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DAMN SKIPPY! |
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A Neil Cicierega sat at a desk within the plastered-white walls of his apartment, which, in its minimalist decor and hollow atmosphere, resembled a room deep within an abandoned mosque. He scrawled out several lines of edgy rock and roll lyrics on a crumpled, white sheet of Nile reed. Its textual contents, despite the Neil's efforts, were not quite up to par with the rest of his material.
When the Neil realized this with his rectally-formed Poet's Eye, he leaned back, sighed, and watched his shoe unravel at his foot and roll off into the distance. Like a strange animal, it longed to fold itself into a carnivorous corner and stare at him with detached intensity. He called after it without words, and it did not reply. He sighed again, shuffled through the many objects inside his shirt pocket, and retrieved a pink glove with the efficiency of a file clerk.
As the glove of the Neil melted over his two-thumbed fist, a bell rang from across the city, notifying the citizens that it was time to begin the daily act of wudu--or as westerners it, the ablutions--to begin. The Neil suddenly forgot about the shoe in the corner and took up a new task: retrieving a fish from a salty tank that stood quietly in cubic dimensions within the closet. He stood before the tank, holding his hand out and looking the fish in the eye. It obediently leaped into his open hand and smiled with a false glaze of fishlike warmth.
The Neil lifted the creature and nestled it under his warm adam’s apple. Since it was a hot day, the fish squirmed in displeasure. The man apologized before clipping its tail between two layers of coffee-stained bones and grinding it thirteen times. The Neil flared his whacked-out eyelids which resembled those of a war veteran. The tail was like gristle, refusing to dissolve despite the amount of force and precision exerted by the teeth. Black blood spurted from the fish’s body, where its torso was once connected to its tail. The Neil showed his spectrum of teeth to the fish in a vague, shapely smile. The fish responded with a glaze of gratitude.
The Neil clutches the fish-containing fist and holds it to his white shirt. “Allah,” he says, “your fish is good. It is tangy, and has queer inner-bristles. And he comes apart—when uncooked—in meaty portions not unlike those of a lobster.” Allah smiles at the Neil and blesses him. The fish struggles against the shirt.
A shoebox legs its way up to the Neil and pops the lid off itself like a centipede. The Neil drops the fish inside and the box vanishes as the Neil slowly stands with fantastic posture.
A doorway becomes open and the Neil strides towards the line of orange, washed-out brightness. The view from his doorway shows the beach, a distant geographical formation sheathed in a low tide. When dry conditions such as these are present, fish often become stranded on the shore and can be gathered by legged organisms in massive quantities with great ease.
The Neil smiled at the thought of the life of a fisherman. “In no other country is this way of life possible,” he said aloud, under the ears of Allah.
Abu Bakr picked up a fish and crawled on down the shore, disappearing underneath the horizon.
Crossing out into the thin oxygen of the exterior world, the Neil took a deep breath and locked his door. He wrapped a bail of trailroot around his doorknob to protect his house from the mosquitoes. Trailroot sales were up lately because there was currently a flood of West Nile Virus sweeping the city. Giant, eight-foot mosquitoes roamed the streets at every hour of the day, looking for unmarked doors and Atheists to chew on. The bugs would inject a fluid into your bloodstream that would cause you to forget about the incident just moments after it occurred. The only way of becoming aware of an infection was via the appearance of things that resembled opium sores three days after the fact. Of course, by then it was far too late to do anything about it.
Nurses who acted like ghosts carried strange accents and scraped incense off the hospital walls every time a virus rolled into town. They were usually carried by the trade ships, but this particular infection was brought on by a beached whale thanks to the miracle of spontaneous generation. “Praise Allah!”
Kustuften Avenue was paved in sandstone. Seaweed draped all along its sidewalks was evidence of a strong fishing-based economy. The Neil made a cleanly sour face as he passed by Man Mo Bistro and caught a whiff of the strange tobacco contained therein. It was imported from an unofficially embargoed country, and it had become highly fashionable among the young adult counter-culture, as is the mode. Normally, a smoke shop would be doing poorly during this time of year due to the overwhelming heat let off by the massive tobacco ovens in combination with the fires of the sun, but in this city, fashion overpowers function often.
The Neil takes a left into a wide-open alley full of leaves and hedges. He passes through the area with a strong sense of direction, immediately focusing in on a poorly-crafted, wooden staircase curiously built on the exterior of a building. Staircases are often built outside for financial purposes rather than aesthetic, and this particular case was no exception. The stairs dent, bend, and crack open like the opium sores of the West Nile as the Neil ascends and looks about him in all directions, admiring the wood grain and the noises that possess processed trees after years of shrinking and expanding under the dynamic atmosphere.
He reaches the second floor and poses for a moment on a small balcony to compose himself and his thoughts before banging three times at equal pitches and volumes on a thick, wooden door. He notices that the knob contains no trailroot, curiously.
A Lady Version of Neil Cicierega opens the door holding a metal pole. Empty, black eyes are glazed under her skin. They twitch like a lizard’s under the ugly Florida sun that makes some people’s skin thick and hard like rising dough and tight like an old Chinese man’s scalp. The woman’s eyes tightened up like meaty disks so that the Neil could scarcely see their flat, brown contents. “What do you want?” the woman croaks from a frozen jaw.
The man smiled with a blown face and his skin flapped open in the wind like a flag. “I noticed you were out of trailroot, and I thought you might want some,” he said as he unhinged an organic bracelet from his wrist.
She waved the sun out of the doorway and said “I don’t want it. Let the mosquitoes come. I’m ready for them.” The man longed to believe her, but he doubted it was true. He thought he could make out a round, red sore underneath a layer of white powder on her cheek.
He said, “I’m glad,” and stuffed the useless trailroot into his pocket.
She waved him inside the building with a yellow hand that was covered to the wrist in tobacco-birthed discoloration and shut the door, pulling on it with her entire body weight until it clicked and snapped in place. Inside, the room carried the scent of pumpkin pie, which was one of the embargoed fruits. The Neil Cicierega fought the urge to twist his nose in disgust. A chair fell from the low ceiling and landed in the middle of the brown guest room. The Neil sat in it and crossed his legs, and then he said, “I’m worried about you.”
The Lady Version of Neil Cicierega unzipped the thick, pumpkin air and pulled a crayon from its innards. She zipped it back up and walked to the easternmost wall. “What should I write?” she asked coldly.
“Write some of your famous rock and roll, Lady-me.”
“Don’t be silly,” said the woman as she began rubbing her crayon on the incense-covered plaster wall.
It read, “Man walks on open plane—probably in Holland, smiling. Dragon is fought and the fight is won. Victory is had and life is complete, for of man and beast, wind is the means of reincarnation.”
She stepped back and looked on triumphantly with her hands placed on her hips purposefully. She smiled at it as her black lizard-eyes danced over it several times, studying her unconventional grammar closely. “What do you think?”
The Neil looked at the front door with tilted eyes and said, “It’s good. Don’t you think you should put something on the door?”
“Yeah, I thought about writing ‘no trespassing,’ in crayon but I thought it would be rude.”
“I mean for the mosquitoes. You know the virus is out, right?”
The woman rolled her eyes and walked to the opposite wall, preparing her arm for another textual masterpiece. “Do you think I can outdo my work on the eastern wall, or should I call it quits?” Before the Neil could answer, she continued speaking. “I thought about calling the minister of culture up here to check my work, but I then I thought it might be a bit too soon. I mean, if I would’ve done that yesterday, he wouldn’t have seen my work on the eastern wall. I think I’m going to call that one ‘Fiction: Life and Purpose.’”
“It sounds appropriate.” The Neil Cicierega shifted inside his shirt. “What does it mean?”
“It’s… you know; it’s just about the strangeness of the process of living. It’s an odd thing, life.” She delicately placed the wax pencil between two layers of bone and began vibrating her jawbone at a high frequency, kicking up the scent of oranges. The Neil Cicierega watched in wonder and felt his own jaw, unsure of his ability to mimic her actions.
“That’s amazing,” he said.
She swallowed the crayon and said, “I know. I think about things like life and—the universe, I guess—a lot.”
“No, not that,” he started to say, but was interrupted by three uneven bangs on the front door. The first one was low pitched and loud like a shattered vacuum noise, the second was slightly louder and higher-pitched like a rock hitting the side of a galleon, and the third was quiet and low like a rocking chair falling from a third story window and disfiguring itself upon a sandstone street.
The woman pulled a pipe from the wall like she was unsheathing a sword and she stomped towards the door while moving like a roach fluttering slowly in water—hanging and spacious in a slow panic like she knows this is the calm before the storm. She banged her pipe on the pumpkin walls as she neared the unevenly-knocked door so that the presence of her weapon would be audible from the porch. The Neil Cicierega stood from his rotting chair and took form behind her as if he were the wall in front of a firing squad. The woman flung the door wide open and the sun gave her skin the texture of a glazed doughnut and a crab hiding under a thin membrane of sand.
It was one of them—the West Nile Mosquito Boys—who stood at the door with a fully-transparent exoskeleton and cytoplasmic eyes suspended in space by rods of bone arranged like postmodernist nonsense. The Mosquito twitched a left leg and the Lady Version of Neil Cicierega said, “come in.”
The Mosquito Boy flickers and disappears. The Lady Cicierega spins her head like a pot dangling on the blunt of a broom in an act of uninspired confusion. The Neil feels his lungs skipping frequencies in panic. “Shut the door!” he chokes as a white mass falls from his throat and lands with a plop on the hardwood floor. The Lady Version of Neil Cicierega makes a face at the puddle.
The Neil Cicierega slams the door in frustration and tries to shoot the woman a look, but finds her body in distortions. Her arms hang in space over her legs in a tied collection of nerves and white powder-tendons that are open to the air for the Neil to see. Her torso then completely swipes into a blank void in one instant, like a change of pitch. The Lady Cicierega’s head twists and her neck bulges in all directions. A steel pipe swishes through her vertebrae and she goes mute.
A wind flares through the room and disrupts all the crawlspaces and pipeworks of the house. Lighting everything up in yellow insect screams. The Mosquito Boy had made it inside and done what he was born to do. The Neil Cicierega jumps through a pumpkin doorway and clutches the chair he once sat on, rotating clumsily in combat. He backs against the eastern wall and a part of the crayon-painted text rubs off on his white shirt.
The Mosquito Boy rushes him with a metal limb, and the Neil Cicierega deflects it with the chair, which then collapses into wooden debris. The insect screams from the fracture, cracks a window out of the southern wall, and falls to the sandstone street with broken wings. A clattering noise kicks up without a visual, and the Neil Cicierega loses consciousness.
When the Neil Cicierega regained his faculties, he found himself perched delicately on the floor with his limbs sprawled in all directions like spilled pasta. He gathered his extremities and shuffled to the balcony while gathering up his scattered senses. The sky above him was wet and black, and the streets appeared as nothing more than the outer-crust of a great charcoal meteorite hanging under a flat membrane of space. The tide had rolled out, and the ocean was trillions of miles away. The Neil looked inside the pumpkin house and glimpsed the sheen of the Lady Cicierega’s waxy limbs. It looked as if they were melting into a new organism, crawling with bacteria. The Neil Cicierega expelled oxygen and nitrogen from his nose loudly and closed the door softly, leaving it unlocked and hanging a wreath of trailroot on the doorknob to keep the woman’s body safe from the Mosquitoes. Her home was now a mausoleum. The Neil said, “Allah, I am unsure of your motives, but I trust your decision to exterminate her. We will speak later, when I am clean.”
The walk home required the Neil to walk through low-hanging clouds of chalk and pollen that scraped the inside of his throat like aerosol can discharge. Carriages rolled through the streets with faceless, white drivers like centipedes. Women standing in second-story windows all seemed to have three eyes; the third would always follow flies as they leaped across walls and Danishes pastries. A blue man across the street who was wearing a badge said, “You there!” and stopped the Neil’s movement with a wide-waving hand. He asked the Neil where his trailroot necklace came from. Apparently, there was an occurrence of a trailroot theft inside a local trade ship earlier that evening.
“I don’t know anything about it.”
The blue man didn’t believe the Neil, but since there was no evidence, no arrest was made. The Neil felt molten eyes disappearing and reappearing in soupy shadows all the way home. It seemed the city had marked him as a shady character. A blue skeleton of a cat that was held together by webbings of fur moaned in an alley. Its eyes were red alarms.
The Neil froze in his tracks and shifted left, horrified. “What do you want, animal?”
“Nothing,” said the cat with an orange smile. There were traces of ground beef locked in pockets deep inside his gums.
The Neil nodded at the animal wearily and continued trucking along the sandstone road. Two blocks later, he discovered two sets of pattering stumps echoing the sounds his own feet made while shuffling through space. The Neil said, “Don’t torment me, animal! If you’re looking for a meal, I have plenty of cash—take it all if you please!”
The animal sped up so that he was walking beside the Neil Cicierega. “Why are your nerves like that?”
“Like what?”
“They’re all bunched up and jagged like a tortoise’s,” the cat wheezed with rattling lungs.
“I don’t wish to make conversation with you. If you want something, just tell me,” said the Neil.
The cat sighed, rattled, and asked, “Might I have a spare dollar. If you’re well-off, that is.”
“It’s difficult to not be well-off in this town,” said the Neil, evoking a tear from the spout of the animal. The Neil quickly unsheathed a dollar from his coat pocket to avoid further emotional evocations.
The beastly form scampered into the urban shadows without thanking the Neil, and gripping the dollar firmly between his skeletal lips. The Neil shortly arrived at his mosquesque apartment, where he quickly returned to unconsciousness to complete his required seven hours of daily sleep.
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comment if u liekedd it if not its beter to not say anything at all then to say somthing bad. add me if ur neil.
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