"The War Against Obesity" by Kim Cancer

An addendum to the novel “Taliban Telemarketer” by Kim Cancer…

“The War Against Obesity”

Next America had far too many obese.

The obesity crisis had worsened throughout the 2000s and 2010s, particularly so in the late 2010s when being “overweight” became socially acceptable, normalized.

The phrase “Fat Shaming” had entered the lexicon.

Large, “plus-size” women, men on the covers of fashion magazines.

After the brief Civil War 2 concluded, when the US National Debt was consolidated by FRED Corps***, “FREDicare for all”, “FREDicare” comprehensive medical coverage plans were implemented and covered the entirety of Next America’s legal citizens (those Class A, B, C - though not Class D).

FREDicare provided basic care, vision, dental, with much of the services handled by cost-efficient AI, BOT…

*** Who is FRED?

What was known about FRED: FRED is a council of major corporations founded by the former “Federal Reserve Bank” and a collective of international mega-corps.

The collective pooled resources to purchase the United States of America’s colossal $125 trillion national debt and maneuvered to annex Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, the UK, Ireland, and Greenland into one awesome nation...

FRED had no visible leader. No known CEO.

The closest visible thing to FRED leadership was the President of Next America, a series of drooling, stammering borderline mentally retarded caricatures, normally chosen from a shit-battery of homeless schizophrenics and loudmouth borderline narcissists, all of whom were raped, beaten, tortured, tarred and feathered routinely on Fucking News STREAMS…

The most popular STREAM for a time was Meet the Fucking Press, an audience driven poll program, featuring survey choices of methods to humiliate and physically, mentally batter the President.

The series finale STREAM having the President believe his term to be mercifully over, and when leaving the White House, hopping, skipping, and singing “Hall-LAY-LOO-YAH”!

The President, a filthy, toothless, raggedy dressed homeless CW2 veteran, was mauled to death and eaten by a genetically revived breed of saber-tooth tiger (infused/possessed by the ghost of Panzram) the tiger dropped via flying drone, onto the White House south lawn…

Following the indignation of PETA for allowing the tiger to possibly be put in harm’s way, and disappointing STREAM, sagging Presidential approval ratings, BIGFOOT, the Sasquatch, the yeti, who’d been flushed from the woods due to deforestation, was installed as Vice President, and then finally took the oath of office, and being 9 feet tall, BIGFOOT was rarely the object of ridicule.

In fact, BIGFOOT became perhaps the most popular President. EVER. The Lincoln Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, and Washington Monument all torn down and replaced with statues of BIGFOOT in various reflective poses…

FRED: Its meetings were held biannually in the massive, heavily fortified super-exclusive Fuck You Resort 2, located on the shores of beachfront Arizona, no media or pictography allowed.

While the innerworkings of FRED remained murky, and the public was largely apathetic, mollified by VR, many of FRED’s initiatives became clear.

Its first was to reduce the girth of Next America’s waistlines…

A government program, a national initiative, called “Shut the Fuck Up and Shape Up!” was launched.

Its First Phase: The Children.

Next America’s children mostly attended school VR, occasionally being led to social events, testing, in armored school buses…

Next America’s children were henceforth required compulsory training (either by VR or IRL) in martial arts, street fighting, Judo, boxing, wrestling, MMA classes, beginning in kindergarten, and were required to engage in physical combat activity, painted camouflage and sent on random urban hyena, baboon spear hunts for a minimum of 3 hours daily…

Morbidly obese children quarantined, processed into “fat farms”, re-education centers, forced into beehive structures, connected by suction wiring, their diets adjusted, and instructed by Tooth Fairy Dahmer BOTS to wrestle small chimps and bears, participate in hand to hand combat, CrossFit, compliance calisthenics…

The Second Phase: “Act Against Obesity Normalization”

An act of legislature that banned images of the morbidly obese in media, except for circumstances in which obesity is discussed as a health issue or the obese were being violently attacked by hierarchical dominant muscular alpha males, rabid animals (usually hyena, baboon, tiger, mountain lion) and/or verbally assaulted, viciously pranked (usually punched in the stomach by surprise robotic arms or chairs pulled out from behind, Fucking Pranking and Punching Fat People in the Stomach STREAM being immensely popular for a time)...

The Third Phase: “Disappeared”

Final Solution to the obesity crisis. The “Fuck Obesity Act” legislation, in which the morbidly obese were given, by legal decree, one year to become non-morbidly obese.

However, no punishment for non-compliance was announced or even mentioned…

(Mental health, monitored by brain chip/neural networking, and physical health, monitored by face rec scans, body scans, was data-maintained by FRED social stability apparatus; measurements comprised an undisclosed portion of one’s Class distinction.)

((Morbid obesity itself was no longer tracked simply by BMI, but instead by a complex, opaque computational algorithm, computed by AI tracker security sky cams and bee-sized roving drones, capable of scanning, ascertaining confirmation of morbid obesity in split seconds.))

Since FRED Corps’ first major action upon taking control of Next America was to legalize all acts of physical non-sexual violence (w/the exception of violence against the Class A and rape of the President) the population, knowing FRED Corps’ insouciance, if not penchant for violence, and their creation of the wildly popular STREAMS like The Fucking Torture Channel, was abuzz on CHITTER with conjecture over what the punishment for morbid obesity would exactly be…

As the compliance date neared, many obese turned themselves in to authorities, and were shipped to concentration camps, where they were forced into military exercises, laborious physical exercise, hard labor, strenuously rigid dietary regimes, self-criticism struggle sessions and MMA training, with the obese pitted against one another in random grappling, fistfights and kickfights…

(The kickfight being a razor wire cage fight where the combatants’ arms are chained behind the back and only combatants’ legs are used to kick at one another- biting, headbutting allowed/encouraged)

PROTEST: SJW obese, unhappy with the decree, fought back, organized a mass rally, a protest, resembling an old school gay pride parade, where the obese nationwide marched (of course not for too long, many panting, wheezing along parade routes, so several rode on floats, or in mobility carts, scooters, Segways).

The obese in only underwear, their bouncy, flabby bellies, flopping, jiggling; their thunder thighs rippling; the obese amassed, taunting police BOTS, picketing the FRED Corp shadowy skyscraper in downtown NNYC; the obese guzzling Coca Cola and blasting, singing and dancing to Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me”.

Little did the obese at the rally know that each and every one of their faces were logged via biometric face scan...

The obese were branded by FRED AI as “fucking recalcitrant” and targeted for disposal.

The few Class A in the protests found their Class distinctions immediately lowered to Class C.

The protesting obese, in days following, arrested in mass.

Police BOTS, squadrons of bounty hunter dog cyborgs hunted the obese, ambushing them outside all-you-can-eat buffets, WWE wrestling matches, Walmart, Next America southern states particularly targeted…

Trailers, mobile homes, apartments, houses raided; obese beaten, dragged through streets, piled into transport vehicles, maglev trains, flying robots; obese plucked up and flown away by aerial octopus attack drones...

Def Leppard’s “Photograph” played, at ear splitting volumes, in continuous loops by and inside each transport vehicle…

The captured obese amassed, brought to the concentration camps with the voluntary obese...

However, as opposed to the volunteers, who were given some leeway, some freedoms (the freedom to watch baseball especially enjoyed, especially the ceremonial opening 1st inning 30-second fistfight between opposing teams’ managers, and the volunteer obese really took a shining to the Fucking Rock Stars Smashing Guitars STREAM) but those rebellious, captured obese were afforded far harsher conditions.

They were tethered, chained to exercise bikes, treadmills, stair climbers, hot yoga confinement cells, forced into motion for hours on end, lashed with electrical cords, wet towels by the volunteers, fed only via intravenous tubes, and administered involuntary, invasive liposuctions, vomit inductions and iced saline water, White Claw enemas.

Many of the obese were unable to endure. They wheezed, plunged from the exercise equipment. Many had heart attacks.

But they were not allowed to die.

They’d instantly be resuscitated by roving medi-BOT, plopped right back onto the exercise equipment, forced to resume calorie burning motion.

(The few unable to be resuscitated obese had their body parts harvested for scientific study or private sale; the pale skin obese in particular fetching a hefty sum, sold at auction to wealthy patrons in Asiatic countries...)

Roughly 2 years after the initial decree, the obesity crisis was considered solved. The obese who survived the camps released, though kept on probation, bodyfat monitoring regimen…

But there remained an active obese insurgency. Obese hiding out underground, in bunkers; obese guerrilla, Class D, off-grid muckers.

The muckers would pop up here, there and attack FRED property, police BOT, hijack food delivery vehicles, highly coordinated armed robberies of restaurants, grocery stores…

However, ironically, since many were unable to eat as frequently, due to their renegade status, they lost most of the flab they’d fought so fiercely to protect and were no longer in danger of simple persecution for being illegal obese.

They were still routinely punished, though, and ultimately terminated for attacking Class A, FRED property.

Many of those on Fucking Torture or Fucking Execution STREAM were obese or former obese who’d turned to anti-FRED, anti-Class A banditry…

"ESL Guangzhou: Dawn of the Nong" by Newamba Flamingo

It was dawn. A committed insomniac and early riser, Happy Sacks stretched out on his balcony overlooking VPN Road, Shamian Island.

“This was once the only place in Guangzhou laowai could live…”

Today the smog had lifted. A purplish sunrise yielded to baby blue skies.

Happy admired the island’s colonial style buildings, the European architecture, stone pillars.

A 50ish Cantonese man pushed his teenage son’s wheelchair past the Starbucks.

“Mainlanders only do two things with their handicapped. Hide them or exploit them.”

Happy drank a morning beer, smoked a bowl of opium, popped his Prozac and ate a hearty breakfast of fried chicken feet and cockroaches and watched car crash videos on the morning news.

He dressed up in standard China TEFL uniform, a clown costume, with requisite white face paint, big red nose, and spit-shined, pumped up kicks.

An obese shushu from Guizhou was his ride to school and waited on all fours outside.

Happy mounted the shushu like a horse, put a cigarette to the shushu’s lips, and they were off, galloping through the humanity, jumping every queue….

Happy convened class. No AC in the steamy, crumbling classroom and silver slivers of sweat streamed down his forehead, armpits, asscrack.

Happy tried a simple ESL game, but the students paid no mind. They talked over him, played on phones, watched movies on tablets, or lay face first on desks, sleeping.

A petite caramel girl sat atop a desk in the front row. Her parted legs revealed a bare vagina underneath her dress, and she stared lustily at Happy, performing fellatio on a Popsicle…

“Age of consent in China is 14…”

A commotion outside. Happy opened the door to the hallway and saw a deranged janitor running amok, with a meat clever, singing Michael Jackson songs in a horrible falsetto as he was hacking at students, staff at random…

Happy closed the door tightly and saw all his students lay bloodied, dead on the floor.

He dialed 112. No answer. Line was busy. He ended the call and realized he was in the WC.

It smelled strongly of piss, shit, vinegar, and secondhand smoke.

Wumao Laoshi with a flesh wound, stood calmly at the mirror, smoking, downloading a suicide app.

Panicked, Happy tried to talk with him.

“听不懂!”

Happy’s stomach began to rumble. He’d been in China long enough and knew the progression of laduzi.

All the stalls were occupied so he kicked in one’s door and found a dentist pulling teeth from a princeling in a Pol Pot hat.

He kicked in another and yanked out a squatting, cell phone playing Chinese Urkel, and flung the fucker to the floor.

Happy dropped trou and loosed his bowels.

He realized he didn’t have toilet paper and knew his only choices: hands, socks or underwear...

As he levitated his fat, hairy, honky white ass over the toilet, he heard a chugging train sound and felt a cold wind blowing below.

A hand clawed from the toilet’s mouth and a man in a panda suit crawled out of it.

Panda Suit Man yelled: “This for the feelings of the Chinese people!” and Happy’s Guns N’ Roses ringtone suddenly went off.

Panda Suit Man then shoved his hand up Happy’s ass, dug around, and pulled out Happy’s prostate.

“So many butthurt!” laughed and pointed Chinese Urkel.

Panda Suit Man dove back down into the toilet. Happy flicked off Chinese Urkel and followed Panda Suit Man down the hole.

“It’s always darkest before it becomes totally black...”

They emerged in Nongjing, at Tingbudong Square.

Panda Suit Man was dashing through a crowd of dancing ayis.

Happy chased after him, but more and more ayis surged forth, blocking his way.

Happy pushed and shoved away the ayis, but, increasingly frustrated, he punched and kicked through them, UFC style, dropping cunt punts and slugging their wrinkly faces and saggy tits with vicious hooks, jabs, and uppercuts.

He finally picked a portly one up and used her as a battering ram to bludgeon his path to the tail end of the masses.

Throwing the battering ram ayi to the ground, and giving her one last kick for good measure, he looked to the sky and saw Panda Suit Man scaling the Great Firewall, with suction cups.

Panda Suit Man zip-lined to Chairman Pumpkinhead’s portrait and used Happy’s bloody prostate to smear Cantonese characters on it.

A gong sounded. It was then the tanks moved in.

Soldiers shooting indiscriminately at pedestrians, ayis; motorcycles running motherfuckers over… Wild lions and baboons falling from low flying helicopters… Gutter oil, stinky tofu, propane canisters from catapults, loud explosions, harmony…

Happy was mowed down by machine gun fire…

Happy awoke on the floor of a hallway in a hospital. The floor was filthy with bloody Q-tips and used maxi pads everywhere. Bobby Shmurda’s “Hot N*gga” boomed from the public address system.

Happy rose to his feet. Mankini-clad middle age Chinese men all around, staring and surrounding him, smoking cigarettes, holding sonograms, making hacking spitting sounds.

At the end of the hallway was Panda Suit Man, behind him, a ball of light.

Panda Suit Man was waving Happy in like a third base coach, and Happy took off running in Panda Suit Man’s direction.

The spitting/smoking mob locked arms, cursed Happy and gave chase.

As Happy got closer to the light, there appeared a beautiful young Chinese girl in a skintight onesie miniskirt, standing in front of a sauna. The girl was smiling, shaking her fist…

Happy ran faster and faster and felt the hot stinky breath and slimy spit of the nong throngs behind him.

Wheezing, gasping for air, he dove towards the beautiful Chinese girl in the sauna, and everything went

"Johnny Buckets in Bergen" by Newamba Flamingo

Johnny Buckets wore a Spider-Man sweat suit.

He hung upside down from the ceiling of the first class carriage, in the fast train from Oslo to Bergen.

Cracking open an Aass beer, he gazed out the window into the green, brown, and white Norwegian countryside.

Someone in the row behind him said how you ain't seen nothing until you’ve seen a middle aged Polish woman speaking Chinese and that those glaciers would soon be gone because of global warming.

Johnny downloaded an “InfoWars” podcast. He gritted his teeth as he sucked down the Scandinavian suds.

“Can’t I get a fucking Budweiser in this country?!” he erupted. “Fucking faggots!”

A sharply dressed man in the seat facing him grimaced, crossed his legs, checked his watch and looked away…

Johnny Buckets hiked up his pants and hit Bergen “like a fucking asteroid.”

The weather was damp and rainy. The mountains hugging the city were molars.

In the driverless Uber Johnny Buckets laughed and did impressions of the language in onomatopoeia…

“Hey, where the fuck can a nigga get some bacon cheeseburgers and shit?” he inquired at the front desk.

None of the staff seemed impressed by his “Make America Great Again” hat or his Joe Pesci t-shirt...

Tourists snapped selfies with architecture, but Johnny Buckets pushed past them on his way to the “Roll & Rock Bar and Diner” on Skostredet 14.

He spit out his first bite.

“This is real beef?!” “Bacon soggy like used toilet paper!” “FUCKING SOCCER BALL KICKING, MANBUN EUROFAGS!”

Johnny Buckets dug out his phone from his fanny pack, got online, gave the diner a shitty review on TripAdvisor and trolled a "libtard" on a fantasy football site.

Then he stuck in his ear buds and listened to the soothing musical stylings of DMX, and Black Rob’s “Whoa.”

Whilst eating the tolerable freedom fries, he drank a coke. It was then decided. That night he was going full retard.

He left no tips, went back to the hotel and shaved his head in the bathroom mirror….

Johnny Buckets got to the club dressed as Freddy Krueger.

A robotic DJ fistpumped and thumped dubstep remixes of Deadmau5. All in automation.

Johnny Buckets slammed a series of shots of Finnish vodka. The spinning room smelled of cinnamon.

“Damn Norwegian bitches look like transvestites!” he lamented. “And not the hot Thai type of transvestites neither!”

Though after a few more shots, the tall, broad shouldered “Nordic pussy” began to look slightly more enticing.

“Gonna go rape and plunder some of this Viking boo-tay!!” he exclaimed and proceeded to be shot down by every single girl in the club.

“Now I understand Anders Breivik!” yelled Johnny Buckets as he was ejected cold into the night by security.

Back at the hotel, he felt like jerking off, but was bored of PornTube, Kardashians, and artificial vaginas, so he hit up an international escort site to find himself a slapper.

On it, he found one in his area; tall, Russian, high cheekbones, looked like Melania.

“Fucking right… Russian va-jay-jay… Bet she takes it in the fartbox...” he clicked “like” and paid in Bitcoin.

An hour later, he was nearly passed out on his bed, streaming a prison documentary on YouTube, when his door spoke in musical claps.

He stumbled up, let in the light, and saw Melania, looking just like her picture from the website, though even taller than expected, at least six inches higher than him.

He smiled. She smiled back.

Then, from behind her, a couple tattoo faced, big, burly Russian lizard dudes stormed into the room.

Johnny Buckets' smile was eaten back by a blizzard of fists.

He fell to the floor and curled into a fetal ball as they punched, kicked, and cursed at him in Russian and broken English.

Melania rummaged through his room, filling Johnny Buckets’ Versace backpack with his laptop, phone, wallet, passport, prescription pills, and folder full of tickets to Hobart, Auschwitz, Orlando, Newtown, Babi Yar, Beijing, Blacksburg, Killeen and Las Vegas.

“Bitch even took my sunscreen.”

Melania then peered into his room’s safe, but it was open and empty. She nodded to the Russians who relented their assault. The three began to exit the room.

One of the Russians snatched Johnny Buckets' red cap from the coat rack, put it on, and whispered “Donald Trump” as he chuckled and pulled the door closed.

"ESL Wuhan" by Newamba Flamingo

The bullet train arrived to Wuhan on a cold winter’s day.

Smog and construction cranes were all one could see.

Chabudi, the Monkey Queen, had a large drone implanted in her backside and collected me from the platform with a toilet plunger and flew me from the train station to my new apartment.

The unit was on the 44th floor of an 88-storey building shaped like a squat toilet…

We swooped down, landed on a balcony. A red trapdoor had facial recognition technology and opened automatically, vacuuming us inside.

There were large star shaped windows everywhere. The place was practically a glass box, with sweeping city views of smog, square concrete structures and what seemed to be a river, its dark water like molasses. Cars and motorbikes crisscrossed a bridge running over it.

Chabudi wore a curvy qipao. Quite the cougar, she glided, air walking me through a tour of the unit. I stole quick peeks of all her floral patterns. She had a small jumpman tattoo near her right ankle.

It was freezing cold in the apartment and grayish breath swirled out of Chabudi’s tiny mouth as she spoke. Her lipstick was black, as were her fingernails, and she wore her hair in a tidy little bun with chopsticks. I caught a whiff of halitosis.

Chabudi had Migos' “Slippery” as her cell phone ringtone, and there was another tattoo on her right hand that looked like a dragon or maybe a cobra…

In the living room was a wooden couch. On it sat a stout, middle aged Chinese man. He was in tighty whities and a stained wife beater that was rolled up to his chest, revealing an exposed beer belly. He was chain smoking.

I asked Chabudi who the man on the couch was. She ignored the question, threw the keys at me and strapped on a surgical mask with a cute bear on it.

She hovered to the balcony and clapped her hands. It sounded like a burst of firecrackers as the door slid open and she flew away, fading into the smog.

I asked the man what he was doing in my apartment. He didn’t answer. So I asked him again, this time in Mandarin. He again didn’t answer.

He took a swig of baijiu, belched and made a guttural “en” sound. I decided to go out for noodles and a hand massage. When I came back, he was gone.

When I awoke the next morning, he was back. This time he wasn’t wearing a shirt. There were dark circles under his eyes. He looked like a panda.

He was smoking a cigarette backwards, filter first.

Again, I spoke Mandarin to him. Again he only replied with the same guttural sound. I sat next to him and turned on XXTV News…

Shu Shu Xin Xiang was visiting a village in Nongzhou, Henan. A beaming pig farmer walked with him arm in arm. Shu Shu’s upper lip never moved...

I turned to what I figured was my roommate. He was drinking from a canister of gasoline and his two parallel tufts of hair were on fire. I ran into the kitchen to grab the extinguisher, but, when I returned, my roommate had dissolved into ash. The odor of cigarettes remained.

That afternoon I met a neighbor downstairs named Rainey. She had a two year old boy on a silk leash. There was an open slit in the back of the child’s Minion pajamas and his buttocks hung out.

The boy pointed at me, yelled out “waiguoren”, and ran into the corner of the hall, squatted and defecated, smiling gleefully as he did so.

Rainey asked me into which apartment I’d moved. I told her. She nervously laughed, scooped up the boy and took off running.

I texted Chabudi, asking if there was anything I should know about the apartment. She replied with “no why”.

So I Baidued the apartment and found a news article on 1344 dot com dot cn and copied it into my Pleco app’s clip reader…

It was about a man named Sha who’d discovered his wife was having an affair. When he confronted her, she admitted it and said she’d be divorcing him and taking their son.

He then choked her to death with a plastic bag and poured gasoline all over the apartment, set it alight, and chained the front door shut. His mother in law and his wife’s aunt were napping in an adjacent room. Both burned. His son was away at boarding school.

An archive picture showed dancing ayis that night pausing to watch their comrades join the haze.

The police found Sha later at a massage parlor. He confessed and shortly after was executed via a bullet to the back of the head. His kidneys were donated to a boy with cancer…

That was four years ago.

That evening, in the elevator, I met a neighbor named Rocket. He had suction cups for feet and prosthetic legs.

He said no locals had lived there in ages and that the place had been rented out to a series of foreigners, mostly English teachers.

They all tended to move out quickly. One died from gas inhalation.

"Superman in Isaan" by Newamba Flamingo

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"African Safari" by Newamba Flamingo

African Safari

We were all a bunch of fuck ups.

Most of our time was spent smoking weed, playing video games, and putting our dicks in any slut who’d let us.

The majority of us didn’t finish high school, but some did or got their GED and went to community college, like a dude I grew up with, my big homie Kevin.

Kevin was a bodybuilder and street entrepreneur. He started off selling small bits of weed to friends and classmates and moved up to moving ounces and keys of coke and became a real life “Dopeman” like his favorite NWA song.

He got himself a used Benz and a townhouse near the local community college, and it became the party house, stoner central.

It started off mostly just longhairs on couches and love-seats in the living room doing bong hits, but as more and more coke came around, the people, like the drugs, got increasingly hardcore.

Like this fat, bushy mustache face cop from Palm Beach that Kevin bought most of his coke and weed from.

The cop’d come by with these Little Haiti street thugs, and sell various contraband, often automatic firearms, out of the kitchen, to other roughneck types.

But the most fucked up person to turn up had to be Ben, who had moved into one of the bedrooms.

Ben had a presence to him that sent a chill over the stoners. Whenever he’d enter the living room during bong hit sessions, everyone would just get quiet and uncomfortable.

Maybe it was his look, his eczema covered face and hands and his long black trench coats, even in the dog days of summer.

Or maybe his work. Ben was a mortician, and if you went into his room, it was like entering death.

He kept the AC in there blasting to frigid levels, and there were satanic, thrash and black metal posters all over the walls. Cannibal Corpse. Cradle of Filth. Anal Cunt.

He’d sit by his TV and computer (which were both always on) watching horror and snuff films, mass killer and serial killer documentaries and raw footage of car accidents, natural disasters, and plane crashes.

Most didn’t go in his room, nor mention their disdain of Ben to Kevin. Probably because they bought their substances from Kevin and Kevin and Ben were tight. Kevin would always call Ben “his boy” and talk about “all the shit he did for me.”

Ben didn’t leave the townhouse much, except for work, so everyone was shocked when he brought home a girl, Stella, who lived with him in the house, from the day she arrived.

Stella was petite, with a small head and boyish bowl haircut. She’d an assortment of facial piercings, big blue bug eyes and bad teeth, but, surprisingly enough, she had a decent body.

She’d walk around the house wearing only a long t-shirt and most everyone caught a glimpse of her juicy thighs and hairy pussy at some point or another.

And, as Ben got worse with the coke and hardly ever left his room, even for work, Stella started to fuck everyone, all the stoners, the cop, the roughneck street thugs, and Kevin too, though he tried to pass it off, saying how he was drunk and she’d “left her shirt on the whole time” and it “just was a couple minutes.”

She was certainly a unique person, that Stella. No one knew how she met Ben or why exactly she was with him. Maybe it was because she was also into death. Really into death. That’s all she talked about. Death. What happens when you die, ghosts, murders, psychic mediums, reincarnation, all that shit.

She only listened to hip hop, but only to rappers who were dead.

Biggie, Big L, Big Pun, Tupac, Eazy E. Nothing new, like Kanye, Pitbull or something, saying how she’d wait until he died, because then “you could truly understand him.”

Things around the house took a turn for the worse when Kevin got some PCP from this short stocky Cuban with shifty eyes and a speech impediment (who, of course, also fucked Stella).

That PCP had a really bad effect on everyone, but most of all Ben and Stella, who’d both taken quite a liking to it.

Now chain-smoking cigarettes, and having lost a lot of weight, Ben began to emerge from his room and had somehow come into possession of a baby pig. The pig would shit all over the house and he and Stella would walk around, cradling it like a baby, singing lullabies to it.

The whole house stank a musty combination of pig shit and cigarette smoke.

Worse yet, Ben would frequently interrupt bong circles, in hysterics, brandishing his Nazi paratrooper knife, threatening to cut off one of his fingers for one reason or another, although he was talked down fairly easily by fake sympathy and bong hits.

Kevin and the stoners who lived on his living room couches tired of Ben and a council convened and decreed he be kicked out of the house.

Ben left the house balling his eyes out, taking the baby pig with him, but Stella stayed.

A couple weeks later, vice cops and a SWAT team raided. Stella broke down crying and turned state.

Kevin took the heat for everything and spent $20,000 in cash on a lawyer who helped him avoid jail time with house arrest, probation, fines, and community service.

The lawyer was able to get some evidence thrown out on a technicality but had told Kevin his case was tough and that he could have gotten him off easier if he’d just raped a 10 year old girl or something like that.

Kevin was convinced Ben snitched him out and drunkenly talked of hiring someone to shoot him. Then he talked of hiring someone to beat him up with a baseball bat in the parking lot outside his job at the funeral home.

Later he claimed he’d pay an ex-hooker with HIV (who he’d met at an NA meeting) to fuck Ben without a condom.

Kevin’s troubles didn’t end. He had a botched dental operation that resulted in his jaw having chronic, debilitating pain. He tried unsuccessfully to sue the dentist.

He called me one night at 3 am from a pay phone in Key West and said he planned on buying a bulletproof vest and body armor and storming into the dentist’s office with an AK, or at least picketing out front with a big sign, telling everyone what the dentist did to him, but, ultimately, didn’t do either.

He’d moved back in with his folks, but they kicked him out as he kept accusing his sister for the diabetes he’d developed and of poisoning his food.

He then got an online TEFL degree and found a job teaching English in Madagascar.

I received a Facebook message from him a year ago saying he was in Kenya, mostly staying inside his compound, though occasionally going out on safaris.

The Rejected Writer

“The Rejected Writer” by Newamba Flamingo

Miles Chester’s stories and poems had been rejected by all the small press magazines he read. And every single response, every single rejection letter was a form letter. Never once did he get a personal response from the masses of editors he'd sent his work.

And why not? His cover letters were personal. He'd praise the magazine, mention specific pieces, writers he enjoyed. He'd address the editors by name and even request feedback. But none ever came. Always it was the same form letters. Over and over again.

Following each rejection, he'd drink vodka to dull the pain. Sometimes he'd snort bath salts and sit alone in his ground floor studio apartment, on the mattress on the floor, watching infomercials all night and listening to his next door neighbors, that young Mexican couple with the crying baby, scream and curse at each other in Spanish.

Rejections and noisy neighbors aside, Miles often had trouble sleeping at night. He'd stay awake, lying in bed, dreading waking up in the morning to go to his job at the call center, where his bosses timed his toilet breaks and he had to repeat the same scripted greetings and responses to the angry voices in his headset.

Miles was happiest when he was writing. And when he was writing, he was writing. He'd slave over his compositions tirelessly, in front of his computer screen, until the small hours, editing and inspecting every last word. Then he'd fire off submissions to as many places as he could and hope that maybe, just maybe, he'd get finally get published and earn his big break.

But the end results were always the same. Form rejection after form rejection. And the more and more he got, the more disillusioned he became. His dreams of being the next John Cheever, Chuck Palahniuk or Raymond Carver dissipated further with each letter.

Little by little, he started to hate all the magazines he previously liked. The cute authors with their sharp wit and incomprehensible allegory! Their stupid little stories nobody other than a pompous critic could enjoy! And those oh-so clever poets and their overly metaphorical poems that no one ever really understood but somehow found so brilliant...

After receiving four form letter rejections in one day, Miles stood naked in front of his mirror that night, tears streaming down his face, and his hatred toward the small press boiled into full blown rage.

His body began to shake as he thought about the dictionary abuse by some of these writers, especially the “clever” poets. Like how many people actually use words like “mellifluous” anyway?

Damn them and damn their narcissistic diatribes! What good was poetry and stories that made no sense!? It suddenly dawned on him that most of the bullshit he had read in small press magazines was merely smug attempts by worthless authors at making themselves look smart.

Damn them! Miles thought, slapping his bathroom mirror lightly. What about his genius? Why shouldn’t he be heard? Why was it that everyone else gets published? Damn them! Damn them all, Miles thought, as he slapped at his bathroom mirror harder and harder...

Damn them all with their academic, look at how great I am writing! Damn their worthless Pushcart nominations! Damn every writer and his or her pithy bio and those annoying lists of places they've been published! What a bunch of phonies! No wonder it’s the “small” press! No wonder nobody reads these magazines! They all suck!

Miles then realized he’d been now punching his bathroom mirror and that his right fist was covered in bloody glass shards.

Miles saw himself hyperventilating in the shattered mirror and decided it was time to exact revenge and concurrently move beyond the incestuous small press world and really get himself noticed.

He’d recently read online about a convention, a gathering of the small press, that'd be happening in a couple weeks, only an hour away from where he lived. There, nearly every editor from every magazine that'd rejected him would be in attendance. What's more, their pictures and names were up on the website.

His plan began to materialize. He would visit the convention, with an M16, and shoot as many people as possible and then himself. But beforehand, he'd send a compilation of his writings to news agencies, big magazines, publishing houses, and popular blogs. Finally, after completing his mission, he'd be heard!

It wasn't the first time he'd plotted a killing spree. He'd done so in high school, inspired by Columbine. He’d thought up a similar attack against the jocks who'd terrorized him and his friends, but his friend who'd planned it with him chickened out, so they didn't go through with it...

Miles always had a fixation on spree killers. Sometimes he didn't agree with their motives, but he respected their courage and how they were able to make themselves heard. When he wasn’t writing, he’d usually be spending hours online researching mass killings.

He particularly admired those who’d been able to kill more than 20. Anything under 20 kills he often wasn’t too impressed by, except for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, due to their teamwork, charisma and meticulous planning. (He’d even signed an online petition demanding “the basement tapes” immediate public release…)

Though he didn’t care much for racists or politically motivated rampage killers like Baruch Goldstein, Dylann Roof, or Nidal Malik Hasan, probably his all-time favorite spree killer was Anders Breivik, due to his 77 kills, and use of both guns and explosives.

At number two was Seung Hui Cho for his high kill count and how badass it was that he’d chain-locked the exit doors to prevent “those spoiled brats'” escape, and that he’d sent an awesome video manifesto to the media, which Miles had watched over 100 times on YouTube.

He also quite liked Adam Lanza and felt Lanza didn’t get the respect he deserved among mass killers. Lanza was a writer and a student of mass killings, even editing Wikipedia pages and keeping a massive mass killer spreadsheet. Miles admired that and admired Lanza’s choice of targeting an elementary school, knowing it’d generate more press.

Rounding out his top ten were Martin Bryant, the perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre; George Hennard of the Luby’s Cafeteria massacre; James Huberty of the McDonald’s massacre (enjoy your Happy Meal, motherfuckers! he’d always think while watching news footage of that one); the “DC Snipers” John Allen Muhamad and Lee Boyd Malvo; Woo Bum-kon, the kooky South Korean policeman; and Charles Whitman of the University of Texas shootings.

He also kinda liked T.J. Lane for his antics in the courtroom, especially the riff to his victims’ families about jerking off with the hand that killed their sons. What a laugh riot! And he loved Jiverly Wong's confession letter: "I am Jiverly Wong shooting the people..." That always cracked him up. He gave Robert Hawkins style points, too, even though he'd only killed 8 people...

Miles decided their way of making history would be his way. So he went to the gun store and bought a fully automatic assault rifle and plenty of ammo. Then he went to the army surplus store and bought some combat boots and fatigues.

When he got home, he found the movie "Taxi Driver" playing on cable. After watching it, he took a piss and stared into his reflection in the bends of his bloodied, shattered bathroom mirror and decided to shave his head into a mohawk, like the movie's protagonist, Travis Bickle.

Then he listened to Pantera's "Vulgar Display of Power" on his phone and tried to sleep, but couldn't, so he read "Catcher in the Rye" and thought about Mark David Chapman and wrote a quick poem about how Chapman should have shot Yoko, too, and sent the poem off as a submission to "Poetry Magazine", "The New York Quarterly", the "New Yorker" and even Yoko's publicist just for shits and giggles.

The next day Miles quit his job and spent the couple weeks before the convention preparing, putting together manuscripts of his writing, doing push-ups in his apartment and target practice at a local shooting range.

He repeated his routine of watching "Taxi Driver", listening to Pantera, and reading "Catcher in the Rye" every night. Every night he'd also write a poem about a different spree killer.

Finally the big day came. He was so amped up the night before that he only slept for an hour or so and when he woke up, he had a touch of vertigo, but, while taking his morning shower, he felt a tranquility and sense of calm he’d never had before.

After dressing up in his army fatigues, he grabbed his supplies, and headed out the door. Before getting into his car, he put on a pair of aviator sunglasses and dropped several packages of manuscripts into a mailbox.

He peeled out of his building's parking lot and drove to the convention. On the way there, he maintained the speed limit, listened to Pantera, and thought excitedly about how a movie might be made about him and his writings and wondered which directors and actors would be involved.

The convention was to be held at a hotel downtown. But when he arrived to the hotel lobby, carrying a duffel bag, the young lady at the reception desk eyed him curiously.

She asked him if she could help him and he asked her where the convention was. She warily pointed him to a conference room down the hall. Without responding to her, he turned and began to walk in its direction.

As he neared the room, he noticed there were only middle aged men hanging around outside the conference room's doors. They all had on three piece suits and a lot of them had slicked back hair. None of them looked like writers or the pictures of editors he saw on the website.

As he drew closer, a couple of the middle aged men went inside and, from behind where they'd been standing, he saw a sign that read: “Rich Dad, Poor Dad.”

Dejected, he thought for a second of carrying out his plan, going in there and opening fire, but he decided against it. Instead, he went back to his car and drove home.

When he got home, he logged onto the Internet and tried to check the convention page, but when he typed the address, all it brought up was a blank window, containing an Error 404 “Page Not Found” message.

"A Powerful and Moving Tale" by Tony Bryer

I don’t know what’s wrong with people who call a meeting for 4:00 on a Friday afternoon, but that’s exactly what Ross Fravell did. Furthermore, he gave us only a few hours notice, sending the meeting notice at 1:00 p.m. The meeting was to launch a new project, the KCX Telemetrix. Sounded like exciting stuff, huh? I mean, how much can one person yawn in the course of an hour? I didn’t know, either, but I was about to find out.

So now it’s four o’clock, right? And I saunter into the meeting room. Everybody’s already there. Great. There’s nowhere left to sit, either, except at the head of the table where everyone can stare at me. Wonderful. I plop my ass down into the chair and settle in for a long, looooong meeting. Long because it’s Friday afternoon and I want to get the hell out of there. It’s bad enough I have to work tomorrow, but having a four o’clock meeting is just rubbing salt into my raw wound.

I glanced around the table to see who all was there. There were test engineers, program managers, sourcing associates, line engineers, and even an agent from Corporate Travel who was probably in the wrong meeting, but she was pretty hot so no one minded at all. I was the sole quality representative so I steeled myself for a barrage of stupid questions and pined for the moment I could flee out the door to make a beeline to the nearest liquor store.

Ross cleared his throat. “Uh…” he said. A meeting that starts off with “uh” is bound to be a real corker, as my dad would say. “I’m sorry for the short notice,” Ross began.

“Yeah!” someone interjected. “You should be sorry for the time!”

Everyone laughed and Ross had the decency to turn red.

“I’m sorry for the short notice, and for the time,” Ross said and everyone laughed again.

I realized I was missing out on a corporate bonding moment and so I laughed, too. “HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW!” I guffawed. Everyone looked at me. The hot chick from Corporate Travel looked frightened. I smiled at her. She averted her eyes and fumbled at her Covey planner.

And that’s when I noticed I could see her booby. The second button of her blouse had come undone and so it was gapping open. I could see it all. She wasn’t even wearing a bra. Her breast was long and pointed. The nipple was a dark plum color, as large and long as my thumb, thick and pendulous and dripping with a clear fluid. I licked my lips.

Ross cleared his throat. “Anyway,” he said, “I just wanted to cover a few things before we go home.” I tuned him out. He probably wouldn’t need any input from me for another ten minutes or more. This gave me ample time to admire the travel chick’s booby and to play a few erotic fantasies in my head.

My Dockers were just starting to feel tight in the crotch when I realized everyone was laughing again. Not wanting to appear to have been daydreaming, I laughed too. “HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW!” I screamed. Ross jumped and the travel chick cringed.

One of the program managers was scandalized. “Tony…” he began, and that’s when my face exploded.

I felt these huge chitinous mandibles explode out of my jaw. It felt like a pair of arms depending from my chin. I could actually see them before me, two grasping pinching lobster-like mandibles snapping open and shut in front of me, ready to rend and tear and bite and chew. It felt wonderful. I remember thinking if sex could only be this good, I’d never get out of bed.

Ross fell out of his chair. The travel chick screamed. “Everybody stay calm,” I said. Or rather, that’s what I tried to say. What actually came out of my… my… Well, it wasn’t exactly a mouth. I don’t know what it was. It was a maw, I guess. There’s really no other way to describe it. So what actually came out of my maw was a thick buzzing sound, like a six-foot cicada on a drowsy August day.

Pandemonium erupted. You’ve all heard that phrase before. “Pandemonium erupted.” Until you’ve experienced it for yourself, you have no idea what pandemonium really is. Papers flew into the air. Chairs fell over. Bodies thumped to the carpet. People scrambled to get out of the room. I think someone farted. I stood from my chair. “Stop!” I shouted. Or rather, that’s what I tried to shout. Again, what came from my gaping maw was that thick buzzing sound.

Pandemonium continued to erupt. I’d had enough. I strode to the door and kicked it shut. “No one’s leaving here until I’m satisfied you can all keep a secret,” I said. Or rather, that’s what I tried to say. Fuck ‘em if they can’t understand me.

Ross cowered before me. “What are you going to do to us, Tony?” he asked, his hands clasped to his chest like a penitent begging shriving.

“I’m not going to do anything,” I tried to say and everyone screamed. The test engineer rushed me, a sourcing associate close behind. I stepped aside and a remarkable thing happened. My head snapped forward and my mandibles grabbed the engineer by his head. A quick jerk of my neck and the test engineer’s head crushed between my mandibles like a grape. My maw snapped open and the engineer’s brain disappeared down my throat with barely a gasp. The sensation was stupendous. Waves of pleasure washed over my body. My first orgasm was not even noteworthy compared to the cataclysm rocking the core of my being. I wanted more.

I snatched the sourcing associate by the neck and squeezed. A thick syrup washed down my throat. Goddamn, if ever anything better existed in Creation, a loving God kept it to Himself. The next few moments blended together in a frenzy of blurred color and waves of incredible pleasure wracking me to my toes.

When next I regained my senses, the room was empty. Not even a stray drop of blood had marred the expanse of sensibly colored carpet. My belly strained against my belt. My God, if I’d ever gorged myself more fully, I surely couldn’t remember it. I stifled a burp. The edges of my maw felt rough against the back of my hand. I grasped around my face. My mandibles were gone. Whatever forces had made them appear had subsequently made them disappear.

Ross’s laptop gaped open on the table. I sat at his chair and opened his e-mail account. Opening a new e-mail message, I typed, “Hey, everybody. Ross here. Seeing as how it’s Friday afternoon, I’m knocking off early. The meeting I had scheduled at 4:00 is postponed. Everybody have a great weekend, except Tony who has to work tomorrow! Ha ha, Ross.”

I clicked on “Send” and ran out of the room. I don’t know how this will play out. All I can do is thank God no one saw me running down the hall.


Tony Byrer drives a truck for a living. He lives in southern Indiana with his wife, three cats, and a dog. You can find him on facebook.