LITTLE BOY

The concrete; cracked, gray, and full from growths of distended, tortured weeds from below—seeping desperations into crevices divided by a mason’s trowel. They defined the walking space and made Little Boy count.

“One . . . two . . . two and a half . . .”

He did this for some time, counting and counting again. Unfortunately, he had to occasionally look up to face the world around him.

The crows flew at an angle that could have been perceived as upward but their flight was oblique and erratic. A man, bedridden, unable to remember his past and not quite mad enough to realize the present, sat on a bench by the park. He stared as Little Boy continued counting. The man existed across the street, engulfed in baggy, open-sored clothes. The few enamel blocks in his mouth accented his wannabe-ism as Little Boy acknowledged that. Boy tried to smile at the man but ached when doing so. He winced—remembering his family, his father, his mother, the way it had never been.

The crows smacked onto the pavement with a hollow thwack; some of them choosing to bleed, others content to twitch on key. The man watched in horror then slowly stared upward with eyes permanently stitched open. The mauve sky would never go away.

“Seventy-three . . . seventy-four . . . seventy-five . . .”

Little Boy looked up, squinting agnostically. It had always been 75 steps to The Gnarled Pet Shop but today he was a few steps short. That had never happened. Just ahead, the store walls swayed outward then inward from bloated biomechanics as he tried to understand.

Had I miscounted? Was I right before all those times and now wrong?

Of course this was the norm. Having to look forward and see the blasted forms of semi-live people before him, he realized the pet place was not far ahead.

Just another 15 steps.

Little Boy walked on. Aspirant saints and near killers streaked this way and that, churning the life he knew into red and black . . .

“And sometimes yellow and brown,” he told himself. He almost managed hope, but the pavement stopped and he knew it was time.

“Oh . . .oh my . . .”

“Never venture further! EVER!” screeched his dad to him before he had left. The memory of those screeches turned and bled the sinew of buildings past the mark, exploding red and black washes of color beyond his specified step. The structured walls bulged and buckled the sidewalk in their wake in front of his eyes. The 15 steps, he knew, he had to take.

In a while, crowless, adjective-less, Little Boy reached The Gnarled Pet Shop and stood outside its dreamlike, swaying, gastrous, organic-induced presence. He contemplated his mother and then jingled the change in his left front pocket. Looking down he saw the swirling black of the festering world that cooked his mind. He knew his legs were there . . . he could feel them. The blackness dulled and the backpack stapled to the posterior of his spine with thick bolts wriggled. He had forgotten about bringing that baggage today, but he could feel the flaps were securely fastened; his amorphous father had checked this before Little Boy left the place he figured was his home.

It had better not get out. Knowing it was there made his backpack seem heavier; 60, maybe 70 pounds.

He looked across the street and saw that the crows had consumed the gray, mindless man as they squirmed sideways and managed to spear their frothing beaks into his innards. A larger, much more ominous shape approached Gray Man and sat on the mush there. This being was dark and scary and it lifted its desiccated eyes, orange with crust, to realize Little Boy. The crows backed away, skittering in indirect angles until they smashed and splattered into the invented trees planted everywhere.

Boy put his hand through the door and this allowed him to enter. He fell inside.

“Help . . . help me!” he pleaded. He wanted to scream but no one would know if he did. One minute, if such a thing as that existed, came to be known. Little Boy chose sight to his lidless, burning eyes and welcomed the surrealism of The Gnarled Pet Shop once again.

No one heard him, as was always the case. He lifted himself up, almost fell as the backpack swam and lurched, then stood upright. There was only one light far and away in that room over there with its seething steps. Lots of aquariums. Lots of cages. Nothing was moving.

“Ahscah Man,” said Little Boy. He knew that was his name.

“NOTHING ELSE!” screeched his father. “Only Aw-scah-man!”

Four large, pale, dried hands, their clubbed nails caked with cement and fat pebbles, straddled the counter in front of Little Boy. He acknowledged them and called again.

“AHSCAH MAN!” he yelled. His voice stirred something to his right and caught him off guard, making him jump. Nothing seemed alive today, but here there was always a possibility. The large cables intersecting the knot at the base of his skull forced him to creak his head ever so slightly and observe the cage. A yellowed light flickered, revealing a large hairy mass. In it was a brazened eye. Little Boy stared and realized it was alive. The pet opened an orifice and screamed, one that exsanguinated its want for less attention, and then it curled and was replaced by the skewed fin of an unborn fish once frozen then thawed for display. This accelerated more movement and soon all the cages were shaking. The tremble shook the floor as the confined inhabitants feared existence. The aquariums bubbled, their serpent lives suddenly confused at their awareness. Noise. Loud quaking swirls in the air—Little Boy tried to understand but knew he did not have to.

“Little Boy!” exclaimed a voice.

The quaking, the rumbles, the noise—all these stopped instantly. Oscar Man was here. He looked down, his head teetering on its neck and nearly falling, and then he managed to smirk. The thin slat of lips curved to a display Little Boy did not recognize. As Oscar Man leveled his head with his right hand, that slat resembled a pungent grin. One of his glazed, opaque eyes stared straight into Boy’s face while the other remained fixated on the world to the left.

This would never change, thought Little Boy. Nor will his pinstriped clothes and thin ragtime hat—he wears the same thing every time I see him . . .

. . . but Oscar Man couldn’t sense things like that, nor would he ever recall this conversation.

“Little Boy!” Oscar Man spat, jumping shortly in a jubilant jig, apparently showing programmed excitement with his recent customer. “What have you for me? Business as usual I say! What have you for me?”

Confused, Little Boy understood Oscar Man sensed the rumblings in his backpack and thought perhaps he had visited The Gnarled Pet Shop to submit a pet. That shape bulged and all could tell what was to happen next. Stringy blotches of vermin and muscle sprouted from the lapels of the backpack and seeped to the floor where they steamed like huge, maggoty drops of sputum.

“For me? Business as usual! For me?”

The rumblings and screams of the perceived lives in their cages rocked and spun with anticipation once again: Was there to be an addition today?

“No, Ahscah Man. I come for my mother.”

Oscar Man, watching his pets in their phantasm goo, jerked his head to acknowledge Little Boy as he spoke. When he did, his head teetered on its base to a 45-degree angle then slowed, nearly falling from the neck and onto the substance of the floor, but then with a wet whack it sloshed to its level again, splattering droplets of recently-added blood across the room, onto pets, and into Little Boy’s hair. As Oscar Man’s head rocked from side to side and the curve in his lips returned, the thing in the backpack reached out with a string of membrane and combed the red liquid from Little Boy’s tussled, dirty locks.

“Oh!” Oscar Man exclaimed, unaware his charred teeth began protruding from his mouth as he spoke. “Your mother! Fifty cents! Business as usual! You must pay fifty cents!”

Little Boy again jingled that change in his pocket as he considered his father’s roars.

“Only 25 cents will we pay!” he spewed from inside his sliced clothes. “Your mother wouldn’t want it any other way!”

Ignoring that command, Little Boy produced two quarters, their sheens long ago devoid of details as minds everywhere considered such facets unimportant within this cubist world. Seeing the blur of money in Little Boy’s paw, Oscar Man turned quickly, again straightened his head, and then quipped, “This way! Business as usual!”

Little Boy followed the caretaker, watching his jiggled, erratic gait as he approached that room over there. There were light brown and green steps leading up, each with its own irritated ideas and pessimistic views. Oscar Man skipped up the stairs like a puppet on strings that held him just above the floor. His feet never actually did touch the ground that day.

Cautious, Little Boy applied his considered weight onto the first, spongy step. Instantly, a vein of boiled pus spewed from a hidden organ at the edge of the stair and drenched the wall. All the steps squirmed as the pets in the shop behind him continued to shriek, and Little Boy gasped. He never could appreciate this part.

“Fifty cents!” piped Oscar Man from above. “Business as usual!”

In a flash, Little Boy bounded through the hides encasing the crust and muck of the final steps, escaping groping spews of errant seepage and angered bodices that gave them strength. Once atop the stairs he acknowledged Oscar Man as he stood in front of the wide, low tub on the floor. Its lid was wooden and moldy from the decaying, bulbous items inside.

Oscar Man stood motionless, perhaps thinking he was staring at Little Boy, but his sight was skewed and focused at the air between the floor and ceiling. Before he would lift the useless lid on the tub, he would need the quarters. He almost exclaimed Fifty cents! again, but Little Boy threw the money at him before he could. The quarters sailed in varying degrees until they stuck to Oscar Man’s red-and-white striped paper-thin pant legs. There they absorbed through the limbs, leaving holes that wafted a repulsive smoke throughout the wall-less room. Little Boy gagged but the smoke was nothing compared to the tub.

“Paying customer! Paying customer!” Oscar Man wailed, his head teetering at an angle to the left and then to the right with each spoken syllable. Like a bedeviled magician revealing the gist of a distorted trick he lifted the plywood lid from the tub, slowly at first as clumps of putrid limbs clung to the wood then dropped with a sickening splat back into the vat and sent liquid revulsion spraying, then he quickly flung the top across the room where it was swallowed up by the swirling boundaries that suggested a 3-dimensional area.

Spiraling vapors jumped from the container and encased Little Boy with their stench. His stomach lurched, and choosing to get it over with, he vomited into the floor. The bile disappeared into the mass at his feet and his backpack wriggled, adjusting to accommodate the absence of sustenance. Oscar Man, however, was unfazed. In a move Little Boy had never seen, the pet store custodian’s head turned first, then the rest of his body followed. In a flash Oscar Man leaned over and sunk his right arm deep into the contents of the tub. As he did, his head fell into the mix as well and became one with the other limbs and appendages that churned within the vat’s contents.

Instantly, the rumblings and shrieks from the pets below stopped.

Headless Oscar Man rummaged through the filth, occasionally pulling a bowel or torso from its girth to consider. Not finding his prize quite yet, he continued stirring the stew of parts. Ripe sounds from squeezed pockets of vital gas often belched from entrails and decomposing parts, saturating what little air there was.

Squish-suck-squish-suck-squish-suck

Little Boy, the nausea subdued by the squirming shape on his back, waited patiently. It didn’t take long before his mother was finally located. With a heave, Oscar Man pulled Little Boy’s mother from the soup with the sound of air being sucked from an anus.

Sssuuuuuck pop!

Oscar Man’s right arm was the color of entrails ripe with feces and organs swollen with trapped pus, and Little Boy stared as this bile and blood dripped to the perceived floor. He nodded, indicating that it was indeed his mother. Instantly Oscar Man dropped her to the floor and then again rummaged through the parts to relocate his own head. Seconds later he found it. The hat being trapped in the tub’s innards, Oscar Man set his bruised, hairless head, now soaked with the same gore as his right arm, onto his neck. Although he could no longer distinguish Oscar Man’s features through the film of excretion and blood, Little Boy knew the man was again attempting that eerie grin. Boy grinned noncommittally in return and then studied his mother’s head. Her eyes were half closed and barely visible. Soaked, thin gray hair enveloped her scalp and partially strung across her moldering nose and cracked lips. As if sensing this she licked slowly with a wide, swollen tongue and cleaned as best she could. Little Boy bent to pick her up but Oscar Man would have none of that.

“Allow me!” he exclaimed, his boneless, limp body jiggling then stooping to grab Little Boy’s mother by her hair. He lifted her. “Put it in your backpack? Business as usual!”

“Yes,” Little Boy replied. He turned to expose his back to Oscar Man and hoped the pet shop guardian was careful with the organism within the pack.

Looking up and away, Oscar Man loosened the straps to Little Boy’s backpack, lifted the flap, and stared inside.

The membranous form bayed like a dying animal as Oscar Man studied it. It slithered its strings of sinew tighter around Little Boy’s spine, assuring to always guard the cable connections to the vertebral lamina. Oscar Man considered asking Little Boy to donate this life in the pack to his pet shop but knew that it would be the death of the boy. So, slowly he lowered the head into the pack and the form there engulfed it with its mucus, steadying it and keeping it secure.

“All done! Business as usual!”

Oscar Man fastened the straps then led Little Boy back down the pulsating steps. They attempted grabs but Oscar Man thought them to death and they became dormant—at least for the time being.

“Bye now!” Oscar Man exclaimed, some of the muck sliding off his face and sloshing to the floor, allowing Little Boy to see his eyes better. For the first time, both of his eyes actually stared straight into Little Boy’s own, puzzling orbs.

What? Can he really know I’m here?

Little Boy moved and Oscar Man’s eyes followed. In that instant, he wanted to ask the man about himself; what he was like before this place, if he had ever known anything other than these wailing mounds of tissue and quaking beasties that surrounded him. He almost did, but then . . .

“Bye now! Business as usual!” Oscar Man turned and trotted off to the back of the store. Soon the walls absorbed him and he no longer existed in that day. Instantly the shrieks of the pets shook the world again and Little Boy could take it no longer.

The door would not open but Little Boy found the crack in time and wriggled through onto the sidewalk again. He fell to the warped cement but was careful not to land on his back—that would make his mother very angry and it would bruise the now-still shape in the pack that allowed his life. He lifted himself up then looked around. To his left, the road disappeared into a distorted gray waterfall of hazy, fluid asphalt and dust-ridden clouds filled with the dimensions of different worlds—ones he would never know. A loud buzz like an angry pack of furious bees became louder the more he looked that way so he turned his head. Across the street, a swarm of stripped crow carcasses stabbed through the man that had been sitting on the dissolving bench. Feathers spotted with white and red fluid stretched across the skeletonized frames as another consumption concluded. More gyrating forms erupted from the bowels of the adjacent bulging soil and would add to the continuous scenes of abstract and illusory scenarios that filled this section of existence. Little Boy showed little interest. Walking away from The Gnarled Pet Shop and its sensations of shock, he began counting his steps again.

“One . . . two . . . two and a half . . .”

It was time to take mother home.

THE END

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