[click]
He sits, concentrates on the sound of his inaudible breathing, a reverse-image of who or what he once believed himself to be, his head expanding and contracting with each inhalation/exhalation, opening and closing like an invisible accordion; there is an insect no larger than a flea inside his chest, he knows it’s there though he cannot see or confirm it for himself, rather, he feels it there, moving inside his shell-like body as he continues to breathe—calm, collected—focuses on the movement of his hollow ribcage, his empty organs, his non-existent extremities…
Two children are playing in an empty field. One of them has already begun to die; the other has yet to be born. The boy will one day grow up to be a doctor, while the as-yet unborn girl, ravished by Catholic guilt for some sin she never committed, will retreat into the body of a simian and be taken to an institute for sex-addicts. The boy, now lying flat on his back and gazing up at the sky, wants nothing more than to be left alone; the girl, whose first menstruation cycle began less than two weeks ago, is frolicking in the sun and thinking about what sort of instrument her playmate is hiding inside his jeans. Before the boy knows it she has sidled up beside him, has slid her clammy hands beneath his plaid shirt, the one his mommy dressed him in so that he wouldn’t catch cold on this brisk January morning. His chest and belly are bare, free of scars or blemishes or warts, and the unborn girl, excited by the possibilities, snakes her fingers into the center of his cavernous navel, eliciting a scream like a siren from the young boy, who falls down a hole that begins to gush like liquid lava, spewing forth black tar, shit-brown water, a fisherman’s cap, a box of soiled condoms…
He slowly turns the page of the tome in front of him, an illustrated textbook on natural childbirth (he is looking at Chapter 23, entitled “Non-Invasive Techniques for Taming the Shrewish Wench”) and gazes down at the drawing in front of him, a drawing depicting a plump woman lying spread-eagled on a wooden table, a tail protruding from her anus; her battered legs hang over the sides of the table like two dead chickens while the head of what looks to be a giant rat peers out from the dark space between them with large, squinty eyes; two male doctors stand at the foot of the table, a mucous-like substance dripping from their gloved hands as they converse and look on in terror at the horrifying female specimen on the slab…
[sound of page turning]
And now a picture of this same “she-devil” with horns, blood dripping from her/its mouth, a mouth that stretches all the way to the ears, belly bulging as she/it rides atop the rodent-like thing that has been ejected from the mysterious place between those fleshy white legs; there is a caption beneath the picture that reads:
Illustration #66-6: The shrewish wench has given birth to a giant RAT and devoured the doctors in her terrible jaws—this is a common occurrence! It is not enough to wear gloves. One must always carry a large knife and an even larger cross when undertaking the dangerous business of delivering babies.
[sound of page turning, the upper right hand corner tearing ever-so-slightly]
On this page there is an illustration of the wench (or what’s left of her) torn to pieces, her uterus stretched across the floor like a slingshot; a trail of excrement leads to the two doctors, who are covered in a mixture of fluid and entrails which they must have hacked through with their large knives and crosses when they made their treacherous escape from the wench’s fetid womb; they are both standing atop the giant rat-child, from whose underside (it is now revealed) hangs a large sack of testicles…
[sound of book closing—very loud thud]
His breathing has sped up and his body has begun to sprout teeth, hair, genitals, eyes; he is suddenly thirsty and—using his new set of baby teeth to grab a carton of week-old milk—he tilts the upper-half of his partially-restored body back toward the floor, sending the milk flying into the air as his entire torso turns into a lolling, red tongue that laps up the airborne white liquid like a starved, expectant feline; the milk careens over the thousands of tiny buds on his torso-tongue before it rushes down into his chest, where the insect is still writhing about, flushing it down into the lower-half of his body, near his still-translucent, dangling penis which, startled (perhaps scared, even), swings with vigor into the book on childbirth now sitting on the desk of his study, causing it to fall on the remote control lying on the floor…
[click]
Mr. so-and-so, age such-and-such, a part-time volunteer for Drugs Anonymous (D.A.), was stabbed in the face with a metal fork this morning at 6:23 a.m. The perpetrator is said to have been an African-American male and was purportedly undergoing a very vigorous detox program when, in the middle of his T.V. dinner, he suddenly stood up, shouted “I’m not hungry,” and plunged his fork into the side of Mr. so-and-so’s face. When questioned about this later he told reporters that “The man’s cheek was the exact same color and texture as the food,” which is why he became so disoriented (this was confirmed by others in the cafeteria at the time, including some of the “chefs,” who spoke on condition of anonymity). The doctors from the next-door hospital who operated on the man earlier this morning told ZYX News that there had been some concern that the metal object, which had been thrust so mightily into the man’s cheek, might have pierced the brain, but they were relieved to discover that his head was completely empty and therefore had been, according to one surgeon, “Extremely easy to manipulate…”
[click]
His toe (which had not existed up until a few moments ago) presses the on/off switch on the controller and once again he listens to the soundless sound of his breathing, of his inhalation/exhalation, and he breathes, breathes with his whole body, his whole being, thinking again about the unborn girl and her curious, clammy touch that January morning so long ago, that day when she unwittingly implanted the insect into his body; he also thinks about the detailed illustrations in the (albeit outdated) medical text on childbirth his wet eyes have scanned and recorded and digested, as well as his mentors in the medical establishment who have delivered him from “evil” on more than one occasion, and as his brain rotates like the earth around the sun he feels the insect pressing up against his anus as if trying to get out; taking a deep breath he coughs three times, expelling it straight through the shaft of his erect penis, now flushed with red and purple and decorated with stringy veins that pulsate like a wet vulva, sending the tiny, black insect onto the T.V. screen in front of him with a watery splat…
…and before long his teeth have grown a second layer of teeth, his hair has sprouted from his newly re-born(e) body in all directions like an overgrown Chia Pet ™, his eyes have bled like ink into his temples, which wrap all the way down and around to his feet— now floating in a gelatinous river of clear fluid—and before it’s all over/begun, all of the images and the sights/sounds/smells/tastes/touches that he has ever experienced or read about or dreamed about all congeal into one final, unresolved, resounding question that has/will torture/d him for eternity, the question that preceded/followed his inception and has/will never, ever go away, the question that can never in a million years be answered because it is intrinsically unanswerable; undoubtedly, undeniably unreasonable…
Why
was
I
ever
born?
????
????
[click]
