Every father abandons his mate after intercourse, and every mother abandons her children after birth. The schools take care of them during childhood, which lasts about twenty years. The cockroach people have the intelligence of any normal human, but they don’t use their intelligence for intelligent things. They prefer pestering larger creatures, eating shit, and fucking out more and more and more pests to clog up the walls.
Their lives are long, but unfulfilled. Their whole point of living is to act like bugs. But in the cockroach people’s dimension, the mammals are as small as bugs, and the bugs are huge like mammals, so there’s probably no point in bettering themselves.
“A storm is coming,” the bug man tells me. “It’s going to be a bad one.”
I nod to him and the little man smiles.
He climbs my bed, and up my blue woman’s fire hair to her shoulder, around her neck to her chest. Then sits down, nuzzling his back into a plump mound, a massive ocean breast, her clock-like machinery pulsating into him, vibrates his back and buttocks. And he blurts, “Comfortable.”
I hesitate to speak with the small man, rolling through my dizzy vision.
He says, “I’m sorry about the wall, but we needed a fire exit.”
“You live in the wall?”
He doesn’t answer me.
He says, “There will be lots of lightning, lots of wind and fire, lots of people going insane. Lots of people dying.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Child Earth wants to have some fun with us.”
The blue woman awakes to the little man on her breast, calm to his presence. Calm. She picks him up, looking down at him, studying.
“Innocent and curious…” I say to myself.
The blue woman tosses the cockroach man against the wall. He screams and breaks his neck and back and insides, and the little body plops to the floor, limp and dead.
Her blue face rests against my arm. Her mouth is wide open. The liquid flowing out of it is icy and ill-flavored.
God’s Eyes:
Mr. Death stops crying. He looks up at his audience, at his wife and kids’ unfeeling smiles. Vodka is still silent and also shows no feeling. Nan and Gin seem concerned for him, but probably just because he’s Gin’s only hope. The room is dim. The room is always dim when you’re at a table facing Death.
Death speaks:
“I killed him… my own son.” He looks up at Gin, curling his lips. His words begin slur-sobbing as black tears fall from his eyes. “He was about to get hit by a car and I pushed him out of the way… I was trying to save his life… I didn’t mean to… but my touch killed him.”
He starts crying again. The wife gets sympathetic now — out of habit — but not as much as she should. She doesn’t break a tear.
Gin says, “But I was killed, and I’m not dead. How did your son die?”
Death responds, “You are not dead because I did not touch you. I was fired by God, my father, and was ordered to never touch anybody ever again. My touch is what kills the body and sends the spirit to its destination. Without my touch, people that die become zombies, like you. When my touch killed my son, his soul was released from his body and sent into the walm, to be turned into energy. He is erased from us.”
In oblivion.
“About my hand…” Gin interrupts him as if he was talking about weather, holding up rotten Breakfast, who squirms in rhythm with his medusa hairs. “My hand was touched by your twin brother. Can your touch take the life from it?”
“I cannot help you,” Death whimpers. Then he stands up and reveals his hands. They are gone. Not cut off, just gone. There isn’t any blood or signs of chopping. They’re just stumps, like he was born without them.
Death says, “I will never touch anyone ever again.”
One of his daughters chuckles at him.
The wrist between Breakfast and Gin rots away as Gin holds it up to Mr. Death. Then there is no wrist left at all, and the bone breaks from Breakfast’s weight. It falls into Gin’s Listen Day dinner plate and begins to do a happy dance.
The two girls laugh first, then Mrs. Death and all of Gin’s friends, and even the miserable Grim Reaper, starts chuckling. Soon the room is filled with insane giggling, all for the dancing demon hand.
Gin doesn’t respond. His eyes look like they’re tranced.
Then Gin hard-blinks and shakes his head, looking around at his hand’s audience and their jubilation. And after a few more hard-blinks, he joins in. But instead of a laugh coming out of his mouth, it is a long red cry.
Scene 15
Boot Lips
I am watching the baby blue woman watch television with awe-filled eyes, and many walm people are watching from behind me. Probably never seen a television show before. All of them are enthralled within six-year-old news reruns. I’m surprised they still have shows on, surprised they didn’t shut it all down completely, the whole damned entertainment market. Surely they will soon, and it won’t bother me much. I haven’t seen Battlestar Galactica in days and don’t seem to care. I’ve already seen them all, but that never stopped me before.
The blue woman is on the floor instead of on a milk crate, comfortable with the cold hardness on her butt flesh, or maybe she didn’t want waffle prints on her skin. I haven’t given her a name yet. I don’t think I’m going to get around to it either. Blue women don’t need names. They don’t seem to own enough individuality to have them.
Richard Stein said that names are inconsequential within a race of perfect people. If they all look reasonably alike, if they wear the same clothes, and have the same style, speak the same, maybe they even think the same. If individuality is wiped out then names should be nonexistent, or maybe numbers should replace them — I should call the blue woman Number Nine. But Richard Stein wasn’t talking about blue women. He was talking about the nazis. If the nazis would’ve taken over during WWII, overpowering the world with their Hitler-loving ideals, they would’ve made everyone identical. They would’ve killed their enemy, which was individuality, which would’ve made for a horrible world, maybe even worse than the one I’m living in now. Because without individuality, everyone would be as boring as a blank piece of paper.
In other words: NAZI = FRAMED PIECE OF BLANK PAPER.
But the anti-nazi people had too much soul to let the nazi utopia happen. Souls were very bright back then and individuality won the day.
The others arrive in time, just before the boredom’s arrival. I sense cold crisps and meat flakes on their minds as they enter from the queer world. The cold crispy emotions they emanate were created from thinking too much while within the untamed outside, mad-agitating streets, which has happened to myself times before. But I’m not sure where the flaky meat emotions came from. It probably had to do with being around Death for so long, or maybe they’re getting disgusted with Gin’s appearance. I’m not for sure, it seems like a very uncomfortable emotion to have.
They tell me about their encounter with Death, taking off their outside clothes and getting drinks from a flapboard box they’ve brought with them, and I try to sound surprised by their story, even though I’ve seen the whole thing in the third person.
I say, “You poop-dicks ate without me? What am I going to do for food? I’m not going out by myself with my crappy vision.” I say this because I want to go do something. Eating seems like the logical activity for me. And I think my whining is funny.