Editorial
by Rewired

Well, I'm back, we're back, everything's back to normal, excluding everything except the issuing of this zine, that is.

In other words, it's been mighty weird out here in the Ohio air.

Maybe it's in the water. Maybe it's just in all of our minds. Whatever it is, by golly, it's there: the

weirdness, the oddity, the strangeness that makes all of my friends... and enemies.... so very interesting.

Thing is, Gopher will be ending at the 23 issue. I, Rewired that is, will effectively die, thus fulfilling the prophecy made in those earlier issues. It's sad, but I feel it needs to be done. There'll be better things. Hopefully I'll put out a zine once my life is a little more together, but I've been neglecting the Gopher and the Crew and I think it's better I focus on that right now. The Gopher will always be in our minds, and hearts, and occasionally waiting for us when we sit down at the potty. You'll be resting there in relaxation, reading the newspaper and sipping your coffee, and up from the toilet seat will pop that fuzzy little creature from the underground, filling your head with the babble we've all grown to love.

With that, here's issue twenty. You waited six months, and I think this issue was worth it. As will the next three - they'll be our best yet.

Live long and fiddlefucked.

Letters to the Editor

It's me and I just won't go away: The Darth Vader

I am always up to new friends, I received your E-mail from a CC… don't worry I will not E-mail you again unless you E-mail me back :o) aw, and with in the fascination of co existence we have begun to forget but where we are in life and as I have grown to believe that nothing is so soon forgotten I have but forgot of you, so with in my deepest apologies so begins this. I am but a man, a simple man to be seen with in the dreams of the nephin as a child growing into some thing of which I only wish I had known the answer to before I mistook this for greatness.

But alas I see before myself within my own eyes that what it is that follows is nothing more than the constant click of keys and a draining of conscious vomit, the every spill of one’s soul into the void of black text upon a white page. And so let this be the writing that I have for so long forgotten to feed those who wish to see such works... drift. Drifting silently as art of which I spill out in short screams of love. For this is the soul of which I have so far and long forgotten to give. These thoughts come screaming to my fingers and out through the keys and into this machine and soon to everyone who had seen my words before.

It is time for me to bleed for you once again, for you are not forgotten - it is I that has forgotten this side of me. Fully this is the taste of life which gives me meaning and though not to prosper but to speak and though there is nothing much to say I still must speak.

And yet time has limited me from speaking as I have wished. This is life and I must live it, for I must be at my keyboard. Why should I not live as I love? To write. And for all of you who see this I have compiled a few little words so you all know I have not forgotten you but have simply been dying inside to say hello. It is more that my life has engulfed my ever spirit to live and I am fighting back. Do so love the world as you wish it to love those around you, and thank you for your time. If you would like me to E-mail you more writing please E-mail me with a subject of "poet", when I do some thing new I will E-mail it to every one....

Thank you all

The Darth Vader

_________________________________________________

From: "Mike Kellum" <admin@vegasgirls2u.com

To: "Gopher Rewired" <Rewired@washout.com>

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Press Release-For Immediate Release

Internet Prostitution?

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shadows
by Rewired

I like the shadows - it's cool there. It's not easy living in an area of darkness, especially when you've lived so long in the light, blinded by the sun of ignorance, rising into the sky every day and then setting, when you fall into sleep and let the ignorance go in dreams you won't remember by the time the sun rises again the next morn. Yet when you fall into darkness, it's frightening at first because you don't know what's out there in the forest, and you wonder who owns those eyes peering back at you, what horrid creatures they may be. Through time, your eyes become accustomed to the light, and you get to know the neighborhood and venture farther.

The darkness I speak of is not evil, it is the unknown. Things that humanity ignores in favor of

focusing on the mundane and the everyday. They seek no greater understanding of nature, they don't really search for meaning beyond their petty lives, and, metaphorically speaking, fail to grasp anything beyond their field of near-sighted vision - if they strive to even understand that. They become no less than biological machines explained by science, and satisfy their spiritual cravings by blindly devoting themselves to religions that they follow mindlessly, desiring not to know or understand but merely to believe. They desire comfort, not freedom, because freedom takes real effort, real devotion. They live up to society's standards, and let the government control them - the machine that runs the country, the machine that is supposed to be below the people, that's supposed to be run by the collective effort of the masses, but which has become the puppeteer pulling our strings.

And if one of us dares to break free of the strings and dance on our own, out of tune with everyone else, ousting ourselves from the norm, we are branded insane and shunned upon. We become the oddity, the weird, the bizarre and the strange among the societal drones, we become the unique individuals among the mindless masses because we refuse to be controlled. We desire freedom, not just the comfort we can get through yielding to society's demands.

I think too much. I've been told that on numerous occasions. Why worry about what you can do absolutely nothing about? I've had that preached to me often. Is it my fault I don't want to stop questioning, and that I refuse to accept and abide by that which I find as nonsensical and thriving in ignorance -namely society and ninety per cent of it's occupants?

I write to relieve stress - I write so I can understand myself- and the world in which I live. I write to understand life, my own consciousness, and those of the people I value in my life.

For the past few months I've been writing a lot of new material, crossing bridges in both my writing and my life that I never thought possible. Strange things have happened and situations have come about that are hard for me to comprehend, but I've been observing, interacting and paying close attention to the meanings and lessons behind these events anyhow. I don't think some god is testing me or I'm an unwilling pawn in some cosmic game, but I do think my unconscious is desperately trying to tell me something - maybe it's telling me it's sick of ruling my life.

I will sometimes escape my friends and my constant hopping around from here to there and settle in my hiding place at a local park, and sit back with a cigarette or a cigar and a soda or a coffee and just let my mind wander. I wonder who I am, and what this world is about, and I laugh at the realization that there are no certain answers - certainty is a delusion of the past, a figment I so arrogantly believed was there. Nothing is known - some things are suggested, some are guessed, others are believed and many are kept alive by mindless faith, but nothing is really "known." Proof is in the eye of the beholder. We can only "prove" something by finding a way to fit it into our philosophical framework - if it works within the framework and can better explain things, it is accepted as fact - if it contradicts our firmly-held beliefs and is too big for the framework, it is dismissed as false, branded a lie and shunned or ignored.

Certainty, for me, is a thing of the past.

I do believe in things - for instance, that I exist, that the world exists, and so on, but for most things, maybe everything, there is evidence for either side - a multitude of sides - and it's all on what you choose to believe. There can be evidence, but what that evidence proves is, in the end, up to the individual. To others it may not even qualify as evidence.

So where does one find answers and strive for truth? By experiencing, observing, and learning, by trying out new philosophies, smashing old ones, only to smash the new a thought, moment, or paragraph later.

Time
by Heather S

Now its time to fly
And time to dream of the sea
Time to play with crayons
And time to cry
It's time to remember days
And time to wash everything away
Now it's time to put on wings
And time to say goodbye.

Peace on Mars
by Rewired

"You can measure a circle beginning anywhere."
-Charles Fort-

Slips through my fingers, to dirt in the ground
the crows they eat pigeons, flyin `round
this orb of listlessness upon my shoulders
propped up by a neck, a flimsy boulder
Blue sky covers far, punctured my fire
shining the pupil, the truth in a liar
leading my way, to lush land of green
where ferrets eat hamsters, and nightmares eat dreams
a leaf sought to fly, and for a moment floats freely
the wind takes it ever closer, to the forever-high ceiling
but whispers a eulogy, as brown leaf hits the ground
and my foot helps it crumble, with a delightful sound
just as the world walks all over me
I'll walk over you, once so far above me
it's all in my head, as I head to black waters
day gave way to the black widow that fought her
covered in a globe of light to protect me
I dabble on the shoreline of horror and mystery
I greet all the evil with a broad, snickering smile
bath my nude body in the black for awhile
feeling it's power, up to my belly button
as the beauty of stars, till my eyes start shuttin'
and I fall into the water, to drown just a moment
then I'm back up - is that what it all meant?
To feel the both sides, yin and yang through your veins
to relish the duel, the bliss and the pain?
To live in the light, and march into darkness,
find dark in the light, and light in night's garments?
Good and evil, they keep us at bay
there would be no shadow, if there was no sun rays
and what would the night be without it's stars?
The light in the dark, peace upon Mars.

Bloody Venice
by Tinman

"The Italian city of Venice was, without warning or notice, besieged by an invasion of demons in the Winter of AD 1061. Called the Incubi, the demons arrived suddenly and in seemingly unending numbers. The ruling Families of Venice waged a futile war against them, hiding themselves in deep underground homes beneath the city canals. After forty years of battle, the last organized resistance was crushed and the city fell irrevocably into chaos.

-Bloody Venice: A Historie, III, Fra Iacona, AD 1304

She was trying to throw me out of her home, but I could not let her.

"Not for me!" she screamed. "For you! For you! If you stay here, you will die!"

But night had almost fallen and there was no other home for me to go to. I knew that if I were out upon the canals that night, I would surely be slain. The moon was full and demon blood was running hot and I needed most of all to be indoors and safe.

I thrust her aside and drew shut the heavy oaken doors, cutting off the flow of fresh night air with a violent bang. I bolted the door three times over and sealed the seam by tracing it with holy water from the vial around my neck; no Incubus would enter the home tonight. Now, safe beneath the canals, Marie collapsed into me, sobbing and clutching my shirt.

"You should have left..." she cried. "Now you will die and we will die together."

I wrapped my heavy cloak around her shoulders to calm her and, taking her arm gently, I led her off to check the children’s room. The lantern cast weird and oily shadows on the narrow wooden corridors, the corridors that sloped ever down, away from the surface and danger and into the safety of the underworld catacombs. Marie’s home was built more reminiscent of a ship than a house. The passageways were long and paneled in old and often rotted wood. Water seeped through the ceilings where the canals ran overhead and dribbled down the walls. Deeper in the home were the subterranean canals that actually ran through the place, down where it took the shape of an inhabited cave. Marie’s home was expansive and most of it was older than any living memory.

Marie had two young children. They lay side by side in separate beds in their room. The eldest, a boy, was four and my son. He was fast asleep in his bed, oblivious to invasions and Incubi and midnight angers. He did not yet know the world of violence that coursed in the city outside. He would not know it until he reached puberty and the angers began to grip even him as well. I looked at my son and I knew that he would learn to kill. He would learn to kill or he would die.

The other child was an infant girl, only a few weeks old. Her eyes were still open and shone brightly in the lamplight, but she did not move or make a noise. Marie bent down to brush the girl’s face. She was not my child, but rather the daughter of one of Marie’s other lovers. She had no name yet; it seemed futile to name any child in Venice, as though implying that there might still be hope for the future.

The room next door to the children’s was Marie’s bedroom, where she laid with another man almost every night. I felt the anger well in me like a rising cloud-- anger at sharing her with whomever could get themselves inside the door first. But the anger had no object, only pointless frustration. There was little I could do and little she could do. When night fell, she was no longer master of her own passions. I had been a fool to fall in love in Venice.

I carried Marie over to the bed and gently laid her down. She did not struggle anymore against me, but had the look of a resigned and defeated woman. Reaching up, she loosened the braids in her hair and shook out her black tresses, letting them fall down over her shoulders. I have always loved that hair. She melted into the bed and pulled the covers around herself. Her almond eyes held much fear that I could see, but also much desire. She wanted to sake her lust, but more. She wanted me to hold her, to love her, to comfort her. Bending down, I kissed her lips. Marie shut her sweet eyes and returned it.

Quietly, I removed my belt and placed it on the floor under the bed, careful not to break any of the items I had bound to it. I then slid myself under the blankets and ran my hand down her side. Breathing heavier and heavier with anticipation as the lust gripped her body, Marie began unlacing the top of her dress, revealing what she hid during the demurity of day. She undid the strings and untied the knots down past her ribs, to her stomach and beyond. At last, she lifted open the dress from neck to hem and slipped out, naked, into my arms.

As her hands explored my body, removing clothing, she spoke softly.

"Rudolpho is in the house," she whispered with a look of mischief in her eyes.

"I will protect you," I said.

Marie pouted. "I’m not worried about myself."

"Your home is large," I said. "Perhaps he will not find me."

"But you are with me," she replied. Reaching up to embrace my neck, she pressed herself close to me. She kissed my lips, and much was there said in that kiss. I felt her heart beating behind her breast, felt the life that trembled deep inside her. She was alive. "Do you think," she asked, "that any man would spend a night in my home and not come to find me?"

Suddenly, she was supplicant before me and she guided me like a gondola gliding into a dock. Her face became distant as her addiction controlled her entire being and she began to spend her lust. She could have continued in this state-- somewhere between life and catatonia-- all night until her energies were spent and shed with our rivers of sweat.

But that could not be. Midway, she suddenly shrieked and pulled herself flat against me. Angry, I pushed her aside and looked up into the darkness. A man, tall and red, stood at the foot of the bed, a long sword drawn.

Marie, cringing in a corner, screamed, "Rudolpho!" I, lying naked and exposed under a blade, rolled aside as it descended and clove the sheets. I reached my hands under the bed and, finding my belt, drew out my arquebus. As the sword rose again to deal a killing blow, I turned to face the man and aimed my arquebus at his chest. One shot smattered blood across his belly. Three more dropped him to the ground in a silent heap.

Through the thick haze of sulphur, I heard Marie sobbing violently. Quickly, I threw my clothing back on, wrapped my cloak around her once more, and carried her swiftly out of the room.

-Bloody Venice: A Historie, V, Fra Iacona, AD 1304

Outside, she squirmed out of my arms, slammed the bedroom door shut and locked it from the outside. "He’s not dead..."

"Of course he is," I said. "I shot him four times from a distance of three feet. That’s enough to kill any man, no matter how big he is."

Marie cried harder. "But he’s not a man..."

I punched the wall. Hard. "You let an Incubus into your home at night and you didn’t tell me?"

"I told you to leave!" she screamed.

I gripped her shoulders and shook her. "Why didn’t you tell me?" I felt the anger inside my chest tearing my body apart.

She looked up at me boldly. "Would it have made a difference?" she whispered.

I sighed and let go of her. I regained some control of myself and cleared my head. Reaching for my holy water to seal the door, I found that I had left my belt, and with it my vial, in the bedroom. I breathed deeply and slowly. "I need holy water," I said.

Marie nodded, wiping tears out of her eyes. "There is a stream that runs through the chapel..."

"You have a chapel?" I asked. "Just how big is this place?"

"Big," she said. Taking her hand, I moved to lead her down the hallway, but she pulled me back. "The children," she said.

I looked back at the bedroom door. It seemed quiet enough. Opening the door to the children’s room, we went quickly inside. I stirred my son and picked him up; Marie lifted her infant onto her shoulder and soon we were in the hall once more. More calm now that her children depended on her, Marie led us without a lantern through dark passages and through great rooms and halls. I could only see a fraction of what was around me in the darkness, but I knew that I was in a part of her house that I had never seen before.

"All of this was built when the demons first arrived," she said. "Every house is like this. The Families thought that if their houses were large enough and full of mazes, the Incubi would never find them all." She paused. "It did not entirely work."

After ten minutes of swift and purposed flight, we came to a stream. Beyond it was a hollow grotto full of cloth and drapery almost indistinguishable in the darkness.

"The chapel," motioned Marie. "This whole stream is blessed. No Incubus could so much as dip his foot in it. We can stay the night here." The stream moved noiselessly by. It looked like any other underground stream; there was nothing to denote it as blessed. I wondered from whence it came and where it would go, making it holier than any other stream. I wondered which saint had blessed the stream, making it safe from the advances of Incubi and what pains and benedictions he had acted out to bless an entire stream. Surely it was more than the simple prayers that priests used to bless smaller waters.

Truly, even the small powers of such priests and monks frightened me. Not saints nor angels themselves, yet their training gave them the power to exorcise demons with words. Incubi are not ordinarily frightened of water and do not cringe from it: no one who is afraid of water comes to Venice. No, but if a priest but mutters one phrase over a vial of water, the water becomes holy. Holy waters and oils are the most potent weapon against any physical evil. They burn those who cannot be burnt. The same is true of blessed holy symbols: rosaries, Bibles, icons, crucifixes. Such simple objects that do not even frighten hypocrites or humans can stop cold the most dreadful demon. Satanic forces will recognize the power of Christ where humans will not.

The stream, swift and wide, was cold as well. I waded half way out and Marie handed me my son. Carrying him across, I placed him in the safety of the holy place beyond.

"Give me the infant," I said, holding out my arms.

Marie shook her head.

"Hurry," I said. I was beginning to go numb in my legs and I was not sure how much longer I could stand in the water. "You can’t cross it carrying her. You’ll both be swept away."

Still she would not give me the child. I was becoming angry and I moved towards her, about to climb out of the stream. Seeing this, Marie at last gave me the child and I started to wade across.

"The children of demons inherit the supernatural powers of their parent. No less is true of the offspring of the Incubi. During the years of the Possession of Venice, hundreds of Incubi slept with human women, producing accursed children, half human and half demon. Often, it was impossible for women to tell the difference between a man and an Incubus until they were engaged in intercourse, for it was widely known at the time that Incubi have icy organs. Although Incubi appear male, they cannot be truly said to have any sex because they are sterile; they are only able to impregnate women with the seed collected from other men and corrupted by the demon’s evil.

-Bloody Venice: A Historie, XI, Fra Iacona, AD 1304

Looking at the baby, I noticed a mark on her forehead. I stopped, the water streaming around me, and looked back at Marie. "This is its child," I said. "This girl is your demon’s child."

She wept but nodded her head. "Don’t kill her..." she begged.

"Marie! She is a demon! She’s a succubus." I knew exactly what kind of life she was destined to have, roaming the streets of Venice at night, wreaking terror upon mortal men. I had seen more than enough of that myself. It was better to slay the demon now before her body developed enough to manifest the evil.

"Don’t..." cried Marie, crumpling to the ground. "Don’t..." She must have known that her pleas would be useless. I knew that it did not have to come to pass. The child did not need to prey on human flesh...

Marie screamed as I plunged the girl into the stream, holding her head beneath the waters. I felt the infant demon in her struggle against me with a supernatural force. Unseen nails and claws raked my body and fingers sought to gouge my eyes. An unnatural throatless scream poured out of the baby, filling the cavern with an icy chill and then was gone. The hands released me and the wind disappeared. I withdrew the girl from the stream.

"I baptize thee," said I, "Denise." Denise, named for the patron of the possessed, stirred her tiny human hand and coughed. I struck her and she coughed again, dispelling the water from her lungs. Her mouth opened and she cried out loud for the first time in her infant’s life. The mark was still upon her head, but her soul, at least, was clean.

Marie plunged into the stream and gripped my arm. I pulled her across and lifted both she and her daughter onto the chapel bank before I joined them as well.

As Marie lit seven rows of seven candles each, I looked around the chapel. A large wooden cross hung from the back wall and a small altar was spread before it. On the altar were a silver chalice, a clay bowl of water, a plain monstrous, and a cold censor. Off to one side stood a bronze statue venerating Saint Joseph Cafasso; to the other side was an alcove filled with spears and swords, crossbows and halberds and every manner of weapon fashioned from silver or holy materials.

I lit a cake of incense and let it smoke for a minute. I then passed a dagger through the smoke, murmuring Latinate as I did so. I am not ordained, but even layman’s words hold power.

"What are you doing?" asked Marie.

"Purifying," I said.

"You’re not going back out to hunt it."

"I have to."

"No!" she screamed. "It will leave in the morning! Stay here!"

I drew a drop of my own blood with the blade and painted a cross on its hilt with it. "It can’t leave," I said. "I sealed the doors with holy water. It cannot pass the seal alive. I must go kill it."

"Take me with you!"

I girded a dagger belt. "You need to stay with the children. Our children." Lifting a holy pike, I walked over to Marie and kissed the top of her head. I then filled a skin with holy water and poured it over my head. As it tumbled past my lips, I tasted wine. "The Blood of Christ," I said. I was consecrated for the battle ahead and so I swam across the river and walked back up the passage.

I moved without lantern, without noise, and without speed. I did not think that the Incubus would have set a trap for me and I did not expect an ambush in such a distant part of the home. Nevertheless, I left nothing to chance and did not turn my back on any room until I was certain that it was empty. I wanted to see it first.

At last I reached the bedroom and, as I had expected, the door was splintered, forcibly thrown open from the inside. The room was otherwise as we had left it. The bedclothes were in disarray and I saw my belt peek from under the bed. My vial of holy water was smashed to pieces. There was a large charred patch where the Incubus had stood at the foot of the bed. Inside the burnt circle were four misshapen lead pellets melted to the floorboards and a pool of mercurial demon blood.

It was obviously not dead, but probably in a great deal of pain. Certainly its physical frame felt pain even if its life was sustained somehow supernaturally. The burn was evidence of the extreme emotion it had felt. The Incubus was alive and hurt and angry.

Suddenly I knew where it was. "Do you think," Marie had asked, "that any man would spend a night in my home and not come find me?" The Incubus was not a man, but it lay with women and had the fleshly drives and motives of a man. If it were anywhere in the house, it would be with Marie, for she was what it wanted, she was why it had come to her home.

There was another thought that struck me even as I set back down the corridors. Marie had consorted with a demon, let it into her home, had a child by it. Had I really been away so much as that? I did not so much mind the human lovers that she took, but I should never have let her take a demon to bed. She could not love the thing, I knew, but she had lusted for it. Women in Venice, however, lust for everything.

I descended rapidly back through the myriad passages, back to the chapel. I stopped once on my way at the front door. Sliding aside the cover, I looked out of the peek hole and saw Venice still cloaked in night. It seemed peaceful enough outside, but I knew that in every doorway and under every bridge was another, worse danger. The demons were in force that night, beneath the mad urgings of the full lunatic moon. The only thing that would save any of the men outside was their own equally mad urgings, made tenfold by that same full moon. When morning came, the streets would drip with every kind of blood.

Why this one would choose to be indoors on this night of its most primal powers was lost to me. Why it should choose again, out of all the women in Venice, Marie I also did not know. The machinations of unholy minds are unknowable to any.

Still, down and down I went, back towards the hidden chapel, looking always for sign of the Incubus but seeing none and neither it. I thought perhaps that we had passed one another unnoticed in the darkness and silence of the home, but then I came abruptly to the cold blessed stream. There, out on the waters, burned a smoky green flame which cast an oily and demonic glow on the cavern. The flame burnt upon a brass tripod which was set in the center of a gondola floating on the holy stream. Inside the craft as well were the Incubus and Marie both. Naked and lashed to the prow, Marie was splayed out before the demon like a sacrifice. Slowly and almost blindly, she turned her head in my direction and looked me in my eyes. In hers I saw only the dim glow of hopelessness. Somewhere near me, another gondola bumped the shore. Looped around the prow was a medal to St. Christopher and a white flame burned aboard this craft. I could not tell where it had come from; it might as well have been spontaneously birthed from the waters of the stream.

I silently stepped inside the gondola and it immediately sailed off towards Marie, taking me with it. As I approached, the Incubus took note of me and fixed his satanic gaze on me.

He held out a single finger, pointing it at me. "Thou slew my Chylde," quoth it.

"Not slew," said I. "Saved."

"Fool!" it bellowed. "Mine Chylde were the daemon Half! The human Frame were but a Vessle for her and the Soul were in bondage to mine Succubus! She were bound & fixed to be the Whure of Babelonn & to give byrthe to the Beast, but now thou hath slew her!"

"The maculate conception," I said.

"Yes," it said. "The Whure, bathed in Synne since her Concepsion, the onely fitting Muther to the Destroyer of the Wurld. And now Dead!" It motioned to Marie. "Thysse One instead must needs to serve mine Purpusses. She shalt be an imperfect Whure, but still an Whure is she."

"Only under the tutelage of you and your kind."

The Incubus laughed hysterically. "Do not thee speak unto me as tho I were some Daemon spawnned in the Cercles of Hell. It is no mean mistake that the Incubi are in Venyce. We did not invade; we were born here! We are the physichal Manifestasion of thysse Citys Immurality. We do not causse your Lusts & Angers; we feed on them & nurturre them, refyne them into raw daemonic Ennergy! Venyce hath beat the Devyll at his own Hande. Thysse is the antiChryst’s Byrthplace, Capitall of the Apocalypsse!"

"Not yet," I swore, my boat floating nearer still to theirs.

"But soon!" it cried. "The Whure will deliver the Chylde who will kill God."

"No one can kill God."

It’s face contorted into pure hatred and defiance. "Then she & all her Issue are damned unto Hell!"

Then I was in the water, beneath the cool surface, swimming beneath the demon’s boat. It grabbed a torch and peered over the side, searching for my shadow. Seeing the light from the torch, I reached up, catching the demon by its throat and holding fast. My head and left arm broke the surface seconds later and I drove the blessed pike into that cursed chest.

Mercury flowed in torrents out of its heart and fell steaming into the water. The Incubus sat back, a look of indigestion upon its face. With one last breath of strength, it pulled me to its face. "Kill me," it whispered, "and the Wurld goes on forever..."

Then it slipped into the stream of holy waters, turning their entire length a rancid red. When the steam had cleared, I saw the pike, its shaft burned to cinder, floating on the river’s surface. Death, for once, came quickly to the Incubus.

I untied Marie and held her tightly as I steered the gondola back towards the chapel. I promised myself to never leave her alone again, to never let the demons touch her, to never let, in fact, another man touch her-- for men are demons and demons are men and, as the Incubus said, the world would indeed go on. I had the strength now, though. I had defeated my possession, drove out all my demons from my own soul and was ready, at last, for morning to break.

-Bloody Venice: A Historie, XV, Fra Iacona, AD 1304

"To live in hearts we leave / is not to die"
-Thomas Campbell-

immortality
by Rewired

Many parents seem to believe that through age they acquired wisdom, and we should therefore yield to them and "learn" through their mistakes and hold back in making our own. In actuality, age does not equal wisdom, understanding does. Experience is the best teacher - yet only if you are conscious of it; if your eyes remain open throughout the events in your life. Parents often fall short of understanding and fall into the delusion that they are their children's god.

News flash: we live in an atheistic world. Deities are delusions here.

The question of who we are is always present in my mind - we're supposedly shaped by such things as genetics, environment, and - if you believe astrology is credible - even the stars. These are the elements that seem to control us and can be used as a convenient excuse for our actions. Yet though these elements shape us, there is a vital element within us that can override everything: free will. A bird can break free of it's cage and fly like an eagle.

It isn't always easy for the "eagle" to break free into the open wind - no more easily than it is for he or she who has caged that "eagle", perhaps unknowingly , to accept that bird's freedom. The parent’s need to accept the freedom and individuality of the child.

Before there can be a free will, there must first be something to be free from, however – the "controlling elements" in point. When an infant, genetics have formed the base of the child's character, and then the environment - the family itself, more specifically the parents - builds off of that. Only then, when the nature of the child has been born with it's body and the nurturing of the parenting helps shape the child's character can the growing child's free will be applied and brought into focus. This personal evolution of the individual from infancy to adulthood seems, to me, to follow a certain pattern. Adults have children, and children grow up to be adults and have their own children - it's how we survive as a race; through procreation. We are born, we grow up, we have children, we grow older and we die.

In religion, they believe after death we rise to a higher state of being and are judged by some divine omnipotent creator of sorts. In science they're convinced that it's "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" and the ceasing of our biological functioning equals the death of our consciousness, and the totality of our selves. Faith in either of these ideas causes family problems, specifically between parents and child, as I will attempt to explain.

Make note that I don't wish to make this seem as if my scenario is set in stone, that I proclaim that this is what always happens; their are obviously variations. This is only an example posed in order to express a point of mine.

Although it is certainly not the chief purpose, bearing children is an attempt to achieve a sort of immortality - if the parents can make young, if they can have a child in their likeness, genetic make-up, a child that can, perhaps carry on their name, they feel that at least a apart of them can go on. They bring up this child -their own blood - and try to make a mark upon him.

Using the child as a tool to achieve immortality, it seems, is not enough for them - they also, in the child, find something even better: a second chance. They remember those dreams they had as children that they fell short of bringing to reality, and they throw it upon the child to achieve. The parents believe their hopes and dreams can live on in the young, and can be made into reality with the right coaching. The children, they realize, have it much easier, would they just listen: the children don't have to make the same mistakes and fall into the same bitter traps, and they don't have to face the same dire consequences of those regrettable choices. They can learn from the mistakes of the parents rather than carrying the burden through experiencing it for themselves.

They use the children as sort of a mirror of what could've been, and they see in them the good qualities they had as well as that which they despised of themselves. The child was their own - the parents' owned him, and could do with him what they pleased. Push him this way or that - and, through programming the child to be like them and live up to the parent's expectations, the parent's could achieve immortality to the child... or shall I say drone? The parents had given birth to their ball of clay, and went on about molding.

Then, one day, the mold breaks.

The clay takes on a life of it's own - the child that once used to never cease its clinging to it's parents, the sibling that leached off it's parents for advice and guidance, even for control; who mimicked them in hopes of being "grown up" like them, of living in their shoes suddenly does something horribly unexpected: he develops his own personality. He demands - not requests, no, demands his independence. The child wishes to flee the suffocating parents wing and attempt to soar through the wind like an eagle, leaving behind the nest, allowing the nest and it's contents to be pushed into the foreground and allowing new things to fill his heart and mind.

The parents try to get a grip - not on themselves, but on the living mirror that they see cracking before their eyes, revealing being it an unfamiliar, perhaps terrifying face.

This face is the unknown identity that, for years, has been growing within the exoskeleton the parent's created for it - an exoskeleton made up of all the demands and impressions and expectations they put on the child for years. They refuse to accept the new face at first - refuse to allow it, then. Eventually they see their insistence that he yield to them and abide by their restrictions as a battle that can no longer be won by slapping him on the wrist or throwing their child in a corner for ten minutes. The child, out of their control, slips farther away, and they try to compromise but it's too late.

In the end, they're usually forced to let go.

So the parents, in loosing their tool of immortality - the willingness of the child to live up to their expectations - rush to find meaning and focus. Growing ever-older, they often turn their empty eyes toward the church - a philosophy that, unlike the one called science, gives them hope, and a tool that, unlike their child, cannot run away. They don't have to question, and in Christianity's blind faith are not permitted to question, the beliefs of that following. They don't strive to know - they wish to believe, they wish to live on beyond their physical existence. Through the beliefs of a religion they can find company with others who share the same fear and openly accept the hopeful delusions. Together, these truly confused, frightened, undeniably lost souls pray to their god for a heaven, or in the least a bearable hell - anything over simply not going on.

Some parents, however, are more stubborn – they’re intent on fighting a battle that's already been lost. It's a battle of ownership they're loosing; a battle of possession. The child, growing slowly but surely into an adult, chooses to own himself, to possess their own being, rather than be ruled by an outside force. He's tired of being a helpless pawn in the hands of his parents. The child takes measures to make sure this solid fact is abundantly clear to the parents: that he is not their tool for achieving immortality, that he is not owned by anyone but himself, that he has the right to make his own mistakes and learn from them (and to be helped, not saved by them), that they have the right to escape the world of childhood, the world controlled by their parents, and begin to create their own world, and that since the parents refuse to accept this the only means of escape from the suffocation of the parental wing is through acts of rebellion.

Though the parents may understand it - they lived through it at one time, too; they were children once- they refuse to accept it, and may go to drastic measures to ensure or regain the control that has weakened or been lost.

Aside from the various mindless religions that are very fluent in modern society, it's impossible to ignore the fact that humanity as a whole has become more materialistic than ever. Science is the new religion upon which the mass perception is based, and much faith is held by the western people in its claim that anything and everything is an effect of the material. That everything begins and ends in and with the material. There is no god, and humans are nothing more than machines composed of meat that came to be through random chance -evolution, rather than creation. The physical world is the boundary for existence.

People of this belief, this materialistic religion called "science", fear the concept of death even more than those of the spiritual religion. Due to their perception, boundried by science to the material, they believe that when their biological bodies ceases functioning their consciousness - all their memories and beliefs, all their thought's and emotions, all that makes them who they are - is dead as well.

As a result of this unavoidable death, they find the only form of immortality they see as possible – by doing their best to leave their mark in the minds of others by making certain that they remember them. They wish to find immortality there, in the minds of the young. It can be a positive or negative mark they wish to leave, as long as the mark stands out and lives on. The moral polarity of their actions is irrelevant - their motive is to be remembered for who they are.

So through their further attempts at controlling, their bitching and nagging, they are, as a result, being a part of the children's life. They're existing in the minds of the children, even after the source of those memories -the parents themselves - have passed on. The children rebel more, and the parents push more. The war never ends- it's a battle that won't be won by either side until there is a compromise or peace treaty both can agree on.

Both children and their parents care for one another, of course - that is not a question - but they go on different perspectives of this bond: the children, wishing to flee in freedom; the parents, wishing to trap them in fear. The change makes the parents feel like a part of them is dying - and it is greed, but only in the sense that they are frightened of loosing their most valued possession. While the teenagers, slowly growing into adulthood, feel themselves giving birth to individuality - giving birth to themselves - they find a pain comes with this birth. The feeling of "death" is felt by the offspring just as the parents. Yet this pain, this death - leaving behind the old, accepting the change and moving onto new trails in life, is a gateway to a new world and a new place in life. A new step in the personal evolution of the individual in question.

The bond between the parents and child doesn't die - it is what's immortal - but it changes: it is not held onto as tightly, because it is no longer a necessity for survival. To the contrary, that bond can stunt mental, emotional, and spiritual growth for both the parent and the child. The distance between the parent and child grows, by demands of the child and eventual acceptance of the parents, and is pushed aside to give life to new bonds with different people. With the escape from the bond between them, whole new worlds are at their disposal that will allow them to explore avenues of themselves they never dared

to imagine existed.

In the end, if both sides realized what must be, the parent learns not to live herself through her children, and the child learns not to live through the eyes of his parents. There is truly no mortality – nothing really dies. Everything changes, however. Yet change can be misinterpreted by death - and with the thought of an end, there comes fear and denial. Yet if one could strive to understand, she'd realize that it is understandable to at first fear what is foreign. Yet one mustn't let the fear take control - a destructive means leads to a destructive end.

God’s imagination
by Wolfe

In God’s imagination: a fertile plump infinity,
each soul a joke seeking to be cracked
He births each into a precisely planned deformity
with voice dry and face straight
And the Universe so laughs
at each new clever twist God puts
into his mundane assembly line job
of cramming priceless impeccable vapor
into cheap flawed bottles;
that even God chuckles

The picture
by Rewired

A friend sent pictures to his rents
mailed from over seas
they let me see them all
said he wanted to give the two to me
one was of me when all was alright
the other was of you - I couldn't sleep that night.
You know, it's strange
a picture is worth a million words
but a word is worth an eternity of thoughts
that coat indescribable emotions.
So I grasp to understand
how I could've been so blind back then
but I see what I'd lost now,
that's got to mean something, somehow.
I miss the smell of rotting strawberries
that drifted off your cloths - I miss your soft lips, and that wonderful chin
I miss that hair you dyed so often
I miss your horrible life, and that fact that it was mine you wanted to be in
It's the funny things I miss
like laying beside you, or having you sleep upon me
you were beautiful, but it was more than that
feeling the way I do now, it had to be.
Yet as time goes on things don't cease to change
feelings are exchanged, relations rearrange
and we grow up and sail across our separate futures
hoping we'll cross paths, if we make a few turns.
But the memories still stay - and that’s fine with me
they live on in my dreams, stories, and poetry
but I won't cry or kick myself in the ass
just because feelings were so fogged then
and now I peer through clearer glass.
So I guess we move on, no direction left but `ahead'
but I hope I feel that way again before I find myself dead.
What was that feeling? So foreign to me?
What was that feeling? That's brought back in memory?
When ever we looked at each other, or slept, or kissed
holy shit... it could've been happiness...

Literary Licenses
by Janet I. Buck

I'd left English 104 on my to-do list like over-cooked peas on a dinner plate, pushing them around from term to term in the hopes they would miraculously disappear. Since it was spring of my senior year, I made the faulty assumption that any instructor would give me a "pass" just to clear the air of desperation; as luck would have it, I ended up with a teacher who believed in the power of words, except when it came to unadulterated begging.

Her name was Miss Kleinschmidt, and she'd earned every harrowing vowel that rolled off her tongue. In this class, the methodology of analyzing literature was the first approach of unmitigated overkill. Every comma was a sperm in the grandiloquent scheme of artistic endeavor and every T (crossed or uncrossed) carried a crucifix of the modern world; if you didn't wring out the contents of a poem like a wet kitchen towel and yank out every weed of hidden meaning by its roots, you were considered terminally hopeless in the interpretation department. This woman could find phallic imagery in everything from a dill pickle to a field mouse. I gave it my best shot, but those little suckers always seemed to get past me, no matter how many times my friends handed me the answer in a paper airplane when her back was turned.

The more out in left-field an analysis was, the more sense it made. Rather like a baseball that goes so far out of bounds it rolls into the boy's locker room on its own accord. Literary criticism soon felt like the blunt end of old umbrella going places that couldn't actually be discussed in mixed company. I'm not all that fond of the stale cushions on a psychoanalytical couch, but I was sure Miss Kleinschmidt hadn't been laid since the American Revolution. Even then, it must have been a major disappointment, because she did the "pick, pick, pick" to every thread of a passage until nothing remained but a very confused-looking emperor without so much as a scrap of dignity left on the poor guy's Fruit of the Looms. Now,

I'll admit I've missed my share of interpretive taxi-cabs, but her stream of consciousness stretched from the tip of Alaska to Timbuktu and there wasn't an outhouse of reason anywhere on the map.

Kleinschmidt had what could only be described as the art of anal discernment. A marigold was gold: therefore, it was money. A rose had thorns: therefore, it was the retaliatory carnage of Mother nature; birds were attracted to worms; therefore, they had a "control problem." They obviously weren't the only ones: she was so determined to lead us down the path of the "great masters" that one of our first assignments was to steal a line from Browning ("How do I love thee?/Let me count the ways") and then

finish the poem. I remember taking the Erma Bombeck approach and watering the roots of reality, but when I wrote "I love thee like a hot-fudge sundae after I've already had three...and a flat tire on a deserted road...and a honeymoon in the African Jungle," her sense of humor evaporated like the last decent nail file in the confines of San Quentin. She could transform jellyfish in a sand dune into ovum in channels of the grandiose "uterus" of the universe, but ask her to dig up something with logic attached or assign it a practical application, and you went straight to death row, without lunch I might add.

One day, right before the mid-term, she asked us why Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven. Utter silence. "Quiet" was usually court-martialed in this class and she quickly began soliciting volunteer victims. I'd vaguely remembered something about the theme of depression, so I selflessly passed my neighbor an answer under the desk: "She used the oven because the microwave hadn't been invented yet." What I thought was an obvious and well-centered nail on the head of reason back-fired like a drunken sailor and I had to stay after class and hose down the chalk boards.

Imagistic offerings in English 104 were like fish hooks. She made us wiggle them in our mouths until the teeth sunk in; then she mercilessly reeled us in and served our blushing cheeks to the principal like a side-order of fries.

One Friday, Kleinschmidt was out sick and I conned the janitor into filling in for her so we wouldn't lose any time with this monster of a syllabus. He renewed my faith in God and humanity when I discovered I wasn't the only one on earth who believed that Joyce created Finnegan's Wake to give English professors something to do with their pencils over summer break.

Miss Kleinschmidt alluded to her spinsterhood more than once and never let anyone address her with "Ms." We ran that one through the analytical blender and decided that whatever she "was" had to rhyme with "Hiss" for the sake of consistency in the tone and meter department. Every selection on the syllabus revealed, in some way, her preoccupation with anatomy. "A Rose for Emily," she said, "was written by a man who was deep-down an unfulfilled woman." I knew the protagonist was a little too caught up the doo-doo of the Deep South, but nobody, even Faulkner, ties up the corpse of their husband and stashes it in the attic in an effort to underscore the need for sexual liberation; we had one sick puppy on our hands and I wasn't goin' near that one without Arnold Swartznegger and a German tank, even if my grade depended on it.

When we read Langston Hughes' "On the Road," I thought our dainty minds would escape the clenching jaws of sexual orientation (after all the story is grounded in an urban snowstorm and no one goes around without their clothes on in sub-zero temperatures). Wrong again. "The snow," she said, "wasn't snow; it was something else." I was looking around for some LSD or a six-pack, but coming from firmly prudish Republican mind-stock, I enjoy living under the delusion that an Emily Dickinson wanna-be doesn't get toasted before 9:00 a.m. I asked who put the weed in the brownies on her desk; since no one would own up, I was forced to take her at her word.

One of the most disgusting sights in my academic career took place the last week of class. There was this absolutely crystal-clear kiss-ass parked like a tow-truck in the front row, trying to buy an A for the course. I can grovel with the best of them if the circumstances call for it, but "falling snow" is not dandruff on the bleached and tattered soul of human nature," unless you're Yul Brenner shopping for a new toupee because his grand-kid buried it in baby powder when he went into the kitchen to grab a beer.

On the final exam, Kleinschmidt asked us all to define "poetic license." This one was just too good to pass up: It's what you show a cop when he's giving you a DUI and you can't find your driver's thingy-ma-jig." I had to go to summer-school and take the class again. This time, however, the teacher was a foreign exchange student with a limited visa. I was forced to rethink my strategy for a moment, but when inspiration finally struck, it was well worth the wait: I pasted a photo of Dolly Parton half-naked on the cover of my empty journal and taught the guy how to say "Me, American" and make it stick...passed that class without ever crackin' a book.

FNORDFNORDFNORD

Cycle
by Rewired

The child awakens
every day
into the delusion of a man;
old feet of young soul
lift and fall
upon the waking land,
what the enlightened child knows,
the old man strives to understand:
Old eyes of a young lad
as the body grows old,
the eyes grow young
the elder strives
to the dance the rhythm
that the young eyes
had once sung:
In every yin
resides the eys of yang,
in every yang,
the ey of yin.
The light of now
casts a light on the dark of forever,
for where forever ends,
now must begin:
the day surrenders
to the fire
to be born in the air
and to resides in ashes.
And after the rain
has turned it to mud,
it dries again,
back to it's past:

"It is by its promise of power that that evil often attracts the weak."

- Eric Hoffer-

LET’S KILL MOM
by Rich Logsdon

I. At Stinky Pete's

This is a story about Sarah, the greatest teller of stories in the civilized world, and about how she got her start.

It was Halloween. It had been a great night for telling stories at Stinky Pete's, a swank topless club

located along the Mexican coast in the savage mountains just northeast of Puerto Vallerta. Aside from vagabonds, gypsies, prostitutes, drug dealers, college professors, writers, and crooked attorneys, few people ever came to this brutal and remote jungle area.

It was said that, at night in this area that was thick with jungle growth and man-eating pythons, death hung in the air like an invisible cape. Some people never made it out alive.

Every Thursday night, between six and eight, many social undesirables traveled to Stinky Pete’s simply to tell a good story or, better yet, to listen to one. People came from all over the world. The rule was simple: Anyone who had a good story was supposed to tell it to everyone else in the room.

On this night, Halloween, with a full moon overhead--blood-thirsty monkeys screaming in the trees just outside the establishment and poisonous white snakes hugging the dry, cracked earth--an extraordinary thing occurred.

"Listen," a grotesquely fat man sitting near the door and right next to the old juke box bellowed, stumbling to his feet and nearly turning over the table with its dozen or so bottles of beer. "I got a great story, too." The gorgeous redhead who had been sitting on his lap, looked up at him from her new position on the floor in surprise and disgust.

"Shut the fuck up, fat guts," said the one-eyed biker with the satanic tattoos sitting at the bar next to the back door and drinking his eleventh Bud Lite. An hour before, the biker had tried to tell a story about how the three duck brothers had tried to drown their crazy Uncle Donald. After five minutes of listening to this crap, many people were yawning. A couple had put their heads down on the tables before them and slept the sleep of the dead. Several people even stormed out of the place. Three of the strippers threatened to quit if the man with the satanic tattoos didn’t shut up and sit down. Humiliated beyond

words, the biker had flipped everyone off and sat down without finishing his story.

Shaken by the biker’s response, Fat Guts tottered. He began to sweat, feared that he was going to lose his lunch, and wondered if he were getting the heebie-jeebies.

"Yeah, sit down, you fuckin tub of lard," said a gorgeous raven-haired woman named Raven66, who sat at a table in the middle of the room surrounded by husky men, all of whom were doing their best to get into her pants. Raven66 was the most obscene of strippers who, within the past three years, had successfully undergone a sex change operation. She was known throughout the civilized world for her expertise in her snake routine. New York bankers and Wall Street brokers loved her. Her tits were huge, her nipples long and pointy. She too had told a story. When the crowd had let her finish her tale about a wolf and three pigs (in her version, the three pigs captured the wolf, tortured him mercilessly for days on end, and then ate him for supper), probably because she was topless and had a beautifully pierced navel, she had sat down to a room of applause. She did not want anyone upstaging her now, least of all a customer the others referred to as "Fat Guts."

This was too much for one man to bear. Intimidated by Raven66, Fat Guts considered calling the whole thing off. He looked around the room for some help. He was sure he had the heebie-jeebies. Then....

"Give him a chance, you bunch of sick worms!" boomed the manager, stepping around the bar and into the middle of the room. The manager was a small bespectacled man who wore a tweed jacket and blue jeans and who looked every inch a college English professor. Anyone who was half way sober, however, could see the manager was carrying a size 34" baseball bat (signature of Ken Griffey, Jr. inscribed on the barrel) and probably meant business." This is my place, and what I say goes. Right?? Fat guts gets to tell his story. Anybody don’t like it, they can see me out back. Where I shall pound his face in."

Subdued, intimidated, the meek yet hostile crowd sat back and calmly, patiently seemed to listen.

Fat guts, the man who had bellowed "Listen," relaxed visibly, straightened his brown and blue striped tie, zipped up his trousers, farted loudly, winked knowingly at the owner, and began again.

"Listen," he bellowed in a hoarse voice. "Once I knew a fellow who studied law in graduate school and then married a woman who turned out to be a raving lunatic. Early in their marriage, this couple had two children. By the time they were in high school, the kids Sarah and Justin were as nuts as the old lady. At dinner, night after night, the mother spun a web of paranoia, in which everyone was to blame for everything bad that ever happened to her. The mailman, the women working in the local drug store, the 7-11 clerks, the members of the local professional baseball team, and even people involved in government subsidized television laundry commercials--all were somehow and quite obviously involved in a labyrinthine conspiracy designed to bring the lawyer’s wife and kids down to the level of common prostitutes. (Er...pardon me, ladies.) The dogs prowling maliciously in the street, the trees howling just outside the front window, the flowers trying to steal the sunlight from everyone else--everything was involved in an intricate design to make this lady’s life, and the life of her children, absolutely miserable. Listening intently, dinner after dinner, the children began to spin their own webs, suspecting all the while (nonetheless) that dear old mom was not like other moms and may be quite off her rocker. One night, an angel appeared at Sarah’s window and told the girl that her mother was in league with the devil. Sarah noted that this angel was a short, dark fat little runt, not at all like the angels she had read about in the dark literature she ceaselessly consumed.

"The world, the mother, daughter and son had concluded, was just one big gigantic dark, lunatic conspiracy? "They’re out to get us all!" she screamed at her children night after night between bites of steak and potatoes." Here Fat Guts paused.

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls," Fat Guts suddenly asserted, gaining confidence, "this nonsense had to stop. God has created a just and balanced universe, and something had to be done to restore order. The husband, though a successful attorney, hadn’t the courage to stand up to his distraught wife. Clearly, it was up to the children, who plotted day and night against each other, against their friends, and against any adults who happened to cross their dark paths.

"One fine spring day, when the birds were singing and laughter was in the air, after the daughter

Sarah’s first year in college, when bullets were bouncing off the sidewalks of Cleveland and San Diego, the two kids--now in their late teens--went out to Johnny Reno’s for dinner one night and decided then and there that their mother had been absolutely instrumental in a clandestine plot that had resulted, for the last ten years or so, in the kids being mercilessly persecuted by their teachers and peers. Sure, Sarah and Justin loved their mother, but facts were facts, and Mom was at the core of the very conspiracies of which she accused others of being involved in. Sarah’s angel had been correct: Mom was part of a cosmic satanic plot."

II. Meanwhile, back at Johnny Reno’s....

"Let’s kill mom," whispered Sarah as she slurped her strawberry milkshake through a plastic red and white straw. "Let’s do it tonight," she said, visions of slicing and dismembering her mother whirling in a bloody pool in her head. Bloody Sarah--as she came to be known-- sat across from Justin at Johnny Reno’s, a swank 60’s place just outside Las Vegas that had partially been converted into a topless nightclub. The place was done entirely in red and black. Appropriately, Sarah was dressed in a long red and black gown.

"How we gonna do this?" asked Justin, wolfing down his third double cheeseburger and giving the passing waiter, a frail bespectacled man who taught English at a local high school and community college a knowing wink. "I mean, we just walk in to the house, pull out some old fuckin’ gun, and bang, bang?? Her brain explodes like a ripe tomato and Mom dies with two bullets into her brain, and dad and the kids live happily ever after? Sounds like a real gory Hansel and Gretel."

"Yeah. That’s basically it. Fuckin’ blood bath. Sounds like a plan to me," said Bloody Sarah, smiling, biting into her bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich. Tomato juice squirted across the table and struck Justin on the nose.. "I love Mom, but this is for the best. Let’s do it. Let’s take her down the crimson highway." Sarah despised her brother at this point in her life and imagined that she had just bloodied Justin’s nose.

"No," responded Justin, nearly throwing his cheeseburger, dripping ketchup, onto the table in front of him in disgust. "That ain’t a fuckin’ plan. That’s a question I asked you. Which I thought you had a plan." Misunderstandings between Sarah and Justin had increased as the kids grew older and the differences in their levels of intelligence had widened. One thing they agreed upon, however: their mother had to die a bloody horrific death.

"Nope," Sarah yodeled, yawing hugely, "wisht[sic] I did have a plan, but I don’t. As Mom always

says, "That girl doesn’t have a clue" Evil Sarah’s reddish hell-bat eyes fixed Justin it their sight. As always, she was leading on her incredibly stupid brother.

Both kids ate in sullen ponderous silence. Jets streaked overhead, taking off or landing at the nearby international airport. One could hear Justin, who made a point of eating with his mouth open, masticating his meat all the way across the restaurant.

Sarah, at ninety five pounds was a petite but beautiful brunette with killer tits that she showed off every chance she got. She had had a bleeding crucifix tattooed over her right breast. In fact, Sarah was a topless dancer at a local night club. She was also an occasional whore, but she never let that fact get in the way of her ambition to go to college, get a master’s in business management, and make a million bucks by the time she was thirty by buying a string of nightclubs in Mexico..

Justin, of course, was not petite. Coming from this sick and twisted family, he very likely had a weight problem. So I ask you to picture Justin as a three hundred fifty pound pimply-faced seventeen year old.

Justin was good at almost nothing: not football, which his father had encouraged him to play; not school work, which he found boring and more often than not totally incomprehensible; and not girls, most of whom avoided Justin like the plague. If the truth must be known, Justin was good at watching television, the only recreation aside from masturbation that he had ever truly enjoyed. He fed his mind on slasher movies (the more gory, the better), often imaginatively substituting his own friends as victims in a killing scene that drenched the screen and his own thick mind in blood. He learned about life through the tube.

III. A comforting voice speaks from the darkness....

Stinky Pete’s was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.. Televisions, placed strategically around the room to enable the customers to watch their favorite sporting event, silently glared at the seated and sweating members of the audience.. The moon hung suspended like a noose outside just over the establishment. Minds filled with bloody images, customers could hear the incessant low rumbling growls of beasts of the jungle who had gathered in a circle around Stinky Pete’s.

Unsure whom to trust, the scantily clad waitresses sat clustered together in a dark corner.. Fearing the proverbial knife in the back, Strippers had turned to stone.. The air was blue with cigarette smoke and the place reeked of tobacco; customers knew they were being suffocated. They all thought of their mothers.

"Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. This place gives me the creeps," said a thin, graying man, who sat twitching nervously at a table near the front. He suspiciously eyed his brother, seated directly across from him, and his brother never took his eyes off the thin graying man.

"I liked the story about the pigs eating the wolf a whole lot better," said the gorgeous blonde sitting at the table behind the man. She reached into her satin purse and wrapped her hand around the small silver pistol she always carried with her. Before the night was over, she knew she’d likely have to kill some one. Everyone in the room had become a potential enemy.

"Let’s watch TV," boomed the perspiring owner, fearing a mass exodus and a tremendous loss of revenue.

"Fat Guts" stood at attention, confronting the crowd of faces, wondering if he should continue. He had become, over the years, a legendary story-teller in the area, expert at creating an atmosphere of total paranoia. Many claimed he was possessed, creating a miasma of suspicion wherever he went. Before he could continue, a high pitched yet somehow comforting (because familiar?) voice hissed from the back: "This is the end of created time. We can all feel it. Surely the angel of death is upon us all. Please continue with your story, good sir.."

Everyone looked into the darkness in the back corner of the club but could not see who had just spoken.

"This is it, folks, the grand finale," came the high-pitched voice. As the story-teller and everyone else in the place looked into the shadows in the back, they could just make out the form of what appeared to be a very small person. "Let’s call the story "Let’s Kill Mom."

Suddenly, a small person stepped into the light for all to see. His darkness made him somewhat ethereal. He had close-cropped black hair, wore wrap-around sunglasses, sported a goatee, and wore a black suit and blazing red tie. Clouds of black smoke swirled furiously around him.

"Who the fuck are you?" asked the belligerent but frightened owner, raising his baseball bat and heading for the small man.

"I, my good sir," said the dark and diminutive man, fire spewing from his eyes and mouth, "am the mayor of this town, the king of this world, the angel of darkness and, I might add, the Lord of This Dark Universe. I am also a creation of this story. As are we all. Who the fuck are you?" Thunder was heard overhead, lightening cracked just outside the door, and the building shook to its foundation. A horrible bestial scream shredded the night air of the jungle closing in on the establishment.

Bloody fear spread like typhoid in the dark room.

Then silence fell like a lead-weight shroud as the story-teller continued. The Lord of this Dark Universe smiled and retreated to the reddish darkness in the back.

IV. Finally, Justin and Sarah put their muddled heads together.

Johnny Reno’s was rocking to the sounds of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. Men had gathered in the growing darkness around the tables to discuss business deals and favorite strippers. A gigantic black lizard crept across the floor.

"I think," commented Justin, studying his empty plate, his mouth full of cheeseburger, "that we wait until the folks are in bed, then tie the old man up with bailing wire and take the old lady down to the cellar."

"Not bad," said Sarah, obviously impressed with Justin’s cleverness. Still loudly slurping her milkshake, she asked, "What we gonna do then?"

"What we gonna do then is you stop slurpin’ that fuckin’ milkshake." Justin’s huge fat fist came crashing down onto the table, spilling his coke all over the table. Sarah stopped abruptly. "What we gonna do is chop that bitch to bits."

"Mom?"

"The one and only, God bless her twisted soul."

"Chop her up? How?"

"With a ax."

"We don’t got a ax, dumbbell."

"Knife?"

"You ever sliced up anybody with a knife, shithead?"

"Nope."

"Too messy, retard. You watch the slasher movies. You oughta know."

"Then how about we use a chain saw? Brrrrruum, bbbbrrrruuummm." In his excitement, Justin did his best imitation of his proposed death instrument. He had seen "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" twenty-seven times and counting.

At this suggestion, both teenagers looked up and stared wildly into each other’s eyes. Light bulbs of insight and revelation went off. Fireworks lit the night sky. Of course: a chain saw. Their father kept an old Black and Decker in the garage!

"Wow! We can cut the old crow up, stuff her in sandwich bags, and use her for snacks," Sarah crooned, certain now that her brother was one of the smartest men alive. "Chomp, chomp, chomp," she said, mimicking the sounds of eating.

"Egg-fuckin’-zactly," responded Justin with a huge cheesy smile. Onions stuck to his teeth. His shirt was stained with ketchup. "Or we could just have a big ole fuckin bonfire out back. A sort of bon voyage for the ole witch."

"Oooooohhhhh," Sarah squealed, calling the attention of everyone in the restaurant to her, "I likes it, bro. Let’s do it."

V. A second story-teller emerges....

In the hushed and stunned silence of Stinky Pete’s, the story-teller stopped, looked around, took a bow, and sat down. He began to drink from his half-empty glass of Wolf’s Head brew, a reddish liquid that was surely warm by now.

The crazed crowd remained silent, the TVs off, the music dimmed. No one moved. All eyes were on the story-teller, who they knew was in league with the dark powers of this world.

"That’s it?" asked Raven66. "Just like that? What about the ending?"

"You can’t leave us hangin’ like that, you fat prick," exclaimed Raven’s sister Fox69, the murderous redhead who happened to be sitting at the story-teller’s table.

"That’s enough for tonight, I believe," responded the fat story-teller, draining his glass of reddish beer, picking up his brief case, and rising to his feet. The damage had been done.

The crowd was outraged. As disturbing as the story seemed, as sickening as Sarah and Justin had become, the audience demanded an ending, however artless or tasteless. In fact, as they saw the story-teller headed for the door, brief case in hand, one person said, "Stop him.

Now!" Another screamed, "Let’s cut off the bastard’s dick!" Of course, not willing to risk involvement, no one made a move.

When the story-teller had left, all three hundred and fifty pounds of him, the man with the biker’s tattoos raised the question that was on all their minds: "Just what the fuck we gonna do now?"

Stories have a kind of magical charm, even the sickest of tales, and this one demanded an ending.

Therefore, forty minutes of complete, brain-numbing silence ensued. Everyone sat and thought. Then, the dark dwarf stepped forth into the light and, hands behind his back, took one quick glance around the room.

"You finish it," he said to no one in particular.

For forty more minutes, the crowd sat, thinking. People looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders. It seemed absolutely hopeless. Apparently, no one could think of an ending. Life as they knew it would be over.

Then, a petite but strikingly beautiful brunette stepped into the light. Though obviously a dancer—she wore a black net blouse that clearly exposed her breasts and a very small blazing red g-string--no one could remember seeing her. "I have a[sic] ending," she said, and all eyes turned towards her. Her reddish hell-bat eyes fixing on various people in the crowd, she began to conclude:

VI. Bloody Sarah speaks....

The moon rose full and bloody in the east the night of the killing. Halloween, I think. Clouds seemed to swirl madly through the night sky and desert vampire bats glided by overhead as Justin and Sarah cautiously approached the garage hand-in-hand. Mom and Dad were sitting in the living room inside, watching "Flipper" or "Gilligan’s Island" or some such shit designed to put the minds of Americans to sleep. I forget which.

An hour before, getting the cellar ready for their mother, in the presence of Sarah’s angel, the two had made a blood oath. Using one of their mother’s huge carving knives, each had sliced a hand. Blood flowed like water from a mountain spring down the arms of the siblings as they brought their crimson hands together, pledging eternal fidelity to each other, calling upon all the powers of darkness to sustain them through what they now viewed as an inevitable ritual.

Now, walking through the side door into the garage, they flicked on the dimming light and searched for their killing instrument. They didn’t have to look long. There, on the wall just above their beloved father’s tool bench hung the blood-red chain saw. To Sarah, it hung in the sign of the cross, surely a good omen. The chain saw was good news.

Taking the saw down from the wall, Justin removed the gas cap to check the tank. Because it had been two or three years since the saw had been used, the gas tank was as empty as most of the characters in this incredibly twisted little tale. But Justin and Sarah knew their father kept a can of gas in the garage for the lawn mower. Thus, as Justin held the chain saw, the cap off, Sarah picked the gas can, slowly opened it, and poured in the fuel.

When she was done pouring and Justin had put the cap back on, she asked, "Think it’ll work?"

Justin looked at his sister, his dark beady eyes blazing red dots. To Sarah, he looked delightfully possessed. Maybe both were possessed.

"Fuck yeah, it’s gonna work. Now we wait."

Like good children, Justin and Sarah crept back into the house, walked together down into the cellar, where they left the saw on an old couch, and then walked up the stairs and gaily into the living room, where for the next four and a half hours they sat in somber, bewitched semi-satanic silence,

watching mindless sitcom after mindless sitcom, both having reached the conclusion that tonight they would be doing Planet Earth one huge favor.

Finally, after a half-hour of Jay Leno’s inanities, insults hurled directly at the audience, the father pointed the clicker toward the TV and pushed the button. The picture on the tube vanished. "Time ta hit the hay," said dear ole dad. This is what he always said just before he and his lovely wife went to bed. It was a statement that, in the father’s opinion, was least likely to elicit a response from his schizophrenic wife, like, "What do you mean by that?"

VII. [At which point the teller excuses herself to go to the toilet]

VIII. The grim but ultimately satisfying finale....

As Mom and Dad headed for bed, I looked at Justin and smiled. He smiled back. I think we were actually in love with each other at that moment. Certainly, we had had sex with each other frequently through the years of our troubled adolescence.

Then I looked to the window. There stood my angel, a short dark thing, smiling hugely, dressed in a red and black gown. I wanted to make things right with the invisible powers that ruled our lives.

Justin and I sat in the darkness of the living room as we listened to our parents prepare for bed. Worse that some of the sitcoms they watched, the ritual seemed to go on forever. First, they undressed and got into their pajamas. Then, they brushed their teeth. Then, Mom took her pills. Then, Dad took his pills. Then, they said evening prayers. Then, they got into bed and fucked, I guess. Then they were out like lights.

First we had to make sure our dad, brave soul, didn’t wake up. Knowing that Mom had taken enough sleeping pills to kill an elephant, I gave Justin the large pillow that he held over father’s face. With Justin’s nearly four hundred pounds on top of him, Daddy could barely move. He gave a couple of muffled yells, kicked wildly for a minute, then all was still. His breathing had stopped, and Justin pulled the pillow back.

Because we [I, actually] thought our father might still be alive, Justin pulled him into a sitting position and, sobbing, with one swift and sickening twist, broke father’s neck. I heard it snap. It was neat work.

Now it was mom’s turn. Mom had slept like a baby so far. Justin pulled back the covers, picked up Mom like she was a rag doll, and carried her out of the room. Carrying Mother’s body, he followed me down the stairs and into the cellar.

By the time we reached the bottom of the stairs, Mom was somewhat awake. Groggily, she asked,

"Wh...wh...where we goin’, lamb chops?" She always called Justin lamb chops, a name he loved.

"Now, now, Mama," Justin whispered soothingly, "we’re just going to help you sleep a little more soundly than you do. We love you so."

I saw Mother give a stupid smile. She breathed "Mama loves her lamb chops," closed her eyes, and drifted back to sleep in her giant son’s arms.

"We can’t kill her like this," bawled Justin, setting Mom gently in an old cushioned rocking chair that my grandparents had given her and dad as a wedding gift. "She’s sleepin’ like a baby lamb."

I grew impatient with my brother’s gentle giant routine. "That’s just the point, dumb ass. That is precisely the fuckin’ point of what we are doin’ tonight. We take her out of this life and usher her into the next precisely when she is sleeping like a baby. If we kill her when she is innocent, she’ll go to heaven. It’ll be all right. God told me so. Let’s bloody the bitch."

"Look, Fuck Brain," I added, figuring I couldn’t handle the saw, "Dad is already there waiting. At

Heaven’s Gate. You don’t wanna make the ole man sad, do you? You wanna be the one fucks up?"

Tears streaming down his fat face, Justin looked at me with his tiny beady black eyes. I didn’t know if Justin would buy what I had just said. But Justin surprised me, at least for the moment. "Just tell me what to do, sis," he requested between huge gasping sobs, and at that moment I loved Justin more than anybody in the world.

Following my instructions, Justin pulled the chord that started the grinding death-whine of the chain saw. Then, grabbing hold of Mother’s long and stringy black hair, I held the woman’s head steady and told Justin to start with the head. "Hit the neck first, then go to the arms and legs, and then the smaller stuff," I confidently reassured my brother.

Meekly, a servant doggedly doing as he was told, Justin forced himself to work. His first attempt was amateurish: as soon as the chain hit bone, blood spurting like a geyser, he jumped back like a sinner scorched by the fires of hell.

Mom, a huge bloody cavity in her neck, was trying to say something. Her mouth formed into a dark round O. "Oooooohhhhh," she moaned. Her eyes were wide open, fixed on my angel, who stood directly across from mother. Christ, it was an awful moment.

Fuck!! Look at this, lard butt; she’s alive. Bleedin’ but alive!!!"

Justin just looked at me, holding the howling chain saw to his side. I was afraid he was going to cut off his leg, so I let go of Mom’s bloodied head, which flopped limply and bloodily to one side, and screamed at my dear brother, "Here, ass!. You hold Mom and I’ll take the fuckin’ chain saw!!!!"

I don’t know where I found the strength, but when I seized that humming saw from Justin, I felt

renewed power and, as weeping Justin held mom’s head, I completed the task. Severing head from trunk was like cutting bread. Like rain in refreshingly violent thunderstorm, blood sprayed everywhere as I took Mom apart piece by piece. From the head, I went to the arms, then the legs, and then her torso. Once, Justin started screaming like a baby in pain.

"Justin," I screamed in a rage, "I am losin’ all my fuckin’ patience!!! I am fuckin’ losin’ it, sweetheart. I am fuckin’ losin’ it, bro!!"

"Sorry, sis," he sobbed, clearly humiliated by his failure of nerve, "but somehow I don’t feel real good about this." He rubbed his meaty bloody fists in his red eyes.

"What did you say, you enormous fucking meat pie piece of dog shit? What the fuck did you just say to your older sister??" Now I was screaming. "You’ll feel good about this, you son of a bitch," I angrily muttered, easily separating Mom’s hands from her arms, "or I’ll cut you in two, baby guts!!"

Drenched in Mother’s blood, Justin finally got a hold of himself. He had to. Drenched in blood myself, I would have killed him. "Turn on the TV while I finish up," I said, motioning for him to take a seat on the old couch. An old TV from Mom and Dad’s college days stood in the corner of the cellar. Justin sat down and used the old flicker to turn on the TV. I think an Itchy and Scratchy cartoon was on.

After I had cut up and bagged Mom, I went up stairs, dragged the second corpse down into the cellar, and cut Dad’s body into little itty bitty pieces. Then, not missing a beat, a good environmentalist to the bloody end, I held the purring chain saw to Jusitn’s neck and forced my blubbering brother to bury the pieces of Mom and Dad in the garden out back under plants and bushes that had grown there for fifty years. Then, after Justin and I got cleaned up, I used the money I had made dancing and whoring to get us on a plane to Mexico the next day.

IX. God bless you, Bloody Sarah....

"...to get us on the plane to Mexico the next day," Bloody Sarah (the petite dancer, for it was no other than she) concluded, her voice a severe monotone. In the satanic silence, they all could hear rain pounding the corrugated tin roof overhead. The drought was over. Primed for a blood feast, beasts awaited them all right outside the door.

The story was followed by five or ten minutes of stunned, sickened, frightened silence. No one knew what to do next. All but Sarah could feel the flames of Hell licking the soles of their feet. Sure that judgment had come, the biker and Raven66 held hands, knelt together by the door and said a series of "Our Fathers" and "Hail Marys."

Coming to Stinky Pete’s to listen to a story about how the little pigs ate the wolf or about how his nephews turned on Donald Duck and fed him to the sharks was one thing. But this devilish story, told by the demented chain saw murderer herself, went far beyond the writer’s code of etiquette. Indeed, the story seemed to be nothing more than a murderous assault upon the intelligence, emotions and imagination of every person present. And therein lay the secret to the success of this story,

After all, one must never over-estimate one’s audience. Thus, as the little dark dwarf took his position next to the story-teller, putting one arm around her waist and raising the other in the air, the crowd broke into thunderous, wild applause. Fears slowly retreated like beasts returning to their dark lairs in the jungle outside. They had loved the story, an abrogation of good taste and decency, a potential best-seller, and told the dark dwarf(none other than Sarah’s angel)that they wanted more. They begged her forgiveness for they way they had treated "Fat Guts," who(of course) was none other than Justin.

Graciously, in the manner of Mary, the Mother of God, Sarah granted total forgiveness with wave of her hand and the jiggling of her tits. Which were beautiful.

And that was how Bloody Sarah, soon to become a major cultural figure in all civilized countries, got her start as a brilliant teller of bloody tales.

Revelations at Cafe Bean
(8:11 in the morn, no sleep, on October 31,1998)
by Rewired

The boy had been writing for some time before he noticed him: a tall man with bushy brown hair in a brown coat drawing things in the sky with his finger. He was outside the open door of the greenhouse. The strange man appeared to have walked to the coffee shop, because he saw no car outside to suggest otherwise. After awhile the man looked confused, put his head to the ground and his hands in his coat, walked in and smiled at the boy. He had been sitting in a chair, with the open book in one hand and a pen to a sheet of notebook paper in the other.

"Whatcha readin' there?" He finally said, the man in the brown coat.

"Gods of Eden," answered the boy, in a less-than-enthusiastic tone, "I'm sure you wouldn't be interested."

"What's it about?"

He sniffed. "Extraterrestrials."

"You believe in that stuff, huh?"

He shook his head without looking up from the pages of the book. "I don't know what I believe in anymore."

"What do you mean?"

"The country, the world, these people - just myself. I believe in myself, that's all - for as all I know all else is a dream."

"Kind of ego-centric, doncha think?"

"A bit. But I figure I'm the one being in my life that won't let me down - the one being in my life that it's okay to use."

"And the only being in your life you don't seek to control."

"What are you - a spy?" He laughed, finally looking up at the weird man. "You watch me night and day, read all my things, pry into my dreams? You really think you know me, the totality of who I am? If so, you might actually have enough adequate information onto which to base understanding, and thus if you stretch it a bit the judgmental statement you just spoke might actually be justified. But I figure you're probably just some average Joe that thought he'd check out Northdon's new coffee shop. So go order something."

"You are one bitter person."

"Fuck you."

"So you ever have passion for anything other than your selfish need to know and control? If you don't mind saying so, that is."

"As a matter of fact, there was something, or more accurately put ‘someone’, but I fucked it up."

"Why's that?"

"My own self-interests. I had some experiences I couldn't readily explain. It didn't make sense in the view on life I had, so I tried to stretch my mind and views to fit what I believed to be the truth behind my experiences. By the time I'd changed my mind and decided that I was riding horseback on a dillusion and chasing shadows, me and her had broken up due to my immense stupidity, after which she quickly changed her personality from a depressed little girl with beautiful pink hair to a beautiful blond-haired girl with a mask of egocentric attitude, gotten engaged to a buff, camouflaged army guy who has about as much hair as a peach, cheated on him, messed around with a whole bunch of guys, dumped him, fucked him the night before she left anyway, ignored how I told her how I felt about her - using the three words I'd been saving for the right girl for nearly two decades of life - as she held her nose high in the air and trotted off to the Army Reserves. So I admitted I fucked up, fell into philosophy and occult, decided to write two books and make about a quadrillion short stories, one of which I'm working on. That's why. Buy some coffee - try the chocolate-raspberry - it's got one hell of a zip."

"Stubborn sunuva-bitch aren't you?"

"My mom would appreciate that."

"So what might your problem be? A lack of commitment to anything behind your brain, ignorance to the whispering of your yearning heart, hand-feeding your penal yearnings - "

"Little personal, there."

"As open as you've let yourself be to the people you're close to, it's only in words and not in true heart."

"I've cried around a few of my friends."

"Over?"

"Her."

"Something so painful - your own ignorance to a girl that was throwing her heart at you - that not even you could handle loosing such a gem..."

"Yeah, well life's a bowl of rotting strawberries. You've got a point?"

"Carpe Diem."

"So ignore the past, live the day, push away all that I've learned - "

"No, move passed all that you dwell on, living off the knowledge you've gained."

"That life is a pointless mobius strip of eternal bullshit that no one can escape? You pursue being a funny guy with a geeky friend in middle school, you chase after creatures from another world during high school, and after you barely graduate you realize you love a girl you've known for nearly three years and have gone out with on at least three separate intervals, and you still end up empty-handed, with a gaping void in your chest where nothing - and I mean nothing - leaves you satisfied. So you end up sitting around in coffee shops all day contemplating the whys and hows of the forever-expanding universes.

"Life, for me, is sitting down and watching. Anything else hurts even more."

"Weren't you the one preaching that you'd rather die on your feet than live on your knees?"

"My knees got so sore from kneeling before the mundane assholes of this society that my forehead was bleeding, so I tried to make a stand, but I lost my footing - so I thought I'd take a seat, seeing as how it so elegantly places me in that perpetually chaotic dualistic land of in-between, where you're nowhere and everywhere at once, and get nothing done in the outside world but a billion contradictory things done in those hidden realms inside your oversized cranium. Wanna smoke?"

"Sure." He said, taking one from the boy.

They both lit up. The boy ground down his cherry in the ashtray, squinting his eyes so as not to sting it with cigarette smoke. "Why are you so concerned, anyway?"

"I'm as curious as you."

"But I've given you so much information, and you've given me next to nothing. Tell me some deep, embarrassing, soul-wrenching secrets about yourself."

"I just escaped a genetics lab."

"Cool."

"I was born yesterday - large mother."

"Interesting."

"I'm an alien drone sent to feed off the experiences of the self-conscious sentient beings of this mindless planet, set the truth of their selves right before their eyes, and irritate them until the thread of sanity they hopelessly cling to severs and they fall into the ever-gaping hole of insanity."

"Good variety in this town."

"I'm an inter-dimensional traveler."

"Yipes."

"I'm a spy - no, no, an assassin for a top secret shadow government sect."

"Provocative."

"I have no penis."

"More believable."

"I'm an unemployed, flannel-clad would-be philosophical writer seeking vast amounts of nicotine and soothing, searing hot, caffeinated beverages so I can grovel about the inadequacies of my life to better understand why my present state of existence feels so miserable and undeniably pointless."

He sat back and eyed him curiously. "Dear lad, are you mocking me?"

"I'm insane, that's all - just like you."

"You know, there are some who say that only the insane believe they’re sane, and that the insane are therefore perfectly sane."

"So if I gargle my own urine, spit it out on an eighty-year-old grandmother and march around singing `London Bridges Falling Down' backwards, in pink panties and a push up bra worn as ear muffs, and boldly pronounce that I'm insane, I'm perfectly normal?"

"According to a good sum of my friends."

"These are indeed unique individuals that seem to be attracted to you like flies to a light bulb in a cool summer's eve."

"Need some bug spray."

"You seek solitude?" He laughed at the boy. "You really haven't learned from experience, have you?"

He shrugged, taking a hit of his cigarette. "I need time to reflect. Time to find my own sanity."

"You run away thinking they'll always be chasing after you. That they'll always be patiently waiting for you until you decide you want to appear. You think they'll cling to you all you life, and as they pull on you, you can push away harder and try and show them how strong you are, blaming it on morals or `needing some alone-time' or whatever, and as soon as they begin to push away, too, you begin to pull. It's like a never ending circle with you. Soon they'll push away and you'll never get another chance again." He laughed. "You stupid fuck, I thought you learned that with Katie."

The boy socked him in the teeth. Blood squirted out of the weird man's mouth.

"You fuck." He told the bleeding man, "You indecent fuck."

"A little touchy? Temper-temper." The guy just laughed at the boy with the reddened face.

"I'm inclined to staple-gun your testicles to a bug zapper and watch you scream in indescribable agony."

"I don't think you'll do it."

He glared at him.

"Oooo- the dark side to your soul shines through. You know, you should be more open, that evil side of you just grows the more you hide it. It's bound to lash out on an innocent bystander at the most inconvenient time, like those people you mindlessly decapitate in your worst dreams - dare I say you enjoy it?"

"Who are you, a messenger from the hole in my head?"

"Your getting closer - I threw out enough hints."

"You keep out of my head, you fuck."

"You fuck, you fuck, you fuck - you just love that word sometimes. You need to get laid, boy, real bad."

He sat down. "Don't call me boy."

"Shoulda got fucked by her. Shoulda let her in a little, least your first fuck would've been by somebody you love."

"Shut the hell up."

"You dicked her over - figuratively, unfortunately - and she won by giving up on you. Her chance now, her turn to show you what it feels like to be neglected and pushed away."

"Just die already." He said, standing up, and pounding the soul of his boot into his face. "It'll save us both some torture."

"I don't mind the pain, I get used to it! I've grown cold, I'm emotionally dead! I'm everything in your friends, all those little elements in the people you know that you despise but find strangely provocative... you know why? Because that's what you're becoming! A madman, boy, a madman!"

"I said don't call me boy. Now die already." The boy grabbed a chair and proceeded to slam the fallen man's head in. As could be expected, it made a big mess, but it didn't stop the sorry son of a bitch from talking.

"Oh, that's right," he corrected, "you're a man right now. Almost twenty. Then you've got three years or so left, and then you die. Face it, you fool, you're gonna grow old! Old, and miserable because you won't let a damn soul in, always seeking a higher power, a greater state of consciousness and the answers to all your ass-born questions. Get a life! It keeps on calling you, but you keep your ass on that chair, writing, thinking, killing your nerves and your lungs. And your little friends, interesting as they might be, you let them drag you off into a dozen different directions at once - even to jail - and you just let them rip you to shreds because you’re a `kind, caring soul.' You’re as cold-hearted as anyone, probably more so!

You're feeding off them, you're trying to control them and you hate them for what they're letting you do to them because you hate who you are! Face you're nature, you're a manipulator, and evildoer, a destroyer, a breaker. And you hide as a healer, a philosopher, a writer, a good, and yet simultaneously an obviously absent-minded and mentally short-circuited and emotionally confused friend! Wake up!"

"For the lack of god, die!"

"And this whole god idea... you don't believe in him on the outside, but inside you think you ARE him! That the world's your dream. Maybe you don't want to fuck a girl because, in the girl being part of life and thus `your dream', you'd be fucking yourself. Course, even if life's a dream all those wet dreams you have would be, in essence, fucking yourself. Aw, face it, there's no way around it - you just thrive off fucking yourself over. You're just better at it from the inside out!"

"There's blood pouring out of a dozen different orifices I've made in

your chest and you're still talking? What are you, a ghoul from a horror flick?"

"And this whole morality thing? Good, evil? Face it, all is harmful, destructive! All is evil! It's impossible not to do evil!"

"Sleep, you ass munch, sleep!"

"Ha! Look at you!"

"DIE!"

"Stop!" He pleaded. "Time for coffee and another cigarette. I've got to go order something. Scuse me."

The bleeding man got up and walked out the door. I sat back down at my chair, sipping my cooling beverage, lit up another one and resumed writing.

For a moment a word came to mind, a word pertaining to something that might help cure this mental disease of mine, but I shook it off. It made my stomach growl.

The word was decaf.

There is Anarchy in the Summerfields
by Wolfe

There is anarchy in the summerfields
The soybeans
are Socialist Democratic
with each
growing to a uniform height
never wanting
greater height than neighbor plants
The corn
a Monarchy,
tall, proud but thin, fragile;
standing on dirt
Wheat is Communist
using the manifesto wind
as an excuse
to wave in unison,
but only managing an occasional ripple
Green Beans
are Democracy
thinking they can grow
as long as they want, but
just getting tangled
in each other's vines

Desire
by Rewired

Desire (#1)

It's not the goal in mind I wish to possess
it's the desire that I wish to crave
the feeling surrounds me, the energy bounds me
let free in a focused, blissful rage.
To want, to need, isn't satisfied
when it is found that which one seeks
the search is the rave, the power we crave,
without passion our poor hearts leak.
One doesn't love, they love the feeling,
it's not the catch, it is the chase
logic, nailing down - all backasswords
once you find, time to erase.

Desire (#2)

Build upon the seated goals, step upon the blazing coals
to reach ever higher, to another level -
another pointless fire.
Yet only is it pointless in the seriousness of thinking,
that it's the object and not the desire.

The Zit on my Butt
by Holly Day

Momma always said I could never
leave well enough alone. Started small
couldn't even see it
no matter which way I twisted in front
of the mirror, late night flashbacks-
wasn't it here in Florida
that that one fat truck driver got one
turned into some flesh-dissolving strain of strep
that left him crippled and mutilated for life?
Reach around, feel
the tiny mute Braille
scratch, tug at my skin
feel the lump
growing hard
and "Damn it!" next morning
I can see it now, feel it every time
I sit, invisible bump grown to yellowing knob
wart on the end of my tailbone, too many
dreams: my skin swollen black
raging fever ripping my body in half, supermarket
tabloid husband crying, "I didn't know she was
that sick!" wake to sweaty sheets, oily skin
and new company budding
beside the first.

"About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgement."
-Josh Billings-

The Book of Plagiarism
by Tinman

CHAPTER ONE: Classic Plagiarism

Everybody knows that plagiarism is wrong. It is a form of theft: taking another person’s work as one’s own. It also involves lying, cheating, and sloth. However, although plagiarism is a regrettable, avoidable, and generally detestable crime, it is not an incredibly bothersome one. People who engage in plagiarism to any extent are generally lazy, stupid people who are not intelligent enough to do their own work. They would rather copy, verbatim, a story, poem, paper, etc., than write something themselves. Often, they are unaware of the content of what they are copying and frequently do not even understand the piece. They will use, for instance, a big word and not even bother to find out what it means. This is, as mentioned, because they are stupid and lazy.

Intelligent people find it very difficult to plagiarize. It is actually very boring to sit down and copy a couple thousand words of text. There are much better things that a smart person could be doing. In fact, most smart people can think up a story and write it down faster, more efficiently, and with fewer mistakes than they can copy one. Moreover, smart people are often tempted to edit what they are plagiarizing. They want to improve it. Eventually they simply decide that they could just write better by themselves and so they do that.

Obviously, classic plagiarism is a bad thing. It is punishable by criminal prosecution and, if used in an academic environment, may be grounds for expulsion. It is dishonorable and a trademark of poorly educated persons. However, there are some forms of plagiarism which are not so easily classified and which are very good things. These will be addressed in the remaining chapters.

CHAPTER TWO: Inspiration

Often, when intelligent people are reading a story, watching a movie, or listening to a song, they will hear or see or read something that strikes them in a particular way. If they continue to think about it, some sort of creative development will come out of that line or scene. This is perfectly all right. It is called inspiration and is not classic plagiarism. A person cannot be prosecuted for being inspired.

Pieces of art that have been inspired in this way can usually be detected fairly easily. Their titles almost always reflect or relate the bit of inspiration that produced them. Thus, a story with a title that makes absolutely no sense was probably an inspired story. For instance, John Steinbeck’s novels The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men were probably the products of this process. The f