Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

“What have you done with Syndi?” Ker gurgles.

“That her name, huh? Cute thing… ”

It strikes Ker he’s never thought about Zodiac Killer’s breath before, but now understands it has the same moisture and fecal reek as the air maybe two inches above a garbage dump on the outskirts of São Paulo on a hot summer’s afternoon.

Ker gurgles some more in anger.

He shuts his eyes.

His bowels round the homestretch toward a pure plasma state.

Zodiac Killer chortles.

“She… liked it,” he whispers tenderly in Ker’s left ear, “is the thing. Asked for more. Died with a grin on her face. Know what she said before I hoisted her off the floor with the noose? Before she shat herself and died, grinning? ‘Do me harder, sweetmeat. Do me… ’ Hic-hic-hic. Hic-hic-hic.”

Ker opens his eyes.

A fairly large rivulet of blood is running out of Zodiac Killer’s right nostril, is the first thing he sees.

Next he catches sight of that mean fire poker jutting from the homicidal maniac’s head like some weird tv antenna.

Next he understands, very briefly, that, despite Zodiac Killer’s breath, the guy really takes very good care of his teeth.

Because those teeth are all on display right now, as Zodiac Killer begins to squeak like a stepped-on mouse and spin around simultaneously, at which point Ker sort of slides down the wall like a slice of peanut-buttered bread, and he notices… hey, way-hate a sec here… Ker’s suddenly wearing lace panties and bra … how the hell did that happen?… and his own pert teenage breasts fascinate him so much he can’t help lifting a palm to cup one and cop a quick feel, only… whump … the chair shatters across Zodiac Killer’s back… and there, above and left… who is that?… oh yeah, none other than the strikingly handsome nineteen-year-old baby-faced boy, Keane or Keir or Kendall or Kilian or Kipp or Kyle, whom Zodiac Killer shishkebabed earlier in the made-for-tv movie with another (and, in this case, barbed) redhot fire poker… and yet… and yet… he’s walking … Keane or Keir or Kendall or Kilian or Kipp or Kyle’s inching along, poker still sticking through his chest, not quite dead yet, still time for one last act of really impressive selfless heroism…

Flawless teeth in his grin, too, the drop-dead gorgeous guy raises two fingers to his forehead in a flip salute to posterity, gingerly releases an oily blue revolver from his back pocket, and takes aim.

“Yippie-kai-yay, motherfucker,” he says.

And pulls the trigger.

But misses.

532. AS SEEN ON TV

4. HE DO THE POLICE IN DIFFERENT VOICES

Rex Rory, flamboyant resident, releases an oily blue revolver from his back pocket, takes aim, and shoots Nona Nova, hospital nurse, once, just below her pert twentysomething left breast.

Not before Nona Nova, though, releases an oily blue revolver from her… where, exactly?… the logistics for this are somehow eluding Ker… and shoots him point blank in the groin.

Twice.

They fall to their respective knees.

“You rascally knave!” he shouts.

“You miserable miscreant!” she shouts.

“Strumpet!” he shouts, blood bubbling to his lips.

“Beetle-headed whoreson!” she shouts, unable to catch her breath.

“Worsted-stocking beggar!” he shouts, falling over on his side.

“Reprobate cuckold!” she shouts, toppling over on her face.

“Mama?” the barrel-chested man in the black cowboy hat asks tentatively, poking his head into the women’s restroom at the hospital. “Daddy? That you?”

249. THE DISCOVERY: CHANNEL

The monstrous great blue whale hangs under the ocean, ultramarine, pine green, indigo, gray, singing for its mate.

207. ADDRESS AT VISION 31

The great wheel spins. The audience shouts insanely. The game show host smiles confidently. Madge Moertel, fifty-seven, from Whitewater, Wisconsin, with a son in Attica, jumps up and down, her fat chugging, and claps her tiny hands in glee. The wheel spits fire. The wheel spits flame. Lights flash like lightning, and… slowly…

The wheel clicks to a halt, its arrow pointing to JACKPOT.

Sirens shriek. Buzzers trill. Alarms rattle.

Madge Moertel leaps into the air like an African chieftain. Bounds into the arms of the host. Her daughter rockets out of the audience and slaps onto the bi-hominidal cluster like a magnet.

Madge Moertel wins a dream vacation to Haiti.

Madge Moertel wins a year’s supply of cat food for her dog.

Madge Moertel’s face sprouts a flower. Her fingers sprout diamonds. Her eyes roll up under her lids.

She ignites.

A tremendous explosion follows: orange and black and umber and saffron fireball.

All around her people duck and cover.

33. WHITE QUEEN: BODILESSNESS: DARK

Which is when the ants come.

Ker lying flat on his back in his lace bra and panties beside his bean-bag chair in the living room, unable to move so much as an eyelid, watching the ceiling swarm with black ants. It seems like the ceiling doesn’t even really exist anymore, that it’s been insectivally devoured, that the ants have somehow become the ceiling through the act of ingesting it, a vibrant black undulating mass… which would have been awfully unpleasant in itself, no doubt, except that wasn’t all.

The ants? They aren’t just above his head. They’re inside his head, too.

Ker can feel them skittering over the bones that comprise his skull where all that facial and cranial skin of his used to hang. He can feel them seething in place of the tongue in his mouth. They rush through his sinuses and over the backs of his eyeballs. They migrate up his otic canals, nibble through his ear drums, make burger of his hammers and anvils and stirrups and cochleae, single-file down his Eustachian tubes, and blast up his auditory nerves in a screech of B-film noise.

They assemble massive ant ranches in the creases of his cerebral cortex and the queen, obese and gloopy and gnarled like a big white turd, excavates his cerebellum and wraps her starched napkin around her horrible neck that joins her horrible cyborgish head to her horrible cyborgish thorax and picks up her mandibular knife and fork and goes to gustative town while birthing thousands of larval rice-eggs every minute, which is awful, godawful, but not as awfully godawful as when her troops force their way down Ker’s esophagus in one big ramrod and then branch out into his lungs, ripping their way through mealy tissue and planting hundreds of larvae in some of the smaller less important semi-mucusy lung sacs, meaning Ker begins to cough, feeling like he can’t catch his breath, till he forgets about that slight discomfort because they’ve also made their way into his heart, it feels like, though maybe it’s just the lower reaches of his trachea, at which point he lurches into a full-blown grand-mal seizure, or what from his perspective feels like a full-blown grand-mal seizure, but can’t be, in point of fact, since he still retains a semblance of consciousness.

Except what really scares him is when they get into his stomach, which about now feels like he’s just gargled with a bottle of Sani-Flush laced with pins and thumbtacks, this flaming mass of damnation hissing into volcanic steam clouds when it hits meaty bottom and pretty much vaporizes his gall bladder and liver, and you don’t even want to ask about his bile duct or poor little fried knot of duodenum, before whooming full-speed-ahead into his intestines, both large and small, like so much superheated plasma, causing him instantaneously to go liquid, simultaneously projectile vomiting blood-ants from his mouth, on the one hand, and spewing them in a hot muddy red jet from his anus, on the other, before what really spooks him happens, which is that he next just sort of goes — what’s the word? — supernova.