Bugs have become rather preemptive over Sladen’s decay. They are a prim component of his nutation, another brood screwed too near – same neighborhood – first drain worms since plumbing went public. Frost and flea-bitten, interatomic nattering deep inside either ear, Sladen translates their spit as it discolors him. He’s in a rush to be devoured.

“I give you this gibbosity sawing fiddle with himself, façade deformed lorgnette to pebble – laxatives for eyes! – percutaneous glint skipped inward and dragged impacted, passed like glass, hyperborean grub enisled by any earth worth stomaching, the risen simian crowning brown, a tutelary botch job evolved wrong on lawns, god swapped sinusoid, my friend the desquamtious sky just shed, aforementioned lunch ejecta parked astride, elasticated thumbprint prophet knifed to the brim, stabbed through his top hat, mister bejeweled scat, a human bezoar aped our lord; visit him at the end of your dung-strewn spyglass, thine decrepit creation, Michelangelo’s five-digit aperture, blackamoor night-cart operator. He doth expel a struck dumb stench his installers stand aghast against, abominable smile engraved off the face, skull-fucked sculpture more chapped lip than man. Pardon. Snowman. Who shat in a porcelain cot and called the cops?” He divides head from carrot, parsing unsavory likenesses towards a patrolman.

“Think how carbon dating belies mankind, good news woefully vamoosed, entropy embodied. Mold grown round a rock god tossed took flight under an insane sun clotting mid-orbit. Then protostomes notch an anus. Fish lurch ashore, throttled awake. Mammals wail into their inexorable fur, digging for loot, an erased decoration, the passing graffiti of a species. Lunatic whims are farmed and formed, caches dug to slurp the surplus. Soon mineshafts require bigwig denizens, dollymop companies, crimson bounties. The one I work’s labeled the same she as a ship, capsized on sight. Her picketers get nibbled where they sit, bowels dysenteric all season, vestigial incubations denied fifty feet per diem, patties wagged away, numbered and unnamed, exempting the hypocrisisms her utmost participant says upon entry. Him being me. She being beneath.” He dodges a would-be tackler.

“Sir, I, too, am bred amid a daily basis hanging. No scab, gotta hate waving a hanky at the adit, dreaming such clusters wended about the fuck-sunk bit, dirt chewed loose, orebody congelation mutually consumed in utero. Now the globe won’t disinter me topsy-turvy along some Chinaman’s sun. Babe amputated out a rope of milt, receipt stuck through either teat, study sans pigment up from hell, born to the very hole I bore open – carrion’s sure been sought to nurse on, one-sided suck, evisceration of the thing that laid me!” He vomits himself a pillow in the clink.

---

Only his kid brings peace. He gets it to emit machinelike shrieks, bouts of slumber induced via counterintuitive abuse. Stories before bed turn quite cruel. Zero baby teeth remain. Equipment’s stored beneath its squab instead, an extracted stash embezzling fairyland, jeopardizing paradise, imperiling the skull. Thoughts outside blast design arrive disfigured. Dry drills hum through everyone’s stuffing. Dust is stuffed down and quartered in a cough. He needs debris to breathe. Words come slit twixt tongue and palate. Expensive clinical speculation proves invasive, never curative. Wifely hokum contributes little. Another malady debuts, misdiagnosed to life. Similar consumptive din surrounds boycotts, plain mutiny, squabbling over automation. “Men gored by an encore. Ain’t sliced right,” he chides, pinching what could be a daughter till he’s done. Lunch whistle yowl, man-car’s tread, engineered low, a mulish ouch. “Nihil boni sine labore. Boni pastoris est tondere pecus non deglubere.” Goal met, able to nap, at last, while she screeches, nothing will conciliate, save a stainless steel lullaby.

Time has clawed the woman he impregnates half out of her wrapper. He’ll continue worshipping, though, well beyond the aphasia of age. She’s starched on each cornea, a svelte memory conjugally filled. Good couples should look like they were drawn by the same artist, related by brushstroke, joint genes sensibly spread, a fastidiously threaded pedigree, an intact spill. No land will be willed their kin. She accuses him of falling victim to trends against temperance when, after an intermitted workweek, he limps home, cruel or mute. Pinkerton threats address their offspring’s chastity. Next crevice to migrate to, circumbendibus marriage cesspool. Picturing fertility reignited, he presses a bible in her grip and explains what leaves him its conduit. Not the stress of anything that maintains them, but medical anomalies, convalescent, secure behind reason. Hunched and busy about his come’s rebarbative pram, she appears less plain. One child survives her excuse of a womb.

---

“Wind like this could rip a stitch from its wound.” A known poet bikes close; schistosomal Finn, scarred, mush-mouthed hematoma spouting overpriced poesy for free. The clothes hang off him like a conquered flag.

“Fumes in that pit etch yorn guts dyspeptic. Lungs switched black, past a life’s craftwork. Brain scratched thin. Broken moiler. Wrecked sediment haloed below headlamps. Clung to the facsimile of human inclusion jobs allot. Fustilugs topside see more time-bomb than pop. Yer almost finished ticking. Let a man alone to perform the task at hand. He’ll fetch you his last bit of cartilage tied in a bow.”

A weaseling aptitude to rescind insults obscured by abstraction will shelter him well. Cuffing scribes is an irascibility celebrated in town square, but many a contumelious timbre goes unprovoked. His function involves parsing land, not flapdoodle. Being combinatorially adequate, a caught wad, fellow clump, sacrificial batch pursued by the future, spermatozoon nose to tail, he’s able to unscrew the bicycle’s front wheel and send it on a separate Homeric quest across Main Street.

Expressions scribble Sladen over. “Too broken to commune.” So the poet spewed. Animus of those who bear an underappreciated skill. He further lignifies himself, singing into drinks. The termites of age have formed a membrane, cheeks bitten in, darkened from the center, each movement an exertion. “Before explosives,” he tells the shoulder brushing his, as by accident, “fire abuts stone. Fissures foment shock as water splits rock. Opposite of a garden. Roots that grew their ruin. Ancient cavitied kablooie…Today we teeter between wage and orifice.”

“Harken yonder blatherskite. Which big-vicious buggery am I summoned by? Bah! Slayed-hen. Poor soul. Calls the drill his boy, or vice versa. Canary, mine, and mascot croaked in one. ‘Nother scooped-out cohort on furlough, frigged in the britches, hypoxic at new latitudes. Nose-dove anoxia umbilicus. Marooned atop the brood. Wrecked, identical rentals he feels foreign in. Fat on clastic store lactate. Stabled, of late, by troubles preventing goddamn shaft collapse because our brother can break the cage, and, quoth, dislodge Mother Nature’s eeriest period. Dubious boast. Why not depart your pap? Nigh a roomy enough gobble. He whose labor, contributed so solely well, fed only his own gluttony.” Grandstanding for the tavern, leaflet speak: “I present Codpiece Earl’s self-same hatchet man. Barnstorming absolutions to pet the copper kitty. Just a deposit the pants they gave him made.”

“Fancy distance from a knobstick, ragged as he stands,” someone tries peacekeeping. Sladen acquaints the man’s orbital region with a sharp corner of bar. Clutching punctured jelly, slit gelatin worn cheek to chin, the large cart mule twirls, emitting blood twisters, all swing, fighting half-blind with the wrong guy. They meet in the middle of each other’s windpipes.

“Be your exclusive self with great precision. Me, I’m a disciple of the churn. The whir recruits its user. Permit me approach de prize inside, boss. I refer to your fucking brains, in this case. There they’re holstered, bathed with offal, baetylic totem, gleaming eyelet.” Fingering the rim. “I own everything penetrated. But this piece of profligate drift? Your paltry muck lucre shan’t add up. Should we hop through the runny pellicle and swim, by way of example?” Of what he’s unsure, but he wipes it on the man’s shirt. “I lack the adjectives to accurately despise you.”

He increases the screaming outdoors, misses his morbific crevice, how echoes arrive weaned upon delivery. The clock’s progress should be grounds for murder. Dwarf outsourced by the hour, straphanger overspun in globular substrata, he once lived out his bathroom break. Everyone’s piss mingled in a single den, as if to prank the bear therein, soil her turf. Adrift from any hard-on, boughs pluck his teeth and play them for the breeze. Moving like a slow decapitation thrown through the trees, gummed clavichord handed back sullied, manger-wet Christ demands the manager, foot hooked around virgin cunt, lowering his holy pate to giggle at our flaws and deem them winter. He will drill the planet off axis, a well-stropped hobbyist, his personal mine in the heads of others. No second thought for Christ’s macramé anachronisms. The spear is his primary holdover. Sladen chafes himself worse on purpose, skin an ingot, arid cultures, symptom of Christmas. He kicks the twinkle from a tree.

Sean Kilpatrick is a writer whose work has been published in New York Tyrant, Safety Propaganda, FENCE, Hobart, Boston Review, among elsewhere. This piece is excerpted from his forthcoming novel, Butcher the Stars.