WILL KILLED THE EDITOR

ROLLS LEFT EYE ROLLS RIGHT EYE

2010-05-18T06:30:00.000-07:00

L R

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Utah

2010-02-19T06:46:00.000-08:00

1

Everything outside me is like a TV screen and I’m watching porches move by the window, alternating between yellow and red indexes from street lights and flashing shapes unseen by all in the Suburban but me.

For a split second, the row of houses seem like a scroll unraveling from a roll of paper tucked into the blind spot in my right eye’s peripheral vision.

I watch these gasps of colors and concrete dance up and down the scroll like musical patterns, and I try to hum this composition but everything from my mouth comes out atonal.

“Comasheena, if you don’t get Liam to shut up I swear I’m going to kick its teeth in.” says the stout man with a stubble and one foot on the accelerator. Does that make him the one who is unraveling the scroll, or does his position in the driver’s seat merely coincide with this spectacle?

My sister pinches my elbow and I stop translating what is outside and focus on her instead. Her cheeks are wet. She is moving her lips in response to the stubbly man but I don’t hear her. Instead, I see translucent red triangles of varying angles fading in and out in front of her mouth. The different degrees probably bear some sort of relationship to different enunciations. I can’t possibly decipher it but I gather that decimal points are involved. 360° can’t possibly encompass the entire range of speech, can it?

Whatever my sister is saying, the man seems to be placated by it.

A slanted grin forms inside the stubble on the rear view mirror.

That’s when I knew she was going to die.

2

Beyond the porches and tucked in their beds were kids who had went to school this morning where they had formed a pack of fatherless Wolf Cubs roaming in the jungle that was MKGC.

Sometimes the children, splashed with sunlight split apart by tree branches hovering over their beige uniforms during playtime, would demonstrate that they didn’t have much sense in their heads, despite being full of untarnished vigor, yet to be worn out by puberty and perverted by the ever shifting nature of the city.

A kind of rivalry existed between the synaesthetic students in the Merryweather Kindergarten for Gifted Children. The boys left Lego constructions and play dough structures around, which served as territorial marks which were eventually destroyed by other boys salvaging Lego pieces to create 2 foot-high Towers of Babel that looked phallic.

I wasn't interested in any of these rituals.

I pissed at the corner in the playroom.

This minor act of subversion didn’t go without consequences. I was exiled from the synaesthtic clique, and then pretty much the rest of the school.

The only kid who would hang out with me was a DKK called Jennifer whom I beat up every day, not that I didn’t regret it afterwards.

I met Jennifer again when I was 17... she had to be 19, then... and the first thing I was aware of was how beautiful and free she looked hunched over the Chaos Pad, bobbing her head around like mechanical spastic while twiddling sounds on the touch screen that were invisible to her. How nice her dimples looked while her double chin shook under that pouting hare-lipped mouth. She was dribbling everywhere and having fun.

Though aurally the sounds she and her band made were dissonant, I could see that the sound she emitted through finger friction was consistently red.

She was the member of a quartet that performed at children birthday parties, incorporating music and video art in staged guerrilla gigs at backyards. They were earnest in their approach and put on a great show. Who in the right mind wouldn’t want to watch a bunch of college dropouts fronted by a hippie girl who walked on the stage on tip toes and proceeded to have as much fun as possible? It was well worth the price of admission.

“Lee-am!” she screamed as I approached her after the show. “Oh my God!”

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it.” I managed to reply.

It was strange to finally see her after all these years. She had been a recurring fixation of my adolescent subconscious, only that in dreams she was just a figment in these dreams, nothing more than a ghostly blur of a childhood friend.

It was odd to see her fleshed out and standing in front of me, hugging me, pressing against me. I could smell her hair shampoo: white ellipses galore.

Her expression changed when she spotted my FFI badge.

I have never seen a look of such utter disgust since.

“They sent me.” I said.

She lets go of me and I finally feel like I'm part of the team.

3

Most people would make way when ever they saw a man in an orange jumpsuit coming towards them holding stun guns.

Most people would make way when ever they saw a man in an orange jumpsuit coming towards them holding tazers.

Most of people would make way when ever they saw a man in an orange jumpsuit screaming “Get out of the way bitch”

But that wasn’t the way for Comasheena.

4

In the Control room,

Where my sister’s dead eyes stared through me… beyond me, even, seeing beyond me and into nothingness.

Where her white arm lay still three feet away on a wet patch on the green floor that stretched out in front of the doors which men in orange jumpsuits made their way.

Where I lay chained over the coldness metal.

I can not cry, I do not know how to.

Red waves overrode yellow ones on the screen,

Indicating that all the rules had been broken, re-initiated, and re-broken, all possibilities exhausted. The time line was organic. Multiple timelines disintegrated and reformed simultaneously over each other

Mistakes were made and the men in orange jumpsuits had to go back in time through pink doors spread through the hallway to fix these mistakes, creating more mistakes to an already mutated linearity.

But whether this happened literally I can not be sure.

The doors could have been magenta.

Or maybe it was the color of her bruises.

The men in orange jumpsuits brought down gardening equipment – rakes, hoes and sticks upon her body after stripping and gagging her. This was not done to shut her up. The walls in the control room were sound-proof.

A four sided one-way mirror surrounded the tower of Babel. Not a word escaped from this reflective moat, but around the city sounds that came within the range of tiny hidden microphones were sent to the Control Room.

The gag was not to stifle her, by far. Her screaming was just about barely muffled.

The gag was made necessary by the Ministry of Babel for the condemned to choke on their own blood.

I had shut my eyes when it happened, my lachrymal glands flashing orange, but when I closed my eyes I saw Enid instead.

Enid the pretty corpse, Enid the specimen.

The feeling of loss lasts a lifetime.

Fortunately, the corporation spared me the burden of killing her. But it didn’t make a difference, anyway. I had brought her to them.

I still think of how beautiful she looked.

Free too.

In my dreams, a butterfly took the place of the blurry image of Enid, who had sat down and ate with me during playtime.

I had pinned her wings down.

5

They say every man has a test in life, one that either makes you or breaks you.

My test in life was women.

Well, two women specifically, my mom, and Jennifer. After all, I was responsible for their deaths. Ma had trusted me with her money when I left the commune for the city, and Enid had trusted me to keep my head screwed on (when she wasn't sticking brain jacks in her own nutshell.)

She had waited 7 years to figure things out. Unfortunately, I came back to her with instructions.

During the morning that followed her death I felt nothing. I felt nothing when I stared at the bacon and eggs laid upon red porcelain.

I felt nothing when my mother reached out and held my hand in her rough palms, worn from 50 years of manual labor. She was getting older and I had the peculiar notion that what remained unrevealed within me would seep through my fingers and into her, like cancer.

I pulled my hand away.

“Liam…” she said. “I just want to thank you for this. All of it.”

I avoided her eyes, diverting my gaze towards the picture of dad hanging under the plasma wall clock. The studio was bugged with tiny microphones and hidden cameras.

To mom it was home, where the last days of her life would take place. Little did she know that she was being watched from the control room. They watched as she ate. They watch as she slept. They watched as she bathed and cried whenever I was cold to her.

Perhaps it was for the better.

They would protect her as long as I complied.

Under the garden, where she tended petunias, lay Jennifer, an unseen but solemn reminder of the thinning ice, the foundation our new home was been built upon.

6

"So Lorrr-d rip awwwt my pituitary glads," moaned the bluesman into the microphone while full-bosomed, bitterly drunk black women noted that he was off key.

The club was deserted, save a few alcoholics and retrograde amnesiacs and an entire arsenal of peanut shells on the floor. The bluesman moaned, nonetheless, moaned and howled his lung out, as if giving caution to the wind. Or giving the wind a blowjob, for that matter.

“Hallelujah, brothers!” screamed the Bluesman.

He glanced beyond the stage to a field of stony glares out the eyes of alcoholics and retrograde amnesiacs.

“Rainbow colored motorcycle gas puddles?” he scoffed into his microphone “It doesn’t matter at all.”

“What matters is the electricity.”

The full-bosomed women stared at him, slacked jawed, with a taste of bitter perplexity surrounding their bewildered expressions.

“And if you can’t understand that, you’re as good as dead in Salt Lake City.” Howled the bluesman.

Outside the Luna Bar and Bistro orange men lurked. There were just seven of them, really. If it looks like more you’re seeing duplicates. They doubled and quadrupled every time they passed through those pink doors in that hallway. Time travel was a fairly easy procedure in the Babel Inc. GBS.

“He’s dead.” sang the bluesman solemnly, putting down his guitar.

No I’m not I’m just hibernating.

“Now peeps on the street be screamin’ an’ testifying against the hands of those in charge, the very hands that, yall know what papa used to say, once you’ve paid your dues, you can sing the blues. Well Lord knows I’ve paid my dues, Lord knows I’ve paid them in spades.” Said the Bluesman, lifting up his left hand, which was nothing more than a plastic cast. A pick had been superglued between the index and middle finger.

“They cut it off. Buzzsaw.” Said the bluesman, while twisting his neck towards the gleam of the tiny spot light so the audiences could see the scratches. “Electrodes. Stuck on my face.”

Hushed acknowledgment registered over the faces of the Alkies and Amnesiacs Alike.

The bluesman was proud to exhibit his wounds.

On him they were like badges of honor.

7

I’m not dead.

I’m staring into my sister’s eyes as they cut me.

I’m staring at the red cubes dancing around her irises in the key of F Major.

I’m looking at my blood cover the floor in falsetto.

8

“He’s dying,” announced the bluesman.

“You full of shit, Bu.” said an alchoholic. “First he dead, now he dying… which it be?”

“If it be in your wretched soul the pure, inquisitive musings of a child, then you shall find out.” Said the bluesman.

Electricity crackled as a housefly died in a metal cage above their heads.

The bluesman looked intently at the faces that made up tonight’s crowd. They did not look like happy people.

“Bu, please do the encore, I’ve got the 9.45 bus to catch.” Said a blue-haired woman.

“Anything for you, brown sugar,” crooned the bluesman and the blue-haired woman rolled her eyes.

The bluesman started playing folk music.

“Man the garden’s caretaker, under the birds and bees he reigned” sang the bluesman. “Man and women stood naked, and in their state they felt no shame. Following the trail of sun beams, as masochists drawn to pain, as bees drawn to nectar and as fireflies drawn to flame.”

The bluesman launched into a series of shrill arpeggios in the bar started clapping to the rhythm.

“So you can give it to me, boxes of ash, from inquisitive fireflies… mix them up with rice and pepper, serve with potato salad, I am sitting and eating with my eyes open,”

“I am sitting and eating with my eyes wide open, looking out”

9

At MKGC, I drew crayon pictures of orange bees chasing fireflies chasing butterflies.

At MKGC, I rolled multicolored play dough together and they turned to mud.

At MKGC, I was beat up by an 11-year-old bully named Chan.

He brought rubber bats from the prop room and tried to choke me during lunch break.

But I got back at him.

There are many subliminal ways of changing a person’s perception on continuity, you see. Color recoordination is one of them.

My 9 year old hands got drawing paper and and magic marker and wrote:

Lactate (L)

Morning - White

Afternoon - Red

Evening - Blue

Night – Black

Reverse (R)

Morning - Black

Afternoon - Blue

Evening - Red

Night – White

The night before Chan was hospitalized, I had cycled to the hardware store downtown and bought 4 cans of paint.

I repainted the grids he sat at during lunch break, changed the color coordinates on his visor during Hand Eye Co-Ord studio sessions.

That night, Chan's mind succumbed to my sabotage.

He had a seizure and bit off his tongue.

10

Outside the city everything smelt of pheromones like prawns in heat, drawn towards ovulating flowers softly spelling out “fuck me” with all the colors of summer. Mating calls were seasonal and love was nothing like it.

Love was like an ambient web turned red throughout many years.

I couldn’t help but feel insecure when Comasheena started taking night jobs. When she was away I would find myself thinking about the other men she would meet after she clocked out, and often I would wonder if perhaps it wasn’t a night job after all, but secret lovers… hordes of them, riding saddleback and carrying diseases.

During her midnight shifts I would sleep alone and dream of one of these secret lovers dressed up as cowboy, plunging forked tongues into her mouth. I screamed at the cowboy "leave my sister Comasheena alone," and he turned into a giant, promptly crouched over and castrated me his long, ragged middle and index fingernails.

When I was a kid, Enid would wake me up occasionally, with her mouth smelling of mint Listerine. She’d wrap her lips around me and I’d see blue inside and outside.

“Naked, a boy squats over red coals
And taunts the devil.”

(which is something you should never do
If you savor your intestines.)

THE END

Pissed-off Folk Song

2010-02-19T06:39:00.000-08:00

Triceratops top of the pops Cro-Magnon man,
get all the Egyptian painters
into your master plan

Leaves and bushes like carpet weavings
Mix them in your slot
Climb out your deepest chasms
It’s a robot’s game all cogs and levers

you've felt like compartments all your life as a bundle of cells
in dermis in epidermis
in dermis in epidermis
in dermis in epidermis

Triceratops top of the pops Cro-Magnon man,
get the Egyptian painters
into your master plan

Triceratops top of the pops Cro-Magnon man,
get all the Egyptian painters
into your master plan

You draw pimples on simple men
Preach about all the good that you know
You participate with Kinkade on the master bed
Set a jungle on fire,
preach about the good of all you know

Triceratops top of the pops Cro-Magnon man,
get all the Egyptian painters
into your master plan

Triceratops top of the pops Cro-Magnon man,
get all the Egyptian painters
into your master plan

you've felt like compartments all your life as a bundle of nerves
between endings of endings...
of endings of endings
of endings of endings
of endings of endings

By Yusuf

THE BOOK OF STRUXUS, ONE

2008-08-04T04:25:00.000-07:00

00:25

1 O CLOCK

I awoke lying on small mound of things flaccid and rancid
everything that would have rendered you and your consummate
middle class ideals into something broken
impotent
threatening.

Hygiene
aesthetics
ambience. all the major illusions
inverted to the point of paroxysm.

Dead fish.
Salmon. Shrimp.
Banana peels. Banana Leaves.
Ants and rice.

I smelt like cat piss.

Unpleasant, but I was comfortable.

I could hear two people, one male, one female, arguing behind the wall next to the garbage heap.

2 O CLOCK

The only memories I have of my mother’s features are a collection of lines enshrouded by crisscrosses of darkness, the afterimage of microbes on the surface of the thin layer of fluid around my eyeballs dancing around her blurry contours like an aura.

After I was born my parents taught me how to talk and write in 3 weeks, with the prolonged and excessive usage of brain jacks, literally installing information into a hard drive that was my brain through the circuitry manipulation of my neurons.

My nursery was the Pink Room, where everything was plastic and smelt of disinfectant. After my mind was wired up to do what it was meant to do, I was locked up in it for 17 years.

Every morning at precisely 6.45 a.m., after untying the strap that held the mint-flavored oral placebo (on weekends it was strawberry flavored) firmly at the back of my throat, mother would go out of the room, shut the door, and the lights would go on.

Come to think of it I’m not even sure that was my mother. Could have been a very dedicated nursemaid.

“Mother” would slide a pen and pad underneath the door, and I would pick them up, go to the pink desk by the pink nightstand, and write.

I would spend exactly 8 hours writing about meat cleavers, second chances, true love, and dogs copulating in the alley outside of… whatever the hell I was confined in, were it a maze or a desert.

I was never sure if the universe outside was finite or infinite. Come to think of it, how could I even be sure if there were a universe outside? At the mean time, life goes on.

Mother fed me based on what I wrote.

3 O CLOCK

I constructed my first sentence when I was 4 months old.

It was a semi-coherent blue scrawl with a faded blue sharpie:
I AM

As soon as I did that the lights went out
and Mother came in.
I heard the sound of a plate rattling against a metal tray
and Mother came out.

The lights came back on, and I saw that she had left me a slice of bread. I ate it.

Six minutes later,
I wrote:
I AM NOT

The lights went out again, and mother entered and exited just as abruptly as before.
Lights on.
She had brought me a plate
with small lumps of peanut butter smeared all over.

Very well.
ADAM I AM NOT

Lights out.
Mother left me a slice of bread with peanut butter on both sides
which I consumed when the lights went on.
I AM NOT
Mother fed me oatmeal

4 O CLOCK

MA, COULD YOU POSSIBLY GET SOME KIT KATS IN HERE. - A can of coke.

OR SOME COOKIES. – A tic-tac.

Withholding.
Just ma’s way of telling me I had a lot more to learn.
Even though she came nonetheless.

5 O CLOCK

Faz said that he didn’t approve of the mammoth-sized metal rods sticking out of Stacey’s breasts.

“Those nips are going to waste, darling.” Faz told Stacey. “Assuming there are any left after what that S&M plastic surgeon did to you.”

“You’re being utterly prejudiced.” Stacey snapped. “Chuck is NOT an S&M plastic surgeon. He’s a proper plastic surgeon who, on his free time, chooses to participate in sadomasochistic activities as a past time among consenting adults at the Bound Muscle Bar at the mall.”

“Methinks Daniel was mixing business with pleasure when he operated on you, girl. You look like a Robert Williams drawing. However are you gonna get nipple stimulation?”

“Ha-ha... It’s not just a piercing, genius. It’s a remote control vibrator. It’s wired to receptors in my nervous system. All I have to do to get an orgasm is to get those metal plates in contact with these things…”

6 O CLOCK

BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO.
- Spam and fried eggs sunny side up with Worcestershire sauce and salt.

JAMES WHILE JOHN HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD HAD A BETTER EFFECT ON THE TEACHER.
- Spam and mash with tomato ketchup and salt.

石室詩士施氏，嗜獅，誓食十獅。氏時時適市視獅。十時，適十獅適市。是時，適施氏適市。
氏視是十獅，恃矢勢，使是十獅逝世。氏拾是十獅屍，適石室。石室濕，氏使侍拭石室。石室拭，氏始試食是十獅。食時，始識是十獅，實十石獅屍。試釋是事。
Brown Sugar Water

7 O CLOCK

The actress reached into her pink purse (wasn’t it a prop?) and pulled out a little metal rod with a small pink handle at the tip. She waved in front of the cinematographer, as if to ward off a vampire with a cross.

Nonplussed. The cinematographer drew a gun with a slight showman’s flourish, then aims it coldly and precisely in the middle of the actress’s face.

The actress made a choking noise and dropped the rod from her manicured fingers. The cinematographer sprang to action. He moved with a combination of speed and artistry, catching the rod mid air before it hit the ground. Just as quickly as he had whipped it out, he squirted pink paint in her face with the watergun, and slid the gun back into his holster. This happened so instantaneously that he looked like a juggler doing this.

The cinematographer set a camera up on a tripod, ignoring an angry flurry of the actress’s questions. He switched on the camera, and put on a mask shaped like a pixel mosaic. He started dancing around the actress, jabbing the blue metal sphere protruding halfway out of the surface of her breasts.

The actress made ugly, squealing noises.

8 O CLOCK

I was peeking from behind the wall watching a monkey dancing around a pig, when burly arms grabbed my shoulders, and flung me back onto the trash heap.

9 O CLOCK

Somewhere along the age of 6 I decided that if I wasn’t going to see the world outside the Pink Room, I was going to taste as much of it that I could instead. So I started writing stories. I started my journey a McDonalds across the street where we lived. To get a Big Mac and fries, I wrote short contemporary horror stories. For a side of milkshakes, I wrote them in third person. For Sprite, I wrote it in first person. I wrote erotic fiction for pasta and Science Fiction for TV Dinners. If I wanted sushi with egg rolls I wrote existential fiction disguised in western genre conventions. If I wanted fruit I wrote colloquiums. If I craved yogurt I used symbolism. If I wanted mustard and sausages I employed deconstruction and metonymy. I had analyzed all the recipes. Writing stories based on plot structures from Chinese fables got me sponge cake. Reinterpreting Greek mythology got me pizza with anchovies. Dada got me gefilte fish. Objectivism got me shellfish. Eastern mythology got me chocolate bunnies.

And I learnt how to get Kit Kats, too. All I had to do was write teenage romance novels.

By the time I was 9, father was an agent for 42 nonexistent authors ghostwritten by me. He also secured all the film rights.

10 O CLOCK

“Nosey little cocksucker.” said the director. He was holding an electronic clapper board and wearing nothing but a pair of yellow boots and a body hair oat. One boot pressed down on my ribs as I struggled.

The director lifted his foot and I rose from the mound of trash.

The director kicked me hard on my behind. I scampered off down the alley, towards a street light that temporarily blinded me. For the next 15 seconds I saw nothing but whiteness and all I could hear was my own footsteps making crunching sounds in the gravel underneath me.

I heard the director’s footsteps in huge, unruly strides behind me. Our combined footsteps created an atypical tempo. It was very disorienting. It made my legs feel wobbly. I felt like I was going to fall over.

I’d have recurring nightmares like this, of me running away from a predatory force creeping up behind me while having pins and needles over both my legs.

“Yeah, run back to your mama, little boy! Tell her we need extras for the sodomy scene.” The director yelled behind me. “I’m playing the FUCKER, and GUESS WHAT…”

Suddenly, the only footsteps I could hear was my own.

“…IT’S NON-STIMULATED, YOU LITTLE FUCK!”

Something hit the back of my head, and shattered.

I fell onto shards of green glass on the floor. They punctured my plastic suit and ripped into tight flesh.

I closed my eyes.

A split second before the pain registered, I felt calm, at peace with the world. I was born from the gravel, now the gravel was absorbing my life back in.

The pain seeped into me as soon as I unclenched my muscles. My wounds came loose. I felt the warmth and wetness of my blood seeping out from under me and into the gravel. The gravel wasn’t a part of any nature order, the gravel was a puddle of vampire quicksand sucking out my blood with its hundreds of green teeth pierced through my flesh.

I made the connection in my head at the exact same moment I registered 3 colors, green, sharp, and red.

The fragments came together in my brain and danced in circles, creating a palindrome that made perfect sense in the severity of my condition. The director had thrown a Heineken bottle at my head. I had seen them littered around the set.

“…little bastard doesn’t know how to go about minding his own god damn business…”

the director’s voice faded into distance and lingered on, melding into the grunting, animalistic noises the cinematographer and the actress were fully engaged in making. The director’s annoyed proclamations were much softer than the other two’s, but his was frighteningly audible because it was of a more consistent pitch:

“… god damn kids ought to be locked up at night.”

I crawled out of the puddle of blood and glass into the light. While I crawled I smelt my blood and bacon grease in the air.

Bacon was the taste of churned-out plot boilers and generic mystery novels. Instantly, I knew what was happening behind me.

Faz, Stacey and the director were performing a sordid Ménage à trios scene on an American flag, while flames consumed a Charcoal Grill off camera. I didn’t see any of this, but I already knew the scene by heart.

I wrote the book the screenplay was based on.

I knew better than to turn my head back to watch what I had written being re-enacted. Lot’s wife had turned into a pillar of salt when she sneaked a final longing glance back at the city of Sodom. Sodium Nitrate may taste good on steaks but it gives you colon cancer.

11 O CLOCK

Dirty limericks usually got me a Twinkie.

“There was a young lady from Brussels
who exercised her virile corpuscles
with dynamite sticks in bed
head to ass and ashes to match head
whenever she got orgasms with fire marshalls”

I wrote this on a yellowing legal pad and put it in the dumbwaiter. 30 seconds later, I heard a motor humming, chains rattling against pulleys. 15 seconds later I opened the dumbwaiter. In it was a fork, knife, and a blue porcelain rice bowl containing a sizzling, deep fried Mars Bar, a nutritionally dubious Scottish delicacy.

Oh well. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. My limerick didn’t scan anyway.

I cut off a piece of the mars bar and bit into the oily, fried dough coating the melted chocolate.

I was instantly rendered a spluttering, coughing mess. I had scalded my tongue. I spit oil and chocolate phlegm all over the floor. The Mars Bar was soaked in oil. Hadn’t anyone used a paper napkin to absorb the gunk?

The aftertaste was overwhelming. I vomited on the pink floor boards. It was Ma’s way of telling me not to write shit if I didn’t want to eat it.

THE CLOCK STRUCK 12,

And I crawled out into the illuminated pavement, a tolerable distance away from the stench of burning wood and squealing noises.

The streets were empty. The houses were patchwork architectures made out of cardboard held together by yellow industrial adhesive that dripped from the sides and looked like molten honey. The tiles on the street were shaped like little hexagonal cells.

Suddenly I felt very tired, like an old bear crawling around during wintertime. I just had to hibernate.

I crawled over a manhole shaped like a pentagon to fall asleep or die, whichever came first.

In my sleep, I heard a bicycle bell ringing faintly in the distance, and another odd sound: Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click Click. Click. Click.

A man peddling a rickshaw stopped right nest to me. He stopped his rickshaw and got on his knees, and crawled slowly towards me. Under the streetlights, I saw that he was wearing a mask. It was extremely peculiar. It resembled a kabuki water buffalo, but it had no eyeholes, just a slit where the rickshaw peddler’s tongue poked out.

“I’m afraid I’ve cut myself,” I tell him.

The peddler sniffs and makes clicking noises with his tongue at me, like a dolphin ‘seeing’ with echolocation.

“You’re just a kid.”

I nod and he makes more clicking sounds.

“Have a name?”

“I don’t know. Bears don’t have names” I say, closing my eyes.

“Sure they do.” said the peddler. “Just off the top of my head, I know a bear called Yogi and another call Baloo. Then there’s Rupert, Paddington, Gummi, Pooh… why, my mother in law owns a bear called Scott. It was the quaintest thing ever. It would salivate every time we pressed a button.”

“I honestly don’t know,” I yawned.

The peddler sneezes twice and rubs his nose. “I smell roast pork.” He says. “Are the Albinis hosting a barbeque party?”

“I don’t know.” I said, and fell asleep.

2008-07-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

THE GRID (PIRATE GIGA WAVE RATINGS WEEK, APRIL 20XX)

2008-07-11T07:45:00.001-07:00

ALL-FOZZ EPISODE

WE HAVE PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE

2008-07-11T07:22:00.000-07:00

SO DON'T BE A PLAYER HATER

SOURCE: THE FOUNDATION VS STRUXUS: THE CASE AGAINST. SHOW 15. THE SISTERS OF TELEVISION