At the edge of America, the world shook and shook, causing the gigantic trees which held up the sky to tremor and crash, to slide into the earth. I saw my sister standing in the shadow of a falling redwood and I grabbed her hair and hurled us both 20 feet to safe ground. From the forest floor we watched the dirt swallow the trees like vermicelli, and thus the roof of the world collapsed down upon us, until all was left was mere crawlspace around wooden corners and the suffocating black ceiling of the solid sky.
So we crawled east.
Sometimes when we turned a corner in the maze, we were greeted by a cellophane window close to the floor. At one such turning, I got on my back and pressed my head out against the cellophane, which vanished as my head passed through the line of the window. What I saw caused my hands and fingers to tremble. Before and above my eyes was a slippery dome, upon which myriad creatures of the natural world were climbing and falling down. Mammals and fish and amphibians and reptiles wearing flat-forward eyes and opposable thumbs as they got higher, wearing clothes and developing technologies alien to me on levels that scooped out my brain. Several frogs caught my gaze and returned it. From the throat of one emerged a tad-pole like thing which landed on my face and wiggled under my collar. I quickly pulled my head back inside. We continued to crawl, and I felt the thing under my clothes turning revolutions around my body, as if I were a Sun and it my only planet.
From dark spaces others joined us in these corridors smelling of deadwood. Soon we were a dozen. Upon turning a corner, an Asian man standing at the end of a corridor pointed a bottle- rocket at us and fired. The flaming rocket roared over us and blazed a hole in a wooden wall. My little frog-planet bit my chest and I screamed, rushing forward and grasping the bottle rocket from the man, flipping it and blasting away his head. In the hole that the rocket had gouged in the trunk behind his dissolved head, the tadpole ripped from my clothes. The thing had changed, not into a frog, but a dragonfly with an enormous mouth bristling with circling, needle teeth. It lighted upon my wrist and faced me. A flower bloomed from the crown of its head and it shrieked, flying into the hole and chewing it completely through. Yellow light and smoke drifted through the new tunnel and we scuttled through to find a large room with a ceiling high enough to stand.
Along every wall of the room sat scarecrow versions of thousands of our ancestors, stuffed and poorly made in wooden chairs. Beside each scarecrow ancestor was a small table with a radio that played a singular voice which told a singular dead story.
On the right side of the room, men were sitting at a table discussing unfinished business. I recognized the few that owned all the money in the world. They were red and furious that other men were even trying to negotiate a part of the money chunk.
At the left side of the room was a multitude of women and children smoking and coughing and dying and disappearing from the cubes of yellow smoke that rose from the floor. A bald man with a worried look on his face was prostrate at the right side of the room, his mouth and nose flush against a vent. He inhaled and inhaled, causing his considerable bulk to bulge until he stood and exhaled into a bag, which he carried over to the left side. He shook out the bag onto the cubes, which dissolved any visible, yet as soon as he left, the yellow cubes reappeared and killed more women and children. He returned to the vent.
Above the rising cubes was a cellophane window, the ledge upon which paced the dragonfly- tadpole. It whistled to me and I walked over, holding my breath to avoid the noxious smoke. Standing close to the tadpole, its teeth whirred and bore a hole in my forehead. I felt liquid and drip down my nose and over my lips.
It whistled again and fled out the window. I could no longer hold my breath.
I inhaled.
Dream Over
The Bones in My Face
Vehicle's gone.
Maybe that's incorrect, or partially unright. I am pointing at the body with my magic baseball glove. The body is there, straddling the perforated yellow stripe of this unnamed highway. But it might as well be gone. Me and Leviticus can't go anywhere else, we're stuck out here watching the mutherfuckin antelope prance and dance. Lots of scrub brush.
My name is Viscous Stanley and I was tired. Took a nap at the wheel. Leviticus screamed, and I cuffed him in a dream with Mr. Magic Wilson. Travelers must sleep.
Hey you. Leviticus. Shut up. No hunting. Yet.
We can't go anywhere because of the wheels. I woke up and we were still. No wind whipping my golden locks. I stepped out of the vehicle and saw that the wheels had become teeth. Big, yellow, immobile teeth. This is Sir Crazy, right?
Leviticus says, "Have you ever turned around in the darkness, expecting to see your Father with a grin and an ax?"
Shut up, Leviticus. Polish Mr. Magic Wilson. Yes, thank you.
So teeth. I stepped out of the vehicle and the soles of my orange sneakers stuck to the road. Something smelled sweet. It was the road. It was a candy road. FUCK! The teeth were yellow and rotting.
Vehicle's got tooth decay and the cavities aren't going to allow me and Leviticus to go anywhere. The bones in my face are growing, because I am frustrated and angry.
Leviticus says, "I never turned around, so I am alive and I love Dad. But, now, Viscous Stanley, we're fucked. Even if I polish Mr. Magic Wilson, you're not going to be catching dreams anymore. Break your thumbs. This place is now our place. Somebody is brilliant upon the peaks of imaginary mountains in the distance we cannot see."
Dammit, Leviticus, cap your handicapped wisdom. Can't you see that the bones in my face are growing? Soon, I will be a stranger to myself. In the middle of a blighted highway with a vehicle gone, that's especially hard to deal with.
We wait for the wind to blow. After all, something new is soon forgotten.
Maybe that's incorrect, or partially unright. I am pointing at the body with my magic baseball glove. The body is there, straddling the perforated yellow stripe of this unnamed highway. But it might as well be gone. Me and Leviticus can't go anywhere else, we're stuck out here watching the mutherfuckin antelope prance and dance. Lots of scrub brush.
My name is Viscous Stanley and I was tired. Took a nap at the wheel. Leviticus screamed, and I cuffed him in a dream with Mr. Magic Wilson. Travelers must sleep.
Hey you. Leviticus. Shut up. No hunting. Yet.
We can't go anywhere because of the wheels. I woke up and we were still. No wind whipping my golden locks. I stepped out of the vehicle and saw that the wheels had become teeth. Big, yellow, immobile teeth. This is Sir Crazy, right?
Leviticus says, "Have you ever turned around in the darkness, expecting to see your Father with a grin and an ax?"
Shut up, Leviticus. Polish Mr. Magic Wilson. Yes, thank you.
So teeth. I stepped out of the vehicle and the soles of my orange sneakers stuck to the road. Something smelled sweet. It was the road. It was a candy road. FUCK! The teeth were yellow and rotting.
Vehicle's got tooth decay and the cavities aren't going to allow me and Leviticus to go anywhere. The bones in my face are growing, because I am frustrated and angry.
Leviticus says, "I never turned around, so I am alive and I love Dad. But, now, Viscous Stanley, we're fucked. Even if I polish Mr. Magic Wilson, you're not going to be catching dreams anymore. Break your thumbs. This place is now our place. Somebody is brilliant upon the peaks of imaginary mountains in the distance we cannot see."
Dammit, Leviticus, cap your handicapped wisdom. Can't you see that the bones in my face are growing? Soon, I will be a stranger to myself. In the middle of a blighted highway with a vehicle gone, that's especially hard to deal with.
We wait for the wind to blow. After all, something new is soon forgotten.
?
Drank a lot of beer and Scotch on a bus from Oban to Ft. William back to Oban once, looking for a notebook. Nobody bothered me. It was wet, and the sheep on the hills looked like puddles of cream leaking away.
Lower the Goat
We are leaving Roma after three days of exploration. We are the sons and daughters of Aeneas, and we will forever be looking for him. Perhaps his fleeting soul has found the cool waters of another Flume Tevere stars away far beyond the grasp of any of our machinations. Nonetheless, we search for him and his answers, and we abandon Rome amid the wails of those haggard shades of hags. They may have burned our ships, and fed our squalling offspring to the boars in the hills to detain our wanderlust in order to try for another wave of swollen bellies, but we ride on wings inspired by the gods. So we remove ourselves from these seven hills to the coasts of Amalfi, where the lost dead whisper for us to lower the goat.
After a Lethargic Breakfast
After a Lethargic Breakfast
By
Todd Austin Hunt
After a lethargic breakfast, the sky exploded. My imaginary horse trainer wiped the grapefruit pulp off his face with a fire napkin he didn’t know was on fire and his moustache ignited. He jumped on the table, shrieking while the ground shook and the thunder from above subsided.
“It’s because I love the taste of horseflesh!” he repeated, pointing at three tremendous holes that had opened in the stratosphere. The holes formed a triangle, and beams of smoky orange light pierced through the apertures.
One of the beams hit a church on a hill, and the church POPPED and transformed into a bank with a vast chimney that spewed ghosts with expired smiles.
Another of the beams landed on my dear castle, and from the edges to its core, my home disintegrated inwards into a ravenous black hole. It ripped the flesh off the horse trainer’s bones, then took his bones as a token. It pulled at the chain mail thread of my imagination. The thread swooped down into a gigantic half loop as it retreated from my forehead, and I watched a flickering Goatman use the stream as a jump rope, skipping it without error as I became less and less interested and unable to foresee the outcome of such sport.
The last beam illuminated MARIO MARIA CHOMSKY’S FREE AND INFINITE HOT TACO STAND. Everything vanished except for Mario Maria. His head grew very large and his hair fell out. As his head swelled, the forms of all his customers emerged in miniature from his scalp, each one emaciated by a greedy disease. The Goatman leaped over the tail end of my imagination thread and Mario Maria’s head blew up, bathing everything in MYSTERIOUS TACO MEAT.
I looked at my hands. My thumbs were gone and I didn’t care.
Giant fingers filled the holes in the sky. The nails were long and dirty and they curved to clutch at the aquamarine roof of the world, causing cracks to radiate outward like poisoned blue blood.
The world moved away from its orbit in a deep arc, and I floated weightlessly above the black hole which was once my castle. The world shifted again in a reverse direction, and I hovered and watched everything roll and roll above and below me with the curiosity inherent in gravel.
The globe collided against obstructions and stopped. I plummeted to the ground next to the hole of my castle face first. My neck was broken. Things that understood that they were people but still looked like things emerged from the hole and began to gather around everything that was familiar, and devouring their familiarity until all countenances and structures became the abysmal Death of my eyes.
By
Todd Austin Hunt
After a lethargic breakfast, the sky exploded. My imaginary horse trainer wiped the grapefruit pulp off his face with a fire napkin he didn’t know was on fire and his moustache ignited. He jumped on the table, shrieking while the ground shook and the thunder from above subsided.
“It’s because I love the taste of horseflesh!” he repeated, pointing at three tremendous holes that had opened in the stratosphere. The holes formed a triangle, and beams of smoky orange light pierced through the apertures.
One of the beams hit a church on a hill, and the church POPPED and transformed into a bank with a vast chimney that spewed ghosts with expired smiles.
Another of the beams landed on my dear castle, and from the edges to its core, my home disintegrated inwards into a ravenous black hole. It ripped the flesh off the horse trainer’s bones, then took his bones as a token. It pulled at the chain mail thread of my imagination. The thread swooped down into a gigantic half loop as it retreated from my forehead, and I watched a flickering Goatman use the stream as a jump rope, skipping it without error as I became less and less interested and unable to foresee the outcome of such sport.
The last beam illuminated MARIO MARIA CHOMSKY’S FREE AND INFINITE HOT TACO STAND. Everything vanished except for Mario Maria. His head grew very large and his hair fell out. As his head swelled, the forms of all his customers emerged in miniature from his scalp, each one emaciated by a greedy disease. The Goatman leaped over the tail end of my imagination thread and Mario Maria’s head blew up, bathing everything in MYSTERIOUS TACO MEAT.
I looked at my hands. My thumbs were gone and I didn’t care.
Giant fingers filled the holes in the sky. The nails were long and dirty and they curved to clutch at the aquamarine roof of the world, causing cracks to radiate outward like poisoned blue blood.
The world moved away from its orbit in a deep arc, and I floated weightlessly above the black hole which was once my castle. The world shifted again in a reverse direction, and I hovered and watched everything roll and roll above and below me with the curiosity inherent in gravel.
The globe collided against obstructions and stopped. I plummeted to the ground next to the hole of my castle face first. My neck was broken. Things that understood that they were people but still looked like things emerged from the hole and began to gather around everything that was familiar, and devouring their familiarity until all countenances and structures became the abysmal Death of my eyes.
Obituary
Early Friday morning, Officer Ollie Bilge reported the remains of local author, Todd Hunt, devoured by an alligator in the mud pits between West Ashley park and The Oasis housing development. Said Bilge, "I was really surprised to see a gator that big out of the zoo. I wasn't
nearly as surprised to see that Mr. Hunt managed to get himself halfway eaten. It wasn't my first encounter with Mr. Hunt. Just last week I saw him walking on the sidewalk in the Oasis development. I told him it was against the law to walk on the sidewalk or the grass. I told
him he could walk in the street, and he obliged. It's my general opinion that gullible cotton balls like him should be eaten alive by crocodilians."
Authorities agreed.
Professor Kerry Falkirk, Biology Professor at Charleston Southern, mused on the alligator: "Its size, 15 feet, was amazing. The scientific community owes much to Mr. Hunt for walking in the swamp at night, for we have never witnessed such a specimen. The gator's facial expression was one of true distaste and regret. I assume the giant was anticipating a treat like a Pomeranian or French Poodle. How could he have expected such a bitter meal? As for Mr. Hunt's expression–well, he just looked rather confused."
Asked about the fate of the gator's remains, Mr. Falkirk replied: "We will most assuredly have him stuffed and presented for display at the Biology Museum. Such grandeur cannot go wasted."
As for the remains of the late Mr. Hunt, Ruth Geberhadt, Dean of English at Charleston Southern, comments: "A fine idea would be to also have Mr. Hunt stuffed, and put on display at the Charleston Library during Banned Books Week. Banned for being really, really bad. But I
expect individuals, probably related by blood, would possibly object to the idea."
Mr. Hunt was the writer of several lurid short stories. "Mr. Hunt," said Geberhadt, "Was not even a minor writer. He can be compared to a dead planet that NASA has yet to discover."
His only survivor in Charleston, brother Godfrey, was given his shoes. The shoes had holes in them. Police speculated that the alligator ripped open the shoes, but Godfrey Hunt commented: "No, they were old shoes. He was too cheap to buy new shoes."
Lowcountry conservationists will hold a Candlelit Wake for the alligator. The alligator has come to be affectionately known as Mr. Bumpy. Professor Falkirk says to Mr. Hunt's survivors: "We in the scientific community give our heartfelt thanks for producing such a stupid young man without whom we would have never discovered Mr. Bumpy."
nearly as surprised to see that Mr. Hunt managed to get himself halfway eaten. It wasn't my first encounter with Mr. Hunt. Just last week I saw him walking on the sidewalk in the Oasis development. I told him it was against the law to walk on the sidewalk or the grass. I told
him he could walk in the street, and he obliged. It's my general opinion that gullible cotton balls like him should be eaten alive by crocodilians."
Authorities agreed.
Professor Kerry Falkirk, Biology Professor at Charleston Southern, mused on the alligator: "Its size, 15 feet, was amazing. The scientific community owes much to Mr. Hunt for walking in the swamp at night, for we have never witnessed such a specimen. The gator's facial expression was one of true distaste and regret. I assume the giant was anticipating a treat like a Pomeranian or French Poodle. How could he have expected such a bitter meal? As for Mr. Hunt's expression–well, he just looked rather confused."
Asked about the fate of the gator's remains, Mr. Falkirk replied: "We will most assuredly have him stuffed and presented for display at the Biology Museum. Such grandeur cannot go wasted."
As for the remains of the late Mr. Hunt, Ruth Geberhadt, Dean of English at Charleston Southern, comments: "A fine idea would be to also have Mr. Hunt stuffed, and put on display at the Charleston Library during Banned Books Week. Banned for being really, really bad. But I
expect individuals, probably related by blood, would possibly object to the idea."
Mr. Hunt was the writer of several lurid short stories. "Mr. Hunt," said Geberhadt, "Was not even a minor writer. He can be compared to a dead planet that NASA has yet to discover."
His only survivor in Charleston, brother Godfrey, was given his shoes. The shoes had holes in them. Police speculated that the alligator ripped open the shoes, but Godfrey Hunt commented: "No, they were old shoes. He was too cheap to buy new shoes."
Lowcountry conservationists will hold a Candlelit Wake for the alligator. The alligator has come to be affectionately known as Mr. Bumpy. Professor Falkirk says to Mr. Hunt's survivors: "We in the scientific community give our heartfelt thanks for producing such a stupid young man without whom we would have never discovered Mr. Bumpy."
In This Room of Unenchantment
In This Room of Unenchantment
I thought that the panoramic windows overlooking the other world had been painted over. Or, even worse, the concrete walls of a banal existence grew together like steel kudzu, forever hiding the Wonder from me.
And so, locked within this blurry room of Unenchantment, the captain of my ambition and hope, the steel of my spine, was swallowed by ennui and anchored by lethargy. The kudzu overwhelmed the window because the captain peered out less and less; his eyes were perusing dank corners where rot is infectious. Where lazy amblers crowd and fill the air with the stink of stasis, where streams are brackish and all decay of the fruits of the imagination lead to no new growth.
Thus, my imagination, my raging captain so aware of that window began to fall away. He fell out of my head, plummeted from my shoulders, slipped from my arms and legs to splash on the floor in this room of Unenchantment. We became two, the corpse ambling on incomplete, refracted journeys, connected at the feet with the two-dimensional captain, puddled on the floor, mimicking the corpse like a shadow in the retreating light of Wonder.
But it was the recognition of that shadow on the floor by this aimless husk which lit an ice-encased flame within my blank outline. How can I see this shadow in the complete absence of light? How can I recognize my dissolving captain if the panoramic window has been completely overwhelmed? Guided by the frozen fire, I see that there is still an aperture of light steeling its way into this room. Slender, yes, but I can also see flickers of shapes moving in that other world! So I rush over to the aperture and grasp the closing edges with hands made strong with automatic labor. They are the edges of shutters, and the shutters give, just barely, but they do give. Although my vision is poor, I can see birds with wings that stretch eons beyond and I feel a presence in my ankles which I haven’t felt in too long a time. The captain has started to climb back inside the husk! I try to push the shutters back some more, but I am out of breath. I’ll have to push them open an inch at a time. I know I’ll get stronger, though; I’ll be able move them more than an inch very soon.
And I’ll open them until I am once again surrounded by the panoramic window, bathed in that brilliance, where the captain’s eyes are behind my eyes.
And all shadows are washed away.
I thought that the panoramic windows overlooking the other world had been painted over. Or, even worse, the concrete walls of a banal existence grew together like steel kudzu, forever hiding the Wonder from me.
And so, locked within this blurry room of Unenchantment, the captain of my ambition and hope, the steel of my spine, was swallowed by ennui and anchored by lethargy. The kudzu overwhelmed the window because the captain peered out less and less; his eyes were perusing dank corners where rot is infectious. Where lazy amblers crowd and fill the air with the stink of stasis, where streams are brackish and all decay of the fruits of the imagination lead to no new growth.
Thus, my imagination, my raging captain so aware of that window began to fall away. He fell out of my head, plummeted from my shoulders, slipped from my arms and legs to splash on the floor in this room of Unenchantment. We became two, the corpse ambling on incomplete, refracted journeys, connected at the feet with the two-dimensional captain, puddled on the floor, mimicking the corpse like a shadow in the retreating light of Wonder.
But it was the recognition of that shadow on the floor by this aimless husk which lit an ice-encased flame within my blank outline. How can I see this shadow in the complete absence of light? How can I recognize my dissolving captain if the panoramic window has been completely overwhelmed? Guided by the frozen fire, I see that there is still an aperture of light steeling its way into this room. Slender, yes, but I can also see flickers of shapes moving in that other world! So I rush over to the aperture and grasp the closing edges with hands made strong with automatic labor. They are the edges of shutters, and the shutters give, just barely, but they do give. Although my vision is poor, I can see birds with wings that stretch eons beyond and I feel a presence in my ankles which I haven’t felt in too long a time. The captain has started to climb back inside the husk! I try to push the shutters back some more, but I am out of breath. I’ll have to push them open an inch at a time. I know I’ll get stronger, though; I’ll be able move them more than an inch very soon.
And I’ll open them until I am once again surrounded by the panoramic window, bathed in that brilliance, where the captain’s eyes are behind my eyes.
And all shadows are washed away.
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