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  After thirty seconds of digging I pulled up the remains of the animal still wrapped in the blanket. Peggy was looking over my shoulder as I opened it up and looked down at the unrecognizable jumble of bones and hair clumps. I looked closely at it to see if I could make out any of my doctrine in the hair but had no luck. I stuck my fingers in the pile and dug around. Moonlight caught something under the skull. A penny, Lincoln side up, was on the inside of the cat's cranium. I grabbed it with my fingers but it wouldn't budge. It was as if it had been glued on the bone. Lincoln’s face winked at me.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  "What the fuck, Jim?" Peggy said, obviously seeing what I was seeing. She backed up, almost tripping over an old can of tuna fish.

  The moonshine was really getting to me at that point. I could feel it. My palms were sweaty and the heat was spreading from my head to my chest, hugging me like a squid on fire. Along with the fishy potpourri of the shack, a copper smell arose from the kitten's remains.

  There was a rattle at the door that sounded like the wind. Peggy put her eyes to the cracks of the wall to look out. The door opened and a pair of arms grabbed Peggy and pulled her out into the night. I heard her muffled cries as she was dragged through the dirt. I dropped the cat bones and ran out, my head still full of warm dizziness.

  A pair of black-gloved hands were holding Peg by the neck and pulling her across the clay. I ran forward a few feet but stumbled, my chin landing on the ground. My tongue was tightly clamped between my teeth. My consciousness waxed and waned as I watched Peggy being raped by a man in a stove pipe hat.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Black Boned Keith

  Keith inspected Jim’s car. In doing so he pocketed several things: about a dozen matchbooks, a half-full pack of Lucky Strikes, and tube of bright red lipstick.

  He walked to the front of the car and looked at the twisted deer carcass embedded in the grill. Keith put his hand out and started stroking the deer-fur until it was covered in swirls and shapes on the parts that were not covered in blood or cut open.

  A cough sounded from the cab and Keith watched as Matthew fell out of the driver’s seat. Chunks of vomit were dripping off his chin as he attempted to pull himself up. Keith strolled back to the cab and bent down next to Matthew. The cabby’s face was black and blue, his beard caked with puke. Short, straggly hairs splintered out from the sides of his face. Keith stared at them: spider-legs waiting to be plucked and squeezed between the index finger and the thumb.

  Keith rubbed the beard with his knuckles. Matthew cursed.

  “Fuck you doin’?” he said, pushing Keith’s hand away. Keith responded by tearing a spider-leg out, then another. He twisted it between his fingers and put it up to his eyes, almost hypnotized by the ends of the legs that were crusted with flaky skin.

  Matthew tried to get more words out but instead let out a long stream of trauma-babble. Keith continued to pull hairs out Matt’s face. The cabbie squirmed and swung his arms in a weak attempt to stop the abuse.

  Standing up, Keith twisted the black, crusty legs between his fingers and dropped them to the ground. He walked over to the car that the cab had hit. Its trunk was crumpled like an accordion. There was no one inside so Keith went through the car, pocketing a lighter and a pack of guitar strings.

  He went back to the demolished trunk and started to wedge it open. A staggering whiff of rotten flesh and copper hit his face like a stale slap. Keith peeked inside and saw a group of hairy knuckles sprinkled with brownish blood. The knuckles belonged to a hand that was lying on top of soiled leather. Keith’s face puckered in curiosity and disgust. He managed to get the trunk open enough to inspect the rest of the contents.

  Though he normally would have just stole the satchels right from under the corpse, Keith was dumbstruck at the utter weirdness of their contents.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Dead babies.” He immediately thought of his neighbor dressed in a diaper. The world’s a fucked up place, he thought.

  Keith looked in the glove compartment. He found a pocketknife, some toothpicks, a matchbook, and the registration to the car. The name wasn’t familiar but the address was.

  One of my goddamn neighbors, Keith realized, recognizing the less than prestigious South River address. He didn’t recognize it so it wasn’t the guy in the diaper or any of the other dregs he knew. He pocketed the registration and then started walking down the road, hoping to either hitch a ride or catch a taxi.

  He held his thumb out even though there wasn’t a car in sight. Several bright stars were visible in the night sky so Keith held his thumb up to cover them. Keith gained double vision when he looked at the sky beyond his thumb. His one solid hand became two translucent ones. The pale cosmos appeared in his skin and his left leg started to hurt again.

  He couldn’t believe he was still standing. Keith heard the stories about how drinking that moonshine for a long period of time can permanently dull one’s nerves so much that agonizing pain was lessened. There even was as story going around about one guy who drank so much of the stuff, he didn’t go to the hospital after some junkie stabbed him in face five times. His eyeball hung on his cheek for two days until he choked to death on an orange peel.

  Putting his thumb down, Keith started walking toward the inner heart of Fisherville. Through the night air he smelt the dry, earthy smell of the clay pits. It reminded him of Jim. The thought burned in his stomach as he limped his way down the road. Fifteen minutes later he heard the sirens behind him stop at the scene of the accident.

  As the pain shot up and down Keith’s leg, he took a matchbook out of his coat pocket and opened it up. He tore a match off and stuck it into his left ear, cleaning out the wax. Then he looked at the address scrawled in spidery handwriting on the inside:

  Red Henry 71 Price St

  Keith smiled and smelt the head of the match. The wax and sulfuric scent brought three-dimensional images into his mind: fluid-saturated scenes of orgiastic copulations in the midst of wet rocks and seaweed. He sees Jim’s ex-wife Laura put her face to the ground, her ass up in the air awaiting insertion, pantyhose hanging out of her anus like a nylon tail. She barks like a dog and digs her face into the sand. Each cube-like grain of sand enacts its own assassination attempt on her pores.

  A bone-white squid slithers out of the water and wraps itself around her torso like a diaper. It swallows the musty pantyhose and inserts a tentacle into her aching brown cavity. Laura’s head comes up out of the sand, raw and pockmarked from the gritty assassinations. She had inhaled some through her coke-burnt nostrils and the tiny assassins were attacking the inside of her skull cavity with prehistoric glass-rifles.

  Keith inserts his penis into her cheek. Now, chipmunk-like, Laura squirms and bucks her hips while the squid-diaper forces itself deeper into her colon. Remembering that he left a matchstick inside himself, Keith slides his hand down his penis in order to work the match out. After several attempts, he succeeds and the matchstick slides out of his urethra and down her throat which was now paved with stale, stringy drool.

  She chokes and lets out a wet and muffled mucus cough. Her mind leaves the neurological conception of what was happening to her and fell on splintered possibilities. She thinks of Jim and the knife-scars spread across his back. A slight abrasive chill shoots up her spine as Laura thinks of the call she made to Jim. She smiles and looks up at Keith. His teeth are chattering. A moist Pall Mall falls from his lips and lands in Laura’s hair. Her fiery red strands tackle the tobacco like the tentacles of a squid until brownish flakes were spread throughout the top of her head. They sizzle and bring to Laura’s mind shamanistic vibrations and frequencies that her brain translates into images. Keith having a test taken for a sexually transmitted disease: the doctor shoving a Q-tip into his urethra. Keith being shocked at first but ending up enjoying the raw movement.

  Keith looked at the address once more and put the matchbook into his pocket.

  “Ah, memories,” he said, blowing smoke out of
his mouth.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jim

  I’ve never witnessed a rape before and in all honesty, it’s more disturbing than you’d expect. My mind felt like it was in a hazy, cotton bubble and I think that made the experience even worse.

  As the man in the stove pipe hat made violent pelvic thrusts in the general direction of Peggy’s crotch, I saw that he was trembling like an epileptic. His fists flapped towards her face and blood ejaculated from Peg’s nose. The man turned his head back and forth and then back towards me. That’s when I recognized him.

  “Joe,” I said. I wasn’t sure if it was really him or if I was just superimposing my friend’s face on the head of this letch. After a few seconds of keeping my eyelids open and staring at the rape long enough, I decided that it was, indeed, my friend Joe Gurney. He pulled his grey pants down and continued to force himself on Peggy.

  I regained some of my composure so I crawled over to where the action was and pulled Peggy out of Joe’s hands. Joe was grunting, drooling and making other wet noises with his mouth and nose. His drool was grey and shimmered in the moonlight like slobbery diamonds. This slop started to drip down from his eyes, too. I began to notice that something just wasn’t right about Joe. Physically, I mean. Getting up to my knees, I was face first with his ass.

  His ass-crack was covered with a whitish greasy substance and hanging out of his anus was what looked to me like the head of a squid. My fluttering mind brought to me images and memory-scents that made me tremble.

  The squid head pushed in and out of Joe’s hole a few times and then I heard Peggy whimper and vomit while she crawled away. Joe turned his whole body to me and made a face that lead me to believe that he was searching his brain trying to recognize me. After a half a minute of us staring at each other, he smiled and grabbed my hair.

  At this point I was drowsy and my head was full of things that would make a normal person drive a screwdriver into their skull. Joe’s fingers became a group of thirteen women surrounding me, their steaming urine cascading down my face and chest. The liquid stained my skin a bright gold and I was taken to a metal-stone slab where I was repeatedly stabbed in the back by each of the thirteen women, Peggy included. Through my piss-stained eyeballs I was able to recognize a few of the others. There was Barbara Niederman, a woman whose husband I once worked for. As she stabbed me I could smell the sweat from the soles of her feet. I felt toes in my mouth but then the toes turned into the worst parts of a squid.

  My face was in Joe’s ass, my mouth sucking on a slimy new appendage. The greasy, whitish substance was running down my chin. Then Pam the waitress stabbed me right under my neck and my scrotum tingled. Joe fell over.

  Peg had hit him in the side of the head with a solid piece of old clay. Joe’s face contorted in surprise and he was on the ground. His stove pipe hat was off and I nearly choked when I saw what it had been covering.

  Chunks of his skull were missing and in their place were pulsating squid parts squeezing back and forth through the holes and around his brain. Grey and white slop oozed from Joe’s skull and he mumbled a few words as he convulsed, grabbing handfuls of clay.

  “Jim,” Peggy said, probably not knowing what to say next. I couldn’t blame her. I didn’t know what to say either.

  I wiped my mouth on my shirt sleeve and stood up. I grabbed Peggy’s arm and started walking away. We could hear wet slurping sounds coming from every hole in Joe’s body. I stopped in mid-step and like Lot’s wife, I turned back to look at the destruction. However, instead of seeing a society of sex fiends turn to a pile of God-damned rubble, I saw my old friend Joe loudly turning into a shivering mass of human-squid meat.

  It dawned on me that Joe was most likely not going to recover from whatever was happening to him. Though I would never usually admit such a thing, my heart ached at permanently losing such a good friend. Joe was one of the only people who stood by me during my turbulent marriage and subsequent divorce. I had to do something.

  I wasn’t going to stand by and be a spectator to Joe’s torment. I let go of Peggy’s arm and ran over to where my friend was suffering. He was gargling with white, chunky bile and it overflowed over the sides of his face. There was a burning, fishy smell that made my eyes water. Still, I got close enough so that I could grab a hardened piece of clay and pummeled my friend’s skull until he stopped moving.

  Out of his shattered head came mangled pieces of squid and brain. Parts of them were moving, slithering across the clay on white slime that had oozed out of Joe.

  Though the smell made my eyes water, the sadness I felt over Joe did more to choke me up. His yellowed eyeballs sat like chipped marbles attached to licorice. I touched them softly and then walked back over to Peg.

  Apparently she had been screaming and pleading for me to stop pounding Joe in the head but I didn’t hear her. I don’t know if my brain blocked it out or if my ears just decided to stop working during those few moments of mercy that I gave to my friend. Either way, I wouldn’t have stopped even if I had heard her.

  I ran across the clay pits so fast that I was practically lifting Peggy off her feet as I dragged her by her left hand. Her jaw chattered so loudly I was expecting her to leave a trail of broken teeth. I looked back but saw only bits of something twinkling in the moonlight. I thought it might be piss. Maybe Peggy was losing control of her bladder bit by bit as we sprinted.

  It was a strange sensation: running in one direction while looking in another. I was experiencing a strange weightlessness, wind forcing itself into my ear and nose and my legs feeling like confused spider-appendages trying to construct themselves into geometric puzzles.

  Peggy’s face turned a pale, her high cheekbones splintering off into triangles of bone. Her round face became a gravestone balloon complete with a large nose that bore the inscription: If I had done this a long time ago, it would have saved a lot of pain.

  Saved it for what? I thought to myself. Or saved it from whom? I was in no condition to try to ponder the answer or answers to that question. I was too busy trying to gain some sort of ground beneath my feet. I was having no such luck. My legs were being manipulated against my will. Not really against my will, actually, as I was becoming more and more apathetic to my physical movements. I kept my eyes on Peggy’s stone face.

  My own face was tingling and I smelt the warm, wet stench of Joe’s brain as well as the underside of Barbara Niederman’s feet. Then I tasted toes and I tasted squid. I tasted the burning fluid from an old jelly jar. The enamel of my teeth flaked off into snowflakes that bombarded automobiles made out of bone. Primitive men and women opened their mouths and swallowed the tooth-snow, swallowing the pieces until my teeth rested in their bellies and I ached to move through their colons and out into the world again.

  Peggy’s round stone face darkened and she started complaining about the size of her nose and the blisters on her feet. A laugh escaped the right side of my mouth.

  And that’s when we hit the deer.

  PART TWO:

  The Synchronicity of Shining Squid

  “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forebode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible…” –Abraham Lincoln

  “I don’t know why you are treating me like this. The only thing I have done is carry a pistol into a movie.” – Lee Harvey Oswald

  CHAPTER TEN

  Black Boned Keith

  Keith limped up Price Street.

  He had blisters on his feet from the walk but he was proud of himself for not taking too many breaks. He spotted the house, walked up to the front steps and stopped.

  Nice house, Keith thought, Very comfy. He thought that he would like, someday, to have a house like this. It was small but quant and resembled a gingerbread house with an odd triangular design. It was a house out of a fantasy, Keith realized. It was someone’s drea
m house.

  The street was silent for a few minutes and then Keith heard the pulsating hum of a factory in the distance. Once he heard the sound, he couldn’t escape it. It was like the heartbeat of the town, underneath all of the roaring engines of automobiles, frantic babbling of housewives and aggravated murmurings of their husbands. This hum was the foundation that held the gyrating vibration of television signals and radio frequencies.