The Dead Boy was born in a toolbox, and unto him came the Ham and the Tie Rack, as overhead shone a blazing ball of hair.
And a smoky ghostlike Face had come to the Dead Boy’s mother Tammy in a dream, and said many incomprehensible things, which Tammy thereby did phone in to the local radio show and soon Tammy was with child.
And to the toolbox came three Kings out of the East and one was Bub who brought a six-pack of Shitz, and one was Al who brought cards and smokes, and one was Tyrone who carried a gun that wouldn't shoot. And goats and giraffes and tapirs lowed and urinated, and the sand blew hot over the Dollar Town parking area, and the babe sat up and lit a Parliament and swore by seven devils and a donkey’s ass that it don't matter what a fellow does, he ain't gettin no island cruise for his shaved bones and busted back.
And when the babe was older, he came upon seven idiots prying hubcaps off a Buick, and said come on, I will make you small-time desperadoes of Men.
#
The boy was given to doing miraculous things. It was shortly after a Miraculous Things kit arrived in the mail.
He turned soap into wax.
He changed water into water that tasted bad.
He turned wine into ketchup, and then into a malodorous blood-colored paste.
He turned steel into wax.
Bees into flies.
Anger into bruises.
A pig into a small pinkish man with a briefcase full of eviction notices.
My expensive car into a marque of lesser value. The leather seats to polystyrene.
Grass into tears.
A frog into a tragic, limbless creature that stared at us with huge heartrending eyes. We were forced to kill it, it affected us so.
His sister into a sustainable-farming activist.
A fence to matchwood. His thumb to soft cheese.
#
And the boy did gather followers from the stricken fields where the soya withered, and the followers he did gather had these names: Shaimaa, Fatma, Rowan, Hosniya, Hasnaa, Hosna, Gamila, Gamalat, and Habiba.
And the boy came to the city of Grand Rapids and settled down in a restaurant that was called Shoney's.
And from within Shoneys, he called they who were perusing the menu and they who had got up to get more napkins and they who were just then finding the portions underwhelming.
And the followers he gathered here had the names Mary, Marie, Mariam, Marina, Irene, Malak, Erika “Juggs” Callahan, Hana, Farah, Marwa, Nada, and Salma.
Beads and ovens and christmas tree stands and tears and fairways and bran. Olives and warheads. Biscuits and chalk.
And he did drop by a large shopping center wherein a multitude lusted after affordable bananas. And the male followers who cleaved to his side were named Santiago, Mateo, Juan, Matías, David, Juan, José, Andrés, Agustín, and Bob.
And the women who gushed that they would bear his babies and prepare his legal defense were named Sofía, María, Lucía, Martina, Victoria, Mia, Kumiko, Amanda, Mikaela, Camila, Amaia, Emma, Kamila, Sofia, Isabella, Emma, Olivia, Ava, Isabella, Sophia, and Jane.
#
And the boy did go up on a mailbox and he opened his mouth and said unto those that were waiting for the bank to open, and unto they who awaited the manna of the drive-thru, and one who was a homeless veteran:
“I am the key to a door that won’t shut.
“I am a bowl with a substance in it.
“I am a star that’s really far away on the other side of the universe and I’ve never heard of you and you’ve never observed me so what’s the point.
“I am the demonic laughter of a child in an insurance commercial.
“I am the lid of a plastic bucket.
“I am an institutional mop.
“I am every atom in the cosmos, I am everything and everywhere. I come roaring at you, like a shower of coconuts, like the sun’s final flare, like static, like blindness, like beaten wildebeests, like cancer and like Spain.”
And the people stood up and cried “Away with shrews in the witchgrass! Fear for my children, drown the kitten in cashew liquor. Clean the garage.”
And the boy said:
“The cure for slow Time is fast Amnesia – try some.
“For thine is the glovebox. Thine is the showerhead. Thine is the doo-rag and the razor and the gun.”
#
Now there was a wedding, but no bride came. There was a wake, but the corpse was busy elsewhere.
The Dead Boy was there, and he said “One of you this night shall betray me.”
And the boy said “This night shall bacon be required of thee.”
And the boy said “Laundry.” At another point he said “Bicycle,” and later on he said “Sagittarius.”
The boy was sold out by the suits and the moneymen, he was set on in the cheap seats and beat good with a monkey wrench and business end of a diesel train. They hauled the Dead Boy right up the piss-and-grease side of a place called Head Bone Hill.
The Dead Boy said “So turns the wheel,” and later he said “Shut them dogs up, will you?”
And there was a shooting star, and there were lamentations.
Scars and bones and memories. Hailstorms and sores. Thefts and dread and weeping and a series of small fires.
And there were chains. And remembrance. And there was pain and forgetting and letting go.
#
And the boy descended unto the place where lies the Lake of Fire, and he glowed like a giant radioactive doll, and he said:
“This is the underside of nothing. This is reversed forwardly.
“This is perpendicular to forever.
“This is the inside of the outside. It is ratcheted slowly counterclockwise. It falls sideways. It plummets upwards, spins in two directions.
“Geometric redundancy of the fallen god. Tormented by the mystery of the spin cycle.
“Haunted by oyster sentience.”
#
Now they dumped the boy in a well, and on the third day, Tammy and Tall Mariah and the one called Juggs fished his skinny ass out.
And up he whooshed into the sky. And he'd become some kind of sorcery-spangled mighty combination of jetliner and hurricane and chainsaw-handed lunatic and kaiju and devil and octo-god.
And the Dead Boy said “Humans, you've done it now.
“I am not going to be stopped.
“I am the fire and the hatchet and the grease knife. I am the tar. I am the number nine screw.
“When you are lost in shadows,
“When it’s all over but the cannibalism,
“When you follow the dodo into that long night,
“I won’t be there.
“You are alone, and always shall you be alone.
“Goodbye.”
And the people lamented, but a few said:
“It will be this way. It is better this way.”
#
The Dead Boy was gone. The rest of the story belonged to those who weren’t him.
That story was dreams and worms and the pale fire of the dawn. It was groceries and short walks and puberty and another visit to the Memory Care facility. It was a Mr. Freeze and yarn varieties and a French coin that was a gift from someone who was beautiful but is dead now and you swear you had the coin in your desk but you can't find it. It was the house you grew up in and your dorm room and your first apartment and your second, third, and fourth through eleventh apartments. It was your brief conversion to your grandfather's religion. It was I can't believe what year it is already. It was rain and cigarettes and batteries and school dropoffs and begonias and it all went so fast and it is still happening and will keep occurring until it doesn't anymore.
For thine is the garage and the dialysis and the beer can, thine is the remembering and the forgetting, and the wishing you knew, thine is the moment passed, forever and ever, junkmail without end, amen.
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