Pins n' Buttons

Tom wears a home-sewn vest over every plaid shirt every day. It's covered in commemorative pins and slogan buttons. Even as he lectures, its beige suede rocks against his arteries. His half-naked students find it obscene, but a heart on his chest puts them at ease during drills and bloodletting. K chicks will often leave purple stains on their seats.

Missy is out on suspension for off-limits vittle. Every re-creature must be protected extra much because they are most likely to be eaten with the smallest pang of conscience. Because they come back, because they must, it seems a venal abuse.

Tho flakes are other matter; academy classmates even graver. Flakes are food for bloodsac only; the grrl in the next seat is your sister in pain. Had Connie stepped in The Crack? Were her tertiary characteristics driving her onto the waiting list for shiv clinic and guided skeletal bursting? Had Connie in fact been a casual associate of Reptily among the rotting alfalfa bales of the Low Chanks long before the filter and the MPS? We measured time in WD then. But it lied.

Imagine all the singing night birds before wide feeding. Now there is only one, and he mocks. Fecundity only breeds more episodes: thumping, wailing, spines. Flakes disappear like soap. Soon only those who rule the skies will have a strip of land. They are proud and unsentimental or grieving. They have paid with burning; they have paid in change. They are tired of thieving, of treating. Now we are their petri dish. Death is a privileged doctor.

Phyllis
Lit-Crit Contractor, Embedded
for Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle

Missy

AWKWARD MOMENTS FOR CHAMA AS A K FLEDGLING

First Service Requirement

Here, if you plug this receiver, you may get what you want. The second receiver is what you should plug, always. If you agree with the contract, you'll be guaranteed some of what you want. If the contract is productive, you'll also receive a medal.

Couldn't any animal do this?

We are not animals, missy.

Are we dumber? We need incentives?

Without a change of attitude, you will start to discover that you no longer feel physically comfortable in your work environment. Picture shoulder blades so large as to prevent operation of the filing cabinets. Spinal curvature. And the less you'll be able to accomplish. It's a vicious spiral. Your skeletal system requires room, just like a goldfish. Goldfish are animals.

You mean I won't make open release?

Chapel of Forgetting

I'm sorry for leaving butts and halves at the altar, Peg. To tell you the truth, it wasn't sloth. Even though my fingernails by nau do resemble... Anyway, it was avarice. I know I won't be able to infuse one day. Smokers have an instinct not to throw away the shiv. Maybe I'm out and I need a puff. I can come back here. A prolonged dose makes life easier, even though you're back and forth to the fire a lot. I've got another stash over at MPS. They've repaired the Likeness of Mthyuh's crack, and everyone wants to kiss it again.

Soon you will take or spare life according to your bowel structure, decide the fate of flakes, entire families. It will be your scars they bear from the boiling cauldrons, splashed from your plunking judgements. It will be their fires, your bellow, your dunk, your douse. Your mother may have pushed you around in a baby carriage in a fur coat with a butt hanging from her mouth, but you are Mthyuh's only protector. MPS can only exist because you are the enforcer.

Am I forgiven?

I ask you to leave everything.

Shiv is for flakes now.

Shiv is for flakes only. I ask you to fly.

Shiv is... I am free?

All you have is space. And you must find Ted and the chillun. Secure a hole in a high chank.

Live feeding can begin.

No. First we must hear your screeching wading at Fire Shore. The first flake you see will be safe vittle. When you land, you'll be able to walk again, but not without full spread.

K's fly with their legs spread eagle.

That's why they call 'em K's, missy.

One Windy Night

One windy night, a kitty appeared at the mouth of the office. He was four colors, all separated out to indicate the hind sections, flanks, forearms. To the Chama, he manifested as an Ambulatory Meat Diagram. For a blurry moment she turned into Shab, the red-eyed dog who is mad and goes with an empty saddle. Her salient features returned in time to knock over a combination tie rack and shoe tree more than 50 feet away with a flick of her elbow, trapping the vittle. Chama gave into pecking furry cat liver out from between the chrome prongs and rubber-tipped clamps.

Irretractable Post-Feminist Crisis

Total conversion or shutdown.
Shivica ficha 1: Chamatilly, frmrly "Reptily".
Comments: Girl's gone too far. Recommend full brain return, winged flight, excretory updates.

Amicus posts: 3

ap1: Chama is the Honey of Life. Our community would suffer her absence more than the brief monthly assaults. Our K response team is empathic and humanish.
Supervisor, All-Chank
Cement Employees Collective

ap2: Oh, Chamalachamalamachama. Chalamachamamama. We wail in anticipation of your claws.
Ultimate Worship Group
Sports n' Sex Crimes Bugle, Sponsor

ap3: She might as well let it all hang out. She is enduring an irretractable post-feminist crisis. I have submitted a volunteer card for embedded feed monitoring and preliminary intimate grooming license. She will recognize me as a specialist and view historic spatting as too easy for vengeance. She'll eat me last.
Phyllis

Keep the Frontier Strong

Keep the frontier strong
Pioneers will come along
Step with all your doubting

Go to where the wind comes from
Take eddies free of aegis
Shout your song to strangers

Unmask the world that's known
Show her to the boundaries
Plant and spread her queendom

Traditional Call to Arms, Mthyuh Preservation Society

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

Lesbian Stem

Oldentimey couples often chance to sit and chat over checkers at one of the Preservation Society chessboard cubicles chained to Sin-Gaberra Chank. Today Chet and Charlie can't decide which carnival or what ride was the most chilling back in the century before Chang K. Chang was even a mention on the Chama's lips.

Was it Hysteria? Tiny Gun Toter? Envious?

If I had to choose, ventures Charlie, in a pinch? It's Devil's Clit. Devil's? challenges Chet. Charlie: You betcha. Chet: Clit? Charlie: Yep. Ok, just checkin, Chuck. Charlie: Yeah, I know whatchur thinkin: 'The Devil's Clit never choked a man's speech like the coaster over at Chank Dhubbabera.' But it was the cheddar curls, not the attraction. When the commissary cooked 'em crunchy, they cheered you good.

Then they made us colonize Chang K. Chang and opened up the longest ridemall in the wurl. On the Vagina Root, you could have some hairs pulled or catch a load of someone's spittle on your chest; coming off the Lesbian Stem, everyone would be dizzy and hurl no matter what. Yeah, Vagina Root, Lesbian Stem and the curio store, Prosthetics Whore, were all perfect for a second or third date as well as kitty-corner from the bar.

Pandora was just a gaping humid cave with a fog machine, but everyone went in there to pee and avoid the perverts in the Ladies' Room. For some of their ideas, we blamed Perpetratoress, which always had the longest line, and once inside, things just went wild with lists of suggestions on what to do without getting arrested. The only way to exit the Perp tricked you onto the street as if the whole churning circus had suddenly become disgusted and attested, "Yor toxic!"

Living as a Career Bachelorette

Last night's doggie-bag salmon with safflower mayo, squeezed lemon, romaine, salt, dill. Downed with a cold $5 sav-blanc. I got the wrong fork, I know!

2nd course: Reheated spinach linguini. It looks so yella cuz I'd added a ton of turmeric to the bottled pasta sauce along with ground sirloin, fennel, cayenne. Topped from a tiny bottle of Kraft parm from the AM/PM Mini-Mart.

All still welcome at the fortnightly Endangered Foods Summit and Pot-Luck.
Mthyuh Preservation Society HQ, Ritual Death Salon, Partition IV.
1st and 3rd Wednesdays.

Donna

World of Mornings

Sure, there was hope, but you woke up
tired.
Fire bear come flying over horizon.
Insects, reptiles click, split.
Now tell me is or is not,
considering nutrition, a dried apricot
as good as its flesh-fulfilled cousin?
Because everything they wrote
can now only be found in the bone
chalk of those scratched letters,
crystal, canvasses, silver, china.

Wiccan Dipsplit

apparently the blind find me goodlookin;
the unsighted obviously think aighm hot.

just when so many naked people are against me,
aigh need people naked against me, and thayr not.

with a witch's fingers on my scalp,
i can travel to new ages as a scab;

before demagnetizing the last few nodes,
i enjoy a robot's timed sense of moving on.

Hoolie, from Birth of the Mthyuh Preservation Society: When K's Gave up Living and Volunteered for Manned Flight.

The World Once Resisted

The world of numbers is only a hideous grease through which we dragged our thongs and lay.
Now that the lie of time has made us acrobats, taking charge of space and raising kids is easy.
Bonded in disfigurement, every zygote knows its trail, forward and back; it's a rutted trajectory.
Rubbing on stones or any kind of friction can make us wistful, reimagining a world that resisted.

Bio-Weaponization of Nuisance Anthroballistic Siege Virus

Mthyuh Preservation Society Garden Club
Announcement of Live Public Oracle

Each of us will bring a dish: the dish must make use of as its primary ingredient one of the endangered food growths in our valley. Participants will also bring unmarked packets of viable seed stock if available, and it's not funny when it turns out to be human sperm-- someone already thought of that many WD's ago, and again just last, so relax.

Because our mission on this night is gardens, nor shall we partake of blood spirits.

As we sample, in bibs, our legacies, the member will recount the hist'ry of each vittle and its plight, though by now we must surely know what's in store for all that is life in the Chanks.

Re-mote Decision-ang

Ref. remote muscular proxy (RMP), remote tissue decisioning (RTD), remote muscular proxy piloting (RMPP).

Pink as a Man

If you are my kids, you should know:

• I came to a point that was a climax and a dead end
• it meant ok, I'll go to jail, anything but worry
• because my objective was to get you back
• and what i believed in was all i had left right then anyway
• the Preservation Society was ended

That last one was a meaning we didn't get yet because no one had ever seen it.

Even when Mthyuh was first born the Preservation Society had already been around for a hundred WD.

I was going to find out how much freedom someone had. It hadn't been tested. Howd'ya think we learned we didn't have any?

Donna has her way of loving too much, so she's forcibly quiet now. It's a shock I'm sure. When Pharmsupply kept me in an army-green, 100%-latex catsuit with vibrating cup tips and a ball gag in me, my brank was Tasteless and Pink as a man.

Hoolie Discussion Board: Connie's Funny Demise

That time Ted came home and spoke to Connie's cold rotting shell, even tweaked a nipple without noticing her death, was a time when Ted was not conscious and not on a path. Thinking it had been his fault was the beginning. Connie was just a drifter trying to fill her hole, as were many of the foreigners who happened by when the Preservation Society was still in operation. He found he cared for others, though. He had senses of justice priusnear that of a prees. On that night he imagined himself a hideous creature with four arms, two of which should always have held her, no matter what else it was he was doing.

Connie had died because of the miscalculation of the most holy and misguided of deities: Peg. Her recklessness, her carnal nature, her powers are unpredictable. She is ditzy and from her indecision and avarice and folly comes the milk we suck to live.

Connie's pain took her over. She could not lick shiv and be pure for her fugitive mom and also live beyond the pool, the gravitational distress of the beacon. Peggy has a dark pool, and the beacon may be so dim that there is not fire enough to reach her whole. This is how Peggy sacrifice her chilluns without that goal. She holy but a flake.

Naughty Somalians

When the hooded one arrives on his apple cart, steps down with a naked scythe?
When sudden death occurs there is a strong initial shock, and then healing begins. A major illness will extend the period of strong exposure and be more likely to create permanent collateral damage. Beyond length of exposure, intensity can fluctuate and climb, stressing out a worshiper's innermost marrow.

Are there any interactions or serious side effects?
Illnesses that provoke secondary expressions of violence, scatology or other dementia deepen the horror, widen the suck of the spinning drain of death. When multiple careers of morbidity overlap, especially in a close social network, death can stomp up and down, a sticking period key, a repeating decimal of dead.

Why do they keep them so long, and wouldn't it be more merciful to kill them immediately?
Well, the fact is that if push came to shove and we'd have to admit it, we kinda like having them around for as long as we can. It's like sitting on yr balls. We grow accustomed to their valiant little defiances; their quirky pronouncements and curses; their cute, spirited jabs from the sidelines. We know how under-it-all dependent they really are on our goodwill, and that makes us fuzzy.

What is your view on the abolition of Blood Sac?
It seems to keep people calm, especially the young mothers for some reason. Nobody needs to say a word, as long as we know it's happening and we can go to see for ourselves whenever we want. In fact, I hear they've been poorly attended of late. Sure, the opposition pretty much gave up after they couldn't get a retraction on the Sac they did on that what was her oh Chang K. Chang. That was because she was such a beloved living maiden that for her to "only milk Mthyuh in hell always" indicated selfishness on the part of the Preservation Society and maybe even envy slippin out some of the high preistesses while we know that's just potty. It's a controversy of the past, certainly. Today's worshiper is just bored with it. It may eventually be won by the inane above humane, as they say. It's all about cultural stewardship for me, and that's what I've shown you crossing over. I say get in my boat and I'll take you there and now here we are. Now there's someone can bring you on to the next big bend.

Tom
CEO, Pharmsupply
A Year to Another Year

Gedditfaidit [the Mp3]

Pulled by the MPS.

Sinewy

Folks that surround Chamatilly, they all seem to know what she don't know. She a toe-cher awda tam. She's thinking it all part of the ceremonies and whatnot. It ain't. They just a laikit, laikit alot. Tor-cher Chamatilly. Thats why she so lucki. Being a shivstar, we wershup you chama, you biggie awda tam. Chamatilly aways in pain because she so ignorant. The Muthya Preservation Society even know boudit. The Community College of Cement know. The chilluns an the bitches know. It's a secret a bit from the Chama, but not so much. She so scared cuz she never thot she deserve a be a deity or a slave to da shiv, on the spot to milk the Mthyuh at the momen notice. She half 2B prepare, ahways. So she ahways givin up da ego to da shiv and thats so paynfl cuz she nothin much modan ego and sinewy bitch prad chal. She so fight it so she cn geddit, fighdit, geddit, etc.

Mike's Swimming Blog, Day 66: I am Keeping this House Alive

try locking your ankles together in the deep end;
see what you naturally do to survive. dancing yor
way out of a situation can save your life if it is sw-
imming. notice also that as you merman yor way
to safety, you swim like a fish, but flap yor arms
like a bony bird-reptile. preservation society helic-
opters could mistake you for a flying reptilian bird
entering our space from a watery third dimension.

21: Time is a Liar

Now wait a minute, Sylvia. I'm wearing lipstick, and you ask me if there's some special name I'd like to be called? I don't ask you that when you put on lipstick. Though I might think of you as some special name or another. With peach you are more a "Janice," with brick you are more an "Audry," and with the bluer tones, "Wendy."

They were at Ted's working on their letter-writing campaign. They felt that the Audubon Society, among many others, should know about the creature they'd been glimpsing hopping from gate to gate or just standing dumbly alongside the canals. It shared many of the characteristics of the Reddish Egret, except that those areas which would have been covered with feathers, and in the same colors, seemed to be tiled or even armored in a very hearty as well as irridescent, metallic plating. The Mthyah Preservation Society website had been down for weeks, and they weren't sure how, if at all, their reports and samples had been processed during previous migratory guest anomalies.

Envelope stuffing had allowed their conversation to drift.

Gee, you know I ran into Lourdi Spires the other day in Career Center, and it's like sometimes there's a limit before you just have to let these holier-than-thou types know that they could really go ahead and act more Christian!

Well there's remember Hoolie? Maintenance? Went around acting just like Christ and wasn't afraid to tell you so. What a dirty freak. Heretic. Stank.

God you know he could have been a shooter. Good thing that cancer he had got him off our campus at least.