Hooded Meatball Face

Christian Giggles

She had Peggy the way she was because the birth occurred in a Crack. Water broke on a reddish brown golf course where giggling Christian children knelt bare-kneed in the dewy Spring mash with their parents and their clubs in a prayer circle. But there was a temple. It seemed a shrine to a hooded, faceless meatball head. The goofy children were giving Sylvia a bad labor, even as she recognized their clothing from a missionary barrel back at Shivchurch. Her guide, Rajkumar, had been a Living Child Goddess, and then become a caddy, then a midwife. The caddy-midwife and Tom made a human rickshaw for Syl and her unborn and carried them into the dark opening of the shrine. All its surfaces were thick with a paste made from human spittle and sacred blossoms of the Tagetes erecta. The ridges were the giant stone elephant trunk whose waviness was deep as hilliness under trees. Peg spilled forth onto these mossy undulations. Something like disco music began to play. Her special features, the spines, scales, woofers and tweeters were like mother of pearl then.

I translate this knowledge from the daughter of Rajkumar, now a domestic I've named "Miss Sprint." It is said as well that the birth occurred in a direct trajectory between the game house of conception and Peak Fordamall Chank.

That temple was a crack as sure as the sidewalk next to the bookstore at Sylvia and Tom's community college is a crack; they know and they sticky progeny are subject to fluctuation. I know. The Pegyuh's brother was my form-shifting, all-night lover.

Dr. Donna "Donna" Thong

10. Time is a Liar

Reptily sat on a footstool before a fire she'd made. Her specialty was burls, but she could also read the heat spots and Burnt Issue of cones, ashes and legumes. This oak burl had burned through the eve of and into the first morning of the new W.D. It was disturbingly reminiscent of a six-hour vision of hell she had experienced using wood from the same river bed the winter before. It's sandy, but it's cured. Miss Sprint just must not have been hosing them down. But fire's eye knows all. It can still carve its message.

She poked at the chunk of glowing wood and lifted it trepidatiously, as if she expected ugliness. "Yes, it's all written there." Reptily let the sandy, helmet-like shell of bark fall back on its tortoise legs of cinder. "Now it must burn up from the bottom. There will be a mark in the sand."

"All year, I do nothing good. I am a samurai against all best choices. I want this WD to break, and in her last flame, for the Mhuthya to roil up and bring home her bad daughter. Bad hunger to good. Vol-vol. God is pleased."

"All year in my pain I treat others bad. The world is my suffer. I am your food Mhthyuh, is me to take to your bowel. Vol-vol.

"All the days I eat I say I have something bad. Vol-vol. Vol-vol.

"I am only so sweet to get birds in the trap, and they rot. Because I have too am too much Mhuthya. Vol-vol.

"My children are lost. I have no children. Take my children. You are their path. But eat them last. Vol. Vol.

"Even temple mascots chew their own bones for me to complain vol. Even my babies have crawled away.

"I put my hair in fire to feed you, vol, I am gorged with lush diseases of lust and mimesis, horror and disgust, fear, misrepresentation, betray, go over, don't listen, TV all time, wastebag, simpleton, hypocrit, make death.

"I am fresh and livid and salt regret, vol. This day. Last day. You ate them all. Vol. Vol."

Reptily's spiny forehead rested on her knees now. There were more items, but why.

"The sloth, the fool, the reaper. I can only see myself, but I cannot see..."

It would be soon now. If she got the 2-spear sign, she could fight and run ahead. Trapped at home was a murder to her.