The Great Contortion

Kitchen girl stepped outside her apartment castle on Tuesday morning
and proclaimed to the contents of E Street that she would no longer be
a slave to modern society.
"I will no longer be a slave to modern society," she proclaimed.
And stepped back inside.
+
Kitchen girl was 25 if you were to describe her with a number, which
is very easily done, and creates a comfortable vague image of someone
of an approximate age of 25, female in this case as it can be noted
that words 'she' 'her' and 'girl' have been used in association with
said character.
Kitchen girl was not an optimist nor a cynic nor a free mason. Kitchen
girl had hair that people called brown but was really a sort of auburn
with a natural highlight of a thick blonde here and occasionally there.
Kitchen girl hated stories in which the narrator was pretentious in his
or her humor. Cleverness was a damn nuisance. This girl was five feet
and seven inches in height. Another set of numbers.
Kitchen girl was told by an unwavering disembodied voice that was not
a baritone within her head that a girl of five-foot-seven known with
auburn hair could never be a capitalist.
"woe?" she said and the voice shrugged but she couldn't see it
shrug.
So the question of a statement remained so;
"woe?"
+
She was a cook that cooked for a restaurant slightly posh on the West
Side of a city. It was called something or other and she did not enjoy
cooking. Kitchen girl cooked and others ate and never saw her face. It
became a curiosity belonging to the girl that her qualms with creating
food were caused by the lack of recognition that such a position
warrants in the world.
If Kitchen girl action figures or Kitchen girl brand dehydrated tomato
paste were to exist then cooking behind the doors that swing to and
rarely fro would not be so bad. Bearable. Better than so. Possibly even
best. But no, Kitchen girl did not think this way, she told herself.
Kitchen girl may resent toiling unknown, but she could never be such a
devout capitalist nor appear in such a society.
Woe? Yay?
Was kitchen girl a free spot dot upon a map?
Was Kitchen girl not already within the grasp of a capitalist
country?
What was it like to experience a smooth muscle spasm? Do those who
suffer from attacks of spasming gain recognition from their peers? How
many spasms would be required for a week's worth of attention?
No, Kitchen girl thought maybe she should reject something or other,
as she was no longer a slave to modern society, and it was proclaimed
once again this time indoors as a reminder.
+
If rejecting ideals of modern society were akin to regurgitating a
well chewed portion of blood red rare steak-meat, potentially ridden
with meat parasites and meat diseases, Kitchen girl would have, at this
point in the existence of a 25 year old, alleviated her stomach from
any number of indigestible ideals. It was, however, not so, and the
population of the city took a moment from their day to chuckle quietly
at Kitchen girl's asperity.
+
Kitchen girl weighed 113 pounds and was a vegetarian. For the most
part. On occasion she ate a chicken sandwich that was always grilled
and she really liked fish. And squid. There was an Indian restaurant 10
blocks down that served this dish with squid in this spicy sauce that
seemed thin and milky but milky wasn't the word to describe it at all
but there was no word that was better in her vocabulary and this
annoyed her but not enough to find a way to figure out a more exact
description so the sauce remained the milky one and the squid stink was
heavy. And Kitchen girl loved it. They even cut the calimari in this
criss cross fashion (fancy) that Kitchen girl admired; despite the fact
she held such disdain for her cooking position she truly appreciated a
meal as a piece of art. All the little details of a plate of food that
didn't need to be there. She would notice these quirks and think about
the man or woman who created the dish, wondered what the criss cross
cut of the squid said about the cook, and sometimes wished she would
take the time in her own preparations at the restaurant but reasoned
with a sneering inner monologue that no one would notice anyway.
Maybe it's about time I rejected something, she thought.
+
Communism is a joke of a comparable caliber to capitalism the voice
not baritone unwavered to her. Calimari is a better system.
"Squid?" she said and the voice didn't know what it had said and
shrugged to absolve ownership of the statement.
Kitchen girl rejected the chicken sandwich and was one step
closer.
I guess I should revolt, she thought.
+
Kitchen girl saw God in a salad one day. The salad consisted of
lettuce cucumber carrot onion olive cheese crouton and a fine
vinaigrette. And it spoke to her about the benefits of the olive.
"A wise choice" it assured her, "a wise choice".
And Kitchen girl smiled and gave a nod and a wink, her mouth full of
God.
10 days later she lost 15 pounds but no muscle mass and has remained
this weight and is not effected by the differences in gravity in the
universe. 113 pounds in Anchorage, 113 pounds on Jupiter. One day after
ten days later Kitchen girl forgot how to multiply.
+
Kitchen girl experienced the same epiphany on a multitude of separate
incidences within a period of eight to ten months that nothing
mattered. Anything that transpired in her own life had nothing to do
with any other being's life nor another event in her own.
Desist from reading Camus, the voice informed, the philosophies of said
man are a natural inhibitor to the young revolutionary. Camus insights
self-destructive apathy.
Read Rousseau, it suggested.
Apathy from Camus? She questioned. The voice nodded but she couldn't
see it nod and kept speaking.
Why read the thoughts of the long dead? I will write my own book, she
mused.
The voice giggled because it had pictured Kitchen girl writing a
children's book about the ills of a mass consuming society with a jumbo
orange crayon. This was enough to insight laughter in the usually cold
world of the disembodied voice. The laughing made kitchen girl uneasy
and she decided that maybe everything did matter.
And then she forgot how to count.
+
It was the opinion of the Saint Bernard that got his kicks eating coca
leaves and canned cat food that Kitchen girl had lost her brain in the
sewer, and was succumbing to the blissful benevolence of the
disembodied baritone. How sad, he said, how sad.
Benevolence does not make proper sense within such a sentence the voice
informed. And the Saint Bernard chewed on coca leaves.
It was not in the best interest of such a canine to adhere to the
paranoid murmurings of such a voice. No, it was in fact out of the best
interest of such a moralistic character, thus the dog used coca as a
distraction form the hypnotic disembodied hymn, though there were those
who would say our hero-esque dog was using anything he could conjure up
as a viable excuse for consuming more coca. But the Saint Bernard knew
perfectly well he could cut the plant from his diet at any time he
wished to do so and the voice oddly mistaken for a baritone agreed.
That was something they shared, their agreement. It was a beautiful
moment and the voice wanted to cry to demonstrate to the dog how
beautiful it found the moment to be but the moment ended and the dog
bought a frizbee that lit up when you squeezed it.
Dogs can't buy frizbees, the voice protested and he told the voice to
die but it didn't.
His name was Tomlin, the dog.
+
Tomlin made the decision after spending 12 consecutive afternoons
meditating b beneath a green dumpster, the contents of which was
comprised predominantly of medical waste and pizza crust from the
Italian place next door that baked terrible dough to delve into the
sewer system of the city in a valiant search for the hardworking, self
respecting capitalist brain that kitchen girl had lost. This occurrence
would not stand in Tomlin's world nor would he accept it for any
American citizen to fall into the quagmire that was communism or worse.
He feared that kitchen girl was perhaps becoming a Wiccan. Maybe she
had already done so.
Tomlin imaged himself chewing through the fattier part of a pair of
legs of such a stance, savoring the taste and texture of leg-flesh from
above the knee, salivating profusely at the thought of so much warm
blood drenching his face with that salty stink as the teeth moved down
with a snap, pushing through the layers of skin and muscle,
complicating the organization of voluntary movement of the lower
appendages, pulling veins apart as strands of starchy noodle, sucking
them down in a stringy gagging slurp and a faint burp of sinewy soft
meat. No, it would not stand, Tomlin nodded, and his stomach growled.
So he ate a squid.
+
Kitchen girl remained silent as she always did while working her shift
at the restaurant with no definite name when the voice spoke to her, a
quickly increasing noise.
-Don't put onions in the soup. Only God-fearing mall-walkers like
onion. It's gross.-
Kitchen girl tried to stick onion in the voice's eye but missed and
struck her own. Tears welled up but the onion was a moot point in
relation to the tears. The onion is indeed a strength and power all its
own but to say a mere root vegetable could bring the girl to a crying
sort of emotion is to apply too much credit to it.
Kitchen girl cried because nothing mattered. She would die in a timely
day and like a yawn no more mention would be given and the earth would
scratch its back and snore.
Kitchen girl bawled for the thought that the earth would die soon after
she. Life would be lead as best it could and then the atmosphere would
choke and any accomplishment left behind would rot right there with the
planet; too poisoned by modern life; abused by man.
Kitchen girl apologized for being human and the voice rolled its
eyes.
Kitchen girl apologized for every bug she ever killed, every animal she
had ever caused suffering, and the voice mentioned the squid. Kitchen
girl cried more forceful. She liked the squid. It was so tasty. The
voice loved misery and licked Kitchen girl's hair. Kitchen girl got
freaked out and yelled. And then she got fired for crying in the
soup.
+
Maybe everything did matter, Kitchen girl thought. Everything matters
but not. Everything will rot, this is true, but Kitchen girl could not
allow herself to spend this living existence idle.
Manic-depressive is the new healthy, she heard the voice mutter. It
sounded drained and delirious, as if a proper night of sleeping had
been lacking, moving closer to a week's worth of lack.
Sassafras oil is the new coke. The pus content of dairy products is
nauseating. No economy is a healthy economy. Reject your elders. Floss.
Floss.
The voice got confused and so did Kitchen girl. She was unemployed and
looking for social change and personal change and the unwavering
non-baritone was distracting her with delirium.
Get some sleep she said.
+
It was three-thirty-five and seventeen seconds and 8 milliseconds and
300 blinks into the morning of the day that was probably Wednesday by
the general look of it, the look being slightly difficult to discern
that it was pitch black and damp, though it should be mentioned damp is
not usually a way to look but a way to be and even then it was not
often a desired description for how one might be, but a nuisance of
existing in a world in which water was common, and it had now extended
far beyond the position of a standard nuisance and was well on its
proverbial way towards becoming an antagonist of a hyperbolic nature,
one that Tomlin cursed to a Christian hell quite profusely as he put
forth a series of vigorous attempts to extricate his bulbous head from
the inanimate, unmolding clutches of a sewer drain located periodically
about the system of curbing as part of the streets that made transit
happily possible in the city; and by the look of it the day couldn't
possibly be another besides Wednesday. Tomlin gave nodding a try to
assert how certain he was that his internal statement pertaining to
Wednesday would have been more than appropriate to say out loud but his
head was still stuck and no nodding transpired. It was indeed such a
day and though dark and damp Tomlin enjoyed Wednesday, however not this
Wednesday. This Wednesday was a stern demonstration that Tomlin's ideas
were not always absurd pangs of genius as he had once allowed his brain
to believe and agree to. This demonstration stung slightly in respect
to the saintly dog's pride and the decision was made with little
consideration otherwise that such an event would never be vocalized to
another living thing and most specifically not to tiger lilies.
Immediately upon his release, he said to the insides of his head, he
would murder thirteen tiger lilies and vomit the remains upon Kitchen
girl's doorstep, and proceed to bite her until she would be willing to
realign her basis for rejecting ideals and to make him a grilled
chicken sandwich with lettuce and mayonnaise and pepper and a pinch or
maybe two of salt and a slice of lemon upon a toasted onion and garlic
bagel from the shop down the street. And oh how it would please him.
How it would indeed.
+
It was inside of Kitchen girl where it was agreed that dampness was a
terrible nuisance. It was not like being dry and comfortable and it was
essentially quite unlike being wet, drenched from eyes and hair to
shins and toes. There was, at the least of it, a totality in being
drenched. A thoroughly saturated set of clothes and skin granted one a
state of temporary imperviousness; a bit of dampness is not wet enough
to warrant a change of clothes but is just close enough to where you
wouldn't want to sit on the sofa.
Kitchen girl hated being damp so she waited in the street for the rain
to increase from a weak drizzle. And it started raining and she saw a
Saint Bernard vomiting at the entrance of her cherished apartment
castle.

The vomit was coca leaves and tiger lilies and vodka and squid and
Tomlin winced a smidgen as it came up. He had not suspected it would
burn so thoroughly but it did. It was these little things that caused
Tomlin to fear for his genius brain. There were those that would say
that such copious amounts of coca were inflating the dog's ego to a
degree of pomposity that had removed his brain from the process of
normal reasoning, leaving him in a delusional state of a grandeur self,
lording over the common population with a head amped by coca and a
stomach full of steel.
It was mentioned by the voice, not baritone, not wavering nor unstable
nor dissatisfied in any conceivable or inconceivable way that there had
been several instances in the preceding 13.8 week days that occurred
without a weekend to interrupt them in which it was documented by the
voice that Tomlin had grown weary of chewing the leaves and was now
deep into the procession of the transformation from coca to cocaine
hydrochloride. The voice gasped that first day and quickly renounced
ever believing that the majestic animal had a grasp upon his habit. The
voice then cried that immediate moment of the present that is
haphazardly being presented but did not cry about beauty and not about
Tomlin's love of cocaine but the sudden realization that three weeks
previously Tomlin had ignored the voice and deemed its words absurd and
detrimental to a person's well being and skills of logical thought. And
the crying became sobbing and the sobbing grew louder as the
realization was three weeks after the initial happening and the voice
felt dumb and didn't want to finish dinner and the sobbing that was
loud just turned to dampness of the face that no one could see, and the
tears were cold and the rain lulled and the street stank of dog-vomit
and Tomlin stuffed a half gram of powder into his nose, snickering as
Kitchen girl cleaned his stomach-mess, fowl and caustic.

Episode 77, 'The Ghosts are so Afraid of Ghosts That We Can't Turn on
the Lights. All We Can Do Is Sit And Wait. '

34 days after the dog-vomit thing,
82 bright gray fairies swarmed about Kitchen girl's head and chest and
swift and gently lodged their grey-glowing hands thru bone and body and
into the heart + brain. Kitchen girl jerked and her eyes got wide. The
Fairies removed the two organs, saran wrapped them and flew south. The
voice quipped 'cool' and then cried. Kitchen girl's eyes fell hollow
and gray and she kathunked upon the city sidewalk. the voice decided
she had departed the mortal coil in vain and expressed the initial
shock-sadness of witnessing a brain and heart being ripped out by
fairies.
'woe for the cosmos' no on heard it say, 'woe for the cosmos.'

The evening of that day Tomlin insufflated 4 grams of cocaine because
Kitchen girl was a dead, lifeless corpse on the sidewalk outside of the
apartment castle and the dog concluded he had nothing better to do now.
Tomlin rubbed his head against the wall and,
'oh,' he said, 'I'm really numb' and he grinned an undesired
grin.
His heart told him it was going to burst but Tomlin knew it was over
reacting. And that's when he got this idea to run for mayor.

the voice buried itself in the sea,
and Kitchen girl's body lay slack on the cement.

The fairies kept glowing brighter and Kitchen girl could still see and
feel as if she were whole, as if her physical body were not sitting
patiently permanently comatose on the sidewalk and Kitchen girl
wondered if she had died and then after that wonder that stayed
unanswered she told the insects she saw in the sky as she flew with the
gray-glowy-things that she still had a body and then the bugs would get
eaten by birds and then the birds would explode because that's what
birds do. Kitchen girl loved the bugs. The fairies seemed happy but not
too social so Kitchen girl tried to make conversation by telling them
what kind of food she had put into her stomach only 83 minutes before
she twitched and died. But 'died' didn't sound right as Kitchen girl
thought the dead were more dead than this but figured there was
adequate if not ample space for her to be horribly wrong, and that what
she was experiencing was in fact death, but well, everything seems to
be up in the air at this point, she thought, and would not say either
way what this was until she got further along.
'I had oatmeal this morning' she said and giggled ever so slight, 'it
was good. oatmeal and grapefruit juice.... and hash browns.' she
laughed out loud and smiled. 'it was so good!'
and she laughed harder. and she laughed more. and she laughed harder.
and she laughed more. and she laughed harder. and she laughed more. and
she laughed harder. and she laughed more. and the fairies said
"Stop please"
and if you fly south far enough you get to this place that's all
black, empty space.
The blue-grays know about it but they think they've used up its
knowledge if it ever had any so they couldn't care if the humans and
fairies wanted to waste their time in the black-space-south-place. The
blue-grays had more pertinent matters to attend to, being 9 feet tall
and brilliant and all. But forget about them for now; it's what they
want.
Kitchen girl thought it was beautiful there and wanted to go play on
the swings and get warmed by the spring sun but there were no swings
and if this space had seasons it was certainly not going through
spring.
Gravity's dead.
Kitchen girl got a sandwich and sat down and waited patiently for the
fairies to come back from their errands.
+
Tomlin had this great idea to run for mayor but got bored again and
used more cocaine. And then he was spun and determined to do something
great with his delicious brain segments and got this better idea to run
for mayor. So he ran for mayor. Tomlin made posters and paid for
billboards and bit people till they bled and passed a vote his way and
after a grueling race and so much blood, that dog got his victory and
celebrated by giving freebase a try.
the mayor deserves a little coke to smoke, he reasoned, and spread a
half gram onto a sheet of tin foil and mixed in the baking soda and
dropped in some water let the paste dry a thick white and smoked off
the foil till the bottom was black charred and laughed and spent 10
million dollars of city money on 1800 kilos of cocaine hydrochloride
and purchased a helicopter.
+
It was 215 years after Kitchen girl's body had dropped upon sidewalk
but it was honestly 200 seconds or possibly 800 minutes but probably
not and just as well and nevermind the measurement of time, it had been
exactly eternity since the gray fairies left and their lunch was
getting cold. Kitchen Girl breathed in but it smacked of black licorice
when she did so. She stopped breathing. it felt very much like the idea
of nothingness that was inside Kitchen Girl, and Richard Nixon
explained that it was this way to her because that's how she was
imagining it. Richard Nixon had the healthy body of a 21 year old
Hispanic man and the head of Richard Nixon circa 1975, and because
Kitchen Girl did not question such an image it remained projected as it
was and then things got confusing.
A projected image spoke to Kitchen Girl and Richard Nixon but was
unseen by Kitchen Girl, as it was an image far too complex for her to
perceive at this point and it called itself Barnibus and was sure to
mention that it was infinitely more appealing than Kitchen Girl.
Kitchen Girl just flashed perplexion.
"I don't understand how I could be unable to perceive an image."
Kitchen girl said.
"And that's the first problem." Barnibus replied. "Why have you made
it so drab here?"
"Because that's how it is." Kitchen girl explained. "Why cant you just
change the appearance if you don't like it?"
"Don't be stupid."
"That's not stupid. Where is the logic here?"
But no one heard the word 'logic' but Barnibus did but only a hint of
it. It had done away with that word long ago,
and Kitchen girl said, 'oh'
and 'say' Nixon said, 'How bout a smoke?'
+
Tomlin was out gallivanting. He tore into the sky through cloud dust
in the helicopter and made constant stops on office tops to deliver
cocaine to businessmen and businesswomen and they thanked him dearly
and paid the price of 300 a gram. Then a building blew up. Then Tomlin
smoked 2 grams of crack rock he had cooked up that morning. He smiled
and panted but thought something was missing.
Down below within the city the confusion was heavy and the debris
clouds thick like a hock of pig meat. People screamed and also ran with
no particular destination because unbridled befuddled panic seemed
right.
"Don't worry," a robot of 5'9" dressed in ragged khakis and tight
black tshirt said, approaching the rampaging crowds with is partner,
"We're from the Pentagon."
"Be calm and there will be no executions," The robot's partner
assured. The robot's partner was nine feet tall and blue-gray in
complexion. It was not human.
"Don't worry" the robot said, "We are from the Pentagon" and he broke
a man's arm it went crack and he pulled outward and jammed the arm into
the man's throat so he gagged and died on his own dislocated broken
bleeding limb. The flailing herds had style in unison as they gasped
and stopped still to stare at the dead man with an arm in his
throat.
"oooh" they said.
One guy poked the limb and said "squish squish".
And the robot laughed. The blue-gray just stood there and sent
telepathic messages to the mesmerized masses telling them to pacify
themselves and they did. But the dog in the helicopter was still
selling coke.
+
'so what is this?' Kitchen girl asked.
'it is.'
'that's dumb.'
'I'm sorry if you cant understand...' Barnibus danced through the
words.
'You probably don't know either.'
'I do.' said Nixon.
'I doubt it.'
'why are humans such skeptics?' Barnibus asked.
'Humans lie,' and Kitchen girl gave a look at Nixon. Nixon grimaced
and blew smoke at her.
It was quiet.
'well, why am I here?' she spoke up again.
'You always have to know but you never know.'
'Why the ambiguity again?'
'it makes as much sense as anything else.'
Nixon had fallen asleep.
'well could you at least teach me how to see you?'
'sure.'
'so what am I doing?'
'How is it the skill of the Mayans is dead?'
'like architecture?'
'the blue-grays are right.'
'blue-grays?'
'The human mind is too malleable.'
'what?'
'you can feed them anything and they'll forget their past.'
'I have no past.'
'Do you ever wonder how clueless your race will be in the
future?'
'There is no future.'
'Then why bother?'
'To change the present?'
'You'll be dead before a change is seen.'
'I'm not dead now?'
'The humans will forget again.'
'Then maybe I should do anything.'
'What good will it do?'
'What's good?'
+
Tomlin managed to crash his helicopter in California; The Oakland
area. He had been bingeing too frequently and his giddy brain was
developing a new protein inside. It was an insatiable desire now,
Tomlin knew this; but his head was too fervently addled and sapped of
dopamine and
The serotonin felt funny, he thought and wondered what was happening
to his vocabulary.
It was sunny out, he said, and remembered he had completely consumed
and distributed the cocaine hydrochloride purchased illicitly with city
money that has now become Tomlin's defining moment in aiding the
declining drug scene by bringing pure kilos of a class 2 stimulant
straight from a place not far from Columbia where there are always
fights between the guerilla soldiers and the coke farmers and
manufacturers to a city in the Midwest where the folks are dying to be
something else and something other than a man
and woman
Drunk Driver statistic;
train-car wreckage;
a tragic one,
the neighborhood cat got caught in a possum fight and that possum win
every three of sixteen times cause we took the time to count the
cries
and mark the wall, for every yowl.
For every creak in the house and crack in the dirt
the basement floor
was not even granite,
and it didn't seem enough that it was growing, so in Tomlin's grandeur
displacement he snorted coke and smoked it as rock but has still never
mainlined and doesn't know if he ever will. In Tomlin's grandeur
displacement he fed a whole city and suburbs; (the rich kids in school
buy an 8ball a weekend, a Friday, and coming Monday they heard the
thump and the anxious chest + heavy brain + knowing it was great
cocaine. knowing that a line as long as a pinkie could numb your face
and coax the ego; they could strut and feel power with a set of keys
and a gram in the pocket. They could up it to ounces and off it in a
day. They could sit and twitter in class like glass fish.)
And he really fed that mid-west city,
all that protein in the way.

And Tomlin got out of his memory, and began a search for the local
scene which was apparently rampant; like police brutality in San Diego
it swarmed the defiantly robust dog in his early 20s (human
measurement) and it had never occurred to Tomlin he might have a
name.
He asked around and around he paced in a fountain-size circle till he
brought out a 100 and got a gram and a half of crystal meth, |fresh
from the lab| he was told, |only chemist-made| it was boasted, |no
bathtub pseudophedrine chemical-cleanser CRANK.|
Tomlin had never tried crystal and got it on the new found knowledge
that it was no where near the price of cocaine but kept you lifted for
8 to 12 hours. He got a hotel room and opened his package on the coffee
table with a book placed like so, and a coaster tossed on top. Tomlin
took his first first peak into the thick wrapped plastic and his
curious tongue lagged out as he stared a glaze upon a pink chunk that
was fat as a thumb and a half. It looked wet. Weird. He touched it.
Dry. Tomlin took the crack pipe with white stripes and filled it to the
slightly open top hole and took a lighter. He watched his paws and
stopped panting. Lighter flicked and the saint Bernard liquefied and
inhaled/exhaled 3/4ths of a crystal gram. It smoked for 45 minutes and
his brain was learning calisthenics. An ever whelming spasm of joy came
out and he laughed and barked and his dog eyes darted deftly to quickly
see it looked the same.
Tomlin was in grave danger,
of eating his brain.
+
Kitchen girl yawned and Barnibus started yawning.
'see what you've done?'
For an image too complex for Kitchen girl to see or even grasp it was
awfully uppity and generally rude. child like.
'let's call you Yawnibus,' Nixon chortled.
Kitchen girl rolled her eyes like the disembodied voice used to and
was beginning to agree to the blue-grays which she had never seen
before. The black space had only brought about strange disorders in the
person or thing due to isolation and sometimes lack of vision.
Her stomach hurt with an empty film of airplane air in her mouth and
she decided then that she was not dead, as most dead people whose brain
and heart have been separated from the body do not tend to have
complicated digestive problems from beyond the black space. She
wondered who in Lincoln was playing with her body.
'No, you're not dead.' Barnibus smiled but she couldn't see it smiling
so it told her so.
'I know,' Kitchen girl said, 'I can feel my stomach being tossed and
squished.'
Barnibus laughed and made a joke about necrophilia, complete with
pelvital thrusts by Barnibus to illustrate the punch line. Kitchen girl
couldn't see and wasn't looking and wouldn't listen.
'Barnibus is a tool,' she thought.

And below the south place and all the black space was the mid west hum
drum city street known as South, located humbly in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Along South street on the sidewalk was a nine foot tall blue-gray being
with an ice cream cone and a 5 foot 9 robot named Undone with a
lifeless Kitchen girl slumped and jostling against the metal shoulder.
The blue-gray was actually having sherbet. Lime and Lemon. Never ice
cream.
A lot of phlegm formed in the robot's throat and mouth and he
spat.
The blue-gray was named Iihiee and his favorite book was no longer in
print.
Kitchen girl's body was warm and not only from the sun. Undone shifted
the girl-mass and spoke.
'How many miles away is Oakland?'
Iihiee sucked some sherbet in and answered.
'Approximately 815 miles.'
Undone nodded. He had this fear of doors and suffered form these
chronic delusions that the doors were being opened with people peeking
in. It made him shake and gasp each time and every time he was a little
less sure he had imagined it.
But he did. Each time. Each minute. Each moment. Each one-thousandth
of a standard unit of measurement for the expelling of life's events,
Undone wanted very badly for everyone to be okay, though he knew he'd
never have his want. The Lincoln city transit system was packed and
stuffed with cars and trucks and buses whose drivers were packed with
cocaine in the nasal passages and when they breathed in it was an
obvious loss of brain cells. When the streetlights became green the
cars and trucks would go fast, the buses would sputter and everyone
yelled to get out of the way.
Undone had seen humans inhale cocaine for a good solid certainly
sturdy day and never give the yayo another notice until another life or
maybe never.
But Lincoln was desperate to be a big city so they built an out-door
shopping mall and the coke became cheap. The rich kids with the real
'out-side-of-Colombia-coke', would stomp the product with numbing
agents the names of which they couldn't remember and cut up chunks and
double or triple the powder, moving it in the office district and
paying off a cyclist cop with a half G a week.
But Lincoln was still a mid size city best known for being the capitol
of Nebraska and nothing more. the two walked calm but brisk and Undone
spoke.
'I hate those rich kids.' he started, 'they've got too much money.
don't know what to do so they go for coke. They get hookt on huge
habits cause they're careless and cocky.'
'Seems appropriate the humans would grow addiction to a
novelty.'
Iihiee's stride was deceiving and his sherbet was gone. It was 90
degrees in April and they were walking to Oakland.
'Don't worry' Undone said, extending and arm, 'We are from the
pentagon' and he ripped a man from his parked car, out through the
window and onto the concrete where he made a 'crack' noise and bled for
a while. Iihiee rode shotgun and Kitchen girl body took the backseat.
There was glee in the robot's eyes and they bought a map and made a hat
with it. Oakland would soon be in mechanical flames.
+
Kitchen girl's stomach ran empty though no longer jostling in a
pinching kind of stapled cold way. Or the way something drains down the
back of the throat and into the belly to make it quiver and sick.
'Stomach acid is the only neat thing about humans' Barnibus
said.
'Look how many cigarettes I can fit in my mouth!' Nixon exclaimed and
demonstrated, achieving 27 but nearly choking on the 28th.
Kitchen girl's stomach hurt worse and she didn't know if she wanted to
live if she were stuck in the black space with Barnibus and Nixon for
her eternal years.
Barnibus then became visible and it was a thing. This annoyed Kitchen
girl even more as it was a horrid thing and she told herself that
Barnibus had no image and he didn't.
Barnibus said, 'ooh'
and Nixon said 'ugh'. His body rotted and the head floated.
Kitchen girl smiled and decided she had to do everything. She made
Barnibus a soy turkey sandwich with no mayo and explained it was her
parting gift. Barnibus got misty eyed and sobbed a little and said
Kitchen girl was welcome back to the south place any imaginable
time.
'what a tool' she said and told herself she was re-associated with her
body before the south place ever came into view but it didn't work.
Barnibus ate the ice cream of the future.
'takes practice, eh?'
And that girl sat in a whicker chair she liked. And thought.
+
Tomlin found that his mouth adored the crystal vapors' taste and
texture but the teeth did not.
|It would be wise to brush| the disembodied voice rang in. |lest your
proud canines deteriorate from vapor residue|
Tomlin bit at the air but the unseen voice was still unseen and
possibly not real. Tomlin refused to respond and instead dove into
contemplation of the empty pull that Tomlin felt inside him.
|Stimulants are making the brain weak| the voice explained.
Tomlin could quit stimulants and be just as empty, he figured. He got
an idea, in fact, and said |to hell with you, voice|
He needed to go to chemistry classes and he did and understood it
well. Tomlin was out 6 thousand but had a million more. He moved to San
Francisco and obtained access to a lab. In a dutiful manner Tomlin used
the lab and made methamphetamines, his very own pink crystal.
|Your motives are wicked| the voice warned and Tomlin purchased an
airplane that could seat one, maybe two.
+
Her palms sweated and she dried them on the image of corduroy pants
she was presumably wearing. The palms weren't real either but she
finally figured it out. She told herself there was a black space exit
to her left and she said things too.
'I will' she said.
And she turned the doorknob, brass, and stept out.
Kitchen girl frolicked in the cosmos and skipped along meteors and saw
the gray fairies doing their laundry. It was an honest noiseless event
and Kitchen girl could never say she had ever seen or been a part of
such a thing until now. She let herself cry when she stepped towards
Earth and saw it there as a planetary gumball. She wished her heart
would stop shaking and that everyone could frolic amongst the cosmos
and understand what it was. She could still touch the wisps of dust
that sparkled off of Mars and she couldn't desist the trembling and
then Kitchen Girl was realigning her limp self on a curb next to a man
vomiting in a storm drain. She was covered in fast-food-coffee-spills
and had various fliers glued to her with filth. The man finished
vomiting, straightened his tie, had a mint and jogged back to his
building.
'The wind feels cool,' she noticed.
+
When the kitchen girl body started twitching and convulsing in the
back seat of the stolen car Undone got worried and threw her from the
vehicle as he drove. it was pretty great to see him pull off a stunt
like that but it probably broke some Kitchen Girl bones.
crunch.
+
Kitchen girl took stock of standing on the curb of the street again in
the American reality and saw a woman on the walkway with designer
shoes, carrying a foot massager (in a box).
|Reject Consumerism!| she skrazzed, and slapped the box out of the
woman's hands like a glistening ham.
She stomped on the box with magic shoes and vomited blood onto the box
and woman. Kitchen girl spasmed violently and her surroundings became
static-ee. The woman cried and vomited. A man laughed and continued
walking. A car cried with a horn blast. Dogs barked. Birds chirped.
Thunder grumbled. The woman gagged. Insects crawled along grass stalks.
Pebbles ticked against the street. Pennies chimed on the sidewalk from
a clumsy hand. Kitchen girl shook. Babies wailed. Traffic twitched
forward. Time clicked theoretically on a watch. Street lights halo-ed.
Birds squawked. The earth moved. Microbes existed. Kitchen girl put her
hands out, face down.
|The days are never going to be __________ again| she thought.
|I would take that as a good thing?| the disembodied not baritone
replied.
|I'm not sure yet| she stared at the static street, |it might be good
but I don't know what the days are never going to be again. But I know
there's something,|
She took a breath, a pause;
|Some feeling; some movement of events, that the days will never hold
again.|
She took a breath, a pause;
|although they might,|
The voice looked attentive.
|But I don't think they will.
In fact,
they cant. They can't ever be like that again. Life is not as it once
was despite that I could not exactly describe what it was|
|Everything's been changing lately| A new voice said, |Maybe things
will never be normal again|
|This is normal,| Kitchen girl breathed hard. |Normal gets warped
along with us... and what was before gets smudged in the memory|
She shook. Her eyes hurt from being wide and absorbing light.
|I don't like this normal| The little new voice spoke soft.
+
Tomlin was smoking crystal again. It was delicious to his tongue. He
had 100 pounds. He was in an airplane. His. He flew to Peru. The dog
had plans.
+
Undone and Iihiee ate hot dogs at Dairy Queen. They had been told to
evacuate Earth within 2 years.
FORGET THE DOG the message said, HUMAN EXISTENCE ON THE EARTH WILL END
IN 5 YEARS AND WE WILL BE GONE AND SAFE LONG BEFORE.
Undone was still scared of the twitching Kitchen girl and doors.
Iihiee was just hungry.
KEEP AMERICA IN ORDER. a message told them. Iihiee determined it was
not a difficult task.
+
The twitching Kitchen girl stopped twitching and found that reality
was more malleable than the human brain. She decided that trees loved
carbon monoxide and they did. Plant life became enormous. She decided
consumerism didn't exist and everybody laughed at her.
|of course it does|
|Well,| she said, |Reality is bright red|
And it was. People didn't notice.
Honey falls from the sky rather than rain. And it did. Nobody eats
meat. And they laughed.
|Kill them| the disembodied voice said. |Exterminate|
And she thought about it. The new soft-spoken unsure voice
trembled.
+
Tomlin flooded South America with crystal methamphetamines. It was
simple. The masses were rabid for self destruction but poor. 15 dollars
for 3.5 grams. A gram went a wealth of a way until a tolerance was
built. Brazilian citizens stayed awake for weeks. Tomlin joined them.
He didn't eat. He smiled. Nobody cared about cocaine. The guerilla
fighters stopped fighting and smoked meth. That's all they wanted to
do. Tomlin smoked meth continuously on one occasion for 18 days and
couldn't handle the swarming noises of creeping images and then
collapsed. His dog body gurgled and he stared blankly forward. He was
afraid.
The next day he vomited and then dry heaved. He whined and wanted meth
but couldn't bring himself to move. Three more days he felt rested
enough to move and all the way out in nowhere Tomlin decided to take a
needle and made a solution of vitamin b12 and meth and water and stuck
it in his vein and shot it. The world began to ring and his vision
blurred and he fell over and shook. We're not sure how much he
dosed.
+
It was bright red outside and nobody noticed. Trees, they were still
green and that barky brown colour. Plants too. They towered above
buildings and began gnawing on concrete and steel. The concrete and
steel were red like a pair of lenses. Iihiee frowned but was admittedly
pleased. Undone would not believe he wasn't losing his mind. People
whispered behind him. he hated humans. doors would creak open but they
were closed. He hated humans more for creating doors. He couldn't
blink. A red reality hurt the eyes. Iihiee knew it was a human's doings
and smiled. It was no longer his place to maintain Earthly order, he
said.
"we have traversed too far form an order of the human past. This world
ends in 5 years; let them have their last goodbyes."
The gravity became slack then and Undone and Iihiee were floating. The
masses still ate red meat and watched television. Consumerism was
robust and svelte.
"humans are a curse" Undone said, crouching down into a robot-ball,
shaking form the constant voices. the murmurs.
Iihiee rolled his eyes and gave the robot valiums. The theory of time
fell apart; maybe it was June and maybe December. A year could go by
already and this would've worried Undone but the valiums were kicking
in nicely and Iihiee never worried.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Kitchen girl stood in a Kitchen girl way and stood, stood and surveyed
from a hill top she thought should be where she had placed her feet and
it was a green grass and mossy hill top, knocked with rocks of granite
from step to step. It was scatterbrained, what she had started to
survey, all these new staples of reality. She didn't like the red. It
smeared and refilled as Technicolor. Nah, earth tones. Well, maybe
something brighter. Or darker. More colors.
The robot got seasick wherever he was. Delirium was setting in from
too many valiums. He fell over. Kitchen girl was unaware of this.
People were generally concerned with the well being of all others.
Laugh track. ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. No good,
Kitchen girl. There is a total sense of community among humans. Nope.
Television programs are intelligent, truly sophisticatedly witty, and
provoke thoughts that one might never think otherwise.
"Quit it Kitchen Girl." No good.

|Kill Them| the voice said.
The soft-spoken voice got scared again. |please don't|
|They are inhibiting the progression of society| The voice did not
waver and was in fact a baritone now.
Kitchen girl stood atop her mossy hill and thought. There were ways
around extermination.
+++++++
++++
++++++++++++++++++++++|
Tomlin laid on his side for days. His paranoia was fading. He was not
happy. He did not feel pleased. He did not know how. Tomlin was lying
in nowhere and gargoyles flew over his head high up above. The dog
thought of his actions and a tear trotted down his face and into the
mouth where it dissipated in a salt burst.
|I'm sorry South America| He said and mourned for the meth supply he
had started flowing thru the continent. It is a sad notion that a
chemical could control a mind so beautiful as his, he thought.
|I Repent| he said. |I Repent the process of accelerating and draining
my brain and body. I WILL NO LONGER DESTROY MYSELF. I WILL NOT BE
DESTROYED|
he repeated, but he couldn't stand up. Tomlin was weak. dissolved. It
was hot, humid. The gargoyles were aimless in the sky, and Tomlin could
not stand. His stomach was full of pains. He wondered how many days
before he would die. Tomlin sighed; 'a wasted brain and a wasted
life'.
And then 82 bright gray fairies descended and stuck their little arms
in Tomlin.
++++++++++
Two years had passed in a day and Iihiee said it was time to leave. He
thought this human had not a strong grasp on what she could do. Earth
was shaking too unstable. Undone vomited with worry- sickness and
couldn't handle it when people looked at him.
They built a space ship and then the air became poison.
|well this is curious| Iihiee mused as the humans gagged.
Undone was filled with sorry glee.
+++
++++++++++++++++
It had been an accident and Kitchen Girl didn't really mean it. But
she supposed she did to some degree, as she had done it. Kitchen girl
had been trying again to get rid of consumerism when a man threw sewer
water and Dairy Queen hot-dogs at her when she was trying to be nice
and Kitchen Girl fumed and her vision began to shake and |KILL THEM|
the voice was loud and |don't| the soft-spoken could not be heard and
in a half-year moment, quite complex, Kitchen girl decided that
everyone inhibiting her should choke to death on poison toxic air. And
they did.
Sputtering gagging and spurting fluid from their lungs she said a
little 'oops' while watching from her hill top. The unwavering now
baritone was no more and not alive. It choked and spurted like the
humans and the little soft-spoken one clung to Kitchen girl and
repeated a frazzled mantra.
'Nothing is sane, we are never the same. Nothing is sane, we are never
the same.'
What was left were plants, trees, Undone, Iihiee and a whole lifetime
or more of cockroaches. The robot jumped and Iihiee wanted to find this
human and Kitchen girl thought it was all a little gross but couldn't
be helped now so she thought it was all right to be the only human
around.
Everybody in the elitist class that planned to leave the Earth behind
was a still twitching human on the floors of wherever, spurting mucus
from their eyes and Kitchen girl slightly smiled. There was nothing in
her head that told the World would end in 3 years. It wouldn't.
The gargoyles still swing in the sky about South America and the
cockroaches scurried to eat the poisoned flesh the world around and
everything had this empty hanging haze to it. And Kitchen girl thought
there was no such notion as consumerism. And there wasn't.
She wondered if she could die and if humans would ever again thrive.
The roaches shrugged. So did she.
'Nothing is sane
we are never the same'.
end.