Like the howling of wolves.

I am a party, strangely enough, and I'm drinking, but not too heavily. It seems like everyone I know or used to know, even for a little scrap of time, they're all here. All drinking heavily. All of the people my eyes ever graced.
I start to feel it coming on, the vomit and I head to bathroom. It's not the alcohol, it's the pills I had hours before. Waiting outside and then, a guy in a red shirt walks out, passes me. He turns and looks me dead in the eyes. I know him, perhaps better than anyone else here, even my flesh-and-blood sister. He looks at me and we both know. He's coming for me, later. He's coming to get me.
I dash in the toilet, quickly vomit and leap up. Splash water on my face and look in the mirror. I can do this, my eyelids flinch. I have to escape. Out the back. Now.
I duck into the back bedroom, kick out the screen and this apartment is on the second story. I have to leap hard, land hard and roll. My twisted ankle, I don't think it's broken. So I run. I run down alleys cloaked in nightfall, past wooden fences with chainlinked pitbulls on the other side.
A howling, screeching terror follows me. Like the howling of wolves, I flee with pumping legs and throbbing lungs.
I dart across traffic, right in front of a police cruiser. The beast floods me with his violet lights and slowly crawls from the cradle of his car. He towers over me, checks that my ID is of age and breathalyzes me. I don't even blow a .07. So weak.
The cop decides to let me go, but I realize it would be better to be imprisoned in the cage of leviathan than the foul hunter on my scent. For I know, he comes for me.
So I sock the officer in the face. Hard. To give him a reason to handcuff me, to sacrifice my freedom for my breath.
But the officer goes down. He's unconscious in one slug.
The only viable option is to steal the cop cruiser. What else is alternative? By barely slipping into gear, I'm screeching off at speeds unknown to physics. The lights are still beaming in all directions as I tear down the wrecked neighborhoods of junkies, immigrants and thugs. A fool's paradise.
A mere second later the hood crumples up into the windshield and the airbag explodes onto my face. Glass and dust bond with my skin, until I am streaked with the blood of the stigmata.
I crawl from the wreckage and inspect my victim. A red sports car, the driver completely flattened by my tires. The angle his neck and limbs hang suggest he was killed instantly. On the other side, I twist the deceased face. It is truly, by the coincidence of saints, my enemy. His life essence leaks and mingles onto my own red covered hand. How could I?
I was guilty all along. He never meant to bat a cardinal eyelash at me. I killed my nemesis with little more than hallucination.
And sirens rise on the peaks and the heavy air, hunting me, like the howling of wolves.

Spacelab (Hundreds of Places)

The car dipped and dodged in potholes, dust speedbumps and avoided jackrabbits, mice and occasional deer. The gas on “E” the whole way down. 40mph.
That isn’t fast enough, Sloan thinks and pulls to the side of the vacant dirt road. It’s 2:13 a.m.
Blackheart skips out the passenger side and Sloan follows, hovered over the door, and staring in awe at the thunderstorm currently attacking the mountains. Lightning tears electric wrinkles across the sky and illuminates the forest of surrendering cacti. There’s supposed to be a meteor shower tonight.
On the horizon, Sloan envisions a horde of angry townspeople, all carrying blazing torches, come to kill them. Blackheart screeches and lightning cuts vertical down the horizon. In rhythm, at every screech of Blackheart, a lightning bolt erupts.
Soon, Sloan hears the baying of coyotes and thinks this must be Blackheart's doing. He's inviting the terrible cannibal dogs!
‘Stop it! Fool! Swine!’ Sloan hisses. ‘You’ll attract the monsters!’
He whips out a butterfly knife and flings it around, cutting out chunks of his knuckles. Blackheart is still screaming at the dogs.
In the moment, Sloan does what he thinks best! He strips naked and wields his belt, still trying to silence Blackheart’s howling. Blackheart ducks back to the car and closes the door as the clouds above burst. Hot, wet saliva-like rain spits on the desert.
Now Sloan is rubbing his terrible cock across the windshield and the rain is rushing across the glass and Blackheart gets out and runs. He picks up a large stick, probably a cactus skeleton, and lunges at a passing minivan. It swerves off the road and is never seen again.
Soon Sloan, still slobbering on the windshield comes to his senses and dives in the car. He races a mile down the road, the wipers squeaking and finds Blackheart cowering in the soaking-wet bushes.
‘Get in the car,' he says. 'We have hundreds of places to be.’

Alone

Sunday, May 31

I am alone in a dark, red room.
Watching a movie and it's horror and I've never been so terrified in my life, never so unselfishly considerate for another's well-being.
Too much fear even to remove myself and turn off the TV.

I watch a skeleton remove his hands and arms and shoulders and he didn't shrug and said, "I give up."

Suddenly, high-pitched screaming, non-stop echoing, so loud, my skin quivers and starts to pus over.
Then, silence.
A billion miles of static and I am strangled by a single note.

If only my life were condensed to a single, silent 8mm home film.

A woman dies of a fatal wound to the head, which slowly pours blood into a little pile for her. Her blood platelets slowly clot the gash, knowing full well this will be the very last time they will ever do it.
On a small street corner, she bleeds out her lungs and a homeless dyke tells her life story. Drugs, sex and rock 'n roll. Depressingly, she sighs, knowing this will be the last thing she ever hears.

Burden

non-fiction
When I was a little kid, I used to pick up cigarette butts and put them in a bucket and throw them away. I was a little groundskeeper.
My dad smoked on our porch made of astro-turf and he'd throw the butts right on the green and then there was little melted footprints all over, little UFO treadmarks. I'd pick the butts out of the cradles they made. I'd pick up these beer cans of extinguished butts where hives of cockroaches would crawl into and drown in their drunkenness. I'd fish through ashtrays.

I had a mentally retarded neighbor named Keith that did the same thing. Cleaning up everything.
Keith was a twin, but sometimes one of the twins don't come out entirely OK. Keith was one of those twins.
He was confused, and he thought his purpose in life was to clean up the earth.
He'd crawl the streets on the way to the bus stop, crouching down for plastic wrappers and pop tabs and receipts and cigarette butts.
He'd mutter to himself.
Keith kept the trash in a grocery bag at his side. I never knew what he did with the bag when he was done with it.

One day I got real sick from picking up those cigarette butts, those cans, those roach motels.
"They check in, but they don't check out."
I lay in bed, sick to death and vowed never to do that again.
The task to clean the planet was too large a burden for me to carry.
I figured, let the world be filthy.

Now when I get sick, I don't reflect like that any more, I don't think about it.
I keep going. No rest.
I wonder, if I'm still carrying any burdens.

My First Computer

non-fiction

I remember getting my first computer, the excitement I had, all of it. I loved it because it was all mine.
I got it from my mother's friend who had an autistic child who watched a lot of VHS tapes. It was used, but free and I loved it.
It was a Windows '95 or '98, not sure which, but it was heavy, a monitor that weighed more than me. I remember bringing it home and assembling it in my room and how I just loved putting the pieces together myself. I loved opening and closing the disc drive, the hum of the monitor, the special sounds it made on start up, the loading screens and the little words that said, "IT IS NOW SAFE TO TURN OFF YOUR COMPUTER". I wanted to keep my computer on forever, but my mother wouldn't let me. I had to turn it off every night.

I wrote novels on my computer. I'd open up the Word knockoff I had and just type and type and type for hours and I didn't care what came out. I wrote a story that was a Paperboy knockoff and one called 20,000 Pennies Under the Duckpond that was about guinea pigs and hamsters that lived on a farm and had to find some money. They were terrible stories and I never finished them, but they felt so good to write.

I had Juno, which was like AOL only so simple and pathetic it only allowed you to check email. You couldn't even get on the internet with it for anther three years. I'd check my mail all the time, but I never got anything so I'd email myself. It took forever to get them.
I'd hack onto my mom's Juno account and email her friends long-winded stories I wrote, mostly re-tellings of faerie tales so they were funny. Or at least so I would laugh. I wanted my stories to be like the chain emails that my mom forwarded to me and I forwarded to myself.

Fuck solitaire! On my computer, I played hours of games (that came with it somehow) like WinBreakOut '95 and I'd install dollar-store floppy disc games. A few times, if they sucked, I'd erase them off the floppy disc and reuse it.

But what I remember most is it had awesome screensavers of pipes and a maze thing and I loved customizing those. I'd change them every hour and then wait for the computer to start them up. It came with these themes, like the Jungle Theme and the Space Theme and it would change all the colors and the cursors and the sounds when the computer started up, loaded up and fucked up.

Really, all I liked to do was mod the shit out of it. It was mine and that was a powerful feeling, knowing I had something so useful all to myself. I felt privelegded. My computer could do anything! I mean, it didn't have internet or any music on it or anything but it still felt amazing to me.

But the computer didn't have a lot of hard drive space. So what did I do? What any kid would. I went into the :C drive and deleted any files I thought I didn't need. Such as old games, themes I didn't use and . . . system files.

After that my computer didn't work anymore. I totally fucked it up and lost everything. But somehow, I didn't really care.

The other day, I bought a new computer for a C-note. Got it for a song, really. It's an eMac with a thousand features that my old '98 never had, even if the eMac is a couple years outdated. It doesn't have a very big hard drive but I'm not about to delete anything I shouldn't.

Anyway, I got kinda giddy again, buying it. I started to feel like I used to, like my computer was the best thing in the world.

But then it faded after a day.

Still, I'm gonna keep my computer on all the time, deep into the night.

Slaughter Machine

None of this was done on purpose. None of this, was, intentional. John Carpenter owned a small farm, too small for most vegetables to make profit, so he slaughtered livestock. Under these circumstances, someone could say, it was bound to happen eventually. But as it was said, none of this was done on purpose.
Carpenter was behind on his mortgage and he was feeling plagued by a real estate agency that wanted to acquire his land. The pig farmer didn't want to sell the farm because he wanted it to be in his family for years. He didn't inherit anything, nothing in his family was generational so he hoped to be the first to create a heirloom. He hoped that would be his farm.
But what if had to sell? Carpenter woke up in the middle of the night for weeks, with nightmares of living in an inner-city apartment and leaving his grandchildren with nothing but a box of photos. And he wasn't a good photographer.
Late one night, Carpenter awoke and couldn't get back to sleep, so he went out to the slaughterhouse and sat on a stool. The poor farmer gazed around the shed, the meat hooks, the carving knives, the special sickle they used to execute the animals. None of this meant anything?
Late in the month, as the old farmer advanced closer to his mortgage payment date, he came across a catalogue that boasted of special machinery. Carpenter flipped, bored, at all the specialty order mechanical bulls, auto-parts manufacturers and vending machines until he came upon a slaughterhouse assistance bot.
Carpenter could easily order this monster on a credit card and he'd slice up so much meat, he could sell thrice as much and make his payment on time.
So Carpenter ordered the machine. Six-to-eight weeks later, the mailman came up the drive and dropped off a six foot-by-eight package. Carpenter tipped the mailman, unwrapped the box and wheeled the machine into the slaughterhouse. It looked like a giant refrigerator, only with wheels on the bottom to help it move.
He didn't have any electricity in the shed, so he ran some extension cables from the house to the bot. Then he switched it on.
The refrigerator popped open and extended six bladed spider arms, each gleaming in the daylight. Carpenter, frightened for a bit, approached the machine again and pushed a few buttons on the front, to see what it would do.
He stepped back and the machine whirled and extended robotic fingers to Carpenter's outstretched right arm.
It quickly snatched and ripped the hand right off the bone and set it down. Carpenter, muted in agony, squealed and fell over, shooting currents of blood against the porcelain exterior of the machine.
Rolling in his fluids, Carpenter flipped over and grabbed his detached right hand. He immediately tried to shove it on the bone, sticking out from the wrist. It stuck on half-way and but got too thick and stringy to push on any further.
The machine quickly snatched Carpenter by the foot and spun him upside down, smacking his head against the floor.
Stunned, Carpenter wheeled about and then tried to free himself. A blade extended from the machine and sliced at Carpenter, detaching his left foot. He collapsed to the floor and his right hand skidded off. The old farmer flipped on his belly and reached for his lost limb, until the robot reached for him again. He lashed out and kicked away an arm with the stub of his left leg. On the other foot, he hobbled over to his second lost limb, snatched and rounded about again for the hand.
He held his foot in his mouth by the toes and tried to force his hand onto the bone again. This time, it was so deflated of blood that it wouldn't but flay around.
The robot advanced on its wheels, scattering puddles of blood. It extended another blade and sliced at Carpenter's good leg. It hacked halfway to the bone, but stopped. Carpenter slipped on it, cracking it off and sending his leg flying across the shed. Still clutching the hand and the foot in his mouth, Carpenter crawled on his single hand, pushing with the stubs of his legs in the blood and muck of the slaughterhouse floor, some of the blood of Carpenter, some of the blood of animals. He scrambled to the base of a huge trashbucket and pulled himself upright. The leg had landed inside the bucket, which had been used to store the skeletons of killed chickens and pigs.
Carpenter fished out his leg, shoved it into place under his calf and balanced on it. He bent down and shoved his foot underneath his ankle, meanwhile pressing his wrist into his hand against a wall.
At the moment that he had pieced himself back together, the robot advanced and decapitated Carpenter. His head fell, splat, into the bucket of pig skins.

Charon 40

The way the sunlight on a hot day ricochets off the windshields of every car in the mall parking lot, that's how the sunlight reflected off of every stone on Planet Taurus' moon, Charon 40. The surface, like a house of mirrors, every direction bright and glassy.

Marc bounced gently on the moons surface, careful not to rip his spacesuit on the sharp, broken-bottle rocks. He didn't want to melt and the littlest rip could do anything. . .

The astronaut watched his companions get out of the ship, really slowly. Two guys, two girls: Mitchel, Wayne, Abigail and Caci. Marc knew all too well, they were all stoned as hell. He remembered, back in the shuttle's cockpit, Wayne passed a fat blunt to Caci, who was staring out the window at the stars, fucked up on shrooms. Abigail was snorting coke off Mitchel's eyelids. At least three of them had dropped acid.

Marc didn't do anything and earlier, Wayne had nudged him and shouted, "C'mon man, don't pussy out, you won't regret this, I mean, c'mon, how cool would it be to DROP on the fuckin' moon?!"

Marc didn't move. Didn't answer, even though he had a hundred legitimate excuses. It's not a good idea to fuck the brain up in the middle of a difficult search-and-rescue mission. On the surface of a planet, somewhere safe, a coffeeshop even, maybe. Nothing could be more fun, a head full of acid, walking down the street toward . . . wherever.

That's fine, Marc thought. But Charon 40 isn't the best place.

So he withheld and the rest of the crew partook.

On the moon's rocky surface, scattered with those millions and millions of little mirrors, gems and disco balls, Marc watched the crew file out of the ship. He watched them stumble over themselves and glisten in the rocks and forget to put their visors down and nearly blind themselves. The sober one watched the drunk as they bounced out, over the surface of the moon, like blissful pixies.

Caci bounded up to Marc and said, "Jesus, aren't you glad they don't drug test anymore?"

Marc wasn't thrilled. He was thinking of the six or so lives the crew had to save, not counting the ones that may have already been roasted alive in the heat of the moon. Say, if their suits ripped or the hull disintegrated, whatever.

The junkies scattered off and Marc trailed behind, loose as a feather, worried as an anchor. They were going the wrong way. But they stopped at a large rock, gleaming blue and beautiful against the infinite night sky. It was worth more than several countries back on Earth. Too bad they couldn't remove it at all, against intergalatic park laws.

"Guys . . ." Marc said into his microphone.

"Guys, I got an idea." Wayne said. "But before I tell you, you all have to tell me the dirtiest secret you have. Do it. We may never be on the moon again."

"Your idea has to be amazing." Abigail said. "I'll go first. I starred in my first porno . . . when I was fifteen."

"Oh, ok." Mitchel said. "When I was six, I took my grandmother's chiuauaha, the one she loved so much and castrated it. Cut the balls clean off."

"Did you make your grandmother eat them?" Wayne asked.

"Hell no. The dog escaped and ran into traffic. My grandmother never knew which pieces were missing. And she never blamed me."

"Wayne's next." Abigail said.

"OK," Wayne breathed in deep. "Let's see. . . I almost set my cat on fire?"

"No. . ."

"I was molested by my older cousin. . ."

"C'mon man, we don't wanna hear your life story. . ."

"Ok, ok." Wayne breathed heavy. "I knew what the Martinville Killer looked like and never told anyone."

Mitchell crouched up, excited. "REALLY?"

"I saw him kill victim no. 17. Night of April 11th. Didn't tell a soul."

"You know, that other guy who was accused of being the Killer, he got the gas chamber."

"You mean lethal injection."

"No, they brought the Chamber back. It's easier to afterward just cremate the bodies. Course, the gas only knocks them unconscious now. It's really the fire that gets them."

"Anyway, the the Martinville Killer has blue eyes, red hair and he's five foot eleven." Wayne sighed smugly and leaned his five foot eleven frame against the giant blue diamond, blinked his eyes to match and shook his red hair out of his eyes. "Believe it or not." He said.

"Caci is next."

"Oh, you don't want to hear about little, ol' me." She said. "Trust me."

Marc spoke up. "When I was six, I accidentally poisoned my parents." Everyone turned to the one person who's head was straight.

"Just a kid, playing with some chemicals under the sink. Poured something bad into my mother's cooking. They ate their food and I ate something for kids and the next thing I knew, they were in the hospital. Watched them die. And I didn't shed a tear."

There was silence on the moon, as there always is, but something about it seemed even quieter than usual.

Finally Wayne said, "OK, now for my big secret plan. I was planning to do this all along, no matter what you did." The intoxicated astronaut reached up to his neck and pulled the seam and his helmet floated away. Instantly, his head froze, instead of bursting into flame.

Abigail did the same. Then Mitchel, then Caci. Their heads froze, dark red and blue icicles running across their faces, the blood vessles exploded with ice. Their eyes shattered into crystal, floated out their heads, now empty and lifeless. Soon, each corpse lifted up by the giant blue crystal and then up further, higher and higher into space.

Marc watched them in envy until he couldn't see them.