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.