AK

We had this game we played together when we were young. All the kids would get together and we would suck each other’s dicks. We’d take the girl dicks and the guy dicks and we’d put them together. This is in the dark. We’d have a blindfold. This is what we did at parties. You’d blindfold the victim and lay them down, and then we’d suck off the dick of the person with the blindfold, so no one would know who sucked their dick. This is the safe way to do it. You’d have this secret clan, this secret clique, who knew what happened, and then you’d have the person who it happened to, and they wouldn’t know a thing except that it happened to them. Start in the dark. You’ve got a blindfold on top of you. You don’t know what’s happening. There’s a party full of people. You’re the victim. You lie back. We’ve got you on the table. Then they take your pants off and they start sucking it if it’s not floppy. If it’s floppy they flop it around a little until it decides it’s safe to come play. That’s the start of the game. Then someone sucks you off. You can play this as an adult game or as a kid game. In the adult version you’re fucking. In the kids version you’re sucking dicks. We played it as kids so we were sucking dicks. Then you get off. That’s basically the game. But you never know who got you off. And you can get someone off without them ever knowing it was you. You have a secret that you keep with the other ones who weren’t blindfolded. Then you take turns. You get close but you keep your distance. That’s the most important part: keep your distance. We figured this game out from school. They taught us that in executions, you have five guys stand there. They each have a rifle. Then you give them all fake bullets. But to one guy, you give a real bullet, but you don’t tell anyone who that is. That way you can shoot someone in the head and not feel guilty about it, because you can always imagine that someone else had the real bullet. That never turns out well for the guy who gets shot in the head. That’s why my life is so fucked up. And why I’ve changed around so much. Five years, eight student-work-study jobs later, two actual jobs later, one car later, two changes of major, one declination of minor, an advisor switch, and moving back into the dorms after having moved out—it worked out bad. I would’ve finished last semester, on time, but now I’m graduating with these retards. That’s what really started this weekend. If Brauch’s class had been offered when it should have been, then none of this would have happened. Not the way it did. But Brauch’s class wasn’t offered the semester I should have graduated, so I’m one semester late, all my friends have left, and I’m stuck with the next wave of students—who I was never very close to. You give a person too much time, bad things happen. With only one class, I had too much time on my hands. That was what the problem was. That was how I got off track. I just wanted to graduate. They could have let me graduate early, and finish that one class later. But no. I mean there’s always some separation in the end but in this case it was like it was just me leftover. And all these young kids. I was old when I started my degree. You get bored with these things after a certain point. I just wanted that degree so I could teach. Or maybe travel and become a loser. That’s really what I wanted to do: nothing. I wouldn’t have minded if I went to jail as long as they had books. To me, life is a jail. But they have good books here. You have to search. But they never should have had me graduating late. With that class. That’s what started everything. Whenever I got a book, I bombed it. Went through the book from start to finish. Did all the exercises. Wrote something for every question they asked. Every question. That’s how I did it. Didn’t hesitate. Jumped into the middle. By the time we were in class I had it all set out in my mind. Focused on one thing. One thing and one thing only. Learned it from the inside out. Got my mind so that was like its home. I could have taught that class. Read the whole book the first week. That’s how you’ve got to stay on top of it. If I get behind—and for me behind is the same as on track—then I fall apart. It’s a feeling of motivation. You have to have it for your classes. I have it for my classes. I gave speeches in that class. Any time I was asked. Got As on every paper. That was how I did it. But that wasn’t all I wanted, and it wasn’t all I did. I wanted to keep my finger permanently pressed up against the asshole of this guy I was with. Never much liked men who weren’t a little loose with what they allowed up there. Too tight=no good. He didn’t mind, even seemed to like it as long as we fucked afterward. I liked to grab his cheeks and push my hand inside him while he was on top of me, expose his ass like that, get all that cool air in there. Wanted to give him whatever fantasy he wanted and he had this one about coming home and opening the shower curtain and there being a woman inside (girl maybe) and she was naked and writhing, standing up in the shower, and they would get to fuck. So we played that one out, it worked out pretty well, we only did it once but he let me stick my finger up his ass while we were in the shower. I needed this chap to like ass-fingering. He was better than my last boyfriend about it. Or: not boyfriend, but…whatever. If I could stick my finger up the ass of a girl I would like it but I can’t seem to find one who would be into it. I’m not sure which demographic I’d have to go after for that one, it’s tough, they’ll let a guy do it with his dick but even among lesbians it’s like the puss is already kinky enough so what’s the purpose of ass-fucking if a guy isn’t present? Ass-fucking always has to do with guys, it seems to me. This chap ass-fucked me only once, and it hurt me a little. He was going too fast, and I had to slow him down. We used a condom. I made him wash his hands before he touched me again, after that. He didn’t mind. He came back to bed and I trusted him to put his fingers up my pussy, trusting that he’d washed them thoroughly. He came inside my ass, inside the condom. It was a certain kind of intimacy. I used to like to do all sorts of things with him but he only wanted to fuck me real quick before he went to work. I took it, though; he was good about making sure I came. This chap was an ape-fucker. Had to keep this chap around for rides. He thought we were fucking. We were fucking, but we weren’t fucking, if you take me. He was a faggoty little chap, unlike my other boyfriend who sold used cars from a family that sold used cars. Would have married that first one if he’d asked, just to fuck around. Usually though it was just that I needed rides, and this bitch had a car. We’d trade favors pretty literally. He’d drive me to work and I’d suck his duck on the way there. Fair trade. Equal exchange. I’d get to work and he’d get off, wreck the car, whatever. This is how we went on for quite a while. I could never break up with him before the end of school, because I needed to keep my job. Once that day was up, though, see ya. I was out like trout. Stylin’ and profilin’. Left his ass to drive himself home, we never fucked again. Saw himself as having had a part removed, he sent me these dumb letters once I got to the hospital. Like we had been fused and his part got removed, just cause we stopped fucking. I swear to god, if one more guy falls in love with me—I’ll kill the motherfucker. Had to call my sister cause I got broke down on the way from my job back to school. “Where are you? Are you close?” “No, I’m broke down.” “We’ll come get you.” “No, don’t you have your whole crew with you?” “We can find you…” “Are you all set up in the Glen though? I’ll find a ride.” “Are you sure?” You’re supposed to offer to come get me sis. “AK?” “Yeah, I’m sure. I’ll see you in a little bit.” “Ok, sis, bye.” “Bye.” That car was a bitch. That was my rabbit and that VW locked up more times than a shitty pistol. If I could get a car made of cold-kilned ceramics and an ambidextrous dual-locking trigger mechanism I’d buy stock in the company. What would you do if your sister came to visit you but you didn’t have a ride from your broke down car on I-675? And her whole crew was implanted at the campgrounds at the Glen? “Hey Matt it’s AK.” “Hey!” “You won’t believe this but I’m stuck.” “No. Where are you?” “Rabbit broke down.” “Oh no! Where are you? You want me to come get you?” “Well, actually, I need a ride to school.” “Where are you now?” “I’m in Centerville but I need you to take me to Yellow Springs.” “Ok.” “You can?” “I’ll be right there.” That was how I used him. That was how I needed. I was still fucking Tim you asshole! How could you not see it! And that one time! I wanted to fuck you but you didn’t take the clues! I brought wine over! What were you thinking? You weren’t. So I’ll ride you, yeah, I’ll get my rides from you. I’ll use you like that. Use you just through graduation. After that I can hermituate. I don’t need to go anywhere. Get Tim’s family to sell me a new car. Piece of shit. That’s what you’d do if you were broke down. You’d get your faggot-ass boyfriend to give you a ride. You’d suck his dick on the way to school, you’d make up some excuse about having to braid your girlfriend’s hair that night and have a good night! Have a good night Matthew! I’ll fucking kill you if you speak. I need a translator to express my anger. And I’m playing the greatest game you can imagine. Ella was waiting. When we met it was awkward. Ella’s telling me about her infomercial, which is turning into more of a TV show about how she travels around getting people mobile again. They ride around in this giant bus which they even sleep in, it’s her and these two techs, plus their producer—Ella’s boyfriend. All the producer does is stand around and eat up their production budget. They started this documentary like three months ago, Ella’s been to…the Grand Canyon and shit…to film it. “Who’d’ja get mobile at the Grand Canyon?” “What?” Nobody. She and the producer just got naked and fucked right next to the giant cunt of the world. That’s why they have this production bus and drive around all over the place, so they can fuck and avoid real life. This while the rest of us go to school and attempt to make our selves useful in some real semblance of a profession. “D’j’ya come to check up on me? Did Mom send you?” “Mom?? No. I’m not here to check up on you.” “I’ll believe it when I see it. Sorry, Ella; I’ll believe it when I see it. Are you not happy with the degree I’m getting or something? Do you even know what degree I’m getting?” “What degree are you getting?” “It doesn’t matter. Do you know what field it’s in? I mean do you know what general branch of study?” “Didn’t you study chemistry?” “In high school, E., yes I did, in high school I took a lot of things. You know I watch your infomercials.” “We’ve only done one.” “Well you know I’ve watched it.” “What did you think?” “I don’t think a lot of infomercials, E., but I watched yours because it’s yours. That’s kindof what I’d expect back from you: that you might give a shit what your big sister has been up to for the last five years.” “Has it been five years?” “Yes. Not since I saw you.” “No, but—” “Don’t worry about it, Ella. I study polisci. Political theory, specifically. We argue about how to argue about people. People in groups. I don’t expect you to learn any more about it but I’m happy you’ve listened this far. I think we should have these talks from time to time, catch up. How’s your new producer?” “Who?” “Your producer. Did you fuck ‘im?” “I never—Jesus Anna. That’s what you would think. That’s what you would do. I don’t fuck my workmates. I don’t fuck my production crew. I don’t fuck just anybody who comes along, because I’m pathologically addicted to fucking. Do you understand that? Do you see where you’re coming from? Anna. Anna. I’m talking here.” Yeah, she thinks I’m “pathologically” addicted to fucking but she doesn’t know what the word means. Just because my sister is a frigid bitch who wouldn’t know the untapped resource her producer is, in terms of a cock-seat. Right? She was the one with the traditional looks, when it comes down to it. I was the one with the freakish looks and the big chin. She had much more traditional hair. So she can afford to be coy, to be inactive. I’ve had to take what I wanted. Ella. Ella. Yeah, I know you’re talking here. Her producer and those two techs are standing around like none of this is happening. In their world it’s normal to stop off at glens and cook out of the back of a bus with your talent’s big sister, making up maps to find dead bodies and buried treasure. The techs I don’t remember their names, so I just call them red and blue. Because one of them wore red and the other wore blue. Little ball-players. Baseball caps, heavenly front-billed sun visors, matching in every form. The boy was red and the girl was blue. They were like twins, I’m not surprised if they have tattoos that match and tribal scars in matching places on their bodies. They have a secret kiss and their shoelaces are tied together at the neck. That’s the kind of little-kid thing I just can’t stand. Fuck your finger up your ass, for god’s sake, you little faux-dyke preppie-looking film techs. Everything is an effing film crew to these people. Never fucked a walnut. I needed to teach them something about non-film life, but how? They needed a lesson in non-film realities. One has this peach-plum face and the other an ass of apples, soggy, rotten, adverby apples. “D’j’you fuck that kid in the cunt of the world?” “What, Anna?” “Did you fuck that kid in the giant cunt of the world?” “No one has fucked, AK. What are you talking about?” “I just want to know if you fucked that kid—” “I heard what you said. And yes, we went to the Grand Canyon and no…we did not fuck. Thanks, big sis. I really need your oversight.” I made a complete business on my own—is what she meant. I—unlike you—I did not need to go to college in order to figure out how to basically not work. I figured out how to make money, and I figure out how to make money, on a regular basis, so that I can cavort around to the giant cunt of the world, anytime I want. Unlike some people. Unlike me. You need to learn to fuck the giant cunt of the world. You need to learn to fuck it. My sister has been there, and she never learned to fuck it. Even if ever isn’t over. She needs to learn a thing, or another thing. I bleed in acrobatics, buying role supplies at the corner market, buying into veganism and marching upward into the statue at the top of the hill, giant person at the top of the hill representing mushrooms and snakes that grow in the woods. Mushrooms called yellow and snakes called black, ripe gray snakes on water-rocks waiting to ugh the fuck out of you. Irk you. Ache you. Make you take him to the statue. In flashlight, making out up there, scared on the steps, walking back in snake-filled dark. Even just mosquitos. That’s the statue of Horace Mann, inventor of public education, it’s a landmark in this area. You should look up Horace Mann on the internet. You should visit that statue. Good students of this book will read passages in snakeframe on the steps of that statue, replace all the es with esses in every book they own, find-search=replace and re-punctuate their whole lives with sex spelled with no vowels and costumes of grey. From costume to face, integral, will smoke consonants of babel in arturo even if bladespin and lose ‘herence, from stripe to spike, from LED to RLK, writing initials of everyone you want to forget, from spinster to Ace, from costume to face, to hair, to shoes, the thing that lynchpins my sister’s value is that she always looks like she’s about to have sex. It’s this chronic readiness she exudes, spaghetti-strap dresses, shoes that look like they’re falling off her, clothes that look like underwear, like everything’s about to be naked. This is in her infomercials, in her daily life—when she’s driving, like she wants every surface to turn into a bed, and it’s not that she’s promiscuous, it’s just that she wants to look like sex 100% of the time. Some sleazy game-show host. Wannabe celebrity. And her casual style, in conversation, like she’s seducing you, even if you’re her sister. Confidential glances, then she touches your hand. Like she’s just put on face cream, every hour of every minute of every day. Grabs your hand: shares some secret confession, releases her grip. Like she’s puppeting you, and doing it literally, with your hands. Like they’re buttons to be pushed, simply ways to manipulate you. Emphasis point in the conversation?: she punches in on the hands. Grabs you. Pushes your button. Feel this more? Get me? Then a de-emphasis: she backs off on the hands, returns them to your good graces. You don’t own yourself anymore, around her. It’s all her, and you’re just an extension. Extension of fantabulousness. “When’s the last time you talked with Mom and Dad?” “Talked with?” “Well, when’s the last time you went over?” “I haven’t been over there in a while.” “Just waiting for them to die.” “What?” “I’m just saying what we’re both thinking.” That’s what one with auburn hair does. “Well. Don’t say it.” She shakes her auburn hair as well. Hers is more brown, darker, but still red. She’s as far from grabbing my hand as she could ever be, after that comment. “But it’s true,” I insist. “It is true,” she says, “but still I wish you wouldn’t say it.” Mom and Dad are dying in their living room, hooked up to machines and with a nurse who comes once every three days to feed them pills and change the catheters. They have a closet full of pills. All day they just lie there and watch Ella’s infomercials. Like they’re on repeat. It’s how we can be together as a family. When I was little I used to think that when Mr. Rogers talked to the TV, that he could see back into our living room. That in his studio there were no cameras like we think of them, just a wall of a million TVs, for each of the people watching him, and it was like glass was all that separated us. If it was like that in real life then my sister would have seen Mom and Dad every day of every hour of the last year. At least. They’re so proud of her. They’re capitalists. The only thing that impresses them is that Ella has a business. They don’t believe in education, they don’t have any appreciation for art, they just lie there dying watching my sister on television. When Ella was in high school they used to write her papers for her. I would help them until I got some sense in me. She’s never written a paper in her life. It was all them, and if they could have been there with her in her math classes they would have, with their calculators and cheat sheets, plugging numbers into formulas. And making a mystery of a molehill. “I’m proud of you, Anna.” “Thank you, Ella.” “No, I am. You did something I never have, you got your degree.” “Not yet.” “But you did. I’m impressed. I will never be able to do that, you know that don’t you? You have the brain for both of us. Anyway, that’s all, I just wanted to tell you you impressed me.” Did I, though? What would this one have to be impressed by, from mere academic me. What if I got another degree? Would that be impressive or at what point would it start being a waste of time? “I shouldn’t give you such a hard time, Ella. You were being nice to me.” “You’re not giving me a hard time.” “But I will. If you sit here long enough. Ella—” And here I paused because I couldn’t bring myself to continue the awful and terrible and utterly pathetic thing I was about to say, but even I felt it a little bit (which is why I said it): “Ella, thank you for coming to my graduation. Your presence is appreciated. It’s nice to see you and I hope this is the beginning of many times to come of familial visiting and otherwise you and I ‘getting together’. I enjoy the sight of you. This is a thrill. Ella, oh Ella. Welcome back to Dayton, did you miss us? Sometimes when I stop by at Mom and Dad’s I think of you, think of how we used to play with Legos in the basement of the old house, before we moved. Those were good days, solid days, and without tarnish. I wish for those days, even long for them from the perch of adult life, and only our current successes thwart my desire to literally be back inside those childhood days.” “Thanks, A.” “You’re welcome, E.” “I’m glad to see you, A.” “No problem, E. Are you sure you don’t mind sleeping in your bus, E.?” “We’re used to sleeping in it, A. You’re welcome to stay with us tonight if you want. There’s two extra bunks, you can spread out.” “I don’t have much to spread out, E.” “Well, A., you’re welcome anyway.” “E.: thanks so much, but I’ll stay in my dorm.” “Well at least we can have dinner together.” “You want me to find us a restaurant?” “No, A., can’t we eat over the open flame tonight?” “Like campstyle style?” “We could eat only smores, just like children.” “Ok, E., but I need something a little more substantial.” “Let’s go to the grocery store—is there one close by?” “There’s one just up the road.” And so on and so forth we arranged a well dinner composed of sanity and hot dogs, Morningstar patties, smores, and pink lemonade. Ella’s techs let us go to the grocery store without them but Ella’s producer came along, and I found myself making eyes with him in the lunchmeat section, near the sliced muenster and the pepperjack cheese, skewered by some pepper beef slices, backed by Budweiser, somewhere in there the lighting took me over and his skinny white ass had to be made eyes with and I thought about the two techs back at the campsite and wished they were fucking. We also bought white and orange Tic Tacs (white for me and orange for Ella, since she has no fucking sense) and we paid for the whole thing with my government assistance food card (I insisted) and Ella stood there awkwardly with her Gold American Express card and wished it was Platinum. She stood like she wanted to be fucked by the check-out cashier, with her long arm propped on the check-out display, which was chunking out cryptic coded identifiers of our purchases. She had her armpit where he could see along the inside of her shirt—if you could call it a shirt, and while I was paying she was sticking her chin out at him, begging for it. The producer looked like a virgin. I was sure he was. I can tell one when I see it—can sniff it out. He was blushing a little in the beer aisle when I was making eyes at him, and I thought I could smell his cock—was pretty sure I could smell it, tasting like pastrami and corned beef, and the tip of it like pimento cheese, sticking out of his pants and popping right out at us wanting a view. That is how I can tell a virgin, when they have a penis and when it pops out into view to say hello, I can tell right then. Some people will recognize this as satire. That penis pops right out to say hello. When it does that I can tell right away that the licensed holder of such penis is a virgin. Isn’t that funny? That a person can be a virgin but a marker of genitalia cannot. A vagina itself is not a virgin. A penis itself is not a virgin. Only the licensed holders of such things. A virgin says: keep that penis to yourself. Don’t share! A virgin says: keep all foreign objects out of here: penises, fingers, tongues, other vaginas with their protruding and kissing parts. That’s what a virgin says. This producer was saying all these things and more with his pimento penis. And it made me want to have him all the more. I popped Ella a look on the way out of the check-out line and I could see that she could see what I meant. And she could see it, just like I could feel it: I wanted to fuck this little producer of hers, fuck the violence right out of him, take him to squat squat heaven and leave him there. Leave him wanting the next take-out order. Leave him wanting squat squat more. And she rolled her eyes—literally rolled her eyes—at me, with herself having that Little Miss Fun look all over her body, not just her eyes, and I knew that she had wanted to fuck him, but hadn’t. When she was young our parents told her not to touch her genitals and she listened, and she was still listening, with the part of her that says Don’t Fuck Your Producer, He’s A Virgin and he needs to take this time to himself to simply be a virgin, but that Little Miss Fun look said something else about her, which was a part of us both that I was more in touch with: which was that we both wanted to fuck him and just splat his cum all over us, splat it up into our pussies, splat ourselves down on him and squat-fuck, squat-fuck until he popped right up into our vagina because it’s what wanted to be done to him. “Did we forget the pimento cheese?” I asked while we were all on our way back to the campsite. And Ella busted out laughing, because she knows exactly what I mean. There were five of us at the campsite. It was me. It was Ella. It was the producer-boy. It was red and it was blue. Red and blue are the film techs. The producer makes phone calls and arranges for everyone in the infomercial to sign release forms so that they can use their image on television without getting sued. They waive all rights to getting sued when they sign the release form. Or they waive all rights to sue. (Analysis point.) Red and blue were a cute pair, red was the boy and blue was the girl, they liked to pretend that they didn’t like each other but they were both gagging for it. I wished they would stop playing their games and bend over blue right at the campfire and red having stuck his dick into her, would forcefully adverb bang the ever-loving shit out of her. (Analysis point.) We had a class on this once. The teacher was banging the shit out of this piece of clay in the front of the classroom. You could tell by the way that she did it that she needed to get fucked. So red and blue were making smores, and all these cutesy types of food where you can nibble sitting side-by-side and pretend not to like each other, but I could see red’s dick through his pants and I knew blue had a smelly pussy, the kind whose bathroom is full of cleaning products and pubic hair and a bunch of magazines. Virgin women sometimes have the messiest bathrooms. I imagined blue’s bathroom like that: with a whole bunch of magazines and pubic hair in the toilet, a hair dryer or at least a whole bunch of brushes lined along the sink and blue would be in there pissing out of this nasty unshaved pussy and every once in a while she would cut the pubic hairs down into her toilet. That’s how I imagined blue. Red I saw as a baseball player. Then there was the producer. He was this sly greasy wackjob whose black jeans I liked. Greasy head. Little boy. He had white seams in his jeans like they had been worn too much, and he had this skinny and fat cock (simultaneously) that was between his legs and he kept his legs slightly spread so I could see it. I wanted to plump it with the smores fork I was holding in my left hand and roast it on the tips of the flickering flames. Flames flicker in the firelight. This producer had never had pussy, had only jerked off and he was a violent masturbator. He kept a list of names under his bed and this was the list of names of women he wished he had fucked but the list of women he had fucked was empty. I wished myself onto this other list, wished his hand with a No. 2 pencil to write my name on this second list, and wished him never masturbate about me again after that time that we had fucked. This producer had never even licked a pussy, and I felt sorry for him—about him—about this. (Analysis point.) He had fingered a pussy when he was in the eighth grade, but that had been a while, and he just thought it was wet and messy then. He didn’t see the full potentiality he held in his hand, the full scope of what was possible (and every opportunity is possible). All he had thought then was wet and sticky and cavernous not at all like the simple shaft he had thought of before he had touched one. But he had no foresight, and for this I hated him. I would never allow him into my house. I would never fly on an airplane next to him. I would never take him with me to an important party. He wasn’t even a checkbox on my form, and if I had to fill in bubbles with a Number Two pencil I wouldn’t fill him in. This producer ate a bubble when he was nine, and the soap had done something to his brain. I’m pretty sure it decomposed it. Then there was Ella. Ella with a capital E. Ella was my sister. We had grown up together in a house. She was younger than me. It was just the two of us. Mom and Dad were dying in the living room, hooked up to machines and watching TV all day—Ella’s infomercials. They had a closet full of pills, but I told you that already. Ella had made a fortune in mobility devices, allowing old and sick people to move in ways that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible. Ella was the smart one, and she didn’t even seem to appreciate this about herself. She just happened to be a small time business genius. But the kind who ends up forty and pathetic because they’re still following the pattern they did when they were eighteen and making moves on the street. Ella made moves on the street. She had contracts and subcommittees and all the stuff you need to make an infomercial. I had Ella’s number. She smoked a rabbit in a hat one time. When you’re the smart one, you don’t worry about being pretty, even though Ella was pretty in an even more conventional way than me. While she had an expressive face that was too expressive (but perfect for TV), I had a borderline face with no light in the eyes, a mouth that didn’t move enough and eyes that didn’t move at all. Ella had too much animation; I had too little. When you looked at me you didn’t trust me, and you thought I had no emotion. I gave the impression of not caring about what I was talking about. And that impression was correct. This is a point of analysis which you should discuss. I have no intention of discussing it with you. This point is a point of which analysis of whom has taken me of which from where I have come into from of where. All that was Ella. Then there was me. I was formed in hell, with the devil as my mother and no chance of a father, who lied every moment from the day he was born. He was very pleasant, he seemed always to be in the good. He was very concerned with whether or not he was a good father, and would convince you of the former at every chance he got. He would make sure of the point. They convinced us, when we were little, that our family was good. They inundated us with it. We grew up thinking that everyone else’s family sucked, and that our parents had the greatest marriage ever invented, that everyone else was sorry to be themselves. That’s part of the reason I turned out the way I did. Because I was raised to be perfect, which is why I turned out this way. We thought we had pressure to score the highest and be the prettiest on the outside and we did, we did become the highest scorers and the prettiest on the outside. And not all missing on the inside either, though I seem to lack compassion, which is a basic element. And inside me isn’t a hole, exactly, but I have a hunger with leads to unnatural things. My actions don’t make sense in normal conversation. Which you may have noticed from listening to me. I have too much passion but not enough compassion. When we grew up they didn’t pay any attention to us. So we learned not to care what anyone thinks. We learned to operate in a vacuum of praise. We learned to operate without love. And while it is true that my family has some money, none of it was portioned out to help me with school, though some of it was portioned out to help Ella start her business. Inconsistencies like these are some clue as to why Ella became who she is and why…well…why I became who I unfortunately am. I am eating at a campsite, eating myself over a bone and making smores and beef hot dogs and me and the techs talked like this: “Have you ever eaten a pussy? What about a rattlesnake?” “Have you ever snapped a chickenhead? What about a muffynface. “Have you ever stepped on a pillowdragon?” “No, have you ever ridden with a pufflydaddy?” “I don’t even know what a puffly-daddy is. Do you know what a muderbaggly is?” “Do you know how to spell infinicandy?” How about Elvis-stressly. Wigglefancy. Apepowder. Mysteryschism. Have you ever heard any of these words? How do you think you can have a future in film?! L-o-l-ness. Lightness of a frightness motherfucker! Don’t get me excited. I’ve got to make a phone call. Roll me over a beef frank and some Jewish Nationals and we’ll have us a barbecue, get me the pepper steaks out of this bitch’s buswagon we’ll have a rockdandy. Hold on. Hold on. Ella, catch me. For I’m falling. I’ve had a disparation with realities that needs to remedy. Grab my phone. Techs one and techs two, it’s been nice knowing you. And this fat-dick producer of yours, come sit on momma. You like the red hair, don’t you. This little borderline smile? Or whatever it is I have. They won’t find out for years. But for now we can have our fun anyway. “Hey, Chippy-Chip.” “What’s happenin’?” “Ready to meet in the woods?” “Ready as always.” “Well get chippin’.” “Wait—seriously?” “Seriously.” “Who—just you?” “Maybe.” “Who’s coming?” “Don’t worry about who’s coming, just meet me there in like an hour. Full costume.” “It’s always full costume.” “Well, it still is, this time. One hour, not a minute off, full costume and don’t jerk off before you get there, you.” “Why shouldn’t I?” “I’ll see you. Bye.” I clicked him off. Bad for a chippy-chip to know too much. You should see his room. It’s full of ColecoVision tapes and old-ass rock posters, fuckin’ Jiffy Pop Poppers and Wendy’s wrappers all over the place. He posts up there watching Transformers and picking out songs on his Rogue Rocketeer 100. But in that closet, behind those messy sheets, and past that gay-ass sheet music and his Walmart computer, is a chipmunk costume. Brown fur, big black eyes, cute little front teeth in white. He’s the only one I know with a full costume, we don’t have parades and shit around here, it’s just Buttfuck, Ohio. But to find a full chippy-chip, whatever the rest of his employment, was a treat. Full chipmonk, brown colors. All brown, all chipmunk, all the time. Suiting up in the basement of his mother’s house, getting it all ready to go out the door. Then packing off for the glen, to meet me. It’s all we had in common, believe that. Just pulp packaging and a love of things furry and huge. It’s a sexual thing, you don’t need to know any more. Shows that you understand a set of aesthetics. It meant something to me, if you don’t mind. Mattered to me on some sub-academic level, more than class and polisci and causes and issues. We met in the Little Art Theatre, I was working there and he came in in costume. I thought: this chipmonk is bold, I like this chipmonk, this is one wack chipster in barbarian language. I sold him tickets and he watched the movie with his helmet on, sitting next to his popcorn. I tailed him afterward, walked him half a block outside the theater, gave him my twitter. “DM me.” He did. Next week we were at the glen, doing rituals in the altar stone. I had him worn out by the time we left, I was calling all the shots. He would do anything, and I liked him right away. Even plan people’s deaths, with me, and let me play with my guns. He would get freaky around the guns, like he had had some childhood experiences with them, but I didn’t ask. I made him eat the tip of my P30 and even showed him the rifle, but I’d always wash out the ceramics afterward. I don’t like chipmunk grease on my weapons. Cats are greasy too but I don’t know many of them. Met some on the internet but it’s not the same. To have a real life chipmonk in front of me, and in my town, was a miracle such that I didn’t care what he did in his spare time or how greasy his paws were. Those front teeth made me, made me right away into him, I could see how a bunny and a chipmonk could get along, even on teeth alone. Those mousy ears and that stubby little tail. If you ever want to piss off a chipmonk, ask him if he’s a squirrel, that’ll do it. But I don’t fuck with him that way, he’s a human being, he deserves respect no matter how much Taco Bell he eats. You have to afford people a privacy, you know, a space within which is theirs, that you just don’t question, you don’t judge. People’s habits, their little dances, you can’t get inside those. That’s just word go. Build from there up. You have to enjoy being surprised. But I’ll meet a chipmunk, yeah, meet him in the woods for a little play-by-play, meet him up for some pantomime. What’s underneath the costume doesn’t matter. So I made a phone call. “Chippy, I’ve got this delicious little word-faggot who needs a name. You’ll like to spank him, you’ll like to call his name. He doesn’t have a penis to speak of but he has this able knob, an able knob and a bone handle, I can’t help but warn you away from the juice he secrets from his anus. It is a muzzle of gold, a red-rock IPA, baked in sewer leaves and the skin of cadavers, squeezed like a pimple and baking between his cheeks. You’ve got to avoid this at all costs, in your infinite wisdom. You are radiating with able mind and abler thumbs from ColecoVisionariness, Taco Bell wrappers galore, and all the object-focus of a true psychopath. You learned this from me. And style, my friend, has never left you, though you may have turned your back a few times.” That’s what I said to my chipmunk friend. And then I said some more: “Chippy, we’re creating something of a family here tonight, which, while I will destroy it, I think you would have benefited from seeing. Just to see how it goes when a sister and a sister and a producer and two film techs sit down for a dinner of smores and Hebrew Nationals. I think you might, Chippy-chip, I think you might benefit from such. Did you have a sister? Did you have a mother who cared? Or was it all done alone, inside the costume? Chippy, breathe for me, since I’m stuck here doing lovey-lovey family time with baby sis and you’re alone in mother’s basement with your costume. I needed to be inside mine. Needed to grab-and-go. Needed to carry this little producer along with me to grab-and-go from the dorm to the altar rock. Can you meet me in one hour? That is the point. Find me at the rock. Bring no one. Step softly. Don’t shine your light. Don’t be bright. Meet right at dusk, and we’ll carry off something like we never carried it off before. You won’t even know, Chipmunk, I will show you something that will escape you from your life of Taco Bell basement and Little Art torture. Come meet me. Tell no one. Bring full costume and nothing else, no hair, no fingerprints, no sticks, no wrappers, no receipts, no chapstick, no cell phones, no cheese. And solidify us both in silence of graves, and let’s do something we’ll both remember, I mean remember with fear, never let go of because it never lets go of us. Be part of something like that with me chipmunk, because if you don’t it won’t have meant anything, any of it, and we’ll be just two more furry things with no purpose, no vision, nothing to show.” Then something my sister said reminded me of kindergarten, because she mentioned Mrs. Hatcher, both of our third grade teacher, and I started thinking about kindergarten, and I saw her. Then I saw myself, and remembered the nose bleeds, which were with me from when I was very young. Some of my earliest memories are of thick red blood coming from my nose. They would start anytime, without warning, and I’d be gushing blood from my nose, leaning back, pinching my nose. I think my nose was bleeding from before I learned to talk. Saw myself at home, watching TV, holding my head back, pinching that nose, looking sideways out my eyes at The Wizard of Oz while I bled. The part where the witch throws fire makes my nose bleed every time I see it. I can’t watch it with other people. Not that you ever do, at this age, but even discussion of The Wizard of Oz makes me bleed—a simple reference does me in. There’s something wrong with making children watch it. Or maybe normal children have no problem with The Wizard of Oz, and it’s just me. But Ella didn’t like it either, and she turned out okay. Saw myself as Tin Man, never Dorothy, though Dorothy’s dog was nice. Saw myself as the empty one, the one with no insides. Scarecrow’s emptiness was the worst yet, though, and something about him losing his stuffing was too much for me. Saw myself as some inevitable version of him. Saw myself as all the emptiness. Saw myself coming out of my sleeves. Saw myself in kindergarten, first month of school, urinating in secret through my coveralls, pee running down the leg of my chair, and changing chairs so fast no one could see it. Then McKenzie Davis got blamed for the pee, even though I peed it, and McKenzie’s parents got a talking to, about What Her Daughter Did in Class, even though McKenzie Davis never did it. Saw myself as the thief of pee, saw myself as a criminal even then, saw myself with scarecrow straw as my red hair. Saw myself. Saw myself. Saw myself through my teacher’s eyes, saw myself bleeding in the classroom. She left us. Why. To go down the hall. To conference with another teacher. Maybe she had to go to the bathroom. Maybe an emergency. She left us. Left me in the front of the room, after naptime, to watch the class. This is kindergarten, zeroth grade. Sat me in a chair in front of the class and told me to keep an eye on everyone. Make sure everyone stayed in line. I was the one student she could trust. There’s me, coming back from the emergency, left it back in the toilet in the teacher’s lounge. Coming down the hall. Mrs. Hatcher. Mrs. Apple. Mrs. White. Third grade. Second grade. One. And my room. Grade zero. Left AK sitting, AK in charge. Cute little coveralls. There she is. Room dark, room quiet. There she is. Have to tell her mother how good she is. AK. Little AK. Hand upon her nose. Why is that. AK. Sitting in the front of my room, on a chair. Told her to watch the class. Her head turned back. She watched them. She didn’t move. I said, “AK, don’t move. AK, sit here and watch the class.” And she did. Hand above her head, clamped to the nose. Pinching it. Her legs splayed around the chair. AK. Blood flowing from her nose. Pinch it. Blood flowing. Shade of the room. “AK. What happened?” “Nothing.” Her eyes turning over to me, head hardly moving. She didn’t move an inch. Good girl. Let me get you some paper towel. “AK.” Here. You’re bleeding. She had an accident. Emergency. “Your nose is bleeding.” “I know,” she says. She knows. Mopping the girl’s face. Have to tell her mother. She didn’t move. I said, “AK, sit right here and watch this class. Don’t move an inch.” And she did, and she didn’t. And this girl’s nose started to bleed and here she still is, in the same spot as before. Blood flowing down her face. That is it. That is it. AK. You get one shot in life. There is no dress rehearsal. That was your one shot and you made it.

2

“Why’ont you come with me, little producer boy.” “Come with you where?” “To walk the glen. Come with me to walk in the Glen, you’ll like it, all producers like it.” “Why do they call it The Glen?” “Because it’s a glen, fool. Don’t you know what a glen is? A glen is a canyon, it’s a valley, well, a small canyon, ours is because of a river, as is the style, the river wraps around and gets all…glen-like…d’ja wanna come?” P-boy looks to his boss. Ella just shrugs. “You got cleared, Jim,” I tell him. “Now get on your backpack and your hiking shoes and give a girl some company while she wanders the glen. We’ll stop by my dorm and pick up my costume, it’s a giant hiking costume you’ll have real fun with this one.” “Anna, shut up.” “Why? Why should I shut up?” “What are you saying about ‘a hiking costume’ Jesus.” “I never said ‘a hiking costume’ Jesus yourself I said a giant hiking costume.” “Ok then.” “Ok then. Johnny get your pants let’s go.” I liked smelling this kid’s cock. And I could smell it through his pants. It was like this kid had spilled a bottle of cock-fragrance right on his cock and someone had forgotten to lick it up. I had to smell his cock. I had to taste it. And before long, I knew I had to have it. This poor little kid should have never spilled that bottle of cock fragrance on his poor little pee pee. So I have my hand on his cock, through his pants, and I’m doing my best to jerk him off through his jeans and I can feel he’s big so I need to jerk him off as soon as possible so that we can fuck and he doesn’t come in me too much. So I was jerking him, bleeding his dick through these pants, seeing blood and hoping some cum will come up with it. Because this kid has a strong-smelling cock. “Why don’t you come to the woods with me, little producer boy? Why don’t you come? We’ll frolic in the ferns and run naked in red springs under a canopy of trees then tie each other up and leave ourselves to die. Wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you? Sip this muffyn. Let me put my hands on you. Put your hands on my muffyn. Feel it. You’ve never had a muffyn like this one, believe me. Believe cinnamon, believe nutmeg, believe sage. Believe I can take care of you. Believe you can have my warmth. And believe you will like it, young one. Believe I can introduce you to the future so gently, so carefully, that you won’t miss a note. Bring you right up. Bring you forward, into what we all breathe. Bring you into pussy. Smell it, monkey boy. While I smell your cock. That’s it. Put that head between my legs, smell and brush that with your lips. That’s what you can have. That’s where you can go. That is all there is, anymore. And bring yourself up, bring yourself to my mouth and to my touch and know that we have to go to the woods to finish this, and we have to go quick before we meet my friend. He’s a little chippy-chip, you’ll like him. Simpleton chipmunk, simple to the core. You’ll have a lot in common. I’ve had this rough tied-up in my mind for years, a rough draft of your meeting. Now is just to pull it off. And I don’t mind taking your virginity in order to do it. I’ll like that, little monkey, knowing I took you off. Robbed you. Robbed you of your cum. That’s what a bunny will do to a monkey: rob him of cum. Take it all and leave you with nothing. You’ll be empty and soft. I will remain. That’s the pain of your power as a boy. I can go again; any time I want. You have to wait and you have to wait for us, for me, to really get what you want. We keep it all, we have you. I was trained in dark closets at teenage parties and trained by the best, little monkey; I won’t miss a beat. Bring your cock here, let’s mimic you with my tongue. And keep it there, we’ll get it out only when it’s time, little monk…ey. Little mon…key. Little money…k. Rocked you in feathers. Made you in a cradle of clay. Come out to the woods with me. Play.” So he said “Okay.” Walk me to my place, where we do in fact get a giant bunny costume. “For effect,” I say. Come with me past the green, where in two days I will finally graduate from this infernal place. That green is where we smoke pot and read books and study by committee and share a heated debate with freshman faggots who are going to school because there’s not enough education in their families, who lament about what they’re going to do other than teach and how tragic it would be if they actually had to do anything real in the world. Like. A job. Lol. Freshman faggots entertain me and pot entertains me and study by committee entertains me and this little producer boy amuses me. I wonder if I could get to hold his hand. Make believe this is a relationship. I wonder. Make him believe this is a relationship. Well: it is. And come with me to my room, which is on the first floor and entirely unprotected. Dangerously so. Dangerously unprotected, my boy. See those windows? Anyone could come in at any time. They call this the rape hallway. Legend has it that these two freshman boys raped this poor freshman girl about a thousand years ago in this very hallway and that’s why we call it the rape hallway now. Poor little freshman girl. That’s how the story always goes. You might believe that story if you’re a guy, you might get all incensed and get your buddies together to go beat the shit out of those two guys, and feel really good about it. But those two guys didn’t rape that little freshman girl. They never even had sex. They just ejected those two motherfuckers for harassing that little girl. Which they never should have done—granted. But nobody got raped there. They never needed to give those boys a slap on the hand. And they shoulda told that girl to stay out of darkened hallways with her white flag flying. Carry some mace, bitch. If it was me I would have shot those two boys front and center with the flash from a Heckler-Koch P30 semiautomatic. Fuck you. That’s how I do it. Fucking freshman. Faggots. Each and every one. But come with me to my room, this dangerous room. Sit with me by my dangerous closet, where I hand costumes with black eyes and black black black black black. Sit with me on this dangerous chair and its dangerous rock. Kiss me by the flip-‘n’-fuck, you know how that works, don’t you? It’s a chair, then it’s a bed. It’s a chair, then you flip it around, then you fuck on it. Flip-‘n’-fuck. My whole life is a flip-‘n’-fuck, producer-boy. See, I flip you over, then I fuck you. But when I fuck you I fuck you up. See? That’s how I do that. So sit with me here on this chair and your knees all awkward so you can get close enough to return my advance—which was a kiss—a simple kiss, nothing more Dear Reader, a simple auburn kiss from a simple auburn head. Is this how I kiss you? Simple with lips. This how I kiss you? With invention in the tongue? This how we kiss: solid and with the intention to fuck? That’s how I kiss. That’s how I do that. You know they say never throw a punch without a bad intention. I say don’t kiss without the intention to fuck. You’re messing with the wrong kind of game. My kiss isn’t an invitation to fuck. It’s a command. Sit here with me, suck on my tongue. Lick the side of my face, up to my ears, get me going with your spit. I need a Q-tip to get off a cat. You heard me. Tape that motherfucker to the wall and get off a cat in heat. You’ve got a cat in heat. You’ve got a Q-tip. Put those two together and get the fucking thing off. Get it off. Sit with my dangerous come. Lie with my dangerous body, and my dangerous hair. Sing me a dangerous song in your face, with the curl of your lips and the last part of you that feels the need. Petition a stranger. To become less strange. Petition a strange auburn-head girl to like you, just for a moment. You don’t even care what happens after that moment. Maybe nothing does. Maybe there is only the moment where we fuck and after that nothing matters, to you. Maybe you come with me and never come back, maybe that’s the way it goes. Would you like that kind of ending? Would it please you, in retrograde? Doubling, twice, and thrice, and my mind ate the possibility of a munch. Hold me, Producer Boy, I have forgotten myself (as sometimes happens) and your safety depends on my staying here. These saddles are poorly tied. These colors—oh—stay with me Producer-Boy! It’s all getting dizzy again, stop kissing! This is where I can’t be trusted, where it falls off and I can never come back. I find the cracks on a wall screaming at me the color of a name. Do you hear that? I can hear the color of a name! Tell me Brian! Tell me Spencer! Tell me Brittany! Tell me Goldilocks! Each has a color: no two are the same! Sing me a color, let me go down, down, down. There it was, P-boy, I passed the point. Passed it on the way out. Dangerous windows. Rape hallway. Each name has a color. Colors sing. I can see the tone of a color in my eye. Tell me a tone—see!? Tell me your other names. Tell me the hidden ones. NO! Tell me your real name before you die. We’re all dying, white boy, we all are. I met this demon in a—NO! I lost my mental in a—NO! Hold me, P-boy, hold me good. “You were shaking.” “I know, I have a dislocated—” “You were shaking.” “See this shoulder? I’ve had some problems with it, a couple surgeries, you know.” “Why were you shaking?” “I probably had a seizure, why, was I like floppy all over the place?” “Yeah.” “And what did you do?” “I didn’t know what to do.” “Well next time try to rape me, it’s your best choice. Kidding. I’m kidding! Did I scare you? One guy left me cause he couldn’t take my seizures. I thought it was a shitty thing to do. I’m trying to lose weight—can you tell?” “I don’t think you need to lose weight at all.” “But I do. Right in here. About ten pounds. Maybe five. Maybe six, actually. I’m pretty sure it’s six. Really. Don’t worry! It’s just a seizure! I’m fine—I do this all the time.” (Although later I learned I don’t actually have seizures.) “Just be glad you weren’t in a car with me when this happened. Of course I’m not supposed to drive. But I do anyway. Live dangerously, that’s what I say. Really, don’t worry, I’m fine. Hold my hand again.” And let me put this costume on, put this costume on above you, shadow you with grey fur and white inner fur and a giant mask. Shadow you with black eyes. Watch my tail. I can strut my stuff in here, strut it down the hallway. You’d think people wearing such things would be more conspicuous. You’d be wrong. Dance with me, P-boy, dance with a bunny now. Does it make you happy, does it fulfil your every dream, to dance with a girl decked out in bunny suit? I’m told they wait in line hours for this to happen, in the theme parks. The major ones anyway. You probably weren’t raised on cartoons. Well let me tell you, I was. This one right here…wasn’t one of the ones we watched. But my life is a cartoon, producer, my life is a cartoon. Come with me. “What is this?” “This is the green, remember?” “And what is this?” This is the glen?” “And what is this?” “This is a Boy Scout camp—they train Boy Scouts here.” “And what is this?” “This is a wildlife research area, you’re not supposed to be here. Well, neither of us are, cause we don’t have a permit. You’re supposed to be a scientist to be here, they study animals.” And what is this? I know you’re asking me. After all those trees and the beautiful red-rocked dripping clay with the red silt and red water that drinking it is like one inch to a gallon of Muscle Milk or something, one ounce is worth taking a bath in the valley of fucking Eden and shit, whatever, that red stuff, it’s like a powerball. And after the red leaves and the red sky and the red-eyed, black-bellied snake we pass on the rock bridge—who is completely venomless—we are headed up the other side of the glen. Far from the farms, past this little fern area, there’s this place over here where two of my friends found a dead body. It was someone who had killed himself in the woods. They found him under this bridge. Which no one uses anymore. They had been hiking, right up this way. Some guy who shot himself with a shotgun, animals were eating him by the time my friend found him. It’s just up this way. Hold my hand. Come with me to my special place. This is a little place might remind you of Stonehenge, proper. I call it my little rock garden. Only one other person knows about this place, only one other who matters. See these rocks? See how they’re arranged. These used to be higher up, that’s why there are rivets in them? See these loops? These are for rock climbers, these rocks used to be up there, see? They would tie themselves to these loops so they could climb down the ravine. Now they’re here, at the bottom, and we have these little rivets and loops to our selves. These rocks all have a name. This is the key rock. See how it’s shaped? This is the piano rock. This one doesn’t have a name. This is the snail, this is the phone. Doesn’t it look like a phone? And this one—this one here—this one is special. It means a sanctuary, or a service. This one here is like a church, but for a certain type of death. Your type. You’re a virgin, aren’t you? “Yes.” “Quick now, before the chipmunk comes.” Lie down on the altar rock, come off with me little boy. Face down and take my touch, take it like you need it, you silly silly boy. Knowing nothing, you have come here to these woods to lose. I will make you lose. And love will be our name. Take the producer and unravel him, leave him with a memory. Ripping through your fingernail. Bleeding your greasy hair. Thumbing your artificial finger. I had this planned on a night in June, had it executed by July, forgotten it by August, dipped my hand in for more by the next June, and made it tradition by December. Remembered you to my menu, ate a possibility by March. You needed me to come, that is all. You waited to come, and I found you and got you off. It’s really nothing, nothing I won’t forget, but something you’ll always remember, your first time. Snapped in the woods on an altar rock, got off, left, forgotten. And maybe more, monkey. Maybe more tonight, something you’ll never breathe out, something not even a chipmunk could imagine, or plan for, or want. I have my own agenda, my own virginity I’m looking to rid myself of, I have a wish-fantasy I need to care for and delicately care for, for my wish is forbidden by people who know not how to desire it, whose language is composed only of adverbs, flat people, people with zero imagination, people who get Cs in class, occasionally Bs, people with ponytail hair and missionary positions, people who have been to space but have never touched their own asshole. Do you realize that? Do you realize that we have probably put in space people who have never explored their own asshole? I’m talking about people with ponytails, people with pink and blue hairclips, never spoken a salty word, lost in Bs and Cs and day planners and butterfly nets. Come quickly, producer boy, come to the altar rock and let me strip you to nothing, so quickly I’ll still be dressed, bringing out the rabbit hood and fucking you with my mask on top of a skinny cock, covering you, commanding you, cornering you in the open. I needed you to see my auburn hair, needed you to see my face while I did it, while it first went in, needed you to see that I didn’t flinch—that it was you who flinched, and all your ideas of boys and girls were wrong, that you never had it right, even in your magazines. Of joy you knew nothing. Of pain you knew nothing. Of humiliation you are just now learning. Learning to lie back and let a redhead fuck you, learning that you cannot keep from come. Learning the difference between one word and its neighbor, when to use one and when not to. That was everything you ever imagined, twisted on its head. You did not imagine your back on cold stone. You did not imagine that. You did not imagine your face looking upward, to the canopy of trees. You did not imagine late afternoon/early evening with the lights still on. You did not imagine a stick in your eye. You did not imagine a stick in your eye! monkey boy. That was one thing you never imagined! You didn’t see yourself full of gunk and muck while we fucked. You saw yourself clean, on my white sheets, but that’s not how it happens. It happens in the woods, on the altar stone, with me on top and you staring upward at my halo and a stick in your eye. That’s how I imagined it, and it’s my imagination we’re in. A stick falling way from above and landing in your eye. Leaves at your back. Your toes in the air. Me cutting your back on the stone as I bounce my bunny self on your penis. You never even knew you had a penis—you always thought you had a cock. But tonight you learned, tonight you found your inner penis and brought it to the surface, got it broke off, got it fucked. You have to fuck a penis sometime. That has a different feel than fucking a cock. In fact, usually cocks do the fucking, whereas penises sometimes get fucked. I fucked your penis. I fucked it. I fucked. I fucked. That’s what you have to remember, producer-boy, monkey-cat. You lap milk from a mother’s teet, you lap milk from a plate, you are the baby-cat, baby-boy, face down in a saucer lapping it up with your butt in the air. That’s where I find you, boy-monkey, little child, with your bare ass in the air licking milk out of a saucer. You didn’t know your penis was going to get fucked. No. You did not imagine it. I did. We’re in my imagination. Where I pick the trees and I lay you back on the stone and fuck you while your back cuts and you just lie there with the stick in your eye, not-removing it and not-fucking but getting-fucked. Getting your penis pulled in and out by my cunt. I have a cunt that bounces! I bounce on you, monkey boy! I bounce you in and out and bounce myself off, bounce my cunt into cumming right off tickled by your tiny monkey penis! Bounce myself to oblivion! Bounce myself into making you cum! Bounce my hat on—where’s my hat. Bounce my bunny helmet right on my head! Look at these black eyes! Look at this grey head! Do you like getting fucked by a bunny head!? Do you like getting fucked by black eyes, wells, bottomless pits! Do you like that monkey? Do you like that, boy? Black eyes, you cannot grasp; black eyes, that look at you without you being able to look back. That’s how my rabbit head rolls. Fuck you with-out you being able to see my auburn hair. Fuck you with only wisps of it hanging down, and my bare ass also sticking out the back, with just a bunny hat and my boobs hanging down over you, fuck you with teets you can never lick, bounce you off, idiot! Bounce you into glassy-eye. You come under me! You come in my cunt! Bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce! I fuck you. I fuck you off Monkey Boy. Fuck you to oblivion. Fuck you to cut back on the altar stone. Fuck you with a stick, in your eye. Fuck your eye right out of you if I want. Do you know what lies inert, in the bottom half of my bunny suit? Crumpled there with no body on the tree stump? Velcroed to the inside of the bunny pouch? Do you know what happens when a bunny suit comes alive? Can you imagine this mind in costume? Imagine what must come out then? When I’m done bouncing your cock I’ll become an even worse demon, pink be damned! I’ll put away this pink and become a grey and white bunny suit, empty inside like the scarecrow, feet protected from the ground, my white ass and white tits submerged in plush, zip me up the side and put on the helmet for good. Bunny helmet, protecting me. Protecting me from the squirt of your come. Get you off with my hands now, wipe my hands on the rock. Squirt for me, monkey boy, squirt now. Wipe you off on your own skin, clean my hands with leaves, zip up my rabbit suit and turn my back on you while I adjust my helmet, and that view from the back will be the last auburn hair you ever see. Little wisps hanging out the back will be the last you see of the feminine on this planet, monkey-cock. We’ll dry your penis in the sun the next day, dry out your lungs tonight in the dark, stop all your systems in mid-breath, but you can’t fuck without consequences. I wanted to take your virginity but not for your own sake, for my own entertainment before you die. I ate myself into a forest with some childhood leftover about what you do with your genitals. It’s the main focus of becoming an adult: gaining control of what you do, sexually. As a child, you’re told not to touch yourself in public. Your parents are essentially in control of your genitals. You internalize their control. And you’re left to become an adult in order to slowly reclaim (in some cases) your own control over what you do sexually. Some people never regain this control. Some people had too much to begin with. Put on your rabbit mask. Let the dust fall from the ears. Let the rabbit whiskers fall into place. Cover up that auburn hair. Tuck it underneath. Let a wispy stick out, let it fall. Let the hair fall on your back. Now get out your gun. Put the gun in my face. Let me look at rabbit eyes. Let me look at black holes, flat black. The Heckler Koch P30, standard weapon of the AK. This to start. The AK doesn’t fuck around. The AK has standard rules. The AK always comes in costume. The AK always brings her A game. The AK is always in style. The AK is underneath the rabbit robes and with the mask I kept in the end-hall closet with our dad’s shoe polish. There’s something moving there, something heavy and wooden. Something smells like shoe polish, and has metal wings. Something with a face, whose mouth is open. There’s something moving back there. And we’re in here. The two of us girls. Just us two. Except. There is another. That’s all we can remember it. That’s all we can know. We’re prevented from remembering it. It is that which we cannot know. Which we can never remember. Without that we would not be who we are. Our adult lives. It happened. We cannot recall. That is who we are. Fought back against some trapdoor that leads underneath the house. Where snakes. Where dirt. Where dogs die. Where crawly things crawl and crawl and crawl. Where you have to bring your flashlight to survive. And that’s where we got raped, me and Ella. It was in the end-hall closet where we got tickled with a feather duster and wrapped up in t-shirts and then finally raped by our dad. That’s what we think of when we think of the end-hall closet, of this ancient sex where we get raped by our father and that’s how we learn it and it is confused. Because who am I supposed to have sex with? And how is my relationship with my sister, now? That’s the kind of thing I have to think about now. That end-hall closet keeps playing into my memory. It lines me, lines me over a wall. So then I became someone else, can you blame me? Or maybe I always had genetics that Ella never had, and maybe that’s why I’m so screwed up. I never meant to be like her. She has it easy, even getting raped, it turns into some extreme neurosis in her case, in me it turns into a wild beast and I can’t claim to even say what I want to say, what I am saying, but I can claim to have been the victim of the end-hall closet just like she was. Just like she was. So I made him squirm. He squirmed his skinny white ass onto the altar rock. Writhing up, and I put a bunny hand out over it, fat glove furring. Then it struck me. I should be fingering his asshole. Like those ladder-climbers from my dream. Standing behind me, with my baby on the top shelf, that asshole who put his finger down my shorts and tapped on the very asshole of mine. That’s what I should do. That’s how I should do it to this kid. See how uncomfortable he gets, with my finger up his ass. Just tapped into the surface, just the tip. So I took the bunny glove off and spanked him, just one cheek. Then I took off my other glove and spread his cheeks, and I licked my finger and squirmed it in him, just the tip, and he squirmed. He couldn’t take it. He hated that it made him hard again. He didn’t want my finger up his ass. Have you ever felt yourself harden against rock? Felt your dick in the cold of the woods, get hard again and need touch? Felt the cold tip of a finger tapping your asshole between open cheeks? Looked up to see a furry chipmunk picking his teeth in the twilight. Twilight motherfucker! That’s exactly the word I meant to choose. Looked up to see twilit chipmunk picking his teeth, cocking head sideways, black eyes staring at the whole situation. To him: a bunny with no gloves fingering the asshole of this white boy, looking down on him like the contents of some experiment. And something wrong about the bunny being without gloves, tiny white hands protruding (yes, protruding!) from the grey costume, white stomach patch of the bunny, brown chipmunk, black trees, and the white boy penis getting hard against a rock while she fingers his asshole. Something…perfect about it. Something so…very…AK about it. I was born an AK, meant to be an AK, meant to live with AK punctuation, AK here and there, AK on a Saturday night for flavoring of pepper. Season your day, with a little AK. Those missing AK are missing the bunny and the chipmunk. We have it, we have found it. He squirmed his skinny white ass onto the altar rock. He has found it, too. Has found some way out of his normal, has found this way. Bunny spanking a white ass. And then you see the bunny hand go inside her own costume, and you wonder where it’s going, what is it doing in there, white thumper paws and that’s the friend I want to have, want to have in some insane way that might just be possible. Want to be inside that bunny costume with her. More trips like these and we might. Might get carried away in bunny love. Having found it. Found it, having. Having. Fun. Bunny fun from bunny fun from chipmunk. Bunny-chip. Monk-rabbi. Someday intertwined (intertwined) with my very favorite AK. Too scared to put my hand inside the chipmunk costume, even with this mask on, what would AK think? Set on its side. I set my mask off and reach inside my costume and Anna asks me what I’m doing. “I’m taking it off.” “What are you taking off?” “Both of them. I’m taking—” “Don’t take your mask off, ever. You understand me?” The white boy looking up at me, seeing my face. And my face red (red!). And my hand on it. My hand on it good, wagging. And Anna angry. I smile. “What are you thinking?” “I’m thinking you’re stupid, chipmunk—you’re a stupid chipmunk! Don’t ever take your mask off!” “Why not, it’s just—” “Don’t even say what I think you were about to say.” “What did you think I was about to say?” “I thought you were about to say it’s just a game.” “It is a game, Anna, it is a game.” “What did you call me? Have you lost your brains? What the fuck did you call me?” Fingering his asshole. Spank that bitch like a bitch needs spanking. “I don’t believe you called me that, chipmunk. Put your mask back on. Or leave it off, for punishment. I had you in my first draft.” “You had me in your what?” “I had you in my first ideas of coming, but I crossed you out, chipmunk, I crossed you out of this place before the second draft.” “What draft are we on now?” “We’re on the second draft.” “But I’m still here. And yet…I’m still here, rabbit.” “I’m not a rabbit.” “I’m still here, bunny, I’m still here.” And that chippy-chip leaving off his mask and keeping his hand inside his suit. Copychip. Copychip. Copymonk. Copychip. Jerking his dick off. Is this what you like, chipmunk? To see a white boy spread-cheeked on the altar stone? I’ll have to remember your preferences. But you know mine? Mine is a decked-out MR556A1 with superscope. That’s my A game. That’s what I prefer. I prefer function with no emphasis. I prefer ceramic. Ceramic white. White to match my pussy, with red handlegrips to match my lips. To match my red insides, red pouch, red body, red blood clit. That’s how I like it: bold ceramics, no backspace. That’s what I finger in the dark. Bad chipmunk. Bad bad bad. You have no respect for repetition. No understanding of the game. No respect for the altar stone. Do not deserve the mask you cast aside, big head bunny staring you down with black eyes. See the cast of the dusk around my head, see the simplicity of my tones: white belly, grey overcoat. That’s how you like your bunnies. Grey overcoat with not-too-matted fur. Packing a P30—which is what I have my hand on, you stupid chipmunk, that’s where my hand goes, goes with the simplicity of a space. No comma, no period: as is the case with your ass. My hand glides like a space, grabs the (red handlegrips of the!) P30, feels the rails. And see that sawtooth rail, my favorite gun. Think of getting shot in the face. Think of how that would be. I might have to cock this in your face, white boy, I might have to bring this up to your temple and fire. That’s execution-style. Style of a furry. Style of grey. Flip the side-piece. You never had a night scope on this bitch, never had a flashlight. Just like the rail for its own benefit. Its aesthetics—something a chipmunk would never understand. Brown helmet, sat beside him, while his eyes bug out, this is what he thinks being a chipmunk is all about. Jerking his dick off underneath brown fur. That’s only part of what being a chipmunk is all about. The rest is far more serious, and not something our chippy-chip is up to. But something he will have to be a part of anyway. Something he’s about to endure. Somewhere he’s about to come along to, with, about, of. Pop. Pop. Pop. Maybe a final pop. Crack. Crack. Crack. BANG! We had you at BANG. We had you at fall-over. We had you at stop-breathing. We had you at last-breath. We had you at heart-stop. We had you at white-ass splayed, no more hard dick, not for long. We had you at brown hair matted with brown blood and sunlight fading, semi-automatic pistol fire, blanking the night. That’s where we had you. We had you squirming. We had your asshole getting fingered as abuse. As abuse, I tell you. We had you with a cold finger on your ass. Tapping. Like a thermometer. Like a pistol thermometer. Would never place my gun on your ass, though. Finger: yes. Pistol: no. Tap tap tap. Tap. Tap. Cold blood on an asshole. Cold steel of a fingerprint. Ripping you with cold. Ripping you with a serrated rail. Feel this. Feel it, stupid white boy. You have never understood. You try. You try too hard. You never understand. My aching you never understand. Neither does that chippy-chip. Chipster-monk. Never. Never did. Never has. Hat off jerking. No mask. He’s going to regret that—what if white boy talks? But that won’t be a problem. And chippy-chip is about to have a surprise, something he never thought would happen. Because chippy-chip thought this was a game, one he could play badly. But this isn’t a game, it isn’t at all. This is me. This is my legacy, my study, this is pure operation, something that a chippy-chip could never understand. Something they never teach in class—never could. But something worth learning, and my only way to learn is this. This little exercise in killing. Only way to expand. Only way to tear down, and tear down is what you must do. What you must do to learn. Tear-down is the only game there is. Tear-down of what is woven. Wearing something new. There was a space in there, right after the comma. I want space-comma-space-comma-space, just like the accessory rail of a P30 Heckler-Koch. That’s what a bunny does: heckle. Heckle a cock. Mispronounce. Mispronounce your face. Mispronounce your name. Mispronounce you right off the planet. That’s what I’m grabbing for, stupid chipmunk, not my vagina, as you would surely like, but for the Heckler-Koch P30 semiautomatic pistol with luminous rear sight (nonradioactive), ambidextrous controls (perfect for Ambidextrous Bunnies), that’ll be the last light you see, flash of the Heckler in 5×5, white ass, asshole-finger, cold ice up your butt. Flash! Flash! That’s how we’ll do you, monkey boy. Silly monkey boy! Came out to play with a chipmunk and a bunny! Silly monkey, don’t you know that rabbits always win! We have been time tested in fairytales and except for that stupid one with the tortoise, we’re all-for-all, tried and perfect against foxes, elephants, dogs. Even silly monkey-children, monkey-people, following chipmunks into the woods to entertain them with twitching butts and squirming penises, squirming right on into the rock. That’s what a monkey boy will do, stupid monkey. Don’t you know never to follow furries into the woods? Well, after that had to come the part where I killed him. So we had to run him back against a tree, and Chipmunk had to get real scared because he thought my vagina was a gun. So I pulled my P30 out of my suit and showed it to white anus boy and he squirmed on the stone even more than before. Walked backwards on his hands alone! He thought I was frightening, and I played up that part of my self and showed him the frightening parts. The part that brushes my hair back with the tip of a P30. The part that places the face of a gun into the face and body of a boy. He had to come to terms with that. He had to come to terms with having a gun stuck in his body and his face. It was difficult to come to terms with. After all, he had just lost his virginity. That’s a lot to deal with on the same night. So I reared back and told him that he was going to die, and he didn’t like that. Chippy-chip seemed surprised, even though we had been playing the dying game all this time. I started throwing away identifiers like “punk” and “pussy” and Chipmunk thought I was insulting him. He needed to believe that I hated him. Instead, I convinced him that we were together in this, and that he could hold the gun if he wanted to. But he didn’t seem to want to, the way he was shrieking with his helmet off. And I told him he never should have taken it off and he kept asking me if this is what made me happy and I told him that I didn’t think I would ever be happy like this, not without a transformation. Very difficult to find one when you’re looking for it, though. Very difficult to watch a shrieking boy hold his face in his hands and beg my auburn head not to do anything stupid. Very difficult for a skinny anus boy to come to face with the idea that he was going to die, and die right then. That was difficult for him, I could see. So I asked the sky and the trees to help me explain. And they stood still. They explained to him that it was natural for him to die and I don’t think he understood them. They were speaking gently in the colors of dusk. And they spoke without moving a branch. There were no leaves moving. And we bargained with the trees. I had nothing to say, but I did my bargaining, too. I bargained for what would happen to me afterward, and I bargained that there be plenty of books. I bargained for whiteboy that he have an easy time of it, and god-bless, he did. It went quickly. It was PACK! PACK! like a dart in the forehead, with ample wounds to the forearm where he was holding up his hands so he wouldn’t get shot. But he got shot in the face. And I couldn’t help him. So that was what happened. It was a very calm and a very simple moment. I reeled back and I pointed at him and I pulled the trigger, twice. PACK. PACK. And he reeled backwards, and that was the end of his life. I had planned it from the moment I met him in the supermarket with his penis. And I knew that fucking him would loosen him up, get him all calmed-out for the big event. On second thought, I would fuck him again if he were still around. Probly should have used him well before I did it. And the p-boy producer affect was that he pretended not to be gay. But I pumped his asshole with my finger and I knew otherwise. I could see how he liked that. And I tried to imagine him with a costume on and what he would be. Maybe he could be our fox, as we always needed a fox. But he wasn’t moving now, after he had unfortunately got shot, and I was waving the gun around above my head like a mad woman and the chipmonk was unfortunately crying, as he hadn’t expected the anus-boy of getting shot, even not in the face like he did. So I lifted the producer-boy’s face in my hands and rolled his neck around, and the chipmonk hugged a tree and maybe his penis was hard, I’m not sure. And I thought back to the FLASH! FLASH! of a few seconds ago and I wished I could see it again. But after a moment is over you have to let it go. PACK! PACK! I popped him. POP! POP! There he went. And he wasn’t squirming any more. Which was sad because I liked to watch him squirm. I reached around and touched his asshole again, and the chipmunk was hating me for this because he said “Don’t do it!” But I did it because there wasn’t a reason not to and that was not a tragedy as the c-monk seemed to imply by his actions near the tree, scratching and clawing his self at the bark and seeming to think he was a real chipmonk who knew how to spell. So we had a disagreement about that point, and I knew I had to prevail. Chipmonk was getting too anxious and I wished I had something to give him. Something that starts with a K. Or maybe a C. Some medicine. He could have help with his anxiety if he had something. But I had nothing so I gave him nothing and turned around the anus-boy again and let his anus go, because I was done touching it and he was done letting me touch it, now that he decided not to move. And he lay there very still, and I knew that he would never move again by himself. And I knew that I had done something bad, because I had read about it in books. And the chipmunk was mad at me, because I had surprised him very badly with the gun. He had thought I was innocently playing with my vagina underneath the costume when instead I was thumbing the red pistolgrips of my Heckler-Koch P30 in the dark, near where I have it velcroed to my leg. Inside the bunny suit. But I surprised him when I brought it out. He saw that we weren’t playing altar-stone anymore and once I shot him especially the chipmonk knew that the producer-boy wasn’t coming back and he didn’t miss him, because he didn’t know him, but it hurt his eyes to see that much blood and it hurt his ears to know that that pop was a bullet to the brain. That would be something for him to think about for a very long time. I would make diagrams of it later, in the hospital, and show them to the nurses, and they wouldn’t understand what the diagrams meant. And the chipmonk screaming, little bitch. Double-spelled, and blinded. He was a simple monk. Didn’t want to have blood on his face. And I stopped holding the p-boy in my arms and let him lie down on the leaves. And I went to the chipmunk with my gun and he thought I was going to do him next, but I wasn’t going to do that. I said, “Chipmunk, what do you say to that?” But he didn’t have anything to say. He had screaming eyes, he had liquid coming out of his mouth, and was very white, clutching his mask, gathering his costume up from beside him and I didn’t think his penis was hard anymore. That’ll teach you to jerk off while someone is getting killed, Chipmonk. You don’t want to get caught with your hand down your suit when I pull out my P30 and clock a producer in the head. And I might do that at any time. There is no warning. PACK! PACK! That’s all the sound you’ll never hear. Bullet through the brain. And chipmonk screaming to the tree. You wish I would shoot you, don’t you. Or maybe you want to do it yourself, because somewhere back there I kicked into action, and my dreams became a p-boy on the ground with blood coming out of his brain. That is all. That is the final moment. I have become what I wanted to see. With fear. With fear coming out of me. I read nothing of this in my books. Had no prior training, no relevant schooling, and I didn’t need you to show me what to do. No one can share this with me except you, chipmonk. In our strange way, you and I are the same, and I can keep you closer to me than anyone in my classes. Even Brauch. She understands my thinking mind. But she doesn’t understand the total mind. There is a thinking mind and there is a mind beyond that, a total mind that touches and breathes and slithers and feels. It is that mind that rubs against clothing in the dark, that knows what something smells like, that makes animal sounds. Shrieks. Knows the feathers of a hawk. Finds oneself behind a bar in downtown retracing the steps where a murder happened—where that guy was beat to death because he was gay, by some idiotic-ass Dayton rednecks, but you find yourself in that alley because you want to be one of the things in the dark, one of the things that stands behind all, below all, like the bottom of the ocean. That’s what I want to become, what I am becoming. There is a simpleness of language that is needed, that I can slip into, that I love. That is where I live. In the animal sense. In the silver slick of oil, that surface of gasoline, that thread hanging from the fabric, that ball of hair that is underneath the passenger seat of my car, the snakes in the woodpile by the river, that is where I am, in the fingernails of a vulture. There might have been someone screaming. No: there was. And I told chippy-chip to leave, and he did, he went to play ColecoVision, and I told him: “Take your helmet with you.” And he did. He gathered it up and scampered off the way he had come. Had come to the woods for a show, had gotten one, left. Had misread the program and there were events there he hadn’t planned on seeing. PACK! PACK! Bang and he’s gone. Chipmonk startled. Like: “What?” Oh my. Little Miss Fun strikes out again, this time in full color. Little Miss Fun goes BLAM BLAM! Little Miss Fun invites you to a show. Oh, oh. And then aftermath. Aftermath. Aftermath of final dusk, of turning into darkness, of mosquitoes coming out and spinning, spinning around the base of my costume where I carried it, collecting on gray fur and the pale hairs of my arm, drawing a little bit of blood and drawing it inward with syphon syringes and tiny mechanical blurs, where the dusk takes shades of orange out of the sky and it’s only blues. I had to dance with a whisker in moonlight, follow fairytales to a pivot, and even then there were no classes, no remembrance that could take me out of having killed a man, punched him in the brain with that tiny hammer. PACK. PACK. That was all there was, and I had to leave him, couldn’t go back, had to tell chippy-chip to run off his own direction and find me maybe on the other side, with sequins on a Hollywood walk, carry-home prizes from the schoolyard, and it was all recess from then on out, no teachers, no one watching, just big, big, black sky. Every star is possible. Every hole is deep, so, so deep. It just kills me to know that we killed someone so invaluable, that someone so small and so simple could die. And could die by me: who is nothing. I was brought here to do nothing, nothing great about me, and this was what she wrote. She wrote me into the waning woods and took me in a moment of brilliance and I had sad, sad strings over and over and into my grave. They said AK, AK, if you want to come here, if you want to come to Antioch, you have to bring your A+ game. If you want to run with the big boys. That’s what they said. So I brought my A+ game.

3

So we met at a restaurant of my choosing after she talked to the police about her p-boy getting killed and I waited patiently through it all. They had a terrible idea of murder like it was all wrong that he had gotten killed and I kept wanting to interrupt to tell them otherwise but I kept my mouth shut due to graduation coming in a day or so. I didn’t want to miss graduation on account of being tied up in the courts and such. So I picked the place and we both got ourselves there by the usual walking and that was the art of it: how do you sit quietly next to someone when you’ve just killed their friend. That was the main catch as I experienced it. And I couldn’t unravel all the angles through which I was thinking about the thing. It was myriad. And myriad colors like the prism which I wished I was dangling around my neck. I found myself backing into corners and backed into hallways of the lack of truth when I was talking to my sister, and my whole mouth was typographical errors. When we were talking to the police it was like a minefield—all these sticky questions! My sister handled it well, though, didn’t say too much and never mentioned where I had been or that I had left with her producer. I think we both knew that would be a bad thing to mention so neither she or I mentioned it during the interview. But later, I think she was mad at me and I didn’t understand her questioning but I knew I would have to provide the truth at some point. She was asking me questions. But I didn’t say a thing. And I cut her lovely skin. Found it beautiful in my eyes and knew I needed to blemish it, knew she needed lines of pain in her wrist but I wasn’t able to get her wrist, exactly, so I brought out my first aid kit with its red and white cross label on the front…white plastic with a red cross and red writing on the back informing me that this supplemental safety device was not a substitute for actual medical care. I brought out the Swiss Army Knife that I kept inside and underneath the table flicked the blade. I brought it out. Flicked it in the sunlight and went for her, on the back of the hand, smarting her. BAM! Got her. Got her right on the hand. Cut that little bitch on the back of her lefty, got her straight across the hand and she was holding it licking the blood wrapping it in her other arm and looking at me like I had some kind of a problem. That’s right, sis. I’ll cut you any time I want, cut you with malice. They say don’t ever throw a punch without a bad intention. I like to cut that way, too: don’t ever throw a cut without the intention to bleed. I intended to bleed. And I bled her, right on the hand. She lost it to my blade and that’s what you get, Ella. That’s what you get for being a girl. Sit at my table one more time, see what happens. I’ll find you in need of aid. And I’ll administer it, administer it like Little Miss Slasher on a Sunday night. Watch it: next time I’ll get your face. “Anna! Why did you do that?” Ella, it’s not a problem. Not a problem. I don’t mind helping you through this painful and difficult time. I can’t remember the last time a coworker of mine was tempted into the woods with the promise of sex and then fucked for the purpose of ruining his virginity with cheap, torrid bunny pussy and then viciously murdered by a chipmunk and his accomplice by being shot in the head point blank by the weilder of a Heckler-Koch P30 semiautomatic pistol cold-kilned in a patented process—better than the space shuttle! I don’t mind helping you through a painful and difficult time like that. When someone gets shot in the head—anyone—it’s a very difficult time for all of the family and friends of the supposed victim. You can slaughter an ape before you package a monkey. Or so the wisdom goes. I was walking back and forth with the P30. I had it in my hand. There was a mark on his head where I planned it going in. And marks on the throat from fingernails of the victim and holes in the forearms where the defensive wounds came in. PACK! PACK! That’s really the sound that it makes. None of these childhood bangs. PACK! PACK! And every pronunciation matters. Every spelling, every format, every file. I had streaks of a name siphoned to my conveyance, professional licenses revoked and repainted in a medley of text. I would really plan on getting over things earlier in the future. When the guts of your friend are strewn around the woods, on an altar-rock, that is not the time to get clingy and emotional. When you have a coffin bathed in the eye of the sun is not a day to spread your feelings thin as paper icing on the cupcake of sorrow. Sitting in the sunlight with my sister Ella I started to regret killing her boy. The sheer pain-in-the-ass-ness of having to console her over the death of this meaningless producer-aspect, I loathed. Don’t you think it’s funny in a book when a character says they ‘loathed’? I do. I think it’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard of. I loathed having to console my sister about this meaningless producer-aspect. His dimension was clouded to me, I could see neither the width nor the length nor the breadth, and it made it hard for me to measure him in careable terms. Even his face and his title I found suspicious of love, as if love itself was suspicious of him, and how could I feel it for him if the emotion itself avoided his object. “To get over this kind of loss you’re going to need to adopt a strict emotional rhythm diet. In this diet, you’ll choose a menu of emotional stimuli that you find appropriate in fitting with your particular loss. Since you’ve lost a coworker, of no emotional significance to you, you don’t have to be as rigorous as someone who’s lost a relative…or a spouse. Still, this kind of violent death can come as a shock to the coworkers and tight friends of the victim. Do you consider yourself a friend?” “We were friends.” “How close were you to the victim? Did you fuck?” “No, we were platonic.” “I wouldn’t worry about him getting shot.” “You wouldn’t?” “No. You can find another producer easy. What exactly did his job entail?” “Anna, I know you’re trying to be helpful, but…” “No, really; what did he do? I could probly do half of what he does in my sleep. What did he do? Make cue cards? Make phone calls? Administer the lunch cart?” “No Anna!” “Did you have a food cart? How’s the documentary going?” “It’s an infomercial!” “Well how’s the infomercial going?” “I don’t know, Anna, my producer just got shot in the head!!” “You wanna get the mussels? I was gonna get the clams. We can share the mussels if you want to get them. They have the best little butter sauce here. Ella. Are you okay?” “My producer just got shot in the head in the middle of the woods in Buttfuck, Ohio, so no, I’m not okay.” “Here’s what happens. They take the guy out into the woods and they shoot him. He’s like flailing his arms up and puts his arms up by his face to block them, so sometimes these victims have bulletholes in their hands and arms when they find them. They’re trying to block their face, and the bullet goes through their hand, and then into their face. It’s very odd to see a bullethole in the hand of one of these victims because you’re like: why did this guy get shot in the hand? But he didn’t. He got shot in the face. He just has a bullethole in his hand because he brought his hand up to his face to try to block the bullet. But then he got shot in the face. Hard. Hard crimes like this. Hate to see them happen. Hate to see them occur. This type of hard crime never needs to happen, especially in a city like this. A village! A tiny village. Everyone—I mean everyone—knows each other here. This had to be an outsider…like one of those traveling serial-killer things. Have you ever watched the Investigation Discovery channel? I’m talking about one of those types of things. Couple: does a bunch of crystal meth and drives across the country kidnapping people to be their slaves—” “Does that really happen?” “Yeah. Oh yeah. Like that’s a thing. It didn’t just happen once, that’s like a thing that keeps happening. It’s like a trend. A couple does a bunch of crystal meth and they develop this desire to travel around kidnapping people to be their sex slaves and they keep doing this until they get caught.” “How do they get caught?” “They stop moving. They’ll be like sleeping over in a campsite and the police bust through on them with automatic rifles and that’s how they stop it. So that’s probably what happened to your boy. You’re gonna need to take some time to get over him, after an event like this, this is not going to go away overnight and I am here for you, oh E., how—I mean how terrible, I am so—wow, I mean…E.” “I know, I know, I don’t even know, oh god. I can’t even believe it was him. Do people just get shot in the head? I mean people don’t just get shot in the head!” “I know.” “I mean—you know? Holy shit, Anna, you go to school here. I mean not anymore—” “Not anymore.” “No. But still. Is there much other crime here? I thought it was quiet…like…a quiet small little…village, isn’t it?” “Oh yes. It is! Oh! I mean—nothing like this. I don’t—I can’t think of anything…oh Ella I’m so sorry. Why don’t you go back and fuck the giant cunt of the world?” “I never—AK, would you please—” “You should fuck it. You should fuck it. You had the luxury of going to the giant cunt of the world. I’ve never gone to the giant cunt of the world. If I went there I would fuck in it. You should set yourself up next to the giant cunt, at least, and fuck that little producer of yours—” “Anna!” “I’m sorry—I forgot. I’m so sorry! He was…what was he like?” “I don’t want to talk about it!” “I’m sorry E. I’m sorry! I’m forgetful.” “Yes you are.” “I apologized, okay!? I meant to help you. This place is beautiful, you can order gluten free everything—” “—I’m not gluten free—” “—and vegan everything, they have this vegan strawberry shortcake that’s divine.” “It says right here vegan cheesecake, but I don’t see any—” “Right, that’s it. I forgot. Vegan cheesecake. Do you want that? I’m so sorry about your producer. Believe me. I am so sorry. He had a very nice tight asshole—” “Anna!” “It was very nice. Like a cold gun.” “Anna, I’m leaving if you don’t shut—the—fuck—up. I can’t deal with this right now.” “E., I’m so sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t mean to…do…anything!”

4

At campsite 82C sat a blue and absurdly long bus whose side was painted in rainbow letters: KREY MOBILITY: ALL THE TIME. Krey Mobility was Ella Krey’s company. They sold mobility devices for the elderly, the morbidly obese, and those otherwise unable to walk: those power scooters you see in the grocery store, or speeding down the sidewalk outpacing standard pedestrians? That’s what they sold. Ella Krey had seen the need for such devices her senior year in high school when a rugby injury had reduced her drug-dealing fellow senior to traveling the halls of Chaminade-Julienne in such a mobility device. Other companies sold mobility devices, but Krey Mobility was different. They carried the loudest, the fastest, the most bulletproof of mobility devices…the SUVs of mobility. Krey Mobility specialized in scooters that could beat everyone else’s scooter: kind of a race to the top when it came to speed and indestructibility for mobility devices. They also specialized in obscenely-large mobility devices: entire beds with motorized platforms, so the bed could be driven around a bedroom with a small handheld remote. The Krey Mobility tagline was supposed to indicate that you could be mobile all the time, whether in the grocery store, rushing to catch a bus, or at home, asleep, in your own bed. They even made mobile dining tables, and they were working on mobile toilets—though the logistics of this presented special difficulties. The Krey Mobility bus was Ella’s personal plaything: a way to spend company profits on her trips to the Grand Canyon and other camping destinations, where she and her small crew worked on a rambling infomercial vaguely suggesting that Krey Mobility devices could get you anywhere, even to the Grand Canyon.

Ella’s crew consisted of Lindsey and Paco, the two interning techs, who took care of filming and sound and editing, and all other matters relating to actually recording the infomercial, and it consisted of Ella herself as the talent, and until recently it had consisted of Adam Walker, the producer, who unfortunately yesterday was shot in the head.

The news had come early Friday morning. Police had knocked on the windows of Ella’s bus back by where the bunkbeds were. Ella had been surprised that Adam hadn’t actually come home from his trip out with Anna, but obviously she’d just assumed that Anna had taken his virginity and he was sleeping peacefully with her in her bed, in the dorms. When the police had asked about the last time they saw Mr. Walker, Ella said he had gone for a walk, not wanting to implicate Anna unnecessarily in anything untoward. Then Ella learned that “anything untoward” meant Adam getting shot in the face. Still, she didn’t say anything, and the techs followed her lead. It was Ella’s sister, after all. They could ask her later.

Lindsey and Paco, though, weren’t stupid. How could Anna not at least have some information leading up to Adam’s having got shot in the face? Surely as they left for a walk together, Anna had parted ways with Adam at some point, and when and where this parting had occurred would bear relevance on the police investigation. That Ella hadn’t said anything to the police about Anna having gone for a walk with Adam, made them immediately suspicious. The Krey family was weird.

After the police left, the three of them dressed without showering, Paco made coffee, and they slumped out of the bus to sit by the ashes of yesterday’s fire.

Paco was sure Lindsey was shooting him looks.

“Aren’t you going to call Anna,” Lindsey asked.

“I don’t see any need to bother her,” Ella said.

“What if something happened to her?” Paco insisted.

“Something like what?”

“Something like she got hurt, too! Don’t you want to call her?”

“My sister doesn’t get up early. Plus, we have a lunch date.”

“So…what: if she makes it to lunch she’s okay, and if she doesn’t…?” Paco alluded.

“I would call her,” Lindsey said. “Make sure.”

“I’ll call her in a minute,” Ella said.

But Lindsey said, “What if her body’s hidden in the woods somewhere? What if no one knows she’s missing?”

So Ella said, “I’ll call her.”

At that point she got up and wandered away from the ashen campfire and Lindsey and Paco sipped their coffee.

Paco whispered, “She seems shifty to me.”

Lindsay agreed, “There’s something not-right about her.”

“What do you think it is? Do you think she has brain damage?”

“I think she might have asocial personality disorder or something.”

“What if she’s a psychopath?”

They both laughed.

“But what if she is,” Lindsey suggested, and it was like they were two young children telling stories under a blanket with a flashlight. The idea that Anna might be a psychopath (whatever that meant) was irresistible to them.

“I think she is.”

“I think she isn’t.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

“Shut up. You don’t even know what a psychopath is.”

“What’s the difference between ‘psychopath’ and ‘sociopath’?” Paco posited.
Lindsey didn’t know. She shrugged.

They could overhear part of Ella’s conversation. “So we’re on for…eleven…right…do you think you could make it ten-thirty…oh, no…of course…so…did you have a good night last night? Yeah? Oh, really. Wow. No I didn’t. He was? Did you make sure he wasn’t by the end of the night? Oh, Anna, you’re bad. Well, I have some bad news to tell you, I just heard it this morning. No, it’s nothing like that. I’m sure he doesn’t. No, I don’t have any way of knowing, I’m just saying—I think he didn’t. But— Well, no I guess I really have no idea. Adam got killed last night.” Then a long pause. Lindsey and Paco were leaning forward in their folding chairs. Ella saw them. She walked further away from the campfire. It was harder to hear. “He got shot in the face. No! What time did he leave you? Yes, I am serious. The police just came here. Oh, yes, yes it is. Yes, he was. Did he say where he was going? No, okay, well I’ll see you at eleven. What’s the name of the place again? You said it’s on the corner? Okay. Okay. Yes I’m sorry too. Okay, thanks. Bye.”

Ella came stomping back to the tarp they had strung up over the campfire, one side attached to the top of the bus and the other side tied to some trees. Lindsey and Paco were pretending to talk about editing work that needed to be done on the infomercial.

“Well,” Ella said, “she didn’t see him. I mean she saw him earlier but she doesn’t know where he went. Do you think it’s safe to camp here?”

Lindsey and Paco looked shocked, and said nothing.

“Well I don’t think it is,” Ella said. “Don’t you think it’s not-safe to camp here anymore? Anna says they spent some time together and then he left, and no one knows where he went after that…so…grief…I don’t believe this happened.”

“We don’t believe it either,” Lindsey said, but Ella didn’t quite get what she meant.

Paco said, “Don’t you think the police might want to talk to Anna?”
“Oh,” Ella said spacily, “I will…I guess I’ll mention it to her at lunch. I don’t want this to impede our progress with production,” she said.

Lindsey and Paco were silent.

“Adam got shot in the head,” Lindsey said.

Ella looked at her like: You’re stating the obvious.

“I just want to make sure,” Lindsey said, “that we’re all on the same page here. Adam just got shot in the head.”

“I know,” Ella said, “it’s hard to believe.”

“Well,” Lindsey said, “I think we should move our campsite.”

As Ella was getting her purse ready to go, Lindsey and Paco could barely contain themselves. Ella found her Baby Lips lipstick and put some on in the reflection of one of the bus windows. She stashed the lipstick inside her purse and sniffed her armpit. Then she was off. She shook her head at the ground and said, “It’s terrible.”

Then she walked off and Lindsey and Paco waited till she was up the road before rushing inside the bus to the editing bay.

“Isn’t she acting strange to you?”

“Yes.” (Emphatically.)

“Do you think she had something to do with it?”

“Wait. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying, she has no emotion about it.”

“Well, what’s your emotion about it?”

“Mine? I don’t believe it happened.”

“Maybe that’s how she’s feeling too.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird she didn’t ask her sister—or—mention her sister to the cops?”

“She’s probably scared. Wouldn’t you be?”

“I’d be scared my sister had something to do with it!”

“What if they both did, you’re right, oh—!”

Then Paco put his hand on Lindsey’s, and for a second she let him keep it there. Then she pulled it back. Lindsey was wearing overalls, but the bottom part were shorts, and Paco was looking up Lindsey’s leg hole when he got a chance, whenever she wasn’t looking him in the eye. Lindsey felt the warmth of Paco’s hand and wanted to grab back, but she didn’t dare. Paco was just…more stylish than Lindsey, more knowledgeable about things film, and she couldn’t imagine him liking her. He must have put his hand there out of disbelief about the murder—there’s no way he could feel the same about her that she felt about him. So Lindsey retracted her hand, and Paco took this to mean that she didn’t like him back, and why should she—she was way more attractive than he was, on a whole different level. There was no chance that someone as cute as Lindsey could afford to be with him. Plus there was the whole white-Hispanic thing; it wasn’t cool for white girls to be with Hispanic dudes. Paco knew that. She was probably holding out for some white dude she had gone to school with, or knew from her neighborhood, or maybe met in church. He definitely thought Lindsey went to church. She had that kind of goodness to her…like she was into film but on the weekends, when not traveling with him and Ella (and formerly Adam), she would surely be tutoring children in math or doing something equally wholesome. Still, Paco couldn’t help imagining putting his hand up the leg of Lindsey’s overall shorts, touching her there, seeing her blush, and rubbing his fingers inside the leg of her underwear, whatever kind she was wearing. He couldn’t imagine actual sex with her—Lindsey seemed like a person who never actually had sex, to him. She seemed like she had made out—he could imagine that. But Lindsey actually fucking—it was a stretch. To Lindsey, Paco seemed too innocent to think of touching her that way. To her, he seemed like all he thought about was film. What filters to use, how to adjust the C-stand, the angle of the gobo arm, and intricacies of Avid Pro Studio—that was where Paco’s mind was, to Lindsey. He never let on that he thought about anything else. And Lindsey was a composition expert, to Paco—her shots were the best. She could make a dolly out of anything, rig the camera on a system of pulleys that acted like they had a technocrane, when they didn’t have one at all. Her knowledge of sound was complete: Paco didn’t feel he held a candle to Lindsey in much of anything in their business. And the white girl thing; there’s just no way someone like her would be with someone like him.

So this time when Paco moved his hand, he moved it carefully and intently, but not onto Lindsey’s. He went for their camera, a Sony HXR-NX5U, and placed his hand over it gently.

And he said: “Let’s go on an adventure.”

---

They passed the restaurant where Ella and Anna were eating lunch, making sure they knew where the pair of sisters were. Neither Ella or Anna noticed them, and the two sisters were sitting outside. Lindsey and Paco continued walking, camera in hand, and headed for the dorms.

“We’re doing an interview,” they said.

“For what?”

“It’s a surprise video for Anna Krey, for her graduation, so we’re interviewing her classmates to see what she’s like and we’re going to edit it together to show her after graduation tomorrow. Do you want to be a part of it?”
It took three classmates before they found someone who said yes. Lindsey and Paco set up a makeshift interview location in the student’s dorm room. Lindsey angled the curtains to be a sort of rough-style bounce card. Paco held the camera and they both asked questions.

“So what’s your relationship to the accused?”

“Anna? My relationship?”

“Yes, to the accused, Anna Krey.”

“We had political theory together, and intro to European philosophers.”

“And how did she do?”

“In her classes? She’s an A+ student. She brings her A+ game.”

“What do you mean, ‘She brings her A+ game’?”

“She’s dynamic. She rocks the house in a debate, man.”

“Do you find anything strange about her?”

“What don’t I find strange about her?”

“What do you find strange about her?”

“Like I said: what don’t I find strange about her.”

“But what do you find strange about her?”

“Well, for one, she dresses like a large furry rabbit at the dinner table.”

“You dine here in a cafeteria?”

“Yes, but it’s small, it’s informal you know, it’s like smaller than a high school cafeteria, everyone knows everyone.”

“And she dresses as a large bunny.”

“Right.”

“What about that do you find odd?”

“Well, I didn’t say I found it ‘odd’. But yeah—I mean…”

“Did you hear about the murder that took place last night?”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes, our coworker, our producer, got shot in the head.”

“I’m sorry, man, that sucks.”

“Yeah, well, it really sucks for us because we’re trying to make an infomercial.”

“And you can’t work without your producer, right…”

“He got shot in the face. Does that alarm you?”

“Who shot him?”

“Well, Brigham, that’s the question, isn’t it.”

“Do you have any idea?”

“Should we?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“We have some idea.”

“Well who do you think did it? He got shot in the face? Man, that’s messed up.”

“Yes it is messed up, Brigham, it is messed up. Do you think you might know anyone around here who would have done that sort of thing?”

“Like who?”

“Like yourself. Did you shoot anyone last night?”

“No, I can’t say I did.”

“Do you know who else we might interview?”

“Uh…”

“Do you think Anna killed our producer?” That was Paco. Lindsey looked at him like he was crazy.

“Do I think Anna—you mean AK—do I think AK…killed your producer.”

“Right,” Lindsey backed Paco up.

“Um…why. Do you think she did?”

“Do you know if Anna owns any firearms.”

“I don’t see why she would. She’s just a polisci student. Are you joking me man? Did your producer really get killed?” The student was grinning stupidly.

“Yes, Brigham,” Paco said, “he really did.”

---

When Ella and Lindsey and Paco met to identify the body the police wouldn’t let them film.

“How was your lunch with Anna?”

“Fine. How was your morning?”

“We filmed interviews around campus.”

“About what?”

“About Adam’s death.”

“Jesus, you two.”

“What?”

“Jesus.”

Then the police led just Ella back to look at the body. They said it wasn’t necessary to have more than one person identify the body. And they looked suspiciously at the Sony HXR-NX5U that Paco was carrying.
“What kind of camera is that?”

“It’s a Sony HXR-NX5U NXCAM.”

“What’s it for?”

“Doing interviews.”

“You can’t have that on in here.”

“We won’t.”

“Are you guys like film students or something?”

“We make infomercials.”

“Oh. Well. Leave it off while you’re in here or we’ll have to confiscate your footage.”

“It’s off.”

“Have you recorded at all while you were in here?”

“No.”

After a short while, Ella came out.

“Was it him?”

Ella nodded, then wiped her face. She said she needed a moment alone so Lindsey and Paco left her to wander the shops of Yellow Springs. Lindsey and Paco went in search of AK.

---

Lindsey knew deep down that something was wrong with this picture. She could hardly believe what had happened. And she knew nothing of Anna’s rabbit suit. She wandered the shops of Yellow Springs, ending up spending most of her time in a shop that sold bouncy balls and magic tricks and gimmicky nick-nacks made of molded plastic. She found herself crying behind a pair of supersized clown glasses, and bought a wire puzzle she had no intention of solving. She clipped the puzzle to her keychain and slinkily walked out of the trinket shop. Her dress was practically falling off her body. Anna wasn’t telling her something. Her behavior at lunch had certainly been odd. Was there something about Yellow Springs that she needed to know, some desperate piece of information that Anna was withholding? Was this like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the whole town was in on it, and night after night they shoot passers-by in the head with Heckler-Koch P30s? Ella wanted to finish her infomercial. And she even thought of heading to Dayton to see their parents, but she hated the smell inside the house. She could go on the excuse of having to check up on their mobility devices, but even Ella found the house depressing. She would need Anna to go with her, to really make the trip worthwhile. Anna’s words kept resonating with Ella, especially the part where Anna spoke of fucking in the ‘giant cunt of the world’. It was spooky, the way she said it like that, and Ella couldn’t help but think that somewhere in that phrasing was a clue to Adam’s death. Ella would get to the bottom of this. She stopped at an art gallery and used the window to apply more of her Baby Lips lipstick. Then she was in a Tibetan import shop and she bought a pair of sandals which she put on sexily outside the shop, sitting on a stone ledge in her red dress and letting the hoop of the dress slip upwards as she lifted her foot to the sandal. She left her other shoes on top of a trash can and went into the essential oils shop that was right next to the Tibetan import shop. She was messing around with some Organic Melissa when this chubby little boy came up to her and reached for some Organic Lemongrass. He smelled of woodchips and feces, and she thought of him as a burrowing animal with a stinky anus before she realized she was slipping back into the mode of the childhood games she and Anna had played when they were young, when everything was feces and anuses and princesses and fairies and knights and killing and Ella was done with that kind of play, even though Anna might not be. So instead of thinking of the kid as some sort of anus-only animal of disgustingness, Ella said, “Excuse me,” very lightly, to say something nice to the boy.

“No,” he said, “Excuse me. I know I smell of fetuses and compost, and that’s why I’m here buying this Organic Lemongrass.”

“But you don’t,” Ella interrupted, “You smell like feces and woodchips.”

Then she realized that was a rude thing to say.

“Do you like to listen to Mozart?” she corrected.

The boy’s eyes brightened. “Oh yes I do!”

“Would you like to listen to some Mozart with me?”

(She would just have to put up with the smell of feces.)

“First I have to buy my lemongrass,” he said.

“Of course.”

And they both bought their oils.

Outside, they traded drops and Ella invited him to come back to the bus with her to listen to Mozart. The child insisted that he would continue smelling like feces no matter what kind of music they listened to, and Ella said she thought that was okay. Any company was desirable after the day they’d had, especially that lunch with Anna. So the two of them walked back to the campsite.

“Do you live in Yellow Springs?”

“Yes, do you?”

“No, we’re only passing through.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Me and my film crew—one short.”

“How short is he?”

“Well, he’s lying on his back so he’s very short now.”

“And what is your film about?”

“It’s about mobility devices—do you know what those are?”

So she explained all about Krey Mobility and how her sister, Anna, was a loser (which is why she went to college), while she (Ella) was a winner, one who won contracts and won sexual advances, and one who won affirmation in the form of dollar amounts and how she was traveling hippie-style with the rainbow bus (which you will see) because she liked the incognito nature of the hippie element and it certainly fit in at campsites, which is where Ella liked to sleep because she shared some (if not all) of Anna’s eccentricity and did he know Anna (AK)?

“I’ve never heard of her.”

“Well she’s a student here.”

“What does she study?”

“I can’t remember. It’s something to do with pterodactyls or something.”

“I’m too young to go to school but when I do, it’ll likely be to a state school,” the young boy said, and Ella didn’t honestly know the difference between a state school and one that was not a state school, she just thought there were schools, and there were states, and she didn’t understand the relationship between them.

“So you’ve never heard of my sister?”

“Is she famous?”

“She might be about to be.”

“Why?”

“Nevermind. What’s your name, I never asked.”

“It’s Colin.”

“Well, Colin, here we are.”

They were at the bus. Ella let Colin go in first, and the annoying techs weren’t there so they could play Mozart as loud as they wanted and Ella left the bus pumping exhaust into nature as the diesel chugged away and kept the air conditioning blasting on them even though the windows were all open. That kept the mosquitoes from being too bad. And they listened to Mozart: Symphony #40 in G Minor, K 550 and it was about half an hour long and they listened to it about three times before either of them said anything. Ella was fighting images of Adam lying on the metal table in the police station, wondering when they would move his body to a refrigerator, and she was stamping the images out of her head because that was the kind of thing Anna would think about, even glorify, and Ella didn’t want to be like that. It was about one and a half listens through the symphony that Ella regained her Ellaness and completely stamped out images of the dead producer from her mind and was back to putting on Baby Lips lipstick and loosening one of her shoulder straps to impress the fecal boy she was listening to Mozart with. She wondered how old he was, and then she realized she was thinking like Anna again, and she wished the two of them were never related, that Anna was just someone she never met and that she had been an only child, born to capable parents who were not yet hooked up to breathing machines and with a nurse that came once every three days to change the catheters. Mobile parents. Mobile Ella. Mobile Anna, if it were possible. But Anna would never be mobile. She was stuck in academia, in ideas of greatness, of literature and of art and of theory. Mobility had to do with market potential. With opportunity cost and manufacturing solutions to problems. Mobility had to do with right now, with everything capable and at the utmost, everything functional and real. And why had she brought this fecal boy back to her bus? To be like Anna, because deep down she really wanted something from him? That wasn’t it. Was she testing herself to see if she could ever fuck someone of his stature. Was she just bored. But there! There again she had to stamp it out! Because boredom was Anna’s M.O., Ella was pretty sure: she was just so bored that she fucked all these boring men living her boring life intertwined with their boring lives and never going anywhere or doing anything or becoming anything. Ella wasn’t about that at all. So they listened to Mozart #40 and smacked Baby Lips and fecal boy sat impressed by the quality of the sound system in this hippie bus painted with Krey Mobility on the side.

“Do you think you could kill someone?” Ella finally asked.

“Like someone I knew.”

“It doesn’t matter. Someone. Anyone at all. Yes, someone you knew.”

“No,” said the boy.

“Well,” Ella said, “what if it was someone you didn’t know?”

“Why are you asking me this?” said the boy.

“Because I want to know. Because. I am thinking of the murder that happened here last night—surely you heard of it.”

“I have.”

“And I want to know: do you think it’s possible for a normal person to just snap and do something like that or does it have to be a…I mean a crazy person…from the start? Can you grow into being a killer, from being halfway normal? Or is it something you are born as, and no matter what you do you can’t escape? I don’t like to think it’s…either way, really. But I don’t like to think that I could do something like that. But I don’t like to think of people having no choice, either. Like they’re destined to be completely fucked up and psychotic, and nothing anyone can do will change it. Like not their parents or anything. That’s a fucked up thought, don’t you think so, Colin? I mean that from birth you’re destined to be a psychopathic killer and nothing your teacher does in kindergarten can possibly stop it, nothing like having a boy kiss you or being in love can do anything about…you’re just fucked up from the beginning. Do you have any thoughts on this matter?”

“I think it’s fucked up when people kill people,” fecal boy said.

“Why do you smell like feces?” Ella asked.

“I am born in fetuses,” Colin began, “and I come from fetuses, and I smell like fetuses from the swamp of cold reunions and datives and logistical nightmares. Have you ever worked in logistics?” he asked. “Do you have much logistics when it comes to your business, or don’t you handle that sort of thing?”

“We have logistics.”

“Well what I’m talking about is logistical nightmares,” Colin said, “like a fetus in a bath of feces and blood, that sort of thing. I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. But a fetus in a bath of snot and blood, with fecal matter floating on top, mixed with the occasional candy cane. Do you know what I mean?”

He cocked his head inquisitively.

“I know what you mean about logistical nightmares,” Ella said.

“No, I’m talking,” Colin said, “about literal baths of blood with fecal matter floating on the surface of a god, of a man, of a stone.”

“Tell me more.”

“I’m speaking of a blood stone, of research done in candles, of libraries of gore and zombie apocalypses that come true in your very nighttime, of aching and baby-love, of palm fronds and yearning for yesteryear, do you know what I mean now?”

“Getting warmer,” Ella said.

“Good. I thought so.”

And this time when the fecal boy cocked his head Ella couldn’t help but think of his cuteness, which was palpable, and of his stench she thought less and less, in that way that you get used to a smell after you’ve been around it for a while, it just becomes your air and you don’t realize you’re smelling fecal matter anymore. And she thought he had potential, not only as a salesman but as a potential Krey Mobility salesman. And she didn’t realize that this kind of potential-think was exactly the way Anna thought of prospective sex-mates, that it was this very same kind of business-likeness that Anna used when deciding who to fuck or who to kill, even though Ella didn’t know yet that Anna had killed anyone. And Ella imagined the boy spreading feces on the side of the rainbow bus and perhaps they could get a shot of that for their infomercial in reds and blues in mystery hues decided in post, of wipe transitions and fades and color corrections of poop. Color corrected poop was the way to go, Ella thought, and then she almost slapped her own face with her hand, to stamp it out again, and she knew that it was genetic, partially, and that she was fucked from the very beginning.

---

Lindsey and Paco were interviewing the guy who works at the vegan grocery when Anna walked in on them. They were just asking him what he thought it took to make a killer and he was raising his arms and making the motion of teeth crashing down with his mouth and he had claws and raring eyes and was about to kill the vegan pastry he was making with his raring eyes and Paco was telling Linsdey to lean down and get an underneath-shot and Paco was looking into the side of Linsdey’s overalls and hoping that she wouldn’t notice him looking at her bra through her tiny white shirt that said “RAWR!” and something about When Dragons Make Love. Or dinosaurs. It was dinosaurs. RAWR meant “I wanna fuck you like an animal” in dinosawr. Paco was pretty sure that was it.

Then right at this moment Anna walks in, and sees Paco looking inside Lindsey’s overalls and Lindsey swings the camera around and it’s pointing at Anna and the vegan chef dude is making animal noises in his best impression of a killer and Anna is like what the fuck.

“What the fuck.”

“Oh!”

“We were just looking for you.”

“Oh really, why.”

“Because we want to interview you.”

“What about?”

“About yesterday’s killing.”

“I don’t have anything to say about it.”

“Can we interview you anyway?”

“Are you stupid?”

“Yes, we are stupid. Can we? Can we?”

“Go ahead. I’m doing my shopping.”

“So. Our first question is: are you the murderer?”

“No. What murderer?”

“Of the producer-boy in the woods.”

“Of course not. Next question.”

“Do you think about killing much?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Do you own a weapon?”

“I own some mace.”

“Have you ever used it?”

“Why, because if I have I might have killed your p-boy?”

“Why do you call him p-boy?”

“Because he’s your producer?”

“But why so familiar?”

“What are you saying?”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything can you get that camera out of my face?”

“Why, are you done with the interview?”

“No I just need to see into…this cabinet thank you.”

“You’re welcome. You’re very very very welcome. Thank you.”

“What is wrong with her?”

“What is wrong with you?”

“Why are you saying there’s something wrong with me?”

“Because you’re acting like a killer.”

“Am I?”

“Sure.”

“And what does a killer act like?”

“Well, they buy groceries at vegan shops, for one.”

“Do they?”

“Absolutely.”

“What else do they do?”

“They drive Lexuses.”

“Well I don’t drive a Lexus, I drive a rabbit, so there.”

“You drive a rabbit?”

“A VW Rabbit, yes. Have you ever heard of them?”

“In my glory days.”

“When were those?”

“Recently.”

“In the recent future to be exact.”

“Are you two on a scavenger hunt?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re around collecting interviews.”

“How do you know we’re collecting interviews.”

“My hallmates mobbed me when I got back to the dorm.”

“How did they mob you?”

“They asked me if I own a gun.”

“Do you?”

“Why would I need a gun?”

“For shooting people.”

“In the head? No.”

Lindsey and Paco waited.

“No I don’t own one. Can I get back to my grocery shopping actually, I’m kindof sick of being interviewed by you are you going to use this in your infomercial?”

“How could we possibly use this in our infomercial?”

“I don’t know what you’d do I’m just saying.”

“This wouldn’t even fit the theme of our infomercial.”

“Well whatever I don’t know what you’re capable of…filmicly.”

“We’re capable of filming a murder if you take our drift.”

“Um. Why don’t we discuss this later.” Anna meant the operator of the vegan grocery, who they had been interviewing earlier. She didn’t think it was appropriate for them to be discussing murders or the filming thereof in the presence of vegan grocery store operators. It was this tiny little store, smaller than most people’s kitchens, and it had pastries and a few refrigerators of vegan items, vegan cheeses, etc. Anna did most of her shopping there, which was an impossibility, but she did and she had lived in Yellow Springs four out of the five years she went to school here. You could get by on the vegan grocery and popcorn from the Little Art Theatre if you wanted to. Anna also frequented the cafeteria more in her earlier years of school at Antioch, but it had gotten old and she had taken often to making oddities in her dorm room and keeping vegan cheese wrapped in damp towels and stored in a cool, dry place. Water from the bathroom frequently replenished the water in the towels, keeping the cheese fresh. Vegan cheese doesn’t go bad like normal cheese does. It’s like the McDonald’s-food equivalent of cheese: when you leave it out, it doesn’t rot, it just gets harder and harder until it petrifies. By saying “Um. Why don’t we discuss this later.” Anna was implying that it wasn’t wise to discuss filming a murder in front of the vegan grocery store operator, and that they should discuss it later, when he was not present. That is what she meant by that. By saying that, she was not acquitting herself of being interested in filming a murder in general, nor was she acquitting herself of being interested in or willing to perform a murder, in general, which was in fact the thing she was thinking, right then. With a film crew present, how could you not? How could you think of anything else, actually: except let’s get these two film school faggots together and get their Sony HXR-NX5U firing away at the same time as the Heckler-Koch P30 was firing away ideally at someone’s very lucky and very pretty little head.

---

“But first we want to interview you.”

“About what?”

“About what it’s like to kill someone.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about it,” Anna said.

“But have you ever done it?”

“Of course,” Anna said.

Lindsey and Paco’s eyes lit up. They looked at each other and Paco’s hand went for Lindsey’s, and this time, for a quick second, she didn’t let go: she squeezed his hand then prompted him back to filming: she needed someone to ask the questions while she held the camera.

“So you have killed someone.”

“I’ve seen someone getting killed, yes.”

“And you liked it.”

“I won’t say whether or not I liked it,” Anna said. “Until I tell you what it was that happened. We didn’t mean to kill anyone at all. There was a chipmunk and a rabbit, both in costume,” she began, and she proceeded to tell them the story of exactly what had happened, what we covered in chapter 2. When she got to the part about the actual killing she made sure to leave in all the important details, like the color of the handgrips on the P30 and the shade of the sky when the monkey-boy was squirming backwards on his hands alone wanting not to die right then. And she hoped the details would not be too unnerving to this red and this blue, these little film techs with their Sony HXR-NX5U clicking away at her in tiny retrograde. But they didn’t seem to be bothered. They seemed to geniunely be interested and choking for more details so she went back and filled in some parts about how she and the chipmunk had met, and how he lived to play ColecoVision, and she even recounted the plot of some of the old ColecoVision games, pixel by pixel she described them, every detail of every spaceship, down to the controls you used to move them, down to the gold plating on the microchip inside the game cartridge and how some cartridges had special hardware like gyroscopes and save-game modules and whatnot. It was important to understand these details to understand the chipmunk, and Anna wanted to make sure these details were relayed. That was the hard part: getting all the object-focus to be specific enough. That was what plagued Anna’s sleep: getting the motherfucking object-focus correct. She struggled with it in her classrooms, she struggled with it in this interview, she had struggled with it in her conversation with Ella at the restaurant on the corner of streets in the Village of Yellow Springs. Do you know what the difference is between a village and a borough? Or a town and a country? It’s all a matter of object-focus. Or the difference between a Sony HXR-NX5U and a Heckler Koch P30…it’s all a matter of object-focus! What about the difference between fecal matter and a fetus? For that matter what’s the difference between a bunny and a chipmunk? Or between a chiponk and a chipmunk? What about between a chipstunk and a chipstank? It’s all a matter of object-focus. This book is a study in object-focus. To be focused on the objects, and what kind of mind would want to be focused on such things? The psychopathic mind, to be sure. That very kind of mind that Anna possessed so mildly, but possessed, certainly, was the kind of mind that had object-focus squarely in the crosshairs (of a P30). And she needed object-focus just as certainly as you do, Dear Reader, who must possess this book in a cartridge form, even if that cartridge is simply a virtual representation of a cartridge, like the ColecoVision cartridges, with their special hardware elements and LEDs and spaceships described down to the level of the very pixel. That is the level of object-focus that took place inside Anna’s mind. She was concerned with the front level of what happened, not what it meant to the people involved, as emotive and compassionate people do, but with the actual events, as scientific and psychopathic people do. That was Anna’s way. And her sister had a similar way, unfortunately, in her usage and thought about Baby Lips lip smacker, or about the fecal boy’s fetus. She was concerned with presenting herself as a hippie traveler and simultaneously selling her own sex with spaghetti strap dresses and hiking her skirt up outside Tibetan import shops. She was concerned with the delivery of mobility products to the infirm…not with the care and recovery of the infirm, but with the delivery of mobility products to them. The delivery of mobility products. Logistical nightmares. Infomercials. That is the surface of her mind. So while she does not possess quite the level of psychopathology of her older sister Anna, Ella possesses the same basic mental makeup in terms of object-focus. This is the study of this book and this paragraph aims to make this clear. We are engaged in a certain type of object-focus in discussing this paragraph from within this paragraph, from discussing this book from within this book. This book strives to ensure the delivery of this paragraph to its reader and strives to stress the importance of this paragraph from within this sentence. We are focused on your learning the value of this sentence right here. This is the purpose of this sentence, and of the one before it. The next sentence will be concerned with the review of this sentence. Please go back and read the previous sentence. That is how Anna’s brain works. From the inside out, she is concerned with surface, with paint, with what actually happened, and she goes no deeper. Except she shows us that this kind of pathology is not always a package deal: it wavers, and there are glimpses of a different kind of thinking. This will be shown in the next chapter, though it was alluded to in chapters 1 and 2. Chapter 3 was a throwaway. It exists to suggest that Anna needed to, and did, console her sister Ella over the murder of Ella’s producer and friend, even though Anna was the one responsible for that murder. Hence the concern with sunlight, which is supposed to indicate both that light was shown on Anna’s crime, and to underscore the obviousness of her crime, but to hearken to the lightness and brightness and weightlessness and clarity of sunlight, in relation to the getting away with (even the temporary getting away with) a crime…Anna is unaffected, unburdened, by any actual recourse for her crime. This is shown by the author by a lunch in bright sunlight, at an outdoor location. The very idea of lunch in our culture contains a connotation of levity, of lightness, of insubstantiality. The description of that chapter from within this chapter strengthens the function of that chapter, while undermining its form, as this sentence claims. Anna wants to fuck the shit out of the chipmunk. Ella wants to fuck the shit out of the fecal boy, so to speak. If the fecal boy and the chipmunk could get together and bathe in shit it would be all the more attractive to the women, and the film techs could stand by and film it all. The police could then arrest everyone on the scene for being accomplices to the crime since they all participate in this book, and this book participates in the crime, and we all bathe in feces forever. This is what I’m saying. This is my point. We all bathe in feces forever. And when we’re done bathing, we dry off with feces and brush our teeth with feces and tuck ourselves in to sleep under blankets of fetuses and dream of fetuses and wake up as a fetus in someone else’s nightmare, loading words upon words upon words upon phrases upon chapters upon years. AK beating this into all our heads and ponying us up to the duty of relating nightmares to shores of readers all of whom eat the feces out of one another’s butts for the sheer delight of doing so. And when a camel makes a poop, does a one-hump camel make a one-hump poop—does a two-hump camel make a two-hump poop? That is the question. And this analysis does not end there. What is the nature of reading someone else’s nightmares? Do they seem nightmarish, as they do to the person whose dreams they are? Or do they seem farcical, and nonsense, with “the school that wasn’t really my school” and “my sister except she wasn’t really my sister” and “we tasted the color of the rain” like they do in dreams? And there—there—not a moment before—does this didactic, sloppy, irresponsible, corny analysis of this very analysis end, but not before the end of this unnecessary, also irresponsible, utterly boring and long-winded excuse for a sentence plays itself out at the end of this sequence of fourth-wall-breaking and utter fecal decay, wrapped in a cradle of fetuses with whom we all now incredibly dirty bathe.

---

So properly Ella now smelled of fetuses, and pooped them out of her mouth when she spoke of Mozart, with Clifton (as she was calling him) sat next to her and they made it through their third round of K 550.

“Do you like me?”

“I sort of do.”

“Well let’s not say anything more about it, and don’t blame me if I do anything, okay, fecal-boy, I am not in control of my actions and I am related to a total psychopath, whatever her name is, but she has me by the throat-strings and I may not be able to help myself. All was derailed by the murder of our p-boy which you heard about this morning in the usual gossip of a small town—even a village. And I missed you in the wash, and you got all covered with feces again, for a second time let me see that lemongrass and you can borrow some of my Organic Melissa which combats feces and we can both sit here and wonder if it means anything. Why did you follow me home, feces-boy, did you think I wanted you? Did you want to use my Organic Melissa and you’ve only now gotten to hold it? Did you know that I had your favorite symphony on repeat? Did you know I was reaching out to years of murder victims with this silly piece of music? And bringing us all together with some insolence? And that no one will care that you’re covered with feces in about a week, due to the Coriolis effect having taken effect? And that this symphony will reign candles of fire on a schoolbus??! Fecal-boy, speak to me, and speak to me in opera, speak to me in rhyme, speak to me in art film language and Canned glory, speak to me now.”

“I have come here from a planet on a nearby star which named me Gobi Boy for shortness and sent me to Yellow Springs to spread darkness on all the land. We’re starting with your schoolbus. If you want to know what I mean then read the next chapter. We’re freaking you into a ’gasm of self-reference, for no discernable purpose, re-inventing invention and founding a foundational on a teaspoon. I came to your bus because I wanted to listen to Mozart, and because I wanted you to smell my feces in rounds and fugues and dioramas of nastiness. If you have a problem with that then take your own hand and smell yourself from the bottom to the middle with a perky nose. Then wipe the floor with your dress and be scrubbing, scrubbing the floor of your bus with that spaghetti-strap dress which makes men want to fuck you which is exactly what you want them to do to want that. Then steal a camera and go in search of AK, that is what your techs have surely done. Go find her in a vegan grocery, and let her surprise them when they were looking for her. Let her ask them what they were doing following her and let them all do an interview. And let me stop here because my friend is calling. Hello! I’m dandy. Can’t talk now I’m busy. What for? For on the trail of some new pussy.”

I look at my friend and blush.

“She is dandy with my fecal-matter, we’re on movement four of Mozart in G Minor and I have to go! Don’t berate me, bunny, don’t call me a fool! I have needs, too, and my needs get satisfied in ways that I want them to and I don’t like it when you berate me, dumb rabbit. You! I called you dumb because you are dumb, dumb like a rabbit and believe me when I say I am getting some pussy, I know you don’t think I’m smart enough to get it but I can, I can, rabbit, I can get it without your permission.”

5

We were getting the altar stone ready—me and the techs. And it was a chore in the afternoon, we had to set up the best camera angles and find the best way to shoot someone on camera while you were also shooting them in the head. That was my challenge. So I had red and I had blue. And I said to them: “Red thing and blue thing, thing one and thing two, swathe me in the camera-light and resume your footage, for here tonight you will see a show unlike any infomercial you can imagine. For our show will be simple. And our show will be unforgiving. We will kill for the sake of killing and I will eat feces if you will allow me.” So they set it up, all with their Sony HXR-NX5U supercam, in digi-light ultrapractice from a duck-beak and mini-focus in the leaf. You let me come here with no clothing. You allowed a bunny-construct to lead you into the woods, into a spot you’ve never come before, and we all gathered my supplies from a dorm room of ancientness and my supplies were a bunny suit and a P30 which I picked up in the bathroom from its hiding place and velcroed inside my suit right it its place by my leg. That way we can shoot people on sight when it is necessary and all I have to do is pull it out rapidly and go PACK! PACK! with it and then that’s the end of the story. So stand on the piano rock, you, and get this angle with the altar stone. That’s what I mean…that’s what I’m saying! See how beautifully the light shone on the altar rock there—you! See! This is the angle you want. It is suggested. And super-ly you will film the destruction of my partner’s feather-pea, whom he will be bringing shortly. He has trouble getting pussy on his own, but he claims that this time he has brought forth the feather-pea on her own, and that the feather-pea has given it up in all willingness to thee. So that is all: we will see it when it comes, and chippy-chip will either be humiliated or glorified, for those are the two extremes with which we concern ourselves. You the film children lie between these two extremes, closer to humiliation, to be sure, but neither on humiliation or glorification. I lie at both extremes. I am humiliated and glorified, all at once. That is how I live. I have been dragged through the mud and also lie on the pedestal, that is what it is to be me. Do you have the shot? There it is. Let me see. You be the stand-in. See that would be me with the bunny-frame. Okay. We will film it now. Let’s do a dress rehearsal. I will be standing here with the gun—my real, real gun—and you will be there on the piano rock and we will kill the chipmunk’s tether-pea for sure, she will be the victim this time. So: no one you know, fortunately, for you have had enough grief recently for all of us combined. So: no producer-boy, as we have killed on the night before, but this time a feather-pea brought forth by the shit-smelling chipmunk on his first time. We’re pretty sure he’s never had a woman. Pretty sure he’s never had a man, too, but that’s all wrapped up in the ColecoVision, don’t you find? An attack and a bloodwing, inventive of the night’s flesh fucking. This is my name: fleshfucker. That is how I get off. You only study film, so you wouldn’t know about fleshfucker. Fleshfucker is where we say: bam! Here’s some flesh to fuck, now fuck it! We have slamming and breaking and hating and even not-hating and not-caring and just not-seeing what we’re up to. We prefer it that way, bunny-ones. We prefer not to see, not to know. We have never needed to see too much. Just needed to take life and give stillness, both perfect in their paper-thin. You have to see life as paper-thin, film ones. You have to see it as takeable at any moment. It is as takeable as a candle in a flame. Poof. You blow it out. It’s gone. That is the nature of the beast. And so when I ask you to see that death is near, I ask you to see only that the candle is paper thin, that the flame is only a poof away from being gone. On this side, we have discussion and fucking, we have career development and academia, we have infomercials and kiddie-crushes and circus songs and infinite smothering. But on the other side we have nothing; there is no other side. So we walk on that edge, between this…and nothing. And we walk so lightly it’s as if there wasn’t an edge, but there is, dear children, there is. You can take yourself close to it at any time. At any time you can cross that line. And poof! You’re walking in the city of underwater danger. Auburn hair. A flock upon the house of leaves and ash upturned. The pleasantry of a ten-minutes nap. A crack in the frame. To blame. And a duck-trap for a cotillion, safer than a thousand tires for the foot of a car. That is the name of the other side. This side has no names. It has everything but no names. The other side has nothingness but every name. That is how it goes. And the manual of zilch is written in a thousand languages, while this side has only one. Set up the shot. Set up the shot so you can see auburn. Set up the shot so you can get a frame of aching, when you see my auburn hair flowing from the bunny hood. Set up the shot so you can see a grey bunny with white belly-fur, with black eyes so well-deep you could sail a ship on them. There we might be languid in a shot, so well-shot you could lie back in it and sink. Shoot me so that you can see the belly of me from under the suit, so you can see my body skinny as it is and luscious, luscious under my fur, wiry rabbit hair all in my pubes. Pert breasts. An ass of gold. Worshipping youth for no reason. (Analysis point.) And point of discussion, why we are posing here on these stones. Children of film, taking pictures of me in this suit, suit of fur and suit of grey. I sewed my head on so it would never come off. Glued my bad dreams to the soles of my feet, took a needle and thread to my ears, sewed them shut so I didn’t have to hear your screams. And it was black thread on pale skin and black thread over my lips and in my eyes so that nothing could be seen or heard or eaten with flashing teeth. That is how I will kill you next, with a bone, with a tooth, with incisors and canines. I will eat you in a bowl of soup and break the neck of a pigeon to see you startled, looking up at me on my birthday party. That was the stone of gold, the altar stone, where we will PACK the next guy and PACK the next guy PACK, PACK. Slowly. In slow-motion. Slow down your camera. Slow down your guns. Shoot it in retrograde. In circumspect. Shoot it in blasphemous little names. Product codes. Digits. A keyboard that types random letters, no matter what key you press, types its own language and it makes no sense, pictograph letters: a baseball bat, an airplane. And that was the package, that was the gift-wrap elephant in the motherfucking room. You sent it to me on Friday, I received it Thursday morning, opened it Tuesday and re-wrapped it Monday afternoon. You feathered me in a caveman. Stamped me in holograms. Sent me in the post. And that was it, we had to press play and watch the sequence unfold. Some moments were in regular-motion, some were in fast-motion, some were slow. And you had one hand on the edit button, clipping clips and reversing values and correcting the absolute colors. That was the name of it, bunny dancing in a strobe light on Friday afternoon. I’ll graduate tomorrow, and all this will be a party to look back on, just a way to spend some time before the speeches and the pomp, and we’ll get away with even though we never really get away with it and they’ll send me to the hospital instead of going to jail, and I’ll be able to say: the last haircut I got was in a mental institution, and this one, and this one. And nurses will wait on me hand and foot, bring me toothpaste and magazines. And we’ll do art classes in maximum security and enjoy pet therapy on Sunday afternoons. And sometimes Thursdays. This is where I’m headed, for they say something is wrong with my brain, something kinked and unusual, something wasted. Something fragile. Something that was damaged when I was very little, by the treatment of elders, in a lost blanket and “years of systematic neglect”. In a fantasy of childhood, where one said this and the other said that and somewhere in-between there was a little girl who didn’t know left from right. I never knew the difference between what they say is different. I never knew left from right. I never knew true from false. They were always simultaneous for me, always happening at the same time, and so I never knew how to argue, because everything, everything, everything was the same to me. That’s the root of my problem, maybe. They say something is missing. I think it’s the difference between left and right. Something they must have taught in film school, which way is forward and which way is back, I missed that part, when they taught that, because I was in a different university, one with create-your-own-major and hug-a-tree and write a paper about it, one where I could argue all day long with big words that never got me anywhere, with high textual theory and uselessness. You had me at BANG! motherfuckers. I ate you with my swath. Swarmed you into submission. Out-classed you with body. Out-guessed you with Oh My God. Out-muscled you with the HK P30. Out-planned you with the formation of the AK. The AK sleeps in dark, AK never has a plan, AK doesn’t tell within, AK surprises its own, AK is a mystery, AK never looks back, AK doesn’t induce new members, AK is a recordless entity, AK stuffs it down, AK never has ownership, AK is incredibly mobile, AK is only one rabbit and one chipmunk and you always, always wear your mask in the AK. That’s something chippy-chip is gonna have to learn if he wants to survive. Chippy-chip. Dumb chippy-chip. I missed him in the laundry and he better be sure I don’t blow-dry him; I’ll fuck his ass up. In an instant. See what kind of pussy he has. So we waited, we waited in the dark, and we waited to see what chippy had brung. It was a bitch, I could tell, cause the bitch was screaming. He was dragging her by a leash around the neck made of a belt, pulling it tight and her choking and half-screams were all we could hear. Stupid chipmunk dragging a pussy around in a belt. Choking her, that’s no way to please a woman. Except it is. It is if you have the right woman. Chippy-chip dragging pussy by a belt. Fucktard. Are you getting this on film with your night-vision? Got it. Action. Shoot the bitch. You see who it is? That’s my chippy-chip, with tonight’s victim, we’ll shoot her in videograde, make this a movie you’ll never forget, kill whoever that bitch is with a P30 HK. Take it too far just this once more. Get ready for graduation. That’s what I need to see. Something meaty to free me from the aching. Something I can use for my final grade. And a real-live tragedy, one that would make Mom and Dad proud. Take them a picture in my mind, show them that their daughter wasn’t to be fucked with. Finally found an outlet for this riveting blanket of rage. I have a cunt-fucker that fucks a cunt twice, once in the front and once in the back, and when you blow on it she cums, instantly, like a fresh fish. Blanket in flowers. Spank it. Hard little lips. Acetone. I knew this before you started reading and I knew it before you were born. Killer little fish. Piranha. Stolen you. There wasn’t one of me before this. I had to do what I did in order to come alive. There wasn’t even a me before yesterday. This me was invented on the sly, by the operation of a gun, hard-won. I was the scratch on a broken record. I was subsonics. I was a maze. Bring your victim forth, chipmonk, we will dispatch her. Bring her on, we are filming now; I have flew myself into a rage. Bring her to the altar-stone, lay her down. She will have no mercy, she will go her way. I needed to do this again, to get all the parts right that I had wrong yesterday. That was key. “Chipmonk, is that you?” “Yes, bunny.” “Good. Tell her to stop screaming.” “I’ll choke her harder and see if that does it.” So he brought her forth and smote her on the altar and I stood on piano rock and looked upon her and saw who it was, and she hadn’t recognized my voice yet I could see so I stopped speaking at once and was taken with a memory. Nothing, nothing could I do to this one—this one my sister. And why had he brought her? Where had he found her? And why was she submissive to his leash? This one my sister, the strong one, the one with goals and accomplishments and who won advances from the right kind of men? That was my sister and I could not do anything to her. Why had the chipmonk done this to me? Or didn’t he know?! He didn’t! He only wanted to make things right from yesterday. Stupid chipmonk, I shouldn’t have scolded him. But I had to. Because he did mess up. And he needed to be punished. And now he has brought my sister. Who does not know me. She cannot see me like this! She has to be saved! But we have come here to commit to a murder. We have committed it. So someone has to die. But—maybe me! Techs, are you getting this? Are you recording who it is on the altar stone? I am frozen. My beautiful Ella, I have never seen you like this—as the victim of my crime. But maybe I should have seen it sooner. Maybe it’s been trying to tell me something…maybe I should have known. So there was a plan; it wasn’t mine. I can stomp you down with the butt of my gun. Could sit on your face and let you taste me, see if you recognize me then. But I was caught. And memory came upon me. And I wasn’t sure who was the strong one, anymore. And came upon me a memory. It was Ella, in the hole. Ella on altar-stone. And why had I had this idea in the first place? Why had we come? To watch two film-techs record my sister? To give chippy-chip his salvation? But this memory, of mine, it takes me over. We’re on a piano. And Ella is playing. And I’m under her feet, listening. It should have been the older sister on top, but it was this way, and Ella was playing Mozart, and she had it down, had it from every chord, and there was a piano. I could have played. I could have listened. But Ella played, and I listened, and I was under her feet at the piano watching buckled shoes and feet pressing pedals and she dropped her sheet music on the floor and kept playing, she was the superior one. And I flipped through the music and thought I was playing, but it was Ella, it was really Ella, above, who had done her practice and I tried to come back from memory but it kept holding me down with sheet music and Ella pressing the pedals and some kind of sound atmosphere that cut slices in the songs and I heard some effects backward and some warped to slowness and I felt I got my money’s worth. There was enough chaos in the sound to make it worth my time. And Ella was underwater. And that was the end of the memory, but I wanted to stay in it and take more time, to slow it down and dwell in the final frames. But I was back to the stones, and I felt sick in my stomach, and all of this was on film as Ella had the belt around her neck and she was choking and the chipmunk was smiling proud like Look What I Brought You and I was smiling back even though it was under my helmet and I wondered What Was Wrong With Me that I felt this way but I did like to see her like that and I could feel the ceramics of the P30 against my leg and I knew what it would be like to take that gun out because I had done it yesterday and I thought the chipmunk did smell a bit like feces but wrapped in a fetus and that was the worst part about him—not that he had brought my sister and how had he trapped her with that belt around her neck? They must be playing on, trying to get me. Must be gaming the crowd to slip me up in a farce. And she was screaming. So she was serious. And the techs didn’t move. They didn’t dare. They knew I would come out flashing because they knew I had done it. That’s why they had interviewed me earlier and it would all be on film and I had a hot face underneath my mask. And another memory came upon me. I was about to fall, but I caught myself on my leg and then the memory came upon me. I was a young girl, and we were at the pool. It was with my parents, one of the only memories I have with them in it, and Ella was there, and it was a pool party with our friends from church—or our parents’ friends. And there was deep blue water, and we played. Ella splashed. I had my blanket with me and I sat on the edge of the pool. Ella was in the water; I was on the sides, as usual. Ella in the water, swimming with grace and the happiness of a young child. Our parents had brought us here after church and all the people at the party were from church, lounging on lounging chairs and getting their sun. Ella splashed. There was a diving board which she sat on the edge of, held her nose, and slipped into the water. She didn’t jump. She didn’t dive. She just held her nose and slipped into the water. And I could see my parents, way back on the second row, behind this man who was bald and from our church, and he wasn’t fat like the other people there, he had muscles and was chasing me. And Ella was still underwater with her nose plugged and my parents weren’t watching. And he chased me around the pool and to the side where my parents were not, and I ran and ran and ran. And I was looking over for my parents to see me, and they were not looking. And Ella was just coming up from the water, and she was looking around for me, since I was not beside her anymore, I was running. And I made it all the way around the pool, back to the diving board and this man was still chasing me and then Ella got out of the pool and he was chasing us both and on the side of the pool he grabbed me and shook me and he was laughing and I was kicking and Ella had hold of his leg and he kicked her into the pool and was laughing and holding me over his head and I was screaming, looking for my parents, shrieking out for anyone to grab me and take me away from him but they were all laughing and grabbing their sun. They applied sun lotion. They didn’t see us, even though we were right in front of them. Ella was shrieking and bouncing up and down in the water screaming at this man to let me down and he had me over his head holding me up high and I thought I was going to hit the ground if he dropped me and Ella got out of the pool and was trying to get me down, napping at this guy’s heels and punching him in the leg. And he could finally see that we weren’t playing, and that we meant business even though to him it was small business. And he started to let me down and I bit him on the back of his neck and he dropped me the rest of the way and I fell on my butt and got scraped on the back, all down my spine. I still have damage from that fall. I have a fractured vertebra or actually it’s the connecting piece that connects the vertebra to the spine from that fall I still have damage and where were my parents they weren’t watching they weren’t doing anything and no one around us was doing anything just watching us and putting on their sun lotion. So I was getting up and I saw that he had my blanket, and I put my hand on my back and there was blood on my hand when I brought it around and he was laughing and my blanket was on his shoulder it got stuck there on his neck when I was coming down. And my butt hurt but I got up anyway, and I punched him in the leg. And he just laughed and threw my blanket in the water. And my yellow blanket, which was perfect before that, got soaked in the water and it became this dark color, and was all soaked, and it was too far out from the edge of the pool to get it, and I bent down with my spine broken and I leaned into the pool to try to grab it but I couldn’t grab it, it was lost, and it was sinking partway below the water and nothing I could do could bring it back to me. I sat up and turned around and was feeling my spine and Ella saw that I was hurt and even though she was the younger one she stood her ground and was cussing the man out even though she didn’t have any words to do it with she was beating him and cussing him out and I looked in his face and I could see he saw Ella and he was scared. The look on her face and the tears in her eyes scared him and he knew he had done a bad thing and he wasn’t getting away with it. Ella screamed at him, she screamed at that man, and all I did was sit by the pool and exist as a hurting child. She’s the one who stood up for me, she’s the one. She was the one who did that. I was the one who sat broken by the poolside and felt my spine and brought my bloody hand to my face and knew that I was broken, from then on out. Then I told the chipmunk to step away from the body, and I told him with my eyes, so that my sister would not hear me. I said: leave her body on the altar-stone, you can release her: where is she going to go? And I told the film-techs with my eyes: you better keep filming this, you better. And they did. And I stood over my sister in my bunny costume and looked down upon her. And I saw her in her current incarnation: red-slipped monster. Of industry. Of mobility. Of moving. She had meant to seduce this little chippy-chip, my chippy chip. Why had she planned to do that? Because she was horny and hard, in all her girl places? Because she liked the smell of feces, and the taste of fetuses, because she liked that all the more with a fecal chipmunk than with her high-class boyfriends who had taste and business prowess? I think she liked it with chipmunks, too, if she would try. And maybe that’s what we could have now: just what she wanted: a chipmunk to squat over her and shimmy shimmy shimmy his little woodpeck off. On the altar-stone. That was a good place for it. For shimmy-shimmy to take place. I would have to lead him with my eyes. Did my sister know it was me? How could she not? Except she didn’t seem to. She was screaming something about why don’t the techs help her and they screamed back that they were filming and they didn’t dare leave the camera for to mess up the shot. That was the last they saw of their morality, once they got behind the camera of this one. They had shot shots of women masturbating in the sunset, of my sister cavorting at the giant cunt of the world; they had shot shots of women with cucumbers and stalks of celery and carrot juice. They had shot shots of people being eaten by chainsaws. But they had never shot shots of this. Never shot shots of a woman with a belt around her neck on the altar-stone. And they knew I would shoot them, shoot them all with my real, real gun if they moved from their camera. And chippy knew I would shoot him, too, if he didn’t do exactly what I asked him to do with my eyes. He had to guess. They all knew that behind the blackness of this bunny eye was a P30 ready to do some damage to a face. And I was sweating, on my pussy, and it came instantly, and I was flush. I had juice dripping down my ears and into my eye and I licked it out with my tongue. This is how to come. First you pack a bunny suit with a velcroed P30, then you come. That is how you do it. I sweat from my pussy. I sweat. I sweat identifiers and high textual theory and I excrete it from my vagina. There is a story in here about the boy cocks and the girl cocks. We put them all together. We got them to hide. When they were floppy we made them come. This was the story about the boy cocks and the girl cocks. It was our little game: see who you can make come without them knowing it was you at the very least. Then we all put on the blindfold. Then you make a cock come. That was the name of the game. And we still play it, we still play it. We play it in spades. I had eaten a monkey and now it was time for me to eat a fox. That’s what our new one could be: a fox. Red fox, evil ears. Red dress=red fox. That’s how I saw it. I saw it as red fox meet grey bunny, let’s get it on in the forest. Chipmunk be damned. Maybe I should mask her backwards and suck her off, that is the way we would have done it as kids. Then shoot her through the mask while she isn’t looking, then she never knows what happened, a bowl of smoke inside the helmet. Come here chipmunk, give me your helmet, let’s get this fox off right quick. What do you think about that, evil ones? Shut the fuck up, your job is to film me; nothing more. That’s what a film school faggot is for. It is mine to control; mine to dominion. Mine to cast flakes of carelessness upon. And mine to retrograde. For that is my business. Retrograde. The backwards. I have to take steps backwards just like we all take steps forward. Our parents are locked in a room with catheters. How does that make you feel? They have no function, no rhyme. They live off machinery, for their minds: a television and a mobile bed that takes them from one side of the bedroom to the other. Give me your mask, chipmunk, give it. Give it. I’ll take this and put it backwards on my sister, then I can orchestrate her, like Mozart. Put this mask on backwards. Mean me an ocean. There you are in blackness. And whore. Yeah, yes. Okay. Strip her of her necklace, she doesn’t need that. And place this chippy helmet upon her, she knows who you are already, chipmunk. Cast her down on the stone. Film it. Film it! There was action here last night and you missed it, you missed it, faggots, so don’t miss it tonight. I am diseased. I am caused to cause. This is my sister and I am stripping her. You see! You see now. This is my sister and I am stripping her of everything except the helmet. Put it on backwards, then she cannot see. Then we can make hand motions in secret and it will be you—stupid chipmonk—without his mask on, and me, brilliant bunny, with its mask on, orchestrating you in front of the camera. Come here, blue, whip this leg with a belt, whip her. Whip her vagina with this belt. There. We have gathered here together to whip her vagina with a belt. And turn her over and spank her bottom. You go too, chipmonk, you want to more. Nasty chipmonk, this is my sister you know! You like to whip my sister?! I know you do. It gets you off in soft chipmonk places; you like to whip my sister. Chip her. Chip her with your tooth. Ride her so hard you kill her back, let it twist to try to stretch. Then push her down with a foot, like this—let me show you! She needs to be beat with a stick—film crew, you weren’t here last night so I’ll have to show you, here is how to beat her with a stick. Nothing too large, mind you. Just a soft stick-whipping to her leg. Now slap the leg—here. Spank her bottom and create torture in her mind. Let her feel confusion. That is the true torture. Make her wonder which is left and which is right in this monkey brain. Hold her—now! She gets up, she spins around, she puts her hands on the chipmunk helmet. No! Set her down. She needs to get ass-fucked by my finger. Blue, chipmonk, set her down. Hold her hands out please and I’ll kneel on her feet with my bunny legs. Careful to let the gun get near my pussy: like that. Cold ceramics near my monkey hair. That I might have won in a carnival, bleeding. And take this hand out of the bunny couture—see? Now flail her, poking this red fox in the ass with this middle finger on my right hand. Now poke this red fox’s ass with the pointer finger on my left hand. Now poke this red fox in the ass cheek with a stick and reach up and feel her with your pinky finger on the right hand. She screams. Let her. Let her squirm under these giant bunny legs, you cannot beat me. And are you still filming—yes. You have brought me naked, and for nothing more than a crime. Wanting to fuck my chipmunk—that is one. That is one of the highest because he doesn’t need to be corrupted by you. He is innocent! He brought you to me so that he can find redemption in the AK. The AK isn’t soft. The AK has its own priorities. AK is your mother’s face. AK has no allies. AK has no enemies. All must submit to the AK. AK rules all. AK is all mask, all the time. AK has no rules to follow. AK is everywhere. AK is relentless. AK never plans. AK is spontaneous. AK cannot be predicted. AK is joker-random. AK needs thirsty. AK is gone! AK is rain in a number, and a bad number at that. AK will finger an asshole any time it wants! AK takes no new members. AK is always and will always be just a chipmonk and a bunny—nothing else! This fox is temporary—she is a lie! AK has no idea what AK is. AK is invincible. AK has a father. AK never had a mother. AK by the pool. AK didn’t help you! AK was scared! AK got hurt. AK has a broken spine. AK had a spinal attack! AK has injuries. AK was none. And there you have it: a sister fingering another sister’s asshole in the woods. Because I had this dream. I was climbing a rock and my baby was on the top shelf. There was a guy next to me fingering my asshole and it invaded my privacy and made me squirm while I was holding onto the rock. It made me squirm! I could hardly hold onto the rock and it threatened to get in the way of my getting my baby! That is my dream! That is what makes me finger a Koch. A Heckler-Koch 8000. Burn it out. Burn it out of me. Take your finger. Take it like this. Lick it, monkey, stick it right here. Now wiggle it around. Make her squirm and make her vagina go to the rock. That’s how we like to do it. Make their genitals seek out the altar-stone. Then we take them off. We take them off so fast they never even know it. So spank this backwards chipmonk mask, looking at us out of the back of her head, and make her come, if you can, chipmunk. But you can’t. Let me show you. I bet I can get her off. She has no reason not to. This might be her last time. You want to come, you stupid foxy infomercial beast? You want to come one last time before we kill you? So I fingered her, wiggled her with my middle finger on my left hand, wiped it up inside her in just the right spot. I know that spot and took it out and wiped it on her in just the right outside spot. Then I spanked her ass some more. That always gets them going. You know how to get a fox off, don’t you? You wiggle them off. You put them in a chip-mask. You turn the mask backwards. You strip up their dress and you blind your ears to the screams. This far out no one hears it. Only the snakes and the deer and the occasional hawk ruffling its feathers. In the wind a hawk ruffles its feathers, and you can only feel it with your spine. This is what she wanted: all of it. This is what she wanted to say but was afraid to ask for, what she’s getting. She wanted this from the day she was born, wanted it like it was lacking. She needed to be beat with a stick and manipulated by furries and filmed by techs. This is what she secretly wanted—you know it, you know it’s true. It is what you secretly wanted, too. You secretly wanted to watch it and you secretly wanted it to happen to you. She spills over with her girl cock bleeding and rubs it on the rock. She needs it now. She needs it more than ever true. Goosebumps. See goosebumps forming on her skin: she needs it more. See this goosebump here? That one’s more of a goosepump. Pumping the gooses out of you. Here, let me pump them. There can’t be any gooses inside my sister: let’s get rid of them! Bunny ripping the geese out of my sister! Leaning over you with bunny couture. Little white tail poking up from my butt. My whole bunny leg leaning into you, and thought of the gun. I can bring this out now, bring out the Heckler and the Koch, bring it up from between my furry legs and bring it up so the chipmunk can see it—there, chipmonk, see this? This is what you missed from yesterday, but today I think you know to expect it. I think that’s why you brought me my sister, is it not? Brought her up to me on a table, silver and all, and served her to me so I can Heckle her cock. Chippy, is it true? Or did you never mean for me to have her, and you didn’t even know who she is. You must have recognized her. How did you find her, chippy-chip? What a joke to play on a bunny. And how did you think I would respond? Did you think I would give her special treatment because she’s my sister? That’s not the policy of the AK. The policy of the AK is to treat everyone as equals. I’d treat myself this way if I were on the slab. Believe it. I’d give myself no special treatment, chipmonk, you need to learn that, maybe sometime I’ll show you, show you how I love to suffer, too. So bring out the Heckler, bring it out nice and slow. Show my sister’s backward chipmonk face the gun, show it to the techs. Point it inside the lens of the Sony HXR-NX5U; a shot for the shot. How does that look to your camera, red; red, get over here, you always said blue was the better cinematographer. Blue: go back to filming, you. Go back behind the Sony HXR-NX5U and let red get a piece of this. Red, get your asshole finger ready, I’ll train it what to do. Put your finger inside her mask and see if you can get her to bite you. Go ahead, Paco. Don’t be shy. You can be shy with your Lindsey-girl but not here, not on my time. The AK doesn’t allow it. Grab your fingers around a leg; touch it. Give it a squeeze. Listen to how she wails. Now you take a turn with the chipmunk; kiss it. There you go, follow the gun. When I say kiss it I mean for you to kiss it. Damn baby. Kiss the chipmunk. There. You see what it means when I drag your face this way with the gun. Now. Kiss. The. Chipmunk. There you go. With tongue. And let me turn the chipmonk mask around on my sister-sis, and show her the party we’re having out here. Show her the huge bunny mask in her face, show her the black eyes, show her my gun. Yes, sister, that is the Heckler-Koch P30, and that is how you will die. I will pump it into you, into your face, but not inside this chippy-helmet—wouldn’t want to destroy that. No, we’ll remove your mask first, and you’ll be subject to the gun, you’ll lick it, you’ll be forced to kiss it, then you’ll be forced to die by it. That’s how we do this. We practiced last night and tonight we will practice again. Look into my eyes. See this blackness. See to the deepest part of the eye. This, my sister, is yours. You do not know what lies behind these eyes. To you I am a stranger, to me you are a stranger, too. Infomercial-bitch. Little cunt. I have lived my life in your shadow, even though I am the older one, you were always the favorite, and I don’t think I’m going to leave this undone, not since you’re here. Fantastic idea, chipmunk; fantastic.

6

When Linsday and Paco reviewed their footage, they didn’t believe what they’d seen. It was perfect footage, of a real event, and Lindsey’s cinematography had held up to form. They reveled in the gritty nature of the crime photography, were doubly shocked to view the actual killing again, and yet, it wore thin upon multiple watchings—it didn’t seem real enough, the way he’d fallen over. And that first clutch of the head: had he felt a bullet, or was that just a reaction to the sound, and his assumption that he’d been shot? They watched horrified as the bunny held the gun to her own head—the idea that their hero might kill herself was unbearable! And the abuse scenes, they enjoyed a little too much, and Paco felt himself harden when Anna fingered Ella and he thought he saw Lindsey squirm a bit. The giant bunny head bopping up and down on the film, and that one point where they had switched cinematographers, and the camera lost focus on the events, and shot a shot of the trees, from underneath, had been a mess-up. And their footage of the two of them walking backwards through the woods, filming Ella kneeling there crying, and the bunny walk away slowly, all in night-vision.

“Do you think we ought to turn this in?”

“Don’t you think we can work it into our infomercial.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Moving from life to death, as was explained, Paco. That kind of mobility. What do you think?”

“I think we’ll have to check with Ella.”

“Does it make you nervous to watch it?”

“Nervous?”

“Does it make you feel bad for the victim?”

“I can’t figure out why, but: no. Does it make you?”

“It makes me feel bad for the bunny.”

“Why?”

“Because she has no friends. She shot her one friend and left her other one behind. Do you think we have a responsibility to tell Ella that was her sister? Because I’m preferring not to, if you don’t mind. I think Ella’s had enough of a weekend so far, that to know she had gotten raped by her sister might be not-necessary.”

“I agree. Lindsey, look: my dick is getting hard!”

“Oh, my, Paco, look: it is! What part of the footage makes you hard?”

“The part where the chipmunk dies. Does it make you hard in your girl parts, any of it?”

“The part with the chipmunk, definitely. Can we watch it again?”

“Surely.”

So Paco adjusted the video and they watched again as the chipmunk grabbed his head and then fell over like a cartoon, and bunny checked him for signs of floppiness in the head, and realized he was too floppy to be alive, and she wondered who was going to get the ColecoVision. And Paco felt his dick harden and Lindsay got hard and wet and they both thought about what it would be like to have sex with the chipmunk, and each of them felt an affinity for the bunny, and they wanted not so much to have sex with her as to be her.

“Do you really think we can use this in the infomercial?”

“I think we can use parts of it.”

Paco looked up the side of Linsdey’s overalls again and he wished he were a man. A man would take Lindsey by the shoulders and kiss her, lean her back and make love to her, hard and true. But he was just a boy, he thought, and too scared to do anything. Maybe this footage was bringing them closer together.

Lindsey secretly wanted to tempt Paco, undo the strap of her overalls, show him her breast. A real woman would have had him already, maybe last night at the execution. If an execution couldn’t bring a man and a woman together—what could? Lindsey needed to get fucked. She wished she could just say it: “Paco, I need to get fucked!” But she didn’t have the nerve.

What they really needed to do was get down to some hate-fucking. Paco would need to jam his dick into Linsdey’s butthole and fuck her hard and true. And Lindsey needed to learn how to take it, kneel like a dog and be soft and wet for Paco, a real feather-pea of a rape-whore. They thought the footage had twisted their brains. Staring at it hour after hour, reviewing key points, enhancing the monochrome night-vision color spectrum with Avid Pro Studio’s amazing array of tools, they came up with a composite that looked like My Little Pony on LSD. Or at least what they thought LSD would look like. Neither had ever tried it.

Paco decided to go for it. He reached out and grabbed Lindsey by the ear. He leaned into her and smeared himself across her breast and licked her ear. He put his tongue inside of it and smashed it around, biting her lobe and then inserting it into her ear canal, hoping to turn her on by doing this. He licked her earwax and started grabbing her leg. She responded well to this treatment, and she liked having Paco smeared across her breast. She said throatily, “Lick my other ear.” And even though Ella was outside the bus, sitting smoking infinite cigarettes by herself and pretending to read Elle magazine, Paco and Lindsey started to get it on in the editing bay of the Krey Mobility-mobile.

First they made out with some ear-licking. That lasted about forty-five minutes. Lindsey licked Paco’s stubbly chin hairs, and the two of them took pictures for their Facebook pages. They needed evidence that this was happening, to prove to their friends that they had in fact gotten it on. Lindsey got a shot of Paco’s leg with her hand on it. Paco got a face shot of the two of them side by side, Lindsey’s tongue reaching out for him.

Then they moved from ear-licking to neck-biting, and that lasted for half-an-hour. Then Paco started getting brave and putting his hand inside the leg hole on Lindsey’s overalls, and Lindsey moaned when he reached her underclothes, and Paco knew that he was doing it right.

This is how their talk went:

“Oh, fuck me, Paco.”

“Oh, I want to, Lindsey.”

“Go ahead. Do it to me real good.”

“I wanna fuck you like an animal. Hey Lindsey.”

“Yeah?”

“I wanna do you like you wanna be done.”

“Good, I want you to. Paco.”

“Yeah?”

“Put on the part where she fingers the red fox again.”

“Ok.”

So Paco leaned over and put on the part where grey bunny fingers red fox again, and then Paco used his memory of the event to learn how to give it to Lindsey with his hands, and he fucked her comprehensively, starting with her pussy lips and moving inside her vagina, then moving to her asshole, which he fucked with vigour. Then moving to her mouth, which he fucked with his shitty fingers, but it was her shit so it was okay. Paco ate her butt out. It was clever the way he did it, because he would eat her out and then spit some of the shit-smelling saliva he had collected onto the chair in the editing bay where Lindsey was sitting with her legs cocked open. Then she reached down and fingered Paco’s asshole for a while, and she said:

“Put on the part with the chipmunk.”

So Paco put on the part with the chipmunk, and they both lost track of hand-fucking each other and just sat there holding each other’s genitals with still fingers, and they watched the chipmunk get shot, over and over and over again.

The part that they really liked, the part that they watched while Paco finally removed Lindsey’s panties and got his dick hard to fuck her, was the dress rehearsal, the part where the bunny told them how to set up the shot and explained about piano rock and altar rock. And they liked thinking about the fact that she had a gun velcroed inside her bunny suit, right next to her bunnyness, and not just any gun, but a Heckler-Koch semiautomatic, as you might have guessed.

Then they fucked. Paco put his surprisingly-long (Analysis point) dick into Lindsey’s bunnyness and pumped all the gooses out of her. He came fast, and pumped her so full of cum that it topped her off, filling up her pussy and dripping out the sides. Lindsey liked to be topped off. It conditioned her pussy and made her like a real woman, not small and childlike, but large and womanly. Paco grabbed his dick after he pulled it out, and tried to keep it hard by squeezing it around the base.

Then they hugged each other, and they kept flipping around in the footage, trying to find a place that made them feel good, but they couldn’t find one.

---

When Ella watched the footage, she was by herself and Lindsey and Paco were disgustingly sleeping together in one of the lower bunks. Paco was snoring and Lindsey was playing in his chest hair, saying “Bunny!” like a bunny is furry and Paco’s chest hair is furry so why not say “Bunny!” That type of thing.

Ella didn’t skip around like Lindsey and Paco. She sat in the editing chair and wore her same red dress from last night and smoked an infinite amount of cigarettes and she didn’t even pause the footage she just watched it straight from the beginning to the end. And she thought she recognized the voice at the beginning, she was pretty sure she did, actually, she just couldn’t believe it. And she watched the part where the bunny took them through a rehearsal of how to kill someone on the Altar stone, and she had even seen Anna’s interviews earlier in the footage, but there was no absolute direct connection between the two. They never had a shot where Anna put on the bunny suit, and there was never a shot where the bunny had her mask off, so Ella held out judgment until she found the evidence she was looking for.

She watched the parts where she, Ella, was dragged choking through the woods wearing a chipmunk’s belt around her neck, and she remembered how it felt, with the belt loose until he pulled it, then the fold of her neck skin being caught in the buckle and pinched when the chipmunk pulled it. And she thought back to when she had met the fecal boy, and she wasn’t sure whether to feel sorry for him because he got shot in the head or feel sorry for herself because she had been molested (probably by her sister, in addition to a few other people, but…molested) in the woods for an hour while being filmed by her own film crew. She was learning towards feeling sorry for the chipmunk, though, because he was dead, and getting molested by your sister isn’t that bad. She preferred not to have fingers up her ass, but it was tolerable compared to getting shot in the head. She wondered if the chipmunk had sought her out, or if she had found him, and she wasn’t sure she cared.

In the end it was Anna’s hair that gave her away. Even though the altar rock footage was in night vision, there was that last shot where the bunny turns her back to the camera with Ella lying there without the chipmunk mask on and the chipmunk having been shot and tested to be dead by Anna rolling his head around where Anna turns to the techs and says, “Now you’ve seen everything there is to be seen” and right at that moment, even though you can’t actually see the color, Ella was sure that the wisp of hair coming out of the bunny helmet looked that perfect shade of auburn.

7

So the day had finally come. Waiting and waiting and waiting. That final class. The events of the last weekend. Ella’s unfortunate visit. Terrible timing. If I could have wished her as a mole, I would have. Now where is that bitch. Finger that bitch into next week. That was the whole idea, Ella, you were supposed to make it to my graduation. Now where the hell is that bitch. We’ve got everybody here. We’ve got those retards from the lower class I’m graduating with. We’ve got all the ridiculous professors. We’ve got Brauch. And then lonely little me, not an ounce of Little Miss Fun in me today. I wanted to wipe the faces off some kids. Maybe finger an asshole or two. But no. All we had on the docket was speeches and marches, maybe a prayer-de-la-paz for some effed-up country or something. Free Tibet. Lol motherfuckers. I had that cause when I was in fourth grade. Now we’re onto finger-a-baby-asshole and so forth. The odd thing was that I did start to miss a motherfucker or two. Not Adam Walker. But like this kid Michael Sauer. He had a certain tinkle about him. Something I couldn’t resist liking in his particular brand of inherited wealth. He was an asshole about it, don’t get me wrong. But I liked him. I didn’t want to fuck him like an animal. But I liked him. Some people are like that. You just like their face or whatever. It was too early to be sitting down, so everyone was milling about acting like they were talking to their parents and professors and everyone. Like this one day they’re wearing graduation clothes is the one day they can talk to their parents without shame and shit. Because guess who paid for it. I was on student loans and my parents were hooked up to breathing machines so I didn’t have to talk with anyone. Don’t ever ask me how my parents got that way. If so I’ll have another story to tell you. I’d like to brick some of these kids in the face, truly, but that would have to wait. You have to have a certain class about events like these. Nothing major, but just that extra touch of fecal congratulations wherein you pat them on the head with a fecal glove and smear fetuses across their face. I mostly wouldn’t miss any of these chaps. But a special part of my heart was reserved for Rachel Fisher, the little girl with the fishnet tights. She had some special mouse quality about her that I find appealing. I could even dream of her at night, though I hesitate to tell you what the dreams include. Let’s just say that she came to a very special end in those dreams, one I helped her get to. But in real life I didn’t touch her. She might be diseased. In the end, it was just Brauch that I liked. We used to play bocce ball in her backyard, which was on a hill, so it was quite difficult, but she spoke six languages so I liked talking with her in two or three of those. In the afternoon students came to her house. Here comes Mr. Frangipani, fucking cock of the world. Thinks he knows everything there is to know about European philosophers yet somehow he doesn’t. Embarrassing for the school. But he has a nice combover so that makes up for some of it. I had a special thing for combovers and Mr. Frangipani was only one of a fine set of examples at Antioch. There was a teacher or two I had to advise on the subject. But mostly I did my own classes, took care of them on my own with no supervision. There was a conspiracy surrounding this that had to do with classrooms being necessary. What I was really hoping was that no one would recognize me and I could remain incognito. To this end I had decided against the bunny couture and gone with the more original cap and gown affair to be unnoticed. So far so good. I might have asked that bitch my sister to be on time, which here would mean about an hour early, which it was, but she would no doubt be getting herself ready in the most lavish fashion inside her pump-up-the-volume bus with some naked film techs to help her get going. I knew that red and that blue would be fucking each other in the least imaginative way possible, probably with Paco eating out the butt of Lindsey and spitting the shit-smelling saliva onto the chair in the editing bay of the make-out bus. Well I was right, that’s exactly what happened as reported to me by my third eye. And this motherfucker, is this other girl named Anna who I spoke to once about the matter, we had a little talk about it, nothing special. But I let her know it was a problem. The day had finally come, to say goodbye to yesterday and everyone get on with it, closer to their deaths (etc.). But I have Punctuation Lite^® as one of my load-in modules so I didn’t have to rollercoaster my way forward as fast as the rest of these motherfuckers. You might notice that motherfuckers and graduation go quite well together in retrograde. There was weaving this way and there was weaving that, mostly by silly motherfuckers who didn’t know their own names in the dark and a candle-waving freak who was passing out candles for a candlelight vigil in the middle of the day. I tell you. I dumped my program on the grass and went for the back of the escapade so I could get a better view of the spectacle formation that was happening on the lawn. Of course Ella showed up, in the second in a series of infinite dresses. This one was red. And she spoke to me longitudinally, because she knows I hate that, and I was filled with dread. I was dodging around trying to get a hand on her head, for some reason unknown to her, which was becoming clear to me by the second. She had a large ruble on her head, spanked in there with a sand castle, and I was needing to get a hand on it to do some field repairs. So I took out my kit, which was filled with this and that and we had some fun trying to sew her head back on, and she had this large-type bump on her head followed by a gash, which I was trying to repair. So I took up my thread, bought myself a moment or two, and tried to get at her with my Swiss Army Knife to heal her. She was swatting at me like I was a bee and I tried to convince her otherwise with a swipe of my knife right near her eye. She thought that was very un-funny and we disagreed on the intensity to which that was true, with me whining that it was less intense and her arguing that it was more, but I won and started sewing her up though I only got a few stitches. Then that was all there was to it except there was extra string hanging out of her head and I held my hand over my mouth and said, “Ella, what happened to your head?” And she says, “Now you’ve seen everything there is to be seen,” and from that moment on I knew that she knew, and the air between us became very odd and stale. I was taken by an island. Needled in the forehead with a goose. Ridden myself of all illusions. I was the camel of a bigot and for some reason couldn’t move. Had a hand on me from god, if there is such a thing, and I removed it right away, for it was covered with a film and it didn’t fit well in my presence. There was a window, and a frame, and I found myself stepping through the frame and out onto the ledge. And there were many words. A+ game. There was my face written in glyphs from that keyboard. And my dreams were there, too. I had a vision of a dog. Eating tires. And everything was eating. I had no way of tracing it, it was so much and so many and so fast. I knew I was leaving, and I didn’t know if this time I would be coming back. Ella must have caught me, if I fell, because I never hit the ground. I was not there anymore. I was eating, and being eaten, and my A+ game was being eaten, too, consumed. Consum. Consummation. Let the chunking. Chunking my arm with the chunk and chunk and chunk. Spread me grey face. Spread me grey face. There you go. There you go. They had a chunking of this mess on supervision once. We saw it. We saw the mess spread wide for TV. They had a schedule. We followed it to the segment. They bammed. They BAMMED! That was the chosen one. That one was chosen by America to win. To win! They had nothing but a superscope tiny rifle fledgling masturbator and choked nitrate when by night they came to slime. There’s your fledgling masturbator kissing for 30 minutes in a high school bedroom they had kissed themselves to a 30-minute pouch. And ate ears and bitten necks and throw themselves for a 30-minute loop. Machination. Machination. Nothing more. You tied yourself to a tree. That was the end. That tree was the beginning. Or did you secret-loop your dagger in Robin Hood’s bananaboat. Did you think so? Did you think so, motherfucker? We had you at hello. We had you in the five-by-five. The 5×5. It had five by five by five by five by five. And there was a superscope swallow which licked me from head to toe. They had bananaboat tellers dealing waterfront meshes of dope yellow fraternization ebullience from the bleeding ankle of a swallow nose. You had a cat back in your elbow. They drnk it. Thy drnk t. Drnk t up and off and had a cow in the backseat of Dublin Cross. Only drinking pens of the finest quality zebra. Ate me with a superslice of pork bacon toothpick hollow. Battery-sized. Candelabra. Tabelcloth. Tabelcloth. Telling fascination’s bone. You have a monster in your appetite. For everything juicy. A side-by-side. Mister of the evening had me in a drawer of utensils. Knives. Attack!-kids. Membrane unleashed. Duly written by wrote of a manatee. Elephant-prone. You hugged a dashing in the caravan and I spoke one-hundred apes into a telephone. We were speaking. Speaking of consummation. They had us. They had us in it. We were alone. There was the parquet floor. A bone-handled whore. They had seen it coming. She was on her front. She had us. She had us. And there in the sight was a needle. Grammaphone. Seven grams of a washback watermelon. Dis-uni-fabricated of eighty-twelve. That was what we said. We said eighty-twelve. We said twenty-nineteen. We said grammaphone. And we said delight was a relish outgrown. For feline wicking at the neckline. Might there dash forty-forty feeling witches Anna metronome. Blood-locked animal. You had animal. You had animal screaming. They were ferrets on automatic. Asymmetric winches had us in blockade. That was the way of things, before. That was how they had us. That was how we were. You brought me into the hanker and now there was flicker-light times thousand-to-one of a sandwich watermarker with ice-cream tones. That was how they had us. Consuming. Consum. Consum. And a touch of Adelaide. Adele to my mother. When we were. When were lightning in a dishrag. That was me cumming. And nonsense. They had it. They had it for a second, then they lost it. It ate us from a cowboy. I ached. Then it was gone forever without a trade. I managed nine syllables from a Heckler P30 in retrograde. On a tiny island bush just north of the seven lines of microSade. You had it cumming. Eighty-twelve bandanas, each one blind, totaled to ruddy sides. One microscope, told to the gills, and a hand crank of infinite redux blemished an apron on moonward but NASA. NASA never knew it came. Eight diamonds by salesforce. Botany. The sliver of a fingernail. Piles of them. They had it cumming. And piles and piles of them. Fingernail agitate. Fingernail agitate. Zyprexa. Dilopophrafter. Amazing graze. Yesteryear. The first doughnut. That almost might have said it, right there. Yesteryear’s yesterdonught. Magpie. Professional. Race. Indiance. Defatiguabolationsifter. Defatigosnafulationgrifter. Absencelifter. Abstinenceifther. Had us consuming. Consum. Consuming. The abla-meter. Measure one abla at a time. To time. After time. Of the year of naughtiness. Of AK’s decked-out MR556A1 with the superscope. Could kill you at a five-meter spectral. I ached with it. Ached with that gun. Rocked in its flowers of carbine. Anti-grass propellant. Blight-mongering. Triple-plated trigger holsters. White ceramics. White all the way through, no paint, no paint to taint it, then red plastics, rubber grips the shade of Strawberry, like a Japanese purse, they had characters carved from silence (but plastic silence) blighting the surface of the gun. That was a real gun. And as my little friend once told me: I’m gonna shoot you with my real, real gun. That’s the problem with friends. I’m gonna shoot you with my real, real gun. That’s simply the problem. And I had you. I had you before consum. They naked. They naked-ed us. Face down without a comma. Toring us. Torn, from the legs up. And that was the scene. Mechanical. Taken. Zero-impact. Elven framing. Torrid. This is what she uses. The Heckler-Koch 556 A1 in letterspade. Seven variable marking systems buried in the handle. That was ceramics, consumed. That was pop! pop! pop! Pocket guns from Spain, consuming sections of LA that you can only read about in children’s books checked out of the library on a borrowed card. Library books so sinister, so consum, that Gandalf guards their pages. That we told you. That we locked away. And consum. Consum. Consum from the pages. Red pistol-grips. They had us at hello. This is the summary to remember. This is my name. Aching—remember that part? Retrograde. This is the name you must call me. This is my name. And flayed. Flayed from ceramics, white, all the way through, no paint. They had us at BANG. And gooses were pumping my rifle, pumping my A game right out of me. And BANG! That was the gong of my dreams, informing me they were over and I had entered the real world. I had “ghjkiuy”. I had “ghjfdhbfnm” followed by “,” and a recent second with “dkuyruehg” and then more of “hdjsnbnm” and then I was amazed so see an Egyptian “ÍÎÏ” with eyes of “˝” and that was all she wrote for from then on out it was simply ˇÁÓı◊ı˜Â ؈¨Á˝ÓÔ ÒÔÓ¨Áˇ‰¨ ˆÒÔÔÔÔÔ ÔÔÔÔÔ ˆˆˆˆˆˆˆ ˆˆˆˆ¨Áˇ‰ ´„ͲÇ◊ı˜ ˜œ∑´®†¥¨ ˆøøøøππ” “””åß∂ƒ© ˙∆˚¬…æΩ≈ ç√∫˜µ≤≥≥ ≥≥≥≥÷khj hgvbndjh grhejkdj hjkwjdh. My A+ game is a decked-out MR556A1 with superscope. Slide-by-slide. Ace-grinder. Ax-bloodtooth. Greasepick. Flashlight mountable. Single-action semi-auto. That’s what we called it. And I ate my words about Mom and Dad because I did go to see them, and I was in my mind, and the living room was there, and Ella wasn’t there it was just me and them and Ella’s commercial is on. That’s the last thing I want to see. Mobility products for the elderly. Ella’s business genius is unsurpassed in our family. It may be unsurpassed in all of Ohio, for the shit she sells to people that don’t need a thing. Ella had mobility products on the market before this latest boom. You have to imagine your media integration years before development. Or something. Ella says it right. Mobility products for a dying generation. That’s actually what it says in the commercial. Ella. Wow. Still, people buy the shit. Mobility products for a dying generation. Then they bust out their credit cards. There she is, stupid haircut. Lab coat. “These are not professionals” it says across the bottom of the screen. Or: “Not actual professionals”. I think that’s it. Then it’s Ella in a lab coat talking about how lack of mobility is the leading cause of death in customers 60 yrs. and older. Not in people. In customers. In her customer base. The wording is very tricky. Ella has no scruples about this shit. Her products don’t even address the issues she rails against in the ads. It’s like your-body-moving-around mobility that kills you. Ella’s devices just move the entire body from place to place, while it stays perfectly still. Her products don’t increase mobility within the body. They increase mobility of the body from place to place. And you can sleep in them—”Many of our customers do”—so the whole moving-your-body thing is moot. Ella. Ella. Mom and Dad in the foreground. Mom with tubes hanging out. Dad asleep in his chair. Nothing too mobile about them. Dad’s chair might as well be bolted to the floor, even though “It zooms at incredible speeds through urban obstacles and checkout lanes”. That’s what it says. Not checkout “lines”; checkout “lanes”. Like it’s some kind of racing event, driving one of these chairs. I sit between them, Mom on my right, Dad on my left. TV light fills my face. The sound is off but I know all the lyrics to Ella’s commercials. They have the subtitles on, but no one is reading. “Serving mobility devices to the elderly since 2008.” Sick, sick sister. How a family of mine got to this point I just don’t know. So then I was back, and I was lying in the grass at the edge of the field and Ella was standing above me like a judge and tapping her finger on her arm and I was sure she must have been there for me when I fell but I was unaware of the moment or the event sequence but there was a small crowd gathering around me so I decided to get up and brush myself of the grass. It was green with strokes of baptisms, and a stick or two in the eye. I had trouble hearing the words of my sister, she was in a tunnel, and her sound was coming in at the edges, I thought she had ProTools filters on her voice and her hair had been color-corrected. It was tough to understand why she was still standing there after what she had told me, I wasn’t sure this was real—real, real. But Ella bent down to me and she was kneeling like the little girl in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with a pleated skirt on the green and she brought a present from around her back and handed me this bag with fake grass coming out of it and pastel colors on the wrapping. Then there were these two little strings that formed as handles, and we were congratulating the winner or something. There was door number one, and door number two. And somehow I had come out of door number one. I wasn’t sure how that had happened, and I wasn’t entirely happy about it, since I’m pretty sure my sister had come through door number two. But Ella didn’t stick around to see me recover, she gave me the present and bent up like that girl from Alice and pressed her skirt-dress down around her broken knees and when she went away from me she had trouble walking, like something had hurt her, and she was limping as though the left knee had been badly broken, or the cartilage around it had been weakened and therefore the muscle was having trouble gripping, and gravity was winning over with it, and the right knee was carrying the gravity for both knees and the entire body, due to the left knee being broken. That was what I got from that. But it looked very compromising and I wished that I had never struck her. So she heads off across the lawn and goes in the direction of the camping spaces and do you believe that she never looks back…she didn’t…she just walked off into the bright bright sun and off the field of view. I was left with all these traces of memory, from Ella and I playing Raiders of the Lost Ark in the backyard with a mud puddle for the Temple of Doom to her being the one who messed up the family picture because she kept frowning and I was the one smiling that time and Ella hadn’t had it so perfect all the time like with that fake pregnancy she stunted us with and the superficiality of her stint at gradeschool and there was even another time that I dare not mention but it had to do with menstrual blood and a little clot she pretended to be a baby in the very early stages of formation, and she scared this guy she was dating by showing it to him and telling him it was her baby and that he better get ready to be a dad. And there were other traces of memory but those were the main ones and then it was just me getting up from the grass and denying this hand that this guy put out for me and then it was my knees that were having trouble and I thought the left one might be missing cartilage just like Ella’s because when I stood up all my weight had to go to my right knee because she left one wouldn’t hold up and I was pretty sure we were the same. These stupid people were standing around me with their punch glasses reading me the program and laughing at the fact I had fallen, then they would reach out and offer me a hand every once in a while to make it okay. So I denied them and I got up anyway, and I brushed my way through the ring of people that had been forming. They were of this younger class, and I had never really had any formation of bonds with them of the imprinting type we were not much closer than a lizard and a lizard’s children though I had hair. So I took that present with me and I went to Ella’s chair. She had a cock-seat in the back row, which is as close as she could stand me, and her little doily of a sweater-dress was hanging on the seat still so I figured she was coming back and I could meet her in this seat to make up for graduating and making everything seem stupid even after we had been girls together. That was my plan. So I sat there and smelled her sweater at the sleeves and there was a memory there, too, though I dare not share it as all these memories are making me vulnerable to you, Dear Reader, and you can’t be trusted. There is a line you must cross to tell a story, and it has to do with making-vulnerable in a moment but some of you are strangers to me and it isn’t prudent to open myself up to every sweater-memory that smell happens to bring up. I tried that once in younger years and it was a mistake. You get lulled into thinking it’s safe and then you meet one more person and that idea goes away like a duck in rain. So I smelled her sweater and remembered what I had to remember and I set the present in the grass at the foot of the chair so I would open it later. Ella surely wouldn’t let me forget it. There was a couple sitting next to me and talking about their daughter and I thought they were a very nice couple so I tried not to figure out who their daughter was so I could imagine them in their own element without being marred. That was the art of it: taking off people the element you wanted from them and leaving the rest to your imagination. So I could be friends with strangers that way, not really knowing them. This couple said the accoutrements of the graduation ceremony settings were ideal—they didn’t use that word but that’s what they meant. Every jot and tittle was apparently in place. Chairs were placed just right. Speeches had been rehearsed. The punch bowl was of acceptable quality, not too red but with a hint of blood in it. I felt naked in my cap and gown, too-thin fabric, nothing like the weighted-blanket feel of the bunny cap. I tried to think of myself graduating in that, all the other animals in cap and gown and then this big, out-of-place bunny sitting there with them, bunching over into the seats to the left and right of her, so that the kiddies next to her had to lean to the side. That would be the ideal form of big black eyes graduating. I could even orchestrate the choir, if we had one, or the string quartet, because we did have one of those, a bunny with those little conductor sticks in her hand, waving them up and down with strenuous movement, making sure all the notes were on key. So my sister’s chair was empty, except for me, and I knew I had to leave it in case she came back so I got my anus up from it and went over to the graduating class area where all these people I didn’t even know were standing and it looked like we were about ready to go so I found Brauch in the crowd and gave her the thumbs-up sign. This would have been much better in my bunny costume as well but I had to deal with it. There were a couple of kids next to me talking about what they were going to do after graduation and it mostly had to do with pizza and maybe some local micro-brew, which I wasn’t interested in because it fogs the brain. We lined up presently and went to our seats on stage. Brauch was in front of us doing her preparations and I saw the field getting empty of participants and the chairs all getting full. This was it. This was the defining moment. And then there were a bunch of speeches by lesser-known elements of the school, and some music by a terrible small band and I had to come to grips with the idea that this would be my last date at the school and from now on out I would have to find another playground to play in—though one found me, in actuality, but it was not the kind of playground you think about when you’re young. It was the kind of playground with grating on the windows and very low ceilings and a day room where the criminally insane watch TV and I could occasionally see Ella’s face even though it was flat and without dimension, that was something we could have together, no matter where I was, Ella had infiltrated the very core of the system and could be seen anywhere, at any time, even in the halls of the criminally insane, which I was, though I did not know it yet. That’s a funny thing about some illnesses: you need someone else to tell you that you have them, because part of the illness is that you don’t know that you have it. It’s not like a cut on the hand, which you can see with your eyes and which you know is wrong. It’s more like if your brain is twisted in such a fashion that you cannot see in what fashion your brain is twisted. That’s more the trick. So in this second case you are by definition unaware of how your brain works, and what is real. That is apparently my problem. I have to be told this by doctors and take their word for it, however, because what is normal seems normal to me. My nature is apparently diseased. My tolerance for reality seems to be low. I was instructed in it early, as we all were, but somewhere along the canal my tolerance for it lessened, and became worse, and then I was egregiously intolerant of it at some point. I never found it handy. I found it to be too stiff and convoluting, honestly. Which is a problem since most people abide by it even though it’s only one piece in a whole pie of optional ways to live your life. I needed something a little bigger, and my way included toys like the Heckler-Koch P30. If I had never been introduced to it my problems wouldn’t have had the same out-facing side-effects, like p-boy dying and then again also Chipmunk. When I think of graduation it’s only sad to me, just a bunch of people looking forth to their limited lives and thinking of how great the future will be, when it’s all full of Ellas and infomercials and little film techs like the two I met that weekend, it’s all just jobs and failed marriages and making more kids. I had a mistake which was to think I could escape all that, but I was incorrect, I had to lie in the same stew as everyone else, though it took me years to know this. My days now are filled with art class, which I’m progressively getting better at, and we have to count the pairs of scissors at the end to make sure nobody gets hurt, and sometimes the floor is on lockdown which means that nobody gets scissors and we have to make collages by ripping the paper with our teeth and using weak kinds of glue to assemble drawings and never, never can there be a sharp pencil. You don’t get to take walks on our floor, you’re inside forever, there’s no yard at all. There is a sitting room, and I do have a window out of which I can see light, though no complete forms, due to the grating that’s on it. And that’s it, except for the meals, wherein we can eat with the lesser units, and I get salads and can eat vegetarian though not vegan and maintain my health. The lesser units include other types of problems, sadly not criminal, who eat with us sometimes when they’re unlucky, because they think they have simpler problems and they look at us like “they’re the ones who have the real problems” but I look at them the same way. Because let’s say you’re fat. You know you have a problem then. If you’re not fat, and your problem is something deep inside, then it’s harder to tell you’ve got a problem. So I don’t envy people who have problems that are harder to see. I think it’s better to have a right-there problem, like I shoot people in the head with an HK P30 for fun, than to have a problem like I take advantage of my spouse by treating them worse than I would treat a stranger—that type of thing. So there’s different ways to cut this. If you want to know why I talk of assholes and fetuses and the like, then you have to understand me and Ella’s upbringing, which included features of those things, and the difference is I never stopped playing. So there were many speeches that day, but I’ll only bring you the important one, which was by this guy Denny. Denny said, “Welcome here today. We have come here to graduate, some of us. But some of us have come here not to graduate, but to play with fiddle-sticks and use our family inheritances to gain education which we blandly play with in the mud, and insult our neighbors by saying ‘what am I going to do with this education’ when so many people don’t have it and would kill for a spot in Antioch like some kid in Africa. Even if he had to take on a major like hug-a-tree and write a paper on it, he would kill for this spot. And so you should think about why you’re here, because you are here and you have a chance to do something amazing, like write a paper on something. And that’s when I started to doubt myself. Because I thought: I can’t write a paper on something. I can hardly write this graduation speech on account of playing with my own asshole. So I was fucking women who worked at the campus radio station and they were fucking me back and I thought: this is where it is. I have come to school to fuck women and there are women who have come to school to fuck me. But we came here to get an education—” (this is what he was saying) “—and we didn’t come here solely to fuck women. So take your fucking classes seriously” and so on and so forth but I wasn’t listening to him, exactly, I was looking up at Ella’s chair and seeing the sea of graduating people and their families, and I was thinking of when we were girls and we got chased around the pool by that guy and I broke my spine and Ella was there, cheering for me. So I couldn’t hold a grudge against her, for being all infomercially now. Because back then she had stood up for me, and how much more messed up would I be if she hadn’t. And I thought about how this reality is all we have, whatever reality you have and you have and you have, and how it makes sense to hold onto it, whatever you have. Ella was my savior, to be sure. It wasn’t my parents. It was little Ella, who had just as much reason as me to turn out fucked up, and who did turn out fucked up, in her own way. It was that little Ella from the Temple of Doom that saved me and came to visit me on my graduation and brought me a present. And now her chair is there, and there’s no one in it, and Ella’s off doing her thing. Maybe it’s driving to the giant cunt of the world. Maybe she’s finding a new producer. Maybe she’s giving those two techs a talking to, for spreading Lindsey’s cunt-juice all over the editing bay. I hope it is the latter. But when Ella said that to me, about my now having seen all there was to be seen, it shocked me, because I thought it was true. If I’ve now seen all there is to be seen, then what do I do next? Do I seek out something more to be seen? Do I start making shit up, just so I can see something new? “Now you’ve seen everything there is to be seen.” It freaked me out when she said that. Nothing, though, not even that, is going to make her chair not-empty as it sits there, graduating along with me. But then I couldn’t take it any more, not with Ella missing, it wasn’t the same for me, so I stood up in the middle of Denny’s ridiculous speech about cunt-fucking and got my gown and my robe with me and set my hat on the chair and let my auburn hair flow down around me. And I walked out, threading my needle through the people in the top row, stepping on toes and sneaking between knees and using people’s shoulders as my handrail until I got to the end of the platform and jumped off, gown flowing in the wind and righted myself, brushing off my robe of the grass that landed on me. And Brauch was right there, and I swore she gave me the thumbs-up sign as I walked out, and I wanted to follow Ella to the campground but I knew she wouldn’t be there, and I wanted to do some fucking myself but everyone was busy graduating so there wouldn’t be any willing takers. And I wanted to put on my bunny suit once more but I knew that was over. There’s only so many times you can dress up like a giant bunny, whether you’re planning to kill people or not. I preferred to kill them, as they weren’t much good at conversation, but that’s my preference. So I said goodbye to that sadly group of graduators and graduatees and left them delighting in their moment of glory, which everyone deserves, and I don’t sleight them for theirs, they surely never sleighted me for mine. No one can stop anyone else from their moment of glory. You just take it, and there’s nothing anyone can say to change it. Mine had probably been sometime last night when I was fingering my sister. Or maybe the night before. When Brauch found me, she didn’t care to say goodbye to me; we had had our times, arguing the science of people arguing about people arguing in groups, and she had her theories and I had mine. Someone like Brauch would never sleight you from having a bit of fun, especially one who sees so many students coming and going, year after year. She has to know that some of them are expendable. Nothing like a film crew to get the ole creative juices flowing. And if I had to entertain myself, I might as well do it in college. Nothing was happening at my parents’ house except people dying in motorized beds and watching my sister on television. I went to the outside restrooms, where I had hidden it, and those restrooms were where I had always hidden it, for you can’t keep that type of thing in your dorm room. Someone searching for beer might find more than they were looking for. And there’s nothing like a shit-smelling bathroom to get the graduation out of you, imagining some girl’s bowels letting loose on the bowl, poking out that meek little turd she’d proudly show her boyfriend. I had spent hours in there spanking my vagina and sticking my fingers up inside me, but I imagined there were those secret girls who fingered their assholes in the public toilet, who washed their hands with smiles and foam-soap and shook your hand afterward. Back, back. Back past the first stalls. Into the last, last one where I knew what I would find. Didn’t even close myself inside. This would be the best time, everyone in their chairs, and if anyone saw me—who cared? Put my foot on the seat. Lifted the toilet back. That cold porcelain. Stinky water. Well water. Red water from those springs. Sit on it. Take a shit. It feels good. When I get nervous I have to shit. And revel in the fact that I don’t know if it’s still there. Open that porcelain lid it might be gone. And what a thrill I would feel. Knowing I might get caught. Knowing there were fingerprints on the gun. But they don’t know. They don’t have it. It’s right there—isn’t it? Take this shit. Take a nice log. Wish there was a mirror in here. I prefer taking a shit in the mirror. Graduation gown dangling. We could probly drop this. Probly drop this suit. Take a shit. Don’t flush. Wipe it up. Stand. Prop open that lid. Take your time. Now prop that lid. No rush. There’s no one in here. Echo of the porcelain clink. Set it on the side. Now look down in. Imagine that it’s not there. Imagine they’ve found it. Imagine they’re standing right outside, knowing I’m taking a shit. Imagine this is my last moment of freedom. Picture what it would look like if someone found it. Silver back of that toilet, nothing it it but gears. Nothing there but the pump. That’s what it would be like: an empty toilet back. That’s all it would be like: empty. But it’s not. Lean over. There it is. A beautiful thing. Fires underwater. Never jams. The P30 with optional superscope. A badass thing. Look at it. I’m not captured. Take it out of the back of the toilet. Lonliness. No one found it. No one near me. No one on my page. Someday I’m gonna use this thing again. Maybe this day. Just so much fun to fuck a motherfucker’s face up, though. Let me take you home. You don’t know anything about me. You think just cause you fucked me that you know anything about me??! You don’t know anything about me. That’s the problem. No one does. No one knows a thing. Not even Brauch, really. She came close. She came close on that one paper, I think. Brauch. Bitch. Should’ve let me sleep with you. But better that we didn’t. Really much better. Much, much better. You can’t kill teachers. Not real ones. Film crews are one thing. Gimp-ass fucktard film crews are another thing entirely. But you can’t kill real teachers. You have to hate the connection—you have to hate the connection between a killer like me and a killer like that fuckhead who killed those two girls who used to walk by his house every afternoon on the way home from school. Put one of them in a block of concrete on his back porch. Kill the weak—I guess we do have that in common. I’m not proud of it. But you can’t kill real teachers. You can’t. I’m a useless—I’m a useless freak. No real imagination, what I do. No. Damn me. Damn this degree. What—truly—what was I thinking. Someone should do a study about what kind of punctuation killers use. See correlations between commas and murder weapons, see combinations of semicolons and victim profile. You need more of these kind of studies. Grab my P30. There it is. Wet with toilet water. Cold ceramics, cold-kilned barrel, better than the shit they put in space. Aim it at the window. Could just run out of here shooting. Never would, though. Clap it to the back of the toilet. Here we go. Clap clap this—clap clap. Double-tap. Just start popping those kids. Kelly Browning. Pop. Amy Banister. Pop. Brauch? No—get it out of your head. Get the fuck out of this bathroom. Flush. Replace the back of the cabinet. Bang. Yeah. Go into the woods. Just go for a walk. Enjoy some silence. You’re done. You’re done. You’re done with this place. You’re finally done. Right about then I was hearing the end of that cleverly-planned speech on cunt-fucking and I had a mind to go out there and PACK PACK away, do a little PACK PACK on the graduation, which would have been fun except it was losing its draw to me and I thought it was about time to retire the P30, when I was looking into the toilet trying to see my reflection and a drop of blood fell down from me. I saw it leave my face before it hit the water, saw it go by my nose and fly down into the toilet. Then it hit there and sank down, and there was only a trail departing from it in thinner red, right to the side. And then another drop flew, and another, and they were getting muddled up in the toilet water, and blending all together down there. So with my P30 in my right hand, I brought my left hand to my face to cover it, and there was blood everywhere, dripping off my hand and still falling directly into the toilet, and I gripped my hand together and then spread the fingers apart, making a pattern on them of fingerprints and blood, and I wanted my hand dry so I wiped it on the side of the stall and then wiped it again, and then wiped it on my gown, pressing down with my palm and wiping along the seams. And my right arm went up to brace me on the other wall, the P30 clacking against the metal, and it was really bleeding now. I nudged open the door with my knee. Bay of sinks. Rushing over to them, my hand stamping the countertop, and I place the P30 right down. That was it, before Brauch came in, and I don’t know how long I was standing there, but I do know that aside from there being one empty seat in the back row of the audience, there was also one empty seat in the top row of students, and I was standing there, looking at my reflection in the mirror and watching it bleed.