Flash Fiction Friday: Titles Are Pointless

by Pedro Proença

There is a problem with language.

In itself, it’s just a way of communicating uselessness. What we are are mere specks of something on a big beach.

The beach is connected to a desert, and beyond that, we can’t even imagine.

Once I swallowed a car. It drove itself inside of me, its tires leaving marks on my stomach. People called those marks tumors and tried to zap me with laser beams. I fled.

Looking back, I think I should have been a dancer. I had the body for it, the skill, but I was too ashamed. My head was to small. Freakishly small. I looked like Brain, from the cartoon, the lab rat, in the episodes he used his robot human body, with the black suit, and kept his own head on top of it. He said he was transformed into a mouse by a freak accident involving a microwave oven and shaving cream, and sued for compensation.

Compensation never came.

I thought that was brilliant when I’d first watched. I filled my mom’s microwave with shaving cream and turned it on, hoping to become a smart mouse. All it did was turn me into a stupid mouse, and cause World War III.

I read a book once, it was made of yogurt. The pages melted under my fingers, and the only word in it was dark.

Sometimes I try to remember what it’s like to be a human being, not just a mouse, a lab rat.

Yesterday, I was taken from my cage at the pet store. A little redheaded girl adopted me. She took me to a wishing well, petting me all the way there, her fingers running on my smooth fur, and she wished for me to be a real boy. I transformed back, naked, in her arms. She collapsed with my weight, and I fell on top of her. People passing through thought I was a rapist, and they lynched me.
It’s nice here on my tree, the wind caresses my naked body. It’s pleasant.

At the End of Time, the rope on my neck broke and I was free. Now I was a middle aged woman named Gladys.

My vagina was dry and caked with mud. I walked until my feet bled, and found the last remaining human city. I needed water, my vagina begged me for some. She talked, and told me her name was Scott.

I never thought my vagina would be a man, but so it goes.

In the last city, I came across men. Only men, no women. They saw my naked body and craved it. Even though I was sagging all around, my hair was flaky and falling and my vagina was as dry as their hearts, they craved me. They looked at me with lust filled eyes, and I sort of liked it.
Scott detached himself from me. He was a tall black man, with the biggest penis I had ever seen. He beat all the men to death, a savage display I wish I could now forget. He claimed me as his wife, and we lived on a cave for the next sixty years, feeding of small plants and some of the mutant animals that now roam this god forsaken planet.

When Scott died, our son took over the role of the provider. I was a dried up old crone by then, and he was barely out of puberty. His name was Dog.

Dog fed me small plants from our makeshift garden, and at nights, he held me tight to hold off the freezing cold. One day, he came back from his hunting and told me had found more people, more humans. Men and women. He had found a girl, and they mated under an oak tree. Now they were married, she was pregnant, and he had to leave me behind. There was no space for me in his new life.

So I spent two years alone in my cave, my only nourishment being insects that came near my grasp. Once they got smart enough not to come by my side, I died.

Heaven is a lot like that Saint Seya episode where Deathmask sends Shiryu to the Underworld, and it’s all chasms and cliffs and a line of naked Ocarina of Time zombies.

I was minding my own zombie self when Scott found me. He was still black with a huge dick, not a zombie. He said he hadn’t died, but that he was there on vacation. He took me in his arms, and ran. We escaped Heaven through a back door, with an Employees Only sign. On the other side, the Lizard god played with a Lego set, and didn’t even looked up when we brush past him, towards his cherry red Cadillac.

We rode his car through an unpaved dirt road and came across a little B&B. It’s was run by a gay couple called Marky and Mark.

I was still a zombie, but Scott made love to me nevertheless. Being my vagina, all he needed to do was to bend down and suck his own penis, and I would orgasm. He did that until he turned to dust, crumbling to the floor.

Our room was free. All Marky and Mark required was for us to watch them make love. It was boring, missionary style sex, but we needed to watch. When Scott died, they offered me a job as a cleaning zombie. I declined, seeing no point in living without a vagina.

I hopped on God’s caddy and drove until I found my old cave. The smart bugs had transformed the place, turned it into a University. Such pride I felt when I found my old food in lab coats, teaching their young ones all about Green’s Theorem and Differential Geometry.

I decided to let them live their academic life, and I hunted down my son.

I found him in a nice, Tudor-style house, in the suburbs of his city. I watched him sleep beside his wife, a beautiful orangutan. Poor Dog. I killed them both with a machete, and ate their kids’ brains while they slept.

All the houses on his street were occupied by orangutan families. I killed them all and smeared their blood on me.

In the last house I found a microwave oven. I took some shaving cream from the bathroom cupboard (there was a lot of it) and tried to turn myself into a lab rat again.

I succeeded, and this time I had all the intelligence of Brain. I knew the next step was world domination.

Crawling my way through more gutters and sewer lines I’d ever thought I could endure, I found the palace of the King of Humans. He was a bald man, with strong Greek features.
It was Kojak.

With my diminished size, it was easy to sneak behind him and stuff myself into his Greek, talented mouth. I found myself inside of him, and I ate his organs. There was a miniature version of his castle there, with a miniature Kojak acting as the King of Big Kojak. I ate him too, in one bite.
Clawing and chewing myself through his anus, I saw myself turning into Scott. I held my BBC in my hand, stroked it, and when it became erect, it fell on the floor, transforming itself. It was now Excalibur. I tried to pick it up, but it was too heavy. Sadly, I was not the chosen king.

I walked out the castle, the subjects staring me as I walked, a tall black man with no penis. I came across a bottomless cliff and flung myself in it.

As I fell, I saw words flying by me. Words like sin and bubblegum and magic marker. I arrived at the non-bottom, and saw a skeleton typing on a keyboard. He was writing a novel since he was still a non-skeleton, and asked me if I could read what he had so far, and maybe give him notes on it. I said sure, and read.

Before the skeleton was born, his father was a traveling salesman. He sold people wax miniatures of world leaders. Stalin, Hitler, FDR, Getúlio Vargas, Mussolini, you name a country, he had a president, chancellor or prime minister for it. He once knocked at my house, and my mom answered. She had just unpacked the microwave oven she had bought online. It took a week to get there, and she was excited about it. She saw the traveling salesman on her doorstep and invited him in. He showed her his figurines, and she bought some. Then she showed him her new microwave, and he was impressed indeed. Just don’t let any kids come near it with shaving cream, he said to her, and she nodded. They fucked on the couch, and nine months later I was born.

I read the skeleton’s excerpt and told him it lacked blood. It lacked fucking. It lacked illegal sexual acts. It lacked miniature golf and brown, cheap wallets. The skeleton punched through his computer, his bony hand breaking in the process. He told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, that dickless men had no clue about life, about what’s truly important.

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Pedro Proença is struggling to fend off the villagers in order to protect his creation in his dark, creepy castle. When trying not to die from the extreme heat, he writes and plays music. You can find him on www.facebook.com/punksterbass