Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

“So what you’re suggesting is that the ideological imperative becomes recontextualized only through a spacio-temporal reconfiguration?”

“I… hey, who are you?”

McLuhan stops with the hand thing.

“Paul.”

“No. I’m serious. Who are you… really ?”

“I’m, em, Paul. Paul McCartney. The Beatle and all?”

“You’re not.”

“I am.”

“You’re not. Paul doesn’t talk like that. He doesn’t… He’s not as… ”

“There’s more to Paul than meets the eye, man.”

“Stop it. You’re scaring me.”

“Have you ever wondered why he never shows any signs of aging, for example?”

“Stop it.”

“Oh, sure, a little gray hair like five years ago, and then… poof… nothing. Remember? And that baby face… ”

“Stop it!”

“Exactly the same as a decade ago, isn’t it… and as the decade before that. I mean, compare his holding-power to that of Keith Richards, you know, and what do you see?”

“I’m covering my ears here and whistling to myself.”

“Freaky, isn’t it?”

“Hmmmmm hmmmmmm… ”

“I’ve got two words for you.”

“I see your mouth moving but I refuse to listen.”

“Tick tick.”

“ Hmmmmmmmm hmmmmmmmm hmmmmmmmm … ”

“Tick tick. Tick tick.”

“ Hmmmmmmmm hmmmmmmmm hmmmmmmmm … ”

268. NATURE IS NOT NICE

How many teenagers are left?

First four. Then three. Then two.

Now only one.

The most beautiful. Fair angel. Eighteen and mostly naked. Lace panties and bra. Bespattered with mud. Wet blond hair matted to face. Trickles of water and tears zigging down her cheeks. Trapped in the barn of the desolate farm. Stalked by Zodiac Killer, homicidal maniac.

Violent rainstorm crashing outside.

Lightning.

In each enormous flash a huge shadow looms closer.

She screams piercingly. She crawls. She stands. She sits, paralyzed by mortality.

Zodiac Killer wields a pitchfork in one hand and a whirring chainsaw in the other.

He towers over her.

He’s laughing.

The teenager must learn how to lose gracefully.

Because in her back pocket she’s carrying a nearly used-up tube of gash-red lipstick and, if she’s not murdered right this minute, Zodiac Killer knows, she will drive to the coast two months hence to quietly reflect upon her past and contemplate her future options (a major in business at Slippery Rock Community College? a major in communications at Fairleigh Dickinson?) and that tube will accidentally work its way out of her back pocket and pop onto the sand where the cute little French boy who starred in that commercial for Zerp will, vacationing on Coney Island with his parents during his first holiday to the U.S. (in celebration of his ascending career), pick it up forty-one days later and chuck it as far as he can into the Atlantic Ocean on a reflexive whim.

Little will he comprehend as he does so, though, that that tube will comprise the last piece of human shit thrown into the ocean before all the human shit thrown into the ocean over all the millennia of human shit-in-the-ocean-throwing finally reaches some critical mass, generating a molecular flashpoint where all the nascent waste-nanites flushed down secret-lab toilets over the last decade off the coast of New Jersey will merge with various contraceptives, industrial sludge, artificial fruit juices for kids, and cheap metals (including that tube of gash-red lipstick) and become in one shocking burst sentient, nor that that mess’s first thought will concern destroying the ignorant lower life forms hogging all the good dry space on the planet, meaning mostly humanoids, and hence launching a massive assault on the human race, which it will do by first sneaking up on and attacking unsuspecting swimmers, then unsuspecting surfers, then small-boaters, then large-shippers, and, on one momentous day in August, by loosing a blitzkrieg no one could foresee on Tokyo, New York, and London, resulting within fewer than four months in the earth having been turned into a big ball of very intelligent gray nano-goo.

3. PRIME: TIME: LIVE

Bad would have to be an understatement for how Ker feels.

Something evil has begun transpiring in his bowels. Plus his head feels like someone has inserted a hose through his left ear and pumped his cranial cavity full of pink insulation.

Plus, if he’s not mistaken, he can’t feel his feet anymore.

He thinks one word to himself: bathroom .

As he shakily rises to propel himself posthaste down the hall, the pounding at the front door commences.

172. AS SEEN ON TV

Tribal drums and primitive wails blossom.

Colors whirl.

Black men in grass skirts and jangling brass earrings, bracelets, and necklaces dance wildly around a bonfire, shaking spears, lifting knees, hooting and jabbering at the nightspirits.

Their earlobes hang to their jawbones.

Scars mark their cheeks.

Only the whites of their eyes show.

They leap and caper around this naked pale body tied to the ground, ready for the sacrifice, his arms stretched out to his sides, his legs wide apart, his anxious face alert… familiar… very familiar…

“Way-hate a sec here,” Ker says aloud, halfway out of his bean-bag chair.

He leans forward, aware of sick sweat forming across his upper lip, squints, focuses, and sees… a-and sees… himself there, his own eyes looking back at him, terrified…

“Oh, fuck !!!!!”

13. HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES

Thomas Stearns Eliot, born in St. Louis on September 26, 1888, was one of the greatest

222. KNOW YOUR INNER CHILD

166. THE GREAT WHEEL SPINS

A car burns out of control. Upside down. A bus on top of it. An orange and black and umber and saffron fireball.

But whose car?

Where?

Under what circumstances?

Who’s inside?

58. LOVEBOAT

It’s too late.

The barrel-chested man in the black cowboy hat fires.

China crashes.

Crystal splinters.

A chair cracks against the floor.

Buh-but the mother in the white cowboy hat fires first.

With her tommy gun.

“Uggghhhh!” the barrel-chested man in the white cowboy hat cries, astounded, chest riddled with bullets. He slumps to his knees. “Mama… ” he says, surprised.

Pitches forward.

Expires.

Mother laughs, embraces the barrel-chested man in the black cowboy hat, united with her lover at last.

99. NATURE IS NOT NICE

Ker starts off down the hall, something expanding in his bowels like a film of a blossoming black carnation, only the pounding at the front door gets louder and more insistent.

He groans, stops, turns, sort of shuffle-hops a couple of paces toward the living room, thinks better of it, turns, trots toward the bathroom, halts when the pounding erupts onto banging, begins worrying about Syndi again (it simply has to be time for her to get home… he needs to remember to glance at the clock in the bedroom as he passes), halts, cradles his belly like a pregnant woman, turns, shuffle-hops towards the front door, earnestly contemplates embarrassing himself in front of a stranger, concludes this couldn’t be Syndi, she just wouldn’t pound like that, turns, trots toward the bathroom, halts when he realizes she wouldn’t pound like that unless it was an emergency , turns, shuffle-hops toward the front door, undoes the two bolts and chain and lock, cracks it open, and… BLAM!!!

In explodes Zodiac Killer, and, fuck, is he big… seven feet tall if an inch, and somehow that ski mask makes him look that much bigger, and the huge Bowie knife, too, which he’s currently resting against Ker’s throat, having with his forearm pinned Ker to the wall, and he’s smiling …