Zombie Lolita: (A Collection of Short Stories)

by Harmon Cooper

  He nodded.

  “What pose you want?” she asked.

  “Any pose, Girl, I don’t care. I’m going to send the pic to Rafa. Got to show him we still doing it right here in America. We used to always chill here before he went to Afghanistan.”

  “Something cute?”

  “Shit, not too cute. Don’t want him getting feelings for you.. I just want to show him who my girlfriend be.”

  “Well, why don’t you just get up in the damn picture then? You know, show him a picture of you and your girlfriend together. Because we are together, right?”

  “Why you always asking me that? Damn, you know I ain’t trying to take a picture with Mr. Tiger. My bad, Mr. Tiger, I ain’t hating or nothing, just saying. Rochelle, just do the peace sign.”

  “Asian style or American style?”

  “Asian style? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Like in Asian photos where they do the sideways peace sign next to their face.”

  “Shit this ain’t Gangnam Style. Why you got to complicate this here? I’m just trying to get a picture for Rafa. Now hold still.”

  “Which peace sign?”

  “Girl, just do what you want. Aight, that looks cool. Move over a little. Let me get that fountain in the picture. Yeah. That’s cool.”

  Click.

  “Yo, let me see that. Oh no no no. I don’t like my hair in that picture. Let me fix it. Aight, how’s this look.”

  “You always looking fine, Rochelle. You know that. She’s fine, right Mr. Tiger?”

  He gave him the thumbs-up with his big paw.

  “Damn, look at Mr. Tiger spitting game! You see this player over here? Got to keep my eye on you, man. Girl, pose, for real. Hold still.”

  “Can I touch your tail?”

  “Rochelle, leave his tail alone. Just hold still, damn.”

  Click.

  “Let me see that one. Aight, that looks cool. Send him that one. Let’s go. I want to ride that merry-go-round again. Thank you, Mr. Tiger.”

  The couple turned away. The boy’s hand dropped down to her ass as they disappeared into the crowd.

  The man in the tiger costume sat down along the ledge of the large fountain. Water fell in a mist from the top tier of the fountain, into the second tier, into the third tier, and finally into the basin below. He’d passed the fountain twice now and the thought of quenching his thirst grew sweeter. He turned and looked at the reflection of the tiger mask in the water.

  Devon Burke had grown to hate his own face. This wasn’t helped by the fact that his face was everywhere. He wanted nothing more than to be himself, but the thing he had become now defined him so thoroughly that he didn’t know who he was any longer. The pressure of being famous was why Devon was wearing a tiger costume. The things we do to escape.

  He heard some commotion behind him. He turned to find the beer-guzzling man from earlier yelling at a pair of ogre-sized guys in Garden State baseball hats. Some type of dispute over money. He couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. The man’s child was crawling towards Devon on the fountain ledge.

  Something about that ledge mesmerized him. Something about that separation, that dividing line between this and that, them and us, the water and fairgrounds. The little boy sat up and wrapped his blue child leash under his arm and pulled it over his shoulder. Devon shook his head at him. The boy laughed and stuck his tongue out.

  Distracted by the men, the father unhooked the child harness. He leveled himself eye to eye with the bigger of his two assailants. One of the men took off his baseball hat and started wringing it out in his hands as if it were soaking wet. The boy stood on the fountain, wobbled, and took another step towards Devon, laughing.

  The boy looked back to his father one more time, yanked his child leash, and twisted into the fountain. At the moment the boy’s body struck the water, a fist collided with his father’s eye socket. He too fell into the fountain alongside his son.

  Devon pried his tiger mask off, tossing his tiger paws aside. His cover was blown.

  He jumped into the fountain, running wildly, splashing water until he slipped on the green pennies and dimes that were caked onto the bottom of the basin. He leered back, caught his balance, and fell face-first in front of the boy.

  What was left of the tiger costume was now heavily saturated with water. The water tasted moldy and metallic. Devon’s knee throbbed from the fall; a burst of red lit up his eyelids. He pushed himself up just in time for the commotion to start.

  “Is that Devon Burke? Oh my God it totally is!”

  He grabbed the child and tried to untangle the child leash that had gotten mangled around the boy’s body. The boy was crying and neon snot was running out of his nose. His face was red and puffy. The tiger mask floated somewhere behind them.

  Click. Click. The father sat up, rubbing the pain away from his eyes. Cameras flashed all around the fountain. Devon would later be lauded as a hero for the rescue, something he would ultimately despise.

  His friend appeared in the crowd that had formed. “Devon, your mask! Oh shit, man, what should I do?”

  “The kid, help me untangle the kid!”

  More cameras clicked like mad crickets in a field. The boy’s father had already stood and was primed to chase after the man who had punched him. He pulled himself out of the fountain, not quite connecting the dots that one of Hollywood’s biggest stars was attending to his child just a few feet away from him. Click. Click.

  “Devon! Devon! Look over here!”

  The father wiped water out of his face and turned to the crowd which had quickly doubled in size. It dawned on him that something strange was happening. He swiveled back to who he once believed was a seven-dollar-an-hour fair employee in a tiger costume.

  “Devon Burke? Junior?” he said. “What the hell is happening here?”

  Devon and his friend finished unraveling the child just as a few security guards showed up. Devon handed the boy to his father. One of the guards tried to pull his phone out and push the crowd back at the same time. Click. Click. His cell phone fell to the pavement and shattered. The guard grew angry, blamed the crowd and pushed harder. More people arrived to see what the commotion was about.

  “Devon! Devon Burke!’

  “We need to go!” his friend said, tugging on his arm. “I’ve already called Paul. The car’s waiting.”

  Someone reached out for him. It was the father, holding his wet child over his shoulder like a sandbag. Click. Click.

  “Hey, Mr. Burke, thanks so much for saving Junior here!” he shouted over the crowd that had formed. “Who would have thought it was Devon Burke in that tiger costume? It’s my lucky day!’

  “It’s no problem,” Devon said, turning away.

  “Wait, before you go, is there any way I could I get a picture with you? I mean, the wife ain’t going to believe this!”

  Devon sighed and the crowd around the fountain grew larger and larger.

  Blogging the Muse

  [5]Arthur begins his mornings by hanging upside down for seven minutes using gravity boots and visualizing lotus flowers. After he finishes, he slides into a sleeveless Liberty Lunch hoodie and powerwalks to Bennu, a 24-hour coffee shop off east MLK Blvd. It’s his daily ritual, the one thing that puts him in a class above other bloggers, the one thing that keeps him relatively sane.

  At the coffee shop, Arthur is greeted by one of two baristas: Sage, an overweight Wiccan fond of hemp necklaces and prison tattoos, or Todd, a too-slim East Texas steel guitar player with a bad coke habit and a penchant for wearing vintage suspenders and bolo ties. Every morning, Arthur gets the same order, a five-shot Americano with two pumps of chocolate in a short cup, which he, of course, finishes in a single gulp.

  Arriving back at his house, Arthur turns towards the street and sighs audibly three times. He stretches his arms into the air and twists them at the sockets for forty-five seconds. Using the railing of his front porch, he does exactly thirteen standing pus
h-ups and cracks each of his knuckles, pinky to pointer finger, starting with his right hand. He kicks off his shoes and cracks each of his toes in the same fashion.

  He checks the time – 3:20 – exactly twenty-five minutes left to prep himself.

  Arthur’s Tumblr blog, Austintxmade.com, had nearly eighty million hits last year. His subsequent Twitter feed, @austintxmade, is equally as popular: not quite @rickygervais or @justinbieber, but damn near close. This year he’s hoping to double the hits on his website, but inspiration and good blog posts don’t come cheap.

  Once inside his small home – which used to belong to a minority family before gentrification pushed many eastside dwellers to either the dreary suburbs of north Austin, or the humid ghettos of Houston – Arthur enters into his ergonomic, Ikea-approved office.

  Attached to the wall in front of his desk are Post-it notes arranged by color in single-file columns: red, green, orange and yellow. He leans forward over his desk and blows onto his Column of Ideas, starting with green, orange, red, then yellow, as if he’s blowing out a vertical birthday cake. Next to his Column of Ideas is a picture of fellow Austin blogger, Bert Calhoun, that hipster wannabe, ironic-mustached buffoon.

  Calhoun is Arthur’s rival, the Joker to his Batman, the Boehner to his Obama, the Capulet to his Montague, the worst thing to happen to Arthur since he slipped in vomit walking down east 6th and had to go to the emergency room for six stitches (which he obviously blogged about). Just seeing his rival’s smug face and red-rimmed glasses makes Arthur work that much harder.

  On the desk below that bastard Calhoun’s picture is a collection of dead animal parts: a piranha’s jaw, a horse’s hoof, a collection of mice skeletons kept inside a small container made of polished tortoiseshell, a lucky rabbit’s foot dyed purple, a cow’s tooth, a hawk’s talon, the skull of a hammerhead fruit bat – the dead are powerful kindlers of creativity, and Arthur knows he’d be a fool not to harness this untapped resource. He smiles at each piece and nods in remembrance.

  Opening his desk drawer, Arthur steadies his head over the rotten oranges he keeps inside and takes a deep inhale, as per his daily ritual. The putrid oranges, their tanginess and moldy stench, give him a boost of energy and trigger an imaginative response in him – he’s certain of this. He closes the drawer, waits exactly one minute, then opens the drawer again and takes another deep whiff.

  He’s tried many things to streamline creative success. He’s attempted blogging while standing a la Hemingway, but his dining room table wasn’t tall enough to adequately account for his height and his knees would always start to buckle after the first hour. Arthur also went through a spell of supine blogging, a nod to Truman Capote, but quickly gave this method up after he kept falling asleep.

  Earlier this year, he experimented with the Nabokov method of keeping his ideas on organized index cards. This soon grew tedious, and it felt archaic lugging the little card boxes around, especially since he was usually blogging about social trends, music news and technological innovations.

  Hoping to isolate himself for periods of deep thought, Arthur commissioned a carpenter to make a coffin for him to lie down in before starting his work. At first he liked his brainstorm coffin, especially the smell of the fresh wood, but he soon found the space confining and discarded the coffin in his backyard, where it’s now filled with large, colorful cacti which he’s named after members of Arcade Fire.

  Some of the peculiar writing habits of others seem to have aided Arthur’s creativity. He has painted his office completely black like David Foster Wallace and covered the room in shadeless lamps, giving his workspace an eerie, opium den appearance. He’s perfected touch typing and occasionally writes blindfolded like Jonathan Franzen. Once a week, he hides himself in a sleazy motel room like Maya Angelou to blog in utter isolation.

  The rest of his daily rituals have come about solely through practice and dedication to his craft. After his moment of reflection, Arthur yanks on a pair of basketball shorts and proceeds to his living room. He plays Whammy by Death Grips and sits down into a wheelchair near his sofa. He spins in syncopation to the jarring music, increasing his speed until the song finishes.

  Still dizzy from spinning, Arthur returns to his bedroom and lies sideways across his mattress. He whips off his basketball shorts, and begins lightly stroking himself. Once he has an erection, he jerks wildly at his proof of manhood. On the verge of orgasm, he stops, stands painfully, and cautiously puts his basketball shorts back on. He waddles back into the living room and stops in front of a blank wall.

  Dropping to his knees – and careful not to smash or squeeze his rapidly shrinking erection – Arthur bends over with his arms tucked under his head. Once he’s in position, he straightens his body into a headstand pose, using the wall for support. He begins counting backwards in Spanish, starting with the number thirty-four to pay homage to the infamous Rule 34, the internet rule which states: if it exists, there has been porn made of it. He finishes his count, and brings himself safely down to his knees. He checks the time: right on schedule.

  Arthur hasn’t always been this meticulous, but the pressure to be something both real and imagined has left many people, including the normally introverted Arthur, scrambling for techniques to consistently generate creative success. After all, the opposite of success is failure, something Arthur hopes to never struggle with.

  For a while, he followed Tony Robbins, even going as far as paying $2,500 for a Diamond Premiere Seat at one of the motivational speaker’s events in Fort Worth. After watching the gregarious Robbins run back and forth across the stage clapping and yelling for everyone to UNLEASH THE POWER WITHIN, and that NO PROBLEM IS ETERNAL, ONLY YOUR SOUL IS, Arthur came to a conclusion that the Diamond Premiere Seat may have been an unholy squandering of hard-earned resources, and more importantly – a colossal waste of his birthday money.

  He did, however, take something worthwhile from the event. On his drive home from Fort Worth, Arthur came to the understanding that humankind will always be searching for some attribute, technique, or universal answer to fill the voids of their lives.

  Self-help books, infomercials, New Age retreats, lecture tours, Reiki classes, 60’s acidheads turned gurus, the cult of personality, The Secret, inspirational YouTube videos, brainwave frequency CDs – all the new concepts of self-awakening were simply keys to an ancient door that had been unlocked long ago. All he really needed to do was find the original key.

  While some people looked for the best investing tips, and others looked to address their personal insecurities or the ever-growing litmus of pathological disorders, Arthur wanted a method that was tried and true, something that didn’t cost $2,500 a pop, something that didn’t promise him some penultimate answer to life (granted he pay a preposterous sum for the answer), something that was less Jonestown and more Eye of the Tiger.

  “O Divine Poesy Goddess-daughter of Zeus, Sustain me for the song of the various-minded men,” he begins, and he has no idea what it means, but it’s Lawrence of Arabia’s translation of The Invocation of the Muse, and the simple act of reciting the words makes Arthur feel immensely powerful.

  Searching long and hard for the true seed of inspiration, Arthur stumbled upon the original Muse – famed daughter of Zeus, Homer’s inspiration for the Iliad and the Odyssey – and he’s been calling on her ever since. It’s his daily ritual; it’s the one thing that puts him in a class above other bloggers.

  In front of his work table now in his darkened office, Arthur falls to his knees with a small stick of burning incense gripped tightly in his left hand. He asks the Muse to pour sweet dew on his tongue, to bless his typing fingers with swiftness and vigor, to strike down the written word of that asshat Calhoun, to hold him like an infant in her arms for all eternity, to fill his blog with her precious insights.

  And like a demented music conductor, Arthur waves the incense stick around as he recites the incantation, as smoke curls into his nostrils like in a Snoop Dogg music video. It flo
ws over his colorful Column of Ideas, his collection of animal parts, the photo of his rival and the keyboard of his MacBook Pro.

  As he finishes the sacred invocation, Arthur tries his hardest to concentrate on the blurred image of the Muse that has materialized in his mind. He sees her heaving breasts as she comes towards him with an aura of light behind her. She’s carrying a writing tablet; her curly brown locks are pressed down onto her forehead by a golden tiara.

  Sometimes the Muse resembles his mother, other times she looks more like Penelope Cruz or Rosie the Riveter. He can never quite get her face right. Regardless, she’s always exquisitely beautiful and divinely inspirational.

  The Muse towers over Arthur with her writing tablet held tightly in both hands. He looks up at her, his heart filled with adoration and his mind open for insight. She holds the writing tablet in the air high above his head, and with a creative swoop, the muse violently smashes the tablet down onto his skull.

  Arthur falls forward into the great abyss of his darkened office. He lies there for a moment, pressing his cheek against the cold wood floor. He turns his head, filled to the brim with ideas and utter admiration for the Muse, for his blogging ability, even for the competition provided by the wretched Calhoun.

  Completely satiated, Arthur lets out a final exhale of appreciation. He holds his breath for ten counts and rolls onto his back, clutching his knees to his chest like a baby. Tears of appreciation form and curve in the corners of his mouth and he laps them up.

  “Thank you. Efkharistó,” he says in Greek for good measure as his salty tears slide down his parched throat. Finally, Arthur can get to work. Finally, Arthur can be the version of himself he works 24/7 to fabricate. Finally, Arthur can blog.

  A note from the author:

  If you have a moment, please leave Zombie Lolita an honest review on Amazon. Reviews are essential for independent authors such as myself to reach a wider audience. If you liked what you read, or you thought it could be better, please let me know. Don’t forget to sign up for my reader’s group to get two free books. As always, you can contact me at writer.harmoncooper@gmail.com