Sex and Death in Television Town Read online

  The spiky woman sees all of the nudity, but decides not to indulge herself. The fishy smells are too strong for her.

  Before she leaves the tent, she finds Nixx crouching in a dark corner. He leaps up and grabs her by the waist. Twists her into circles and sucks in her spicy lips.

  They continue spinning in a circle as they kiss, like a mirror image of the fleshy rotating totem pole that spits whiskey saliva instead of squid juice.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Bleary-eyed Random is lying in a dry tub. He has a straight razor and is wondering if he shouldn’t slit his own throat with it. A square ladybug crawls a cross his chin.

  There’s an unconscious Telosian in another tub.

  “We need to stick with the others,” Sharp says from the doorway.

  Random nods and puts the razor away.

  “Those things should be here any second.” Sharp cleans her nails with a fork. “I can feel them all around us.”

  Random has an ear in one hand. His lower lip sags gently at the hermaphrodite.

  “I’m still a virgin,” he says. Sharp cleans her spectacles. “I got married yesterday and my wife died before we could even consummate the marriage.” He scratches at a drop of blood on his sleeve and frowns.

  Sharp nods her head and goes up to the attic, an empty place of white powders and webs. Death is here, digging through an old chest in search of bullets.

  On a shelf, there are jars filled with seasons. There is a jar of tiny winter, jars of tiny springs, autumns, and dozens of jars of summers. She wonders if the season will change if she opens a jar. She wonders what will happen if she drinks a season or rubs it on her belly.

  Beneath the seasons she finds transparent paper-thin clothes labeled: Music, forest, and lunch. Wide eyes, like she found just what she’s always been looking for. She wads the glassy suits into a little ball and hides them under her shirt.

  Death doesn’t seem to notice her. He is playing with a toy truck and cursing himself.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sharp goes into an empty room and examines the strange suits. They have a stretchy latex feeling to them. She removes her clothes, exposing shriveled hairy breasts and a penis/vagina combination. And pulls on the suit marked “Forest”. The suit is tight-forming, like a second layer of skin.

  Once on, it changes. Deep green colors swirl across her flesh, until her body becomes a painting of a forest. No, a moving painting. The trees are swaying in the wind and she can see tiny birds inside of her.

  Like a Telosian’s face, she thinks.

  Her new forest body looks sexy to her. Much better than her regular body. She goes to rub her curves, but her hands slip inside of the forest. She can feel the trees and the crisp air. There are birds chirping and deer sharpening their antlers.

  She looks at herself in a mirror. The light of the forest brightens the room. She smiles and cries and laughs to herself.

  The mirror shatters. Sharp looks on the ground of broken glass to find a bloody twitching dove that had flown out of her chest.

  She picks it up, pets the blood out of its feathers, and drops it inside of her torso.

  Then goes back to smiling/crying/laughing . . .

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Random is out in the desert, sickle-running, aimlessly. Something is after him. Screeching baby-cries all around him in the darkness. Gurgles, white-bubble movements.

  He doesn’t know how he got outside or where he’s going. But he’s running away from Telos, deeper into the unknown wilds. The lights from the town disappear from view.

  Stumbling. He doesn’t look back.

  Blind and nerve-flooded, his heart punching out of his throat and eyeballs.

  He runs until his body goes limp. His face collapses into the hard dirt and blood pops out of his nose.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Morning comes. Nixx and Cry wake in a worm-mud puddle in the middle of the road, with gila-scorpions clipping at their knuckles.

  “Don’t move, they’re poisonous,” Cry says.

  “I’m not moving,” Nixx replies.

  Nixx isn’t moving.

  “They lock into your skin with their jaws and sting you repeatedly with their tails. You have to cut off their heads to get them to stop.”

  “You don’t know anything about gila-scorpions,” Nixx says.

  Cry frowns at him.

  The gila-scorpions are squatting up and down at them.

  “I didn’t die during the night,” Nixx says. “The creatures never came.”

  “So?” Cry draws her blade and cuts the insect-lizards into halves.

  “You told me I’d die in the night.”

  Cry shrugs.

  “You lied to me.”

  “I didn’t lie,” she says. She stands and wipes mud from her legs. “I was just off by a day. You’ll surely die tonight.”

  “I didn’t see my death when we made love last night. I saw pianos.”

  “You don’t always see what you’re looking for,” Cry says.

  Cry stretches in the soft morning sun. It’s quiet. Not even birds chirping. The Telosian circus tent is down and wadded against the side of the road. Dead campfires expel willowy strings of smoke.

  “What do you think they were doing last night?” Cry asks.

  “Some kind of religious ceremony,” Nixx says. “Most likely.”

  “It really got me going after that juice sprayed on us.”

  “It was probably some kind of drug,” Nixx says, slow blinking eyes.

  Cry bites her lip.

  “I think I’m going to like these people,” Cry says. “There’s something inside of me,” she rubs the skin below her belly button, “that’s telling me these people have a lot of potential. I think there’s a real future for me in this town.”

  Nixx is trying to reassemble the gila-scorpions, placing their bodies in a perfectly straight line exactly two inches apart. Cry stands over him and presses her bare feet against his hands.

  “Too bad you won’t be around to help me,” she says.

  “You never know,” Nixx says. “You were wrong about last night. I might not die for a long time.”

  Cry smirks and shakes her head at him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Nixx and Cry walk in on Death sticking his hands in and out of Sharp’s torso.

  “What are you doing?” Cry asks.

  It is raining inside of Sharp’s forest skin. Jesus is washing his hands in the water.

  “I found it in the attic,” Sharp says.

  Cry’s eyes light up. She sticks her face through Sharp’s back and wets her hair, drinks the raindrops. “I want one!”

  “I’ve got three,” Sharp says. “They are all different.”

  “Go put another one on,” Cry says.

  Sharp comes back with another skin. This one puts a city inside of her. Mile-high skyscrapers, thousands of honking cars, smog pouring into the room.

  “Take it off! Take it off!” the others say.

  Sharp leaves and returns with food inside of her skin.

  “Yummy!” Cry says. She pulls a cupcake out of her butt cheek and takes a bite. “It’s sweet!”

  Jesus pulls hamburgers out of her belly and Nixx pulls a ten foot chain of linked sausages from her crotch.

  “Don’t eat too much of her,” Cry says. “She’ll die.”

  Sharp shakes her head. She empties all of the food out of her arm onto the table. Then removes her arm from the sleeve. It is perfectly fine. Her flesh has not been turned to food like Cry suspected. When Sharp inserts her arm back into the skin, all the food has been replenished.

  “Where’s Random and Oxy?” Nixx asks.

  “Oxy is upstairs,” Sharp says. “I haven’t seen the kid.”

  Nixx searches upstairs and finds only Oxy asleep in front of the television girl, missing a show with burly muscled women wearing American flags for underwear. Random is nowhere to be seen.

  Nixx walking downstairs, “We should look for h
im.”

  The others sag with disinterested faces.

  “He’s probably dead,” Jesus says. “He wasn’t very strong. Anything could’ve killed him.”

  They search the town but only find Telosians with their heads plugged into walls, high-pitched hums for faces.

  Above the saloon, caged animal smells, there’s a group of gnarly black-clothed Telosians lined against the walls facing each other. Also with blank-hum screens.

  Cry claws at a man’s bare chest, cat-growling at him and licks flakes of skin from her fingernails.

  “What are you doing?” Sharp hisses.

  The Telosian wakes and his face turns into an angry b&w horror movie with a golem walking through a village.

  Cry snickers when the man reaches for his remote control.

  Cry snickers when the man reaches for his remote control.

  He draws it and his hand falls off as he points it at her face, not realizing the blade she was holding in front of him. The television channel changes to thousands of screaming Japanese people running through the streets of Tokyo to escape Rodan.

  Blood rivers out of the Telosian’s wrist as he flails out of his seat, rolling across the splintery floor and knocking the other men out of their seats.

  The rest of them wake up with more angry horror shows.

  They shoot at Cry with their remotes, but nothing happens. They don’t understand why.

  Outside:

  Jesus has found Random in a terrible state. His face is bloody. His tongue is dry and swollen. He can hardly speak.

  “What happened?” Cry asks, as she steps out of the saloon, lick-cleaning her blade. “The desert . . .” Random says. “It’s alive.”

  “Show us,” Death says.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  They leave town to the west and discover the landscape has changed. It is not desert anymore. It’s just . . . babies. Millions of them. Human babies growing from plants. They are all that can be seen for miles. Screaming, sleeping, wiggling, cooing, gurgling, pooping, crying babies.

  “I always wanted a baby!” Sharp says.

  She dances into the babies like a field of sunflowers.

  “Were these here before?” Cry asks.

  “I was being chased by the creatures last night,” Random chokes. “I was knocked unconscious last night and about an hour ago I woke up in a pile of babies. I had to step care- fully through them to get back to town.”

  Sharp plucks her favorite baby from the field, a plump blue-eyed girl, and brings her back to the others.

  “Are you going to keep that?” Nixx asks.

  “I can’t have children of my own,” she says, kitty-eyes glazed over at the child jiggling in her arms.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Back in town:

  The gang of black-clothed remote-slingers with horror movie faces has gathered in the middle of town, waiting for the outsiders. Their leader is in the front with a long trench coat spinning in the breeze, Nosferatu on his face. And in his hand: a gun. A real gun. Not a remote control. It is extremely old and rust-candied, but will work. The Telosian waves it over his head at his opponents, surprising them with the new weapon. He glances at his brother next to him, the one with blood gushing out of his wrist in cartoonishly large splashes.

  He wants justice.

  Jesus nods at him and steps forward. The Nosferatu Telosian holsters his rust-pistol and nods his enormous head back at Jesus.

  Facing each other, hands out to their sides, Jesus throwing the right side of his trench coat behind his thigh to reveal a black widow pistol.

  Jesus allows his opponent to go for his gun first. The Telosian draws and both guns fire at the same time. But Jesus’ bullet hits first, right in the screen. Exploding the television head, and Sharp’s baby cheers at the cloud of smoke.

  There is a bullet hole in Jesus’ hair below his left ear.

  His hair is so matted that Sharp can see a perfectly round hole. She closes one eye and peers through it to see Nixx on the other side.

  Nixx is on the ground with a bullet in his chest.

  Cry kicks him.

  No response.

  “Dead,” she says.

  Sharp and Random back away.

  Two of the Telosians, including the one with a missing hand, are fighting over the rusty gun. The pistol falls apart in their hands. Christ fires his gun two more times and makes two more clouds of smoke.

  The rest of the raggedy Telosian gang doesn’t move. They stare at Jesus with ghostly TV shows on mute. They make sudden movements that force the grim reaper to go for his other pistol, but the movements aren’t aggressive. Jesus relaxes his arm, confused face, when he realizes they are applauding him, cheering with golden-age Hollywood movies.

  Even though he killed their leaders.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Telosian gang makes Jesus Christ their leader/savior/god. He is invincible and will make them invincible.

  Almost dusk, in the saloon: Jesus is party-king with the Telosians. He is at the table chugging bottles of whiskey with chubby television whores on his thighs.

  Sharp at another table with Random, crouching her shoulders to shield her baby from the splashing whiskey and blaring television shows.

  “It’ll be night soon,” Random tells her. “What are they doing?”

  Sharp is captured by the infant’s smile.

  “They said they were going to barricade the town . . .” Random’s voice is barely audible in the television ooze.

  Cry descends the staircase. Two Telosian men and a woman behind her, straightening their clothes rubbing the sweat from their necks.

  “What are we going to do?” Random asks Cry when she sits down next to him and lights a cigar.

  “About the goblins?” Cry asks, blowing smoke out of her teeth.

  Random nods. “It’s getting dark.”

  “Not sure there’s anything we can do,” Cry says.

  She goes to Jesus’ table, sits across from him and steals one of his chubby whores.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Cry asks.

  “Making friends!” Christ is very animated. He is gargle-laughing and chattering everyone’s ears off. The complete opposite of his usual calm/quiet/depressed demeanor. “I learned their language and can communicate with them now! They say they will help fight the goblins! We have nothing to worry about!”

  “I don’t care about the goblins,” Cry says. “I just don’t want you taking over this town. These people are special. I want them.”

  Jesus’ face drops. His voice is no longer happy-toned when he says, “You can’t have them.”

  “They’re mine,” she says. “Stay away from them.”

  “I’m willing to share them with you,” he says with black/broken teeth. “But I won’t give them up.”

  Cry says, “I’ve seen the future. They aren’t for you. Keep away.”

  With that, Cry whips around, nicking Christ’s knuckles with her stegosaurus spikes, and stomps out of the saloon with most of his television whores.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Sharp comes back from the bathroom into the saloon. It is late in the night, most of the Telosians are passed out or plugged into outlets upstairs. There is just one table awake, with Jesus and three Telosians playing poker. The bartender is back in the kitchen washing dishes.

  She goes to the gambling table to reclaim her baby from Christ and jumps in shock when she sees the condition of her new child. It is covered from head to toe in yellow bruises, it’s skin loose and droopy, very sickly. It’s mouth is sagging open but it doesn’t cry or gurgle.

  “What did you do to her?” Sharp screams at Jesus.

  The gunslinger is busy trying to keep his eyes from rolling back into his head, unable to concentrate on his cards or Sharp’s words.

  She slams her tiny fist onto the table in front of him and he wakes up. “How could you beat an infant?” she cries.

  Jesus grunts when he sees the baby. “How did th
at happen?”

  “You tell me. She was fine ten minutes ago.”

  Jesus shrugs and moves his eyes to the television shows. She hasn’t had that twitch since before she met Battle Johnny.

  Sharp begins to twitch her neck at him.

  “Don’t ignore me!” she screams, spitting on the deck of cards. She’s scared to touch the baby, worried it’s skin is too sensitive to be touched.

  Jesus stops looking at the Telosians and turns to Sharp. “They say that it isn’t a baby.”

  “What?” Sharp asks.

  “It’s not really a baby. It’s a piece of fruit.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” she asks.

  Jesus holds up his hand like a stop sign at Sharp and a Telosian passes him a butcher knife.

  “Look,” he says, and chops the baby in half with the knife.

  The baby is in two pieces and still wiggling and gurgling like nothing happened. The infant’s insides are not human. They are the like the insides of a watermelon. Juicy, red, with black and white seeds.

  “See?” Jesus says. “Fruit.”

  He cuts a slice from the gurgling baby and takes a bite.

  Sharp’s face is frozen at him, blank eyes, mouth agape.

  She can’t say a word as the gunslinger devours her baby.

  “Delicious,” he says, licking his lips.

  He gets up and takes the baby’s upper half with him.

  He gets a spoon from the kitchen and shovels red balls out of its gut.

  Sharp doesn’t react until the baby is hollow of fruit and no longer moving. Just a baby-shaped rind pushed to the edge of the table.

  Her reaction is: a high-pitched shriek that makes the glasses crackle.

  She races out of the saloon, out of town, into the dark landscape to the west.