Come Down Mthyuh

I stay up in Pennis, near Ground Bay. There's some RV resorts and a gas station with a POD. They have a golf course and some cows grazing moss on the Dirtiest River in the World. Mondays Mike comes down Mthyuh for feed and takes the pups while I work cement and watch cable at Chank Suites, 60 hours a 4-day week. I drop about two-fifty on booze and groceries and lodge it against the back of the bed. Don't need much hay. Llamas ran off with a minstrel. This is just until he can get a second mortgage or some family help. Then we'll build a fence the girlz can't chew and still have gophers on their plates every day. We used to call it Death Farm 3000 for all the graves. But Mthyuh turns up her babes and they walk away. When the filter's up the sky is clear of pests.

Come down Mthyuh with your truck,
Come down the mountain
Where life isn't measured;
Bring your extended cab full of dogs.

Kev

bent anachronism

I know I can't shake my head too hard. There's been no moon for a couple of nights. Getting used to the high beam flipper in the new hooptie. Waking up in a pool of lipstick tubes at the bottom of the boat told me I'd been in a real bumper. I scratch across the desert pavement on my knees. Jumping cactus smoldering and weeds. Foliage, then fire. A feathered witch pokes at the holey cholla bone with a stick. AAA on the way. Jan, wait for me.

"Wayne, my main enchufe at TRW, protege. You will learn the tricks of trade in charms and powders."

So you are the Chama. They said you were a topless Afro-American in her thirties.

"We will shapeshift and read coals together."

That one says you're hot. Boom! I like you.

"Father."

No...

Ashes and sand blew into ripples around the Chama and took her shadow in the ridges of its trunk. Crickets chattered. Wayne could see the spines. Then he could pull a rabbit out of a hat. Then he could manage his family. Then he could finish his work. Then he accepted two soft-centered suckers from the tow-truck driver. They drove over horned toads, out of the land painting, off MPS grounds. The road was not so black.

Idling Caprices

Now that the swimming pool had been drained for good, Mike took up with new ways and associates. One amante at the Preservation Society, another down at Shiv Council. A scientist, an accountant, a bum. Let bloom a goatee and a black, open-shirted look. Got into trouble with rents and men all the way to Cliffe Suites. Until he showed up here one morning.

"I'm looking for Julio."

"Do you mean Hoolie?"

"Told me he lived out back in the shed."

"We don't live here at all. We..."

"Julio." He was looking over my shoulder at I guessed Hoolie.

"Mike." Hoolie says behind me. I step out of the way and they say,

"Just because there's no water, don't mean you can't dive."

"We squirmed like eels in another atmosphere."

"Even while lawn salad bobbed on top."

"But now it's a neck breaker."

"NO. We've got lungs now. Ears."

"We've got the Filter down and K's rampaging."

"Yeah. I let 'em out. One of my pranks. Come dark-rule the chanks with me."

"NO. Come with us. We're deities."

"NO. My life is free."

"NO. You are a slave to shiv and idling caprices..."

As the sun set, the two worked out their issues. Silhouettes in pink on the listing log cabin porch. I, a woman, could not intervene. I wasn't even sure if Mike had the right guy. Hoolie isn't Mexican.

Chama-tilly

They can Go Back to Hurt you

An agent of anything steps into your life and shows time for what it is: a lie.
Let's take the bullet holes along the side of Ken's sedan.

Pick any vertical line to indicate "now" (Her). Let's say the long crease of the driver's door.

Punctures to the right and left are future and past, for a lack of better tautology.
Inside each dark opening, poorly-captured moments flicker.

On the left, they are ripples of attention. Starlene's prism black lights the steps in hot retrospect:

• Oh what a pommeling he gave that love. He was brown nosing fate.
• Showers ruined the yard sale. Now we know why he sought that.

On the right, they are ripples of motion. Starlene's gravity stones past the splash, dropping wet:

• Must have been some undercurrent make him call his mom the next day: eddy pull?
• In less than a year they've got him surrounded at the Club Martinique-- surprised?

Swamp Baller

Hoolie finds work at a reform school in a swamp for jaded chillun. It is too late to go backward, for any of them. They can grow tho.

First, two bombshells of 14-- opposite race, but like twins-- receive him in the palatial Atrium of Thinkers. They show him the way to his cot, freshly splayed, between two metal filing cabinets hanging obscenely with padlocks and combination cylinders. It was the medications.

Dinner that night includes an equestrian-themed ice sculpture and cruise-like buffet for 80. If you had recently fired yourself for wanton / self-harming behaviors or gone truant from one cinderblock apartmentchank nightmare to the next, you could still join in song, partake of the table, and be limited to no special fruit. Of the few punishments allowed, money and higher society were two.

Tho one night a red-headed, wide-pupiled chick or twink, ruddy with astyptic bloom, play hooky big time in the apt-4d sugar shack of latest re-hiree and retired pro-baller remembered for having pulled in to the compound with bullet holes all alongside his Charger. Ken, until now, has never been identified as either black man or monster, except while toying with himself, among characters to whose points of view we've not been privy, and by his own mother.

Giant Cranking Engines

Wind makes the hills shimmer with light be-
cause 150-ft turbines crank their shells and
spill friction into every living room and den.

Their howl is an avian or canine call, a harm-
ony of inter-special gaiety. The low one drones
to all: "Hear my prolific growl. Take my free

issue." Others ring shrilly, morbidly inviting.
Jangling crickets tamber nature's consent, ig-
norant. All-night criminal traffic now wafting

in from the 10. Bitches stretch in the sand, ne-
ver yet having met up with a scorpion. Lit ho-
opties creep by to the petrol stand, buffeted.

Hooptie to Tomorrow

I combed the chanks, all of them, to get housing for me and the bitches. It was the end of the longest Off Season ever, and a lot of what was closed down was going to stay that way. I guess I saw about _ spaces and met about the same number of men.

Phil Barleycorn drove me out to a hive where your fwd view and rear shield look the same. Phil was white and pink with the earnest humor of a man who'd been telling challenging jokes to chillun for all time. Never laid a meal in his own way. He also seemed to be sniffing for lint in my mind as he bragged about sending three zygotes to Pig 'n Tongue U. The rental structure had provided final launching pad for an original pioneer famly whose ultimate jump was remote lordship of these spoils.

"You may have seen it, the death march lot for K's right there at the end of the field, but the wind Never Blows this way," counseled Phil, farting. "They started this hole way back when the chanks were still flush and sweating. Then their heartland became a museum for ugly, militaristic protocols. Everyone who came here wanted badly to be a cog. So they called it God. It's where I'm still living."

Next stop, last rest stop before High Chanks and extremer pointz. RIP!
"Hoolie Roll: Hooptie to Tomorrow"

Reliquary of K's

Every time his head surfaced, he'd scream at the cameras, "How do I kill it?! How do I kill it!" and it would again twist him under the muddy foam. They were rolling, and the beast's plastic branks had come off in the scuffle. Kevin would have been crying if he had not needed to maintain, to save his life, a fierce persona. The electronic eyes became absurd to him then. He had to squeeze these prehistoric lips together in a lovelock and keep it shut until emergency services could hooptie on over. Publicity may have been his job, but he felt he had already stretched his adventure comfort aperture nearly to snapping.

Meanwhile a family of K's coasted about 250 rods above the desert floor. While they appeared to be a team, each one was searching, lost in its own way. Parents and chillun. Their bodies knew to fly to the left of another's wind, but that was all. Then they heard Kevin Reynolds's horrific squalling.

They turned as one and on a diagonal, calm as death, swooping low enough to take him. There was no question which. As deity, a mother must step forth to challenge the moral capacity of any contrary life form.

The sweat from the back of Kevin's neck began to pool under Peg's tongue.

Clipped in her beak, flanked by her significant others, Kevin wondered if they, now, might eat him, removed from record on a windy chank cliff, solemnly, as if picking through a reliquary.

Jaws of Emotion

Peggy's back arches across the saw-like top beakrails, full and fresh as a fish on a monger's forearm. Points puncture her skin at the tailbone and shoulder blades. More than gravity feels like it's calling her feet and hair to return to the world she's known till now. Cement and soil are drawing her even more strongly than her own existence has ever created sucking for most others. The strength of the Earth's pull on Peggy in this moment is only comparable to the power of the dark beacon with which she calls her own children, a burning siren of their own suffering, for they know she is gone.

In a pants suit, Peggy now suffers: suddenly swiped from her grounding in the Sears parking lot, stars smear past as if the whole planet spun. We can see a purse, shoes, keys, barrettes and shiny coins raining down hard from the jaws of her perp. Its toes are leathry and Dirty Pink against the blacktop. The claws alone are hooptie size. No one else, however, is present. No screaming crowds bear witness to this spectacular and tragic abduction. Security cameras tilt or hang dizzyingly, dead in their grips. Only the crazy orange unblinking lens of Peg's beholder confirms the scene to God. Chang K. Chang Chank Mall has been shut down for weeks.

Seven Over

Sylvia felt almost the same whether she was in her car or on foot. It was just a difference between pedal pushing and weight shifting, really using one foot or two. Shells of cloth, leather, metal. Her spring lifts gave her the same buoyancy as the shock absorbers in her hooptie. She dreamed of bouncing all the way to San Diego along the Hard Trampoline Highway. She soared upward, seven yards over the limit. There was Ted hitting climax at about the same time, the Valley stretching out beneath them like a Dirty White Vinyl Bible. They shared weightlessness for just a sec. They continued as such until splashdown in the Pacific. They bobbed alongside steamers and pleasure craft, were dwarfed by the wreck of the USS Ronald Reagan, sipped Seven and Sevens from straws in tall, frosty stones.

I Blow Life Out My Ass

http://www.history.rochester.edu

"Why do you come to me now Tom."
"I don't know, but it may be just your improbability. Sometimes I go where life is least likely to be, and tonight I saw your fire. I also snapped the axle on my hooptie driving over some unexploded ordinance. Someone else might feel lucky to be alive."
"Why do you turn from life Tom."
"It's trying to rub me out. It doesn't want me except as a host, and I do not accept that."
"Life is all you have."
"Life is cheap. It can't afford me. Life is a Bolshevic revolution. It wants to break me up into small, poorly-appointed apartments."
"Do you believe in the Shiv."
"I do not."
"Do you have health insurance?"
"Only if I take the shiv. And only for pharmashiv."
"Auto Club?"
"Yes."
"What does your shiv priest say."
"You are my shiv priest."
"I only do Volca and sing. I am strictly ceremonial."
"I want to stay and hear your song."
"I am in a bad mood Tom. Volca did not go well. I cannot sing now."
"Maybe you can refer me to a shiv priest who gives a shit."
"Tom. You are a leper. I care for no one else."
"One song, Chamatily."
"Then will you call AAA and accept life's plan?"
"I will accept your song Chamatily. Life covers me in boils. I blow life out my ass."
"Very well. I sing. You bleed and ooze. We die together. Then we see about a truck."

http://www.hooptie.de/

Fortunately, though she was muddy and on the ground, it was only the driver's skirt he wanted. He had already made holiday mincemeat of her shoes and her kairn terrier.

He Jacked a Hooptie

Kug speaks to us directly from a windy, 10-acre golden poppy meadow near Cliff Suites.

"I have dogs and my dogs are free. I didn't come up here and make a sacrifice on this land, move my life, so my animals would have to be in a cage. They run when I run, eat when I eat, walk when I walk, and sleep with me. I've got a big four-poster with a California queen stone, and that's where we wake up every morning."

Four fluffy one-hundred pound dogs romp in circles around him when he walks, and walk beside him in the colorful high grass when he runs. Kug's long blond hair all blows over one ear as he sends a smile back to one of them. Gray clouds are beginning to blot the sunshine and cast hand-like shadows. There is a faint mechanical sound, possibly woodcutters.

The dogs are suddenly gone. There is a screeching of tires.

"Pippi! La-la! M'Lady! Come!"

It was Juniper. He'd run down to the one-lane road and in front of a car to stop it so that he could attack the driver. He was successful in this.

Someone's husband was screaming like a child. There was grunting from behind the car, an Edsel, and Juniper's persistent growling insistent throaty message.