Got Me a Date with an Uptown Girl by Douglas Hackle

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The Scab-Begger by Zoltan Komor

The scab-beggar steps to me on the street and asks for some dry wounds. He can see that my arm is full of crusty layers and he's already eyeing a big wound on my elbow, the one I wanted to buy a pack of smoke with. It's such a long time since I’ve smoked—the overhead charges take away all of my wounds and I can't torchure myself forever.

I look the scab-beggar up and down. What a miserable little fellow. Since scabs became the new currency only weak-kneed, spineless people who haven't got the balls to bruise themselves become poor.

"Grow your own!" I growl at him, covering the wound on my elbow with my bruised hand.

"Please, mister, I'm anemic, my blood...my blood doesn't clot correctly..." he snivels, then he adds: "I've got a family to take care of!"

"Then why don't you beat them like every other decent person does?" I yell at him, suddenly remembering my father who beat the crap out of us every night when I was a kid so he could take us to the zoo on the weekend. He was a great man, but finally he took too much weight on his shoulders. He and my mother decided they should save some scabs for a new house. So they had a big fight every night and beat each other hard for the wound-coins. It wasn't easy for dad because he was also torchered in his workplace all day long. So the house... They couldn't save enough for the house because my father dropped dead after a few months. I think that's when I decided that I'd never get married and have children.

"Their blood doesn't clot either, ’cause they haven't eat for quite a long time!" the beggar cries. "You're not gonna leave me alone, are you?"

I sigh and pinch the crusty layer between my two fingers and I tear it up slowly. From behind the brown wound-coin transparent liquid and some blood oozes out. I drop the slimy clot-coin into the beggars palm, who slips it into his pocket thanking me.

I can almost see that he will step into a bar to buy some booze with it. But later I see him in front of a milk automat. He's pushing my wound into its coin slot and suddenly a really good feeling overwhelms me. Though, there's really no reason for me to be happy. After all, I didn't buy any smokes.

I go home. The sounds of infant crying and beating can be heard coming from the neighbour. Maybe a mother is kicking a newborn so she can buy more diapers for it. I'm cutting myself with a kitchen knife when an image pops into my mind from my childhood. I was seven, kneeling in the middle of the room, scratching up a dry wound from my knee that I'd got falling off my bycicle. I was saving my wound-coins in a porcelain piggy bank while a bald, chubby politician talked on the tv about how great an idea it was to make scabs the new currency after the usual money became worthless in the big economic crisis.

"The world will never run out of wounds!" He winked from the screen.

This was long ago. I go to bed. In my dream I see pigs with foaming mouths eating my wounds from a rusty trough. I wake up later with the dark suspicion that the politican in the tv was wrong, even the world can run out of wounds.

Houses of Paper by Nathan Wunner

Trevor’s nose is bleeding and his eyes are rolling back in his head. He feels the blistering black edges of death gripping him tightly and pulling him down. In his mind he pictures the whole universe coming undone, the distance between stars becoming infinite as all of creation’s desire to expand and multiply is tearing it apart from inside.

His body growing cold, and knowing that he has very little time before the lights go out on everything, forever, Trevor frantically recalls a happy memory and grabs hold of it like a life preserver.

There’s soft jazz playing in the next room. Trevor feels a cozy fire at his back and a warmth in his abdomen which could only come from a whiskey bottle. He feels silk clothes on his skin, wool socks on his feet. His vision is only slightly blurred because of the alcohol; just enough to give everything a vibrant, warm halo.

Trevor taps his fingers upon a black oak desk and hums along with the music, not caring if he misses a beat. He takes another sip of whiskey and holds it in his mouth, sloshing it back and forth across his tongue and letting it burn.

Across from him is a window, and through it he sees that the ground outside is covered in snow. Fat snowflakes leisurely drift down to the earth to mingle with others of their kind. The horizon is a dark and radiant blue.

Julie enters the room, wearing a tight skirt that clings to her hips and a top that reveals an acceptable amount of cleavage without looking slutty. Her curly red hair spills around her shoulders like the froth at the bottom of a waterfall. She holds a bottle of champagne in her right hand and her left hand rests upon her hip. In a blur of motion Trevor finds himself on his feet and tasting her lips. He buries his head in her flowing hair and his senses are overwhelmed by the scent of that wretched conditioner she’s been using for the last six years.

No, no. Stop. That’s not right.

Julie bought a new conditioner. New makeup. Dyed her hair black.

It’s my fucking consciousness, Trevor thinks. I’ll make this moment work if it’s the last thing I do.

Trevor and Julie awkwardly shrug off their clothes as they make their way upstairs. Julie’s nipples are wide and perky and her skin is soft, like a pillow that’s been left out in the sunlight. Her polished fingernails fumble with Trevor’s belt buckle, then his zipper, and finally, with his flaccid cock.

Shit, Trevor thinks. I can’t get it up. Everything can’t be perfect for the last time if I can’t get it up. He tries to back out of this moment, to recall another memory in his mind’s eye, but it’s too late. Everything is falling apart faster than he’d thought it would. He has to make do with what he has.

Trevor imagines himself taking viagra. His memories become so entwined with his fantasies of how he wishes things were that he can’t tell the two apart.

Julie is wearing leather and fishnet stockings, a whip in hand, rivulets of blood seeping from the corners of her mouth. She sits on the stairs with her legs spread wide; pale white thighs with a creamy pink center out in full view. Trevor, engorged, strokes himself furiously.

Outside the sky is cracking in half. The snowflakes have all frozen in place in mid-air. Everything is frigid and iced over, even the interior of the house.

It's as though all of creation wants nothing more than to stifle Trevor’s erection.

Trevor’s hands find Julie’s throat as he thrusts inside of her. Julie squeezes her tits together with her biceps and licks her lips. Her vagina is the last light and heat left in the world.

Trevor squeezes her neck tighter and he thinks, “If it weren’t for you, I’d be perfect. I’d never feel inadequate. I’d be a God.”

In his death throes Trevor fails to realize that this is his own fantasy, a universe of his own creation; that he is Julie, fucking himself.

The walls of Trevor’s house are dripping with blood one second and on fire the next. Julie is lying dead face down on the floor, bleeding from the mouth, her feet still twitching as her brain tries to make sense of what’s happened. Then she’s on her feet, speaking in reverse, spreading her legs and crab-walking backwards up the stairs with a smile plastered to her face. The snow outside is falling upwards into the sky.

Trevor is trying to hold on just a little while longer.

Julie takes the first two fingers of her left hand and rubs her clit rapidly, reclining her neck, letting her hair fall backwards, feeling her spine tense. She speaks in that sultry voice she’d reserve for her most playfully flirtatious and private moments, and she says “This…” and as she speaks she looks down at her genitals and nods knowingly, “This is the whole of human history summed up into one moment. Cosmic amoeba with an uncontrollable desire to breed and multiply. This is the best you could do.” She reaches her fingers up into her vagina and pulls them out, and then thrusts them back up again.

Trevor feels a tug at the back of his skull pulling him away. He watches the orbits of a dozen planets decay, sending them plunging into their respective suns. He watches galaxies collide in reverse, while the stars that were born in the process collapse into themselves and disappear into the nothing that they originated from. He watches everything grow still and cold.

In the midst of all this, still desperately clutching his limp penis, he hears Julie’s voice. “Was it worth the suffering, and the pain, and the knowledge that you’ll never be alive again, just for this moment? Is this what you wanted?”

And Trevor answers like any true and knowing God would, by saying “I don’t know what I wanted.”

Silver Threads by Joseph J Patchen

“Officer all I was doing was trying to warn anyone who could hear me. All I was trying to do was to save the innocent.”

It was just a few minutes after dawn and the patrol officer questioning the disheveled elderly man was himself in a hurry. “Which is why you were running up and down the street at 5 a. m. screaming?”

“Yes.”

“And you threw pebbles and small stones at windows of the houses and automobiles?”

“Yes.”

“So, what is this terrible thing causing you to play Paul Revere?”

“Officer, you would expect fright to always stalk the night and to be the darker darkness in the black. I have seen it come as swirling mists of white oozing out of the vast quiet void. Just take a look at the light emanating in their eyes bright; in the yellow, red and white of their sockets wide; comprising hypersensitive sight. As they stalk the day bathed in rays of gold, slithering in plain sight, Hell bent to torment young and old; the silver worms of dread and rot whose green trails never clot, march forth.                                                                                                                                           

“They come for me. They want my thoughts. They crave my dreams and thirst for all of my ideas and theories that my intellect has wrought. They crawl into my ears, nose and mouth gnawing the grey until its brown; they creep in my head without a sound until I’m dead and my body is found empty like a husk.

“They will do the same to everyone in this neighborhood and the same to you.”

The police office pauses for a moment and composes himself. It has been a long shift. He has had to deal with drunkards, perverts, and an attempted armed robbery. “Listen buddy, I am off patrol in ten minutes and have a hot date, I mean a really hot date with a grateful coed I gave a warning to on Route 8. I don’t have time to bring you into a psyche ward or into lock up at the precinct. Understand? Why don’t we do this, you tell me where you live and I’ll give you a ride there. You take a nice hot shower, get a nice cold drink. Hell, have a shot or two with a beer chaser for all I care. Get some rest and just forget about all this worm stuff.”

‘I can’t, they’re here.”

“Where? Where? It’s broad daylight and all I see is me and you. Do I have to look into your ear to see them?”

‘No sir, I suggest you use a mirror.’

“Oh, I see you are a smart ass. You know I can take into the woods up Route 8 and leave you there. So cut the crap.”

‘Yes sir. But I suggest you do look in a mirror and question the thin trickles of blood emerging from your ears.”