An old man leaves a large downtown department store with an enormous lump under his coat.
Stop, thief! cries the store manager rushing up behind him and grabbing his elbow.
Remove your hand, the old man tells him, it’s only a large, malignant tumor I have.
The store manager opens the man’s coat and removes the refrigerator there, carrying it back into the store on his back.
An old man leaves a large downtown department store with an even larger lump under his coat.
Stop, thief! cries the store manager as he rams his head into the old man’s back.
Why, it’s only a committee of concerned citizens I have here, the old man says, nothing more.
The store manager opens the coat and pushes the down escalator back into his store.
An old man leaves a large downtown department store with an enormous black shadow almost hiding him.
Stop, thief! Will you never learn? cries the store manager as he leaps on the old man’s head.
It’s merely a cemetery, you funny little man, replies the old man.
Whereupon the store manager rips open the coat, revealing the hundreds of faces of his best customers, all staring out, sightless, their skin pale, lips cracked.
And their torn hands and arms pulling the store manager in…
BRAIN OF SHADOWS
While he was asleep someone played with a flashlight in his head.
The intruder was silent but betrayed his or her presence when sudden flashes illuminated the figures in the dream, making them cower and cover their eyes and revealing the landscape they walked in to be no more than paper, plaster, and cheap paint.
Have some courtesy, he mumbled in his sleep, and his dream folk nodded their agreement.
The intruder stumbled and accidentally flashed the light on himself to reveal a biblical figure in long white robes and a beard.
The next night the dream folk were all wearing dark glasses and the body of God lay broken and bleeding behind the sets.
ATTACHED
A mother takes needle and thread and attaches herself to her first born, a daughter.
A father weeps and shouts, What have you done to attach her so? How can you both live that way?
A daughter sews the first boy she finds to her left leg. Later she attaches an older, more attractive boy to her right thigh.
Eventually she has young men attached to her feet, head, shoulders, breast, buttocks, and groin.
I’m afraid it’s becoming quite difficult for us to walk, a mother comments in long-suffering resignation.
A father just weeps and wrings his hands over the foolishness of females.
A daughter attaches children with tighter and firmer stitches to all exposed parts of her body, until her own body is quite hidden by the bodies sewn to her.
Each child displays his or her own small needle and thread.
See, see what you have done! a father shouts at a mother. We’ve lost our daughter; she must be quite dead under there!
All the small children plead tearfully for their mother, once a daughter, even as they begin attaching food, feces, playthings, and other children to their own bodies with needles and thread.
Help, help, I’m quite suffocated! shouts a mother as she falls over backwards, pulling the mass of squirming, sewn-together bodies on top of her.
A father stoops over the crushed body of his wife, weeping and wringing his hands over the foolishness of females. He shuffles sadly away, absentmindedly scratching at the sewn-on corpse of his son, their second born, crushed so long ago between his great buttocks.
THE RIFLEMAN, THE CANCEROUS COW, AND THE SWEDISH MEMORIAL HOSPITAL, A Western
Lucas McCane, formerly known as The Rifleman, had put away his famous weapon with the enlarged firing ring, and moved to North Carolina so that his son Mark might grow up among deciduous trees and shrubbery.
“This will all be yours someday,” he told him. “This wooded area here, this lake I’ve recently dammed and drained for cropland (at great physical cost to myself, by the way), and there’s a nice little fast food franchise down there by the creek where members of your peer group eat hamburgers, shakes, and fries, and converse on various age-appropriate subject matters. It’s taken me most of my life, made me old before my time, not to mention quite impotent, but I was glad to do it for my eventual posterity, please don’t mention it.”
One day Mark and his father were walking through the wooded area, Lucas talking on in this manner, Mark listening, when they came upon a level clearing covered with a thin film of oil. “This bog has been here for millions of years, Mark, consisting of various animal and vegetative matter pressurized underground, then later exposed for our current viewing, but nevertheless, this too will all be yours when I go to meet that Great Ranch-hand in the sky,” Lucas went on and on.
Suddenly a large black cow with a cancer on his head stumbled out of the underbrush. And before Lucas could point out that that too would someday belong to his son, Mark spoke up for the first time in some while, saying, “Pa, what’s that?”
“That, son, is a large black cow with a cancer on his head. Notice how he eats large stumps and other useless vegetative matter around this here bog. A cow with a cancer on his head must be pretty clever to survive out here in the wilds of North Carolina.”
It suddenly became apparent to Lucas and his son that the cancerous cow was lapping up great swatches of the oil with an enormous, rubbery, gray and white tongue. And gradually revealed by these great swipes of the tongue was a smooth, hardwood floor. “No doubt created through the troddings of extinct land reptiles on the decomposing animal and vegetative matter, compressing these into this smooth dancefloor-like surface we see here before us,” Lucas speculated, “…though I have to admit this is somewhat unusual for North Carolina.”
During this speech the cow had completed his vacuuming, and a perfectly square, glistening orange hardwood plain, two hundred feet on a side, was revealed, bordered on all sides by rotting stumps and blackened underbrush. Lucas strode to the middle of this floor. “This, son…”
“…will someday all be mine,” Mark interjected.
Lucas painted an elaborate image of the mansion they would someday build using the floor as base. A wide portico all around, several entranceways, an immense expanse of glass, and several vistas of awe-inspiring aspect. Lucas counted some of these off on his fingertips: the curtain of gigantic pine, the plateau gauzed in grays and purples, the broad grassy slope flowered yellow, red, and blue, and… what was this?
Mark had run past the tall marble columns, the coved ceilings, the exotic tapestries of the home place, and was climbing the fan-like marble staircase of this last unexpected vista, The Swedish Memorial Hospital.
Lucas stared slack-jawed at the ruin. The Swedish Memorial Hospital was a five-level complex, each level built on the ruins of the former. Castle turrets meshed with steel framing and glass walls, stucco and wood. The several hundred yards of skylight had been shattered. Six brightly painted hot air balloons and two large dirigibles hung torn and abandoned from spires and eaves. Vines and weeds crept up between cracks and holes in the concrete. He could just make out the scarlet thread remnants of the banners. On the plain behind the hospital he could see the ashen wrecks of dozens of flying fortresses, once used to transport the wounded from all parts of the globe.
Mark was halfway up the stairs when Lucas snapped out of his reverie, panicked, and raced screaming after him.