This is a writing exercise from my third year of uni. I haven't edited it, but it has appeared online on and off over the years and people find it enjoyable. I think I put it together with a deck of cards or role playing dice. Each card or side of the dice had a situation then there was another set for what needed to be included. It would have been something like that. The date on the file says 15/10/2007. I would have written it out by hand. I actually think I wrote it the same night I started Seth (04/10/07) but my notes for Seth are a lot clearer. If you enjoy this story, try Middle Age Rae of Fucking Sunshine. www.amazon.com/Middle-Age-RAE-Fucking-Sunshine-ebook/dp/B00PLZ4KJ6/

One
 
An unknown man looked around, he is alone – sometimes he likes to check. Public wanking has been a hobby of his since he was a teenager. Now in his forties, he still enjoys the thrill of possibly being caught. He has had to stay the night in a hotel in the middle of nowhere, but they have an outdoor hot tub. There is nothing our unknown man enjoys more than to sit in a public hot tub spanking it while looking at the stars, but not really seeing them. His mind is on a different type of star, one of the celebrity variety (sometimes more than one). Tonight he is thinking of one of the stars, some new and probably illegal actress – he can never remember their names. This one is quite the looker. Compared to most actresses she is heavy, with large breasts and a full arse. Still thinking of this young actress he removed his dressing gown and stepped into the hot tub, he’s wearing swimming trunks just incase somebody walks by, but it’ll be quite obvious what he is up to anyhow. His erect penis has created a tent in the flower-patterned lime green shorts. The hot bubbling water connected with rather hairy skin which turned it a horrid pink that clashed terribly with his shorts. He looked around again, pulled down his swimming shorts a bit and leant his head back so it rested on the hard edge of the hot tub. He reached over his flabby stomach and wrapped his hand around his cock. The nearly obese, ugly, hairy man sat jerking off, picturing the young actress was riding him like a pony, for nearly twenty minutes before he blew his load into the warm water. He pulled up his swimming shorts, got out the hot tub, put on his dressing gown and vacated the area.
*
 
Ten minutes later an eleven-year-old virgin goes into the hot tub with her older sister. The older one is on the pill. Nine months later the virgin gives birth to a hideous baby boy.
 
Two 
An unknown man goes to a party and gets insanely drunk. At this party there is a hot tub, he strips down and jumps inside. Someone watching him says the magical-bestiality-word. He spanks it while thinking of goats.
*
 
At this same party is a beautiful teenage virgin. All the boys want her, but she’s saving herself for someone special. The girl and her brother didn’t witness the man jerking off while he thought of fucking goats; the man and his audience had left the hot tub.
 
The girl and her brother go into the hot tub. She didn’t want to go to the house party, but her brother dragged her along. He was hoping to introduce her to one of his friends, but his friend never turned up. When she saw the hot tub, she wanted to go in, but not alone. Her brother felt that he owed her so he went in with her.
 
Nine months later the girl, still a virgin, gives birth. She has never even kissed a boy, let alone done anything to become pregnant. Upon hearing that the teenage virgin has given birth, a boy who was at the party nine months earlier goes to talk with her brother. The brother hears of the man who jerked off into the hot tub. The brother learns the man’s name. The brother and his friend run home to tell the virgin the story and give her the name of the man who masturbated into the hot tub nine months before.
 
With the help of her brother, his friend and her father, the girl gets the address of the man who fathered her child. She takes the baby and her father drives her to the man’s house. A man she has never met before and she is a bit nervous because she doesn’t know what to say to him. She holds the baby in her arm and knocks on the door. The man answers. He looks a lot like the baby. She tells him about how she went into a hot tub at a party nine months earlier. A hot tub that he jerked off in. She tells him that she had a virgin birth and he’s the father. She congratulates him and walks back to the car where her father is waiting. They drive off into the sunset.
 
Three 
A very pretty girl once stood by a hot tub and watched her very geeky older cousin play with his penis in it. He was moaning and then some white stuff came out the end of his manhood. He left the hot tub and then she got in. Nine months later the girl gave birth.
 
*
There was once a very geeky young man. He was a virgin and believed that he was saving himself for someone special, but no girl who wasn’t legally insane would ever get with him. Because he was saving himself, or so he thought, he regularly wanked in the hot tub in the garden. Jerking himself off in the hot tub was his favourite activity.
 
One evening this seventeen-year-old geek was meant to be looking after his younger cousin when he got the urge. He put Walt Disney’s Bambi in the DVD player for the girl who had just begun her periods. He thought that it would keep her entertained while he made a trip into the garden. She got bored with the film and went outside to find him. He was nearing his climax when she found him. He didn’t notice her until after he blew his load into the hot, steaming, bubbly water. He figured that the girl had no idea what he was doing (he had guessed correctly) and so offered no explanation and went inside. He thought that his cousin followed him into the house, but he was wrong. When he discovered her missing he went to look for her. She was found in the hot tub – he figured that the hot water would kill his sperm and didn’t think anything of it until nine months later when the girl gave birth to an inbred child.
 
 
Four 
An extremely attractive man once found himself spending the night at a very expensive hotel without a nice young lady in which to spend it with. The man was so sexy that woman practically threw themselves at him. He even had fifteen kids with fifteen different hot mommas. But that night all the young ladies were hideously ugly so he decided to masturbate in the hot tub instead of getting it on.
 
*
Ten minutes after the extremely fuckable man left the hot tub, the ugliest woman that most people have ever seen entered it. She was so disgustingly ugly that mirrors broke if she just happened to walk by. She was in her forties and still a virgin. No one would ever have sex with her, not even if they had drunk an entire bottle of Jack Daniel’s and she had a paper bag over her head. The poor lady was so gross in her appearance that when she went to buy a vibrator the girl in the shop puked all over her shoes when the woman went to pay. the woman had resigned herself to never having kids which she desperately wanted. Not even the sperm bank would give her any sperm for fear that the ugly gene would be passed onto the offspring. Every night before bed the woman prayed to God to make her pretty so a man would impregnate her. God never made her pretty. This forty-something was still a virgin when she gave birth to triplets nine months after entering a hot tub in a very expensive hotel. Although God had never made her pretty, he answered her prayers times three. The sperm bank was wrong, as by looking at the triplets and then looking at their mother, it was clear that they did not inherit her condition. If she knew who the father was, she would have known that they looked like him. Because she prayed every night, she thought that God had sent an angel from Heaven to have sex with her as the triplets seemed to glow in their own light. She thanked God for being so kind to her and blessing her three times over.
 
FiveA girl of child bearing age got in an argument with her parents and ran away to a friend’s house. She only had the one friend, so her mother phoned the friend’s mother before the girl arrived and explained what happened and checked to make sure it was okay for the girl to stay there until she felt ready to go home. The friend’s mother said that it was okay, but informed the mother that her and her husband would be going out for the evening.
 
The girl arrived at the friend’s house to find her friend with a young man. The girl had interrupted something. Her friend was understandably upset until the girl explained to her that the young man was like the town bicycle and already had a child to represent each of his fifteen years. As it was nearing his sixteenth birthday, he probably wanted another.
 
The friend’s parents had recently purchased a hot tub and the friend suggested that they go in. Within five minutes they were in the hot tub, the friend thanking the girl for stopping her from doing something stupid when some white stuff floated by. “Ew, what’s that?” asked the girl. “Semen,” the friend replied. Both girls jumped out of the hot tub.
 
Out of the bushes jumped the boy who was a teenage man-whore. He was laughing, “Ha, ha you stupid bitches, I was a hot tub virgin but I needed to blow my load somewhere.” The girls’ felt stick as he ran off still laughing.
Nine months later the girl gave birth to triplets. She always used a condom so she couldn’t understand how she became pregnant until she thought back to that night her and her friend went into the hot tub. The boy wasn’t too popular with the mothers of all his children so getting a DNA test done was easy.
 
*
Nine months after popping his hot tub cherry a sixteen year old answered a knock on his door. On the doorstep stood the girl and the three babies. She handed him an envelope. He opened it and shouted, “Serves you right, stopping my fun.” And he slammed the door in her face.
 
SixTwo lesbians who found the very thought of anything to do with men repulsive went into the hot tub at a cheap motel. Two months later, much to their horror, both lesbians were pregnant.
 
*
In that same cheap motel, there stayed a goat-fancier on the same night as the lesbians. He had been watching Animal Planet when a documentary about mountain goats was aired. He had been looking forward to the documentary all week and booked a room in this particular cheap motel because of its cable and hot tub. His parents were having a party that particular night so the hot tub at his home would be off limits. He loved to jerk off in the hot tub after watching a documentary about young feisty goats. He was a virgin, he wasn’t saving himself for another geek, but for a special goat. A nice lady goat he could fuck from behind. He thought those mountain goats on the show would be nice to screw and suck. He restrained himself from spanking it through-out the entire hour long duration of the programme. He wanted to, but he knew it’ll be better in the hot tub. He was already wearing his horrid swimming trunks when the show ended. They had a nice tent in them when he left his room for the hot tub. With thoughts of lovely little goats he stepped into the steamy water. He sat down and put his hand inside his shorts, rubbing it back and forth over his throbbing cock. After he ejaculated into his swimming trucks and water, he heard the voices of two woman. He decided that it was time to go back to his room and find more TV shows about goats.
 
SevenAt a party one day a teenage girl goes into a hot tub. A month or two later she discovered that she was pregnant and told her parents. Her parents thought that she would bring dishonour to them by having a baby out of wedlock so they kicked her out. Nine months after the party she gave birth to twins.
*
At a party one day a very sexy man wearing truly horrid swimming shorts decided to go into the hot tub. The man was beautiful, so beautiful in fact, that he seemed to glow in his own light. He always dressed absolutely dreadfully so he wouldn’t appear to be as gorgeous as he really was. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. When it didn’t work he usually ended up impregnating some woman. He had fifteen kids even though he always used a condom, but the a lot of times the condom broke, which is why he is never very enthusiastic about meeting new ladies. That night at the party (it was a long party) his purposely terrible fashion sense seemed to be paying off. But there was a very beautiful young lady there. A dark and mysterious woman who turned on all the guys. She seemed oblivious to her own beauty. Even though the sexy man found the woman to be very attractive he decided not to speak to her and instead went to jerk-off in the hot tub. He did not want another kid but he needed some way to get rid of the massive erection. The bathroom seemed to be in use, as were all the bedrooms. That was when he went outside and saw the hot tub. It was beyond the pool (an unusual place for the a hot tub, thought the man) and relatively secluded, so no one would see him. He got in and still wearing his horrid swimming shorts he started to masturbate. No one did witness him in the hot tub.
 
EightAn attractive man was one night staying in a very expensive hotel. He liked to jerk-off. He saw that the hotel had a hot tub so he decided to spank in that. When he was done pleasuring himself he went back to his room, watched some porn and jerked-off some more.
*
A middle-aged mother of two from a very respectable family decided that she needed a little break from her controlling husband who was the vicar at the local church. She took his bank card and her credit card (which he paid for) and decided to stay in a very expensive hotel until things improved for her. To relax a bit she decided to go into the hot tub. She did not own a swim suit and as it was night all the shops were shut. No one was around so she went into the hot tub completely naked.
 
After about a week her husband and teenage children told her that they would be nicer to her and requested that she come her. Although she enjoyed her new-found freedom (and going into the hot tub in the nude) she missed her family and agreed to go back home.
 
She began to get sick in the mornings and took and pregnancy test. She was pregnant. But that’s impossible, she thought, as her and her husband had not wanted a baby and being good Christians they only had sex when they wanted to reproduce.
 
The woman tried to hide the pregnancy from her husband but he soon found out. He was very upset, it would look very bad for him. After some thought, he told her that she would have to move out. He packed her bags and put her on a plane out of the country. 
 
Nine months after staying in an expensive hotel the woman gave birth in a strange country. She tried to contact her other children to tell them, but all of her letters got stamped with ‘return to sender’. It was obvious that they wanted nothing to do with her or her baby.
 
NineOne night a teenage girl was staying in a hotel with her very large Catholic family. She couldn’t sleep and decided to go for a walk. When she reached the pool area (which in this hotel was outside) she saw that everyone was walking around naked. Being a very rebellious (although sheltered) teenager she decide to give it a try. She was not worried that any of her family members would wake up and catch her walked around as naked as the day she was born because they always slept through the night – the entire city could be under attack and still they’d sleep. She took off her clothes and left them by the gate and joined in on the naked fun. She had never seen a naked man before, not even in a picture or drawing. She was offered a drink of beer, which she accepted; it was her first drink and did not taste as good as she had imagined, so she put it down and asked for a soft drink instead. She was glad that she do so because as the night wore on all the drunk people (which was mostly everyone) were acting very stupid. She eventually found herself standing by a hot tub with a large group of people. There was a man in the hot tub playing with the thing that made him a man but she really wanted to go in because she was cold from walking around in the nude and she didn’t want to put her clothes back on because no one else was wearing any. She figured that because everyone was drunk, they wouldn’t remember her going into the hot tub with the strange man. In fact, the people at the party were so intent on watching the man, they never even registered the girl in their minds. The strange man was moaning as the girl got in, she wondered why. He started to scream and she wondered why nobody would help him, the people standing around the hot tub were all much older than she, so she went over to the man and as she got closer a bunch of white stuff had escaped his thingy. He had stopped screaming and left in girl alone in the hot tub. She wondered what the stuff was and tried to catch some in her hands. People were leaving the pool area, she asked what time it was and discovered that it was nearly four in the morning. She decided that she had better get back to her room. She dried herself off, found her clothes, took a quick shower (so her parents wouldn’t smell the chlorine) and went back.
 
When her parents discovered that she was getting sick in the mornings and had strange food cravings they took her to see a doctor. The doctor confirmed their fears – their daughter was pregnant. They were so very disappointed with her that they disowned her. She begged and pleaded and said that she was still virgin (she hardly knew what sex and the whole baby making process was) but they didn’t believe her and sent her away anyhow.
 
*
At a hotel where a teenager was staying with her large Catholic family, a group of nudist were also staying. In this group there was a man who enjoyed jerking himself off in front of everybody. In the early hours of the morning, he found himself in the hot tub and right after he comed he discovered the Catholic teenager in the hot tub with him. He found it odd but because nearly everyone was drunk, he didn’t think anything other than the girl had probably had too much to drink (he was wrong) and left the hot tub.
 

Ten
A middle-aged couple were having a garden party one night. After a bit too much to drink things got really out of control and the host decided that after the hostess went inside to bed, to take off all his clothes. After some encouragement from his friends he went into the hot tub and began to masturbate. His friends stood around the hot tub egging him on until he ejaculated into the water. When the party ended everyone found their way home. The next morning when the hostess woke up, she found her husband still drunk and naked wandering around the garden. He made a drunk confession about what he did the night before. She was disgusted and left the house in her car, he stumbled after the moving vehicle.
*
Later that afternoon the couple’s teenage daughter came home with her boyfriend. Upon discovering her parents weren’t home and the place was completely trashed she suggested that they go into the hot tub together – naked.. The boy had been waiting to take away her virginity so he promptly agreed. They got into the hot tub, but the girl heard her parents so the quickly exited and got dressed. The girl didn’t lose her virginity that day, she was actually still a virgin when she gave birth nine months later.

I don't think I've posted this one before. It was written a long time ago, when I was still sick following child birth. I used to read it on the rare occasion when I when health was good enough to go out. It was written way back when I thought people would treat me with some respect and had hope for the future. Enjoy...

Three thousands habitable planets in the known universe, and I’m stuck on the only one without soap. Not disinfectant, there’s loads of that – all different types with different fragrances and different purposes. What I’m talking about is a simple bar of soap. The type used to wash one’s self. Surprisingly the smell isn’t so bad. It has something to do with the atmosphere, I think. When the wind blows it smells like freshly cut flowers, which perfumes the world. There might be other factors but I can’t elaborate on something I know nothing about. The real problem with a lack of soap is all the dirt that encases everyone’s body. Sometimes someone’s bright pink pimple will penetrate the filth, but that’s about all you see of someone’s skin. We have showers but water can only wash away so much – it loosens the top layer, but that’s about all. There’s even shampoo, so everyone’s hair is clean but shampoo is too mild to wash away the muck from pig farming. The entire planet is a pig farm. We used to import soap from the cow farming planet next to us, but their surplus has begun to run low and they need the rest for their population, which is considerably larger than ours.
 
No one really knows what happened to the soap factory planet. It happened so long ago that only legends exist. Everyone knows there was once a planet that made soap for the universe. It’s in the history books, but they differ on what actually happened. Some say a natural disaster wiped out the entire planet. Others say soap angered the Gods. And yet others blame intergalactic terrorism. On the museum planet there’s an actual bar of the stuff in a special case. Nearly all the other planets have a few bars left but pig farmers are possibly the most wasteful beings to have ever existed so all our soap ran out centuries ago.
 
I used to travel a lot and I can tell you the vast majority of planets are smelly, dingy places with momentous amounts of industrial waste. When they run out of soap no one will want to live there. And where does that leave us? I’m sure our population will swell, it has already begun as stricter soap rationing comes into force all over the universe. The warm pleasant fragrance attracts refugees from everywhere with horror tales of sulfurous smelling winds.
 
I once tried to make soap, I think everyone has, but I was unsuccessful. I thought it would be easy and other people were just being idiots and going about it wrong. This is a planet of pig farms so animal fat (which features as a key ingredient given in most of the legends) is abundant but the slimy bar of stuff I made only smelt terrible and did nothing to remove the filth on my body. Even with reverse engineering no one has figured out the secret to making more soap. And any planet with soap reverses doesn’t want to sacrifice another bar to a lost cause. Soon nowhere will have any soap.
 
Sometimes, with enough shampoo and disinfectant and a shower loafer one can scrub off most of the grime, but not all of it –a good old bar of soap is required to do that.
 
We’re getting a shipment of imports from the outer galaxies later today. Perhaps someone on one of those cold dark planets in the nearly forgotten galaxies has figured out how to make soap in their spare time. It isn’t very likely though. Most young people today have never seen a bar of soap and have absolutely no interest in the ancient art of cleaning one’s skin. But us old timers, or at least one’s who have travelled have and some, including myself, have even used it. Those who have known soap hope for its return.
 
I decided to go to the spaceport and wait for the ship to arrive. I joined about fifty old folks already waiting. It was a small platform way out in the middle of nowhere so there wasn’t a building in which snacks could be purchased like in the cities, we had a vending machine that worked about a quarter of the time.  We waited and waited, talking to one another of places we’ve been and the soaps we’ve used. Eventually a ship arrived, a big old one coated in space dust (it can’t be washed here). If there was any soap we wouldn’t be able to see it, everything comes out of the ship in big unlabeled crates. It’s then stacked up on the platform. If there was a box of soap we’d be able to smell it – that’s what brings the old folks out every import day.
 
I thought the ship was unloaded and started to walk off the platform when I heard heavy footsteps and gasping. While turning around there was a loud clunking sound as someone fainted. The wind started to blow as a creature was lead out of the ship. It had a hemp rope tied around its large neck and another rope connected to that one as a leash. I wondered how someone managed to tie the rope around its neck – it was so large. Although I really didn’t think the rope as necessary. The creature was tranquil and would probably have followed the Box Boys off the ship. It was bigger than the crated imports from various planets even while walking on all fours. And it had fur of the brightest pink imaginable that fell in dreadlocks all over its body. Once on the platform it stood on two legs to its full height. The Box Boy, well Box Girl in this case, extended the length of rope she was holding so the creature could walk up right. It wore no clothes but with all that bright pink fur I don’t think it was concerned with covering up.
 
The creature was lead away. I was curious but by no means curious enough to follow as some people had. It was the last thing off the ship and unless this creature somehow knew the secret of soap making there’d be none this shipment. I always feel a bit sad when everything’s off the ship and there isn’t any. I should know not to get my hopes up, but I can’t help it. The thought of once again being entirely clean ensures I’ll always feel this sense of disappointment.
 
The people who didn’t follow were gathered in clusters on the platform trying to figure out the significance of the creature. I didn’t really care and wanted to get home. I put my head down hoping not to be recognised and brought into an in-depth yet boring conversation.
 
Upon arriving there I discovered my son and his wife had already seen to the pigs and the grandchildren were telling each other stories of a pink monster in anxious whispers. When I was finally noticed everyone went quiet. They knew I went to the spaceport when imports arrived and correctly assumed that I’d seen the pink creature. I told them what it looked like and how it was lead off the ship. I didn’t tell them how I hoped it held the secret to soap. We settled down for the night.
 
One would think a planet of pig farmers would be early to rise but that isn’t so. When I woke up around noon I heard excitement from outside my open window. News travels fast and it sounds like some people were too excited to sleep much last night. I quickly dressed and went downstairs. The entire household was out of bed, even my son who usually considers it to be illegal to make an appearance while there’s still natural light in the sky.
 
The television in the kitchen was on which is most unusual, even the grandchildren don’t watch much TV. It was tuned to the news. A young news presenter with clean skin was at the spaceport. I thought that with a story this big the Journalism Planet would have sent a more seasoned presenter but I was wrong. The news didn’t give us a clue about the creature. All the presenter did was regurgitate what everyone knew already. I wasn’t surprised. The news lady didn’t even tell us if the creature was dangerous. It seemed tranquil enough yesterday but the Box Boys could have given it some sort of calming serum. I decided to go out to see if there was anything I could learn.
 
There were far too many pedestrians to take the car, besides one learns more when traveling on foot. That’s how I found out an import was coming in today. Two days in a row. That’s a bit strange, but not unheard of. The Depot Planet is one of the slowest moving things in the entire universe and the Administrative Planet just messes things up. We were probably due two ships yesterday but it was held back for whatever reason, probably incorrect paperwork.
 
Based on the gossip I heard, everyone seemed to be in agreement on two things; firstly, the creature is meant to be here, and second, there really is a ship of imports landing today.
 
The spaceport was so crowded with people and news crews that I couldn’t get on the platform. I don’t think anyone in the area was tending to the pigs. The police had to monitor the crowd that was gathering outside and leaking onto the road. Suddenly everyone went quiet. I couldn’t see anything from my position on the road but I knew the ship had come in. In the silence I could here the door opening. People tried shifting their bodies but it was hopeless, no one would be able to see anything from the road.
 
I heard the box boys shout at the crowd, “Stand back. Clear a path”.
 
I craned my neck skywards even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to see. Lots of people did that, some type of reflex, I guess. There were gasps from the platform. I wondered what they saw.
 
There were more of the creatures. Blue ones, green ones, pink ones, yellow ones. Colours of the rainbow and more. All with that bizarre dreadlock fur. They had ropes around their necks and were slowly being lead away. The crowd followed.
 
No one needed to have worried about aggression – they were the calmest creatures in the entire universe. So calm in fact, that the creatures brought to the Pig Farm were the last of their kind. Later that day I found out that the rest had been wiped out. Not so much as by hunters which usually involves some sort of chase, but by people who fancied themselves as hunters.
 
Some archeologists set out to discover the formula for soap and found these creatures cowering in the ancient ruins of a factory on what is assumed to be the Soap Factory Planet. The creatures the so-called hunters didn’t drive to the brink of extinction were dying of starvation. They were brought to the Depot Planet to await further instruction from the Administrative Planet. The creatures would have surely died then because the Administrative Planet never sent the order to feed them but the Depot Planet has a fair number of rebels and these rebels took responsibility for looking after the creatures. Eventually the Administrative Planet gave the order to the Depot Planet to send the creatures here. We already have a large number of refugees from all over the universe and it was thought that someone would be able to speak the same language as the creatures. But the creatures were silent. It was obvious they were an advanced species, but seemed to lack vocal cords and no one could tap into them telepathically. 
 
The creatures appeared to be interested in the pigs. They’d point and stare at them.
 
One lazy evening the town awoke to find dead pigs scattered down the road leading to where the creatures slept. Some of these were exceedingly expensive award winning pigs. It’s the only place on the entire planet that farms these particular pigs and they were nearly all killed. Anger wouldn’t be the correct word. I don’t even think rage would cover how everyone felt. No wonder why these creatures were facing extinction, if they go around killing people’s livestock like that. The townspeople and people from surrounding towns and even far-away city dwellers quickly assembled into a mob. I think the intention was to burn them alive while stabbing and beating them. The mob gained strength as it hammered down the road, swelling as more rage filled people joined uttering incoherent battle cries. I’m ashamed to say that I was a part of the blood thirsty mob, but I was.
 
We circled the bright fur creatures so they had nowhere to turn and run away. I dread to think about how similar we looked to rage filled rabid monsters. They were crying, not tears, but bubbles that floated up instead of running into their dreadlock fur. These were really large bubbles. They had a calming effect on the mob. Weapons were lowered as arms became tired. Bubbles popped high above the mob and rained down blessed liquid soap of the highest quality.
 
One of the creatures, a small one, a baby by the looks of it silently screamed. It pulled at the fur of the creature next to it. The creature knelt down to comfort it with such loving tenderness it brought tears to the eyes of the monsters in the mob. Turns out the baby needed to shit but didn’t fancy the idea of doing it in front of everyone. The mob had already blocked all exits, which in turn blocked all ways leading to a toilet. The poor little thing was forced to shit right there in front of everyone. With all that fur it’s hard to imagine no shit or mud caked to it but there wasn’t any.
 
The mob denied the little creature any dignity. Bubbles rose up in the air as the creatures silently cried harder. Tension was once again building. Slowly people began to raise their weapons luckily the venom had left the mob. The creatures stepped aside. The little one had finished its business. A lot of the people in the mob were young but I was there at the front. I knew what the pile of droppings were. Before the mob could attack I dived towards where the creatures were with my hands held up in the universal “I surrender” gesture. I reached the shit and held up a bar of soap. I figured out then why soap was scarce and impossible to make – it is a waste product of these creatures, but only when they eat raw pork, which we always ensure they have plenty of.
 
 
 

I wrote this while under a lot of stress. I was trying to get back into second person writing. I think this was my second attempt, or maybe third. It hasn't been published.
 
 
 
 
You Can’t Eat the Slugs Down Here
By Dani Brown
 
 
 
 
 
 
Sinkholes open all the time. A little one, good for a poke with a stick – a secret between a boy and a girl. They both have sticks and a lot of anger – poking helps.
Sinkholes open without warning. Sinkholes swallow a boy and a girl. Down through the depths of the Earth they fall, never to be seen on the surface again.
Darkness surrounds them. Strange noises click all around them. A sliver of light appears above and to the right. Shadows stretch out before them.
Anger finds itself replaced by fear. A boy and a girl clutch each other. Daylight above, close to high noon; night time below, close to midnight. They don’t see the slugs with their teeth glistening in their own natural light.
Sleep washes over them. The fast beat of their hearts, the shards of fear like glass in their lungs and the belts around their chests dissolve into a world of dreams.
Something nudges and sniffs at them until they re-join the waking world. The girl wipes her eyes first. She has to wipe them again, believing that sleep kept her in its clutches. A pinch. A slap. A vague memory of the tumble through the sink hole.
Pink nostrils flare, interested, at her. A long neck bends somewhere above near the trees. A scream traps itself in her throat. She can’t nudge the boy asleep next to her. She can’t do anything except breath and stare.
A small head attached to a large body nudges the boy.
The creature thinks these two appear young – no older than hatchlings on their first trip out of the nest. Another pair of lost travellers with the clock messed up. The creature’s heart cries for her own children, kidnapped years ago by an old man of the same species as these two, with screams on his breath of fame and fortune. He didn’t make it out alive. None of them did.
Her flat teeth pluck at the clothes of the boy and the girl. A crack sounds overhead – one of the morning storms. The first drops of rain splash. If the hatchlings can’t swim, they will drown. Rain come down heavy below the Earth. Rivers form in the morning and dry away to dust in the evening.
The boy rubs his eyes. Sleep doesn’t hold him the way it did the girl. The pink head nudges them both until they stand. Experience with humans means that she knows the adults wear undergarments. She hopes the hatchlings do too.
She plucks at their bottoms in search of the elastic. These two are more difficult to pick up with her teeth than one adult. And they squirm. She drops one to pick up the other.
A bit of a thinker, but not a talker. Her kind don’t talk. She doesn’t dare stamp her feet – that would scare them. With her long neck, she places the first on her back. The second she grabs with speed before he can escape. She places him with his friend – comfort came in pairs.
The rain drops fall with more intent. The clouds fight the rays of light. It won’t be long before they win. The hatchlings must be with the others of their kind before the weather becomes worse.
She wasn’t one to move with speed. With a long neck strong enough to break the back of even a T-Rex, or the occasional super-sized mega-elephant, she has no need for speed. Long life is granted to only the slowest of creatures. But with hatchlings on her back and the threat of rain, now would be a good time to run. She hasn’t done so in many years.
She doesn’t see the trap. Fishing wire from above, tied across two trees. It hits at her knees, slicing them off. She carries on a few steps before she notices, and comes down with a thud on her stumps.
Tiny men with spears shout from behind the trees. They aren’t of the same species as the hatchlings on her back. The girl falls. Soft mud cushions her. The boy holds on.
She lacks a voice to scream her agony. Blood attracts the first predators. The men with spears throw them into her pink hide. They are sharpened, with poison on the tips. They pierce her hide without effort.
The tiny men pick up the girl from the mud and encourage the boy to slide down the creature’s long neck. The boy doesn’t move. One of the spear throwers manages to climb up and grab him around the waist. The child screams. It makes no difference.
Rain drops fall. They are large enough to swallow the children and the spear men. They need shelter.
Trees fall in a path leading to the dead pink dinosaur. The spear men do not have much time before the terror comes upon them.
The children are in shock by the time they are bundled beneath blankets in the back of a cave. The sound of rain hits everything, so conversation is impossible.
The terror down here takes the shape of flesh-eating giant prehistoric slugs with teeth. They come out from under their rocks at night. Slow they may be, but they still have enough power to take down the biggest and meanest dinosaurs.
Safety doesn’t exist anywhere two nights in a row. The chances of escaping this world are slim to none, due to a lack of anywhere to set up a lab to tear a purposeful hole in reality. To step through a random portal would be risking stepping into something worse.
The slugs themselves ooze into everywhere with a hole in reality. Governments make it a game to cover them up and relegate them to the darkest realms of conspiracy theories.
Spears present no obstacle to the slugs. When hit, they spray toxic slime in a fifty-two-foot radius. Not even the best spear throwers risk it in case they hit an extra-squirty one.
Each night more come out of whatever holes they crawled underneath to sleep away the hot summer sun. Spear men who make it through a winter say they crawl out of frozen rocks and melt the snow with a green glow beneath the northern lights.
Safety is an issue when sleepiness washes over the party. Guards sit watch, but without coffee or cocaine they soon drift off to a land without slugs.
The population is dwindling. Each night someone is carried away, wrapped up in slime and spat onto the ceiling in a dry cave at the bottom of the lake. Rescue missions fail. Bodies decompose and the slugs absorb them. Spear tips are added to the rows of the slugs’ teeth. The poison the men dipped them in is absorbed and used against them. The bits of twine that hold the spears together are excreted, and used to make nests for the slugs’ eggs.
The cave offers shelter from the storm whilst the children come to their senses. The arrival of young blood presents an opportunity to connect with the other humanoids who find themselves down here. Under normal circumstances, spear men are to be avoided.
They plan to move out in the morning once the rains pass. The trek to the other humanoids will take all day. Rumour has it the other humanoids tame pterodactyls as a mode of smart transport, and use them to hide up in the air away from the slugs and their sharp teeth. Just a rumour, but still, there can’t be smoke unless someone lights a fire.
The children must be protected. It seems stupid now to have killed what could have been a mode of transport and protection. They should have formed an alliance, but no creatures ever want to form anything with spear men.
The children, so young, will force the other humanoids to grudgingly accept the spear men. The spear men couldn’t trust other creatures though. Never again will they be lured into a false sense of security.
There will be no moon tonight. New moon night in this world stretches on longer than any other night of the month. The slugs have a bizarre mating ritual based on gratification. Few creatures experience sexual pleasure, but their ritual just proves they are one of the exceptions like no live-action porno flick ever could.
One-by-one the spear men drift off to sleep. The children wake. Somehow, shock had pushed them into natural sleep. The rush of memories erases the confusion. Eyes, on the stalks of a slug, stare at them. It doesn’t need light to reflect. Slugs have their own – bright enough to illuminate the blood on their teeth and leftover tendons of the spear men.
The nuclear green glow indicates it will always be summer here - not winter like the propaganda would have the children believe. Broken spears litter the floor. The men are gone. The slug bodies are bloated.
A weird click from back of the throat of the slug on top of the children alerts other slugs to their location. Children do not make good dinner. The slugs want their fresh young blood to take back to their underwater kingdom in the centre of the lake. Entertainment for the young slugs. A status symbol for all of slug-kind.
The click grows louder as more slugs join in. Claws, harvested from a raptor, were brought forth and used to slice gills into the children’s necks. Slugs grab the children by the ankles and drag them out. Heads bang on the rock, and the children black out.
The water becomes icy at a depth of twenty feet. It wakes both children. Underwater screams echo around the lake. Too much attention, when the slugs desire to operate in secret, results in ball-gags for the children. The balls are very fresh eggs, laid right there in their mouths. The water burns and itches as it finds its way into every cut. Mouthfuls of slug eggs to bite down on ease the pain slightly.
The little girl notices the mermaids. On the surface world, her brother would wind her up and tell her mermaids had long filed teeth, scales for skin and snakes for hair. It pleases her to discover his lies.
She reaches for the boy. The slugs do not allow them to touch. The enchantments that lie over them will break if they arrive at the centre of the lake with fingers laced together.
Blackness surrounds them. It takes a moment for the children to see the luminescent dots. Plankton drift on unseen currents. Everything glows down here. The centre of everything revolves around the cave.
The entrance looks like a giant green mouth, ready to swallow them and excrete their bones into some other dimension. The boy tries to swim away. More slugs came out and grab his legs. No hope for escape.
The girl wants to know more about the mermaids. She’s also ware of the giant white shark floating above them.
“Don’t worry, she’s sleeping,” she heard whispered into the centre of her brain.
 Megalodon. But those are meant to be extinct. Confusion washes over her. Mermaids don’t exist and dinosaurs are also extinct.
A wondrous world surrounds them. A meeting place of past, present, future and outer space. With a final look at the sleeping shark, the girl is dragged into the cave. If that thing wakes, she won’t even feel its teeth as it eats her. She shudders. Ripples travel through the water and hit the shark.
The airlock drains and dries their clothes and hair at the same time without dehydrating the slugs or the eggs the children spit onto the floor. Once dry, the door rises from above.
The slugs urge them into an underground city. Despite the location – a floating cave in the exact centre of the lake - moisture presents no issue. It doesn’t even drip down the walls.
The cackle of the radio and burst of electronics, dropped in from various times and places, makes their hair stand up and dance. The children cling to each other. Windows to the outside show the sharks. They appear to be surrounded by a school of them. Little sharks dodge the Megalodon – they don’t want to become dinner either.
The slugs assure them of their dominance. The children do not believe it. The top of the food chain surely are the sharks.
One swam up. The children’s legs turn to jelly. The slugs form themselves into a sofa for the children to collapse upon and watch the mysteries of the below.
Portals to various worlds open at random intervals. A shark swims through one and emerges out of another with a Loch Ness monster clenched in its massive jaws. No one challenged it for its prey. The children experience an understanding. Thanks to the randomness of the portals, they have entertainment outside the windows.
A portal opens in the cave. The children don’t walk through, but stare. They know not to attempt escape. Anything they ever want will come out of the portals. It doesn’t matter if it hasn’t been invented yet; Somewhere, at some other time, it will have been.
A waiter steps out with a full tray. Their dinner is served, the portal closing before he could step through it. He looks around. He is having a bad acid trip.
“Bad acid. Too much acid. Not enough acid.”
He sees the window and looks out, mesmerised. The girl stands next to him. The mermaids ride side-saddle on the sharks. She takes the waiter’s hand.
“You can’t eat the slugs down here.”

One day, I was winding up John Ledger on facebook by changing Brittany Spears lyrics. A story was born. I don't think it has been published anywhere, but don't hold me to that. And this one combines sci-fi and the sick shit you lot know and love. You know what else is popular? My messed up sci-fi, but no one buys Dark Roast. If you like this, check out Dark Roast - there's werepossums and coffee that is genetically modified to be a hell of a lot stronger than cocaine. www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Roast-Dani-Brown-ebook/dp/B01HYG87P2/ Dani

 
Oops I Shitted Again
Dani Brown  
Flying saucers don’t have flushing toilets. They should do. After a good anal probing, a virgin arse often needs to take a dump (assuming it doesn’t whist on the metal table). Yeah, they really should have flushing toilets.
Greys need to be a lot more considerate of who they’re kidnapping. Sometimes in the deep of the night, they’d abduct someone who wasn’t an anal virgin. Yeah they would. Their probes wouldn’t need any lubrication. They would glide in without resistance.
Cows didn’t need flushing toilets. They’d crap anywhere. So would this girl. Anal seepage was an understatement. She declared she drank some habanero sauce prior to collapsing into bed with her fist up her arse buried to her wrist. Getting lost in her butt was a common occurrence.
Her complaint with the greys involved the probe not being wide enough. They understood her perfectly well. Disgust was something they communicated via telepathy and not facial expressions. Greys weren’t one for facial expressions even, with their arms up the backside of cows.
All that anal play, once the wrist and fist were, removed resulted in a fountain of liquid shit. Habanero sauce was not a drink. They had the words to explain it to her along with illustrations on a flip chart but she ignored it.
She asked for their fist. She wasn’t in love but she needed to feel it deep, even after it had been up a cow’s butt. She knew Greys had skinny arms but hands that big could roll into a large tight fist. She didn’t care. There was a little surprise up there waiting in her colon. The saucer travelled at the speed of light on its way to the highway out of the Milky Way.
The woman didn’t care. Her diarrhoea could save humanity and humanity’s cows. Yeah it could. She showed them how it was done by fisting her own arse. She couldn’t feel it so she shoved another fist up her vagina and pushed back.
Greys were capable of vomiting. They did so. The one with its arm up the backside of a cow too. Projectile puke hit the cow’s legs and it kicked as the flying saucer sped towards another galaxy.
Blondie wasn’t the only human in the examination room. Puke and shit flew about, defying the gravity machine, and landed on one guy, waking him up. His anus was virginal. He might have played with small rubber butt plugs but that didn’t count. They were no larger than his doctor’s fingers. Face down, arse in the air, something was up it. He wanted to shit. He tried to clench. That made it worse.
Blondie was just leaking. How embarrassing. He was embarrassed for her - more so for her than himself, despite his current predicament. The Greys had to stop on a planet another galaxy away before they could return home, show these people off and drop them back in their beds and the cows in the field. They weren’t the ones responsible for mutilating cows - that was the Reptilian Shapeshifters - but they got the blame for it.
However, Blondie’s explosive habanero diarrhoea was corrosive. Landing on the cows, it burnt their hides. This was the first time the Greys had ever been responsible for mutilated cows. Fisting didn’t count. It didn’t cause any more damage than an Earth vet finding out if the creature was pregnant.
They had no need of flushing toilets. They didn’t understand why Earth creatures couldn’t just relieve themselves by tearing a hole in the fabric of reality and shitting and pissing into another dimension like creatures from every other planet in the universe. It wasn’t that difficult. No special skill was needed and they could do it while carrying on a conversation without anyone noticing. It was more dignified.
Diarrhoea was apparently a natural lubricant. Blondie’s singing woke up another human - a nun with her arse on display. The church would not approve of her anal bruising. She jolted the probe telling Blondie to shut up.
Diarrhoea and vomit got into the gravity machine and short-circuited it. The cows were floating with Greys’ arms up their arseholes. Gravity was needed to pull their arms out. Telepathic sighs were nearly visible on the air in the flying saucer. Luckily, the lack of gravity only affected the anal probe room. The rest of the flying saucer still had gravity and could be navigated to the next galaxy. That didn’t spare the driver and engineer from knowing what was happening down there. They picked up on the telepathic signals as well. They also got a good splattering of Blondie’s thoughts on anal play. They would have to more careful with whom they abducted in future.
Her gaping arsehole was in danger of swallowing everything in the experimental anal probe room. It already swallowed a cow’s head and was working its way down the body. A Grey was still attached via the cow’s arsehole. He sweated. He could feel a baby kick inside the cow trying to be born before Blondie’s arsehole could swallow that as well. The cow shitted all over his arm with so much force and the lack of gravity, he received a mouthful of that as well. Tasted like Earth grass and antibiotics.
Blondie’s gaping arsehole couldn’t get enough of the cow. It was like a black hole in the flying saucer. The cow’s baby was gone up Blondie’s arsehole. The Grey could feel the gaping arsehole on his fingertips. Through telepathy, the rest of the Greys could feel it too. It made steering the flying saucer rather difficult.
The Grey was gone up to his elbow. To the other Greys in telepathic range - which included a lot of other flying saucers due to being on a busy highway out of the Milky Way - it felt like sheer burning. The flying saucers crashed into each other.
Other species didn’t have the telepathic frequencies of the Greys. They had no idea what was happening. However, swearing in thousands of different languages in thousands of different frequencies, both verbal and telepathic, was heard in Grey saucers throughout several galaxies.
The cops were on their way. Meanwhile, Blondie’s gaping arsehole swallowed the Grey with his fist in the cow. It still wasn’t satisfied - Blondie wasn’t that innocent. The nun tutted in disgust. She wasn’t innocent either but there was a world of difference between masturbating with a wooden crucifix and returning it slimy with vaginal sludge to the wall it hung from ready for communion, and gaping arseholes leaking diarrhoea (all the lubrication it needed) swallowing everything.
With the gravity device broken, Blondie’s arse went for the next biggest object – another cow with a Grey performing a rectal exam. The Greys let out a collective telepathic sigh.
The cops on their way didn’t notice – they weren’t Greys. They were Reptilian Shapeshifters with massive sticks up their arses the size of logs. The flying saucer that was causing the spaceship crashes that were backing up the highway was in range of their viewing scope and their disintegrating giant laser beam. That fucker could destroy a planet. They turned down the energy. They only wanted to destroy the flying saucer causing the crashes.
The driver and engineer were drunk and jumped to conclusions without finding out what the problem was. Reptilian Shapeshifters were like that - shoot now, question later. They were the massive douchebags of the universe and resided in the centre of every galaxy.
They switched the laser on. It didn’t take long to warm up. They shot, but there was a problem; Blondie’s gaping arsehole was swallowing the laser beam.
All that energy and it still wasn’t enough. The Greys in the saucer could feel the laser beam by tuning into Blondie’s frequency and had their minds completely blown. Those on the telepathic end of their fellow species on other spaceships blew out a few brain cells from the slits that served as their noses.
Greys’ brains weren’t the prettiest of things. Their chemical makeup was remarkably similar to Earth faeces, hence all the anal probes (they really just wanted to find out if Earth’s anuses could communicate with them). It smelt the same as well. Faecal brain cells flying about from exploded heads got into the other gravity devices shorting them all out.
Blondie’s arse was too occupied with battling a laser beam. It was nearly too much to handle. It couldn’t swallow up anything else. There wasn’t enough space. This was the best laser beam it had ever come across. It dried up all of her diarrhoea so she could feel the burn. It was so much better than habanero sauce and her ghost chilli enemas. Those were her guilty, twice-a-night pleasure followed by sitting on a cactus.
The Reptilian Shapeshifters were confused. Nothing had ever resisted their laser before. They steered their ship closer to the out of control flying saucer and it hit with X-Ray vision.
They could see inside. Shit was floating around. Too much shit. It was mixing together in a giant blender of anti-gravity swirling around the source of the trouble with the laser beam. It could not be penetrated with X-Ray vision.
They would need to go in. Biohazard suits were a must on this job. With shit that could repel X-Rays floating about, they couldn’t quite see what they should shift their forms into. To be on the safe side, they shapeshifted into a being with a cow’s head, long grey arms, a penis and a vagina. Their eyes were simple yellow slits. Those were hard to change without contacts so they put on sunglasses and hoped for the best.
In they went. They became part of the tornado swirling around Blondie’s laser-sucking anus. After seeing the cops go in and not come out again, creatures in the pile up tried to flee on little emergency ships. Those were also sucked into the tornado.
Blondie’s arse was becoming a black hole on the highway between galaxies. There was only traffic to suck up once the laser was out of energy. Without diarrhoea, debris scraped her arsehole going on in. Warnings had to be placed on that stretch of intergalactic road while a new highway was built by prisoners.
Creatures were stranded unless they could jump dimensions and pass by the highway. It was the only road out of the Milky Way from that particular arm of the galaxy. Highways were slow to build and light years had to be put between Blondie’s arsehole and the new road. Creatures grew old and died in galaxies they didn’t belong in before the new highway was built. The first few journeys on the new road featured more hearse spaceships than anything else.
Seeing the giant arsehole on the horizon while driving past on the new highway, a little boy Grey suggested it should be plugged with a giant butt plug. The intergalactic committee approved the suggestion and one was commissioned. Twenty-five different aliens died installing it. The old highway was haunted by the things that were sucked into the gaping anus. The surface of the giant butt plug became a favourite make-out spot for teens and a place to tell ghost stories whilst being touched by actual ghosts.
Nobody on Earth missed Blondie.
 
 
 
 

Sister
By Dani Brown
“Daddy, I want to go feed the pygmy humans.”
“Daddy, I want to feed the pygmy humans to pot-bellied pigs.”
“No Daddy! I want to feed eyeballs to the ducks. Where do the eyeballs come from?”
“Daddy.”
“Daddy.”
“Daddy.”
Goat Lord ground his teeth and wondered what exactly made him think impaling the nanny upon his cock until she bled out was a good idea. Then he remembered, blood is an excellent lubricant. The warm liquid dripping into his piss hole always resulted in ejaculation. He wanted a sure-fire because even getting an erection required far too much effort. Balls, they needed to be relieved.
Now he was stuck with the last remnants of his wife until he hired a new nanny. He would be careful not to impale the next one upon his mighty cock until he had another waiting in the wings. Nannies were difficult to come by. No one wanted to work in the crumbling Hellhole that served as his home. Rumours persisted of certain death and burial under the stairs.
No one wanted to visit either. The smell from under the stairs knocked goats back and sent them running down the street on all fours, reverted to their former pre-revolution, pre-evolution selves. The rumours of burial were false. Goat Lord chucked the bodies under there and hoped for the best.
“Daddy, this way.”
“No, this way.”
“I want to feed the pygmy humans.”
A headache grew from just behind his horns. Goat Lord, Lord of all the Goats in the little patch of land that was his, knew he couldn’t cope with his kids much longer. Not without his head exploding, or his brain turning to liquid and oozing out of his ears and nose.
The world speed by as the little brats shouted for his attention. Goat Lord stamped his hooves. Goats hadn’t even come up with an implant to place in the nose to exhale steam and fire. They would one day, but today was the day to express his anger and frustration by swearing at the fruit of his loins. 
“Shut the fuck up.”
His pocket watch went flying, the chain broken, with the third stamp of his hooves. It didn’t work but served as storage for his stash. Since the time of the uprising, goats found themselves with more and more addictions to block out the blood memories of times gone-by.
Goat Lord was partial to a line or two of coke to perk himself up in the mornings. Too much, over too short a period, and he wouldn’t be able to impale the staff upon his mighty cock.
When dealing with his late-great wife’s leavings he found himself becoming more reliant upon shrooms to see through the long, brutal days of fatherhood. They were meant to be non-addictive, but clung to him like shit on his fur. Much like his surviving children, each one more mutant than the one before it. It was amazing these three lived at all.
He dropped to all fours and screamed. He had to get his pocket watch back. Goat Lord’s mouth dried. Flakes of spit snowed upon the mud from between the natural fork in his tongue. They could have been cocaine grains. He wished they were. His nose ached for the burn as the coffee he gulped back in the night when he couldn’t sleep, wore off. The brats didn’t give him enough time to drink enough to make him shake.
He kicked the youngest brat over with his back legs on his way to look. If the clasp on the watch held, he would maintain a sense of dignity by not eating mud and slurry on his quest to get the drug into his system.
The older brother took the opportunity to lift his leg and pee on his little brother. He never liked the little shit. It wasn’t any wonder their mother topped herself with that deformed thing squealing all the time. Things would be okay if Mother was still here. First Born spent time with her under the stairs, but nothing he did would make her talk.
Sister-in-the-middle kicked First Born out of the way, envy rising inside her. Mother fucker, or mother corpse fucker, if he was only old enough to maintain an erection, knew everything. Every little fucking secret, like he could read minds. He couldn’t bring their mother back from under the stairs. She reminded him at every given opportunity.
She wanted to piss in the little shit’s good eye on account of not remembering her own name since her mother died. Sister was what she went by now. Every time she heard it, she wanted birds to fall dead out of the sky and land in a carriage, their corpses suffocating the next generation or at the very least, sheering their horns.
Sister let the river of foamy urine flow, with a little burning and a dash of blood. Daddy never bothered to call the doctor out. Little Brother can deal with the infection in his eye, if opportunity didn’t present itself to her. She almost wished it wouldn’t. She wanted to see the effect of whatever lurked in her bladder on his eye. But she had waited too long.
The overcast morning just might give her opportunity. It started promising. The old witch by the stream promised clouds on the day. Bladder as empty as it was going to get, she bent down to see if he wept pus.
Her disappointment expressed with a hoof to his misshapen head and the half a third horn on the centre of his forehead. Sister’s kick failed to snap it off. His cloudy white eye rolled around to glare.
First Born watched his father shift around in the mud and shit looking for his broken pocket watch in a river of pygmy human diarrhoea. There wasn’t much in there. He had been pinching from his father’s stash for two weeks now. He didn’t feel any better. The only thing that would help involved puking on the pygmy humans.
They were his favourite. His mother used to tell stories of when they dominated the Earth. They were bigger back then and wore clothes.
First Born experienced vague recollections of his name, but it wasn’t important. He wanted to be a human back when they stood tall and proud and lived in their cities in the sky. Archaeologist knew these once existed, the ruins proved it. He had a stupid goat name, like Little Lord, or something along those lines. It would’ve had Lord in it somewhere at any rate.
His father shifting through manure disgusted him. He wanted nothing to do with his dysfunctional family of the highest inbreeding. Apparently, it was the mark of high status. It wasn’t that high if the peasants had silk fur while First Born was left with course tufts and bald patches.
His mother and father were brother and sister, as were his grandparents. Each generation lost some silkiness and gained roughness in its place. It took generations of tracing back the family tree before a non-related couple could be found. First Born looked at their pictures, photographs from before the Great Uprising. Finest cashmere harvested for wool for the rich.
The miscarried remains of countless brothers and sisters lay beneath the stairs. No one bothered to scarp the flesh from the bone. The smell was horrendous and the linger of decay, enough to result in vomiting in the most sensitive.
First Born enjoyed nothing more than crunching the bones in peace, staring at the shrine to his mother and all the magic he tried to weave around her. No one ventured under the stairs, except for him.
A stray pygmy human squealed past, making it hard to believe they had speech once. He kicked it in the head, getting the thing’s puny brain on his hoof as its body went flying in the opposite direction. Love for a species was one thing. Love devoted to an individual pygmy human didn’t hold a place in his heart.
He spat at the twitching body but missed by half a dozen feet and moved onto their pen, drowning the sounds around him. Pathetic creatures, covered in their own filth, looked up at him with fear and hunger in their eyes.
He went to the feed dispensers and grabbed a bucket with his teeth. He would get down on all fours, like the way goats used to be, to build the fantasy of things being the way they were around him.
The red one was his favourite. Chunks of bone and organ floated in it. More so than usual. The grinder must be clogged again. First Born liked it. Before his mother topped herself pushing out the deformed creature that served as Little Brother, she told him the contents of the red feed were the ground up remains of pygmy humans. The illusion of him on all fours, trotting with his hooves throwing up mud, with a bucket in his mouth wasn’t lost on him.
Sometimes the pygmies in the feed were old. Sometimes there was a surplus. First Born liked the thought of the babbies slurping the Earthly remains of their parents. It was said, humans believed in an afterlife. First Born scooped the red feed into the pen, having to stand up temporarily, imagining the souls of the ground up remains screaming as their relatives ate them.
A youngun’ came over and jumped at his hoof. He looked down and saw it dripping blood. The yougun’s tongue tickled.
A rush of air and pain hit First Born from behind. He toppled over, taking the fence of the pen with him and letting the pygmy humans out. Their soft feet walking over him brought no relief.
Dried shit snowed onto his fur. He should have taken his father’s advice and put on clothes that morning, but it was too late for should-haves. First Born couldn’t have predicted the attack that landed him face down in pygmy human shit.
His sister’s hoof dug into the back of his neck, pushing his face deeper into the slurry. His mouth and nose filled with shit. First Born’s ears were spared. With his other senses dull, noise became a loud firework travelling to the centre of his brain. Slurry blinded him, but it didn’t stop the fireworks going off in front of him.
“You’re going to die.”
He knew his sister whispered, but the voice came in loud and clear.
“Every single week, Daddy takes us out, and every single week, you make us stare at pygmy humans eating their own shit.”
A warm glob of phlegm-filled spit landed on the back of his neck. She would’ve been holding it in her mouth, otherwise he would have heard it being born with the new-found ear sensitivity. The phlegm indicated she ran out of piss.
“I fucking hate pygmy humans.”
She stamped on his head.
“I hate the way their sad beady eyes follow you everywhere, like they remember but not well enough.”
First Born wanted to shout that they wore clothes once. They used to be able to talk but couldn’t very well do that with a mouthful of slurry. He wanted to tell her and them everything he knew.
The warm liquid mud crept further down the back of his throat and into his nostrils. First Born loved the little naked humans. He didn’t love drowning in their filth. His ears searched for their sounds, desperate in hope the connection he fostered between himself and them week after week, was felt on their end. First Born’s legs twitched as slurry filled his lungs, always listening for the pygmy humans.
Goat Lord didn’t pay any attention to what went on around him. The search for the missing pocket watch consumed every ounce of his concentration, drowning out noise and movement. There were no witnesses to First Born’s murder, except the few pygmy humans that turned around once they remembered they had two legs and two arms. His father didn’t feel any loss connection when he died. Little Brother did.
Goat Lord rolled around in the filth of the petting zoo, not noticing the stampede of pygmies running and leaping clumsily on their hind legs, until one stepped on a tiny shimmer of gold and pulled his broken pocket watch up by a toe.
Cocaine snowed on the muck. Until that moment, the clasp held. An old relic from the time of the humans, stolen during the revolution. It should have been replaced generations ago. Goat Lord dived at it, nose aching for the burn as his children murdered each other in the background.
Thunder sounded overhead before the first fat drops of rain fell from the pregnant sky. Sister looked up. It was her day. The witch by the stream said it would play out in the exact way it did.
First Born felt them land on his fur as his body twitched beneath his sister’s weight. He knew he should have put on pants before leaving, but that took up time better spent licking the decayed remains of his siblings beneath the stairs.
Little Brother took off his clothes and threw them in the mud. Everything smelt of his sister’s piss. He couldn’t get the smell out. He didn’t want the memories to follow him. There’ll come a time in the future when he’s bigger than her. If he can get his piss to come out the right hole and aim, he’ll be able to get his revenge then.
He saw his father sniffing the air and decided to join him. Something must smell good over there. He didn’t know of his father’s drug habits, like his brother. Sister suspected something, but didn’t care.
Little Brother crashed into a pygmy human and knocked it face first into the mud. His next step brought his hoof down on its neck. He didn’t look over to see Sister doing the same thing to First Born. He wouldn’t have done anything to stop her, if he did.
Little Brother, upon realising what he stepped on, moved his hoof up, ready for the jump. He knew the things were fast. He didn’t want it to escape. He settled for stamping, the smell of his sister’s urine evaporating with each hoof into the pygmy human’s skull.
They were bigger than goats once. First Born told him that goats used to be kept in pens and fed pellets while humans roamed the Earth and flew to the Moon. First Born lies!
The thought of the stories he told on stormy afternoons made Little Brother’s stamps harder. The brain burst on his last landing, sending skull shards flying and grey matter up Little Brother’s legs all the way to his waist.
Sister watched Little Brother stamp on the pygmy human as First Born drowned in the slurry. Her little brother wrapped himself in an aura of anger from the day he was pushed out with the last of their mother’s blood.
He bit off the wet nurse’s teat and spat it in her face. Father didn’t bother ringing the doctor. His youngest lapped up the blood and sucked her dry.
The smell of her decomposition and the buzz of flies chased Sister into nightmares each time she closed her eyes. Little Brother ate the maggots. First Born tried to study them beneath his cracked microscope. She didn’t know which one disgusted her more.
Little Brother presented an issue with his energy versus an ambush. The most she could handle was peeing on him when he was down. Any threat to his life and he’d end up killing her. She had something special saved for him in the pockets of her dress.
Little Brother seemed happy turning the pygmy human to mush as the heavens opened. Her father appeared distracted. She ran for him, knocking down a confused pygmy human on the way.
Sister’s balance was exceptional. Goat ballet being something she taught herself after her mother told her a bedtime story about how the humans of legend would do it. She begged her father to take her to lessons, but he flat out refused. More reason to charge into him at a twirl and leap.
Mud and coke flakes went up Goat Lord’s nose. His brain was hit at the same time his daughter leaped onto the back of his head, crushing his skull in the landing. He died doing what he loved; snorting cocaine.
Sister glanced at Little Brother, waiting for her father’s death rattle. He found the pygmy human she knocked over and was suckling at the creature’s teats. Pygmy humans were known for lactating pus. Sister felt the vomit raise in the back of her throat. She swallowed it back down.
Memories of his wet nurse overwhelmed him. The pygmy squirmed beneath his bite. Animals felt pain. He couldn’t giggle with flesh in his mouth. He climbed onto her stomach comping down on her nipple until blood flowed with the milk.
Sister had no desire to torture her father’s deceased body while his soul was cleansed with fire. He’d be in too much pain to notice her hoof up his anus. Physically feeling something in the afterlife was said to be impossible, but mentally, the waves of violation would hit him if she stored the body in the freezer until a later date.
She let Little Brother suckle while she went to fetch a cup. Nothing fancy, filled with hot blood and floating chunks of fat, from the shitty little petting zoo café. Sister knew that was his favourite. She paused by the table with the stirrers to add the special ingredient from her dress pocket.
He was right where she left him, sucking the other teat clean in the rain as the creature screamed its agony for the other pygmies to hear. All the other goats at the petting zoo sought shelter from the rain. She could feel their eyes watching and picked up on their attempts to protect their traumatised children from the Goat Lord’s deformed offspring. She hissed at them, the noise not perfect despite her hours spent practicing in front of the mirror.
The hot drink splashed in the cup. It didn’t matter, she checked to make sure the lid was secure. A little burn would ruin the perfect day.
Little Brother chomped on the raw flesh of the tiny human. Since the day he was pushed out in a massive haemorrhage, he was hungry. Born ravenous, he gnawed on their mother until her empty bag of bones was taken away and placed under the stairs.
Sister trotted over to him.
“I thought you might be thirsty.”
Before he could reject the drink, she cleared her throat to add more and bowed her head in the hope he wouldn’t catch the glisten in her eyes or pass it off as the rain.
“I’m sorry I pissed on you. I didn’t want First Born to target me.”
The sweetness in her voice, or the rain falling on the ground did the trick and he took the hot drink, removing the lid so he could suck back the chunky fat in one gulp. Sister watched, attempting to appear causal, wondering if the drink burned his throat on the way down.
The little surprise coursed through him even as he crushed the cup beneath his hoof. Blood dripped from his eyes before he knew what was happening. Sister couldn’t help but smile.
She took her time to shoot the grin at each family as her brother keeled over. She was in charge now. There weren’t going to be any more pygmy humans at petting zoos, or petting zoos for that matter. She held up her arms to a flash of lightening and felt the energy on the air mix with the fear.
Those goats didn’t know fear, but soon, they will.
.

first appeared in Box of Bizarro
 
Little Bo Peep
By Dani Brown
 
“Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep.”
A man in a frilly blue calf length dress hides in the hedge of a Welsh farm and hums beneath his breath (he doesn’t realise he is doing it). Bet you can see where this is going? Just to be sure, allow me to elaborate. Although bestiality is illegal throughout Britain, some people flout these laws, mainly with sheep.
“And doesn’t know where to find them.”
This man knows exactly where to find the sheep. Hence hiding in a hedge in a Welsh farm. He left his car at the bed and breakfast and walked the three miles to the farm.
“Leave them alone.”
The man wanted out of the hedge but he had to make sure the farmer wasn’t around – farmers had guns and they don’t like it if someone fucks their sheep. They’ve even been known to shoot at their own sons for making love to the animals.
“And they’ll come home.”
The man in drag heard heavy boot steps on the dry earth. He backed into the hedge snagging the frills and lace on his blue dress. He was making far too much noise but maybe the person stamping on the dry earth wouldn’t notice. Or maybe it wasn’t the farmer come to check on his sheep and make sure the lambs’ virginity remained intact.
“Bringing their tails behind them.”
He heard a scuffing a little ways down the hedge. And coughing a little ways down the other side of the hedge.
“Little Bo Peep,” started up somewhere else and the man in the frilly blue dress realised he had been humming it all along.
It appeared he wasn’t the only person here to lift the tails of the sheep. But it could be a trap set up by the gun-wielding farmer. Those farmers were really smart when it came to ensuring the sheep weren’t violated.
“Has lost her sheep.”
He could have easily dumped a recording into the hedge to lure potential sheep fuckers into a sense of safety.
“And doesn’t know where to find them.”
The fear of being caught and shot at made the dress wearing man really horny. His erection made his dress a few inches shorter in the front.
Lurking over there was a shadow – the long shadow of a man lacking a gun. The moon shone high in the sky, it was full. The dress wearing man could see the silhouette as it skipped towards the sheep. Too much joy was in that skip.
“Leave them alone.”
It wasn’t a farmer. Another silhouette joined it. This one was clearly a man with a very large, very erected cock.
“And they’ll come home.”
The dress wearing man leaped out of the hedge and became another silhouette running beneath the light of the full moon towards the sheep. He wanted to bring one back to the bed and breakfast with him but then he would be arrested so he had to do the act in the field with all the other men hiding in the hedge.

I don't think this one has been published anywhere...

Skippy
by Dani Brown
Digging. Endless digging. Here’s some more digging. The hole is already so goddamn deep but still, the foreman won’t allow you to stop. Something big must be down here. Something important. If there isn’t, you can round up your fellow employees and impale him. Impalement is always an option down below.
Your fellow employees are letting the frustration show. The lyrics in their stupid chant changed, taking on something more dark and twisted in a subtle sort of way so the foreman wouldn’t be able to work out what they meant.
You don’t chant while you dig. You’re too cool for that bullshit or any other bullshit. You’re doing your time, paying your dues and then you’re out of here – onto great things, better things.
Fingernails are a thing of the past. You’re digging with the nail bed. They broke off long ago with the embedded dirt. Probably eaten by the foreman when you brought them to him with your bleeding fingers. The foreman was a dirty fucker. They always were. What this one was searching for, he never said. Just said to keep digging. Forever digging. It never stops.
At least you have ten hours off at night. You crawl beneath your blankets and don’t move until someone shoves luke warm gruel beneath your nose with dawn’s first light. You swallow that down before you even piss.
Thoughts of the outside world are long since gone. What comes to you in waking hours is like a weird hallucination. This is what has always been and always will be.
You dig some more silently cursing the chanters, hoping they’ll act on their chants with the even more sinister twist (“feed him his liver” – you like that). Your finger hits something solid. You bite your tongue to stop from crying out. It is your discovery. No one else’s. They can chant. They can go fuck themselves and murder the foreman beneath a pool of communal bodily fluids.
It is dark down in the hole. No one knows you are brushing aside dirt with your bare hands. You look up. They’re still digging. The foreman is at the top barking orders through a megaphone. He won’t even shine a spot light down here – something about being a waste of electricity and upsetting luminous albino spiders.
The spiders don’t bother you. If your tongue was longer (and not bleeding) you would lick them off the wall for a tasty snack – gotta be better than the gruel they feed you, but then again, anything is except dirt. Eating spiders earns a trip into blistering daylight though. Your eyes would melt out and you’ll never be able to see again.
The surface is only something you’ve read about in books. Dawn’s early light is only a bulb since the air on the surface is impossible to breathe without getting shards of strings of pollution formed together in a solid form dancing on the wind storms up there. Light, a replication of old photographs and descriptions read about in books by those who still knew how to read. Not many now.
Life had become endless digging down, looking for more space. It couldn’t be built up any more. The winds raping the surface were too strong. Building swayed in them.
One collapsed not so long ago, killing everyone and everything inside and letting in the surface pollutants into the comprised buildings next door – also killing everyone inside. Ghost buildings. The building’s planners, builders, engineers and architects were forced to handle the body removal and bring them to the surface with flimsy bio-haz suits. They died too.
The here and now. Brushing aside the moist soil. It is loose. You feel your neighbour’s body heat next to you. At a guess, you say three feet. Luminous white spiders dance on the walls of the hole.
Your behaviour is suspect but the chances of the foreman paying attention and shining a spotlight down here are slim to none. He’s one lazy bastard. How he made foreman is anyone’s guess. Your theory? He sucked and licked all the chain-gangs working his way up, out of the hole. The next layer of the planet where the bulbs change colour with the daylight outside.
The smoothness gives way in the dark. Light pours out and up. You shield your eyes. The chanting stops. Everyone has noticed. You hope it burns the foreman above. A pull. The gravity. It is intense. Punishment of yesteryear, endless falling. That’s all the old people’s holes were for. And to dump bodies. Skeletons. Partially decomposed. Mummified. You’ve dug up them all and discarded them with the rest of the rubbish from hole digging.
You try to move your heels away from the hole. They scrape against something solid. You wiped away all the dirt. There’s nothing to stop the hole sucking you into the light.
Your heels touch it first. It is warm and strange. Tingles work up your body from there. It is not unpleasant. Relaxing even after more of you is sucked through into the light.
You’re free-falling. You can feel the air rushing past your body even with the tingles. You hear the screams of your formerly chanting fellow employees (in the loosest sense of the word, digging is punishment for crimes unknown). You try to open your eyes and can’t. The wind speed is too much. You aren’t scared. The tingles feel good. You’ve never felt wind. Only heard about it through whispers in the dark.
You can understand why people have to be protected from the surface now. But something this good, can’t be evil, like the church-people claim. You slow down. You were expecting to shatter on the ground eventually. You open your eyes and look down. You can see it, coming slowly up to meet you (or more, you are slowly going down to meet it).
There’s light. It doesn’t hurt. It is soothing. Better than dawn’s early light. Those bulbs are cold and harsh, an endless winter below ground with nothing to eat except bone meal of the old people and gruel.
There’s something lush a green brushing past your cheek. It tickles. And smells divine. Plant life of times gone by, another myth whispered in the dark between the chants. Apparently only stuff with vines and eyes exists on the surface these days. The eyes came when greedy scientists went a bit too far and cross bred the flowers with the fish next to a nuclear reactor. They do nothing about the wind speed and poison pollution up above.
A drop of something wet hits the top of your head. Followed by another. It is cool and refreshing after years spent in the dark.
Your co-employees have stopped their screaming. You hope the foreman wasn’t sucked in. He doesn’t deserve to feel the light defused through the soft greenery, even if it ultimately leads to your death and the death of those you have so recently found yourself working with.
You land on your feet. Even the dirt has a different quality to it down here. You look up. You can’t see what you’ve fallen through. Trees block the way. Or, at least, you think they’re trees. You heard them spoken about in the dark.
Something brushes past your ankle. Something with many legs. You don’t scream. You look down. You can’t see it. An insect of some variety. In the light, they aren’t luminous. They blend in with their surroundings.
Noise in the distance. An animal calling its youth home. Animals would be something of myth too but you’ve dug up enough of their remains and left to be discarded with the trash to know they actually existed in the long ago when the old people were throwing their criminals into holes.
You wonder if you’re dreaming. Maybe your hallucinations became more vivid since your work took a more unpleasant turn down in the pits digging for seemingly no reason at all? Everything about life was pointless. You wondered why you carried on existing. Hallucinations kept you going. Was this the final one? Did you now drop dead out of a combination of sheer boredom and far too much manual and pointless labour?
Hallucination or not, life has new meaning. Another drop falls on your head. You look up. It is coming out of the sky. The light quality has changed. Something grey and mean is blocking it out. Clouds. You heard about them whispered as nursery rhymes to send you to sleep during childhood. Little rain clouds.
Behind the trees, the little bit of woodland you landed in, the light is bright. You look at your hand for the first time. You are clothed in layers of dirt from the years. The rain washes it away. Naked as the day you were born.
The ground shakes. You grab the nearest tree. You don’t want to fall into another hole. Hell was something the church-people blared on about. You didn’t believe in it until now.
There’s something else out there. You hear the mumblings of your co-employees (employment digging wasn’t a choice; it was something forced upon everyone who had to do it but you have no other name for it). People sound confused, not frightened.
Your hair is matted with dirt. You wonder if theirs is in a similar state. You walk towards the voices. Small creatures bounce by you on two legs. You have no idea what they are.
You wonder if people are down here too. People who have always lived in the light, even if it is only the light of your imagination. You see a co-worker. Naked apart from the dirt. They have no shame. Neither do you. Only foremen wear clothes.
You don’t know of people whose status is greater than foremen. You know they exist. Sometimes the foreman is in a bad mood because someone above him gave him new orders. They might wear clothes too. But down in the pits, clothes are forbidden. Even threadbare rags pillaged from the dead of yesteryear aren’t allowed. Clothes would be allowed in this place.
As would soap. Soap was a privilege granted only to the people ruthless enough to claw themselves out of the pits. You want soap. You want to be clean. You want to feel the soft brush of fabric against your bare skin.
Warm air breathes into the cracks in the dirt on your neck. You wait for a tap. Fear, for the first time since feeling the tingles engulf your body grips you. You can’t turn around.
You don’t want to seem rude. These people have lived all their lives in the light. You want their help. You want them to show you the way. This land is so pure and uncorrupted. Clean air to breathe. Light. Plants. The ferns are waist high and don’t have eyes. Fossilised ferns were another thing for the trash heap in the pits above.
But sometimes a particularly sadistic foreman with a spot of education would shove them in the throats of the pit workers endlessly digging. Stories of ancient plants were shoved in ears and brains in the same way the rocks were shoved into the mouths of hungry pit workers.
You want to run into the ferns and hide. The breath cracks open the dirt, pushing it away from your body right down your spine. Your body is frozen. This is how it ends.
The person (creature) behind you moves. You can feel it. Most of your life spent in the pits digging made your senses ultra-sensitive. To your left. Their breath is still on your neck. They’re about your height. They move slow.
You can see out of the corner of your eye now. But it is still green over there. Still raining. Light defused through the green trees. Everything is so green. After a life in the dark, it seemed so pleasant before. Now, you don’t want to see.
You’ve felt fear before. You’ve seen luminous insects. Eaten them when no one was looking. You’ve felt larger things lurking in the dark. Things with blackened teeth, still sharp – looking for a quick bite. But you knew that fear. You knew those things lurked in the dark.
Nursey rhymes became urban legend became the education of the pits. Down in the pits, those things mattered. Your body would freeze. You could go without breathing for two minutes. Longer if needed. Your body was built for it.
But the thing breathing on you now, it could see – as could you. Your mind never wanted to imagine the things lurking in the dark. It didn’t want to meet what was breathing on you now.
You close your eyes. You can’t see it but it can still see you. It can smell you too but the sense of smell in something that can see isn’t as strong as the creatures that lurk sightless in the dark.
You are perfectly still. You aren’t even breathing. The bottom of your feet itch but you’ve learnt to ignore that over the years.
The rain, moments ago so pleasant, falls like torture. Drip. Drop. Not falling with any speed. That would be like the showers you were told about. Something to aim for down in the pits where there’s only festering rags on sticks, ripe with imagined mould growths because it was always too dark to see anything even below dawn’s early light bulbs.
Mud falls off you in drips revealing your bare flesh. So liberating at first. Not so with fear coursing in your body. You can feel that move. You can smell it coming out of your pores.
The person (creature) moves in front of you. You can smell them and not you. The smell isn’t bad. You’re used to bad smells. Anything that isn’t enough to make non-pit creatures die is suspicious by nature.
The person (creature) sniffs and breathes in your face. You have to take a step back. You must exhale the air in your lungs. Your body is frozen. The person (creature) breathes and sniffs.
Your senses and your imagination don’t agree on what is standing in front of you. Your body tells you it doesn’t have skin but scales in green to match the ferns and trees. Your mind tells you another human, clothed and holding something sharp and pointy with teeth filed into points.
You can’t hold your breath any longer. Your lungs are hot and heavy. A few seconds more and maybe the person (creature) will lose interest.
But you’ve been seen. You aren’t in the dark any longer. Things down here in the light are strange.
You hold it in and clench your anus as if this can help you hold your breath.
The person (creature) blows hot breath on your closed eyelids. The request: to open them. You disobey. Little scraps of disobedience were common in the pits. It was the only way to survive. Down here, in the light you aren’t so sure. Blatant disobedience of this variety wasn’t tolerated up above.
It took the last of your mental strength to keep your eyes shut. Your lungs protest inside you. You needed air. The rapid beating of your heart was giving away your location anyways. What difference does it make? If your heart was to randomly stop, it wouldn’t matter. The person (creature) can see you. A battle raged inside you between old habits and new environment.
In the light, nothing is as bad. The pits were dark and dank with luminous albino spiders and terrible gas. You were brought up in a world where trust was a myth experienced by the people of old. They trusted too much and the world became the way it is.
You keep your lids shut. You’re dizzy, lightheaded. Lack of air. You need to breathe. Exhalation of the hot heavy air in your lungs before opening your eyes.
You stumble backwards and are caught by a big green tail. Creature, not person. Expression: curious. Not even the bits of ancient debris in the pits held any sort of explanation for what was sniffing you. Breathing. Eyes open. Heart rate normalising. You pass out.
Green light pokes into the slits of your eyes. You aren’t ready to open them. Sleep wraps her thick arms around you hugging you in a warm embrace.
The smell of something greasy but good travels on the air up to your nostrils. You crack open your eyelids. This time, you open them further. The waking world awaits. You are lying on your back, sunk into something soft. Nightmares of the pits are a distant memory.
The sizzling on the air. You don’t know what that is but it accompanies the smell. Movement around you. Your eyes try to focus but your mind isn’t ready. The sound of a light door moves and the smell becomes stronger. You see a blur. That is all. Eyes aren’t ready.
The smell makes you hungry. You don’t remember when your last bowl of gruel was. Time is a meaningless string to count how long you were in the pits. But you aren’t in the pits any longer. A vague thought of your co-employees dances across your mind but hunger chases them away.
A clicking and a jingle. Something creaks below you. Your mind goes into panic mood. The ground is giving way. What’s below this world may be unpleasant. You want to stay here. Sweat breaks out all over your body. The ground doesn’t move. But you are above it laying on something soft and warm.
The creaks, clicking and jingles get closer. The smell accompanies them getting stronger. So mouth-watering intense. There’s something bitter too, sitting next to something sweet. All those years in the dark and your senses are sharp. They haven’t even begun to dull. But you have no idea how long you’ve been here, or even where here is. Being sucked into the light seemed to have happened so long ago.
Heavy breathing and the ground moves some more near where the air changed. There’s sounds from that direction too. People talking? Maybe. Maybe not. You’re too dazed and hungry to contemplate it now.
With a thud and much clicking, the pleasant smell lands a foot away from your head. You turn towards it begging your eyes to focus. The first thing they hone in on is a flower sticking out of a ceramic vessel. You can see its aura of death. Plants are of such abundance they can just be cut up and put in a vessel here. The death of the flower seems to serve no purpose. Ancient graffiti left behind by the old people, viewed under the dim light of the bulbs hinted as much. Something for decoration only.
There’s a scratching from the ground next to the person. A different smell too. Your stomach rumbles. You cringe at the vibrations. They make you sound weak. A lifetime spent in the dark and you are weak. You don’t want to advertise it. Your vision isn’t as blurry. Tiny details stand out on the vessel containing the dying flower. Vines painted on. Down in the light, someone took the time to make that.
“Food,” a voice says.
You look up from your bed. You know what that word means. It means the same thing above and below.
You push yourself up. Everything is so new and daunting. The soft thing you are laying on wants to suck you in but not in a bad way.
The voice belongs to someone clean and kind-looking but the people above the pits would scrub themselves up and look nice. A kind appearance can be deceptive. You don’t think that is the case here.
Next to the person, is a green creature of some variety with a long neck and tail. Not as large as what you landed on when you fell over due to lack of oxygen. A baby? You think this one might be fully grown.
You succeed in pushing yourself to a sitting position. You didn’t bother to count how many attempts it took. It doesn’t matter. The plate of food is like something you’ve only seen the fossilised remains of. No gruel in sight. Bone meal isn’t there either. It smells so good.
A brown liquid resides in a cup with a handle made of thick ceramic. It doesn’t smell like shit passed through a blender. You avoided that stuff. The person speaks up, “coffee”. You try the word on your tongue, “coffee”. It brings the sound of joy. Steam rises from it.
Steam rises from all the food. In the pits, everything is luke warm and covered in dirt. Not here. That’s actual sunlight out there.
The creature puts its neck on your leg. You have no idea what it is. It seems friendly enough.
You take a sip of the coffee. It feels warm and pleasant going down chasing away the grogginess. Shit in a blender never did that the few times you tried it. It was meant to. That’s what the foremen above said. It was all lies though.
With the coffee in your hand, you reach the other one for the top of the creature’s head. It likes that. The person who brought the food smiles at you.
“I think you two are going to be great friends. Everyone here has one. A connection between a person and a genetically engineered micro-dinosaur is a sacred bond.”
With that the person left, leaving you to sample the offerings on the plate. You ate everything without knowing what it was called. The person returned a short while later. A lizard creature followed behind – another one of the micro-dinosaurs you later learned.
There were lots of different micro-dinosaurs here. They adopted people or people adopted them, depending on who you asked.
There were pits here too. The micro-dinosaur with the long neck who adopted you, took you to see them. They weren’t dark and dank like the ones above – slowly fading into memory and nightmares. They weren’t there for for no other reason than to keep the down-trodden occupied and build more space so there could be more down trodden made. They were places of great learning about the past of this place. DNA was extracted from lizard-creatures and they were born in labs, shrunken down from their big ancestors.
You found some of your co-employees down here. You would meet up for lunch sometimes. Three to four meals a day. This was the life. Your micro-dinosaur was large enough to ride.
You called him “Skippy”. He liked that. You called all the micro-dinosaurs he’s but some were clearly she’s. You rode Skippy to explore the uncharted land with a group of old co-employees.
Life here was easy and relaxed. There was time for leisure. It took a while to get used to.
The sky opened above you. People fell out. The pits above were getting too deep. The foremen too greedy. Skippy kicked into a canter. These people needed help. Down here life was good. You knew from experience they would be a bit dazed. A good life took some getting used to. There’s was plenty of everything for everyone. The labs had just hatched new micro-dinosaurs in anticipation of the sky opening again. Scientists would keep track of sky-quakes to have a general idea of when it would next happen. Being prepared was the key to living in harmony.
 
 
Dani Brown, April 2016

This bit of flash first appeared in a JEA newsletter. Hope you like your vampires with extra sparkle.

Sparkles
By Dani Brown
 
The fucking bitch put hidden glitter on her eyelids like she could predict I was coming to get her. Don’t fucking do that! If I absorb your personality, I too will sparkle. No one wants that. It won’t be a simple case of washing off some eyeshadow but my entire body will be like a goddamn sunbeam sent forth to rape your eyes and burn the back of your brain.
It was her hair that first caught my attention. Long and flowing, I wanted to feel the individual strands flossing dick cheese out of my foreskin and get her to pull them out of my arsecrack with her tongue.
I watched it bounce in the setting sun from my window. The shimmer sent chills through my spine and up my pisshole. Once the orange orb passed over the horizon and cast the world in shadow, I searched her out. I wanted her to be mine. She wouldn’t be allowed a say in it.
Each second in her presence, my black soul took more of her. This could have been the love of the ages, if it weren’t for the secret weapon buried in the flaps of skin around her eyes.
I approached and ran my fingers through her long locks. Moonlight made it sparkle as much as the sun. I don’t see why she felt the need to hide glitter in her eyelids.
Between her thighs was nothing but sweetness, like her soul, but I suppose I should have tasted something a bit off and hidden in the seed of a different man. I spat it into her anus and pushed it up there with my fist to be flushed down the toilet and forgotten.
Nothing down there sparkled. I didn’t see it when she closed her eyes as I slid myself in and bashed against her cervix. She laid panting into my ear and didn’t notice my lack of sweat. She drowned in too much of her own.
I blew my load and fell off. Emulating humanity, a pulled her into my arms. Her golden hair shone in my glow. I hadn’t taken in too much of her, yet I lit up the room.
I pushed her to the floor, screaming.
“What the fuck have you done?”
My confusion mirrored in her face. She didn’t have long to express it. Infuriated, I choked her with my dick. I always grew hard in times of anger, even if I couldn’t cum again.
She fought back. The feistiness made me want her more. The shimmer on her eyelids was exposed with her tears and sweat washing away the top layer of makeup.
There was nothing to do about my own shimmer except wait it out. It would be too embarrassing to go hunting in the state I found myself in. I ran my fingers along her delicate neck and sunk in my teeth.
Her blood didn’t taste as sweet as what waited between her thighs. Drained, she went limp in my arms. Even in death, she was beautiful.
I put her in a wheelbarrow with a bottle of rum in her arms. The glitter washed off with makeup wipes and thrown on her floor. She was mine.
It wasn’t far to my flat. I had a big freezer with no food. I shoved her small body inside, dislodging the ice maker to ensure it fit without breaking. Company until the shimmer fades away and I can go out again.
Every night, I take her out and defrost between her legs with my cock. My spunk freezes inside her. It’ll be a nice present to my next girlfriend.

First Appeared in a random anthology I've since forgotten the name of. It is based on the Steel Panther song. 
Gang Bang at the Old Folks Home
By Dani Brown
It was a wise move building the old folks home next to the cemetery - it made logistical sense. There was a funeral parlour tucked into its immense grounds. A prune plantation resided on the other side. These old folks were spoiled. Unfortunately, the planners didn’t consider that old folks may like something to make their diarrhoea that bit more explosive. Pizza loaded with fifteen types of chillies for instance.
There were enough chillies exploding into toilets that night to wake the dead. It became a drainage issue. The owners of the cemetery, old folks home, prune plantation and funeral parlour argued with the city council over who had responsibility for the pipes. They had been leaking sewage all over the land for years. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, the smell would move over the town and hover there for a few days if the gods were pissed off with the residents for whatever reason (usually a lack of human sacrifice).
Diarrhoea was a better lubricant than what could be bought in a shop. The old folks didn’t have access to shops – only pizza delivery. Every pizza delivery person who showed up there wasn’t allowed out again.
The nurses working the desk did nothing to put a stop to it. They tried their best to ignore the goings-on in the TV room. The stuff of nightmares lurked in there. Old people shouldn’t have sex.
They ripped their incontinence pants from each other with their teeth and dentures. It was a sight to give the nurses nightmares for the rest of their lives. Staff turnover was high at the old folks’ home. The funeral parlour next door had had to make numerous nurse corpses look pretty after they’d blown their brains out when the images wouldn’t leave them. They were buried next to their former place of employment, often facing it so the memory could follow them into the afterlife.
The pizza delivery guy that night intended to escape with not just his dignity but his life as well. He was not about to be sexually assaulted by a bunch of people who needed their prune juice thickened. He copied the hair and makeup from his sister’s magazines and threw on his best leather jacket over a torn tee shirt. He checked himself in the rear-view mirror. He was a walking piece of confusion. The old people won’t touch him. They would eat his pizza. He’d added an extra special secret ingredient tonight.
He walked in. The smell rose up to knock him back. The nurses on the front desk didn’t bother to look up. The sacrificial pizza delivery guys weren’t missed by anyone. He couldn’t see much above the stack of pizzas. He dropped them on the desk. The nurses still didn’t bother to look up.
“That way.”
 Double doors blocked the way and held in the worst of the old folks’ smell. He swallowed. His pockets were filled with baggies of the extra special ingredient, double wrapped so none seeped onto his skin. Guatemalan death chillies were hard to come by – even rarer in powdered form. The old folks will melt from the inside out. No more pizza delivery. They wouldn’t have intestines for much longer.
This particular pizza delivery guy walked with a spring of confidence in his step. The smell beyond the double doors made his eyeliner melt. It burned his eyes. But he kept walking. He had a surprise for the old folks. His foundation was next to run.
He could hear the old people in the TV room. One jumped out of the bathroom using a Zimmer frame for balance. She had a gun in her mouth rigged up to her false teeth. Another granny stood beside her.
“This way,” she cackled.
He was held hostage and forced to walk on. Guatemalan death chilli powder would take them both out but first he had to put down the pizza. Once the pizzas were out of his hands, his clothes were torn away. The smell had dissolved some of the leather, making it weak. That jacket was meant to be able to see him through a motorcycle accident!
His cock would have shrivelled up but someone already had a diarrhoea-lubricated fist up his arse and a toothless mouth on his dick. It had nowhere to go except down the old person’s throat. His girlfriend would never believe he was raped by a tag-team of grannies. Good and hard, they demanded he fuck their neck skin while fingering their arseholes.
Pizza was served up on paper plates. He had a wrinkly cock in his mouth, so declined a piece by shaking his head – he knew what was on it. The old folks didn’t make it to the toilet. Drainage problems existed with the floor-tiles too (the owners of the old folks home decide to cut costs on all areas for maximum profits). Guatemalan death chilli-laced shit seeped into the ground and the cemetery next door.
This was the shit that woke the dead. Slowly at first, as some old folks had to take the time to run their pizza through a blender. He didn’t notice.
The granny he fucked beneath him was moaning her last. Her dying hole sucked up his spunk as her bowels released. He couldn’t stop blowing his load even though she was dead. She’d eaten a slice of pizza before demanding he fuck her to next Tuesday and he’d complied. There wasn’t any choice - his balls would go blue otherwise, a painful condition.
She was lively and warm when he’d first dove in. Her breasts sagged to her knees but he didn’t let that stop him. Someone took out their dentures to suck his arse while he pumped into her. He must have been riding too fast and she’d had a heart attack at the same time as reaching the mystic female ejaculation.
Fucking a corpse had never appealed to the pizza delivery guy but he couldn’t stop until his spunk was gone. He kept pumping. The corpse changed colour beneath him as her final bowel evacuation seeped back into her pores. It didn’t have the pallor of a still-warm body losing colour – it took on a tinge of green as the diarrhoea re-entering her body travelled around. There was a reason the chillies were called Guatemalan death chillies. As he pulled away, with cum and granny cum dripping from his dick, the corpse reanimated.
Noises were heard from the cemetery. People trying to escape the confines of their caskets. Those in the morgue fared better – they didn’t have inches of polished wood to claw through. They didn’t bother to help their brothers and sisters beneath the earth – there was a gang bang to attend.
The pizza delivery guy backed up with his cock out. Another green-tinted granny jumped on him before he could go soft. The green didn’t return their youth. He checked his hands. They weren’t green. He tried calling for a nurse but a big green cock with grey pubes was shoved down the back of his throat.
A window shattered and a brick landed on the floor. There were more outside looking to claw their way in. The lights were attracting them like moths. Big green gooey moths with shredded skin in place of wings.
The pizza delivery guy tried to back up with a green-tinted granny riding him and a green dick in his mouth. There was too much weight. He fell. It was impossible to look around with balls hitting his chin and a hairy grey pubic trail in his eyes.
He needed his trousers. Guatemalan death chilli powder was in the pockets. He didn’t realise this was the problem. The stuff was well beyond the realms of hallucinogenic and right into the world of reanimating the dead, regardless of how long ago they died and how far away their souls were.
Some of the souls had been reincarnated, which made for some very surprised relatives when their family member dropped dead in front of them. Their screams could be heard over the clawing through caskets during pauses in the gang bang.
The fresh ones from the morgue came in through the broken window. Embalming fluid was no barrier to green skin. Being dead was no barrier to a gang bang.
The grandpa who was throat-fucking the pizza delivery guy blew his load. The taste was of sour rotten eggs with added salt and undertones of decay. The green-tinted man pulled away and ran towards a granny with his ejaculating cock in his hand. He bathed her cum, which was blue (unless it was a trick of the light), giving new meaning to the term ‘blue rinse’.
With the granny on his back, he tried to pull himself along the tiles. They had been polished to a dull shine – it made cleaning body fluids easier for the nurses. But it made the tiles hard to grip at first. If the reanimated could claw out of a casket, they could easily dig a tunnel of a few feet in length and claw at the concrete foundations of the old folks home. As they reached the TV room, the tiles were pushed up from below by green hands. It made the tiles easier for the pizza delivery guy to grab a hold of and pull. He went a few feet. He was close to the door now, his trousers with their pockets and Guatemalan death chilli powder forgotten. Another few pulls and he’d make it.
A hand from below reached up and grabbed his ankle. There wasn’t much skin on it. It was mainly bone held together with cartilage and death rags. The hand belonged to the former bed occupant of the first granny he fucked.
The mattress hadn’t been changed before the granny he fucked was moved onto it. He didn’t know any of this but the granny he’d fucked until she was dead did. She launched herself at the hand coming out of the floor. Along the way she lost her false teeth and came across the contents of the pizza delivery guy’s pockets..
Fiddling with plastic wrappings in both hands, she only had her gums to attack. She didn’t appreciate having to sleep in the same bed in which the previous occupant had died. They might have to share tonight given she had risen. Other previous residents of that very bed were still underground trying to figure their way out.
The bones came away easily enough in her mouth. It wasn’t enough to feed her appetite. She needed more. The ankle of the pizza delivery guy hadn’t gone far. She latched her gums onto that and received a mouthful of leg hair for the effort. Healthy pink flesh was tougher to bite into than bone with a few flaps of green skin. The pizza delivery guy pulled his ankle away. The skin wasn’t broken.
The granny then reached for the one on his back. She was still fresh, but once the green tint set in the skin was weak. The granny he’d first fucked to death had a feast. She poured the chilli powder all over second-dinner while it kicked and thrashed about, its face in the pizza delivery guy’s arse and masturbating with someone’s wooden leg. Guatemalan death chilli powder did not make a good lubricant, even in one already dead. It burned away her green flesh leaving nothing for the hungry reanimated granny to eat. The reanimated granny ripped away a thigh bone to beat people with and the other to shove up her arse.
The pizza delivery guy puked. Fucking grannies was vile enough, but looking over his shoulder and seeing them all fucking each other in various states of decomposition was worse. His eyeliner ran into his mascara and down his cheeks in rivers. The reanimated grannies were attracted to it. But he couldn’t help crying, not after the sights he’d witnessed. He wished he could claw out his eyes but there was too much chilli powder.
A wind blew in from the broken window, sucking the chilli powder out and carrying it high into the atmosphere to rain down on a larger cemetery in a city two thousand miles away. Guatemalan death chilli powder didn’t affect the already dead. The wind managed to blow it around in the TV room. It was strong enough to make the diarrhoea airborne.
The pizza delivery guy had to be out of the room before it rained back down. He wasn’t making good progress with the reanimated trying to fuck him and more pushing the tiles up, bringing with them chunks of cut-price concrete. He pulled with his hands and kicked with his ankles.
The first tint of green spread from his fingers after grandpa’s arsehole ended up in his way. All that thickened prune juice, pizza and using bed posts to shove stolen earrings and dentures up there meant it was loose enough to take a fist before the pizza delivery guy realised where his hand was going.
 He accepted death and reanimation, as long as he didn’t have to spend eternity in a gang bang at the old folks’ home. Even the nurses would be a better fuck. He had to get out of the room to make it to them. One hand in front of the other forevermore. Kick with the feet (also turning green but he didn’t turn around to see), pull with the hands.
Someone with a few natural teeth left bit into his bare arse. He’d had it waxed two days ago. These teeth were strong and sharp. They tore away a chunk – the green hadn’t spread there yet. It was still fresh and tasty. The reanimated smelt the blood on the air. They stopped fucking and flocked toward him.
A granny with a tongue to rival Gene Simmons stuck it up his arse. The best flesh was in there, she declared. The reanimated moaned. They wanted him. His fingers and toes came away in mouths. The green hadn’t spread any further. It made the rest of the flesh tough except for the handful of reanimated with their natural teeth.
They rolled him onto his back, crushing the granny with the Gene Simmons tongue beneath his arse. She didn’t care, her tongue was eating him from the inside. With a tongue up his arse, it was impossible to go limp. A green-tinted granny with shit caked to her arse breathed in the chilli powder and jumped on board.
The wind was changing. More reanimated were climbing in the window and pushing up the floor. The dead couldn’t sweat; otherwise it would have been a sweaty affair. The fluids leaked out of their arseholes instead.
The smell was something to make the nurses come from their desk to see what was happening. They usually ignored the plight of pizza delivery guys. There was something pressed against the door. They looked in through the reinforced glass window. Nurses are nurses because of their strong stomachs – but all three lost their lunch onto their white shoes.
They tried to run for it, but the tiles beneath their feet came up, attracted to the smell of puke and fresh flesh. Bony hands grabbed their ankles; the old folks they’d neglected in favour of answering Cosmo’s latest quiz were hungry.
Old men liked to have their cocks played with. Dead now, they still had cocks to play with. The mortician liked to ride all the corpses so would pump extra embalming fluid into the men’s dicks. Even the bodies buried deep with no one to mourn their loss had hard dicks.
The uptight nurses were pulled down to the broken tiles. Their trousers were pulled down by bony hands. Underpants were brushed aside, except in the case of the one wearing a thong – that was ripped away by dentures. That nurse lost her cheek flesh as the man climbing onto her bit her arse. He’d had them filed extra sharp whilst he was still alive.
When what was left of the pizza delivery guy reached the door, he couldn’t get out due to the nurses blocking it. The window was still open but only old people and uptight nurses with their heads blow off were buried in the cemetery next door. Hope lay in the prune plantation owners being young or having daughters.
He tried to turn around. It was pretty hard on his back with a dead granny pumping herself away on him like she was a jockey and he was the horse. The green tint travelled up his arms and legs making his flesh more edible for those with dentures or reduced to just their gums.
Grannies and grandpas pounced on him. If they couldn’t fuck him, they could eat him down to the bones. The granny riding him reached into his chest and pulled out his heart. She bit into it as she reached reanimated orgasm.
Other grannies wanted a bite. They clawed their way over to her and pulled her off his cock trying to get to the heart.
Someone else jumped on him and rode. His cock didn’t have embalming fluid to preserve it through eternity. The process of decay had already started. It was hard, for now. It was the only place in his body that could hold blood but it wouldn’t hold for long. He was destined to watch reanimated grannies and grandpas fuck forever.
 
End

Comb of the Hipster
By Dani Brown
First appeared in "Girls Rock Horror Harder" Issue 3
 
 
 
 
 
I shaved my pubes and glued them to my face. It didn’t help my beard come in quicker. It didn’t help my beard come in any fuller either. All I wanted to do was take a trip to the barber shop in the city with my friends. It was the one that banned women for a bit of guy-to-guy banter behind the closed shutters. The Internet said pubes and ointment would give me a beard to rival Gandalf’s. Once it had that wizard look I could shape it and braid it and be the hippest hipster on the mountain.
The only thing I could sculpt now was my arse hair. My friends weren’t interested in that. The barista at the chain in the city was rather impressed when she went to administer my espresso enema in front of all the other hipsters. She asked for a date but I had to turn her away – my hipster friends looked down on the ones who served us.
My head was nearly as bald as my face. I didn’t have enough pubes to glue to my head as well. I managed to harvest my arse hair, but I only stuck it to the top of my head to cover the shine. Beards held much more hipster cred.
I think the Internet lied. The glue dried to my skin. An unseen rash spread underneath the pubes. The temptation to scratch until I had no skin left was strong.
I reverted back to my typewriter to contemplate my next move. If I didn’t have a full face of hair my friends would desert me for pastures of curls. They were rather clear the ones on my backside didn’t count.
There were rumours in town of a mystical voodoo woman capable of offering solutions to anyone’s problem with the shake of her voluptuous arse. Resolved to see her, I placed the dust cover over my typewriter – the paper with the same word typed over and over covering both sides.
My greased bicycle ran better than the Cadillac I traded it for. It also cost a lot less so I had more money to spend on bowels of cereal and a Penny Farthing. It was the Penny Farthing I took down the mountain that fateful afternoon, lest I lose all my hipster cred on a mountain bike.
It wasn’t a big mountain to ride down. It could be described as a hill with an exclusive housing complex on top. The non-pathetic mountains could be found further to the west but would leave me in complete isolation. A tempting prospect but in the real world people have to get to work. The Penny Farthing wouldn’t be able to handle a bigger hill.
I didn’t know how to find this mystical voodoo woman; all I knew was she was somewhere at the bottom before hitting the city. There weren’t that many stores, even on the main stretch of roads criss-crossing suburbia. For all I knew, she could have been operating out of a house with a small sign or no sign at all.
My ride wasn’t so much as aimless as it was steered by the vibrations and my requirement of a full beard, so maybe I could be forgiven for saying The Cure are better than Joy Division as far as the mainstream is concerned – in truth, I don’t like either. The voodoo woman would be the one to help me. I just knew it, the vibrations told me so.
She wasn’t so difficult to find – lurking not in a back alley or house as I expected, but in the main plaza with a bright red sign minus the neon lights. I could see the city below, not small and in the distance but less than a mile away. It was with regret that I looked back on the decision to ride the Penny Farthing. It was okay for short journeys but this was stretching it.
I went in as if I was meant to be there. It seemed the voodoo woman was expecting me, or maybe she simply had the desire to unnerve me. She wasn’t what I was expecting at any rate. Her arse wasn’t round and plump - firm with hours of zombified slaves rubbing concoctions in. She was skinny. Her ribs poked through her cotton vest.
Incense devoured my entire being until it coursed through my blood, and yet I could see no smoke. It was possible she had so many in stock the store smelt like that on a permanent basis. I would probably be washing eau de cremated hippy out of my pubic hair beard for a week.
There were oddities and ritual objects spanning all mythologies. There was even a little tribute to Satan on a dusty bottom shelf – a rare sight in such places. Even witchcraft stores did not like to associate themselves with the dark lord.
Everything had a price tag, ranging from the affordable to the extravagant. At a guess, I would say even her soul could be bought. There was something for everyone; even the dirt poor teen new to Wicca.
“I’ve been expecting you.”
Her voice was slow and smoky. She spoke with purpose. I did not yet know what that purpose was. I must admit to being turned on by this strange voodoo woman.
Land then just like that she was gone. Hardly a second had passed when she reappeared with a brown paper package tied with string. She handed it to me. The conclusion I reached was it was to make my beard grow.
I pulled on the tie curious to know what she had given me and how to use whatever it was. She cupped her hand over mine.
“Open under the glare of the full moon when it is at its highest and casts shadows on the mountains.”
I hadn’t told her where I lived. For all she knew, I could have rode in from the city below. The haze protected it from knowing it is only a few miles to the wilderness. The last city in the north. I reached into my pocket for payment and she snickered.
“Oh no dear, for you, no charge.”
She cackled. It made my baby-fine body hairs stand up, reminding me that if I failed there wasn’t much of me left to shave and glue to my face. Arse hair I had in abundance. ‘Had’ being the correct tense – it, too, was now stuck to my face. If I had a girlfriend, she could knit a Christmas sweater out of it.
I hopped back on my Penny Farthing for the journey home. It was the most impractical of all vehicles; the journey back up would have been better on my mountain bike. It was friendlier towards the environment than a mountain terrain adapted Segway and purchased with the sole intention of impressing the people I hung around with – I wanted to be accepted into the inner circle (I had a crush on the Hipster King).
The impracticality of my Penny Farthing left me holding the package between my teeth. It was obvious my journey wasn’t well planned out thanks to my spur of the moment impulse. The string hung down and rubbed the pubes and superglue away until my face experienced the uncomfortable sensation of chafing. Regardless of my discomfort, I kept hold of it until I arrive home.
The temptation to open it was great, so I occupied myself with my Gameboy while the sun fell and the moon rose high over the mountains. According to my chart, luck was with me as the moon would be pregnant that night. As it crept higher my excitement combined with nervousness to the point I could no longer focus on my Gameboy (probably for the best as I was to my last few batteries).
A rut was run into my cheap floor with pacing as the shadows changed. Time seemed to stand still. Curiosity and the desire to have the bushiest beard of all were getting the better of me.
I crept outside so as to not alert the neighbours to my nocturnal fancies with brown paper packages (I knew one was awake, I could hear her vibrator in the next apartment over – damn flimsy modern walls). The blinds twitched on the ground floor – the nosey old insomniac was out of bed but not on the grassy area between the apartments and parking lot. The ritual should have been done on my balcony but I thought my bare feet touching the ground would add some significance to the affair.
Opening a package under the full glare of the pregnant moon wasn’t a crime; its contents might be. I put my back towards her. The caution was needless. The package contained one single comb. Plastic and generic, I knew the only thing special was the voodoo.
The shop owner did not instruct me on its use nor what it would do. Combs are for combing so that is what I assumed this one to be for, even though it hurt my brain to arrive at a conclusion myself (real hipsters pass off other people’s conclusions off as their own). If the comb worked I would go back for a love potion. I wanted to feel the Hipster King’s bristles against my bristles.
I ran it through what few pubes remained glued to my face as I went back inside. The nosey insomniac must have found me more interesting than whatever was on the television in the middle of the night. I offered her a smile but I could nearly hear her tuts judging me through the glass above the too-close howls of coyotes.
The package was a let-down and my body required sleep at some point. I let myself back inside and climbed the carpeted stairs to my apartment – a touch of modern luxury on the mountain top. I kept hold of the comb. It was a bit of ‘just in case’ and a bit of ‘maybe it’ll transform into something hipster as I sleep’.
My alarm never went off. It seemed there was a blackout in the middle of the night. All my friends had battery operated clocks. It was on my list of things to buy but I lacked the infinite supply of money they seemed to be in possession of, as if their bank accounts inflated by magic with each purchased instead of haemorrhaging money. I wished mine would do that but I had to work to earn my keep.
Fry cook was not a very cool profession. I kept it hidden beneath perfumed sprays and a lot of bathing. It wasn’t a very high-paying one either. And the chef was never complimented. My life full-out sucked, made worse by the constant reminder of wind hitting my bare chin.
The morning felt different somehow, even though the hour was not yet late. My face and head itched. They’ve only ever done that when I’ve rubbed tonic in before bed in hope of waking to a full face of hair. Itching wasn’t my only concern; I couldn’t put a feeling to it and had to dismiss it in favour of clocking in on time.
With a minute to spare, the other employees gave me a strange look. I wanted to believe they were impressed with my reaching for a second hairnet to wrap over my patchy pubic hair beard. It added to my surreal amusement, which was the only way to look at the morning without losing my sanity. Everything was different, yet somehow exactly the same as it was.
The hairnet over my face pubes grew tight and uncomfortable as the day wore on. An internal argument raged about the merits of a full beard. Sideburns wouldn’t be enough to fit in, and they still required a big blue hairnet wrapped around my face so I couldn’t stick my tongue in and out of my mouth like a lizard. There might be less chaffing without that little bit of glued-on stubble.
My feet ached but nowhere near as bad as my face – my head wasn’t faring much better. My feet were used to the agonising days spent in front of grease splatter. I clocked out after what seemed like an eternity trapped in Hell serving greasy offerings to obese families with IQs that might stretch into the double digits when combined.
The hairnet strangled my face. It wasn’t letting go. Cutting seemed like such a drastic action which would present too high a risk towards my face pubes. It would be at least another six to eight weeks before I could trim again and stick them to my face.
If I was to make it home on time to wash the grease away before my friends wanted to do something, I could no longer fiddle with the hairnet. I would have to cut it away stood in front of my mirror. They’ll be impressed with how much stubble I had after a week of not seeing each other.
The one covering my patchy hair was also reluctant to let go. I left on my Penny Farthing. A decision I regretted. The Penny Farthing stood out; my mountain bike didn’t but it was all the way up at the top of the mountain. I could only hope no one I knew rode past and recognised me on such a distinctive mode of transport. Bright blue hairnets could not be passed off as the latest hipster fashion. All hipster cred I built up would be lost forever.
Bright blue from the hairnets was in the corner of my eye for the duration of the journey. It was worse than if the sun were to shine in my eyes. I couldn’t ride fast; apart from my cumbersome mode of transport, the hairnets cut into me in a way to restrict my airwaves.
My insomniac neighbour was still awake and standing at the window when I arrived home – unless she’d slept for a few hours during my shift. My biggest fear was her uploading the footage of my arrival to the internet. Hipsters worldwide would watch and share. Not even non-hipsters would want to be seen with me.
The neighbour’s vibrator echoed through the entrance. Not even my key ring with hipster trinkets could drown out the sound. All that woman did was masturbate. It must have been her income source. I once typed out a letter to the super about having her apartment soundproofed to no avail.
The comb from the voodoo woman was there waiting for me to pick it up and use it right away. I didn’t recall leaving it on the dining table. That isn’t a very hygienic place for a comb. I grabbed it on my way to the bathroom.
Upon looking in the mirror, I understood why I was given such odd looks from my fellow employees in the city below the mountain. The pubes glued to my face poked through the hairnet and grew before my eyes until the hairnet could no longer be seen. It must have been doing that all day. The patchy hair on my head, likewise. It couldn’t be contained by a hairnet. I don’t know how long I stood there watching my hair grow. It couldn’t have been long – the hairnets would have killed me.
The comb grinned at me from its perch on the toilet seat as the hairnets clung to my face and head. Bright late-afternoon sunlight shone through the bathroom window and frilly curtains. The sunlight and window placement were in conspiracy with the comb. The way it looked sent a shiver up my spine. The hairnets didn’t like that and clutched tighter.
I drew the shade to sudden darkness. The plastic teeth shone even when cast in shadow. Cackling from an unseen source echoed through the small room. It liked darkness. I pulled the light switch and filled the room with bright artificial light. The electronic toothbrush hidden in the vanity came to life, buzzing in retaliation.
The door on the vanity where the toothbrush lived was awkward. The toothbrush banged against it in its quest to escape and sounded louder than it should have in the small room. There wasn’t much else in the vanity. There’d been no point in keeping an electric razor until recent events but I did need to defend myself against an array of cheap disposable blades that suddenly flew out of the drawers. Most were dull, donations from previous sexual partners – male, female and other.
Breathing became difficult as the hairnets tightened and hair grew out of my nostrils. Nostril hair was very unsexy and not very impressive to the hipster crowd. Day coyotes howled, or maybe they didn’t; it was hard to tell from the confines of my bathroom.
Quiet detachment allowed me to handle anything life threw at me, which at that very second was a pair of scissors. I intended on using them to cut away the hairnet. My reflexes are fry-cook quick. I grabbed them out of mid-air, with my hands keeping the blades closed, as if they were a crocodile’s jaw. I needed to get them under my control. With me in charge, I could cut away the hairnets. I wasn’t sure the comb would allow that. The bright artificial light really brought out the gleam on those teeth.
The comb was silent. Everything else made noise as it buzzed into life. Even things that had no right making a sound buzzed. A hovering razor hissed. The distant howls may not have been day coyotes. Come to think of it, I’d never heard a coyote in the day. I didn’t know what in my bathroom could make that sort of noise.
I caught the dusty bottle of shampoo sneaking up on me in the reflection and ducked out of the way just in time. It could have been that making the coyote sound. It shattered the glass of the medicine cabinet, releasing more sharp things to fly at my head yet nothing to free me from the dual force hairnets.
The comb didn’t move through-out the entire ordeal. I’m not sure it could do anything other than grin at me with those plastic teeth and issue commands. I was restricted by its plastic body; it wanted to hop into something else and was testing the waters with the bathroom paraphernalia and distant coyotes.
I wanted to dive out of the room but the door held me trapped there. My body wouldn’t be pleasant to live in. I had too many problems, most of them related to being a poser. I couldn’t help that – I’m a beautiful person.
One looking in would think that I was jumping to conclusions for blaming the entire affair on the comb but there could be no other source of my torment. My pubes held no supernatural properties until the comb was introduced. Unless someone cursed the hairnets. But the hairnets weren’t introduced until I arrived at work. The morning was different. Reflection told me what I felt was related to a deep sense of dread and unease I couldn’t articulate after the late night opening ritual.
There was always the possibility they were two separate entities that formed an alliance. A co-worker could have cursed the hairnets with ease and introduced a demon lower down the hierarchy into the box of bright blue. Management only cared about whether the customers were happy. Low morale and threats of rituals and suicide were a daily affair. The hairnets, lower down they may have been, held the upper hand in that they could choke me. The comb was jealous. All this would make it onto my next album.
The scissors dug into my hands, looking to taste blood. I needed them under my control to free my face. I didn’t want to cut my beard, just the hairnets. After this much trouble, the beard was not going to be lost. The hairnets needed a taste of their own nylon blood.
The scissors hissed like a pissed off alley cat, so I grabbed them tighter. The skin on my hand was as over-rated as my Penny Farthing, if not more so. My life was worth more – at least to my fan-girls.
The comb glared at me. The guilty culprit. I could feel its plastic aura. The hairnets were nylon; a different plastic with a different aura, vibrating the words “choke, choke, die, die”. The comb had the thoughts and feelings of a wasp about to move in for a sting for the sole reason it could. The hairnets didn’t.
The broken mirror took flight like one hundred wasps – the fucking comb could read my thoughts (unless that was a paranoid delusion and the mirror pieces intended attack all along). I ducked out of the way – an automatic fry cook reflex. I didn’t know if they could follow me around or only fly in one direction. I hoped for the latter.
The best refuge against airborne bathroom accessories was the shower cubicle. In there, I could cut away the hairnets with the protection of a Plexiglas screen between me and the broken mirror and cheap razors. The bottle of shower gel flew up and hit my ear on the way in. On its attempt at my face, I reached up and threw it at the comb. I missed.
Inside the shower, I threw the various bottles and bars over the top in case they tried to fly at me. Each one was aimed at the comb. Each one missed even though my aim was true under normal circumstances. The comb never once moved. Each time I missed, the cackling echoed through the small room. It sounded worse behind the Plexiglas screen.
The only threat left was the shower itself. It glistened lifeless. The trust wasn’t there. Everything else seemed to be coming to life, so why wouldn’t that. A heavy power-shower head could knock me out while the hairnets choke my life away.
The mirror glass flew at the screen. It held out. The shards seemed incapable of flying up – only across. I let it hit the Plexiglas and focused my attention on bringing the scissors under my control before the shower could whack me over the head.
The desire to sweep the mirror glass up and release it in the voodoo woman’s store was strong, but I would have to deal with it later. If I lost my grip on the scissors by giving into fantasies my arteries would be severed and my body would be found two weeks later by the insomniac downstairs.
My fingers found their way to the handle while the other hand clutched the blade. A man-bun and full face of hair seemed less important now. I could always join up with the local skin-heads. A shinny scalp and clean-shaven face would impress them. Hipsters and skin-heads shared a lot of the same fashions so I wouldn’t need to stretch my pay cheque to cover new clothes.
The biggest threat to my airways was the hairnet covering my beard. The neck contains a lot of veins. This was the dangerous part. The comb cackled from the other side of the screen, never moving from the toilet.
An idea occurred to me. I could drown the comb and flush it down to the sewer where it belonged. With the comb gone, things would stop flying around my bathroom and the scissors wouldn’t pose such a big threat to my neck.
I jumped out of the shower cubicle clutching the scissors and prepared for flying bits of mirror to attack. The scissors sensed I only held them with one hand and tried to make their escape. Dodging some glass that had yet to fly at me, I grabbed the comb. It drew blood from my palm in the few seconds I held it, before I flung it in the toilet and flushed. The scissors relaxed in my hand and all the objects fell to the floor. I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I was holding as the hairnets let go.
The hairnets were easy to cut away. I had facial hair to shape. Walking around looking like Big Foot was a sure way to put off any potential partners.
I looked good. I swept everything into a pile and dumped it in the bag. I had business to take care of on the way to the city. I opted for my mountain bike. The Penny Farthing could be sold for parts. I was done with hipsters.
The ride to the voodoo woman’s store was quick and uneventful. She seemed surprised when I walked in. Her confidence of the previous day evaporated before my eyes. The cackling became a cough.
Frail and old, she reached out to touch me with a liver-spotted hand. I jumped back, crashing into a display of dull swords. They didn’t look so new and shiny anymore. A cloud of rust coloured dust puffed up on the air. I dropped my bag of bathroom paraphernalia. It rattled but the objects remained lifeless or dying. The magic was gone.
The wood of the house that played host to the store decayed as I stood there. I ran for the door. I needed to get out. She cackled. This time, it sounded stronger as if she grew life with her store dying.
A beam fell right before the door – I should have seen that coming. It seemed normal here, a beam falling in front of the door. Just as it seemed normal for a cloaked figure to jump out of the mirror.
The best chance of escape was an open window. I dived out and onto the porch. The wooden floor was dusty with age and road dirt. I didn’t mind. I ran for my bike and pedalled as fast as I could back up the mountain.
A crash behind me told me the house had collapsed. The sirens from the fire trucks blasted. I could only hope I wouldn’t be tracked down for an interview. I hadn’t done anything wrong but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t be suspected.
My legs grew tired and I was wet with my own sweat but I pedalled onwards up the pathetic mountain. On a normal day, the smell of pine and decaying leaves would greet my nose as I put suburbia behind me. Today the scent of raw sewage danced on the air.
My neighbours were outside with bits of fabric over their faces. The odour was almost visible in the air. One neighbour was puking in the bushes. The sound of sirens climbing the mountains could be heard. My taxes were being put to good use.
It seemed the sewer had exploded leaking filth from drains and toilets into the entire complex. We were allowed in to gather a few untainted things. My phone charger was top of my mind; without that I would have to sleep in the forest. I let myself, the smell bad enough to knock out someone sensitive.
The comb sat on my table covered in slime.