by Aimee Bender
ERASERHEAD PRESS
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PORTLAND, OR 97211
WWW.ERASERHEADPRESS.COM
ISBN: 978-1-62105-056-8
Compilation Copyright © 2012 by Eraserhead Press.
Individual works are Copyright © by their respective authors.
Cover art by Alan M. Clark and Kevin Ward
Cover art Copyright © 2012 by Alan M. Clark and Kevin Ward
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Printed in the USA.
Table of Contents
I PRAISE THE IDIOT BEAUTY OF THE UNNATURAL WORLD
an introduction by Cameron Pierce
AT THE FUNERAL
D. Harlan Wilson
ANT COLONY
Alissa Nutting
FIRE DOG
Joe R. Lansdale
CANDY-COATED
Carlton Mellick III
THE TRAVELING DILDO SALESMAN
Kevin L. Donihe
WE WITNESSED THE ADVENT OF A NEW APOCALYPSE DURING AN EPISODE OF FRIENDS
Blake Butler
CARDIOLOGY
Ryan Boudinot
THE SCREAMING OF THE FISH
Vincent Sakowski
ATWATER
Cody Goodfellow
THE DARKNESS
Amelia Gray
LI'L MISS ULTRASOUND
Robert Devereaux
CRAZY SHITTING PLANET
Mykle Hansen
CATERPILLAR GIRL
Athena Villaverde
COPS & BODYBUILDERS
D. Harlan Wilson
A MILLION VERSIONS OF RIGHT
Matthew Revert
HELLION
Alissa Nutting
MR. PLUSH, DETECTIVE
Garrett Cook
HAT
Roy Kesey
THE SHARP DRESSED MAN AT THE END OF THE LINE
Jeremy Robert Johnson
HOTEL ROT
Aimee Bender
THE MOBY CLITORIS OF HIS BELOVED
Ian Watson & Roberto Quaglia
SCRATCH
Jeremy C. Shipp
THE SEX BEAST OF SCURVY ISLAND
Andersen Prunty
INHERITANCE
Jedediah Berry
EVERYBODY IS WAITING FOR SOMETHING
Andrea Kneeland
EAR CAT
Carlton Mellick III
NUB HUT
Kurt Dinan
PUNKUPINE MOSHERS OF THE APOCALYPSE
David Agranoff
THE OCTOPUS
Ben Loory
YOU SAW ME STANDING ALONE
Kris Saknussemm
MR. BEAR
Joe R. Lansdale
ZOMBIE SHARKS WITH METAL TEETH
Stephen Graham Jones
THE PLANTING
Bentley Little
SURF GRIZZLIES
David W. Barbee
THE MISFIT CHILD GROWS FAT ON DESPAIR
Tom Piccirilli
I PRAISE THE IDIOT BEAUTY OF THE UNNATURAL WORLD
AN INTRODUCTION BY CAMERON PIERCE
I was a teenager when I discovered bizarro fiction. As an angst-addled punk who played in a death rock band while devouring weird and decadent literature like Sizzler was having a special on surrealist cuisine, bizarro wasn’t a revelation; it was a revolution. Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Lovecraft, Kafka, Breton, Ballard, Burroughs . . . those guys were my heroes, but in the first bizarro books I read, I discovered my life. These were writers who embodied the banality and horror of my upper-middle class California neighborhood. They did it not by examining motifs of alienation in quietly wrought prose, but by stitching those same motifs into Frankenstein-like monsters. The key ingredients? Baby Jesus butt plugs, post-apocalyptic cockroach suits, and pitch-black absurdity.
The stories meant something, but they weren’t metaphors. If there was any unifying message between bizarro books, it went something like this: buckle your seatbelts, because we’re in for one hell of a shit storm (which is basically how the twenty-first century has played out so far). As a young man who had a difficult time understanding that his own behavior was a little left of odd, this was just the right medicine. Aesthetically, bizarro fiction treaded the waters between genre fiction (horror in particular), Adult Swim, and the games and experiments of writers like Andre Breton and William S. Burroughs. In short, it was the quintessential mindfuck.
I had been down rabbit holes before. If you want to see the most beautiful (and ugly) things in life, you’ve got to take those plunges. But bizarro was different. There was no leaving this Wonderland. That’s because I already lived in that space without even knowing it. Now, looking back nearly ten years from when I read my first bizarro book, I still call this genre home. Bizarro has changed in big ways since then. Evolution has been rapid. I suspect the next decade will be even wilder. Right now, though, let us reflect on the crustaceans we’ve plucked from our hearts, the slithering (and sniveling) fairy tales of hatred and hope that we tell ourselves to get by, “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung in Klingon by a clown with scoliosis at a four-year-old’s birthday party (the parents were frightened, but the kids were happy). Let us explore the Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade.
AT THE FUNERAL
D. HARLAN WILSON
It’s been a week already and the funeral isn’t over yet. For seven days and nights we’ve been roaming the hallways of Frinkel’s Death Emporium whispering in each other’s ears, massaging each other’s elbows, politely trampling each other as we ransack the hors d’oeuvre table, which is replenished with a fresh round of fruit punch and cold Swedish meatballs at noon and sundown every day. The Emporium’s staff consists of two short, round men in bird costumes. When they’re not setting out provisions and cleaning up after us, they wobble around on their big yellow feet and make bird noises.
Seven days and nights of walking around a funeral home is enough to make anybody tired, and yet nobody seems to be tired but me. I start asking people why they don’t sit down for a while, maybe take a nap, but everybody just smacks their lips and waves me away.
Annoyed, I decide to look for a bed and take a nap myself. I find one in a secret room. The bed is king-sized and made out of Queen Anne’s lace. On the far side of it, my sister Klarissa is sitting there playing with a doll.
In the middle of it, The Deceased is lying there dead.
The upper half of The Deceased’s body is hanging out of a black, halfway unzipped body bag. He isn’t wearing any clothes and His skin is absolutely colorless. His eyes look like they’re on the verge of popping out of His head.
I sit down next to Him and frown at Klarissa. “Did you unzip this body bag?”
She shakes her head.
“You’re telling me you didn’t unzip this body bag? Is that what you’re telling me?”
She nods her head.
“Well, I guess the thing unzipped itself. I guess that’s what happened, isn’t it?” This time my sister doesn’t respond to me. She whispers something into her doll’s ear and giggles.
I use my feet to try and stuff The Deceased back into the body bag, but it doesn’t work, and when I’m about to lay my hands on Him, my mother walks into the secret room, scolds my sister and I for being there, sits down on the
bed and places The Deceased’s head in her lap. She strokes His curly brown hair. A few seconds later . . . He coughs.
“Holy moly,” I say.
My mother closes her eyes. “No, no. That’s just a reflex.”
“Reflex? He’s been dead over a week.”
My mother begins to massage The Deceased’s neck. The Deceased coughs again. Then, purring a little, He mumbles, “That feels good.”
Before I can say anything my mother shakes her head. “Reflexes. It’s all reflexes.”
I stare at her.
My mother says, “Listen, I have to go. Aunt Kay’s been feeding meatballs to the spiders and I have to try and convince her to feed them to herself instead. You two can stay here, but not for long, okay? Be good.” She removes The Deceased’s head from her lap, gets off the bed and leaves.
The Deceased flexes His jaw. He coughs again, and again, and again. He keeps on coughing until a rotten apple flies out of His mouth. It sails across the room and shatters an antique lamp. Klarissa and I leap off the bed as The Deceased starts gesticulating like an angry worm. “Get me outta this damn thing,” He says.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” I say. Klarissa adds, “We might get in trouble.” Then, under her breath: “Is this a reflex, too?”
I purse my lips.
The Deceased gives us a dirty look. “Fine. I’ll get out myself. And I’ll never forgive you two for being so crummy to me.”
Klarissa and I glance at each other. After a brief struggle, The Deceased manages to unzip the body bag the rest of the way. He climbs out of it. He stretches His wiry, naked limbs, rearranges His genitals, and strides out of the secret room without a word. Klarissa and I watch Him go.
Then we leap back onto the bed and fall asleep on either side of the open body bag . . .
Out in the hallways The Deceased approaches the attendants of the funeral one at a time. He taps them on the shoulders and asks if they can spare some clothes and if it’s not too much trouble a meatball and a cup of fruit punch. “I’m very cold and undernourished,” He says, eyes fixed on his toes. Everybody frowns and pretends they don’t understand Him, except for my Aunt Kay, who, in response to His plea, spits a mouthful of tobacco juice on Him and then shoots up into the ceiling on a thread of spidersilk attached to the back of her neck. The Deceased breaks down and cries. My grandfather threatens to have Him hanged. “We’ll string you up right here and won’t even think twice about it!” he twangs. The Deceased snarls at him. My grandfather signals the Emporium’s two bird men and they all chase The Deceased back to the secret room and tell Him not to come out again unless He wants to die.
“I’m already dead,” says The Deceased as my grandfather slams the door on His face.
Klarissa and I don’t wake up. The Deceased shuffles over to the bed. He stares at us and thinks about what He should do. Should He kill us? Should He maim us? Or should He leave us alone? Since He dislikes us so much, the most sensible thing to do would be to kill us. But He can’t make up His mind. He tries to wake us and ask us what He should do. No luck—we’re sleeping like dead things. No matter how hard He pokes our shoulders and screams in our ears, we won’t open our eyes.
The Deceased sighs. Then, having nothing else to do, He crawls onto the bed and back into the body bag, and zips Himself up as best He can.
ANT COLONY
ALISSA NUTTING
When space on earth became very limited, it was declared all people had to host another organism on or inside of their bodies. Many people chose something noninvasive, such as barnacles or wig-voles. Some women had breast operations that allowed them to accommodate small aquatic life within implants. But because I was already perfectly-breasted (and, admittedly, vain) I sought out a doctor who, for several thousanddollars, drilled holes into my bones to make room for an ant colony.
After being turned down by every surgeon in the book, I finally found my doctor. Actually he’s a dentist. I had to lead him on in order to get what I wanted—he only agreed to the procedure because he is in love with me.
“I have all your movies,” the doctor told me during our first consultation. “I think you’re the most perfect woman in the world.”
Since this had never been attempted, I was a study trial. My participation in this experiment had a lot of parallels to modeling, which I used to do before commercial acting. Once a month I went into a laboratory and removed all my clothing. This latter step probably wasn’t necessary, but I did it because I was grateful, and also because it was interesting to feel someone looking at my outsides and my insides at the same time. When I laid down onto an imaging machine and certain buttons were pushed, the doctor could see all the ants moving around in my body, using their mandibles to pick up what he said were synthetic calcium deposits. The ants were first implanted within my spine, where their food supply was injected monthly, but then they quickly moved throughout the other various pathways that had been drilled into my limbs and even my skull.
The ants’ mandibles were the only part of them that disgusted me; they reminded me of the headgear I’d had to wear with my braces in grades six through eight. I’d refused to wear it to school or even walk around the house when I had it on. Instead I wore it two hours each night before bed, and I spent this time reading fashion magazines in my closet. I wouldn’t allow anyone, even my mother, to see me. She used to stand at the door and beg for a kiss goodnight. This was of course before the cancer—she had already been dead for several years by the time the organism hosting movement started. When she began dying I didn’t want to watch; I usually grew angry when she’d ask me to come see her in the hospital. The cancer overtook her body until she looked parasitic herself. Near the end, if I felt her lips on my cheek while I was hugging her I’d pull away—I knew it was ridiculous, but I was afraid she was somehow going to suck out my beauty.
“Can you feel them inside you?” As he watched the scan from an outside control room, the doctor would whisper into a microphone that I could hear through a headset earpiece. His voice sounded sweaty. “Does it seem like your blood is crawling? Does it tickle? Are you ticklish?” He’d ask me questions the entire time, but even if I were to answer, there was no way for him to hear my response.
In truth I didn’t feel a thing; it was hard to believe they were even there. On my first follow-up visit I made the doctor show me footage of myself in the large ant-imaging machine to prove they were actually inside me. But after awhile I got used to the thought of their presence and even started speaking to them throughout the day. The doctor said this was healthy.
“It’s not uncommon to feel a shift of identity,” he assured me. “It’s okay to talk to your organism, and to feel like it understands you. After all, it’s a part of your self. We could talk about this more over dinner?”
But I never actually crossed the line into dating. Then one day I received a frantic call.
“Come in immediately. Where are you right now?”
At the moment, I was in the middle of shooting a commercial for a water company.
“Leave the minute you hang up the phone. What we have to discuss is far more important.”
I was very used to people feeling like they were more important than me, but less beautiful. I often felt that every transaction in my life somehow revolved around this premise.
“Refreshing,” I said. It was my only line in the commercial, and I’d been practicing all day.
I can tell you this: I did love how invisible the ants were. They were creatures that seemed to consider themselves neither important nor beautiful. Earlier that month, the doctor had given me a videotape of several ants feasting on the corpse of an ant that had died in my femur. This cannibalism was an aberration, he’d pointed out: ants do not normally eat other ants from their own colony. The doctor had worked with an entomologist to specifically breed a contained bone-ant species that would eat the dead, lay the eggs in the dead, and make the dead a part of the living.
Defying
these orders, I finished the refreshing water shoot. When I finally arrived at the doctor’s he was very upset—he’d cancelled everything and had been waiting in his office, which is covered with wall-to-wall pictures of me, for hours.
“Your left wrist.”
I slipped off my glove and held it out to him in a vulnerable way. My wrist was smooth and fragrant and pale and had a nicotine patch on it; the doctor had suggested I quit smoking for the health of the ants. I squeezed my eyes to look beneath my skin for them. “It’s like they’re not even there,” I muttered.
“Grip my fingers,” he said, holding two of his own upon my pulse. It was a little difficult to do.
“God,” he said. Even though his voice sounded worried, he seemed a little pleased. “Goodness.”
He ran out of the room, face flushed. And there I sat alone, or not alone truly.
“We seem to be in crisis,” I muttered to them, and put my glove back on.
Since the ants, I have started gloving my arms. I buy the longest gloves I can find. It feels like putting the ants to bed, the way one might place a blanket over the cage of a bird.
“We are all certain this can be resolved.” Around the table sat several new doctors I’d never met, or maybe they were dentists. I spotted a magazine that I was in—mascara ad, page seven—lying on an end table in the conference room. Somehow this made me feel safer, more of a majority. There were two of me in the room and only one of everybody else.
My doctor passed me a glossy picture: its subject was a fat, excreting ant. The ant was surrounded by small piles of powder that, when magnified, almost looked like crumbs of bread. I gagged a bit. “Why are you showing me this?”
“This is their queen,” he said. The doctor’s pupils had dilated to a width universally associated with insanity. “She wants you gone.” His fingertip moved from pile to pile on the glossy photo, leaving a print upon each one. “These are piles of your bone. You are being devoured by the ants that live inside you.”
