fingers like a scroll from the heavens and read: The baby died. I put it in the trash. Remember to pull the can to the curb tomorrow. I’m sorry I don’t love you anymore.
Don’t feel bad about it. This is just what I do.
You pace from one end of the kitchen to the other. You hate yourself during every minute of it, but you’re compelled to pace. You’re a mad pacer. You were born to pace. The sun shines and you pace. The sun hangs itself on the blue horizon and you pace. The blue horizon fizzles into black emptiness and you pace. Black emptiness and you pace. Black emptiness. Pace.
Morning comes and you pass out on the floor. You dream that you die and meet the spouse-stranger on a bus taking you to Hell. The spouse-stranger shows you a ticket stamped PURGATORY in gold embossment. The bus drives off a cliff and you wake up. You realize what you must do.
You leave your house and stand at the bus stop. The bus pulls up five minutes later. Strangers occupy half the seats.
The other seats remain unfilled. You sit beside a stranger near the back of the bus. The two of you speed headfirst into small talk about the poisoned cat food epidemic in China, and that settles it.
You go to the stranger’s house because your own house is behind you now. You feel the stranger’s stop approach like a historical compendium of all the strangers who have ever slept together.
But when you get to the stranger’s house, you find that it is haunted. You stand outside and squint your eyes at the house’s twisting spires, as if to gauge its spook count and decide whether the risk is worth the fuck. “I grew up in a few haunted houses,” you say.
“It isn’t that haunted,” the stranger says.
Puffy white ghosts peer out from all the windows. The house is definitely that haunted. “Maybe it isn’t,” you say, and walk inside.
The stranger guides you upstairs to a room where a stained 134
LOST IN CAT BRAIN LAND
mattress lies in a corner. “I can’t have sheets in the house because the ghosts poop on them,” the stranger says.
“That would be a lot of dirty laundry,” you say.
You and the stranger undress and lie on your backs. Then you turn and kiss the stranger and you fold over each other.
The sex isn’t that great because ghosts howl and fly through the walls. Lovemaking strikes you as a funny thing to do in a haunted house and you laugh. The stranger takes sex very seriously and does not laugh. This also makes it less great. The stranger sighs a ghostly wail and orgasms. You haven’t come yet, but the stranger says, “I guess that’s the end of our sleeping together.”
“I guess that’s it,” you say. You dress in silence, recalling all the reasons you vowed never to live in a haunted house again.
A ghost follows you down the stairs on your way out. You wonder if the stranger ever gets lonely and tries to sleep with the ghosts.
You stand at the bus stop and figure you’ll have to try again some other day. The bus arrives a few minutes later and you step on. You spot the spouse-stranger you’re still legally married to. The spouse-stranger sits beside another stranger who once meant something to you. You can think of nothing that made this stranger different from all the other strangers you have slept with. That stranger was not special, you think. Anyway, it took place in some half-remembered time.
It no longer matters that you engaged in brief encounters with either of these strangers. You still love them, but in the way people love the memory of a carnival funhouse. A gust of longing rises up in you because to hell with it. These encounters do matter. They must add up to something more meaningful than any of the strangers who make them happen. To think otherwise would be sticking a foot in the mouth of your own aimlessness.
Your stop is coming up and you want a stranger to talk with, but all of them converse with other strangers. Your thoughts no 135
CAMERON PIERCE
longer slosh around like bad meat, but you are hungry and a hamburger sounds delightful. Half a mile from your stop, you stand and tiptoe to the front of the bus. You tap the driver on the shoulder. You think that even if she’s a pterodactyl and missing a front tooth, her blue uniform compliments her yellow eyes. You can tell this dinosaur has style and taste.
You ask if she’s heard of an all-night diner that recently opened.
“No,” she says, bubblegum smacking between her elongated jaws.Before you can tell her about the dinner and ask her on a date, the pterodactyl misses a turnoff because you’re distracting her. The bus zooms straight ahead, right off a cliff. As the bus plummets into a canyon, everybody screams, including your ex-lovers.
The bus driver climbs out of her seat and takes you in her arms. She opens the door and leaps out of the bus. Her wings unfold like a lovely umbrella and you sail toward the sun. Deep down in the canyon, the bus explodes. Those strangers are dead now. It’s just you and the pterodactyl. Maybe, if she doesn’t have a nest full of babies somewhere, and she doesn’t feed you to them, the two of you will hit it off.
136
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Introduce yourselves to the bizarro genre and all of its authors with the Bizarro Starter Kit series. Each volume features short novels and short stories by ten of the leading bizarro authors, designed to give you a perfect sampling of the genre for only $5 plus shipping.
BB-0X1
“The Bizarro Starter Kit”
(Orange)
Featuring D. Harlan Wilson, Car-
lton Melick I I, Jeremy Robert Johnson,
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BB-001“The Kafka Effekt” D. Harlan Wilson - A collection of forty-four BB-009 “Dead Bitch Army” Andre Duza -
irreal short stories loosely written in the vein of Franz Kafka, with more than a pinch of William S. Burroughs sprinkled on top. 211 pages $14
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BB-002 “Satan Burger” Carlton Mellick III - The cult novel that put Carl-
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BB-004 “Shall We Gather At the Garden?” Kevin L Donihe -
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pages $14
BB-006 “Stranger on the Loose” D. Harlan Wilson -
-
“Tangerinephant” Kevin Dole 2 -
son’s 2nd collection is planted in the soil of normalcy, but what grows out of that soil is a
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dark, witty, otherworldly jungle... 228 pages $14
164 pages $11
BB-007 “The Baby Jesus Butt Plug” Carlton Mellick III - Using clones
“Foop!” Chris Genoa -
of the Baby Jesus for anal sex will be the hip sex fetish of the future. 92 pages $10
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- The world of the past is an il-
300 pages $14
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BB-031“Sea of the Patchwork Cats” Carlton Mellick III - A quiet BB-023 “Sex and Death In Television Town” Carlton Mellick III - In dreamlike tale set in the ashes of the human race. For Mellick enthusiasts who also adore the old west, a gang of hermaphrodite gunslingers take refuge from a demon plague in The Twilight Zone. 112 pages $10
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with a mind of its own. 104 pages $10
BB-017 “The Unauthorized Woman” Efrem Emerson - Enter the world BB-025 “Sick: An Anthology of Illness” John Lawson, editor - These of the inner freak, a landscape populated by the pre-dead and morticioners, by cockroaches Sick stories are horrendous and hilarious dissections of creative minds on the scalpel's and 300-lb robots. 104 pages $11
edge. 296 pages $16
BB-018 “Fugue XXIX” Forrest Aguirre - Tales from the fringe of speculative BB-026 “Tempting Disaster” John Lawson, editor - A shocking and al-luring anthology from the fringe that examines our culture's obsession with taboos.
mining forgotten treasures of the past. 220 pages $16
260 pages $16
BB-019 “Pocket Full of Loose Razorblades” John Edward Lawson BB-027 “Siren Promised” Jeremy Robert Johnson - Nominated for the
- A collection of dark bizarro stories. From a giant rectum to a foot-fungus factory to a girl Bram Stoker Award. A potent mix
of bad drugs, bad dreams, brutal bad guys, and surreal/
with a biforked tongue. 190 pages $13
incredible art by Alan M. Clark. 190 pages $13
BB-020 “Punk Land” Carlton Mellick III - In the punk version of Heaven, BB-028 “Chemical Gardens” Gina Ranalli - Ro and punk band Green is the the anarchist utopia is threatened by corporate fascism and only Goblin, Mortician's sperm, and a blue-mohawked female assassin named Shark Girl can stop them. 284 pages $15
their way as they try to escape an underground nightmare. 188 pages $13
BB-021“Pseudo-City” D. Harlan Wilson - Pseudo-City exposes what waits in BB-029 “Jesus Freaks” Andre Duza - For God so loved the world that he gave the bathroom stall, under the manhole cover and in the corporate boardroom, all in a way his only two begotten sons… and a few million zombies. 400 pages $16
that can only be described as mind-bogglingly irreal. 220 pages $16
BB-030 “Grape City” Kevin L. Donihe - More Donihe-style comedic bizarro BB-022 “Kafka’s Uncle and Other Strange Tales” Bruce Taylor -
about a demon named Charles who is forced to work a minimum wage job on Earth after Anslenot and his giant tarantula (tormentor? fri-end?) wander a desecrated world in this Hell goes out of business. 108 pages $10
novel and collection of stories from Mr. Magic Realism Himself. 348 pages $17
BB-031“Sea of the Patchwork Cats” Carlton Mellick III - A quiet BB-023 “Sex and Death In Television Town” Carlton Mellick III - In dreamlike tale set in the ashes of the human race. For Mellick enthusiasts who also adore the old west, a gang of hermaphrodite gunslingers take refuge from a demon plague in The Twilight Zone. 112 pages $10
Telos: a town where its citizens have televisions instead of heads. 184 pages $12
BB-032 “Extinction Journals” Jeremy Robert Johnson - An uncanny BB-024 “It Came From Below The Belt” Bradley Sands - What can voyage across a newly nuclear America where one man must confront the problems asso-Grover Goldstein do when his severed, sentient penis forces him to return to high school ciated with loneliness, insane dieties, radiation, love, and an ever-evolving cockroach suit and help it win the presidential election? 204 pages $13
Lost in Cat Brain Land Page 13
