|
Holy loving poo poo there is a banner ad?
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2010 08:43
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2024 00:25 |
|
|
Another day in K-Mart and I can taste my throat. Like some dumbed cattle I lean against my register and wait. Pressing on my nametag so the pin bites into my chest and reminds me that I am in fact still here. I resign myself to the customers, enduring their tirades, suffering their petty charitable smiles. Watching despair-fatted waddling housewives bear down in a storm of glasswear and vomited progeny, eyes flat with the death-joy of the kamikaze. They stalk down my lane like bloated Ivan Vankos mounting the Monaco raceway and with a start I realize that this is a suicide bombing, that it's not even really about me, that I've become a prop in some sick transcendental performance. They know what they are, and it sickens them; and so they fling themselves at our registers in self-annihilation, catharsis by destruction of the self. We are their Sirens, and they leap not for the sweetness of our calls but to be broken upon the rocks. In a moment of revelation I can see the whole of my life, the current by which the river of time has taken me to the now. I perceive the eddies and flows of chance that pushed me towards this present, the dams and chokes that blocked possibilities; I see the tributaries of other lives. But only here, at the end, at this broad delta where what I am leaks into the vast ocean of humanity, do I see...this. This horror, this unforeshadowed death, the uncoiling umbilicus of pollution that finally winds through my waters. I cannot see the diversion that would have saved me from this thing. I see no tether on this ultimate malefaction. The cruelty of it boggles me. It has killed even fate. This bitch wants a price check on cashews. They're labeled. But no matter how I pray and beg, there will always be more of them. They aren't people, anymore, in the sense of a person as an individual being. They are some ghastly collective, adherents to the same God-cursed forgotten religion. In the blackness of the night they will gather, and in prayer before their totemic spider gods, as inspiration will be spread among them. An inspiration that leads them inevitably here. Their arachnid deity-queen supplies them. The children are always the same. Always the same few children. They are spawned, not born, spawned from that terrible godish anthropod. The seed of their worldly guardians only in spirit, never in blood. Come screaming from the belly of the thing, strained through the clutching bothria of its womb portal, full-formed and perfect as the manifestations of its hate. They are little cataclysms, etched and frozen in flesh; forever boy-and-girl-shaped hollows, hollows where the world should be, their fingernails crusted with vile effluvia, reaching, clawing at the candy racks, at the bagging station, at the register. On and on it goes, my life degenerating into a menagerie of horror. The store manager and his lieutenant in Women's Clothing factionalize and engage in a crude civil war on the bulletin board in the break room; there are rumors among the floor associates that they give vent to their violent passions and hatefuck in Pantry after-hours. Bent octogenarian women prowl emptied aisles looking for camo-pattern Snuggies, cloth exoskeletons to wear like chitin while they lurk in the woodlands and hunt their natural prey-animals. I can hear them trilling in their strange language cognate over the flung geography of Housewares. Last month one of them attempted to start a nest in the picture frame aisle; security had to move in with flamethrowers, burn away the caked digestive fluids before they hardened into resin. One of the men got too close, inhaled the foul vaporized plasmid and passed out. Corporate has him on suspension while they sort out insurance on the evolution of his membrane wings. His most recent Facebook posting is a picture of him clenching a basketball in his outstretched mandibles. The topography is grown sick. I wander towards the breakfast cereals in Pantry and find myself coming out halfway across the store, in Domestics. Aisles writhe like infected skin and reshape their dimensions. In mere steps I cross from my register to the electronics counter, this localized etheric breakdown causing impossible coterminous planes. I leave the restroom and discover that I am in the neighboring Pathmark. Strange ichors from the in-between coalesce in my hair and dissolve instantly with what sounds like screams. I am no longer sure of my mind. The lines at my register form unreal, brain-throbbing pentagram shapes, dissolve into non-Euclidean queues with uncertain orders. The nights where I sleep grow endless. I lay and twitch helplessly while phantom HR directors lecture me on my breaks; Cartesian demons sit on my chest and laugh, as my timecards float skywards and melt into amoeboid shapes, cruel parodies of The Persistence of Memory. I reach to punch them out and the hands of the clock twist backwards, revert tantalizingly towards the end of my shift as I draw away. I stare at the ceiling and wonder. At the end of the week my paycheck totals nearly three hundred dollars. I wonder how many calories are inherent in the paper. Sometimes I think, and sometimes, I do not. Is this Hell? Axeface fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Feb 1, 2011 |
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2011 23:47
|
|