Jordan Krall - Blow Up the Outside World

The man said, “Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.”

He stared at Sarah’s crotch and wiggled his nose. Slowly, he moved his face down between Sarah’s thighs until he was an inch away from her snatch. He sniffed again.

Sarah said, “What are you doing down there?”

“Smells….like…..”

She frowned. “Smells like WHAT?”

The man sniffed and smiled. “Smells like…..pancakes.”

“Pancakes?”

“Yeah,” the man said. “Pancakes. And now I know that something’s coming. Something’s going to explode all over me.”

“Ew, what are you talking about? You want to jizz on yourself, you don’t need me.”

The man sat up. “But I do need you.”

Sarah pulled down her skirt and put her feet back on the floor. “This is getting weird.”

“It’s going to get worse.”

“Hey, fuck you. I’m out of here,” Sarah said, standing up and walking down the aisle. The man jumped up and grabbed her shoulder.

“Don’t go!”

“Get the fuck off me!”

The man released his grip and leaned in close to Sarah’s ear. “Please, I didn’t mean to scare you. I can still smell the pancakes, you know.”

“Fuck off or I swear to god I’m going to scream.”

“Listen,” the man said. “How about I pay you some money now and I go take you to my boss. He’ll pay you more. I promise.”

“Your boss? What kind of weird set-up is this?”

“No set-up. My boss will be quite interested in you.”

Sarah looked at the man’s face which was now filled with complete sincerity. After thinking about it, the man’s behavior didn’t really surprise her. Those businessmen were usually the freakiest and in many cases, they paid the most. If this guy said his boss was willing to play and pay, it might turn out good for Sarah.

She said, “Okay, fine. But are you sure your boss is going to like me? He didn’t even see me.”

“Oh, he’ll like you,” the man said. “Mr. Valdrott will like you just fine.”

The first man was floating naked in a human-shaped aquarium that covered his body completely from the neck down. The clear, corrosive chemicals filling this aquarium were already at work, but it would be a long, long process judging by the rate of his flesh’s dissolution. His screaming was cut off by an apparatus surgically attached to his throat and countless raw wires dug deep into his brain, seeing if it would turn to mush long before his body did.

Locked in chains hanging like curtains from behind their nude bodies, a second man was fused to a woman by a large metal helmet covering both their faces. The shackles on their legs gave them a bit of free movement and they jerked and pulled away from each other when shocked by mild electrical currents sent through the flowing chains, prodding them into performing a strange mechanical dance. Their bare feet slapped the cold metal floor like the legs of a clockwork spider. This spastic movement caused the man and woman to tear at their faces where the Valdrott had welded them, then secured and bolted the metal helmet in place to hold their fused flesh together.

The gas was the worst of all. They took groups of humans and locked them in a room made of gelatinous slop. It only took seconds for one man’s eyes to roll back in his head. He would then turn and violate a twitching woman until she expired. Another man was busy clawing out his own eyeball and slurping it down like an oyster freshly shucked from a shell. The Valdrott sat crowded around the cage, ingesting catnip with strange glowing instruments, and watched this horror show as if it were fine theatre.

Potter and Oswald walk down 42nd street, both of them digging in their pockets for loose change so they could take in a movie. Should they see The Man with Two Heads or Nam’s Angels? They can’t decide.

Oswald says, “How about Django?”

“I saw it already,” Potter says. He takes a dollar out of his pocket and also a cigarette which he lights quickly.

“I thought you quit,” Oswald says. Potter doesn’t answer him but instead drops the cigarette on the sidewalk.

Potter points to a theatre. “Let’s go in here. This is the one.”

They walk in and buy tickets to a triple feature of movies they’ve never heard of: a handful of Italian films that look bloody and incoherent.

Oswald and Potter buy popcorn and candy. They walk into the bathroom. Oswald enters a stall while Potter waits by the sink. He washes his hands three times and looks at in the mirror. “Sometimes I just feel like gutter trash,” he says to his reflection.

Then Oswald walks out holding a mess of electrical wiring, metal, multi-colored glass shards, and bits of biomechanical jetsam all fused together by a sticky substance that was not glue. He exits the bathroom and Potter says, “You didn’t wash your hands.” Oswald ignores him and continues to walk to their theatre.

They take a seat in the back row. Both notice they have missed the opening credits for the first film. They watch a killer in black leather gloves holding a razor. The killer slashes a woman, the camera moving wildly across the nude body: blood and purple lace roughly projected onto a soda-stained movie screen.

Potter nudges Oswald. He says, “Is that woman real? Or is she a Valdrott?”

Oswald sticks his hand into the contraption that is on his lap. He fiddles with a few wires. “I don’t think it matters now,” he says.

And then everything explodes… again.

Saturday Morning

Eh, look here, son. New Jersey isn’t all Springsteen and scumbags. In my time, I’ve seen so much weird shit, you wouldn’t believe. Clay pits full of gasoline porn, factories that only make fake dog shit. But there’s other….stuff, too. I’m talking out of this world, you know? Well, there was this one time…

I must’ve been maybe twelve, thirteen years old and was riding my bike home from school just like a lot of kids my age did because it beat taking the bus which was just a bumpy ride in a sweat box driven by a toothless slob who didn’t believe in showers.

Anyway, on the way home I had to pass a patch of woods. It wasn’t a big forest or anything. It was really just what I said: a patch of woods in between a bar and a park. The kids called it Dot’s Woods.

I had never seen anyone actually go into the woods. I thought it was because it was so small it didn’t have anything to interest anyone. But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t it at all.

So there I was on my bike and as I passed Dot’s Woods, my tire blew and I found myself on my stomach with a bleeding chin. My leg hurt like hell, too. I looked over at the woods for no reason at all and saw something peeking out from behind a tree.

I guess I would describe it as a white worm the size of a puppy. It had a handful of eyes that looked like shiny marbles. I really can’t come up with a better description than that, son. It looked like a worm puppy with marble eyes, okay?

Of course being a boy, I was more than a bit interested in that. I’ve seen monster movies before and I’ve read those comics with all those wild creatures wreaking havoc and whatnot. I got up from the ground, wiped myself off, and walked towards the woods. The thing disappeared by the time I got to the edge of the woods. I wasn’t surprised. Most animals will run off if they see a human coming, you know.

I won’t lie to you. I was a little bit scared, I guess. I’ve never been in the woods and for all I knew there were rabid dogs or drunken hoodlums waiting to cut some young kid up, you know. A young kid’s mind can come up with all sorts of horrors. I even thought maybe there were some perverted hobos in there who made that small patch of woods their own personal Sodom. I imagined they’d have a whole cache of petroleum jelly and sex toys and baseball cards to lure the boys in. See what I’m saying? I’m still thinking about this, as if my imagination would ever beat the real horrors in Dot’s Woods.