Dream Part Three - New Members of the Baboon Congress: Leaving the Writer

We rounded the last curve; the walkway ended at the open roof of the house, and moonlight shone on a circular tub of stained tin.
“That’s the tar beetle pit,” the writer said to me. “Go watch it, but don’t put your hand in it until I say so.”
He had a lot of demands, but I acquiesced to all of them because of guilt at having forgotten his novel.
My brothers and the writer stayed behind, looking up at me as I approached the tub. Inside, hundreds of thousands of centimeter-long black beetles cascaded over one another, each oozed from their mouths and anuses a purplish thick paste, which reeked of licorice and onions. They crawled over each other to reach the lip of the tub, but constantly fell back, creating the illusion of a rising escalator. At the center was a pool of the licorice sludge.
“Put your hand in the middle,” said the writer.
I pushed my hand in up to my wrist. It was tepid, and after a few seconds my skin prickled as if circulation was poor.
My brother A screamed, and Z was shouting.
The writer had shoved A off the path into the empty space. I watched in horror as he fell down, smashing through the stucco floor, through another floor into a dark space crowded with baboons.
Z struggled with the writer at the brink, but was overwhelmed by his strength, and he toppled backward, plummeting down and down into the area where A had been carried away.
I yanked my hand out of the sludge and clutched it to my chest. My heart beat pounded, and for a moment waves of pain radiated from it like fire in my arteries.
I pointed at the writer, licorice spit and shit dripping from my fingers. “You are a . . .”
“I am a writer,” he said. His chin jutted out, and his face grew heavy with fat. He looked at me as if bored. He sat down at the edge of the walkway, swinging his legs in the emptiness.
I peered down for a few seconds, choked with worry, before I finally leaped. The fall was fast, and I landed softly on my feet in a cellar that smelled of urine and meat. The space was huge and empty. A gigantic caged gate was ahead of me, and through it I could see a well-lit area with rising rows of chairs and tables, like a university classroom. The chairs were occupied by bipedal baboons that occasionally stood and chatted with one another in what sounded like Spanish. In all the brown and gray fur, I caught a glimpse of rich red. It was my brother Z! He was leaning forward on a table, concentrating on a source of light that washed over all of them.
I didn’t see A, and it made me sick.
An enormous, two-headed gibbon crawled down from a crevice above when I stepped to the gate. It stood on the main lock of the gate, four eyes searching me, the heads turning inward to search each other.
“Por que você se aqui?” they asked.
“I don’t speak Spanish.”
“Not Spanish! Portuguese. Why did you fall in here?”
“The writer pushed my brothers down here. I want to see if they’re okay.”
“Raise your tar beetle shit hand to us.”
I did, and the gibbon heads sniffed it, then licked the back of my hand clean. Each head bent towards the opposite shoulder and vomited.
“Eu não posso acreditar como eu amo a vomitar isso!” they said, and unlocked the gate with a lever hidden in the above crevice. The gibbons gestured for me to enter before creeping up into the darkness. The gate rolled open on a track, filling the air with a horrible grinding noise. Hundreds of baboon eyes focused on me, as well as those of my brother. The huge light into which he’d been staring went black.
Z called my name and waved for me to join him.
A tall baboon in the front row grabbed my hand and led me up to my brother, who sat in a chair between two ancient baboons. One moved two seats over to accommodate me and my missing brother. I embraced Z, asking, “Where’s A?”
“He went to the bathroom.”
I exhaled in relief and we both sat down.
The descending rows of tables and chairs faced a low platform at the fore of the auditorium. The baboon to my left pointed to a red button on the table in front of me. Every seat had a button.
“Push the button for a piece of his oblivion,” he said.
“What?”
Below, a great line of light spouted up from the center of the platform, and unfolded into an enormous hologram of the writer’s head. Except for his face, his skull was transparent, revealing his brain. His brain was the center of the powerful light; the folds radiated with it. His head slowly rotated. The writer looked different from when I last saw him. His face was lean, his expression crisp and aware.
Baboons from all across the room pushed their buttons, sounding like dozens of people simultaneously pushing the plastic bubble in the game TROUBLE. As the buttons were pressed, sections of light within the writer’s brain went dark. By degrees, the writer’s countenance changed, his chin receded, his cheeks slackened and swelled, his eyes lost their electric intensity and concentration, pupils seeming to fade and retract within, to gaze noncommittally at an inward erosion.
My brother pushed his button three times fast.
The writer’s spinning head flickered, froze for a moment facing all of us in this baboon congress, his decreasing intelligence and curiosity apparent in a mouth hanging open to release an unrestrained river of drool.
“Fuck the writer,” I said, and pushed the button, leaving a smear of tar beetle shit and spit.

Dream Over

The Powerful Baby, the Roach, and the Twinkie

This is a modified version of a story I told my niece. I don't know what I was thinking telling her the baby took steroids, and her parents quickly corrected that. Of course, it's just ridiculous, I don't support ANYONE illegally using steroids, especially BABIES.



The Powerful Baby, the Roach, and the Twinkie






One day a chubby and darling baby girl sat in her high chair, preparing to eat a delicious Twinkie. She smacked her lips and rubbed her hands together. But when she reached for the cake, a sly and spry cockroach scampered over the tray and snatched the Twinkie, laughing as it ran off.
The baby was furious . . . and hungry. She got a membership to the gym and began lifting weights and taking lots of steroids(whoops) to bulk up. Soon she was incredibly strong and began to canvass the neighborhood to find the roach. She knew roaches liked to scurry below.
She came to the first house. With a baby roar, she lifted the house from the ground, but there was no cockroach at the bottom, only a woman washing clothes. Enraged, the baby hurled the house into the sky, and it smashed against the moon!
She came to the second house, and pulled that one up, too. No cockroach, only Peppa the Pig in the bathroom. Peppa yelled, “Hey! Shut the door!” The baby wailed, and threw the house into the sky, where it crashed into the sun!
She came to the third house and with both hands ripped it up from the foundation. And there he was! The scoundrel roach! The roach was scared. He held on to the Twinkie and shook like he was cold. The baby held the house up high, and the roach thought she was going to smash him. But the baby put the house down to the side and sat next to the roach. She took the Twinkie, broke it in half, gave one half to the roach. They laughed, and each enjoyed the shared Twinkie.

THE END

Dream Part Two - New Members of the Baboon Congress: Following the Writer

I scrambled to jump through, but the column monster pushed past me with the poor kid plastered by force to its front. It slammed into the wall to the left of the window, squashing the fan in a spray of orange fat that streaked the wall and window.
The impact had created a door the size and shape of the column, and the thing entered and scuttled to the right. A light clicked on, illuminating a human shape sitting behind the fat washed glass.
Knuckles tapped the window. “Come on in,” said the writer. “It’s me. Bring my book.”
I stepped warily through the door. The writer sat at a desk and smiled as if he’d never smiled in his life. His appearance was different than that on stage, and it again matched the photo on the back cover. He took the paperback and signed his name on the title page. I didn’t recognize the name.
“So tell me,” he said. “What do you think are the finer points of the novel? Your favorite character and scene?”
He handed it back to me. I hesitated; my mind seemed whitewashed. The cover was foreign to me. I remembered the delight I felt at the prospect of seeing this writer of a story I loved, yet I had no memory of the story itself. I flipped through the pages, which were filled with black and white illustrations of people picking their noses, examining what they had found. I was blank.
“Uhh,” I said. “When Suzy had a cold in the desert . . .”
“Oh shut up,” the writer said. “You didn’t even read it, you stupid shit!”
“But I’m nervous.”
He ripped the paperback from my hands and threw it under the desk, then stomped out the door. “Come with me! I’m doing research for my new horror novel and I need help. Since I ate my wife, I have no one to assist me.”
I stepped through the door into a piebald lot under a moonlit sky. The lot ended at the crumpled porch steps of a huge old house that leaned over us.
“You walk too slow!” said the writer.
My two red-headed brothers stood to either side of the front, holding torches. I was so happy to see them. They shouted my name.
“Who are they?” asked the writer.
“My brothers A and Z.”
“We can help,” said A. “What are you looking for?”
The writer crinkled his nose as if he were smelling undead cheese. “There should be a tar beetle pit at the top of the house. I need to watch somebody watching you watching the pit.”
Z shook his torch. “That sounds awesome! Let’s go!”
The double doors had been shorn from their hinges and lay stacked on the porch. The entrance curved immediately right into a rising path that spiraled up around the outer wall. The writer took Z’s torch and the exchange lit upon a dead baboon whose face had been nailed to a beam in the wall. As we ascended, we passed hanging baboon corpses at regular intervals. Each time, the writer stopped and kissed it on the jaw.
No railing prevented us from falling into the open space on the left; the bottom floor was already far below, a scattering of stucco tiles scored by holes. Every so often I saw fervent movement through the holes, knotted scramblings.