Savage Tales

and told her my feelings my deep inner longings that could only be fulfilled by her and I awaited her response and sure enough she reached down for a handful of dirt in the muck and tossed it into my eye leaving me screaming for a medic which soon appeared and took me aside and said I might not live and I cursed her and she said I might leave but I'd lose the use of my eye and I said why not just lose the eye altogether and she said she'd been developing a hypothetical experimental cure and I could be the first and boy I did not like the sound of that but I was a boy not yet seven and what could I do I sighed and said go ahead do your worst which she promptly did putting me down on the table and ramming a spiky metal driver into my eye like an olive and pulling it out forevermore and when I saw it with my one good eye remaining I said What is this you call this a cure and she said she told me it was experimental she had the insane mad belief we could see without eyes if we only had the motivation presupposing she did that my motivation would be a desire to see but alas it was not enough and at that moment my father entered and seeing my eye toothpicked by the nursy hag he wrestled her to the ground and beat her within an inch of her life preserving her measly existence only to allow us to sue her and reap the benefit in timely payments for many years to come bringing me to the present moment where I am still alone and cyclopean and wondering when the next señorita shall appear to take my breath away but not my eye because I'm running out of those for I am a man never beset by scurvy or poverty but thoroughly exasperated by loneliness not syphilis but cowardice not bronchitis but agoraphobia not gonorrhea but diarrhea of the isolated being that talks endlessly for the sake of hearing its voice and referring to itself as it as though it could ever escape the subjectivity of its horrible being by putting on the lame mask of objectivity and never looking in mirrors taking them down shipping them out even those obligatory to the housing agreement as instilled and installed by the serf master who is never met seen or known but somehow regularly depositing informational control packets to deal with the reality of the nightmare the reality of night and day and dream and flatness and night oh endless eternal unblinking night that shall never be suspended this night without is nothing compared to the horrible night within it lurks latches loves the inner void the inner night is binding with the night without till there is nothing but night no being to touch or smell no foreign odor of armpit for all is pit drilled through to night, oh night, horrible evil ugly night, oh night.
    In a counter-scenario to the one proposed above the narrator time travels back to inches before the young girl succumbed to scurvy sent an orange juice packet hurling through time directly into her stomach so orange juice not man or monkey or kitten was the first time traveler all the bacteria lacing each pulpy glob so juicy that time traveling sugar without name or intimacy but destined to eradicate that scurvy save the girl and bring joy for a few moments until death is forgotten again.
    But these things never happened there is no time travel she has succumbed the past engraved in stone and this fevered blister of the imagination comes only at the expense of night eternal, folding and unfolding in its final swerves before settling into the land without memory or return from which nothing emanates, proposes, laughs, or turns to suggest an opposite alternative for there is nothing, nothing.

THE FABU LOUS SKIN TRAP

    I had struck out. Again. We were supposed to be a team, but when I got back to the dugout everyone was giving me the stinkeye. Joe the manager called me a little bitch under his breath. Maybe I imagined that.
    When I got home I beat my wife for leaving the ice cream out and letting it get all soggy and she said we could just put it back in the freezer and I said that's ridiculous, that's how you get E. coli .
    I took the Honda down to the bar where I got chuckles from the locals and even Fred the bartender served me with a smirk. I left after one drink.
    I went to the bowling alley and played three games alone before a prostitute came over and propositioned me. I tried to shoo her away but she was persistent and a little pretty so I played her a few rounds and then took her to a motel.
    In the motel there was a giant cockroach on the wall