6/5/2017 WDR-GAS #2 by Jim MeiroseWDR-GAS #2 Now on to cooking; there I see, you got the Skip codes, yeah, they are the Skip codes; that’s senility; yeah, I see you read them; that’s senility; yeah, now you enter them; that’s senility; and then they’re in and your face pressed to the cathode ray tube, but; they don’t call them that anymore; what do they call them now, those cathode ray tubes? Go back to when they called them that but that is before the ship was built before cable cooking shows and all my word, that young man Skip seems to have disappeared in some kind of flash-bang of a conflagration; can’t see nothing till the smoke clears; ship gone, ship here, hey, hit a mine; yeah that’s senility yah that’s senility yah yah yah that is; and then the old dog that just happens to be out with the new dogs spies me and does the first thing it ever does when attacked; snap snarl nip on the new one, new one, new one, new; and all at once we are in some kind of mind-floating silly-place; ship not yet built, TV not yet invented, no such thing as cable but to winch up things by, and as a matter of fact, somehow alive before born, both I my crew my meat my fish as a matter of fact, it’s possible the ship blew up but somehow way in the future so that’s why I wasn’t killed and the cooking show set is safe in some eternal bubble as a matter of fact this must be how coronated saints feel the day they make it, yes; but the poor Skip-devil must be in the water; yes, the slimy ice-cold ocean water. Thus Skip plunged from the gone Dakota Maru, exploded or otherwise, and it was a dive or a fall or a cannonball on a hundred degree day at the fucking Brookside Swim Club, in its first of two incarnations, the water smelled like it couldn’t be breathed not salt not fresh not chlorine wait back up yes chlorine and, up out of the water into the real close face of a women from the gone fearful past, say her name what is her name who is she, God, she is pretty-face young Gundren just as soaked as me in the blazing cancer causing sun but before that was known to anybody and Skip and Gundren weren’t married yet so Skip didn’t know they were going and the Dakota Maru cruised away without him into the future intending to wait for him, if it can get through Viet Nam without being recommissioned as a hospital ship and blown to bits in the Denmark Strait by a Barham Blaster model modern slick-sided U-boat of a make-believe vintage replica submarine, no I don’t know I don’t know no I don’t, I think that’s the wrong war; that’s senility; wrong ship; that’s senility; but who cares it really hasn’t happened yet, so there’s really no right or wrong, everything’s just a stupid guess backed up by absolutely no research of any kind human or otherwise. Plus, submarines had nothing at all to do with it. Thus, she surfaced bone dry somehow, and quickly spoke. Hey, boy. What is up? Word on the street is, you plan to get a sea based job. What might that be? It sounds mysterious and fascinating. I, uh, oh, blubbered young Skip, flustered. I guess the thought that the sea’s out there right now this minute every minute past or future kind of—pulls at me. Yah, pulls. Pulls. You know? No, I don’t. I don’t know that kind of pulls. That’s why it’s fascinating. There was a life a past a world behind her eyes, Skip spoke to provoke it, though back in those days where they were now, things were different. He asked her, Say, I know you, yes I do. You’re in homeroom with me; in school, as in—school. You know? Isn’t that funny? Yah, I know. I’ve seen you. I do. Say, but, what? What’s your name, anyfree? No, no, I didn’t mean that. What I meant was, like, I mean—besides being Mister extremely unique? That’s what I was trying to grab down. Like, you not run with the pack man. You lone dog, you. You! I kin tellit! What’s wrong anyway what I’m sayin’s not quite correct? Oh—no, said Skip, somewhat squishy somewhat squirmy—I mean I think I’d rather continue this talk with you, honey, out of the deep ice-cold water all dry, if you don’t mind. I feel; I feel that in this monstrous monstrosity of an ocean, there’s all limitless nothing all around us forever to some shores we never can return to, that will stifle and stifle and stifle us down, until the day we die, if we don’t protest. Especially, given the extreme chill of clammy wetness in this breeze. Now, now, don’t get me wrong—water is great to have around us, there are worse things to be enveloped in, because water won’t form up into a million jagged toothy mouths, and rip you turning its own self red so effectively, that might have been its intent to begin with, but if you get out in time, nothing untoward can happen, especially not if it’s just water, you know. And the little frostbite you incur, heals fairly clean, along with the use of the correct high-dose opiates. So, how ‘bout it? Up we go on the dry, like, huh—oops! Pulling her by the hand from the water, he at once realized a slip had begun, but the realization came too late to avoid his taking a barefoot header onto rock-hard sunny poolside tile. The ocean had sunk away beneath a pool, a pool like Brookside pool all painted blue in the bottom, and all private where you need to pay dues yearly, and his slimy uncallused young flatfoot slip up on the unexpected tile surrounding the wonderfully bright yes blue bright yes, threw him back half in the water and half out, you see, and his headbone hairline broke against the unyielding hard of the poolside tile slipway. The rumble and drum of the bang went down and the mind-demons that lurk in the shallow caverns everybody has seen but no one dares admit to for fear of being called crazy, injected the first of fifty once per week shots of pure hard crystal terraphobia into his sweet left butt-cheek; and that was where it all began. Fear of land was planted now; and full-blown terror would rise in the coming weeks, but, this is now; he picked himself up not knowing he had gained from the hard tile the seed of a profound mental disorder, that Father Dwyer’s fifth generation replacement down the road will memorialize the legendary Skip for having withstood acting out his inner struggles with. The intent was to imply that Skip got well and proceeded toward a much more substantial future almost a normal future and he will emerge from the door in the wall from the inner dark to the outer bright, and will see what Father Dwyer has prepared for him; in a row down the counter stretched selections of teas, bag over bag of sliced white bread, a washtub sized container of butter and fortune cookies, and a line of dark squat sticky-jam bottles the number of which amounts to fourteen. Doctor Dwyer, the someday priest, on the day following the poor man’s slip-fall, examined the MRI of the wretch’s injury, and the results were inconclusive because no one he discussed the case with knew what an MRI was, since such a thing was not invented yet. Once this hit him the results disappeared and so, that was the end of that. So, taking a step to the future, he abandoned his expensive shack up honey, who would go on to write a self-published expose of the great holy man’s youth, and moved to a secret location where even before he took his first piss and then tinkered for hours with a defective wall thermostat, he rushed to dial the number of the nearest seminary, the urge having been summoned up in him by the savior on high to enroll. The red dot of the first camera assigned to him appeared years later and so, now, yes now, whatever that is, he stood in the air-conditioned studio of the Sunday Dinner with Father Dwyer stage set, banged down his car keys on the stainless-steel countertop, angry at having reached into his pocket only to find them and immediately become disoriented blurting out to the open mike, What the hell are these jingly chained together things? What? Car keys? Why? I have no fucking car or fucking celibate car or any kind of car, I am much too famous to drive my own car, the terrorists yes terrorists will abort me with a blast of some kind, or maybe even some lower sexless pale grey vermin would end my short life with a single press of a single remote control homebrew cellphone activation green-glow button, and, again; a large blast will have spelled my end a second time—so on and so, Father Dwyer went on—but, yes, someplace deeper in his severely mature brain, he knew this was just a plain vanilla civilian-style panic attack, the best cure for which is the pop of two Ativan and bang of the left fist up hard on the bone bridge right between the eye. Thus treated, he was fit to do the show, once more. Fit as scads of perfectly tuned Guarneri Del Gesu fancy old-school Paganini style worn out aging fiddles being sawed away on by hordes of unwashed but quite enthusiastic Lil’ Abners and Lil’ Axises, who sport scarcely one lesson between all of them, are fit to take the stage in Carnegie hall. So, fit as he was no fiddle at all, Dwyer mounted the cooking show set, and bellowed quite hard, Welcome to episode nine-hundred three of my quite unique holy God yes holy Jesus, wild wild cooking show! No, here is the pickle; the show today may be abbreviated, because there’s a fat superstorm Sandy blowing up solidly all over the whole world outside, like God sends to buffet us every hundred years, meaning we may lose our artificially manufactured power soon, if not so already, and if it gets dark when there is no power-light, we will have to split shot the show all the way to under-down city in the chilly black depths no man has ever reached and lived, for today. There is something odd about one of the ships, out there; one of the ships that is tuned-in; can’t tell the actual name though, as; aha, I bet it is the Knock Nevis. Once the world’s largest bulk crude carrier, it is at sea today, and is too fantastically huge, yes much too wide and deep to see; they are awed, always awed, so they scream as if at the Beatles’ first gleaming, Yes, there it is! Yes—yes—yes, there it is! That is odd that the master control board told Father Dwyer that the huge ship was not only at sea, but had a cable networked and operational flatscreen tuned in, but it has to be right must be right yes—but, no. The ship was scrapped years ago. Why is the master control board stating, she still exists and is far at sea? Why is it looking back far in the past? Oh, it needs calibration, yup! Uselessness is the price we pay for scrimping on regular tuneups and maintenance. This is one example. But as much as I would like to give you more, this is it, because my correspondent in Alang, Bangladesh, is going to be taking over the rest of the time of this episode, for the complete news on Ships Scheduled to be Broken Today! Here you go, I fade away but I still know here comes the new picture the remote correspondent, absolutely all woman and rather good-looking at that, so we will see her, but, her voice is not allowed. My voice’s contract states, that as long as I am alive and able to do the job, I will do all voice-overs and any other voice announcer’s work anywhere in the damned near and far wide and narrow long and short network that carries my show or remote reports thereof. So, here goes; the woman is standing close in with a sparkling-clean face and haircut and clothing immaculately fitted and pressed and she looks more like a millennial office junior manager than a reporter, but here she goes; she’s saying, but not, so I say into and through her and out her mouth, Here in Alang, the biggest most dangerous super-loud workplace in Bangladesh, the workers have been found to have one fascinating thrilling unusual hell-and-hellhound bound piece of information to share; in the hut up the hill with the slick greasy hot floor between Bodhisattva I and Bodhisattva II rooming boarding and floating evening to black-night forever nonstop Incest Can be Fun shows, is playing in a spectrum-spaced clear spot carved from the back wall of the residential unit one of the dozens of flat screen TVs the network distributed to all the super-gigantically-hulled and what’s worse, just plain enormous huge but oddly deathly quiet steel monsters sailing across the earth’s curved ultra-liquid surface, and is proudly and ignorantly blasting fourth the very same words I am now. Yes just like now, but; since you cannot hear their TV around the world to where you are, it really doesn’t make a sound a la the tree in the woods’ stupid question that is so hackneyed anymore; in the hut it indeed of course sounds, and—the workers living in that hovel, who lifted the TV and all supporting electronics needed to get it going out from the steel bowels of the Knock Nevis when it was driven up for beaching onto the conch strewn pebbly totally asbestos plus crude oil contaminated beach, where it crushed quickly and quietly a horseshoe crab laying her eggs into a hot slit she carved not without effort, from the blazing stinking sea-sand between two decaying human-style sandcastles built when open public commoner’s open swim season was on, and its televisions and anything else of value that’s not sheet steel, was waiting submissively to be unplugged, removed, and taken. Okay, take it back away, Father, said the correspondent foolishly not considering that since I am her voice, I need not have her tell me that which I of course know by heart already. So, I will finally say, because this is after all my cooking show, on the counter are a selection of teas, a bag of sliced white bread, a jar of peanut butter, and fourteen varieties of jam; so, just as you were ordered earlier, Noman my man, take the pill laid down before you. Sure, take the pill laid down on the silk pillow before you. Yes, that one there, why do you ask which one when there’s just one right there. Yes, that, the ringbearers’ pillow. What? Why do you so stupidly ask why is that there, why the hell do you think that’s there? What other kind of pillow do you expect a small boy named Henry to march up to the altar with the rings on top for? God-dammit! Yah, well, I suppose this is it, said Noman, with his eyes screwed tight down on Phyllis’ face-blue eye-lashed blinking pools. It all sped on from that instant their worlds changed. And, in that very night in the semi dark Holiday Inn Hotel room, on the never-yet-used brand-new Tempurpedic mattress the Holiday chain was upgrading its millions on millions of sleeping stations to, Phyllis was legally and properly impregnated during one of several coital sessions spanning the long fat night. The wedding night in fact was so deeply intense, that the next morning she absolutely dropped off to sleep over breakfast, with a mouthful of yellow egg yolk dripping from her slack lip-corner, her being too weak to chew any more. With this, the equally spent Noman rose clicked and summoned the goofing-off bus-staff lined up against the far restaurant wall to get her and take her and load her back up to the room, to sleep the day away. They left grumbling at the lack of a tip, so then Noman sat by the bed in the semi-dark lightly curtained morning room, to wait her out by slipping into a nearby book. He tried but it proved too dark for him to get any pleasure from the reading, so he put the book aside, soon nodded as the empty time flowed into him, and he was weighted down enough to dive and join Phyllis on the wedding bed; yes, join her in the perfect kind of tiredness’ expected and ultimate love-coupling. He breathed in and she breathed out and so and so all vice versa, super in love wreathing their true unconsciousness’ envelopment, and finally starting her down the road to that ultimate tokophobia. Bio: Jim Meirose's work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including Calliope, Offbeat/Quirky (Journal of Exp. Fiction pub,), Permafrost, North Atlantic Review, Blueline, Witness, and Xavier Review, and has been nominated for several awards. His E-book "Inferno" has been published by Underground Voices. His novels, "Mount Everest" and "Eli the Rat", are available from Amazon. Visit www.jimmeirose.com to know more. Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2023
Categories |