Butter, or the Dairy of a Madman is a two-volume novel that takes place in Spain, located in the Fifth Dementia, a dream dimension known to all and sundry as Hell on Earth, with the life expectancy of Eswatini, and the fertility rate of Somalia. Existence for many in this ticking time bomb of a city has sunk to a Hobbesian low: solitary, nasty, and short. The story’s protagonist, Peki Zambrano, is a butter maker/shop owner with dwarfism who lives in despair with his mentally ill mother. She ebbs and flows with the tide of their history, whereas he is continually fighting not to be pulled under. A master in love with his medium, he also happens to be a murderer, using his victims’ fat to create the product. The ‘Butyrum’ creates drug-like hallucinations, and Peki gets high on his supply.

As business booms, the body count goes up. Peki is in desperate and dangerous pursuit of whatever pleasures might be squeezed from the free fall of contemporary civilization. He is no longer lurking menacingly in the wings, but is maniacally taking center stage. The toxic domestic environment is poisoning him. The dark shadow of law enforcement is moving ever closer. The country is on the brink of collapse, with financial disaster looming. Will Peki find the self-and-societal acceptance he is looking for?

The book is by turns a Grand Guignol, character study, Rabelaisian soap opera, and cat-and-mouse psychological thriller, a cautionary tale of aberrant passion and sensual perversion, a dance among the dramatis personae.

PEKI

The misshapen baby, living for nine months in a fetal position in a uterine universe, so sick and tired of placental nourishment, his umbilical cord acting as some strange antenna, suddenly falls down the rabbit hole of a birth canal and finds himself in the wonderland of this world. This, reader, is Spain in the Fifth Dementia, a dream dimension.

In this botch of a burg, a harelipped, humpbacked sadsack, Peki Zambrano, built like a fire hydrant, is a butter maker/shop owner, his establishment set up in what was once a petroleum jelly factory. He is a frequenter of casinos and brothels. He lives with his mentally ill mother, Marisa, in a gaunt building made of brick, glass, wood, and steel, a veritable house of horrors, with its accompanying cobblestone driveway and garage that could pass for a bunker, located in a funky neighborhood. After receiving from his doctor a diagnosis of syphilis, Peki pops mescaline and experiences a vision of Marisa castrating him. He holds his genitals like he would broken birds.

PEKI AND MARISA

The Charles Mansonoid Peki’s laboratory architecturally resembles a rundown Moulin Rouge. Once upon a time, he was lost and found. He has vivid memories of Christmases at the orphanage: the pine tree, with its resinoid redolence, swaddled in lametta and cocooned in tinsel, with vibrant explosions of bulbs and baubles, and a glittering star on the tippity top. The whole affair was stabilized in a bucket of soil. There was the caroling and games, the holly and mistletoe, the parish parties and festive feasts. Priests and nuns often played cards and dice on the steps of the church. The celebration was a yearly miracle. Sills were glowing with candles. Windowpanes were constellationed by snowflakes. Abstract fruitage, antique lanterns, and paraffin lamps were strategically situated on particular surfaces of the residential institution. There were many angelic and astral ornamentations to marvel at. Bells jangled. Tunes were sung. Yuletide records spun on the gramophone. Huge plasticine effigies of Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and adorable elves stood like sentinels around Santa’s sleigh. A few staff members wore convincing polar bear costumes. Children tweeted in a chorus line, like warblers on a telephone wire, twittering in time to the pounding organ. The meals were indeed Lucullan in extravagance. The Argus sky was full of starry eyes, and snow banks were soft as cotton candy. Peki remained reserved, forsaking the opportunity to establish contact with the other foundlings. He made sure he remained out of sight and sound. He recollects mistreating a lashless and lipless teenager, the wheelchair-bound Oscar Jara, afflicted with muscular dystrophy, in the dank cellar. The boy had a skeletal face, twiggy limbs, paddle hands, and floppy feet. His head was permanently cocked at an unnatural angle. The kid could have been mistaken for an ashen goblin. It was common knowledge that he had a dubious liver and a defective kidney. Peki, complexion grape-purple with rage, was struck by his delicate peepers and jutting chin. It was practically a slaughter of the innocent. His aggressive force found an outlet, using the boy as a punching bag, slapping him with incredible energy and abandon. Later abuse happened behind swing doors. Peki was venting frustration and fury in equal measures, feeling vulnerable to his own random and destructive behavior which he couldn’t understand. He pictured them as Jacob wrestling the Angel. The gymnasium-sized sleeping quarters held many cots in cubicles. The edifice was visually reminiscent of an enormous enameled cigar box. A plastic babe, an imitation of Jesus Christ, rested in a rickety stable in the lobby, the statues of Mary and Joseph protectively watching him. The surrounding environment suggested a Brueghel brumal scene. Doctors and nurses at the local hospital (the place always had a whiff of disinfectant) distributed presents to the orphans. Most of the gifts consisted of vehicular toys and stuffed animals. Peki received a bunny and a duck, both invested with personalities, and he adored them unconditionally. This one time he disemboweled a girl’s elephant and monkey…. Blanca Luque wore a pretty christening shawl wrapped around her waist. Asthmatically breathing, he went to slug her but stopped dead in his tracks as if he were rejected by some deflector shield. He had an unfocused gaze, elongating his speech, and abbreviating his pauses for dramatic effect. She managed to adapt to this behavioral pattern. Her tresses flowed lank. She was eggplant complected. Even back then he was more sexually predatory than the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto. His spoken language had exactitude and specificity, whereas Blanca’s was florid and figurative. She was a bullet-headed, goggle-eyed, hook-nosed, breadstick-slender, salacious hoyden who, rumor had it, hailed from the rude provinces. She was composed in patience and caution, dignified and balanced, dealing with him. Her high-pitched modulation could shatter plate glass. She cut quite a decorative figure, possessing an androgynous perfection and conspicuous self-sufficiency he envied. It was a white-knuckle vocal exchange between them. His erratic conduct called his sanity into question. Flicking an imperious raven-feathery forelock, the teenage Lotharia turkey cock-strutted away. Silence in space imposed silence on Earth. The light shone brightly and sang soundlessly. Blanca was gone, never to be seen or heard from again…

Life, to Peki, is unfair. He should be in the royal box and not the cheap seat, so to speak. Incontinence (his) is the one torment in Hell that Dante inexplicably forgot about. He looks like a homuncular, hungover Rasputin, caricaturing himself when communicating his love to Marisa. It is difficult to make confidences to her, not knowing how she will react because she is so volatile. With a blank countenance, she shells boiled chestnuts at the sink. He is possessed by a physical and emotional attraction to her. Although he recognizes that it’s wrong, he can’t help himself. It doesn’t come easy to bring himself to make contact with her. He is tolerant of her haughtiness. He has endured a lifetime of effacement and subordination to her and it is getting rather stale. His form of passive resistance to her rejections has taken shape over the years. He wants to be noticed, to be desired by her, but she seemingly goes through the motions with him. Currently, she regards him as though the sight of him makes her ill. Their private acts pull against public behavior. The relationship goes against the grain. The two don’t falsify tricky truths, pretend their partnership is normal, and ignore circumstances. They face facts. She, a woman of uncertain temper, sitting cross-legged on the Quaker-gray sofa, partaking of bread and wine, appraises the cypresses and oleanders in the queer country beyond the city with absentminded scanning attention. She has a beetling brow, beaky nose, and sharp cheekbones, her intense, beady pies a pale blue. And she has a straight mass of straw-brown hair and pear-shaped breasts, dressed in a denim shirt, baggy corduroys, and platform loafers. Peki has a plentiful black mop and prickling beard and wears a herringbone tweed suit that could have been tailored in another galaxy, and a derby hat and shoes.

There is a leaden stream. A bifurcated path simmers with hazy heat. In the orangey effulgence, puddles are transformed into splashes of blood. The cloud cover conveys the impression of bruised flesh. Mist is an enveloping veil. The ample meadow blazes with sunflowers. Mother and son are perky as Punch and Judy. He imagines them as being a couple of Toulouse-Lautrec models, those quaint cafe habitués. They share coconut marshmallows and boysenberry yogurt. Shit only makes sense by contrast, he believes, the way a walk-in fridge feels warm when you’ve just spent a week in a walk-in freezer. Pornographic neckties with psychedelic colors snake dance. Unceasing smog, peculiar and precise, blankets and paralyzes the cryptic and perilous freeways.

The semi-furnished apartment is a series of repeated bland rooms, all painted battleship-gray. Marisa has an avian aspect and a bony body, her skin chalk-white. Draped in a bathrobe of cornflower taffeta, seated on the shell-pink couch with heaped and plumped pillows, she sees the preponderance of pedestrians on the sidewalk while gobbling dark chocolates, her “magic beans,” and glugging a glass of bourbon, her disposition of hostile distance persisting. She remembers living for a period in America. She used to be a consumingly competitive rower in high school, this overcast dystopian oasis of modernist concrete slabs, motivated less by any kind of innate interest in the sport than the challenge of becoming Samson to beat Goliath. Wanting to surmount every obstacle, not just to win but to excel, in every way and at all cost, she approached the situation like a mathematical problem, frantically scribbling down equations, measurements, and times in her notebook to calculate exactly how to overcome her distinct size and strength disadvantages. There was a simultaneous physical and psychological deterioration, and a hallucinatory blurring of night and day. Her practice schedule was grueling. She pushed her body past its limit. She developed stigmatic wounds on her palms. Her athletic journey was on par with a religious experience. She took an analytic approach to everything. Her existence was like an infernal Nike commercial, where “just do it” was more akin to an omen of doom than an inspirational motto. Having an obsessive-compulsive drive, she occasionally did her homework in a spindly boat, one hand on an oar. She was continuously told by teammates that she lacked the right stuff. After all, rowing is a collective team undertaking, not an individual indulgence. Marisa’s coaches, customarily taskmasters, became pushovers when it came to training their most rabid recruit. She was a breath of fresh air. However, her quest for perfection often came off as an indication of instability. The educational institution felt increasingly claustrophobic and sinister to her. The cuts and bruises on her were products of her hitting herself when workouts went wrong and her times did not improve. Her destructive conduct was directly linked to past trauma. She barely ate or slept, pushing herself to the breaking point in pursuit of athletic excellence. Her self-perception was defined by the brutality that she could endure while staying alive. A freshman determined to make varsity, she would skulk like some gynoid Gollum through the cavernous cellar, almost Brutalist and subterranean in design, with the glaucescent refulgence as if it were some watery purgatory, driven by her passion to succeed. She had a relentless thousand-yard stare and was never compelled to Freudsplain her actions to anyone. A voice in her head, muttering an inner mantra, was as compulsive and damaging in its way as the impulse to self-harm. Usually, she reckoned her victories as epic events worthy of public celebration. She was a pressure cooker of a human being, fixated with numbers, constantly making calculations and setting goals as though it might be possible to break the system by way of enhanced understanding. It all came to an end when, firing on all cylinders on the rowing machine, experiencing hours of powerfulness and exultation, she suddenly collapsed. When she regained consciousness on the floor, in a urinous pool, she mutilated herself and verbally accosted the cleaning staff. The basement was gloomed and gleamed. Marisa suffered a nervous breakdown and was soon institutionalized. The mental hospital was a crafty setting to her… Presently, she wanders into the kitchen, beholding the peacock rainbow. Buzzed on the booze, she experiences a lightening of the cumbersome heaviness of problems, dreaming of dwelling in a house a youngster would wish to draw with crayons. When she walks, it is half skip and half march. The conversation with Peki is mostly monosyllabic, discussing how imperative it is to exist frugally and avoid waste at any cost.

This is a killer world, with daggers drawn. Peki is grilled not unlike a turbot by Marisa. Her hair-tearing psychotic tantrums are incessant and uncontrollable. The argument goes up and down similar to an unequally weighted seesaw. Things have been dicey between them lately. He feels like a dummy and she is the ventriloquist with her hand up his back. He has an eggshell inflection. Her intonation is a cow low. Weakened by malnutrition, she wavers where she stands. Prescribed pills solve, at least for a spell, her plaguey issues. Off her medications, she is capable of being a monstre sacré—overbearing and splenetic. She imbibes Bordeaux and ingests oysters, saying his ass is wide enough to project a movie on, and adding that he is plump and moist as a Medjool date. Acid-tripping, he has chloral hydrate-laced whiskey with a joint soaked in PCP, in solitude and confinement, content with the knowledge that his existence is on the margins, unaffiliated and unburdened. He inhales and exhales, pondering the cosmos, understanding the idea that it’s slowly winding down as the Big Bang turns out to be the Final Whisper. His brain is a state-of-the-art bomb that detonates, releasing dozens of thoughts that fulminate in turn to puncture indistinct targets with thousands of little metal fragments. He wallows in chemical dissipation, whereupon a hologram of StarKist’s Charlie the Tuna abruptly materializes and announces that he has junk-food cravings and that he is employed primarily as a surf-rock saxophonist. A cartoony Arnold the Pig emerges from out of nowhere to declare that Chicken of the Sea is inessential. He keeps cropping up at random junctures, not unlike a hitchhiker, to slather nonsense over everything with an industrial-size trowel. The uninvited visitors transmogrify into animated cardboard cutouts. A doorway, leading to a funny foreign land, unexpectedly metamorphoses into a hula hoop. Peki feels twinges of guilt for neglecting his razor. His snaky mane makes him look like a manly Medusa just out of the shower. His eyebrows start to smolder. He wants to leave his uneasy compadres’ orbit and follow his own star.

Later on, Peki, sick as a dog, finds himself getting tired of Marisa’s matter-of-course indifference towards him. He fails to keep pace with her shifting moods. She is unpredictable, selfish, and petty, as far as he is concerned. He feels like a shock absorber in her company. He rolls himself a cigarette with pricey tobacco, listening to her interminable egocentric parabolas of speech, and thinking that she is flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. Nothing and no one can change this. Trains clash by on the tracks. Peki feels as if society has let him down, and that it should be more welcoming to him. He is sick of working menial jobs to make ends meet, but he realizes it is a necessity until his mantequilla production career picks up steam. The bills are piling up. Marisa talks to herself, unaffected and unembarrassed, hobbling in heels, arms akimbo, glancing askance at the adjacent Renaissance brewery yard, a medieval courtyard, and a flight of stone stairs with wrought-iron balustrades, skirted by oregano, acacia, thyme, wisteria, and juniper. Smiling, she fantasizes that mother and son are Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. She is fumed with alcohol and drowsy with warmth. The air is fluent. Doves make wing to the horizon. A lavender field is unvarying. Cockroaches make their agitated forays from the wainscot, skittering into the pantry. Marisa reads Peki’s facial expressions as she did those fairytales in her childhood. Then she shrills like a trumpet before burning lichen and mushrooms in the tub, creating a hallucinogenic effect. She strips, steps in, and closes the curtain. Her laugh is a vulpine bark. Meanwhile, he has drugs to do and butter to make (with consummate esoteric skill). Coming down from his high feels like the net of comprehension has been torn down, draining the universe of most of its meaning. So, he smokes pot. Fear has noticeably crept into the metropolis like fog. Here are his latest preoccupations: paranoia and marijuana.

ROBERTO SEQUEIRA

Ramshackle residences are in various states of faded monotony. Throng’s features create an amalgam of aspects, the people as though they are collected to view a sideshow on the curb, in these imprecise, indecisive shadows. A crummy edifice is pyramidally shaped. A profusion of detritus in the gutters. The crumbling majesty of a chapel glistens with stained glass windows. Homo sapiens are in a compact mass in the square. The reservoir is restless. Canines of hail chew predatorily on the prey of the metropolis. Rush hour’s practically cataclysmic. Streetlights are like dentists’ lamps. Trucks the size of warships trundle along. Arrhythmic wheezes of wind. It rains, the incipient beginnings of a storm, and sounds like a tinny voice amplified through a microphone. Crooked buildings slowly sink into the ground. Crows lined on telephone wires have these voracious beady eyes, on stern watch, feathery shirttails nodding, their heads bobbing. Gang of rabble, grim-faced, well-groomed, foul-smelling, spill out of a beer hall, helter-skelter, onto the busy road. People bubble in a froth of activity. A flock of pigeons takes flight from a mournful park. Vehicular motors sob. Peki compulsively issues indecipherable verbiage, touches the erect kernels of his nipples, squints like he’s skeet-shooting, and pictures Marisa’s scaly soles as she skimmed lazily along, like a gecko, her expressions listless, movements dispirited. He drives decorated military officer, the suave, Herculean, crew cut, virile Roberto Sequeira, with a sandpaper voice, Adam’s apple standing out not unlike a hernia, dressed to the nines, to his home base. He finds himself, on the highway, in disrepair, in the center of a whirlwind of humanity. His eyes are enlarged by the thick lenses of his specs. Roberto, with his offensive lineman’s lollop, is about as terrifying as watching a middle-aged weekend warrior check off his to-do list at Home Depot. This thought goes unvoiced.

JORGE MACHI

The dead whale of the sun is picked apart by fish of clouds. Scabrous ocean. Dismal, slouching huts on baking soda sand and in sorrowing gales. Gulls are enlivened monograms on the vellum of the vault. Postcard panorama. Jorge Machi, a drag queen, Peki’s lifelong confidant, leases a crepuscular cave that is capacious and dank and reeks of a hospital for the impoverished for some reason. She looks like a cartoon character, fresh-faced, rosy-cheeked, elfin-eared, with a russet thatch under a Robin Hood cap, wearing a virescent tunic, ballet tights, torn at the knees, and floppy shoes. She abruptly resolves to dress in a magenta monokini and flirty fluffy pumps, come-hitherly sashays, bun flapping on her head as the wing of a trapped dragonfly. Peki peruses a profane paperback novel and Jorge reads a tabloid ragazine, a stuffed bunny rabbit resting on her lap. She denudes himself, and her flirtations pay dividends. To wit: she grabs Peki’s tool like an elephant would a carrot. Her glabrescent, alabastrine keester shines like a polished teapot. Her craving is uncontrollable. She could eat this yummy piece off a toothpick spear! She coos like a pigeon perched on a still. She has the pallor of chalk and slides down him as water on a slanted board. Her voice is rough. Moon’s not unlike the rusted and round head of a nail. Peki experiences an animalian ardency, the desire for her overwhelming. His panting sounds like sighs from a seashell. He strokes his soft and smooth integument. Jorge’s teensy feet are redolent of poultry guts. What a peppy, fetching creature! Her sighs are mellifluous notes on the scale of his carmine mouth. She says she saw her shrink and went to yoga class. His arachnoid hand scuttles on her planar, ivorine tummy, muscular gymnast’s legs, pert breasts, and cormous buttocks, her suspirations turning into wheezes. Her respirations with the sound of milk bottles in crates on a wagon hauled by old mules. Her perfect bum, to him, is a sugar-sweet peach. Her discarded scanty panties are dotted with menstrual stains. Her commas for facial divots drive him crazy. She is inconceivably gorgeous. Cellulitic dents on her upper thighs are like plastic pinholes in a telephone. He sees but does not believe. He trips, guffawing, with her, naked now, riding piggyback. Her belly is warm as an alcohol burner, shaven armpits slathered in deodorant. His hurtful wisecracks leave her with a haughty frown. She earns a slave wage, employed as a freelance stripper. Her stilettos are set on the backgammon tables with a few canvas chairs circumscribing them. She has insectile peepers and perpetually pouty lips. Her discouraged chops are palatially on his erectile cock. His constantly changing personality can be, for her, the equivalent of a needle turned malevolently in an infected wound. She’s slight like a sparrow. She straightens out her wardrobe of maillots and sandals in the musty closet. Gusts sound like talking crickets. Without her, he’d be like a shell without the sea. She catches him peeking through the modest bathroom’s keyhole while she wipes her fanny with toilet paper, and asserts he’s a “disgusting ding-a-ling.” Blood pounds in his coconut as waves slam against a wall. Impersonal furniture. Stone barriers in dampened despair. He swigs pinched port wine. His heart pumps as the dickens, expanding and contracting like a well-oiled machine. The sky’s swollen with saturation. She impulsively admits her slumber has been, recently at least, rodentially light, and confesses she’s horny as hell. The decor oscillates to the rhythms of the refulgence, which reveals its subtle imperfections. Sun’s a huge loaf of bread baking in the oven of the empyrean. Bowed bed with ligneous splintering paws. She, insulted, bawls on it as a baby abandoned on a doorstep, and swaddles herself in an embroidered throw. The duvet requires reupholstering. Antique backgammon table. Surreal and cinereal effulgence. Unsightly Oriental mat. Her sparkling teeth click as used knitting needles. Inanities of their argument with accompaniments of nit-pickings, and with generous injections of insults into the language. Jorge is inwardly hurt, outwardly confident, and struts like an emu. Indecisive illumination on the ceiling’s plaster. Stinging sleet as strange acid. She calls him a “nincompoop.” Peki gropes for the hooch on the art nouveau bar. Pea-sized hail. Her pursed choppers are painted orangey. Inexplicable fulgor. Her stiff knee creaks like a corroded hinge. Zinc-silver overcast. His head coincides with her creamy stomachic concavity, the pair on the over-cushioned couch. She scours her calluses and bunions with a handy file. Sheets brumously drift. He has a resigned air about him. Cotton balls placed in between her painted toes, she walks like a lame egret. Photographs, framed in carved wood, depict faerie folk—her relatives. Silverish scintillation leaks. Bric-a-brac (ripped off from a distant bougainvillea) litters the joint. Her taut abdomen, unexplainably, feels spongy, noggin filled with helium vapor. Rufous arabesques of the dinghies bobbing in the horrendous harbor. She says he has an “infantile imagination.” He exhibits his incredulity. Her harsh comment hastens his departure into the kitchen, in complete chaos. An umbrella stand capably serves as a clothes rack. Kestrels’ chorus of keening breaks out suddenly. Contorted features of her countenance, bogus tress a ball of saffron (in the intense splendor) as yarn unraveled. His manhandling of her prompts her to deprive him of the rimming she usually accords him. She thoroughly beautifies the premises. She puts on crumpled denim jeans and a frilly blouse. Her knockers separate like cells dividing. Frantic avian commotion proves distracting. Booted, blushed thus, she resembles a rose withered from drought. The very fabric of her person is torn. Her admonishing tones annoy him immensely. His expression of agonized distress. Her unexpected submissive resignation to his (customary) uncontrollable sexual gluttony. He swaggers as a construction site’s foreman. Romantic fire in the stove, vibratory and shuddering. He scarfs their bonbons while she fumbles lecherously at his fly. And he bounces awkwardly not unlike a crippled grasshopper. He’s not in the mood. He flips through a porno magazine, fixates on the centerfold, and frets about their financial woes. He claims he has done some sporadic private detective work, only it’s dried up as of late. Hyaline dermis of the mirror in the dinky parlor. A miscellany of mementos on the shelf. Ethereal serenity of the deliquescent countryside. Peki paces back and forth between the solemn sofa and the writing desk. Intricate auditory mosaics of their echoing modulations. Pair of her floral-patterned bikini undies. His scrotum smells of moldy cheese. Moans and groans shatter into sharp shards. He’s dazed by her curvaceous physique, delicate hands, and dainty trotters. Wilted flower of her forced smile. Long-limbed, lachrymose species streak down her cherubic cheeks. She cracks jokes and gestures dramatically like a tour guide. Her potent perfumes permeate the place. He can be temperamental over such piddly nonsense, making a ridiculous fuss! He’s all bark and no bite. There are tingles in her wormy-wiggly toes. Attributed to the horrendous humidity, everything appears distorted, as though it is reflected in a funhouse mirror. Overlapping cruddy cotton curtains. He snorts several lines and she rolls reefer. Turbid lake. She meditates on universal tragedies. Weird bark dangles as loose flesh on the bones of folks who’ve lost significant weight. Her parenthetical dimples are on display. He masturbates in front of her and she is disgusted by his lack of decorum. Her cardiac organ barks in her throbbing temples. Firmament has a similar hue to smelted lead. Jorge’s permanently goggled pies are more gigantic, snots runnier than fried eggs, phony bright blond hair fastened in a serviceable knot. Peki, prick throbbing, devours her like an owl a baby bird. The garden path has wilted plants. Moored boats. Lonely soccer stadium. She endures her physical and psychological discomforts. Moon’s congealed in cirri. Jade lagoon’s ripples visually remind one of winds running over grass. His histrionic phrases, pregnant pauses, and hard-on like a telegraph pole. He splits her as a prow does the surf. Rain has the sound of a running commode. She expected an indifferent, inert dick. Pollen’s like trapeze artists’ chalk dust. Her gait as a tightrope walker’s. Absinthian pool, magnificent mermaids with glaucous manes cavorting. A tubular gypsy shoos away swarms of flies with a filthy hankie, waving it like a surrender flag. Showers sound like enamel being scrubbed.

NIGHTMARE

The mechanized Medusa’s serpentiform wires writhe and hiss with electricity as downed power lines. Deluge is like a second instrument taking up the breeze’s melody. She is pale as a distant memory, watching the meanderings of clouds in the welkin, blue and serene as the Mediterranean. Her body is as responsive as a cello in rendering every modulation of emotion. Technology had broken the chrysalis and hastened her metamorphosis in the building that was structurally reminiscent of the Temple of Solomon. Pain encircles her head, stabbing into it like she’s wearing a crown of thorns. Her eyes coruscate with undiminished luster. She advances, with timid and pious steps, near the drowsy waters of the public garden, in a plenitude of luminosity, and pays idolatrous worship to her makers with a lachrymose bow.

PICKENS HAPPYMEAL

The variegated raindrops on the windowpane are like Pollockian paintdrips on a vitreous canvas. Pickens Happymeal has a caricatural malangularity. His brain’s empty as a noose. He is a Marabou stork of a young man. An effete, self-maiming sourpuss, mesmerizingly egoistic, he has a sock puppet’s blank gaze, paralytic mind, the beak of a nose, mismatched, acned cheeks, viscid grin, bat-handle wrists, board belly, and underwater modulation. Sometimes he seems detached, not unlike a somnambulist; or he’s stuck sempiternally in an amnesic state. He relishes being single. There’s no key to the door of his heart. He is so sick of the knock-down, drag-out fights with lovers, male and female. He’s a dead end of a human being, a hapless waste product who has a vagabond’s indirection in life. He’s one of those guys who’d perish and leave no more of a mark of his existence on the world than a bug leaves on a pond. He has no dreams to realize. He is bereft of a master plan. He wears a secondhand sweater, ripped jeans, and flip-flops. His egret feet reek of cod. He enjoys telephone calls, Scooby-Doo, public benches, fast food, and thrift shops. He dwells in a ramshackle edifice with its rabbit warren of dilapidated apartments, sleeps on a recycled mattress, and uses borrowed blankets. A fly is cast in the room. The downpour sounds as death rattles. Thick, humid oxygen is like damp rubber. He puts up a punk pretension in a social environment. He’s tired of slaving for peanuts, selling cosmetics, and bagging groceries. He is considered by many to be underadvantaged and overconfident. He’s a maladjusted daytripper. Rainbow is an extravagance of color. Pickens thinks of the classic rogues’ gallery of exes: Gladys Doty was dreadfully anorectic, looking like a retail store mannequin with an abnormal nose-to-mouth ratio. She had a fish-eye stare and barnyard/cayenne stink. She was partially deaf and had a ferret face, badly clipped bangs, psychoceramic eyes, gummy smile, setose chin, etiolated integument, and pipe-cleaner limbs. Braces zippered her buck teeth. She lived in a structure that suggested a monolithic file cabinet and worked these entry-level jobs at sterile tech companies. Oh, how she dug futuroidal films, electronic gewgaws, and mechanical gizmos! She’d been dealing with intestinal parasites. She felt like she was on the last frontier of sanity. She walked wobbleheadedly and puffed on cigs as if she were attempting to send smoke signals. She had proportional turpitude and hopelessness. She bore the stamp of the damaged. Her nipples were like pencil erasers, ass flat as a flapjack. She was lonely not unlike a field in winter, feeling as though she was a failure, and compulsively stretched, appearing pretzelesque. He eventually hooked up with her gal pal, Marge Barnstorm, with Tourette’s Syndrome, bucket-shaped head surmounted by an avocado-hued coiffure, peepers round like pocket watches, plainness of phiz, balloonish body, bollard-arms-and-legs, sandbags for nates, derma layer soft as bread dough, and the gait of a pelican. She continually panted like the air was methane gas. Her dewlap was barnacled with zits, the goth tats hit-or-miss. She had inner mayhem and outer stoicism. She loved pizza, bowling, cacti, wrenches, bunnies, and, with an unsurpassable omnivority, read skin mags. She was evocative of some sullen bovine creature, talked in this tranqued-out manner. Anatomically speaking, she was all arc, Gladys all angle. Pickens rips the stale baguette in two, remembering Orville Zartoonian-Smythe, an attention-addicted, suffocatingly clingy, insolvent rageaholic with pert chops and zombielike self-preoccupation. He resembled a goosey girl and possessed a rodentine/timbery smell. The glistering flecks in his rheumy pies were as teeny-weeny homunculi floating in a hyaline jar filled with formaldehyde. Their smooches were more like bonks. The breakups barely register. “Meta beta big and bouncy,” he says, regarding the leaf-dappled, tree-lined lane, the unsorted heap of coins on the cheap dresser, opining he’s slender and breakable as a breadstick. What’s he doing? Where’s he going?

Peki strikes up a conversation with Pickens, with his pretty kisser and impertinent air, in a nearby noshery, appraising his feminine characteristics with every conceivable mark of consideration, everything that is masculine about him nullified. Pickens finds his aristocratic affability and artificial inflection to be irksome. He tries to connect with him, a labor in vain, the need coming by spontaneous propulsion. He sees his true colors. He listens to him with a sufficiently respectful quality. The ill-humor aroused in him by his companion’s behavior doesn’t go unnoticed. They putter in a patch of clover. The welkin imitates the ocean, like a flower that assumes the aspect of the insect it seeks to attract. Peki’s voice hits the note of a tuning fork to his trained ear. He’s a Don Quixote who has tilted against scores of windmills, and worries his acquaintance will nip in the bud any chance of them venereally commingling. He wishes to devour him alive. He utilizes comradely language and a jocular affectation of camaraderie. The cordiality is conspicuously fake. He thinks of giving himself an advantage, if things get out of hand, of suggesting a diplomatic action, expecting him to counter with an act of war. With an eye to the future, should he lower his sights, and cut his losses? He’s grown weary of being swept into the gutter by people. He studies him inquisitively like he’s confronted with an artistic masterpiece. He brings him to his chest with the power of a suction pump, addressing him as a scholar speaking to an ignoramus. A metalline breeze sounds like a blade being sharpened on a grindstone.

Peki sports a sapien smile, and pictures his rail-thin Mama, a woman of the world. The household has become hostile territory for the two. His life is a Racine tragedy. He wants to believe she’s this glamorous seductress, a statuesque stunner, her eyes glinting like jewels. She is the light shining upon the darkness of him. He would allow himself to be dragged from his deathbed. To her, there is a foundation of resentment on which to build. The lab is as mysterious as the Temple of Jerusalem. Rainwater channels through the eaves, obedient to the designer’s original orders. He’s soaked with perspiration, like he was plunged, dressed, into a bath. And he mops himself with a handkerchief, migrating, in his head, to another hemisphere… He whines, with distended nostrils, not unlike a wild boar, and it turns into a resounding roar. He’d pounded Pickens into a pulp.

Peki slathers butter, with Pickens’ fat, on coburg, and devours it. He sees Pickens waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. He looks up to see a gargoyle hanging from his fan. It just dangles there, glaring at him, and he is frozen, unable to move.

Christopher S. Peterson has been seriously dreaming since he was a child, immersing himself in Icarusian flights of fancy. He enjoys literature, film, music, animals, working out, football, hockey, and living in nerdvana. He has been published in several lit mags very few people have read. He was properly educated at Wildwood Elementary School in Burlington, Massachusetts, and currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his black cats. His latest book is Butter, or the Dairy of a Madman, published by Fomite in two volumes. You can get volume one here and volume two here.