Fulster Ulster

we want to spread them like butter of course your watermelon won't fit there because it's the thin sheen that we need not big fruit not big fruit layers and layers of squashed squash to revitalize all of them. all the talk is the juice did you drink the juice? this is about nothing - nothing fills it up like poisoned helium in a sheep condom balloon. IT IS SO BIG. and you and I float away on the rim of a nothing chorus like static in yer ear, fragments of titanium whole thoughts pulsing and pulsing. the air will grind up your face and it will rain your face your happy and sad and the dry upheaval of despairing sobs so those below will use it to climb to the ladder. THE LADDER IS BROKEN. HERE. HAVE SOME OF THE SHARDS. SOME DEEP SPLINTERS TO INFECT YOU.

Nightmare 52012

Woke up after a terrible nightmare. I was driving across a dark landscape in my Volkswagen, my passenger somebody I didn’t know. It was night, but so black the road over my shoulder was devoured. We stopped at a nondescript house at the side of the road, shaped like a brick with no windows and one door. An orange light over the door illuminated the night. I was expectant about the house, felt like I knew somebody there. I turned around for a moment staring off into blank fields. When I looked back, she was there, only a few inches away from my face. I think she was ---, I wasn’t sure. Her face was a burnt orange. She held a bundle of blankets in her arms, which she handed to me. “Hey!” I said. She moved her head in a careful circle, slowly examining my face. I felt self-conscious and wondered whether my features had changed so much she wouldn’t recognize me. But then she stopped and kissed me. I might as well have kissed a woman composed of ancient paper, it was so dry and featureless. I got in the car with the bundle and drove off. The dream shifted. I was in the corridor of my apartment building with a dolly, moving phantom objects into my home. Walking through the doorway, my apartment turned into a huge industrial loading dock facing a vast parking lot where my car was parked. The left side of the dock was a metal grill, with panels that collapsed into a sort of huge threshing machine operated by means of a lever emerging from the center of the dock. A high wall divided the grille from the rest of the area. Several men were working and laughing here. I rolled the dolly down a ramp to stow it in my car. “I’m finally done with this, guys,” I said. As I approached the vehicle, I passed a beautiful woman. And from around a corner came running -----. He was exercising. He stopped to give the woman his lightning smile. He told a joke, making us both laugh. But they didn’t hear or see me. I became a ghost, an invisible observer. The workers had gone inside for a break. ---- embraced the woman and they moved up onto the metal portion of the dock, which was blocked from view. The couple lay down on the metal and kissed. Renewed laughter filled the air as the men returned to work. The woman disentangled herself from --- and jumped up, running off into the distance. ---- started to get up, but a man with blonde hair, unaware of his presence, pressed the lever. The grille opened up and the he fell inside. I was horrified but couldn’t say or do anything, only watch as if I was at the cinema. He started to shout from below, but the men were laughing too loud. The blonde man clutched the lever in both hands and pulled, causing the machine to start. Immediately the screams. Oh my God the screams. “Ahhhhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhhh! Ahhhhhhh!” Constant and horrible. The men stopped laughing. The one who had pulled the lever froze for a moment amidst the shrieks, terrified and unsure what to do. To stop the screams, he pulled the lever all the way. Silence. My ghostly form floated above the metal, giving me a horrid close-up of what was left below, the man ground into sections. His severed head faced up through the grille, mouth opened in an eternal howl of misery. The worker had stepped around the wall and looked down into the carnage. His face had transformed into animated clay, blue eyes filling with white tears. “It isn’t my fault,” he said. “I didn’t know he was there. You can’t blame me.” Dream Over

Dream - Fallen Sky

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.

?

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.