The Thing from Elsewhere

Saturday night, late but still early, an inner ring of Washington, DC. A man and a woman are in their apartment. It’s a typical east coast city dwelling: small, forced, cosmically unaffordable. The man and the woman are a couple. He thinks they’ve been together for “about two years,” while she knows it’s been two years and five months and a slender week. It is December 25th, known in most social circles as Christmas, and the usually rowdy downtown had been asphyxiated by the anti-vibe of deep December.  

The man—since we can call him anything, let’s call him something interesting and yet not too wayward: Jody—is naked and standing, staring through the living room blinds at an ambitious lightning storm and a steady but merciful rainfall that had besieged their Saturday night.

“Something’s out here,” he said, looking at the silhouette of a misshapen thing on the roof of the apartment building behind them. The top of the building was about thirty feet away and thirty feet up, which put it just about level with their window.

The woman—let’s call her Jodi, for consistency’s sake—took notice of his words but did not respond to them.

“They passed that Idiom Law thing,” she said, to neither really him nor herself. She was sneering at her phone, face aglow with algorithms, equally naked and splayed out across a plateau of chewy-looking rug. Jody and Jodi had only five minutes ago resurfaced from a vicious fuckfest, domestic fury, blowback from a double digits’ worth of hours spent apart from each other, and their bones and tendons and tendons and ligaments would remind them all about it in the morning.

“Idiot Law?”

“Idiom,” Jodi said, looking up at him. “Platitudes and aphorisms and all that.”

“Sad day for horses.”

“What?” Jodi said, immediately aborting the query when she realized it was just an unfunny quip. With a gymnastic panache, she sat up and shapeshifted herself into a tidy buddha position and started reading off her phone. “Offendable idioms in any context, either written or verbal, shall be punished by no less than a twenty-five dollar punch in the face…”

That secured Jody’s attention, so she continued, “….no less than a twenty-five dollar fine, et cetera, et cetera.”

“What’s an offendable idiom?”

“Any sort of jerky statement that is anachronistic to the current cultural climate,” Jodi said, now looking at an online menu of a nearby sushi joint. One of their bellies had growled nine times in three minutes.

“Give me an example.”

“Indian giver, rarer than a bald Bolivian, quicker than a Kenyan . . . ”

“You make those up?”

“Those last two, yeah.”

Jody strained his brain for a mean-spirited idiom but arrived at nothing. He said, “What human pothole came up with the idea of legislating this?”

“That senator from the Dakotas,” Jodi said. “Chief What’s-Her-Nuts.”

“I’m guessin’ Kill Whitey ain’t on the list.”

“That’s a mantra where I come from.”

That pissed Jody off a little bit, so he upped the ante. “It’s like this whole country’s twat started gushing blood all at once.” He could feel her glare on the back of his head, so he changed the subject. “I swear there’s something out here.”

“Rats is what’s out there,” said Jodi. “Rats and them busted-up lookin’ city squirrels.”

“No, no, I mean like some sort of night creature. Something that came in with the storm.”

Jodi looked up at him again and said, “You’re weirdin’ me out, Plaquemine.” This would be Jodi’s solution to the Jody and Jodi business: refer to Jody by his cumbersome, slapstick surname. (Jody’s solution was to simply lop off the second half of Jodi’s name and repeat the first half: Jojo.)

Jody fingered his mustache and said, “I guess my brain is restless from the crazy amount of electricity in the air. That and that freaky fucking movie.”

Before fucking, they half-watched some Eastern European thing about postmodern werewolves. Shaky and frantic and lacking any semblance of a story, the overall uncertainty of the movie succeeded (unintentionally) in doing a number on Jody’s brain.

Jodi said, “I liked that at the end you find out you’re the werewolf and not the, you know, the people that looked like werewolves.”

“They didn’t look like werewolves, they looked like languid Englishmen in dogboy costumes that had been patched together by their mums. They weren’t even fuzzy. ” Jody closed the blinds, quickly reopened them. “You hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That,” he said, “You don’t hear that?”

Jodi heard nothing aside the pianissimo rainfall. She looked at Jody and opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.

“Nevermind,” Jody said. “My ears are being weird.”

“You’re being weird.”

Jody walked to his archipelago of clothes and began to dress. “I think I know what it is.” He put on his shirt and hat before boxers and pants. “In fact, I know I exactly know what it is.”

“What is thy reason for this great confidence?” Jodi said, with a sort of feigned annoyance.

“Lightning with no thunder.”

It occurred to Jodi there had indeed been no thunder.

“Lightning with no thunder isn’t that weird. It’s that other way around that’s weird,” she said, shimmying into her panties. “You sure there hasn’t been any thunder?”

“Positive. I mean, if there was thunder, we would have heard it, right?”

“Yeah, but we had the TV on, and it’s not like we were listening for it and—“

Without warning a thunder more thunderous than the most Hollywood thunder in history thundered…

“Jesus,” said Jody. “You okay? Ah, fuck…”

The thunder had toppled the bottle of red wine they had been sipping on. Jodi grabbed it and put it back on the coffee table.

Jody grabbed a roll of paper towels out of the kitchen and said, “Which book of the Old Testament did that shoot out of?”

“Every single one of them, plus Revelation,” Jodi said, ripping off a few sheets from the roll of paper towels and soaking up the tiny lagoon of wine. “It’s like the thunder had been lying behind the couch waiting for us to start yammering about it.”

Jody went back to the window and stood there for a little while, haphazardly dressed, looking at the lightning, which had grown much more frequent and more frenetic. Paparazzi flashes; unsympathetic, merciless spritzes of pure light.

He said, “There’s a succubus for the ages sitting on top of that house right there.”

“That’s not a house, that’s a bank,” said Jodi, joining him at the window. “And that isn’t a succubus, it’s a chimney.”

“The banks on this planet do not have chimneys.”

 “The ones in this neighborhood do,” Jodi corrected. “They just don’t have fireplaces. Or they used to, but they don’t anymore.”

“Still, that ain’t a chimney,” said Jody. “I’m tellin’ you, it’s some sort of night creature.”

Jodi squinted through the blinds. The dark lump was basically a silhouette of the poop emoji. Jodi could not tell if it was indeed quivering a little bit or if it was just the rain. “It’s probably crows,” she said, after ten long seconds of examination.

Jody turned and looked at her. “I’ll be fifty in four years and I have never not one time seen a crow at night. Not even dead.”

“Then what you are looking at is what you call expectant attention,” Jodi said to him, matter of factly. “You are misinterpreting visual cues because you want whatever it is to be one of your damn cryptids or whatever. All those Mothman and Bigfoot documentaries you drool your way through have at long last melted your brain.”

Jody swiveled to face her. “Come on, those documentaries are fun. Wholesome, noncommittal, soul-enriching entertainment. Plus, they’re as free as yesterday’s doughnuts.”

“They ought to be paying you fifteen bucks an hour plus gratuity to sit through them,” Jodi said, recalling the last documentary she had to yawn her their way through: The Wondering Eye of Biscuitville, it had been called. Why, Jodi had wondered while watching it, had it been wondering instead of wandering, also wondering if wondering was simply a huge fuck up by either the documentarians, as they optimistically called themselves, or just a manifest clerical error by the townsfolk of Biscuitville. Jodi also wondered how a whole community could get by without using a single syllable of honest-to-God English, as the film suggested, and she wondered how any homo sapiens with a cerebral cortex could even live in Biscuitville, which, due to the pure insignificance of the few neighboring townships, found itself as county seat of Sesquipedalianacana County—basically the hives-infested thorax of a comprehensively dilapidated region in the middle of United States. She also had wondered how the legend of the Wondering Eye of Biscuitville (affectionately dubbed Webby by the locals) had somehow existed for over two millennia without anyone actually laying eyes on it. (Half of the documentary consisted of whatever local they could prop up standing there staring at the ground and fidgeting like a hamster and muttering cryptic ten-car pile-ups like: “I know what I think I probably maybe saw.”)… The Native Americans of the region had allegedly called the Wondering Eye “Hwathachonkamathonk,” which directly translates to “Hoax of the White Devil.” Jodi, who was a fine surveyor of detail, had also wondered why the Biscuitville library, where the documentarians had done most of their shooting, had contained six books and eight televisions.

Jodi cupped her hand around Jody’s balls, which were sexed-out and in a state of retreat. “Do you actually think Mothman exists?”

“I don’t think he doesn’t not exist.”

“Jesus fuggin’ Christ.”

“I mean, generally I don’t recognize anything my Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize,” Jody said, reengaging the window. “But I do think those people are seeing something out there.”

“That’s silly. This whole world is basically one big film studio now—everyone has their own private cameraman right there in their hand, all day all week—yet we get nothing but blurry image after blurry image,” Jodi said, walking away from the window and sitting down on the couch. She opened a six dollar bag of potato chips, prompting the dog to come into the room.

“Let me ask you,” she said. “What if some good ol’ boy finally plugs Bigfoot, and they haul him down to the Smithsonian or wherever, and come to find out he only wears about a size 8½?”

“Moot point,” Jody said, joining her on the couch. “Most people call him Sasquatch, not Bigfoot.” He ate a few of her chips and threw a couple at the dog.

Outside a car horn blared, a small sounding dog barked, the lightning flickered, the rain kept hissing, and occasional thunder grumbled but there weren’t any more city razing sonic bursts like the one that rattled them earlier.

Jody’s imagination started doing its thing. He stood up and walked over to the window again and looked outside. “Whoa,” he said. “Come check this out…”

The lumpen silhouette thing on the roof had either grown a little larger or was now a few yards closer to them.

“It’s closer, right?”

Jodi agreed that the thing was indeed a little closer.

Jody asked Jodi where the flashlight was and she reminded him that it was on the floor next to his side of the bed, where he had put it only a few days ago.

Jody went in their bedroom and got the flashlight and when he got back to the living room, Jodi said, “What the fuck . . .” He was motionless, staring out the window. “I definitely saw it move. It’s coming closer.”

“No way.” Jody stuck the flashlight through the blinds and aimed it at the thing. He turned it on but nothing happened. Repeat, same results. No light. Jodi took it from him and tried it too. She snapped open the latch in its abdomen and took out the batteries and put them back in and tried to turn it on again. Nothing.

“Oh, well,” she said. “Wasn’t meant to be.”

“It’s gone anyway,” Jody said. “Check it out . . .”

Jodi confirmed it indeed appeared to be gone.

“So fucking weird,” she said. “Maybe it was a garbage bag or something.”

“I’m baffled,” Jody said. He looked at the dog, who was now asleep, his paw masquerading as a little pillow. “This dude’s not getting employee of the month this month, that’s for sure.”

“Does he need a walk? What time is it?”

They agreed he did need a walk so they continued getting dressed and then the three of them walked down their three flights of stairs and did a slo-mo amble around the block while the dog did its business. When they got back to their apartment, the sushi that they had forgotten they had ordered was waiting for them on their doorstep in a paper bag that was stapled together beyond belief.

Back in the apartment now, they sipped on wine and nibbled on sushi for a little while and then one by one worked their way into bedroom, where they capsized and dozed off.

In the morning, over coffee and scrambled eggs, they speculated very briefly about what the thing was that they either saw or didn’t see, mutually deciding it was nothing. (“It was nothing, babe. Probably a rogue garbage bag, like you said… Yep, for sure, either that or our eyes were screwing with us.”). The topic was never brought up again in their remaining forty years together. (They lived to be old but stayed relatively healthy and kept in great spirits, which was no small feat considering the world around them seemed to be exponentially atrophying both mentally and physically. The only pain they would really experience would last about a tenth of a second, when, on their third leisurely trip to Antarctica, the vessel that they were on smacked into a Soviet mine that had wriggled its way out of the Volta and been drifting around the ocean since the opening paragraph of the Cold War).

If only the batteries in their flashlight had not been dead all those years ago in their tiny apartment! Jody and Jodi would never know—and how would they know!—that the thing they had seen on the roof was indeed a creature, and not just a creature, but a monster, all claws and fangs and terrible intent. While they were watching it, speculating, bandying suggestions about what it was or wasn’t, the creature had been watching them, sizing up its chances against taking them both on, eagerly waiting for them to separate so it could attack them one at a time. When the dog entered the room, the thing reluctantly decided to abort and go eat rats and pigeons and stray cats and maybe take a chunk out of some homeless guy’s leg. And Jody had been right! For the creature had come in with the storm. And in the morning, it was back in the stratosphere, its appetite sated, riding the storm to everywhere and nowhere. Eventually it would need sustenance and it would again land in whatever city or town or neighborhood it ended up over, and it would snatch and chomp whatever or whoever it could, until its belly had no vacancy, and only then would it ascend back into the stormy sky.

We cannot fault Jody and Jodi for their desultory interest in the thing from elsewhere that had visited them that night. If there is one circumstance that a person is exempt from having even the thinnest membrane of ambition, it is the expanse of non-time after sex. Maybe next life, Jody and Jodi! For this queer opportunity shall indeed require another lifetime . . .

Once a lifetime the universe will open its mouth for you and let you look down its throat, the cosmos will slip off its nightgown and say come and get it, and you must be prepared for this moment, otherwise you will not recognize the opportunity. You will look directly at a thing you know in your bones is from elsewhere and tell yourself it’s a wayward garbage bag. For there is no bigger menace to humanity than the thing outside the realm of humanity’s experience. The thing that no human eye can recognize, no human nose can smell, no human ear can hear, no human tongue could taste, no human hand could touch, the thing that all the human speculation on the planet cannot identify because we are not equipped with the tools to detect it, the thing that evades not only our speculation but our sciences, each rubbernecking at each other, sniffing each other’s asses, or tonguing the mirror, like Narcissus . . . And this moment of cosmic candor shall—like the thing from elsewhere that came in with the storm—slip back into the uncharted and never present itself to you again...

(Or it will eat you and spit out your bones.)

Local DC Indie Label Releases Reissue of Reissue

Washington, DC-based independent label Angry Face Records has released a reissue of the 2003 reissue of legendary DC hardcore band Meattosser’s 1983 album Bean Bag for the Soul.

Over a cup of Cozy Chamomile at the House of Angry Face, as it is colloquially known around DC’s old guard, Dex Pallor, primary owner/operator of Angry Face since its inception in 1980 explains that, “To commemorate the twenty year anniversary of the reissue of Meattosser’s Bean Bag for the Soul, we are going to release a reissue of the reissue. Real simple.”

But why the reissue?

“Angry Face put out Bean Bag a long, long time ago. 1983,” Pallor says. “It was only on 7-inch vinyl. Nothing else. Not even cassette. We sold it for six nickels and a trinket. With the reissue, we sold it on compact disc for five American dollars, and for the reissue of the reissue, we’re gonna put it out on both vinyl and compact disc.”

No, no, I mean why the reissue of the reissue?  

“Oh. Because we wanted to do something special. We have reissues coming out monthly. Twice a month. Literally every Friday. Every single day of the week before noon. But a reissue of a reissue? Terra incognita. The dark side of the moon’s hairy underbelly. And if there’s one thing on the planet that the Angry Face family is really proud of, it’s Bean Bag for the Soul.”

Why so proud of this particular record?

Pallor, who in addition to running Angry Face Records, was also singer and primary songwriter for Meattosser says, “The most notable track off the album, both then and now, was the opening track, a song called Facts are for Mugs. Right? Back in ’83, to say, you know, facts are for mugs, it was considered irony. Facts aren’t for mugs, what are you talking about? Who are you kidding? Mugs being, you know, the hoi polloi. The common people. You, me, that lady in the moo moo on the other side of the street walking her little bichon frise. But to say facts are for mugs in 2023? Totally different connotation. Right? Facts are for mugs in 2023. Facts are as common as field mice in 2023. Any ol’ mug has their own facts. I have my facts. You have your facts. That’s a fact. Right?”

Why no new music?

“Excuse me? We have a lot of new music. New music is something we have a lot of,” Pallor says, now fidgeting in his chair like a hamster. “Just last year. 2016, whenever that was. We put out Easy Math.”

Easy Math was the lone album by DC post-rock group Places Named After Dogs, which featured Pallor on vocals and bass, Chuck Pallor (brother) on guitar and Lori Pallor (wife) on drums.

“And the year before that, 2008, Angry Face released the Tattoos Look Like Rashes comp.”

But wasn’t Tattoos Look Like Rashes just Meattosser with a new name?

Pallor scoffs and walks over to his pantry and pulls something out and comes and sits back down. “What is this?” he says, holding up an unopened can of cat food.

What do you mean, what is this?

“Tell me what this is,” Pallor states, sharply.

It’s a can of cat food.

“To you, yes. It’s a can of cat food. Specifically a can of Fancy Feast. And if we want to get even more specific than that, it’s a can of grilled tender beef and flaked mackerel with a touch of real milk. But what are words? Why bother with words? If you throw out all the words, you’re left with just the thing itself. And the thing itself, removed from the infestation of language—the grotesquerie of language!—is simply lunch.”

Ew. Please tell me you’re not going to eat cat food.

“The tuna kind is the exact same ingredients as Chicken of the Sea but twice as cheap,” Pallor says, peeling open the can of Fancy Feast with the zeal of an eight-year-old on Christmas morning. “My Fancy Feast is your Chicken of the Sea. Right? You beginning to see how this works? And your Meattosser is my Tattoos Look Like Rashes.”

Okay, I think I get it.

“Want some? There’s some paper plates over there in that cabinet next to the electric synthesizer.”

No, thank you. I think I’ve got everything I need. Thank you again for your time. Looking forward to the reissue of the reissue of the reissue.

“See you in 2043.”

Loud + Animated

My girlfriend and I live in a big apartment building in downtown DC. It’s a comfortable place, about a hundred years old, and used to be a somewhat famous hotel until it was bought out and turned into apartments some fifty years ago.

There is a Chinese woman here who deals with the trash and does all the sweeping and mopping and vacuuming. The woman is built like a Panzer tank—low and thick and fearsome—but is friendly enough, especially toward the end of the workday.

Every morning around 8 am, she goes about her chores, starting in the alley below our window. Our apartment is on the third floor, which is just high up enough for us to not be able to see her. (I assume she’s hosing the alley off because it’s always residually wet when I leave out through the back.) The only way we even realize she is down there is because of these loud and animated conversations she has on her phone. I think she’s speaking Mandarin, which probably means she’s speaking Cantonese. (I have one of those brains that run into all sorts of shit when it comes to this or that. I can remember 24-digit codes from Castlevania II from like thirty years ago, but if I think it’s this, it’s probably that, and vice versa.)

I am routinely bewildered by how loud and animated these conversations of hers are, and my girlfriend and I often ponder what she could possibly be yammering about with such unruly fervor like three hours before The Price is Right even comes on.

“I’ll bet you anything it’s just gossip,” I theorize to my girlfriend. “She’s gossiping her huge head off about whatever nonsense is going back home in Shenzhen or wherever… ‘So, my mother told my brother that my sister’s husband was supposed to pick up their kids, but then he’s like, hey, why don’t you pick up the kids, I always pick up the kids, you goddamn heifer!—so now my brother wants to go over there and throw his ass off the balcony,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

“Maybe,” my girlfriend says, putting on layer after layer of black clothing, getting ready to go to work. “She could be talking about anything.”

Indeed. She could be talking about anything.

“So, Joey Meneses is at the plate,” I imagine the Chinese woman yelling into her phone. “Runners on the corners, nobody out, and boom, just like that, he’s down 0-2 because this jerk-off ump’s strike zone is all over the place, right? I mean, basically everything between the Yangtze and the goddamn Horsehead Nebula’s a strike, right? So, Joey’s got no choice, he’s gotta hack at pretty much anything coming in for a landing. But Joey’s a real cheeky hitter, right? What’s he do? He squares up to bunt and then bloops one right over second baseman’s head! But the kid standing on third, our skinny little shortstop who looks like he ain’t had a warm meal in six weeks, just stands there. That’s it, just stands there. He figured the second baseman would get a glove to Joey’s blooper, so he just stands there, like he’s in line at the Krispy Kreme on the corner of 19th and Connecticut. Meanwhile, what’s-his-nuts on first sees him just standing there, so what does he do? Same fucking thing, of course… Just stands there… Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the world’s first game of professional freeze tag! Total disaster. So, yeah, the center fielder scoops up the ball and underhands it to the second baseman who gently steps on the bag for out number one. And then our shithead leftfielder—that utility guy, Dixon or Nixon or whatever, the guy who’s lived out of hotels his whole adult life—steps up to the plate and swings the bat three times and then goes and sits back down. And then that rookie Dominican kid must had said to himself, gee, that looks like fun!—because he gets up there and gives his best impression of Dixon. Inning over.”

Or maybe she’s talking about the rivalry between 19th century German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and G.W.F. Hegel. “Ah, Team Schopenhauer all the way. I mean, both dudes were total creepsters and they’d both suck Immanuel Kant’s winkie for a crisp five dollar bill and a trinket, but Schopenhauer’s 1818 magnum fuckin’ opus The World as Will and Representation makes Hegel’s whole oeuvre look like the back of a box of Fruity Pebbles. Granted, I do admit that since I’m, you know, a contrarian, as you like to call me, I’m finding myself dippin’ into Hegel more and more. I think it’s because of all the mopey kids around her, right? It’s like they all went to the same pity party and snorted The Schopenhauer Reader and now they just wanna do nothin’ but sit around and feel sorry for themselves all day all week, right? But, yeah, at the rate I’m goin’, if I keep oinkin’ up this Hegel, I’m gonna see the glass as neither half full nor half empty but filled to the brim with cute ‘n’ fuzzy bunnies, you know what I mean?”

Or perhaps it’s the Men in Black phenomenon that she’s carrying on and on about before I’ve most people have even had their second cup of coffee. “Most people think the Men in Black, you know, these spooky dudes who sometimes show up after a person has experienced a UFO—excuse me, a UAP. Boy, I ain’t ever gonna get used to that—and tell them, hey, you won’t tell nobody you saw nothin’, if you know what’s good for you are, you know, the FBI or the CIA or maybe the rubber gloves department of some kind of deep state officials, but what they really are—at least what I think they really are—is some kind of tulpa, right? I mean, all the reports of them say that there’s just something off about them. Their skin is this, like, weird gray color, and it’s too tight lookin’ or too loose lookin’, and their clothes fit weird, like they’re two sizes too big, or that they try to drink Jell-O, you know, like pick it up and drink it like it’s a cold glass of sweet iced tea on a hot summer day, right? or they don’t know the difference between a fork and a spoon or how reclining chairs work. And their eyes are too close together or too far apart… See, now if they were government officials, they’d be, you know, normal people, right? But, if they were some kind of tulpa, they’d just be ambling around the planet, totally directionless, or with some kind of vague agenda, like going around scaring the silly putty out of UFO witnesses, right? It’s like they’re badly briefed, you know? I mean, for all I know, they could be the same agency as the ufonauts themselves! But FBI? No way. CIA? Get real.”

Sometimes you can hear the person on the other line. It’s a woman, for sure, who also speaks in a loud and animated fashion. (You can hear her metalloid declarations and confirmations over the singing of the nearby city birds.) I wonder who calls who, or maybe they take turns calling each other.

The World’s First and Last Grapefruit Eating Contest

In a curious effort to squelch the region’s manifest obesity issues, the powers-that-be at the Biscuitville County Fair have decided to replace its wildly popular pudding eating contest with a contest of seemingly similar disposition.

“It’s just grapefruit, ya’ll,” said Bud Plaquemine, mayor of the anonymous county seat of Biscuitville and master of every ceremony that’s ever been known to the county. “A little bit of Vitamin C ain’t gonna muss nobody’s mane.”

The mayor was addressing the forty-six contestants, who were all perched on and around a flotilla of haggard picnic tables. “Regular ol’ grapefruits, that’s all they are,” he said, his exasperation beginning to show. “Grown right here in the county. I think.”

“If you got ‘em at the I.G.A., then they ain’t from the county,” said a Tina Ray Belcher, last year’s runner-up.

“I didn’t get ‘em at the I.G.A., Tina Ray. I bought ‘em down in Boofport off one of them trucks that sit out by that Huddle House every Saturday and Sunday.” There was a cascade of moans and grumbles.  “Aw, c’mon, now, ya’ll hush and let me explain the rules... Seriously, ya’ll cut me a break, okay? Remember, it wasn’t my idea to change this up. Not to throw anybody under the bus, but all this is a direct result of the county commissioner and his yankee doodle wife and all them commie spinsters they go to brunch with every other day. If it was up to me, we’d be doing puddin’ for the next thousand years.”

“Well, why ain’t it up to you? You’re the damn mayor,” said Fistbump McGriddle, the only person in the county who was born outside the contiguous states. “Can’t you veto ‘em?”

“On the federal level, I could probably do that, yes sir,” said the mayor. “But we ain’t on the federal level, are we?”

“This is some secret society bullshit, is what it is,” said Rudy Fracas, ambiguous security for the event. His hat said CIA and his shirt said FBI.

“Rudy, please,” said the mayor’s wife Julia, whose real name was Juli, but had long ago added the “A” at the end in an effort to maintain a regal air.

The mayor started troubleshooting with a grapefruit, eventually going full-blown Houdini on the thing and sawing it in half. He took a big bit and when he was done grimacing, he said, “Mmm! They’re actually pretty damn yummy. Real juicy, too… Plus, like I said, a little bit of Vitamin C can do wonders for your health and such.”

Jiffy Hormel, the self-proclaimed Michael Jordan of the now defunct pudding eating contest, stared at the deep October sunset and began channeling his internal rage into something like ambition. “I’m gonna give these buncha hosers SCURVEY is what I’m gonna do,” he said, chinning at the other contestants.

“Where’d you learn that word, on the back of a box of Oinktard Flakes?” said one of the contestants

Tina Ray Belcher swiveled around and said, “He ain’t gonna do shit except make his Wranglers look like somebody exploded a Baby Ruth in ‘em. Just like last year and the year before that and the year before that.”

“Yeah, all them years I won,” Jiffy Hormel countered. “Second place is first loser, homegirl, though you ain’t even gonna come close to that.”

“I just hope nobody out there knows the Heimlich this year.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do mean that.”

The mayor ignored them and said, “Here’s what’s gonna happen… Everybody’s gonna start off with thirty pounds worth of grapefruits…” He directed the contestants to a nearby convoy of big brown wooden buckets. “Each of them there has got exactly thirty pounds of grapefruit in it, which accounts to about twenty-somethin’ grapefruits, depending on how big or little they are. Most grapefruits weigh about a pound plus tax and tip, if you know what I mean, though there’s definitely a few in there you could probably make Jack-O-Lanterns out of if you felt so inclined.”

The mob of contestants said nothing, though they did continually pepper the sylvan silence with a weird improvisation of burps, grunts, and farts, as well as varied internal emissions.

“Same deal as usual with regards to cutlery. No forks, no knives, no spoons, no sporks, no damn chopsticks, no nothin’,” the mayor said.

“What about napkins?” hollered one of the contestants.

“You can have all the napkins your little heart desires, provided it’s just napkins. Remember what happened two years ago to that ol’ boy who’s name I shall not mention who tried to hide a roll of Tums inside a roll of Bounty. Any unsportsmanlike conduct will be dealt with swiftly and thoroughly. Immediate disqualification from not only this year’s contest, but all future contests as well. Next year, the year after that, and the year after that… Basically disqualified until the sun falls into the sea, right? Now, you’ve all been warned.”

“That’s pretty harsh.”

“Well, don’t cheat and you don’t gotta worry about it.”

“What about bathroom breaks?” hollered another contestant.

“What about ‘em?”

“I’m sayin’, what do we do if we gotta go to the bathroom?”

“I’d suggest doing what ol’ Jiffy does, otherwise just hold it.”

“Eww.”

“Oh, and this prize is a little bit different,” said the mayor. “It’s a surprise prize.”

This information really fired all the contestants up. “Yeah, right… Surprise!—It’s a fifty dollar gift certificate to Wal-Mart… Surprise!—It’s one free dinner at the Western Sizzlin… Surprise!—It’s a bottle of Hot Damn… Surprise!—It’s a big ‘nilla envelope with rattlesnake eggs in it…”

“Ya’ll think ya’ll some funny bunnies, don’t ya?”

“Just tell us, is the prize money or not money?”

The mayor paused and fingered his mustache. “Let me put it this way, it’s moneylike,” he said, to their satisfaction. “Anyone have any more questions?”

“What do you suppose we do with the skin?” asked someone. “We’re supposed to peel the grapefruits and eat only the inside, right?”

“You can do whatever you want with the skin. Thing is, you start off with thirty pounds of grapefruits, like I said, and whoever has the least amount of pounds left wins, right? So I’d maybe suggest going back and eating the skin when you’re done with the insides. Kinda like what they do with crawfish eating contests. After they scoop out and eat all the meat, they go back and suck the holy spirit of the heads and then tackle the claws, et cetera, et cetera.”

The crowd purred with mild epiphany.

“Any other questions?” said the mayor, making his hands into little binoculars and looking over the congregation. “Good. Everybody rest up and I’ll see ya’ll tomorrow at 10 on the dot.”

 After everyone had cleared out, the mayor sat down on the edge of the stage they were using for the event tomorrow. He swung his legs happily like he was on a porch swing while he frisked himself for his pack of Winston Lights. He found them and took out a cig and lit it with a lighter that said Cum-N-Go down the side of it.

His wife Julia stepped out of the shadows.

“Great night for stargazing,” she said to him.

The mayor looked up at the sky and stifled a massive yawn and said, “Sure is. Look, you can see both dippers and that damn belt I always thought was a dipper. Just like the planetarium. Better, even.”

Julia took the mayor’s hand in hers, which meant she was about to say something she thought was important, and said, “Don’t stay up all night with Cliff.”

“Who’s Cliff?”

“Your buddy from Poncho’s,” she said, pointing at a meaty dude assembling the concessions area off to the side of the stage. He had backed his truck up to it and no less than forty cases of Budweiser cans were in the back of it.

“His name is Cliff? I’ve been callin’ that boy Clint for I don’t know how long.”

“Bud Plaquemine, you are really something special,” Julia said, getting up to leave. “Be home in bed by 11, okay? You have a big day tomorrow.”

“I have a big day every day.”

“And don’t smoke that whole pack.”

“Yes, ma’am, I won’t, ma’am.”

Julia made a kissy sound and then walked over and got in her Jetta and eased out of the parking lot.

 The morning weather could hot have been better for opening of the Biscuitville County Fair. The air was crisp and cool and apart from a patch of dainty cirrus clouds, the sky was as blue as a blue whale’s belly.

The big banner everyone had to limbo under to get the acre of folding chairs where they could cheer on the contestants said Welcome to the 2021 Glade Air Freshener Biscuitville County Grapefruit Eating Contest. All of the picnic tables—which now looked impossibly more busted up than they did last night—had been moved to an elevated stage. The contestants sat one by one and across from each other, with nothing in front of them but huge buckets and tons of napkins and a few emergency pitchers of Coca Cola.

The mayor, who was either still drunk or massively hungover or in some terrible DMZ between the two states, adlibbed about the importance of the contest and thanked his desultory cast of organizers who were arranged intermittently on the front couple of rows, and then pulled out what looked to be a snubnose .38 and waved it around a couple times for effect.

The crowd watched this leftfield shenanigan impassively so the mayor pointed the gun at the sky and went, *click* . . .

“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch . . .” *click, click, click* “Julia, you didn’t do what I think you did and unload this thing for some stupid reason, did ya?”

“Just borrow mine, Bud!” said somebody in the audience.

“That’s okay,” said the mayor, squinting, blinking. “I’ll just holler. Ya’ll ready to do this? I said are ya’ll ready to do this!”

Random hoots, a smattering of claps. The contestants themselves looked uncertain if they were indeed ready to do this. No less than six dogs, unseen but near, had been barking mercilessly since the fair had opened up at 9.

The mayor went, “GO!”

All forty-six contestants sat there motionless.

 The mayor scowled at them and repeated, “Go! Ya’ll dig in, damnit!”

The contestants stayed deliberately frozen.

“Ohh, I see what’s going on,” said the mayor at last. “This is protest, isn’t it? Makes perfect sense. Actually I’m surprised I didn’t see this coming.” He addressed the crowd now. “Did any of ya’ll see this coming? Check it out, it’s not just a protest, it’s a silent protest. Aww, poor babies didn’t get their puddin’, awwww . . . What a buncha weinies. Tell you what, I’m gonna go get something out of my car real quick. I’ll be right back. Don’t nobody go nowhere.”

The contestants all stayed motionless, moving their heads on a little to make uncertain eye contact with each other.

The crowd, on the other hand, was beginning to get impatient.

“What a bunch of little you-know-whats . . . Seriously, ya’ll oughta be ashamed.”

The mayor returned to the stage and held something up and said, “Anybody know what this is?”

The mayor held up what no one in the audience recognized to be his personal checkbook (his wife Julia, withstanding).

“This is my checkbook. See? Checks inside and everything. Here’s what I’m gonna do . . . I’m gonna take out check number . . . Oh, let’s see, zero three two four and I’m gonna sign the bottom—dit-dit-dit—and gonna write one . . thousand . . dollars on this line right here. Boop! There. And I’m gonna leave this part blank because I don’t know who I’m making it out to yet.”

Julia stood up and said, “Bud, don’t you dare!”

“Lady, hush,” Bud said, sharply.

“Don’t you tell me to hush.”

“I’ll tell ya whatever I wanna tell ya. Now, shut up and sit down! Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag, dear lord,” said the mayor. He walked over to the side of the stage and did a little royal wave at the teenager who was minding the event’s little makeshift bar. “Yoo-hoo, bartender, bring me one of them Bushwackers you were feedin’ me last night. Goddamn, those things are yummy, once you get past the brain freeze part, at least. And put some extra chocolate syrup in it, I need something to get me going a little bit. And gimme a Bud chaser. I don’t need no cup or nothin’. Thank you very much.”

The mayor took his little gun back out from inside his jacket and said, “Ooh, I almost forgot…” He put his hand deep in his pants pocket and felt around for a long while and finally pulled out a single bullet and put the bullet in the gun’s chamber and pointed the gun straight up at the sky and said, “Real deal this time, ladies and gentlemen. Are ya’ll ready to do this?”

The crowd and the contestants all agreed: they were ready to do this.

Sea of Bunnies

My name is Van Jason Hillard, and I am sitting in the living room with my girlfriend Elizabeth and our dog MJ. We are on the second floor of an old brick apartment building in the waterside neighborhood of Georgetown, DC, and, for all purposes, we are safe.

(It is the middle of August. The temperature outside is around 95 degrees and the sky is [still] the color of an impressionist peach.)

We have enough food to last us about one month if we eat modestly and only when we are hungry (no snacking). Our proximity to a CVS enabled us to Super Mario our way over to it and preemptively stock up on milk and juice and toilet paper and canned goods, et cetera, in the nascent hours of what the news channels are now gloomily calling B Day.

 Two weeks ago I was fishing at a little spot where the C&O Canal meets Rock Creek when I heard a cacophony of sirens coming from seemingly every direction. I initially thought nothing of this, since sirens are as common in DC as field mice, but it was the sound of people that instilled a queasy curiosity in me. The sound of people yelling, screaming, hollering, laying on their car horns… I scrambled up the hill away from the canal toward M Street to inspect the ruckus.

Everything was everywhere, people in the streets, cars on the sidewalk, upside buses sliding into the buildings that flanked the street… Nothing anywhere was still. People were running spastically, zig-zagging up and down the street and sidewalk, jumping, falling, as if avoiding some unseen menace.

There . . . The ground was moving, impossibly. Something was all over the road and the sidewalks, impossibly clinging to the storefronts. Something brownish grey (or greyish brown) . . . Rats? No, bigger than rats. And endowed with massive ears . . .

Rabbits.

Hundreds of bunny rabbits. No, thousands of them… Tens of thousands.

A man on a electric scooter capsized. Immediately he was covered in bunnies.

In the middle of M street: a lady with a shopping bag started kicking at the ground, hands at her side, like she was Riverdancing… She grunted as she kicked, muttering sentence fragments. And then she began screaming an awful scream. A wail, they call it… A wail of unmitigated horror in cahoots with sincere pain. And then she was gone, carried off down the midday Georgetown thoroughfare on her back like she was on a waterslide.

The whole weird scene was encroaching on me. I dashed to the apartment. I fumbled with my keys and opened the door to my building and closed it behind me and ran up the stairs.

Can bunnies open doors? No, they cannot. Bumping sounds at the base of the door. Were they trying to get in? How sharp are their little bunny teeth?

“What’s going on out there?” Elizabeth said as I entered, closing the door behind me. The dog was panting, as he does, and shaking. The carpet beneath where he stood was dotted in droplets of drool.

“Rabbits,” I said, crisply. “Bunny rabbits. Tons of them. And they’re attacking everyone.”

She looked at me like I was covered in grape jelly, so I explained what I saw with as few exclamation points as possible and then we clicked on the news and stared at our TV for a while, which was showing footage from drones and helicopters of, what appeared to be the entirety of the United States of America being besieged by millions of hostile bunny rabbits.

Later that afternoon we smoked cigs and drank beer on the patio and watched the sky go from blue to grey to yellow to peach.

 That was two weeks ago.

The bunnies are still outside. Everywhere. It’s an inland sea of bunnies. I’ve not heard a siren in ten days.

Most of the networks stopped broadcasting, but we still have France24. There’s talk of sending in big mean dogs. Millions and millions of big mean dogs. They’re actually calling it Operation Big Mean Dog… And all the aviaries have been opened. Its contents now divebombing the bunnies, snatching them up one by one by one by one. The enemy is being penny & nickeled while it churns out million dollar bills on the daily. There are more bunnies today out there than there were yesterday. And there were more bunnies yesterday than there was the day before.  

Staying out of sight of the bunnies is key. If they see you, they pursue you like athletic zombies, toppling over each other to sink their awful little teeth into you.

Our balcony is out of sight of the ground. We need goddamn cigarettes.

“No,” Elizabeth said, flatly. “No more sorties. Did you forget what happened when you raided Taj Mahal?”

A week ago I ran over to a nearby Indian restaurant which had been abandoned. I swiped an unopened case of Absolut vodka and bottle of Johnny Walker Black. I got bit thirty-six times in less than four minutes and walked with a limp for six days.

“No, I did not forget,” I told her. “Look, we have ten bottles of Absolut left, half a thing of scotch, and a mere two packs of cigarettes. I cannot work with that ratio.”

“You won’t make it ten feet, much less ten blocks,” she said, reading my mind. My plan was to sneakily dash to the 7-11 and back. Our car, outlandishly bad luck would have it, was at her father’s place, way too far away.

“It’s five blocks. And they’re not that active during the day,” I said. “Especially in the middle of the day.”

“Van. No.”

 At some point in the last week we stopped hearing the few other residents of our apartment building. Either they were keeping hush or they had escaped or they had been eaten alive by bunny rabbits.

“Watch a movie?”

“Sure.”

“What are you in the mood for?”

“Anything but Watership Down.”

Time passes, we go up on the roof sometimes, belly crawl to the edge and sneak a peek at M street. The ground is all bunnies, sort of roiling down the street. The soundlessness to it all is somehow more sinister than the sight of it. It’s just kind of a low whooshing sound with little clicks mixed in. The sound of an expensive washing machine or maybe a Japanese golf cart. Of course it was neither of those things. It was billions of bunnies cloaking everything to the horizon and probably beyond.

 “Ha.”

“Huh.”

“What is a nine letter word for hare?” Elizabeth asked me. She was doing a New York Times crossword puzzle from three weeks ago.

“Hair as in pelo or hare as in conejo?”

“H-A-R-E,” she said, “as in la fin du monde.”

“Oh,” I said, and snapped my fingers. “Lagomorph.”

She penned it in, nodding.

The Bunny Level, as we called it, somewhat predictably, was one foot. One foot of bunnies. I used a street level window of a storefront across the way to measure. One foot from the bottom of the window to the bunnies. I estimated the bottom of the window was two feet from the ground. So, yeah, a whole foot of bunnies, two or three on top of each other, all wriggling their way east.

I went up on the roof, came down . . .

“The Bunny Level is getting higher,” I said to Elizabeth, as if I was remarking on the difference between home fries and hash browns. I imagined the three of us on the roof, castaways in a sea of bunnies.

She was now rolling a joint and watching something on her phone.

“I’m watching this Youtube channel, some chick in Inner Mongolia . . . She teaches you how to turn off your nervous system.”

“Inner Mongolia is just a baroque way of saying People’s Republic of China.”

“No, it is not. Inner Mongolia is an autonomous region within China. It’s China but it’s not China.”

“Schrodinger’s China.”

“Pretty much.”

The dog wheezed and jerked in his sleep. In his dream he was either chasing something or being chased by something.

“Why do you want to learn how to turn off your nervous system?”

She looked up from her joint and her phone and said, “In case they get in.”

France24 is starting to rear its ugly head. All the wackadoo conspiracy theorists, brains marinating in low-hanging algorithms, have started popping up, presumably because FOX News is kaput, along with the myriad of shit-budget internet channels that stay in existence by gargling pure uncut disinformation all day all week… Big ugly fat faces blaming China, blaming the Democratic party, blaming the Mossad, blaming global warming, blaming billionaires, blaming poor people . . . Are the bunnies Chinese? Are they not from this planet? (weirdly, this seems more plausible to me that them being sent from China) . . . Are they from the center of this planet? And why are they so hostile or hungry or both? And why’s the sky peach-colored? Or is it more orange than peach?

 “Operation Big Mean Dog was a bust,” Elizabeth said to me while filling up the coffee grinder.

“What do you mean?”

“The bunnies ate the dogs.”

“Shit. All of them?”

“Every single one.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Poor dudes didn’t have a chance.”

“Guess not.”

 Midnight storm. The bunnies, it seemed, did not at all dig the rain. They made a strange buzzing sound to express their disapproval, sounding like a chorus of cicadas all brushing up on their Cantonese. It was an awful sound, but it made me happy that the rain made them unhappy.

 “I caught one,” I said to Elizabeth. She was watching a reality TV show about a rich and famous carnivorous plant.

“Caught one what?”

“What do you think?” I said, revealing the contents of the plastic bag I was carrying. “I caught a bunny.”

The bunny was kind of flat-faced and had big round eyes, creepily observant, and each with a mustard iris. It was doing this weird thing with its mouth like it was trying to crack an Atomic Fireball. It did not look pleased with its current predicament.

“Whoa... Is he sick?”

“I don’t know what his deal is,” I said, petting his head with my index finger. “I think he’s just punch drunk. I thwacked him pretty good on the head with a curtain rod.”

“Where’d you get a curtain rod?”

“At what’s-her-name’s below us. The door was open but, yeah, no sign of her. This little guy was sprawled out right in the middle of her living room. Pretty weird, actually.”

“He’s gonna be pissed when he comes to,” she said, inspecting the bunny. The thing was brown and dirty and had a permanent sneer on its tiny face. It smelled like a mixture of raw sewage and a car fire. “Holy shit,” she said, holding his paw and examining his claws. “I hope he doesn’t start hollering for his friends.”

“I’m gonna chop his goddamn head off,” I said, getting a huge knife out of the kitchen. “Make an example out of him.”

“Van . . . Go do that in the sink or in the shower.”

“Good idea.” I held the bunny over the sink and started sawing his head off with the bread knife. It hissed at me and started wriggling.

“It would be easier if you killed him first.”

“I know,” I said, sawing away. “But I want to give him the Taliban treatment. I want his whole terrible life to flash before his creepy little eyes.”

“What if he’s a good bunny?”

“No such thing.

Something like sympathy kicked when I was about halfway through the bunny’s neck. Elizabeth noticed this and commandeered the knife and deftly detached the bunny’s head from its body and deposited both in a garbage bag. Tomorrow we would toss the garbage bag on a neighboring roof.

 The Bunny Level stayed where it was for a few days and then appeared to be ebbing a few inches.

Elizabeth and I were lying on the roof on our bellies. Classic recon pose of cinema . . . She had her binoculars out and was looking up and down the street.

“Bunnies upon bunnies upon bunnies,” she said.

I lit the second to last of our American Spirits and said, “Last night I dreamt that this was all my fault.”

She took her binoculars from her face and looked at me.

“I dreamt that I changed the wallpaper on my phone to a picture of Harvey the Rabbit, you know, from that Jimmy Stewart flick, and that’s what made these fuckers all come out of the woodwork and go nutso on us.”

She contemplated this and said, “But in the movie, you never actually Harvey, right?”

I hadn’t seen Harvey in probably twenty years and could only remember an especially aloof Jimmy Stewart trying to out-hokey himself. It was a cutesy movie for kids and dolts and insomniacs.

“Yeah, I don’t really remember. I don’t think you do ever see him.”

“Further proof that dreams don’t mean anything,” she said, reapplying the binoculars to her face.

“My real wallpaper know is a Yakuza tattoo,” I said, holding up my phone so she could see. “My dream is not a premonition.”

“What blows my mind,” Elizabeth said, “is how nobody saw this coming. I mean, we know when the Sultan of Fuckistan last pooted in public, but we don’t know ten trillion bunnies are about to invade us and eat us alive.”

“Yeah, it’s weird,” I said for probably the thousandth time in the last couple of weeks. “If you went to the ATM and withdrew a million bucks from the Pentagon’s bank account every single hour of every single day on the calendar, grass would grow on the moon before they dipped into overdraft.”

“A world without carrots is chaos.”

“That is a fact.”

The implied rumble of the sea of bunnies gave way to the sound of helicopters...

Dozens of helicopters on the western horizon, heading toward us. I couldn’t remember if I dreamt that they were sending helicopters for us or if I somehow heard it or read it somewhere.

“How do we get the dog up here?” I hollered, as the helicopters whooshed over us and off toward the White House and Capitol and all that.

“There’s a solution for everything,” Elizabeth said, lighting the last cigarette.

 Epilogue: Ten thousand band-aids later, Elizabeth and I and MJ are now on the Shrimpbuster, a charter boat as big and sturdy as an Emirati limo. We are cruising southeast in the Potomac, heading towards the ocean. It eats our souls that the apartment is now infested with bunnies, and probably will be from now until the sun falls into the sea, but the concept of worldly possessions is pretty much a thing of the past. For all the land—I hear, and I see—now belongs to the bunnies. 

The Potomac reflected the impossible sky… The ship’s crew, exclusively Honduran, gazed up and grimaced at it, blabbing in animated Spanish.

I said to Elizabeth, “They’re talking about peaches.”

She tuned in to their chatter for a second. ““They’re talking about the sky, saying the same dumb shit that everybody else is saying.” The breeze from chugging along at twenty knots elevated her hair. The dog—all tongue now—turned his attention from a flotilla of city ducks to look up at Elizabeth, as she drably said, “But the sky is not peach-colored.”

I turned and looked at her, knowing what she was about to say, but still marauded with queasiness upon hearing it…

“It’s the color of carrots.”

The Flatwoods Monster Convention (Sept., '23)

Aphorism of the day~ Not all men in black are Men in Black but all Men in Black are men in black.

In other news, I spend more time in the endearingly kooky state of West Virginia than the ghost of Chief Cornstalk's private hairdresser.

Braxton County, WV

Travel Greetings: Twin Peaks

"U got cash app?" ~ Laura Palmer

Obligatory dork-out session in Twede's Cafe, known in slicker dimensions as the Double-R Diner, where Bobby Briggs did all his bitcoin trading and Audrey Horne learned how to Whip/Nae Nae — and, yeah, notable prom queen–cum–snow bird Laura Palmer famously wrapped her Tesla around a Jimmy John's billboard, thus prematurely merging with the infinite.

(More/less, innit?)

Also seen here: the bridge Ronette Pulaski zombied her way across after getting thwacked in the dome by Leland/Bob and the motel where Theresa Banks stacked up bad decisions like Jenga planks 🏔️🏔️

North Bend/Snoqualmie, WA. circa Nov. ‘23

GOATMAN WAS HERE (LESS BLOOD, MORE GUTS: an excerpt from upcoming work of pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

Behold, a sneaky preview of my upcoming work of pseudofiction Indrid Cold is Dead . . .

PROLOGUE: What’s this button not do?

 It is no secret that I am a steadfast bohemian type, with a head full of Fellini flicks and dreamy equatorial literature. Aw, hell, reader, I’ll just come clean with you: What you are about to read is sort of a hallucinatory overview of my endeavors to encounter a cryptid, or maybe an alien being or ultraterrestrial—or at the very least, find myself muzzle deep in some good old-fashioned high strangeness.

Now, the nature of these endeavors varies greatly. From prepubescent nights spent slinking around railroad tracks in northwest Louisiana (searching for ghosts and wild men of the woods) to idling down the canopy roads of the Florida Panhandle in my 1978 Fiat (top down, tunes cranked) to roaming around some of the most pod-people infested small towns of the USA, east of Rod Serling’s smoking den.

But, yeah, this slender little book is what in the Old World they would call semi-fiction, but here in the New World they are more likely to call a fib salad tossed in nonsense topped with bullshit. It is common knowledge that every time a UFO chaser or cryptidhead swerves out of their way to use a term like Mothership or Mothbunnydogman, an angel gets thwacked across the face with a rubber hose—and with that awfulness in mind, most of this book is, in fact, as truthful as Saint Peter’s pet parakeet. However, should you like to engage in, what they call in some social circles, serious investigative journalism, please look to the excellent cryptidcentric works of John Keel, Ken Gerhard, Stan Gordon, Linda S. Godfrey, Loren Coleman, Lyle Blackburn, Nick Redfern, Lon Strickler, Shannon LeGro, Seth Breedlove, Charles Fort, Ronan Coghlan, George Dudding, David Weatherly, Gray Barker, Ivan Sanderson, and Rosemary Ellen Guiley. And of course I have my own great big piles of moon food from my independent investigations, and from my work as a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (affectionately known as MUFON), but, yeah, sometimes you got to make the peanut butter and the jelly stand in opposite corners of the room with their backs to each other, yuk-yuk-yuk.

I believe you are now sufficiently primed to begin this book, dearest reader, and I shall leave you with a rather dubious quote from Fred Madison in Chief Freakster David Lynch’s 1997 neo-noir eye-widener Lost Highway: “I like to remember things my own way… How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.”

 VJH, September 12th, 2023

 ~

 GOATMAN WAS HERE (LESS BLOOD, MORE GUTS)

Prince George’s County, Maryland

 It was obvious that the demons were pretty much in control – John Keel

 I jumped off the highway and pulled into a Beltsville, Maryland, an edge city of Washington, DC that mainly consisted of Salvadoran karaoke bars, shabby Ethiopian restaurants, and dump trucks. I idled down the main drag, looking for an honest to God set of English syllables. It was eleven o’clock on a Friday night, and I was a proven marksman when it came to finding late night bustle.

I found a lounge with numbers for a name and curbed the Audi and entered the joint. The bartender looked displeased to see an unfamiliar face, so I paid cash for the chunky-style microbrew I had chosen at random and then tipped him heavily. It was a steadfast ploy of mine—tipping one hundred percent to buy myself a little conditional fanfare. It is a reliable method in which you can obtain information, granted it can backfire severely if you catch the bartender while he is under a weird moon or steeped in a cocaine binge. In the murky world of bartending, excessive gratuity almost always comes with a huge, hideous, implied asterisk.

“Say, brother,” I said, chummily, “I was yappin’ with a buddy of mine about your cozy little town and he told me to keep my eyeballs peeled for Goatman. You know anything about that?”

The bartender threw his bar rag angrily at the ice pin. “Mister, are you cuckoo or what? Don’t you know if you yak about that stuff around here, these beady-eyed spinsters will duct tape your skinny ass to a Tomahawk missile and launch you into the South China Sea?”

I told him I did not know that, and the world was probably a better place for it. I ordered another beer—a regular ol’ Coors this time—and left him a five dollar bill on top of the five dollar beer that covered the beer. Anticipating this sort of standoffishness amongst the natives, I had stopped off at a Bank of America earlier in the day and pulled out two hundred dollars in freshly-minted five dollar bills that did not yet smell like a pile of germs.

The bartender let out a huge sigh and leaned in from across the bar and into my personal space. “Look, I don’t know what your deal is, but if you really want some more information about you-know-who, then pop off at that Huddle House up on there on the left across from that Shell station. The little creepster chick who waitresses there on the weekends is a goddamn living breathing encyclopedia on ghosts and ghouls and such.”

I asked him what the girl’s name was and he said he couldn’t remember, so I retracted one of the fives and split.

~

The Huddle House was sparsely crowded. A couple of lone truck drivers and a cluster of drunkies here and there. It was not yet midnight, but the general vibe of Beltsville was spent and sullen.

There were two waitresses—one was old and spavined, with the bendy demeanor of a beaten dog, and the other was suspiciously young and ambiguously Latino. She had turquoise hair and an arm tattoo of some sort of lycanthrope wearing slacks.

I was about to wave her over when she glided up to my table and asked me if I was ready to order. I asked her if they carry beer and she said they did not, so I ordered a Coca-Cola and some hash browns with cheese and chili on top.

“Say, let me ask you something,” I said, before she could confiscate my menu and zoom off. “I’m on a scavenger hunt and it is absolutely imperative that I snap a pic of, well, your local celebrity.” I winked at her twice and she looked at me like I farted out of my face, so I added, “—You know, Goatman.”

Before I could slip her a crisp five, a small herd of meaty guys wearing every season of camouflage was dragging me out and making sure I bumped myself on every hard object in the establishment. They tossed me like a frisbee headfirst into a muddy ditch that was just beyond the parking lot and then stood there smiling at their accomplishments.

Not a single word was said by anyone throughout the entirety of this unfortunate end to my night, a few wayward grunts and snarls, notwithstanding. As a professional permanent outsider, I was used to this type of treatment, but it still severely mussed my mane when it happened.

 I had an apartment in the belly-button of Washington, DC, but opted to spend the night just north of Beltsville at a preposterously luminated motel that was nestled up to the highway. I asked the receptionist, a gloomy fellow who seemed mired in some light existentialist warfare, where I could get beer at this hour and he told me I’d have to scoot over to a neighboring county or I could just buy some of his personal stash.

I opted for the latter choice—sixty American dollars for a partially nibbled-on case of warm Peroni and a half-pack of Winston Lights. I was by no means the worst deal in the world, especially considering the hour and the circumstances.

~

 Okay, reader, I hear you clamoring for a little bit of personal history and background, et cetera, et cetera, so I will cater to your demands…

I have always had a persistent zeal for the unknown, and I don’t mean the tangible unknown—the scientific unknown of quarks and quanta, nor the tweedy unknown of dreams tigers and labyrinths and mirrors and all that. My enchantment for the unknown lies gift-wrapped at the doorstep of the house of monsters.  

I was born in the Florida panhandle on Eglin Air Force base—a true alpha male of an Air Force base—on the first day of the last week of the first half of the 1970s. December 24th, 1974… My father was in the Air Force just long enough to push enough weed to buy a yellow Chevette with wood grain. It was a sufficiently roadworthy vehicle in which my mom to scoot me around without incident.  

We moved back to our hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana before I was old enough to pronounce the word lemonade without getting the jitters. (There is a manifest rumor floating around that my first words were Led Zeppelin, but I can tell you with confidence the first thing out of my mouth that wasn’t that milky bile that babies emit on the regular were the words love me two times, bay-buh.)

Shreveport is basically the city Hollywood has you looking at when you think you’re looking at New Orleans. It’s a city whose only development over the last thirty years has been casinos and overpasses and drug houses. It’s the kind of place you go back to after many years of deliberate absence and when the locals say you won’t recognize a thing, they really mean the Arby’s is now a Hardee’s, or the Piggly Wiggly is now a Hoggly Woggly.

Shreveport sits in Caddo parish in the northwest tip of Louisiana—a region that has more allegiance to the dudsville caboose of Texas than it does the wild child state that it emanates from. I know for a fact there was not a fleur-de-lis north of Natchitoches until the year 2010 on the dot.

In the early ‘80s I would often go to my aunt and uncle’s house to listen to Cheap Trick and watch Dragonslayer, and I was routinely enrapt with their wackadoo collection of books with sinister covers and freaky titles like Alien Animals and I ended up putting myself on a daily regimen of this phylum of imagination fodder before I was old enough to eat hard candy. As a result, when my father would take me deer hunting and deposit me up in a stand at spookteen o’clock in the morning, every pre-sunrise rustle in the woods was surely either the Jersey Devil or Mothman or some sort of phantom pooch or basically anything but the deer or squirrel that, in retrospect, it probably was.

I soaked up everything I could about monsters (the sleeker and more fashionable “cryptid” didn’t debut until I was steeped in adulthood), and I began to actively seek them out around the various semi-rural neighborhoods that I lived in. I mean, why go gar gigging and bass fishing and squirrel hunting when what the taxidermy man really wants to lay his greed-glazed eyes on is a skunk ape?  

My brother and I blazed a zillion trails around the neighborhood on our four-wheelers. I took a silver and black .22 rifle everywhere I went (often substituting the .22 for a BB gun, when the social climate called for it—Children of the Corn had only recently come out at the box office and every pre-teen kiddo across the states was bug-eyed with glee about the film, and a buck-toothed eight-year-old with a loaded rifle, head to Ked in camouflage, was sure to make your average fully-grown adult fidget a like hamster).

Anyway, back to Beltsville…

The motel bed was as lop-sided as a three-legged elephant but since I no intention of sleeping—tonight or ever—I was okay with that. It was a nonsmoking room, as they all are these days, so I opened the window and pulled off one of the socks off my feet and put it over the fire alarm.

Someone knocked at my door. Without thinking, I opened it and standing in front of me was the girl with turquoise hair from the Huddle House.

“Can I come in?” she said, rubbernecking at her surroundings like a Sopwith Camel pilot.

“I don’t see why not,” I said, standing off to the side so she could enter.

She let out a little fake cough because of the cigarette smoke and then asked me if I could have a beer.

I had put about eight beers in the sink and dumped a bunch of ice on top of them. The rest were still in a cardboard box, moored next my shoes alongside the bed.

“They’re still room temp, and this ain’t a cold room,” I said, adopting an avuncular tone with the girl.

“It doesn’t matter how hot or cold they are, so long as they got bubbles in ‘em.”

I could not have agreed with her more, so I grabbed one of the beers and opened it with my lighter and gave it to her. “Out of sheer curiosity, how old are you?”

“I’ll be twenty-one in two years, seven months, and five days,” she said, as if reading a script.

“Better you than me,” I said, peaking out the blinds. “How did you know where to find me?”

“Those dudes that played human pinball with you told me.” She took a swig of beer and stifled a burp. “They followed you out here to make sure you were out of city limits.”

On closer inspection, the girl seemed Eastern European. Romanian, probably, which explained the pseudo-Latino look.

“Very considerate of them. Tell ‘em I say thanks.”

She ignored me and said, “You can’t just go around blabbing your head about Goatman like that. It’s a really stupid thing to do, you know?”

I did not know, and I told her as much. She sighed real big. I decided to change the subject. “And who is this dapper gentleman?” I said, talking about her little wolfman tattoo.

“Oh… this is Ralph.”

“Pretty neat little tattoo,” I said, lying through my teeth and lips and everything else. I had seen many tattoos in my life, and this was not one to remember. “Is it temporary or permanent?”

“It’s permanent,” she said, fingering it. “At least I hope it’s permanent.”

“You win it in a raffle or what?”

“Long story.”

“Short legs,” I said, indicating the wolfman’s disproportionately short slacks-clad legs. “Why’d you decide to give him the Calvin and Hobbes treatment?”

The girl ignored me again and started fucking around on her phone. I got up and grabbed another beer. Eventually she put her phone away and enthusiastically engaged me and we talked about everything and nothing for half an hour or so while we drank our beers. I told her my name and she told me hers and I forgot it before it was halfway inside my ear. Julia, maybe, or Julie. She offered to take me to an old spooky bridge where Goatman occasionally still gets spotted. Governor’s Bridge, the natives called it; one of several bridges in the area with all sorts of hideous juju and Rated R lore. It was over on the other eastern fringe of nearby Bowie, but nothing was really far from anything here in the Washington, DC area. On the way we would hit a couple of roads where Goatman was known to often set up shop (or chop, rather?—it is said that Goatman is often accessorized with a pickaxe).

“I’ll drive if you navigate,” I said to her, putting on my shoes. She agreed to this and we jumped in my rental.

Three ELO songs later, we were on the desolate stretch of road that Goatman allegedly haunts.

“Lottsford Road… Bit a misnomer, innit?” I told her, switching on my high beams and slowing the car to an idle. “Where I come from, roads are paved, and they have two lanes at the very least.”

“You’re one of those people who has to remark on every single pleasure and displeasure they experience, huh,” the girl said, rolling down her window. She started sniffing at the air like a bloodhound and said, “Eww… You smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“That,” she said, scrunching her face up. “Smells like if you ate a bunch of cat food and then, like, puked it all up.”

Jesus. That bartender had called this called this girl a creepster and he had not been exaggerating. Unfortunately, the grisly imagery that her wayward description conjured up engaged my brain before I could slam the door in its face. Still, I smelled nothing aside from the vanillaroma air freshener that dangled nervously from the rear view mirror.

And then—

Bam! Bam-bam-bam!

The first thing I thought when the blood splattered all over me was, why the hell did I wear my light blue denim jacket instead of my expendable black denim jacket, knowing goddamn well some shit like this was probably going to happen… And then I remember thinking, man, that is soooo freaky, bloody fucking smells, man, it smells like how multivitamins taste, if you’ve ever had the misfortune of having to chew one up. It’s that same grody sort of barftastic metalloid anti-taste… And then I remember thinking, whose goddamn blood is this anyway? And why do they have so much of it. And why’s this girl screaming like a damn torture victim? And then more bam-bam-bam… And I saw the pick-axe before I saw the thing wielding it…My wherewithal kicked in and I gunned it, with the girl hanging either halfway out of the car or halfway in the car, depending on your perspective. Somebody somewhere started yelling, “Stop! . . Yo, man, STOP!”

 ~

I like to research new cryptids—new cryptids to me, at least—before I go slithering all over Biscuitville or wherever trying to find them. It was my own personal theory that any creature endowed with such a surly moniker as Goatman must emit a stench akin to that of a refrigerator-size stack of turds. And I little cursory internet research told me I was right.

“. . . And then I smelled something like burnt meat lovers’ pizza,” said one unfortunate anonymous soul who was unlucky enough to get within wafting distance of Goatman. “Like, really burnt. Like, you set the oven to eight hundred degrees, and you put the pizza in, plastic wrapper still on it and such, and then go upstairs and crawl into bed and konk out and stay that way ‘til the fire department or whoever shows up.”

Another anonymous person who had encountered Goatman was less specific. “One time I went campin’ with this buddy of mine who got real mad at his rubber boots because they weren’t fittin’ perhaps as comfortably as he would have liked, and, man, this ol’ boy starts pitchin’ a fit and callin’ his boots every curly syllable under the sun and moon and stars, and, make a long story short, he finally takes ‘em off and throws ‘em right in the middle of this big fire we had goin’ and, man, I tell you what, them burning boots smelt just like our mutual friend whose name I shalt not mention.”

“One time I ate a whole washbasin of homemade peanut grease—long story, lol—and my farts and burps smelled exactly like what I smelled right before I had my encounter with Goatman,” said another anonymous person who had had an encounter.

The internet is stuffed to the baleen with this variety of looney tunes esoterica concerning Goatman and his brethren.

The world has no shortage of Goatman theorists, and many of them are crazier than a sprayed roach.

“Well, Goatman’s genes are pretty much split right down the middle,” said one self-proclaimed Goatman expert via email correspondence. “Fifty percent goat, fifty percent man. You ever seen that movie The Fly? Cronenberg flick from the 80’s with what’s-his-nuts in in? That’s pretty much how it went down. Classic case of transmogrification gone awry and such.”

“I have been studying Goatman all my life,” said another, “and the only thing I can tell you for sure is that he’ll go friggin’ nutso on you if you call him Sheepboy.”

Another is more diplomatic with his theories. “See, Goatman really only has one natural predator, you know, besides good ol’ boys with hunting rifles, and that is the Chupacabra,” he said, responding to my queries via phone call. “You see, cabra means goat, and I’ll let you figure out the rest.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s just some sort of tulpa or manifestation that the Capricorns whipped up,” said another. “I mean, what else they got to do but stare at their savings accounts and gripe about born so close to Christmas, yuk-yuk-yuk.”

 ~

Okay, back in the car, huff, puff, huff, puff… Less blood, more guts, pretty please… Goatman was on my hood now, that was for sure. And he was doing a little equatorial wiggle like Manu Chao. Something landed in my lap that looks like a chicken gizzard. That’s when the weird girl stopped screaming and started laughing her head off.

 “Ho-lee crap, man, you should see your face!” said the girl, smiling real big like a drunk hobo.

“I see my face multiple times daily, pretty much every day on the calendar.”

I pulled the car over, realizing that I had been pranked. The thing with the pick-axe, I was told, was her boyfriend wearing some type of kinkster onesie, and the pick-axe had Fisher written down one side of it and Price written down the other side. The blood had really been blood, but it was deer blood and not people blood.

Okay, lesson learned, don’t roll into town and start treating other people’s cryptids like a box of ten dollar shark jerky at some beachfront tourist trap. Be sensible and courteous and discreet with your inquiries. Hotcha, hotcha.

 ~

Once you are fully submerged in the realm of the outré, be it the supernatural and paranormal or UFO’s or cryptids or the whole creepy loaf, it is difficult to extract yourself. I have seen men lose their minds and never recover them. Once while fishing for bass in the C&O Canal near the DC/Maryland border, I happened upon a man swatting at invisible mosquitos and yelling at the sky like it owed him money.

“I know you’re up there, you son of a biscuit eater!” he was saying, teeth bared.

Against my better judgement I approached him and asked him with whom he was conversating.

“I’m talking to GOD, man! . . Only it ain’t God. It’s some capricious thing that don’t care about you or me or any other bag-of-bones on the planet! It’s playing with us, man, I’m telling you, it’s just playing with us.”

I saw nothing in the sky aside from a few busted-up city birds.

“I don’t think he’s up there, brother. Maybe try him back later.”

The man ignored me and accelerated his insults. I abandoned my inquest and reengaged my fishing rod.

 ~

If a cute little dog is found sans head and mangled beyond belief in Act 1, it sure as hell better be blamed on an upright humanoid monster by Act 3. This is the general rule of cryptid lore. Fact is, though, the Goatman legend appears to have indeed started with a family pooch named Ginger who had the misfortune of having its head detached from its body, and nothing will stir up the human imagination like a mutilated dog. Skeptics say Ginger was probably hit by a passing car or train, but others believed the dog met its maker by way of a more sinister means, albeit an unlikely one.

Or is it?

Turns out that quite a few doggies in the area met equally gruesome fates, which gave strength to the Goatman theory.

And then of course, there have been Goatman sightings by the denizens of Prince George’s County and environs. Bigfoot-like creature, but with horns, seven to eight feet tall, three hundred pounds, says one account. Ditto, ditto, but twelve feet tall, says another. It does appear that something has been slinking around farms and golf courses and patches of wilderness just east of Washington, DC.

Some folks believe Goatman is a classic case of transmogrification gone haywire at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center: man does experiment with goats, man presses wrong button, man emerges from laboratory looking like half the Halloween section at Target, et cetera, et cetera.

 ~

Months after my adventures in Beltsville, I did a little sortie to the Governor’s Bridge, a hundred-plus-year-old truss bridge located in the middle of a Tim Burton-esque mire about ten miles east of the District line in Bowie, Maryland. The Governor’s Bridge is one of several bridges around the area where Goatman allegedly conducts his creepy business.

Even though it was deep December, I still took my fishing rod as a sort of pretense prop for skulking around the woods. Generally the people that live outside of Washington, DC do so because of their steadfast animosity for other people, and I did not want to be mistaken for a burglar or passing Satanist. I also took it because I knew for a fact people pull pickerel out of the Patuxent River all twelve months a year.

The road to the Governor’s Bridge was blocked off by some graffiti-covered concrete barriers about a quarter of a mile from the actual bridge, so I parked the car in a nearby nature reserve and continued the trek on foot. Beyond the barriers the road became overgrown with grass and weeds and old spindly trees. It basically looked like what happens if Poison Ivy defeats Batman and you don’t insert more tokens.

I approached the bridge, which to my dismay was accessorized with a couple of fishermen—a stubby guy and a tall skinny guy…

“Aye, man, any luck?” said the skinny one, chomping his brains out on a Swisher Sweets cigar.

“Not yet, brother. I just pulled up,” I said, casting into the river. The Patuxent was about twenty yards wide and maybe three feet deep; more of a creek than a river but still plenty fishable. “How about you guys?”

“Oh, a couple of itty bitties and that’s about it.”

We stood there fishing in silence for a little bit. One of the dudes was humming Le Marseillaise.

I cleared my throat and said, “I hear this bridge has a bit of mystery surrounding it.”

“Yeah, but it’s all bullhonky,” said the stubby one. “I’ve been coming out here and exploring these woods since I was old enough to dress myself and I ain’t never seen nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Same here,” said the skinny one. “I bet I’ve boinked thirty different girls under this bridge, all without incident.”

Sure, there’s a sucker born every minute, but a million shiny new killjoys come squirting out of their mothers every three point five seconds.

I said adios to the two dudes and worked my way down the shore for a little while, casting about, occasionally rubbernecking at the woods around me. Man, there was not an honest-to-God fish anywhere in this river… Whoa. I heard the distinct crunch-crunch-crunch sound of someone walking through a forest during the late autumn or winter. Or maybe not? Nothing nowhere… There. A few prissy deer, running—but from what?

I got the spook mumps so I began working my way back toward the bridge. The fishermen were gone. The road seemed impossibly more desolate than it was a slender hour ago on the way out here. And yet I felt like I was being very intently watched. I had read enough Oliver Sacks to know there is no more mischievous critter on the planet than the human brain—especially one out in the woods by its lonesome… A brand new bugger of a thought ambushed me: I had become dreadfully obvious to me that there was zero point zero chance the car would still be in the parking lot of the nature reserve where I had left it… But why? And where would it be now? There was no reason for it to be towed. And it was a very difficult car to break into, I knew from experience . . .

I got to the nature reserve. The car was there, just as I had left it.

Well, almost just as I’d left it.

There was a note on it, under the windshield wiper, midnight blue ink, penmanship in three different time zones…

You park like Goatman smells, you dipshit commie spinster!

It was no prize-winning parking job, no doubt about it, nor was it offensive enough to merit a malice-sodden handwritten note… I held the note closer to my face, inspecting it… I had seen this cryptic handwriting before, with its insolent slant and buggy undulations . . .

Damn, man. No way . . .

That feeling of intently being watched heated up again so I swiveled around real fast. Not a thing anywhere. No birds or squirrels, even… I reexamined the note and the handwriting upon it. Yeah, no way, man…

To confirm my awful little hunch, I took my Cross Townsend rollerball pen out of the left pocket of my jeans, flipped the note over, and wrote down a single four-syllable word…

Doppelganger.

The penmanship was identical.

Well, heck.

I checked the backseat and the trunk… Nope, no stowaways. I guess the other me just wanted to top off his big full day of doing nothin’ by leaving me a little passo-aggro note to freak my out and then skip off to wherever. All this reminded me of an old saying (that I created and curated, myself) . . .

Life is short, revenge is long.  

The author contemplates the difference between rocks and pebbles while visiting the Governor Bridge in the belly button of Goatman Country.

Bowie, MD

~

What was that all about?

“Sir, I regret to inform you that you are being hunted.”

The spirit of Dr. Who is alive and well here in downtown District of Columbia.

Washington, DC

~~~

When I do good, I’m Van Hillard, and when I do bad, I’m Han Villard

Houston, TX

~~~

Nothing could have prepared me for what CAPTCHA stands for.

Houston, TX

~~~

Q-Bert’s real name was Le Corbusier.

Houston, TX

~~~

These five motherless goslings and aspiring snakehead dinners are out here performing the last ten minutes of Lord of the Flies.

Georgetown, DC

~~~

Dostoevsky died watching Garfield the Movie.

Wheaton, MD.

~~~

I call this look Le Shoplifter.

Silver Spring, MD

~~~

I wonder if ol’ Robert Mitchum was a Splenda guy or a Stevia guy.

Georgetown, DC

~~~

Spider & I

Behold, a few conversational encounters with spiders in/around Washington, DC . . .

Spider in my room: "Whatcha thinkin' about?"

Me: "I hate when people ask me that. I hate when spiders ask me that, too. Now I'm thinking, what was I thinking about."

Spider: "Which was..."

Me: "Nothing. I wasn't thinking anything at all. Nada. I was lying here making faces out of the cracks and bumps in the ceiling."

Spider: "You're a Krishnamurti in denim."

Me: "No, I'm not, not at all. Krishnamurti wouldn't keep dreamy spiders around who don't do shit besides graze on other people's black bean dip and slobber on their books."

Spider: "Ha. Further proof of him bein' a charlatan, I say... Faces on the ceiling, eh. I see Leonid Brezhnev. There. See it? Those are his eyebrows, there, and--"

Me: "Shit, I do see it. That's his eyebrows, his like bushy as fuck eyebrows, and those are his big boxy sunglasses there, those watermarks or whatever they are. And there's his frown right there--you see it?"

Spider: "It's more a grimace than a frown. Like he's at a performance of Shostakovich's Symphony Number Five and he's gotta poot real bad."

Me: "It's totally a grimace. Damn, you're good at this... I changed my mind, it's the Fonz, smiling. And those shadows are his leather jacket."

Spider: "I'd be lying if I said I see the Fonz. You and me maybe didn't watch the same Happy Days."

Me: "Shit, story of my life."

~~~

Spider: "I don't know how you do it, Van."

Me: "You don't know how I do what."

Spider: "Go through life without getting smushed or flushed."

Me: "Not biting people helps. Not biting people lends an immense benefit of the doubt. You should try it."

Spider: "Wish I could. My nature is to bite everything and anything. Plus, I love biting things. People, bugs, other spiders..."

Me: "Look up real quick... Smile... God, you really are hideous. Those mandibles look like they can do some damage, though."

Spider: "They can! I can bite through all sorts of stuff. If you gave me like ten or twelve minutes, I could take your whole pinkie off."

Me: "See, that's the kind of talk that'll get you into trouble... Are those... Why are you wearing tabi socks?"

Spider: "They help me sneak up on bugs."

Me: "Do me a favor, go run around outside or something. My head hurts and I need a nap and you're weirding me out."

Spider: "Don't mind me. I'll be real quiet. Which of these Paul Auster books should I read first?"

Me: "Doesn't matter if you're quiet, your presence freaks me out. Seriously, last chance or it's slipper city... And start with the New York Trilogy like everyone does. Weird existentialist mystery shit. Right up your creepy little alley."

~~~

Small but muscular lookin' spider: "What's that, guy?... Yes, I do have mandibles, but don't persecute me. Remember, I kill bugs."

Me: "You bit me last night, didn't you. This little welt, that's you, isn't it."

Spider: "My excuse, my lord, is to admit I have no excuse."

Me: "Don't get cute. You're gonna get Scrubble Bubbled either way, but you might as well be chewing on a better set of last words."

Spider: "I wasn't getting cute. I was quoting Khalil Gibran. I'm real learned for my age."

Me: "I bet you are. I see you over there by my books fucking around in your little web. I permitted you to camp out there and do your creepy spider shit and you show your appreciation by giving me a fucking welt."

Spider: "Look, just cool off, okay? It was an accident. I was crossing you and you like jumped in your sleep and I didn't know what else to do."

Me: "Eight legs, eight eyes, yet still one default reaction to everything in life... Look, nothing personal but you leave me no choice. Scrubble Bubbled, crunched, or both?"

Spider: "You could always capture me and let me loose outside."

Me: "Yeah, so you can bite me again? Thanks but no thanks."

Spider: "*sigh* Okay, I'm ready. Any chance of me gettin' a funeral at sea?"

Me: "You mean will I flush your mangled little corpse, admiral? Yeah, I can do that."

~~~

Spider in my room: "What are you, dosing on shrooms or something? Why the weirdness, guy?"

Me: *gazing at ceiling/walls* "This goddamn mosquito feasted on me last night and the little fucker's probably still in here."

Spider: "What a bummer. What *a* bummer."

Me: "You see him anywhere? Can any of your eight fucking eyeballs spot him before he zaps me again?"

Spider: "No need. I know exactly where he is. And now I know why he tasted like Triscuits and sharp cheddar and Asahi."

Me: "You ate him?"

Spider: "Yessir. Midnight snack! I actually nabbed him while he was sucking on the top of your foot. You may or may not be delighted to know he begged for his life. Man, zero dignity. Like none at all. He went full on Miller's Crossing on me. 'Look into your heart, look into your heart' and I said, real coldly, just like Gabriel Byrne, I said 'what heart. *crunch!* You woulda loved it."

Me: "I bet, I bet. My hero. I owe you one. Still, I wish you would've got him before he gave me the Nosferatu treatment."

~~~

Spider in my room: "Uh oh. The Vanimal is on the prowl. The Vanimal is restless. Whose unlucky blood will be drawn in attempt to satiate his unquenchable thirst."

Me: "What are you carrying on about, weirdo?"

Spider: "Are you punishing me or are you punishing one of the other blokes? I presume that's why you're boxing up all your books."

Me: "I'm boxing up my books because I'm blowing this creepy little bungalow. Moving across town. Found a spot right smack dab in the middle of Gringolandia. 14th and T... It's a little pasty over there, but whatever, it's the same price as this joint and I'm closer to the stupid bar. No more thousand dollar Uber rides."

Spider: "(!!)... This is terrible news. Totally terrible. Shit sandwich, man, I had no idea. Hmm... For old times' sake, do you think I could, ya know..."

Me: "Do I think you can what, bite the flamin' fuck out of me? No, you can not. And where are my Nelson Algren books. I have like ten fucking Nelson Algren books and I don't see any of them.

Spider: "You do not have ten Nelson Algren books, you have seven Nelson Algren books. Or is it six? Or is it five? Or maybe you don't have any Nelson Algren books at all. Maybe there never was a Nelson Algren. Maybe "Nelson Algren" is a construct that your deviant little human mind manufactured to defer blame to, I don't know, peace lovin' arachnids who like to spend their Sunday evenings languidly sipping on fly juice and reading Heidegger and Baudrillard and---"

Me: "---and Nelson Algren."

Spider: "Fine, goddamnit, will you just leave me The Neon Wilderness? Pretty please? You can blast me with all the Scrubble Bubble you want or flush me or whatever. Just leave me that one book."

Me: "Keep it. Keep all of 'em. Keep in mind, though, his stuff will rot the heck out of your brain.

Spider: "Haha. What mind. What brain."

Me: "Ah. Good point."

~~~

Me: "What's your little protest sign say? *peers down at spider in my room* 'We Are All Itsy Bitsy'... You know, a lot of people wouldn't agree with that."

Spider: "Exactly. Say it again. A lot of *people* wouldn't agree with that."

Me: "You're upset because I poured hydrogen peroxide on your friend the other day and flushed him.... What did I say to you right after I did that?"

Spider: "I don't know, time kinda stood still."

Me: "I asked you if you remember the end of Natural Born Killers."

Spider: "I haven't seen that bullshit movie in three hundred years."

Me: "Well, during their murder spree, Woody Harrelson and what's-her-nuts always let one person live to tell the tale..."

Spider: "Oliver Stone swiped that from a spaghetti western."

Me: "Yeah, and the spaghetti western director swiped it from Alexandre Dumas who swiped it from the John of Patmos who swiped it from Charles Schultz and so on and so on..."

Spider: "Look, guy, I'll take sticks and stones over this verbal treatment any day of any week. Either hit me with the death juice or don't, but whatever you do or don't do, ease up on the syllables. Pretty please, with a big fat fly on top."

Me: "You have a commendable amount of verve for a gentleman in your predicament."

Spider: "Because I've got zilch to lose. What do you take from a spider who's already lost everything?.... Hey!---Asshole! Give it back! That took me hours to make!"

Me: "I'm doing you a favor. Your penmanship's in three different time zones and you spell like you need an exorcist."

Spider: "Typical greedhead human scum."

Me: "Asterick with mandibles."

~~~

Me: "What the... Is this what I think it is?"

Spider in my room: "I don't know, what do you think it is?"

Me: "Spider shit."

Spider: "Then, no, it's definitely not what you think it is."

Me: "*sniff sniff* What the fuck is it then? And why's it all over my China Mieville book."

Spider: "Easy, guy. It's just black bean dip. See? Black bean dip. From Trader Joe's. I'll wash it off in a little bit."

Me: "You can't wash it off. It's like all up in the pages."

Spider: "Then I'll eat it off then. I got the most adroit mandibles this side of Planet X."

Me: "You're pretty nonchalant about all this, eh? What would you do if I got black bean dip all over one of your books?"

Spider: "Probably penalize you same way usual. Take a chunk outta your leg or something while you're snoozin'. Moot point, though, because I don't have any books and I don't need any books because you own like a million fucking books---a million fucking books that you never read because you're always doing stupid shit on your phone."

Me: "Blah, blah, blah. Why are you eating black bean dip at 9:30 in the morning. Not even homeless people do that."

Spider: "Because there's no bugs in this place and because I can't open the fridge and also because none of these bullshit restaurants along this hoity toity bullshit drag accept Diners Club."

Me: "Jesus. That is a lot of books, huh."

Spider: "I'm tellin' you, one library card and the Sultan of Brunei himself's gonna be knockin' on your door askin' if he can like borrow your Turtle Wax."

~~~