I wonder if my dad would be excited to take me to the doctor. We might talk about coffee. Would he leave work early? In the snow. Talk about curly fries at school. I could ask Mr. See. Maybe the art teachers. What do they think? But it’s kind of boring. 

The insurance card was in Mr. See’s hand, hazards on, and he was closing the door behind him, but he told us, when he squinted through the falling snow, there was no movement in the other car. There was no damage, aside from his own headlight, he noticed after scoping out the scene, waving other drivers past. Lunchtime juniors and seniors. 

The snow makes everything quiet. It’s like a giant blanket smothering everything beneath it. And Mr. See’s head was hurting because he must have hit it in the clash. The flakes fell silent, and even all the cars going by seemed to hush past. No one stopped. They all drove by until there was no one left at that light but Mr. See. And the guy who hit him. 

There was no movement from the car. 

His frustration was rising–his kids would be waiting and worried–he marched over to the driver’s side door. Every window was completely fogged over, the driver invisible. What the hell was this joker doing? Mr. See swears like that sometimes, even in class. He knocked. No answer. 

A whole minute of knocking went by, then shivering, then knocking again. He had his phone open. 9-1-1, ready to go because something was wrong. Maybe he was hurt. Or maybe something else. But it was just a little bump. Just his own headlight. What was going on inside? And the snow was cold and quiet. 

It was enough. 

Mr. See yanked the door open, jumping back to a haul-ass position just in case.

I probably would’ve hit the deck no questions if it was me. Or ran away as fast as I could. Would my dad answer the phone if I called him then? I think he would. 

But Mr. See didn’t need to hit the deck. Or call his dad. 

It was just a kid. 

Probably a senior, sporting a letterman jacket, like the ones all the football players sport daily: red and blue, a design unwearable and embarrassing after high school except by burnt-out bummers or at some kind of reunion. I probably won’t go to those. Will Juliet? 

The angle was almost impossible to make out the letterman’s features. The guy’s left hand still had a death grip on the wheel. His body twisted, extended as far into the passenger side as he could go, clearly holding something below the passenger dash, eyes barely peeping above the wheel. 

Mr. See told us how his heart ran all around like a thumping, metal bassline. He was in the military, I think, so his imagination went off roaming. All of the things someone could be reaching for raced like Hell’s grocery list through his head. What did he have to be ready for? What did he have to do? 

Mr. See tried to visualize the details of his sons’ faces until, with wet, blue eyes, the letterman looked up at him. Tears streaming down his face, his chin quivered like frostbite. He desperately whimpered sorrys, hiccupped pleas of don’t call the cops, don’t call my mom, and what do I do nows. Mr. See went blank. 

The letterman choked how sorry, so, so sorry he was, sir, through macho tears. He couldn’t see the lines on the road because the windshield was all fogged up. Mr. See glanced around at the falling snow and the gray and silent sky, still eyeing the kid’s right hand, which hadn’t moved at all. And he nodded.

What he would give to be back in his own car, he said, driving to the doctor, his kids in the back fighting and playing, screeching, and laughing. He’s going to tell his kids this whole story when they’re older, I bet. Even the part where he nearly peed his pants and booked it when the letterman in the car suddenly straightened from the passenger’s side and aimed the contents of his right hand directly at Mr. See’s face. 

Everything stopped swirling. 

The kid blinked. 

Mr. See’s face must have looked wild, drained, and distorted. 

Then in a tiny mouse voice, the letterman whispered sorry he needed to keep them warm and sorry sorry. The heater was out on the driver’s side. He desperately needed to get back before the end of lunch because the fries he had brought for his girlfriend were getting cold, and she had broken her leg, and she was all alone, and she needed–the letterman’s eyes lagoon blue and overflowing, she loves fries, he choked. Lukewarm and soggy, he had to do his best. Had to make it back to her. He didn’t want her to slip on ice, so he went himself. Didn’t want her to fall and hurt herself, the letterman said, with eyes like a dog, and looked at the sloppy bag of fries in his outstretched hand, which were definitely worse than the ones in the cafeteria. But you pay a price for that taste of freedom. Even if it’s second-hand. I guess I’ll find out when I’m older. He had been holding the fries under the passenger’s side heater as he drove, so they wouldn’t get cold because she really needed a pick-me-up and and sorry sorry sorry. 

His blue eyes welled. 

Mr. See’s pulse steadied–it had been like a marching band going, thumping around his chest, he told us–but his breath calmed, and he nodded at the letterman before returning to his car, one headlight just a little messed up. The light turned green and he drove to pick up his kids. Snowflakes curled.  

That’s love, Mr see said after telling us a story about a gray and snowy day. What is? What is love, we asked? But he just smiled and told us to take out Pablo Neruda. The bell for lunch would ring in twenty-one minutes, and I bet I wasn’t the only one who could smell the fries–waiting for us, warm, crispy spirals in the cafeteria below. Juliet had asked what I was having for lunch. We could sit together, she said as the snow eddied, and I could almost taste those fries, rich and substantial. What was I doing for lunch? Fries. I think, and then I shrugged a little, like the guys in the movies do. How can you tell when something is significant? What was I doing for lunch? Sitting with you. I couldn’t say that, though. But she nodded at me anyway. So maybe we’ll sit together. Maybe she likes fries too. Outside, was a different world now, snow spiraled. Nothing looked like it had when the bus dropped me off in the morning. Now quilted in clear white, and a horizon of fries was twenty-one minutes away. Maybe. 

Mr. See sat on the windowsill, a winter breath from the open window twisting around him, and he held up Neruda. Love, he said. 

I opened my book. 

I don’t know about that.

The post Coffee Love and Curly Fries appeared first on The New Absurdist.

We all know why we’re here: our country is being stolen. They’re here to take our food, they’re  here to take our jobs, and they’re here to take our homes. They think they’re entitled to our  healthcare. They think they’re entitled to our wealth. They think they’re entitled to our possessions.  We know what’s going on: they think they can be the new us. 

For too long, we have suffered this injustice. I say, no more! No more to their lack of morals! No  more to their terrible English! No more to their sucking on our women’s breasts! It’s time to act.  Babies will not replace us! 

Look around! Babies are everywhere: in our pre-schools, in our playgrounds, even in our maternity  wards! And they’re disgusting. They don’t even look like people. Their heads are gigantic, their  hair doesn’t grow right, and — and — Excuse me. It’s just so unnatural — no real human is that  short. We should not have to share our air with these aberrations.  

And have you ever talked to one of these monstrosities? It’s impossible. Many of them just make  noises. Not a word of English! And the rest are even worse. They need you to read to them. Can’t  do it themselves! No education! And they don’t even listen if you try. They refuse to understand.  You read about green eggs and ham and they talk about “gween eggs anam.” You read about three  little pigs and they go on about “free yidduw bigs.” And don’t get me started on Peter Piper picking  peppers! If they won’t hear us, why should we tolerate their presence? They have to go! 

Now, I know some say we should love babies. “Babies are God’s creatures,” they say. But I’ve  read the Bible. Look at Genesis! It’s right there. God created one man and one woman. Where are  the babies? Nowhere. It’s Adam and Eve, not Mommy and me. “We were all babies once,” they  say. But we’re not anymore. We left that behind. We’re better than them. “We need babies to keep  the population up,” they say. But what about the immigrants? Our beautiful immigrants need space  to live. Their accents are so musical and their cultures are so vibrant. We don’t need babies and  they don’t deserve our compassion! 

So what can we do? Well, first, deportations. The babies have to go. All of them. Back to where  they came from. Back to women’s bellies. It will take determination, but if we do enough chopping,  and grinding, and maybe seasoning, our women, our capable, capable women, can eat all the babies  within a year. Then they’ll be gone. And then? Then we make sure no more of those minuscule  abominations enter our great country ever again: We need new laws to defend ourselves. Our  schools must teach the dangers of heterosexual sex. Free contraception must be available to the entire population. And abortions — abortions, our God-sent panacea! — abortions must be  mandatory. Everywhere. For everyone. The character of our country is at stake.  

We can’t wait any longer to save ourselves from being replaced. We must act. And we must act  now! Vote for me and I promise to do everything in my power to save our way of life. Down with  the babies and up with the flag! Make our country grown again! Now is our time! 

Thank you. God bless you and God bless our great nation. 

The post The Growth of a Nation appeared first on The New Absurdist.

I. 

He got rid of the Saturn Astra in Frederick, Maryland. The car barely made any money, a  tenth of the price that his father had bought his first car for (a Volkswagen), but its AC had  kicked the bucket and he had no money for its repair. The buyer was a white woman that  smelled of garbage and expired food, and this seemed to be the last of her money.  

It was enough for new clothes, measly lunch, and a trip to the pool. In the men’s  bathroom, he applied hair dye on his fraying thin hair, and stepped outside to watch other  people, hear snatches of names he could take from. At the pool: a mild murmur, drowned out  by the waves the swimmers made. He didn’t see the appeal of swimming, largely because he  couldn’t. His father, whose father had been in the Navy, had never much enjoyed swimming.  His mother loved the sea but had no use for the pool; the chlorine didn’t do her curly hair any good, and she hated wearing swimming caps. She told him multiple times to take care of his  hair, to which he — then as now — responded with bleach and chemicals. He had done this for a couple of towns now: wash the dye; find a job, a crappy place  to stay; go do whatever job he found, cut down on food until he had enough money for a new  car. Then he’d drive off until he ran out of fuel or arrived at the next town, whichever came  first.  

Back in the bathroom, he stared at a shock of red hair going off in all directions, with  spots of white blond from where he had forgotten to apply the dye. He looked like a bet gone  wrong. A night nobody remembered, the morning that everybody regretted.  

“Mickey, go get your things!” he heard a boy shout. He smirked to himself. 

Soon enough, he came across a record store and badgered the owner into staying there in  exchange for working at the record store; the owner, a large white man, offered a storage  room that was really a recording room for local bands, and his own bed was a mat tossed  aside at the corner. There was a drum kit installed prominently at the center. He decided then and there that this would be his instrument and began to play drum fills, not very good ones, but soon enough he approached something he could only describe as sludge. “Good playing,” he heard. 

Across him was a dark-skinned man; bald and hunching, carrying a guitar in his hand,  he approached Mickey with a sparkle in his eyes. 

“How long have you been here for?” Mickey asked.  

“Maybe an hour. You were playing the drum track to When Doves Cry there, weren’t  you?” 

Mickey shook his head. “I was just playing anything.” 

The man took out the guitar from his case and plugged it in. He swished over the strings, playing in a way that was neither rock nor R&B nor punk; it was too jerky, too  jagged, too discordant. It stretched any definition of the word music, but the man nevertheless  continued playing.  

Mickey hit the kick once. The other man kept playing. Mickey hit the kick again. He  added a snare when he felt like it, then a drum fill. The logic was that there was none. The  drum barely made sense with the now screeching guitar, but it made Mickey play, and Denzel  did not stop, either. 

Denzel abruptly stopped. Mickey added a drum fill and hit the hi hat, and Denzel  laughed. 

“This ain’t your instrument, but you obviously played one before,” Denzel said. “And  you obviously know rock.” 

Mickey smiled. “So do you.” 

“What do you think of punk?” 

“You mean what Nirvana’s doing? Garbage.” 

Denzel smirked. “And Television?” 

He shrugged so as to answer the question without addressing it. “I like music that  ain’t got much to do with charts. They’re played on college radio once and they think they’re  hot shit. MTV made it worse. There’s no counterculture anymore. It’s all mainstream now.  Fugazi might be cool, but they don’t alienate. It’s ‘cause Black people aren’t part of this. No  wonder Bad Brains is the only band worth a damn.”  

He heard Dylan, almost smelled the waft of cigarettes, in half of these words. The  more Mickey talked, the wider Denzel’s grin got.  

“Name’s Don. Join my band,” Denzel said. 

“Mickey.” He got up and shook his hand. “Gladly.” 

In this version of the dream, they play together: Reese on drums, Dylan on guitar. A knock to  the door. Dylan stops playing, then goes out to see who it is. Mudman comes in. He looks at  Reese, and Reese knows he’s going to die. He starts to whack the drums instead. The force of  it kicks Mudman back and down to the ground; now Reese pummels on top of him, and he’s  gone.  

The name was Bridgeburn. Their sound: annihilistic, a word that Don combined from  annihilation and nihilism. Some of the pamphlets he made, the ones that Mickey could read  anyway, declared, “It isn’t metal, nor punk. Bridgeburn is COUNTERCULTURAL,  INTELLECTUAL and VISCERAL.” Mickey had no idea how intellect and viscera could  correlate, but Don was not receptive to feedback. 

Don was tall, though how tall, Mickey couldn’t tell from his hunch. Maybe six foot  five, maybe more. Everything related to Bridgeburn went through him: garish posters and  potential album covers, melodies so gossamer they might as well be hallucinations, lyrics that  were best performed spoken and not sung. When he played lead guitar, he’d stand like he was  peering down on an ant crossing his path. Mickey surprised himself by identifying Lou Reed  out of the creative rubble — his father revered him, and the first record Mickey had heard  was The Velvet Underground & Nico.  

Don, upon hearing the name, turned to Mickey with an indignant air, glared once, and  decided to sing instead. It sounded like scratching metal. 

Blair excused herself for a smoke break, motioning for Mickey to follow; as soon as  they were out, Blair said, “Make him speak again. This is horrible.” 

“Wasn’t aware this was on me.” 

“Say you didn’t hear Lou Reed.” She glared at him and puffed smoke in his direction.  “Soon as I’m done with this cig. The other day, my supervisor wouldn’t let me finish it. Because the shelves weren’t filled yet.” She rolled her eyes. “Damn shelves never fucking  end. And this cig’s not strong enough.” 

Blair, the bassist, was also tall, but she stood straight as a rod when playing. Her face  communicated her desire to talk as little as possible; but here, on one of her many smoke  breaks, with Mickey next to her, it exploded to long complaints of her job at the supermarket,  which included nasty customers, odd coworkers, pesky bags and dusty shelves. That she  didn’t bring up her parents’ heritage seemed a dogged insistence that she was as American as  everyone else, though frequent rants about citizenship applications let Mickey know that she  was not, at least in the legal sense. She never smiled, though it wasn’t for lack of Mickey  trying; the one time he didn’t, she asked him if he had gotten ill, or if he was mentally ill. He  said it was the latter; it made her smirk.  

They returned from the smoke break. Mickey said to Don, right away, that the Lou  Reed from before was bullshit. Don nodded; for a moment the air in the room was blessedly  silent, and then Don decided to sing again. Mickey exchanged a glance with Blair and  shrugged. His job was to play drums, though in his case, it translated to hitting them with no  rhyme or reason. As long as he kept Mudman at bay.  

He sometimes thought Don would disappear into his brown jacket, the jacket taking  over, turning liquid, like mud. This usually happened when Don decided to voice his thoughts  out loud. Like how he thought Mickey was more white than black. Said it had to do with the  smell, the vibe. Blair only shrugged when Mickey looked at her for help. She thought him  soft because he didn’t fight.  

It wasn’t that Mickey hadn’t thought of any violence. When Dylan fought with his  father, using his actual fists, Mickey had dreamed of fighting his dad all night, ending up with  a bloody mouth. It was that Mickey couldn’t fight. He blamed his nose for it, which bled by  itself. Anything could set it off and just about everything did. He couldn’t smell and taste all that much, but blood, he always managed to. Its pungent, metal smell never faded. That  interrupted the rehearsals more often than it had to, and only because the drums started to  sound wet, which was against the intellectual viscera that Don wanted Bridgeburn to have. 

Don thought Mickey had polyps in the nose. Don thought maybe Mickey should play  one song with the snare only, no kicks. Don thought Mickey should get himself checked.  Maybe it was the stress. Maybe it was just because he was genetically malfunctioned, a  cripple. 

Those times Mickey thought of violence again. Surely there would be some way to  hurl something at Don and rattle his brain a little. But Don told him to speak up if he had  something to say, and Mickey didn’t. 

Dylan, in his mind, always half-grinned when he said this. Just before Reese would go  somewhere, he’d shrug. Reese knew the story, right? There was this cult member who  believed he was made of mud. He’d go around biting others, harass and psychologically scar  them to induct them to the cult. He did this by biting people: their legs, their necks, their  shoulders. Then these people would become mud people. It was a virus of some kind. So  better not walk alone when it’s mud season. Mudman would always be there. When he told his story, the smile never reached his eyes. 

It was just past dawn when Mickey sat in front of the drums. He whacked over the snare, with both drumsticks and quick succession, then assaulted the rim like he was going to break  the drumsticks in the hope that it would hit him. Whack-whack-whack, patter-patter-patter,  clunk, clunk.  

“MUDMAN!” he shouted. He shouted it again, elongating the u, the a, a growl as he  continued whacking over and over. “MUD! MUD! MUD!”

Distantly he heard the bass and the guitar joining him, but Mickey heard his own  noise first, and he felt his throat strain from shouting. Blood dripped down the snare, mixing  with the sweat from his hands. The beat was audibly damp. He stopped to a thumping heart,  throbbing hands, and a clogged nose. He couldn’t tell where the blood came from: his hands,  his nose, his fingers. His head kept shouting: MUD! MUD! MUD! 

Blair and Don looked at him, Blair with her mouth open, Don with a glimmer in his  eyes. 

“Mudman?” Blair asked. 

Mickey swallowed. He wiped the blood off his nose. The world spun ever so slightly  in his vision; he distinctly felt that he would fall if he were to get up. He nodded. “This is it, man,” Don said. “Where’d you get that one from?” 

Blair raised an eyebrow. “You like it? Thought you didn’t want nobody doing the  lyrics but you.” 

Don laughed once. “I never said that.” 

II. 

In the dreams, Mickey was aware he was dying and then dead. Every time he woke up, it felt  like he was reborn. It didn’t feel as holy as it sounded. 

“Mudman”, pressed and distributed independently, came at a perfect time. Punk had broken,  as though punk was a dam keeping the putrid water of music journalism and the overall  establishment at bay, and now, more than usual, Mickey found Don talking to white people in  their band shirts and a card in their hands. Sometimes, they ran into Mickey, mostly at  restrooms; those times, Mickey pointed outside and led them back to Don. Don was clearly  into it. All the venomous looks he shot Mickey’s way were proof of it. In the touring van, Don openly discussed labels as though either Mickey or Blair had a say. SST was a no-go;  Dischord was good, but Don didn’t like to be in DC; Geffen was an absolute no-go. All major  labels were off the table, including a man from Atlantic Records that had promised them  “Beatles money”.  

In Chicago, Mickey paid with the remainder of his money for a recording studio,  enough for three days. They were about to record “Mudman”, the only song of Bridgeburn  that hit college radio, when a journalist – a white woman with thick-rimmed glasses – waited  for them at the entrance. Blair was nowhere to be seen, probably in some bathroom trying to  get her fix, and Don said they could use the break.  

They conducted the interview at the studio. The journalist was from a high-profile  music magazine that had recently begun to interview underground bands. Her eyes were only  on Mickey, and she shook his hand first.  

“And Blair?” she asked. 

Don looked at Mickey. Mickey rolled his eyes. 

“We can continue,” Don said. 

The first question was if Don was inspired by Public Enemy, because he, too, was  “rapping”.  

Don: “It’s not rap. I don’t think of my performance as rap.” 

“Sounds like rap to me,” the journalist said. 

“Is this because I’m Black?” 

“It’s because you’re rapping.”  

“We’re not—” Mickey said. Don raised his eyebrows, but didn’t cut him short.  “We’re not inspired by rap. I would say we do our own thing.” 

The journalist turned to him with a wide grin. “Surely you’re inspired by someone.”  “Mickey has no inspirations,” Don answered. His posture was eminently calm; Mickey had no doubt that Don believed this to be true. “He does what I tell him to.” “So Mudman is really your creation?” the journalist asked. 

“It’s not,” Mickey said before Don could claim that it was. “It’s mine.”  Don narrowed his eyes, straightening up as the last resort of towering over Mickey in  some capacity, but let him talk. 

“I like Fugazi,” Mickey answered. “Guy Picciotto is a great songwriter, abstract and  evocative. I don’t suppose I have a lot of inspirations besides that. Maybe some poems my  mom used to read to me, but I haven’t been able to read much these days.” 

“Yes.” She jotted this down. “Yes, I hear your similarities now. So would you  categorize your work in Bridgeburn as post-hardcore as well, or would you call it emocore?” Bridgeburn was a band with no remarkable talents swept up in a tide of media interest. They had one song, an emotional outburst Mickey had to perform by himself every  other day, and it was the one Don didn’t write. “I think we’re an older brand of post-punk,  closer to Wire. It’s about rattling the soul.” 

“We’re not close to anything,” Don said. He stood up so straight that he appeared a  head taller than Mickey. “People are close to us. They see us and want to steal what we got.” She looked at Don for the first time. “Mind telling names?” 

“Depeche Mode stole from our outfits. Looks too. The goatee—” 

Mickey laughed; he closed his mouth so more wouldn’t come out. That was his  goatee, not Don’s. 

“Goatees are dope,” Mickey said once he calmed himself down. The journalist’s head  turned right back to him. “Black and leather too. The scene is smaller than it looks, so I think  some overlaps are part of the point.”  

Seeing her jot it down brought him a little relief. At least he would come out alright.  These were group projects individually graded. Don would come to the same conclusion soon enough, and when that happened, Mickey would take the “Beatles money” an Atlantic  representative promised Don, go solo, buy a plane, and fly across America. He managed to  write some lyrics lately. There were toplines, some chords. He could use them all and it’d  still be better than the bullshit they recorded here. He rather liked it up on stage; the lights,  the shouts, the sweat, the blood working together to create a concoction more powerful than  chloroform. It was so nice to not exist for an hour or two. To not remember anything afterward. 

The journalist looked at him like she wanted all area access into his brain. “Mudman…” she said. “What a song. Truly ferocious.” 

Don said, “Matter of fact, we’re about to record it right now.” 

She furiously nodded. “Is it alright if I could sit in the room and watch you? To my  understanding, it is a Mickey Stanbull solo.” 

“It is—“ Mickey started. 

“Not a solo,” Don said, voice so clipped that Mickey flinched.  

The silence that followed was cold and thick. She didn’t write this down. “Don will play the guitar,” Mickey murmured.  

“On a song with only drums?” 

“Studio versions always differ,” Don said. “And it originally started as a band.” The journalist jotted it down. “But Mickey, you can play the guitar.” 

Mickey nodded. “I can. I started out acoustic. I wouldn’t mind going acoustic, even  folksy, down the road.” 

She tapped against the notepad. “This is interesting. I wonder if you heard of Dylan  Fitz—“ 

“I don’t want you to be part of it,” Don suddenly said.  

“—gerald,” the journalist said. She turned to Don. “No?”

Don’s leg jerked up and down.  

“Gerald?” Mickey asked. What’s this about?” 

“Dylan Fitzgerald. This talented young songwriter from Vermont. It’s a real tragedy  what happened to him. We could discuss this off the record,” the journalist said. She glanced  at Don. “Are you truly against me joining your recording?” 

Suicide was not a tragedy. To have a song stolen, to find no audience, to put all your  hopes in one song – these things were once tragedies to him, but now that Mickey had met  record label executives hounding him in parking lots, asking him to sign a contract, he  understood that it was all quicksand regardless. The tragedy was that Dylan had told Reese  he’d be outside for a minute and never returned.  

“Yes,” Don said. “Shit comes out when it comes out.” 

“I agree,” Mickey added. “It should be a surprise to everybody.” 

The journalist nodded, peeked at her wristwatch, and cleared her wrist. “Final  question. Mickey Stanbull, Mudman, I believe, is deeply personal to you. Where I’m from, in  Vermont, we have five seasons and not four. Lots of mud there. Vonnegut called it  Unlocking.” 

“That’s a good speech,” Mickey said. “I know that one.” 

“So are you from Vermont?” 

Mickey laughed. “Yes.” 

She fixed her glasses. “So how come you don’t know Dylan Fitzgerald?” Mickey didn’t know Dylan; Reese did. But he felt like Reese again. He felt it like  toothpaste remnants on his shirt. He was too old, too tired to think that driving from state to  state would wash it away, but he did once harbor the hope that Reese Fitzgerald would  reemerge as a part of himself, like a snippet of a melody in his head. Instead, Reese had  become a journalist’s scoop, part of the coveted biography of Mickey Stanbull. 

He found it quite hard to breathe in here. “Burlington has room for… um, all kinds of  lives and stories,” he managed to say. 

“I believe he had a brother. I saw him once. They performed the song together, over at  the Blunder, in South End?” 

“That’s nice.” 

“I’m just saying that you look like him.”  

His mouth felt stuffed with cotton. “Is it because I’m Black?” Mickey asked. She didn’t answer. They left it at that. She shook his hand and grazed Don’s. 

As soon as she was gone Don stood up straight; he seemed seven feet tall. He entered the  recording booth, cocked his jaw at Mickey, and picked up his Fender.  

“You don’t need the electric guitar,” Don said. 

He whacked it down to the ground in a beautiful arc. Even from the isolated room, the  sound was gnarly. The recording engineer, a muscular man with a Viking-like beard, shot up  from his deck. But Mickey was faster; he flung the door open, he was about to swing his  clenched fists, but a breath out and blood dripped down his nose, all over the rug. He put his  hands to stop it; energy seeped out of him like a teabag dropped into hot water. He could  barely stand straight, saw stars in his vision, black and white. He fell to the ground, his  fingers sticky.  

The viking jostled past Mickey, which made him bleed even more, and now it dripped  from his palm, thudding onto the rug. “Get the hell out of my studio!” the man bellowed. Mickey felt something past him and slid to the ground. 

III. 

He left the record store, the one in Frederick. The sky was a slab of white marble, the streets swept clean save for one figure at the horizon.  

Mickey knew at once that figure was Mudman. 

He wanted to turn around, but his body had become stone, his eyes burning the longer  he stared at Mudman. His mouth was parched; he couldn’t scream. His heart thumped too  slow. When he did move, it was a sudden jerking motion. It didn’t hurt his body, nor his legs.  Soon he floated backwards, and the entire time, he stared at Mudman. Mudman was getting  closer by the second. He was running, sprinting towards Mickey. There was a baton in his  hand that he whipped out, and his rattle petrified Mickey. 

Mickey fell. Now Mudman was on top of Mickey.  

“I…” Mudman began. A disgusting mix of horse and human feces emanated off him.  “I… crave….” 

Mickey was going to die. 

He shouted, screamed for help, yelled for somebody to come save him, but no one was there. Not one person opened their windows. He staggered up, felt his feet hit the  concrete as he ran as hard as he could. The horizon didn’t move. Something whipped him to  the ground again. His whole body shook from his tears, his open, loud sobs. He couldn’t  move his body, and this time, he felt a sudden coldness in his legs. He was being stripped;  Mudman would eat him, leg up; Mudman would kill him, He closed his eyes shut and let snot  and tears run down his face to the concrete. Everything in him tensed. There was no God to  pray to. Only Dylan on the other side. 

His stomach growled. Behind him, he couldn’t feel Mudman anymore. He felt something wet and rather sticky beneath him. When he opened his eyes, he found he lay on a  puddle, staining the street ruby red.  

Then he felt a horrifyingly large scraping inside his stomach. Like he’d never eaten before.

Mickey woke up. He was in the recording room. The viking man was shouting at Don; there  was a fight of some kind, outside the studio, the viking’s arms pressed against Don’s, locked  in something Mickey couldn’t quite get. But he saw Don, Don in his coat, and he felt the  scraping from the dream that didn’t feel like a dream anymore. He felt himself floating  toward Don. He heard himself say, “I’ll handle him”. They walked outside.  Don looked at him and asked, “What?”  

What a nice day it was outside, crisp and blue. Dylan killed himself on a day like this  one. Mudman had never had a chance to bite him. And if there wasn’t Dylan to warn him  from the threat, then could Reese be blamed for being caught after all? He tasted blood on his mouth. “I…” he said, “I crave.” 

IV. 

One to Watch: Mickey Stanbull 

This story was reported by Janet Lexington-Schwartz 

As soon as he got onto the mic, a blue Jazzmaster strapped on his shoulder, Mickey Stanbull  bellowed MUDMAN on stage and gave everybody a good fright. Time stood still and  became an eternal present — the thick riffs that were choked further against the amp; the  repeated wailing, oh my God, the wailing; the face, the locks falling like an angel fallen to  the pits of hell. This man spells out sex, desperation, and dirt all at once.  

The pit waited for this moment for almost an hour. And in four minutes, this grim  eternity was over. I was rattled, and grateful that this was the last song. The entire stage was  as spellbound as I was.  

Rock cannot be consumed through radio and MTV alone, and Mickey Stanbull is  living proof of it. He has a presence best experienced live. No more nerdy characters mumbling their way to the stage; it’s not cool to act uncool, despite whatever pretensions our  current leading men are under; and it’s not cool to be overeager about stardom, despite  whatever delusions Billy Corgan puts himself in. Our greatest frontmen are showmen,  whether conscious or not, whether willing to play on purpose or by accident. Hours ago, in  conversation, he struck me as the former; now, I am not so certain.  

After “Mudman” ended, Stanbull locked eyes with the nearest spotlight. His face was  startlingly empty when he looked up, as silent as everyone else. The audience erupted into  applause, roared for an encore, but Stanbull moved backstage without thanking anyone. I  couldn’t help it; I ran backstage, a few fans in tow, calling for him. He turned and didn’t  seem to understand. He looked at us and seemed to ask himself who “Mickey Stanbull” was.  It was to the degree that I briefly wondered if this “mud-man” he sang about chewed at  critical portions of his brain, leaving him crippled but savant, without an identity. In truth, as  he tells me later, he was rattled too. He felt the song exactly as we did, an earthquake of an  experience. What had just happened could not be repeated — until it would have to, all  across America, for many years on end. 

That night, in Chicago, he announced his departure from Bridgeburn. The death of a  band is the birth of another star. 

Lately, Reese dreamt of him playing music with Dylan, both on acoustic. He’d toured all  across America, and he was in Connecticut now. It wouldn’t take long to go back to Vermont  now, just in time for mud season. He’d just have to wait for Dylan to step outside for a little  bit. 

The post Mudman appeared first on The New Absurdist.

He went down the road and, somewhere, was apprehended by demons. The demons  shoved the boy along, all the way into the city, straight to Satan, who was cucumber-eyed and  reclining in a mud bath in his colossal Palace of Fire. The boy was thrown forward. Satan’s cucumber slices slid away with dramatic slowness to reveal two caprine eyes flaming with  vexation. He spoke: “Who in the hell are you?” 

A fine question. “Jerry,” said Jerry. 

“Just Jerry?” 

“Jerry Lugubrious,” said Jerry Lugubrious. 

“Are you here with the living or with the dead, Jerry Lugubrious?” 

Another fine question. Jerry answered. Satan sat up in his mud bath. This was an odd  situation. Satan asked Jerry more questions, and Jerry tried to supply helpful answers. Jerry told Satan that the last thing he remembered doing before being transported to Hell  was trying to heave a rather unwieldy bag of garbage into the dumpster behind the apartment  building where he lived. Satan said “ah” and explained that a lot of portals to Hell are hidden  inside dumpsters; Jerry must have fallen into one by mistake. The two had a good laugh. Satan  really was very nice and understanding about the whole thing. He ordered one demon to make Jerry some tea, and another demon to draw Jerry a mud bath in the neighboring tub. The boy and the Prince of Darkness drank tea and mud-bathed and talked about life for a very long time. 

Jerry Lugubrious was a sandy-white doll of a boy who had only recently begun to be  called a “man” with any seriousness or regularity. He looked a bit like an illustration on one of  those old Boys’ Life covers. The creased eyes. The coiffed hair, so blond it’s yellow, impossibly  fitted to his scalp. Teeth so white they almost hurt to look at. Satan had liked him right away, but  he especially liked him after Jerry unabashedly related his life’s dream of becoming a big-shot  advertising executive with lots of money and a firm with his name in big shiny letters on the  building’s facade. 

“Normally, I don’t take so mercifully to interlopers,” said Satan, “but you, kid, I like the  cut of your jib. Dammit, I could use someone like you around here. Someone with your attitude.  What’s the word? Ambition. Someone with your ambition. Let’s say something wild here. Let’s  say I offered you a job. What do you think you might say to that, Jerry?”

Jerry didn’t know the words “interloper” or “jib,” but he knew better than to refuse work  from a big shot like Satan. Bills to pay. Student loans, rent. Jerry had a glove with one finger  missing, and his shoe was blown out at the side. Plus, working for Satan would look quite  impressive on his resume, thus increasing his chances of one day becoming a big shot himself.  He could see the way out of his middle-register existence lighting up before him like a runway in  the night. 

Satan interviewed him right there in the mud bath. Jerry told Satan everything he believed Satan wanted to hear. 

Satan: “Are you a hateful person?” 

Jerry: “And how!” 

Satan: “What’s your attitude toward your fellow man?” 

Jerry: “I can’t stand that guy!” 

Satan: “Tell me about a time you used evil to solve a problem.” 

Jerry: “Once, I took advantage of my roommate’s peanut allergy so he’d stop stealing my lunch.” Jerry was hired on the spot. He and Satan laughed and smoked cigars in the mud. He still works for the big man today. 

It’s 2019 on Earth. Thursday. Nanette Hubble keeps saying “sweet flippin’ flapjacks,” a  catchphrase in a new cartoon, into a studio microphone until the casting director tells her thank  you, we’ve heard enough. Nanette, a seasoned reject, does not stand there all dumb and  incredulous like they do in movies about struggling actors. Nor does she shout or cry at her  rejectors. Nor does she give the other voice artists the finger and storm off to the bathroom to berate herself in a mirror before smashing it with her bare fist. Nanette is a professional and is  guided by propriety, not impulse. As she coolly but readily makes her exit, she very politely  thanks the people at the table for their time and produces upon herself a smile so huge it almost  looks like it hurts. 

Flying home, south on I-79, she smokes a cigarette against the lamentory slowness of a  lesser-known Miles Davis number, one wrist on the wheel, in a blur of evening snow.

The apartment is small, cold, dark. But quiet. Officially, it’s smoke-free, but not as far as  our Nanette is concerned. She lies in the recliner in a blue haze of Bionic Woman reruns that  dance silently on the old Electrohome. The swish and sigh of cars in the wet street put her to sleep,  and the old dreams replay. 

Dreams of exchanging her ratty green bagger’s apron for a shiny studio lanyard. Dreams  of being known not as “Nanette, the girl who struck out looking in the final at-bat in the series deciding game,” or as “Nanette, the girl who pissed herself that one time in pre-algebra in the  middle of an exam,” but rather as “Nanette, voice of this beloved cartoon character, bringer of  joy who is, herself, joyful, and who is just as pleasant in real life as you would think, and  surprisingly pretty, too, and has a great sense of humor, and loves all her fans, takes time out of  her busy schedule to sign autographs, donates her excess wealth to dog shelters and cancer  research,” and so on like that. 

The old nightmare, too: Nanette fakes her death and attends her own funeral in disguise,  only to find that she is the sole person in attendance. 

She jumps awake at sudden pain. A two-centimeter burn appears on her left forearm.  Nanette deposits her cigarette into a half-eaten bowl of microwave noodles on the TV tray.

Just out of view: polaroids depicting Nanette and her disappeared boyfriend in a cork board jumble that summarizes their life together. Nanette and Jerry sharing a big sandwich.  Nanette and Jerry kissing on a glittery New Year’s Eve or Day. Nanette in a birthday hat  pretending to take a slice out of Jerry’s ass with a cake knife while Jerry parodies a look of terror.  They met at school, he the mindlessly practical version of her, she the helplessly fanciful version  of him. They liked each other a lot, but “love” was not a word uttered freely between them. It  was more like an intense interest. Jerry was interesting in the way the unusually long icicle outside  Nanette’s window right now is interesting; was it about him, or the icicle? 

The anniversary is, what, Tuesday? Of Jerry’s mysterious disappearance. Nanette has spent the year since feeling lost and blaming herself. She thought they had a good thing. She was helping Jerry with money while he plodded towards his degree. And she did voices, impressions,  which Jerry found infinitely amusing. Bart Simpson under the influence of various Schedule 1 drugs. Walter Matthau and George Bush Sr. picking out the very ripest tomatoes at a supermarket for their homemade salsa. Jerry had a great laugh, one that made you laugh, too, even if nothing was really all that funny. It seemed so good, so permanent at the time. She misses him always. 

But now here he comes emerging torturedly from the building’s dumpster out back, the young man covered in soot and clutching his devil-horned boater like some childhood nightmare’s addled notion of Dick Van Dyke. Once out, he crouches a moment in the  snowy darkness, coughing, colder than hell. He does not at once realize where he is. When he does, he runs to the building’s entrance and buzzes every number he thinks he remembers possibly being his. 

The dramatic reunion of Nanette Hubble and Jerry Lugubrious is like the emotional  soldier’s homecoming in movies and Super Bowl commercials.

“I thought you were gone forever,” she says, “I thought you were dead,” crying into his chest. She squeezes him hard so that he stays. 

“I should call my mom. She probably thinks the same thing.” 

“You can call her tomorrow.” 

“All right.” 

“Everything can wait till tomorrow.” 

“All right.” 

“You smell like farts.” 

“It’s the dirt. High sulfur content. Sort of interesting, actually. I’ll tell you about it later. I  should probably shower.” 

“No,” she says, squeezing him harder. “I don’t care how you smell.” 

“You’re not mad?” 

“No. I’m so happy.” 

“I’m so sorry, Nan. I didn’t mean to leave without saying anything. I didn’t mean to leave  at all.” 

“I’m not mad, Jerry. Not right now.” 

The moon is impossibly bright. The falling snow’s shadows on the bedroom walls create  the illusion of gradual ascent. Jerry playfully sticks the devil-horned boater on Nanette’s head.  She laughs. Neither can look away from the other. They have sex. Nanette keeps pinching Jerry’s  cheek and calling him “my little Jer-Bear” and telling him how she missed him so, so much. 

As he enjoys his first cigarette in almost a year, Jerry does his level best to explain just  what’s been going on all this time. There’s no straightforward or convincing way to put it. Jerry  was in Hell, and now he works for the Devil. Nanette thinks at first that it’s just a metaphor, the way soldiers in Vietnam said war was “hell,” or how a miserable office drudge might use the  word “hell” as a synonym for “dull, unending work” or “a state of ennui.” But the more Jerry talks, the crazier he sounds. 

“It was a bunch of lousy grunt work at first.” He keeps drawing on his cigarette, creating suspense. “Dusting, landscaping. I delivered a whole lot of mail. After a while, Satan said I could  start selling real estate over the phone, like they do in that movie. He gave me a desk in the same  building where he lives. Can you believe that? My desk was by the door because, you know what  he said? He said, if I couldn’t hack it, see that door, that’s where my ass would go, right out that  door. He’s funny like that. A little scary, too, but. Anyway, he said I really cut the old mustard.  Said I was the best closer he’s had in centuries. That’s where I got the hat. There was a  competition. The hat was first prize. Second prize was a set of steak knives.” 

“Sorry,” says Nanette, laughing, “I could’ve sworn you said Satan got you into this whole  mess.” She sits up a little, doffing the boater. 

“Yeah, you know. The Devil. Evil guy with the horns and the goatee. The Bible makes  him out like he’s some monster trying to destroy the world, but actually he’s trying to save it.  We’ve been lied to our whole lives, so we don’t realize that evil is actually good, and good is  actually evil.” 

“Um.” 

“You’ll have to meet him sometime. He explains the whole thing a lot better than I do.  He’s sort of like a father or mentor to me. He’s so smart, Nan. I don’t know his IQ, but it’s gotta  be in like the hundreds or thousands or maybe even higher. He’s taught me all kinds of stuff about all sorts of things. We play badminton every Saturday. I’m not very good. He always beats  me.” 

Nanette feels cold and a bit sick. “Jerry.”

“Hey, but guess who just got a big promotion? That’s right. That’s why I’m here, Nan. I  get to do the Devil’s work right here on Earth now. Isn’t that great? We can finally be together  again.” 

“Jerry.” 

“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, what about school? What about finishing my degree?” 

“That’s not what I’m thinking.” 

“Well, there’ll be no more worrying about any of that stuff anymore, Nan. That all goes  out the window. This job is everything I’ve ever wanted and more. I really feel like I’ve found  my purpose in life. You know?” 

Nanette scratches her nose. “Something stinks,” she says. “I think maybe you should see  about that shower.” 

Nanette is up late the next morning, Saturday, thinking that it’s Friday, a workday. She  checks her phone, relieved. “I could’ve sworn.” 

Jerry is still asleep. He’s on his side, drooling a bit, one leg overtop a crumpled mass of  bedding. He breathes so subtly that, if it weren’t for the very slight nose whistle, you’d almost think he was dead. 

Nanette is frying eggs at her dingy kitchenette, wearing a bathrobe with little cartoon  sheep on it, when here comes her landlady’s unmistakable shave-and-a-haircut knock at the door.  Nanette scuttles over in her slippers to answer. “Mrs. Lieberman,” says Nanette. 

“Nanette,” says Mrs. Lieberman, “dearie,” always infantilizing in a way that makes it  hard to tell whether she’s being malicious. “I hate to disturb on you on a Saturday morning, but I  just thought I’d just drop by to—”

“I know, Mrs. Lieberman. I have the money. I just lost track of the date. I’m very sorry.  It’s been one of those weeks. I’ll send it over just as soon as I’m done with—” “Oh, honey, not at all. In fact, I came to tell you that you can just go ahead and forget about this month’s rent.” 

“Forget? As in…?” 

“You’re an exemplary tenant, Nanette. I don’t believe you’ve ever given me any trouble  of any kind. Look, I know this past year has been awfully unkind to you. I just thought, that poor  girl, someone ought to do something nice for her.” 

Nanette almost laughs. “Geez, Mrs. Lieberman. I don’t know what to—” 

“Nothing at all. You just enjoy your weekend, sweetie, and hail Satan. Bye-bye now.”  Nanette makes a slightly twisted expression in the doorway as she watches Mrs. Lieberman limp  down the stairs with her silver-plated cane. The muffled scrape of a passing snowplow swells and  then recedes against the walls of the stairwell. Nanette actually has to pinch herself. Then,  remembering the skillet, she runs back to the kitchenette to find that the eggs are, by some  divinity, perfectly cooked. 

“These eggs are perfectly cooked,” Jerry remarks at breakfast through a mouthful of  eggs. Nanette bites into a piece of toast, smiles at him weakly. The situation with Jerry feels  somewhat like a tightrope act with Nanette teetering way up on the wire. Dealing with him will  require a balanced approach, she’s decided; his babbling will be neither dismissed nor indulged.  It’s the classical approach of both psychotherapists and exorcists. 

“Hey, um. Look. I know last night was a lot,” says Jerry, spitting a bit of egg at his  girlfriend.

“Nooo,” Nanette says pleasantly, wiping her cheek. “It was just so much at once, I think.  Like, you know. I wasn’t expecting any of that. Like…” 

“Yeah, no, right.” 

“Yeah.” 

“Unexpected.” 

“Exactly.” 

“I guess you didn’t have too much of a reason to believe all that stuff about Hell. I  probably sounded like a crazy person.” 

“And Bingo was his name-o,” is what the inner, meaner Nanette might have said. But,  “You sounded like someone who’d just been through something very stressful,” is what she  actually says. 

“Stressful but rewarding,” Jerry says pointedly, looking serious. “Please don’t be  confused about that, Nan. This has been the single greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.” He  hesitates before taking his next bite. “Better make that second-greatest.” He winks a disarming  wink. Nan tries to laugh convincingly. 

A silence. Jerry is apparently a lot hungrier than his girlfriend. “Anyway,” he says, eating,  “I wish I had some kind of proof for you. Wouldn’t you know it, I lost my phone just as soon as I went through that portal to Hell, so here I am without any pictures.” Jerry’s face brightens with  epiphany. “Hey, there we go. I’ll just show you the portal to Hell. That portal’s how I got in with  Satan in the first place. Boy, was he mad, even after I told him it was an accident. Man takes his  security very seriously, understandably. It all worked out for me, of course, so.” “Portal to…?” 

Jerry wipes his mouth with a bare forearm and squeaks his chair back. “It’s right out  back. Right in the dumpster behind the building.”

“I don’t recall a portal to Hell being in the lease agreement.” 

“That’s what I thought, too. Must’ve been a boilerplate thing. Apparently, a lot of them  have one. A portal to Hell, I mean. A lot of dumpsters lead straight to Hell. Come on, I’ll show  you.” 

“Maybe later, Jerry.” Jerry nods and dabs his mouth with a napkin. Nanette touches her food absently with her fork. She lets her perfectly cooked eggs go cold. 

The weekend is a haze of quiet tension and little peculiarities. Nanette looks at Reddit  and WebMD while her boyfriend spends the weekend watching the eighth and ninth seasons of  Swamp People on Netflix. Strangers keep coming to the door with gifts like alcohol and frozen  organ meat. The strangers all make ominous pronouncements like “hail Satan” and “blessed are  the destroyers of false hope” and “welcome to the Order of Darkness and Despair” before  departing abruptly. The freezer gets so full of organ meat that Nanette has to start throwing out old bags of vacuum-sealed birthday cake and three-bean chili to make room.

Monday, Jerry ties his tie in the mirror and says he’s going to work. He is dressed to kill,  absolutely mercilessly. He even has a briefcase. He kisses Nanette and is out the door before she  can start in on any kind of interrogation. In the doorway, she tells him he’d better not go  disappearing on her again, the young woman sounding just a little mad. 

Jerry’s job is to search the town for lost souls. He takes buses. Browses grocery aisles.  Sits in various kinds of waiting rooms. Just waiting, however long it takes, for someone to make  their unhappiness evident. Sometimes it’s a sigh. Sometimes a pronounced gesture of frustration.  Sometimes—and this is the jackpot right here—a little sniffle and tear in the eye. You’d be  surprised how many of these occur publicly; you just have to pay attention.

Then, Jerry will look up from his phone or reading material and carefully approach the  unhappy person in a direct but non-threatening way to ask quietly what the matter is. The  unhappy person will say it’s nothing, perhaps deny even knowing what Jerry’s talking about.  Jerry will affect an empathetic expression and press. “No, really. I think I might be able to help.”  He will be sure to make it his business right away, to cast himself vaguely as a potential aid to  the unhappy person before they can tell him to fuck off. 

This always gets desperate people’s attention. A hand on the shoulder sometimes  enhances the effect. Just on the shoulder, very gently, not around the whole neck or anything like  that. He will use what he learned in advertising school to appeal to the primary sadnesses almost  all unhappy people share. Loneliness. Hopelessness. Powerlessness. Regret. For maybe the first time, the unhappy person will feel understood. Being understood, they will confess they are  desperate. Up against a wall. At the end of their rope. And being desperate, they will be willing  to try just about anything, no matter how crazy or unconventional, if it advertises even the  slimmest chance of a solution. And Jerry will be quite happy to inform them that he happens to  have just the thing they’ve been looking for. All they have to do is surrender their soul. 

Neither Satan nor Jerry actually cares what the unhappy person’s problem is. I owe the bank money I don’t have. I have a rare bone disease that causes incredible pain. The girls in Alpha Beta Epsilon don’t want to have sex with me. Whatever. As long as you sign on the dotted, flaming line. 

Do not underestimate the soft sell. I know this is probably a lot to take in, Mrs. Murray.  Tell you what. Why don’t you think it over. Sleep on it. No need to rush into a big decision like  this. I’m not some huckster. I want to help. Take all the time you need to decide. In fact, here’s  my number. Line’s always open. Just text or call. Questions, anything. Anytime. No pressure  whatsoever.

Jerry is a natural. On his first day, he deftly convinces eight townspeople to sell their  souls to the Devil, positively obliterating the previous rookie record of five (set by the man who  legendarily went on to swindle Robert Johnson out of his soul at the Dockery crossroads). In the  early evening, as our triumphant Jerry rides the bus home in his slackened necktie, he gets a call  from Satan who personally congratulates him, tells him he’s proud, and hints at the possibility of  a very nice year-end bonus if he keeps up the good work. Jerry is so pleased with himself he  almost becomes emotional. 

It’s dark. Nanette takes a smoke break in the parking lot of the grocery store near closing.  Gusts push loose snow across the pavement in little scarves. She keeps her arms folded in the  cold. 

An unsaved number lights up her phone. She answers: “Yeah?” 

“Nanette Hubble?” 

“Yes?” 

It’s the casting director from the other day. “Congratulations, kid. You got the part.” He  sounds to be holding an executive-size cigar between his teeth. 

“Part,” Nanette repeats. “Um, what part would that be?” 

“The Bonnie Blunderbuss part. ‘Sweet flippin’ flapjacks,’ and all that.” He continues  before Nanette can react: “Anyway, kid, we think you were just dynamite. You’ll forgive us if we  had to underreact at the audition; see, we make it a point to stay neutral in front of the other  voice actors during the audition process. Keeps things professional. At least, that’s the idea.  Apologies if we were in any way discouraging.”

“Wow,” goes Nanette. “I thought I was being turned down. It felt just like all the other  rejections.” She laughs the slightly crazed laugh of those who must countenance the too-good-to be-true. 

The casting director laughs a little too. “Rejections? You kidding? Look, Nan. Can I call  you Nan? Look. Frankly—and normally I don’t go around admitting this stuff—we were all  blown the fuck away. I mean, the comic timing, the understated zaniness, with just the right  amount of Ali MacGraw demureness and naturality: Dynamite, Dynamite, Dynamite, with a  capital motherfucking D, sweetheart. I said to our producer Jim, I said, Jim, here’s your show.  This girl is the whole show.” And he goes on like this while Nanette keeps smiling into her own  shaking hand. 

“I guess I was just trying to make it my own,” Nanette explains. “It’s funny; being  someone else is the only time I feel like myself.” 

“Uh-huh,” goes the casting director, not interested. “Anyway, just wanted to call and let  you know and say congrats and all that. We’ll be in touch. All right? All right. Hail Satan, kid.” Nanette does a little dance and gives her place of employment the vengeful one-fingered  gesture of long-awaited emancipation. 

Fertility. Freedom from drink. Just a little more time with a dying wife. The resurrection  of a childhood border collie. A normal-looking nose. Money. Reconnection with an estranged  daughter. Authorship of the great masterpiece of contemporary opera. 

These were the eight Faustian bargains brokered by Jerry Lugubrious in his first business  day on Earth, which he later tells Nanette all about as they share their apartment’s recliner in the  glow of the CBS Evening News. Nanette has already shared her good news, but the goodness has now somehow worn off. “I feel kind of sick,” she says. Jerry ignores her. For both their sakes,  she pretends to feel all right, and keeps pretending for years and years and years. A general fact about actors is that, when they’re acting, they’re not, and when they’re not,  they are. 

Jerry and Nanette Lugubrious attend Jerry’s retirement banquet in Hell in the year 2120.  They have a newborn, Jerry Jr., whom Nanette totes around in a nylon Ergobaby papoose; no  sitter was available. Physically, the new parents are as young as they were a hundred years ago,  though Nanette’s face has settled noticeably into the creases of maternal exhaustion and a  century of vague discontent. Most people assume she’s one of those women who looks older than  she really is. 

The dress code is business casual. The venue is TGI Fridays, the one on Anguish Avenue,  a favorite haunt of Satan’s salariat where, intriguingly, Satan himself is known to occasionally  stop by and unwind. 

This whole thing was Satan’s idea; he’s rented the whole place out for the night. Some of  Hell’s highest-profile damned are present. J.P. Morgan and Napoleon I are solemnly engaged in a  game of billiards. John Wilkes Booth is hunched intently over a pinball machine, a game at  which he is said to be superb. Richard Nixon is having a go at “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”  on the karaoke machine. Everybody is smoking cigarettes or cigars under their own little  stratosphere of smoke, which Nanette worries may be bad for Junior, despite his supposed  immortality; she’d given up the habit during pregnancy just to be on the safe side.

Satan really is the goateed, tomato-red satyr most people imagine him to be. The  pitchfork is a myth; he has scoliosis and makes it a point not to lug things around without good reason. He did not impress Nanette as particularly evil when they were introduced, just phony.  He possesses a kind of salt-of-the-earth, Sam-from-Cheers quality and leads Hell with homespun  charisma, not an iron fist. Nanette of course remembers the old rule about bullshit: the biggest  pile attracts the most flies. 

It is also a misconception that Hell is the place of ubiquitous torment described in  sermons, or the Kafkaesque bureaucracy wryly depicted in satirical cartoons; each soul is tortured from 8 to 5 on business days and allowed respite after hours and on weekends, just like on Earth. The concept of “unending” torture is purely pre-industrial, made a thing of the past by the emergence of the Torturers’ Union, with whom you most assuredly do not want to trifle. The  torturers and the damned souls they torture actually get along rather well and often go out for  drinks after a long day in the dungeons and pits. They’re here forever, so they might as well be  friends. After all, the demons are just doing their jobs. 

Junior is asleep in his papoose. He seems to have an easier time sleeping in raucous  environments than perfectly silent ones, a fact which Nanette contemplates in her chair at the  head of the dozen or so tables that have been conjoined to make one long dining platform. 

Satan and Jerry Sr. are mingling with the evening’s ass-kissers, while Nanette is left  anonymous and alone. Jerry has not yet seen fit to introduce her to anybody here. Instead, he goes around relating old war stories from his hundred years in sales, remembering them as a  former boxer remembers his knockout-prime. Occasionally, he’ll glance over at Nanette, and  she’ll hear a snatch of his old joke about why salesmen’s wives always seem to be much more  attractive-looking than the salesmen. Satan keeps laughing and giving Jerry a hard, sportive slap  on the back.

Already tired, Nanette sends for a bottle of TGI Fridays’ finest Heineken Silver.

“…just to have you…back again…just to touch you…once again.” So plaintively ends Nixon’s rendition of Bread’s “Everything I Own.” A small group applauds. Nanette scowls and makes a low, inconspicuous farting sound with her tongue. 

“Wish me luck,” Jerry, suddenly nervous, whispers to his wife. He does not notice the  little copse of spent Heinekens that’s materialized before her. He takes a deep breath as he  discreetly reviews the notes Nanette prepared for him one last time. 

Satan gives Jerry an inquiring thumbs-up, and Jerry shoots one back in the affirmative.  “Folks, if I could have your attention for just a moment please,” goes Satan. His voice is huge.  The TGI Fridays goes reverently silent, except for the woody scrape of a few chairs twisting to  face the front. “I’d like to thank you all for coming tonight on behalf of both myself and the man of the hour, who I believe now would like to say a few words. Jerry?” 

Jerry smiles flatly. Clears his throat. Tugs nervously at a cuff link. “Just be yourself,”  Nanette said to him all week, the most hypocritical advice there is. Rarely in life does anyone get  what they want by being themselves. There is a reason dull jobs are applied for with suspicious  enthusiasm, a reason 60% of pictures uploaded to dating sites are altered. Some unsaid rule is always inhibiting you, interfering. At a point, you hardly remember what “yourself” even means. 

All this occurs to him in a fuzzy and indirect way as he stands there at the head, frozen, a bit waxy-looking and pale, like a Jerry sculpture that approximates but does not replicate the real  Jerry. Somebody coughs. Jack the Ripper gives one of the Enron people a look like, what’s with  this guy? There’s something odd—unsettling, even—about a silent salesman, especially Jerry  Lugubrious, that famously slick masseur of the English language. Everyone’s beginning to get a  little creeped out.

Finally, here it goes: “They say when you retire, you leave the job, but the job doesn’t leave you.” But it’s not Jerry. “That’s what he was supposed to say. He’s been practicing all week  what to say. But I guess there’s no practicing for stage fright.” This is Nanette saying this. To  everyone. “Just take a deep breath, honey. Try picturing everybody naked.” She’s swaying  slightly in her seat like a reed in a low wind. Little Jerry Jr. is stirring at her chest. He yawns with  his tiny triangular mouth. 

Jerry Sr. laughs uneasily with a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Ixnay, darling,” he says  from the corner of his mouth. They have the kind of tolerant intolerance for each other that  longtime couples sometimes do, that kind of buried resentment. 

Nanette shoos him. “What does that mean, ‘the job doesn’t leave you?’ I hung up my gloves years ago, and I did voices for a living; if my job hasn’t left me, I’m goddamn psychotic.” “I do believe you’re preaching to Satan’s choir, dear,” goes Jerry, still doing his awkward  laugh. “This is my wife Nan, everybody,” he explains, grinning painfully. No one is sure whether  to laugh with him. 

“Oui,” says Napoleon I, trying to be helpful, “Bonnie Blunderbuss. ‘Sweet flippin’  flapjacks.’ It was a very funny character of the television cartoons.” 

“Damn right,” John Wilkes Booth agrees. Some of the other damned souls mumble their  agreement as they suddenly detect and recognize her voice’s dormant cartoon aspect. Nanette grabs one of her bottles, disappointed to find it empty. “How funny you all  remember me when I myself have forgotten.” Some in the audience are eyeing Satan to see  whether he might intervene, but he gives no sign. “And who are you, Jerry? When you really get  down to it, are you leaving your job behind, or is the Devil now just part of who you are? Who we are?”

Jerry clears his throat. “People, clearly my wife has gotten herself pretty happy by this  point in the evening.” He points a thumb at the bottles, makes a face. “I’m afraid in these  conditions she tends to get a little philosophical, as you are now witnessing.” 

“You wanna know what I think?” Nanette belches softly into her fist. “I think we’re just bad people. You have a genius for badness, Jerry, and I have a genius for pretending you don’t. In  the end, we got everything we didn’t deserve, and nothing we did.” 

Jerry has broken a rather noticeable sweat. “All right, Ophelia. You made your speech.  Now listen, everyone here’s itching to raise a toast. Would you let the birds dip their beaks, for  Christ’s sakes?” 

Junior begins to shriek and cry at his mother’s bosom. Nanette bounces him in his  papoose and tells him it’s okay. She cries a little, too. “Our boy has evil parents,” she whimpers,  looking away. It’s a terrible sight. “He’ll never have the goodness he deserves.” 

Jerry sits, rubs his face in his hands. Everybody looks down at their tables, thoroughly  bummed out. Junior keeps crying that horrible infant’s cry while Nanette tries to talk him out of  it. The pinball machine chooses an unfortunate interval to snarl out its little rock-n-roll flourish,  which makes Junior cry even louder. Nobody wants to be here, but nobody wants to be the first  jackass to get up and leave, either. 

Now Satan approaches Nanette and her baby, slowly, his expression shadowy and  malevolent. He stands huge at her side with all the guests watching. “It can be changed,” he  pronounces. “Your son can be granted a good, moral life. A mortal, honest life.” 

Nanette wipes her nose with her wrist. “With all due respect, I don’t believe you’d know  an honest life if it walked up and gave you its card.”

“You’re A-number one right about that, Mrs. L.,” Satan concedes, laughing. “Couldn’t  have said it better myself. Luckily, I have people, experts, who take care of that business for me.  Your boy would be in good hands.” 

Jerry sighs. “Now wait just a minute—” 

“Very, very good hands,” Satan iterates, ignoring the husband. He puts his own hand on  Nanette’s shoulder. Just on the shoulder, very gently, not around the whole neck or anything like  that. He makes little cooing noises at her baby who is instantly soothed. “It can be done, if that’s  what you really want.” 

“That’s all I want anymore,” Nanette says softly. 

Satan nods, strokes his goatee. “There is a cost, as you well know. The parents must  never leave this place. There goes your immortality, and there go your souls, effective  immediately upon agreement. Your own death and damnation. That’s the offer: simple and fair.” 

Jerry stands. “All right, enough. Get your slimy sales talk off of my wife. She has no say  in what happens to my soul.” 

“Your soul?” Satan has to laugh. “You gave that up years ago, my abject servant, when  you fell in with me. I’ve met bellhops less obsequious than you, Jerry. That’s your philosophy,  isn’t it? Leave no ass unkissed.” 

“‘Abject,’ ‘obsequious…’ La-di-da-di-da. You always make with the big words when you  want to confuse me. Well here’s something I’m not confused about. It’s her decision, her soul.  One soul, one favor. That’s how it works.” 

“Half a loaf is better than none, and two loaves are better than one. That’s economics.  Don’t you know that?” 

Jerry shakes his head. Finally, people are beginning to gather their things and leave. A  small tear forms at the corner of Jerry’s eye. “I thought you were a friend.”

“I thought you were a businessman. Now if you don’t mind, I’m about to close.” Jerry picks up someone’s bottle. “Here’s mud in your eye, you old serpent.” He drinks  what’s left in the bottle, which isn’t much, before making for the double-door exit. “She just  likes wasting salesmen’s time, you know,” he warns, stepping backwards through the doors.  “Take my word for it. I’m a century deep into that whole game.” 

Satan looks at Nanette. Junior has already drifted back into a light, fidgety sleep. “This is  obviously all very overwhelming, Mrs. L.,” says Satan. “Tell you what. Why don’t you just take  some time to think this whole thing over. Sleep on it. There’s no need to rush into a big decision  like this. Take all the time you need to decide. You know how to reach me. When you decide it’s  right, I’ll have my people draw up the contract for you to sign. We’ll see that your boy has  nothing to do with us for the rest of his life.” 

The soil in Hell smells like shit. Something to do with the sulfur content. Jerry still isn’t used to it, even after coming and going all these years. 

In Hell, everything is on fire. The ground is on fire. The sky is on fire. The TGI Fridays  sign is on fire. Jerry wanders out through the parking lot and into the middle of Anguish Avenue.  A car swerves screechingly to the left to avoid him. The driver curses. Jerry looks back through  the restaurant window to regard his wife with utter contempt, his innocent child with savage  indifference. He knows Nanette has already made her decision. He goes down the road and  wanders for a long time. Somewhere, in an unfamiliar place, a horrible fear comes on; Jerry  doesn’t know whether he’s dead or just lost.

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