Inside of the shopping mall, God creates all of his creations.
The first thing Mr. Yahweh ever created was a small table. It was not a very good table. The legs were not evenly cut and it wobbles when you touch it. Near the center of the shopping mall, you can still go and see it on display. It’s a good example of how nobody is perfect, not even God.
Satan was the first intricate structure Yahweh ever made. Satan was the first angel. An angel is the same as a human, only it’s born in the dimension where gods live. They also get special powers. Some angels have the power to fly. Others can see in the dark, or read minds, or run really fast. Satan has the touch of life. Satan was God’s favorite.
Gods live very frustrating lives. That’s why they are so frustrating to get along with. And they are bitter for living such a long-long time with no end, and being responsible for billions upon billions of life forms is a very demanding job. Gods are the fathers of their worlds, but Yahweh seems more like the drunken abusive father that wears a wife-beater T-shirt, who doesn’t like his home dirty when he comes back from work.
When Satan came out of the closet, he was sent to hell. Hell was just a giant prison located at the center of the Earth, within the god dimension. Of course, it was the most pain-drudgy prison ever built. All of the evil souls of history lived there, and Satan was the prison guard who monitored the evil. Yahweh labeled him the most evil person in hell, because he was the first homosexual. And God considers homosexuality the most disgusting evil of them all.
Satan is glad Hell doesn’t exist anymore. It was a shitty job, and he didn’t need it. The walm ate all of the souls from hell before it started eating the ones on Earth, so all the tyrants of history that you’ve known are in oblivion now. Only your memory of them exists. Satan saved some of the souls, though, because he is a collector of souls. Hitler is one. Kublai Khan is another. Aristotle is another.
Richard Stein said that God is very picky about the souls He lets into heaven. He won’t even let you in if you haven’t been baptized. And people like Aristotle are the ones that really got screwed, since the art of baptism didn’t even exist in their lifetimes. Aristotle was a good man, but he was born too early in history and had to go to hell.
Richard Stein hated God for making up that rule. Actually, he just hated the Christians for it. He never met God. Why should he care about somebody he never met?
Scene 8
The Festival of War
Awake around noon, I tremble my corpse throughout the warehouse, feet sticking to the concrete floor, grits of sand cleaving, devoted to my feet. Going without shoes makes your feet go tough and leathery, but they become susceptible to picking up rocks and bits. A piece of broken glass can never cut you when stepped on, but it will stick to your heel and walk with you for days.
Nobody else is encircling yet. Three of them are at work and the other two are sleeping. My hair is stiff-scrabbled from the hard rest. The head my body owns is heavy, pulling my neck muscles to work. The neck bone is cramped up. A good sharp pain would relax it, massage it. The jab of a knife might do the trick.
I find a knife near the band equipment, one that Mort uses for screwing.
Stabbing my neck’s back with the sharp of the knife, I sit on the toilet in the center of the room. As I poop, I put the television on my lap and watch adventure cartoons on the network for cartoons. Johnny Quest is on right now, Thunder Cats is coming up next. As I stab my neck, making the neck tissue loose, and Johnny Quest rides his speedboat in the amazon, rolling in my rolling world…
I notice a man through the window.
At first, I don’t mind him. He’s only passing on the carpet walkway. Then he passes again, and then another again. I continue pinching out the waste-food, trying to pinch faster, hoping that the man outside does not see me sitting here with my pants down and a TV on my lap.
Another man clankers by. He’s in a suit of armor, doing some kind of construction work.
I use my God’s eyes to investigate.
A large tent picks itself up in my yard. The tent is made of gray wire lizard tissue — used in underground societies for clothing and other textiles, societies which are widely known as dark ones. Black tendons hold the tent sturdy, flags swim from the ropes on small poles, cages and cages of murk below the tent’s arena filter a smoldering fatty smell. The workers continue right by my window, annoying us (their neighbors) with a festival, just as we annoyed them with our electronic noise performance last night. Payback.
The landscape is early dark from the smothering rain clouds and a drizzle of pollution. Everyone seems a mess: sludgy clothes, grains of soil and weed milk that dreads their hairs together, and the skin cut by rocks becomes infected with crispy diseases from grooming the caged walm beasts.
I don’t see any dark ones, only the medieval tent villagers. The dark ones are a race that came from a diseased world. They lived under the planet’s surface with the giant beetles and reptiles that became their food and materials — clothing, beds, bone-weapons. Nobody in Rippington communicates with them except for our neighbors, the medieval ones, who are their friends because they are both very violent cultures. Every so often, the medieval ones and the dark ones will have a battle for entertainment, for the whole world to see, and they call it The Festival of War.
The dark ones are probably not out yet: still too bright outside. Dark ones are sensitive to the sun and can only wander during the night moments. They have pale features: white skin, white hair, and white eyes, with a hint of green to their nails and blood vessels. They look a lot like humans, but have cold blood. Some say they evolved from lizards rather than apes. I heard about the dark ones from Christian, who heard about them from our neighbors.
The dark females are known for their unusual sexual behavior. They are the dirtiest, most violent, most revolting, sex-crazed creatures to ever come through the walm. Christian says they are more reptilian than the male species: without any hair growing on their bodies, sharp claw-like fingernails, cold beady eyes, and snake tongues that are up to ten inches wide and eighteen inches long. Their sex drives are intense. They can’t be sexually calmed without being gratified at least six times a day. It gets so laborious at times that the males are forced to lock their females away, to keep themselves from injury.
A dark one’s sexual performance starts with the female injecting her enormous snake-muscle tongue within her partner’s rectum. This arouses the male’s penis, which is situated on his chest between the nipples. She can also carve simple designs into his backside to help him bleed. This is foreplay for dark ones. Once the tongue is disengaged, the female squats into the male’s erect penis.
As the struggle progresses, the female drives her claws deep into her opponent’s flesh, rip-cutting with the magic moment. She will begin licking the blood or eating the pieces of meat she has taken, or she will plunge her tongue into the male’s throat and suffocate him. Suffocation is sexually exciting to dark males. And the male will give the female extra pleasure by dishing out fist-blows to the sensitive portions of her skin. The females may look more reptilian than the males, but their skin is gentle and smooth, so the males don’t cut the feminine flesh as the females cut into them. They do, however, pound bruises into their milky scales.
After the males first started locking away the more sexually active females, they smiled their big teethy mouths a lot, very happy to be relieved of their sex duties. However, the females found imprisonment very frustrating and resorted to lesbianism.