Ugly Heaven

by Carlton Mellick III

  The cave stretches for miles. Empty of life except for the dozens of tiny tick-people that hop at his feet. He walks in the direction that looks the flattest, careful not to slip. His blade raised above his head.

  For hours, he travels the meaty underworld, searching for other people. But there is only a thick black hairy smell here.

  "Salmon," Tree calls out.

  No response. He's not surprised.

  Soon he comes to a skeleton's arm on the ground. People don't have bones in Heaven so he's not quite sure where it could have come from. Actually, it couldn't be human. It is much too long and the fingers end in razor sharp claws. He's pretty sure humans did not have razor sharp claws.

  Tree continues through the slippery meat until he finds another skeleton arm. Then another. There is a trail of them that leads him to a whole field of the skeleton arms.

  And beyond that: a lake of sweat.

  There is something moving near the shore. Tree steps closer, his blade itching in his palm. It is some kind of creature. A blob of flesh, a large womb creature with three skeletal arms growing out of its guts.

  The creature picks tiny people/ticks off of the bank of the sweat pool and drops them into its goo-hole mouth. Tree can hear micro shrieks from a pink tick-woman flapping her limbs as she is sucked into black blubbery lips and swallowed.

  The pudding blob groans and gurgles at the tiny people. There seems to be an unending supply of them. Tree attempts to sneak by while it eats but his movement catches the beast's black ball eyes. It drops the little people and rips across the tonguescape on centipede legs, screeching at Tree with outstretched skeletal arms.

  Tree points his blade at it and the creature pauses.

  "Stay back," he says.

  The thing looks like it might have once been human. It might even understand him. The creature circles around Tree, traps him against the water bank. Belch-shrilling at him.

  In a blink, the creature's arm is cut off as it slashes at Tree.

  Tree doesn't realize that he just defended himself with the blade. It is like his subconscious controls the knife, as the creature attacks again and the knife slices off the other two skeletal limbs lightning-fast. He can cut through bones like wax.

  The yellow man smiles at the armless creature, dances at it.

  "I'm not so easy, am I?" Tree says, giggling at himself, in complete jubilance over his newly discovered abilities.

  The creature unfolds four more arms from its blob-body and lunges forward.

  Tree cuts through the bones, knocking them off at the elbow. But for every arm he cuts, another regrows. Tree's slashing movement becomes too fast to see, a whirlwind that makes a crystal hum. Limbs pile up around them. Tree has to shield his eyes from the chips of bone.

  The blob slices at Tree's arm in a funny angle and almost hits his blade out of his hand. Since that arm is controlled by his subconscious, it was able to jerk away just in time. But while dodging, another arm cuts into Tree's chest. Another stabs into his belly. A long sickle arm swings out of the creature's back and cuts through Tree's ankle like a stalk of corn.

  He tumbles back and splashes into the water. His severed foot lying on the shore.

  The yellow man flaps his millipede tongue at the wetness and rises to one knee. The water isn't deep. He can see into his open leg. It is mostly hollow. Sodium foams out of the hole like blood.

  The creature doesn't enter the liquid. It stretches out its arms and gurgle-roars.

  Tree stares into the creature's black ball eyes and inches slowly forward. The creature inches slowly back. Once his big toe reaches the bank, Tree springs at the blob's face and slashes at its eyes. The blade misses by a hair. And as Tree flings himself backward the demon catches him with a single claw-finger in the pit of Tree's throat.

  He slides back into the pool. Sitting on his butt and fingering the gash on his neck. It would have been deep enough to open his jugular if he still had one.

  Tree backs away. He goes deeper into the sweat lake, away from the meaty snowman. The creature lowers its arms and watches carefully, but does not pursue him.

  Why doesn't it follow? Tree wonders.

  He smells the liquid. He wonders if it is poison. It stings his open wounds. Definitely not safe to drink but perhaps safe enough to wade through for now. Hopefully there isn't anything more deadly lurking within the water.

  Tree crawls through the spicy fluid, swims through when it is deep enough, trying to find dry land.

  He hears whispering but he's unsure which direction it comes from. It could just be echoes of his splashing steps. But the closer he gets to the end of the cave, the louder the whispers become.

  The whispers turn to voices.

  Human voices.

  Tree sees them. At the end of the cave, against the meaty wall, there are two figures. One is on a tiny mound rising out of the water. The other is lying in the water at the foot of the mound.

  The two figures stop speaking and watch Tree as he splashes near.

  "Tree?" Salmon says, as Tree arrives. "It is him."

  Salmon is the figure in the water. He says, "Hey, Tree. Look. I'm shrinking.”

  Salmon has a big smile as he stands up to show Tree his new size. He is now twice as thin and the height of a ten year old boy. But other than that, he's the same Salmon.

  The other figure pops up and raises its skeletal arm.

  Tree whips the knife out of his skin and balances on one knee.

  "Stay back," the figure says.

  It is a woman. A teenage-sized girl holding one of the blob-creature's detached limbs as a weapon. She is a cool green color with seahorse-textured skin and spidery vortex patterns.

  "She won't share," Salmon says to Tree in a tittering pout, pointing at the tiny dry island the girl stands on.

  "Where are we?" Tree says, holding his neck, his voice crackling and full of sodium.

  The girl swings at his words like they are invaders.

  "Welcome to Heaven's stomach," Salmon says. "All the unwanted ones are thrown down here to be digested. Recycled into fuel for Heaven's machines."

  "Rowak didn't tell me anything about this," Tree gurgles.

  "Rowak doesn't know anything," the girl says. "Rowak is a child just like you."

  "He likes to pretend he's all grown up," Salmon says. "He has a crush on the blue woman up there and wants to appear wise and mature for her."

  "CLOTTA doesn't know much more than Rowak," the green girl says. "She has never left the town since her arrival in Heaven. The people up there are too afraid to venture outside of the city gates. They all live in ignorance."

  The green girl curls her eyebrows at Tree like everything is his fault.

  "Her name is Swan," Salmon says. "Isn't she cute?"

  The girl kicks at Salmon.

  "Swan?" Tree says. "You look more like a spiky fish than a swan."

  "A cute spiky fish," Salmon says, swimming in the digestive fluid.

  Tree tries to stand up but he can't balance on only one foot.

  "What happened to you?" Salmon asks his ankle.

  "That thing," Tree says, looking back.

  "It's some kind of guardian of the stomach," Salmon says. "It chased me in here and wouldn't let me out. Wants us to stay in this stomach acid until we're digested."

  He splashes at the water like it's no big deal.

  "Stomach acid?" Tree examines the wall, stagger-slides through the water to it. He follows the corner, looking for something.

  "What are you doing?" Salmon calls to him.

  "There's got to be a way to cut ourselves out," Tree says through the gash in his neck.

  "You can't cut through," Swan says from her island. "I've already tried."

  "We've been eating the walls," Salmon says. "They aren't very good."

  Tree returns to them. "Where did you cut?"

  Swan points to the chewy holes behind her.

  "It's
too thick and it heals too quickly."

  Tree tightens his vision...

  "The acid," he says. "We can cut under the acid. It will slow the healing."

  Tree splashes to a deep corner of the stomach and fires his blade deep into the underwater meat. The flesh shivers and rumbles around him. He pulls down, soaks himself up to his neck, and pushes his entire arm into the meat. Cutting, pushing his weight out to open the wound. He starts submerging his face to get down deeper. The water burns his eyes shut like concentrated chlorine.

  A strip of light appears in the wound. The water level drops slightly, for just a moment.

  "It's opened," Tree screams with acid like fire down his throat. "I see the other side."

  Salmon swims over and nearly leaps onto Tree's back to look over his shoulder.

  "Look at that!" he says.

  The girl enters the pool and steps cautiously behind the men. Once she sees the light in the wound she pushes the men out of the way and hacks at the gash with her razor-clawed skeleton arm.

  "Where do you think it goes?" Salmon asks.

  "Who cares," Swan says. "Anywhere is better than here."

  They cut into the wound and hold it open with their legs. Tree stretches as far down into the meat as he can reach and stomps at the sides until they snap wide.

  The opening explodes beneath them and they find themselves riding a waterfall of spicy fluid out of the giant stomach and into midair. Free-falling.

  They plop hard onto a metal platform. Acid dribbling onto their heads until the stomach's wound heals itself behind them.

  Tree is getting choked to death. The spiky fish girl wrapped around him, hugging him with all her strength.

  "Thank you, thank you!" she cries. "I love you!"

  Her belly is firm but smooth against him. Not rough and spiky like the rest of her body. Snake belly textured. The seahorse-shaped features dig into Tree's neck, reopen the wound there.

  Salmon is also hugging Tree, and hugging the girl, and hugging himself. He doesn't want to be left out.

  Swan's underarms and inner thighs are as smooth as her belly as she cat-kisses Tree's cheek with her sticky iguana tongue. Then, without a blink, she lets him go and turns her back. More interested to see the outsides of the massive stomach above.

  Salmon wonders how Tree will get around with one less foot.

  They are standing on a large platform surrounded by walls of circuitry and electrical waterfalls. The flesh bag above is as big as a city, hanging by tendons from a ceiling too far away to see. Large veins crawling the sides of the stomach, pulsing, emitting watery digestive sounds and a smell like wet rat hair. There is nothing else organic about the scenery. It's all metal and electricity.

  Swan goes to the edge of the platform and stops short.

  Little Salmon follows her, licking his palms, but she waves him back.

  "It's not flat," Swan says to Tree, tapping on the platform with her heel. "It's round."

  Tree notices the curve in the distance. They're on top of some kind of giant metal sphere.

  "What are we going to do?" Salmon asks.

  "Keep ourselves from falling off," Swan says.

  They spend the night on top of the sphere, not really sure what to do. Tree allowing his wounds to heal. His ankle has sealed up, rounded off on the end like a foot was never there.

  Swan doesn't thank Tree anymore. She now blames him for trapping her on top of this enormous sphere and won't forgive him until he comes up with a plan to get them down. She allows Salmon to sit in her lap and sometimes bounces him on her knee like a baby or pretends to play drums with his arms. Salmon claps his hands with a big open smile.

  Tree notices Swan has three extra shadows. Two men with curvy furniture bodies and a small teenaged girl with no hair. The girl's shadow seems ancient. Like the shadow of an Egyptian or tribal queen. They spread away from each other like they are desperate for privacy.

  The little girl shadow on Tree is sneaking out from behind his legs to get a view of Swan's extra shadows. He almost forgot about her, his new dark side. He doesn't feel any different with her attached. He doesn't feel like she has influenced his behavior or made him a darker person. Swan has three extra shadows and according to Rowak that would make her a psychopathic demoness. But she doesn't seem that bad at all. Certainly not a threat to society. Perhaps she is just hiding her true personality or perhaps Rowak and CLOTTA don't know what they're talking about.

  Tree examines his newfound shadow. She is probably ten years old, wearing a fluffy dress and pigtails. Tree wonders about her pigtails. Is she able to change her hairstyle? Does she need a shadow of a brush to manage her hair? How does she see the other shadows in her two-dimensional form? Perhaps the pigtails are pieces of meat growing out of her head like Swan's seahorse ridges.

  When she notices Tree watching her, she darts back behind Tree's legs, safely hidden beneath (or within?) his shadow.

  Swan and Salmon sleep curled together. Salmon almost half her size, coiled like a puppy in her spiky arms. The acid really dissolved him. If Tree hadn't come when he did Swan probably would have let him shrink to the size of a gerbil before letting him out of the digestive fluids.

  Tree doesn't sleep. He watches the others, examining the details on the woman's skin, the vortex patterns and the bluish speckles on her neck. Her patterns are similar to Tree's. He has snail shell patterns and she has seahorse patterns. But her entire body is the texture of a seahorse and Tree is not the texture of a sea snail. She even has the same shaped skull as a seahorse. But with a very human face, freckled and hairless. With eyes like red fireworks within black marbles.

  Tree counts her breaths. He watches the fluid trickling under the pale sections of her skin. For the most part, he remembers what humans are supposed to look like. How they looked on Earth. Staring at Swan's body he decides that this is better. They might no longer have sex organs, but now they are walking works of art.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The ground opens up and an elevator rises out of the sphere next to them. A man steps out. Very tall with coily blackish purple skin and a long blue beard. Wearing white shorts with a rope tied to his belt.

  He sees Tree and snaps three fingers at him.

  "There you are," the man says, pulling a clipboard out of his coat and handing it to Tree. "Sign here."

  "What's this?" Tree asks.

  The man creaks his head. "The work order.

  Tree shrugs.

  "You're not the one who sent the work order?" he asks.

  Blue Beard turns to see Swan and Salmon yawning and stretching awake.

  "Wait a minute..." he says. "Who are you people?"

  "Who are you?" Swan asks.

  "There was supposed to be some kind of mess out here," says the man, twisting his beard. "I was assigned to clean it up. Boy are they going to be surprised when they find out the mess is a family of three."

  He doesn't realize Salmon isn't ther child.

  "Where did you come from anyway?" Blue Beard asks.

  Tree points at the giant pulsating stomach sack.

  The man's face scrunches into a ball. He whispers, "In there?"

  Tree nods.

  Blue Beard examines them. Notices the extra shadows, Tree's missing foot, Salmon's pink skin, the wound on the stomach where they emerged.

  "You better come with me," he says, gently waving them over to the elevator.

  Swan and Salmon help Tree onto his foot. He uses them as human crutches.

  "Just don't let anyone see you," Blue Beard says. Swan squeezes Tree's hand, excited and happy again.

  There is another world within the sphere. A city is built around the inner walls and there is a small sun radiating from the center.

  The elevator arrived into this world in a horizontal position. All four of them lying on their backs, piled together, staring up at the sun.

  Salmon is blinded by the brightness, striking at it lik
e wasps. "What is this place?"

  "Heaven's Earth," Blue Beard says, poking a finger in and out of his belly button. "Gravity is reversed here. Instead of pulling toward the center it pushes outward."

  Tree can't look at the sun for too long but Swan stares directly into it, completely mesmerized.

  "I forgot all about the sun," she says. "How could I forget about something like that?"

  Tree diverts his eyes and watches Blue Beard poke at his belly button. No, not a belly button. A hole. There are air holes running down his chest and belly. He sticks his fingers in and out of them like he is playing a flute.

  They are inside of a small white room with a glass ceiling. It is wide open and clean with fresh lemon carpeting. The carpet fibers feel like plastic tattoos between Tree's fingers as they crawl out of the elevator and step outside onto the street.

  Swan opens her arms to the warmth as Salmon and Tree examine the surroundings: it is a recreation of a 1950s suburban neighborhood, wrapped around the sun. Everything is overly colorful. Almost fake, as if they are within a giant model or children's playset. Everything made of plastic.

  A car passes them on the road, slow and silent. It appears to be lightweight, without an engine. More like a windup toy than an automobile. Tree can't see the driver, but he feels as if he could lift the bright red car off the ground and tip it over if he wanted to.

  "Cover your faces and don't speak to anyone," Blue Beard says. "Outsiders aren't allowed, for ecological reasons. Just follow me."

  They follow Blue Beard through the neighborhood, past multi-colored people. Some wear fancy hats, sunglasses, scarves, but otherwise naked. Nobody pays attention to Tree hopping on one leg.

  "We're trying to recapture the spirit of our past lives," Blue Beard says, leading them through the neighborhood. "We didn't know how to turn Heaven back into a paradise. The technology is too much for us to understand. But we learned enough to transform this tank into its own self-contained world based on memories we had of our past life. We created the happy American small town."