Savage Tales

a toilet without warning, and I cursed that damned cook for whatever it was he fed me. Probably dog or cat, I decided, or some roadside critter like the one –
    My skin was breaking out with sweat, but I could tell my bowels weren't quite ready to give out with it. I started having funny thoughts. Like... bowels... what a strange invention. If there was a God, and if he could have created something like bowels to wind through us like a maze.
    I snapped open my eyes, unaware that they had even been closed, and got the car back on track for the road. I hadn't even felt tired then, but maybe I should take a short break. No! No time. And here with the sun coming up.
    Wait a minute. I was looking into the sun. I was looking into the east. But the sun should have been behind me. How could that be? Had I somehow turned the car around when I almost drifted off? No, that was impossible. Or had I left the diner in the wrong direction? No, that couldn't be. I had seen the light on the horizon behind me in the rearview mirror. Sometime after that I must have turned around. Or perhaps the highway merely curved and would continue west, but only appeared to be going east for a small section. Yes, that must be it. Best to continue until I saw a sign that confirmed this.
    I watched the road intently, my stomach moaning loudly and twisting into knots. I was having hot and cold flashes and I felt light in the head. My skin was sensitive to every touch. The rubbery feel of the seat behind me was almost painful. I wanted to stop the car and pull over and lie in the sand, but I wouldn't allow myself. I had to get to El Paso.
    On the road in front of me I saw an animal.
    "Goddamn, another one," I said. "What are the odds of –"
    But it wasn't an animal. This was a person. I slowed my car to a trickle. I could almost make it. The light from the sun made it hard to see. Maybe I was only imagining it was a person. It was probably just a piece of trash or a tumbleweed. I decided to do what I'd meant to do with the animal I'd seen earlier in the night, and accelerated to 80 mph.
    As I got closer, it looked more and more like a human being. But something was wrong with it. I realized what the problem was when I was about twenty feet away: there was no skin on the body. It was a bloody mash of muscle and bone, and I could see the eyes of what had once been a real human. I pressed hard on the gas pedal and closed my eyes.
    To my surprise, there was no bump this time. I opened my eyes and looked in the rearview mirror, but I was already too far around a curve to see anything behind me. I lay off the gas and got my speed back to a normal rate, turned the radio back on. My body was sticky and bloated, but I would find my groove again and be in El Paso before I knew it.
    I felt something on my shoulder.
    I turned to look and it was a hand, skinless and red. I turned and looked over my shoulder and there he was, the creature I thought I had left back on the road.
    "Can I get a ride, mister?" he said.
    "You're not real," I said. "You can't be."
    "Sure I'm real," he said. "And I'm heading your way. El Paso, right?"
    "Right," I said.
    "You might want to look ahead. I don't know if you're heading in the right direction."
    I looked ahead of me saw that I had gone off the main road and that this road was ending. We were just feet from the end.
    We smashed through some road work signs and some barriers, and then we were flying through the sky, dropping from the cliff and aiming straight to the ground below. I screamed.
    I felt the creature's hand stroking my Adam's apple, and he said, "You really ought to watch where you're going, man. You never know what's ahead of you."

I WONDE R WHERE MY BODY IS TONIGHT

    "I'd like to thank the Academy for this beautiful statue. It's so beautiful. If I had to create the platonic ideal of beauty it would be this statue.
    "Let us go back in time to that moment when my agent first told me about this film. We were having lunch at Urasawa on Rodeo – you know it? – and my sashimi had just arrived. I was going to eat it and he said wait. He said wait, because he had something to tell me. So I waited and listened.
    "And I heard in his husky voice a story. Like a movie that you go to see but without pictures. A pictureless story – weird, I know. They should try that someday. But that's what I had there with my sashimi (I had a hangover to burn off and decided I would experiment and try listening and eating at the same time