Ryan Harding - Genital Grinder

“Condemned,” Geoff agreed.

“His value is assessed by a wide audience often incapable of objectivity.”

“Or thought,” Lee added.

“It’s a blasphemy in our eyes that it should be this way. Those with the need to create are basically used and discarded according to the prejudices and limitations of the only people they can show their work. We certainly weren’t looking for this to change. There didn’t seem to be any way around it. But the funny thing is that there was a way.”

I was thinking all this philosophizing was abstract, and there were certainly no stones left unturned in abstraction. Then Lee proved me wrong.

“Simply put, the world ended.”

Section V

This was never written. You are not reading this sentence. None of the following ever happened.

Section VI

Their theory was madness, and before January 1st of our new epoch, I never would have put any credence in it. What if there wasn’t a 2000, though? No act of inhumanity could allow the proper alignments for the end process. The twentieth century saw the merciless execution of millions in war, mostly by-standers . . . then came the birth of rock ‘n roll, and everything was okay again. Maybe as long as we were being fairly inventive about our methods of mass destruction, we preserved ourselves. What if even that ran out, though? What if the repetition and stagnation of art was mirrored not only in the boring cultures it portrayed but its cutting edge science as well? What if said scientific breakthroughs were just experiments in cloning? Did it not signify something when the sum of our advances stopped being half as fantastic as the dreams of artists, and the artists’ dreams themselves stopped being all that impressive?

Why had I really thought I would know the shape of the end? With such ambition and on such a grand scale, would it not have to be something previously unseen and unforeseen?

Section VII

“Think starlight,” Ursula said. “By the time it gets to us, it’s thousands of years old. Those stars could be dead, but you’d never know it to look at the night sky. We’ll think they’re alive for millennia after they’ve burnt out.”

Lee smirked. “Now there’s a fresh metaphor for you.”

Geoff said, “Personally, I think you’re wasting your time trying to convince him that way. The important thing is that a woman who never existed before was very alive before we ripped her from our reality like a page in a notebook. We believe this wasn’t something anyone could do before the end of the century. Something shifted in the relationship between art and its limits, maybe because it had to.”

Ursula wasn’t about to be denied another metaphor. “If you accept the idea that the universe was a clock wound and abandoned by a creator, what happens in the time between when it is stopping and rewound? Maybe something new. We felt it. This wasn’t something we accidentally discovered. We knew it would work. We weren’t waiting for the right time, but no time. That’s where we are now. Artists all over the world could interpret the same subject to no effect, but when the three of us do it, it lives.”

Section VIII

The trial and error behind this had been the cause of its obscurity. It was not the kind of thing they wanted to publicly experiment with, because they could not afford any attention before mastery. To do what they’d just done with Rebecca . . . to make her exactly as they wanted . . . wasn’t innate. (I can’t say it took time to learn, because by that point there was no longer any such thing.) Their ideology valued art over humanity, and in their hands art was no idle expression awaiting admiration, condemnation, or indifference. Their golems were still hostile, but not toward the authors. It was the audience endangered now. Don’t blame the messenger; kill the recipients. I was like-minded, but that didn’t explain why Ursula wanted me there. The why behind their new talent was of secondary importance to me anyway; I wanted to know what. What could be done with it? And how. How far could it go?

“Want to try an experiment?” Geoff asked.

Section IX

If somewhere there is a race of almond-eyed extra-terrestrials bending time and space to travel great distances and dislocate the rectums of unlucky homo sapiens with their excruciating probes, perhaps they will land on this planet long after it is deserted and wonder where all the potential rape victims absconded. Maybe they will sift through the ruins to find clues to the great exodus. This would be the first.

From The Herald, article by Jackson Zirnheld.

“MAN CLAIMS ASSAULT BY ANIMATED VILLAIN”

While walking home from work, Peter Swaggerty was undeniably attacked. Beyond that, the facts are difficult to establish. Swaggerty insists that his broken limbs and extensive bruising resulted from the assault of a figure he claimed was an animated drawing.

“Sure, I know it sounds crazy,” he concedes, “but I know what I saw. It was like some kind of insane dream that I still haven’t woken up from.” He describes his assailant as “sleek and very powerful. We’ve all seen him for years on those old neighborhood watch signs, the guy who’s a black silhouette except for his crazy eyes. He’s the one who attacked me last night, as if he stepped right off the sign to pummel me. He looks like that Marvin the Martian cartoon in his face, but Marvin the Martian never said stuff like ‘I’m gonna pull your entrails right through your [backside].’”

Swaggerty suffered six cracked ribs, eight broken fingers, elaborate facial damage, a dislocated shoulder, a compound ulnar fracture, and two broken legs as he attempted to crawl away. He was walking the three blocks to his house from his job at a movie theater when he was ambushed on Bava Lane.

“No one will believe this, I know, but that guy’s still out there, and he’ll keep taking people down. I’ll be scared to walk the streets when I get out of here. From now on, I’m taking the bus.”

Police declined to comment on how seriously they are taking Swaggerty’s account of events.

Section X

It was the best review we could have asked for. Peter Swaggerty had seen what we could do, and he was afraid. Everyone was laughing at him, of course, and there would be no reappearance of this mysterious hybrid of Marvin the Martian and Edmond Kemper, but the skeptics would learn in time. It went like we’d hoped. Lee sculpted him, and Ursula and Geoff painted before and after representations of his violence to Swaggerty, whose routine they had noticed months ago. We probably didn’t have to model the victim after a person we recognized, but to be on the safe side we did. Swaggerty might have invented the dialogue, but maybe that was the kind of thing a black silhouette with crazy eyes was born to say. Lee speculated that Blackie (as we called him) used Swaggerty as the author of his own pain. After that, we took more chances in preparation for our masterpiece. I gave my input on what we might utilize in these unorthodox manifestations, such as the neighborhood watch assailant (which had always haunted me as a child; being kidnapped was my worst fear), but I could contribute little else. Lee, Geoff, and Ursula worked tirelessly, and the experiments multiplied.

A steel incarnation of Baphomet showed up at a highly publicized environmentalist festival, resulting in the deaths of six at the hooves of the uninvited guest and another twelve trampled as by-standers fled, screaming in abject terror. Blood, it turns out, was not seen as very “green.’ A midnight screening of Demons was interrupted when a helicopter inexplicably crashed through the theater roof. Miraculously, the propellers continued whirling, and a full house was treated to the privilege of live decapitations and torso halving (provided they weren’t the decapitatees and halvees). No crew members were ever found, nor was anyone ever able to determine where exactly the chopper had come from. That something almost identical happened in the movie was actually comforting to many, as though it proved it was simply a bizarre stunt rather than a paranormal phenomenon. No interpretations were offered for the letters EOTA painted on the side of the helicopter. The dream factory of the Gard Theater proved tragically cruel for another audience, some of whom were ground up in its cogs in something that would ultimately be called “the Gard Incident”. A teenager texting a friend (about something nobody cared about even after what happened) suddenly stood up, shrieking that she couldn’t see. Her boyfriend and another friend on her row came to her aid, while other jaded movie-goers told her to shut her trap. They needn’t have worried. The friend (the recipient of the text, two seats away) held her illuminated cell phone screen up to the screaming girl’s face. The faint blue glow revealed busy spools of blood gushing down her cheekbones. Her friends promptly joined her in a choir of ear-splitting hysteria (the boyfriend arguably more so). Someone else’s makeshift cell phone flashlight added some unfortunate radiance to the macabre display, just in time for the spectators to get a better view of the girl’s jaw suddenly unhinge from her skull. It was as though the integrity of her flesh and joints failed her instantaneously, the skin elongating like cheese from a slice of pizza. The weight of the jaw proved too much for the thinning strand, and the lower half of her face dropped to the floor of the auditorium. Now the screaming really began. By now, everybody close to this row had their cell phones trained on the cluster of the three of them. The girl with no mandible dropped back in her seat in a dead faint and, as one witness said, basically “exploded” on impact. Her head dropped one row back as if the top of her seat had been a samurai sword, and it careened into the lap of someone who hadn’t had to get up from his seat to see the action, his free jumbo popcorn refills now a non-factor indeed. The trunk of her body splashed in myriad directions, a torrent of splatter like a tire shooting rain water up the side of a road. The friend, who now could have been a stand-in for Sissy Spacek in Carrie after the bucket dropped . . . if the bucket had been a bathtub . . . stood glued to the spot by the strange surplus of blood—surely far more than normally part of the human condition—unleashed from the bag of flesh with whom she’d entered this theater. Muscle memory even now allowed her fingers to walk on the keypad of her phone to inform somebody, anybody, that OMG, it was a massacre (to which she received the strange response “LOLZ” from an unknown number). She vomited from the sheer unthinkable horror. By this point, nobody was left standing around to play “best boy grip” with the surrogate lighting scheme, but the screen still provided enough light to see that the emesis was the color of the carpets in the atrium—a deep crimson. She instinctively reached for the (now ex) boyfriend, who was backing away from the tableau in what seemed like slow motion. He yanked his free hand away from the girl. Her hand came with him from the elbow down. He stopped backing away and ran for the end of the aisle, heedless of the debris of his ex-girlfriend still cluttering the way. The disembodied forearm burst beneath his shoe, and the backsplash of blood corroded his calves in quick succession. His momentum earned him one step, and then his leg wrenched itself away from the knee up, the foot still planted. It tipped over like an overloaded coat rack. He had nothing but the stump to come down upon, and as the now legless half of his body struck the seats to either side of him, he emulated the hot new trend of bodily decimation unwittingly started by his girlfriend. “Come on!” someone shouted above the chaos. “Let’s all go to the fucking lobby!”