Don't Kiss Me: Stories(2)

AFTER


After the apocalypse, which stopped being a shock to the system after you saw them mallwalkers being vaporized over by the P.F. Chang’s that you used to eat at with your momma at every birthday, idiots pumping they elbows like the sun wasn’t an oozing boil, one of them a hawkfaced sculpture of bone before the rapture, so the pile of ash was an improvement, and why you was so angry at these ladies you didn’t quite know, but it just seemed retarded, caring about your physical fitness while nearby four crows picked at a halved lady’s crotch, but anyway after you crawled out the basement and your momma made you eat canned for every meal, after your brother’s eye just one day burbled and dripped out the socket in yolky clumps that he wiped off with his shirt hem, after you found yourself prizing your goobers like the pig to the truffle, the moist dark ones you imagine having the most nutrients, after your daddy stopped wearing pants and you stopped feeling alarmed at his swinging wrinkled scrotum, after you watched your daddy’s pimpled buttcheeks rumble with fart while he was staring dumbfounded out the window, formulating a plan he said, after your daddy took off besocked but bare-assed on your brother’s bicycle, your momma making like to run after him but then shrugging and scratching herself, which is what she started to do after it was clear there wasn’t no help coming, no tanks no army man no superhero no angel no wizard no god no God, your momma took to scratching herself, your brother took to rubbing himself through his gym shorts, both of them in a daze, these were comforts, after you saw the neighbor lady wave to you from the roof and then throw herself off, the body snapping when the rope caught and then blam, it crashed through her front room window, after your momma had you and your brother cut her down and your momma said, She always kept them flowers tidy and your brother said, She had sweet titties for an old lady, after your brother filleted the neighbor lady and you roasted her upper arms over a trash fire and salted them with dirt and had a regular chow down and then the next night you ate her inner thighs, which to you tasted like buttered rubber, after your brother tied one of the neighbor lady’s breasts over his no-eye till it was greened and shriveled, after a priest came to the house asking could we smother him, or punch him in the throat till he was dead, or he don’t know, stomp his head into a pudding, he couldn’t do it himself, after your momma sent him down the road to the Circle K where that could be arranged, after you thought about having relations with that priest before he died because you never had and you couldn’t with your brother, what with that eye, after you nearly said it, but then your daddy’s privates flashed across your brain, that arid peachfuzz desert of a nutsack, that shriveled defeated wiener, and you let the priest walk on, after you watched your brother’s baseball coach come down the road and stop to take a bite out his own arm, screaming and chewing, after your brother said, He always was a f*ckin *, your brother rubbing himself, them gym shorts no bigger than a pair of undies now, all shredded and shitted cause your brother just went wherever he was, and why not, once you nearly ate a plump turd that toppled out his shorts into the dirt cause it looked just enough like a juicy sausage link, and cause you knew it’d be nice and hot, after you woke up and saw a baldheaded lady riding your brother’s bicycle, your daddy riding the handlebars, you knew it was him cause his ass was out, after you didn’t tell no one cause what was the point, after your brother lodged an old marble he found in the neighbor’s yard in his empty eye socket, after he complained it itched his brain, said he was like to dig your momma’s eye out and use it for his own, cause she don’t do nothin with it anyway, old curdled cow, he always was embarrassed by your momma’s cellulite problems, which persisted unchecked despite there wasn’t no junk food to gnaw on, after you told him that wasn’t respectful, after you had a dream a mouth with a burger tongue and onion teeth was eating you, after a woman in a ashy pink suit came to the door trying to sell a tin of blusher, after your brother said he’d give her a nickel for it, after you saw your brother and the woman humping against the side of the garage, your momma not ten yards away in a lawn chair, ash fluttering down on it all like the opposite of snow, after you asked after the blusher and your brother said, Oh yeah but didn’t hand it over, after a fire came and you saw a pack of dogs outrun it, after your momma decided to live in the shower, after your brother started eating gravel, swallowing each pebble like a difficult but necessary pill, after your brother malleted the rest of the roof off cause he was bored, after you agreed boredom was the worst, far beyond the hunger and the fear and the fat chewed-up gumwad that your ear had become, after you woke to your brother curled up around a tattered stuffed elephant you didn’t know he had, after he muttered, Eat your boob meat in his sleep, after you heard it before you saw it, after you thought maybe your brother wasn’t asleep, maybe it was a lit fart, after that second white sting, after that clap of light, after




MY BOYFRIEND DEL


You got a eye booger, Del tells me. I can’t look at it, it’s sick. You all gooey. A goober goo-face. This he finds funny, he laughs loud, his mouth huge, all teeth but for where a ridged half-tooth is working its way down in the front. I try but can’t get a purchase on why it was so funny, but even so I laugh too, I work out the eye booger with my fingertip and try to be demure when I wipe it on his momma’s carpet. All the magazines say it’s important to laugh together, laughter is important in any successful relationship, I laugh until Del gets distracted by his Transformer and tells me in his Transformer voice that it’s time for me to die. I die over and over, wilting into the carpet, one time I wilt onto his laser gun and he tells me to quit being a stupid dummy. This hurts, I pretend I have to use the bathroom, I run the water and cry a little. When I get back Del asks me, Number one or number two? but I don’t answer, I never know how to answer that.