The Purchasing Agent
Fiction by Alex Rogers
“My sentence applies to the whole of your kind, and to all your descendants.”
—Minerva to Arachne
“…I was running out of veins.”
—William S. Burroughs
I got the stuff. The good stuff. The purple stuff.
Pretty purple powder.
Smokeable. Chewable. Shootable. Rub it. Pop it. Drink it. Snort it. This shit gets you higher than Benjamin Franklin’s kite.
And at 37,000 feet in the cloud-bursting air over North America? Even higher.
I was sitting in my aisle seat wearing a sweat-stained tailor-made suit topped with a newly acquired Panama hat, gesturing to the skirt-uniformed blonde number. “Oh, Stewardess?”
A helpful smile led her way to me like a friendly flashlight and she said, “Yes?”
But her accent made her ‘yes’ sound more like ‘Yaze?’
Reading her name tag, I said, “Piper,” then grinned up at her. “Would you light me up?”
I held out a cigarette. One of my own. Rolled. With a twisted tip.
Piper the Stewardess cheerfully replied, “Yaze!” and with a silver lighter emblazoned with the Can-Do Airlines logo, she lit me up nice and sparkly.
Smoking was not uncommon aboard Can-Do Airlines, nor any other airline at the time. After all, this was 1963. Smoking aboard an airplane was about as commonplace as napping, and as of this moment, on Flight 357 westbound to Wichita, the entire cabin was a tobacco sauna.
Plus the stuff that I was smoking.
Piper took a curious whiff, then asked me, voice low, mouth sideways, “Is that marihuana?” And she really put some breath behind that ‘h’ in marihuana.
I winked up at her and said, “You bet your beehive. And,” then I winked up at her with my other eye when I said, “a lil’ somethin’-somethin' extra.” I let that land. Then I offered, “Try a sample. I know you’re on the clock, Piper the Stewardess, but up here? At this altitude? At this time of day? Time is out of mind, is it not?”
Piper retorted, “You’re out of your mind,” and she took a toke of my purple joint.
In 1963, there weren’t any strict regulations on airplanes other than to try not to crash.
As for pharmacopeia, paraphernalia, even pistols? Hell, sky was the limit!
Piper exhaled her squeaky hit: “Wheeeeee!” Then commented, “That’s kinda nice.”
“One for yourself,” I offered her a freshly rolled purple joint. “Share it with friends.”
She accepted it without question or concern, and said, “Gee, thanks, Mr. Flye!”
“Call me J.J. Nobody else does.”
“Maybe I will,” she hummed. “When I come back.”
I said with a question mark, “You’ll come back?”
“Yaze!” And she glided down the buoyant aisle in her midnight blue high heels to faithfully attend to the other passengers seated aboard Flight 357 westbound to Wichita.
“She’ll be back,” an English accent seated to my left told me. “She always comes back.”
Who’d that voice belong to? I looked over: Dapper gent. Big nose. Huge ears. Cravat.
Smirking at him, I said, “Well, what’d’ya know?”
“Oh,” he told me in a primly educated voice that had no time for idiots but all the time in the world for itself, “I know plenty of things. I ought to, anyway, after so much flying about, to and fro, embarking and debarking hither and thither. Why, all that’s really left to know at this phase in the flight is whether one is going or coming.”
I took an immediate shine to this fop and offered him a toke. He told me, “I never touch the stuff,” while opening a petite pearl box to pinch a sniff of Pugh & Cavendish No. 8 Snuff, snorting it up his bulging snout. He swallowed, then went on, “I presume, my dear fellow, that you are aware of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, as implemented by Harry Anslinger of the Narcotics Bureau of your Federal Government?”
“Yaze,” I, J.J. Flye, replied, imitating the word ‘yes’ the way Piper the Stewardess had said it. Then I switched back to my own voice, “But this is 1963, ol’ chap. And this ain’t no taxation. This is business. Dig?”
The dapper gent gummed that word: “‘Dig’…” He seemed to tolerate the taste of it. “Well, I suppose such a colloquial phrase is acceptable, now that 'dig' has found its way into the addenda of the O.E.D.”
Exhaling a plume of purple smoke, I said, “The what?”
“The ad-den-da,” he slowly repeated, as if spelling it out for a moron. “Of the… O…E…D.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can dig it.”
While pinching another sniff of snuff, the dapper gent reached into his breast pocket.
“My card,” he handed it over. It read: Willis Kent. Retired Knight.
Bogarting my purple joint, I discarded his card and presented one of my own.
It read: Jerome J. Flye. Purchasing Agent.
“Call me J.J. Nobody else does.”
Willis Kent, retired knight, replied, “Perhaps another time.” He read my card once more. “And tell me, Mr. Flye, what goods and/or services do you exactly purchase?”
Glad he asked. From my wrinkled jacket pocket, I produced a flask—the kind of flask you’d use in chemistry class or maybe see in some B-sci-fi flick on the television and call it a ‘beaker’ until some know-it-all like Willis Kent corrected you.
“See this beaker?” I asked him.
“That’s a flask,” he corrected me.
“Yeah, well,” I shrugged, “just take a nice close look at it.”
Inside the glass flask gleamed the glittering sands of purple time.
I tapped a few toots onto the flat surface of my business card. “Try a sample.”
“And this is the purchase you have agented?”
“This is the stuff.”
“My snuff is strong enough stuff.”
“Not when there’s enough purple stuff to rebuff your snuff.”
After a pause, the retired knight decided he’d sample the purple powder, his reason being: “After all, one cannot pre-judge without the prior post-judgment of an experiential P.O.V.”
“A what?”
“An…ex-perien-tial…P…O…V.”
From my business card’s edge, the purple powder shot straight up Willis Kent’s honker. His eyes rolled back and squeezed shut, and he said while loosening his lips, “You are a jewel, my darling, you are a jewel!” Then, with an alchemical swoon, he reclined in his seat with a zero-gravity grin.
“Toot enough of that,” I told him, “and you’ll lose your vocabulary P.D.Q.”
“My…what?”
“Your…vo-cab-u-lary…P…D…Q.”
Then nothing but a low drone and a high hum in the pressurized cabin as I smoked my purple joint down to the bitter roach.
“Mr. Flye?” it was the husky voice of Piper the Stewardess. Sure enough, she was back!
But she still hadn’t called me J.J. And it didn’t look like she was gonna call me J.J.
She did, however, look like she’d palpably hit the purple joint that I gave her.
I was mellow yellow to the gills myself, and asked her daydreamily, “What’s cookin’?”
Before I could say ‘good lookin’’, she said, “The captain wants to see you in his cockpit.”
Now, ordinarily, I’d bust a gut anytime anybody said ‘cockpit’, but this sounded serious.
“Sounds serious, Piper the Stewardess. What is this, a bust?”
“Not a bust!” She crossed her heart, but I doubt she hoped to die, then specified, “You’ve been invited.” And she winked a bloodshot eye at me. I caught it with my own bloodshot wink.
Glad to stretch my legs for a minute, I rose up and took my leave of the now-catatonic Willis Kent—his knighthood was still in retirement—before stepping into the aisle and making an after-you signal to Piper.
No jive: I followed my female guide with the hungry focus of the age-old male gaze.
Further no jive: I never knew how to feed the hungry focus of my male gaze at any age.
On our way up the aisle, I spotted a seated war general—I could tell from the back of his Eisenhower head. Just before he sipped his coffee, I tapped some purple powder from my flask into his cup. I really shouldn’t have been giving out samples so freely, but I figured, why hog all the fun?
The general frowned down at his purple-peppered coffee, then quizzically eyed me.
I told him with a casual salute, “Sure am grateful for what you fellas did out there.”
The general brightened up and took a big sipping gulp.
Can-Do Airlines had a red-white-and-blue pattern to everything, from the seats to the cabin to the wings. The curtain separating the pilots from the passengers was an American flag.
I snorted purple powder off my knuckle as Piper unveiled the flag and we stepped inside.
The cockpit was a bubble of buttons and blinking lights in a purple mist.
The captain had a JFK haircut. His co-pilot’s RFK haircut was a nice complement.
They slowly turned their heads toward me and I could see that both of them were loaded.
“They wanted to thank you for, you know,” Piper whispered to me, loud enough for them to hear her, too, “that purple stuff you gave me!”
The pilots graciously grinned. That, apparently, was their thanks.
I told them, “Don’t mention it, gentlemen.” They didn’t. I then stepped in closer to peer out the fogged-up purplish window. “How much farther till we get to Wichita?”
“Not faah,” replied the JFK pilot.
“Not faah,” concurred the RFK co-pilot, emphasizing, “Not faah’r-at all.”
“Christ!” I exclaimed. “You guys even sound like the Kennedys!”
It was moments like these when the meaning of inner monologue meant nothing to my outer mouth. But the pilots kept graciously grinning, all the same.
“Toot?” I offered them, holding out my flask. “It’s nice when you smoke it, but it’s real nice and tasty when you give it a toot.” I tapped another bump onto my knuckle and snorted.
The RFK co-pilot unscrewed the lid of his silver Can-Do Airlines flask. He toasted Piper the Stewardess. “Pipe’ah,” he told me, “aw’ready spiked my beak’ah.” And he took a swig.
“That’s a flask,” I corrected him. “What about you, Cap? Powder your nose?”
The JFK pilot made that facial expression that people make when they’re already full but they could still go for dessert. He tapped his right nostril and told me, “I could take a pow’dah.”
We snorted. Piper giggled. I offered her a toot. She giggled again and said, “Yaze!”
By this point, what with all my partaking during everyone else’s sampling, I was blown.
And I was very glad that I was not the one flying the plane. I wanted to express as much.
“Gentlemen,” I began, “and Lady,” I included Piper, of course, “I want to thank you all for being the shepherds of us, the flying flock. We’re all grownups here, but when it comes to aerodynamic wizardry, well, some of us are still just babes in the woods. I know I am! That’s why it’s good to have some responsible grownups like you in the room. Dig what I’m sayin’?”
That’s what I thought I said. This is what I actually said:
“Zip zwee, zweev zzzwwweeevvvv, vvvvwwweeeeeeeezzzzzjjjjjj-zip!”
But the pilots and the stewardess weren’t listening. They were fucking.
And the plane was still flying.
Regaining speech, I said, “Not my de’pah’tment,” and headed back to my seat.
I figured any tomfoolery in the cockpit was best left to the professionals.
Forty-five minutes later, somehow, by luck, by miracle, by gum, we landed in Wichita.
Maybe I should’ve test-driven the purple stuff before dosing everyone right and left…
They meandered meaninglessly out of the terminal looking lost. Lingering.
The driver who was sent to pick me up from the airport waited for me near the exit, holding up a big cardboard sign with one word written on it in black marker: FLY.
That bugged me. It was already a no-go trying to get anyone to call me J.J. Now this goofy chauffeur with the beer gut and four chins couldn’t even spell my last name right.
As I approached the driver, he asked me, “Fly?”
I informed him, “There’s an ‘e’.”
His eyes widened and he said, “Where?!” He swatted at the air with his cardboard sign.
I just stared at him. Wondering why I seemed so far, far away.
The driver collected himself and said, “I’m Charlton.”
Mishearing him, I asked, “You’re a charlatan?”
“No, sir!” He held up his gloved right hand. “Chauffeur’s honor.”
Then there was a slight delay in which neither of us knew what was going on.
Snapping out of it, Charlton the driver asked, “Any baggage?”
I tapped my breast pocket, feeling the almost-empty flask of purple powder. “Just me.”
“Swell! This way, please.” His mustache smiled with him. “Gettin’ back from Panama?”
I guess he figured Panama on account of the hat. I told him, “Yep.”
—the fuck am I gonna do tell you where I been or what I done or didn’t do you couldn’t handle it couldn’t fathom it couldn’t dig it wouldn’t know what to do with it if I told you in any color you like or finger painted a map of your choosing because where I been there is no choice there is no map there is no color where I been it’s dark dark fucking dark where I got the stuff the good stuff the purple stuff where I stuffed my stuff real deep down and dirty down the dark dark fucking dark—
We walked out of the airport into the blinding parking lot and the high noon Wichita sun made me feel like somebody’s thrown-up breakfast.
Left my sunglasses on the plane, too. Damnation.
I followed Charlton to the parked Lincoln Continental and noticed that its doors were stenciled with the company name and logo: Show Fur Chauffeur Company.
What a dumb name for a business. And was that illustrated logo of a lady wearing a fur coat supposed to provide a visual aid for that clunky pun?
But then I flashed onto the way the fur on that illustrated coat had a sort of silky shine.
Kind of purple.
And what on earth did that illustrated lady remind me of?
I needed a smoke. I patted my pockets. Out of rolled joints. Only the glass flask. Maybe I needed a toot. No. Couldn’t afford that. I was a purchasing agent, not a dope fiend. Man’s got to draw the line somewhere. I had to get on the road and out to my buyer. That’s what the driver was for. That’s what this cornball Show Fur Chauffeur Company was for. Cover. Anonymity. Who, me? Us? Drug dealers? No, officer, just gettin’ a ride out to visit my Aunty Myrtle here in your fine town of Wichita. Do I have any identification? Sure! Jerome J. Flye. Call me J.J. Nobody else does, and neither will you, you buttoned-up narcotic boy. Blow me.
Still. For now? I needed a smoke.
Charlton got what I was looking for and offered me one of his. I told him, “Hey, you’re alright,” then under my breath, “for a charlatan.”
It wasn’t my favorite brand of cigarette: Slap-Dash! But it’d do.
Just before I could even light it, I dropped it onto the sizzling pavement, and that’s when I began to go where I went to—where I’m rappin’ with you, right now. You see, at that moment, the purple stuff started doing what it really does: it doesn’t just get you high, it puts you on a shelf above your Self.
To wit: I went outta my wits.
You ever have a dream where you’re floating over yourself? Like you’re your own guardian angel but you’re not there to do any blessing or guiding, you just sorta hang there and observe? Well, you can thank your lucky stars and blueberry moons that you’ve only dreamed it. Because I’ve lived it. The purple stuff put me there. There. Above and away from my body. Helplessly detached. Watching my own motion picture from a seat outside the cinema.
“Never mind,” I said, which was weird, because I said it, but it was like another guy said it for me. “Let’s just hit the road, okay?”
“Okey-doke,” Charlton said, tipping his chauffeur’s cap. Then he hesitated and mentioned, “There’s…someone else in the vehicle.” He clarified, “A fellow passenger.”
This made me hesitate, too. I didn’t like it, but this was sometimes to be expected. Show Fur Chauffeur Company often ran its operations in the guise of a carpool. Why, no, officer, there’s nothing to be suspicious of here because we’re all just decent Americans who don’t know each other from Adam trying to go our separate ways. And you can go to hell with a handjob.
As for whoever this fellow passenger was, I hoped that when I sat next to them it wouldn’t be expected of me to do a whole lotta talking.
Turns out, this fellow passenger would do all the talking for me.
As for getting into the car, how was all of me going to get inside? Charlton had opened the vehicle’s rear door, and my body was bending low to sit in the backseat, but what about me? I mean, I was still floating above everybody. All I could see now was the roof of the Lincoln Continental as Charlton closed the passenger door, then got into his driver’s seat, shut his door, turned the engine over, and began to drive away.
Aw, c’mon, don’t leave me hangin’ here.
But my body wouldn’t do that to my soul. Not while we were living.
It felt like I was wearing a necktie made out of a leash as I strung along with the rest of me, moving at a rate of fifty-five miles per hour down a straight and narrow highway up Wichita.
This was about as far away from myself as I cared to float, so I shortened the leashed distance by gliding down to the open window on the driver’s side, where I saw the pudgy profile of Charlton at the wheel.
“Allow me to introduce your fellow passenger to you,” he said, loud enough for everyone’s benefit, while keeping his eyes on the road. “Mr. Stanton P. Swirl.”
I drifted alongside the swiftly moving vehicle and saw myself through the closed rear window, slouched in the backseat, looking hazed out and hollow. But there was indeed this other guy, this Stanton P. Swirl, seated next to me, and I wanted to know who he could be.
A glass window ain’t nothin’ when you’re untethered. You just slip on through and adjust your angle. That’s what I did, anyway, to get inside the Lincoln Continental. Only pisser is: while untethered, you can’t get back inside your body. But I hovered just above my Panama hat, all the same, and got a good look at this most remarkable gentleman positioned to my right.
Stanton P. Swirl.
He was built like a ghost and had a kind of phantom classiness to him.
With a face from the heartland of America going east and west at once.
Looked as if he’d seen the funniest and most frightening things before any of us.
Sat cross-legged wearing a brown suit-and-vest the color and hue of pure H.
Wore a terracotta fedora complete with a grosgrain wraparound with this inscription:
experiential P.O.V.
He had a voice like a rope on a Moby-Dick boat getting twisted and tugged by the throat.
And he said—to me? To my body? To the driver?
“You can’t take it with you.”
Hearing that made me feel like a stowaway, but I couldn’t help but hover.
“Anyway,” Stanton P. Swirl proceeded, the rope of his voice twining outward to fill the entire car. “Where was I?”
I could see the reflection of Charlton’s big face in the rearview mirror. He smiled uneasily and said, “Uh…something about…” and he swallowed. “Ectoplasm?”
“Oh yeah,” Stanton P. Swirl replied, leaning back, getting more laconic. “Yeah.”
He gathered his thoughts like a southern calm before a northern storm.
“Therefore,” he declared, “by the laws supreme of the ineluctable ectoplasm, every man eventually squirts out his last drop of jizzum.”
Charlton took a sharp turn onto a one-way dirt road, and Stanton P. Swirl commenced:
“Down in Durango, I told the four-foot-eleven matron of the manor, ‘Qué no, mamasita, no yo tango al dinero.’ And the old woman was about to cut me down, but her big son, the one she called mijo, told her it was cool, that he’d vouch for me, that I was an ‘amigo conmigo’. She acquiesced, letting me stay, but I had to crash in the barn, ‘con los animales similares!’ Well, it was probably for the better, because her big son, the one she called mijo, plowed me in the ass like a corkscrew til cockcrow. A romp in the hay, if I do say, but a gentleman never tells. Turn me over and you’ll find I’m no piñata.”
Charlton smiled unflappably in the rearview mirror, and Stanton P. Swirl continued:
“Well, there’s cockle-doodle-doo and then there’s cockle-doodle-don’t. So, by dawn, I cut my losses and got lost on the way back home. Saw a hanging in a pueblo. Three horse-thieves hung by their necks until dead, but before dying, they had a dick-measuring contest without tape nor commentary, except from the horses. The crowd couldn’t decide which hanged man had the biggest and they never can. There they swung, three dying men, cocks out, jizzum spurting, ejaculating into the faces of the crowd—a dying man can’t help what comes draining out his hose when he’s dangling by a noose. Why do you suppose they call it ‘hangin’ out to dry’? I don’t make this shit up, I just make special note of what’s scrawled on the wall of the men’s room. Well, hitchhiking my way up past the border, I made it back. Back to the land of the free and the home of the brave, if you can find any. Then back up to New York City. Back to Times Square.” He nudged me, “Back to time out of mind, huh, kid?”
“Yeah,” my detached body managed to squeak out to him. “I can dig it.”
“Then dig this,” he pointed at me like my number was up. “The Man doesn’t give a fuck what you do so long as you goddamn do it off the clock. Times Square’s always clocking time, so if you got to up your dose or down your blade, you got to slip in real low and thin-like, slither sideways into an alleyway, slink on down the subway steps and catch on up with an unraveling roll of toilet paper not used for feces but for semen. See the sick junkies, poor wretches retching over the southeast platform, waiting for the big score to arrive on the 10:45 A Train, on time.”
Stanton P. Swirl switched his legs in their crossing and continued:
“Then, there you find yourself on 2nd Chance Avenue jerking off a helmeted journeyman who may or may not be an extraterrestrial—persona non grata—and you ask him what time is it, you lost track of the hour, you meant to make it to the Met but you’re only halfway finished melting his meat. Nevertheless, this alien with a cucumber hard-on tells you time is immaterial and space is imitational, all while never losing his erection. Look, can you hurry it up, you tell him, because there’s a new Caravaggio exhibit you’re going to, so just wrap it up padre and come all ye faithful. But, by the codified bylaws of the ineluctable ectoplasm, no man—human or intergalactic—can bark orders at an orgasm.”
Charlton smiled apologetically to me in the rearview mirror. But there was no way to tell what my body really thought or felt. As for me, I listened onward. What else could I do?
“They say life is a three-ring circus,” Stanton P. Swirl went on, “and that’s true insofar as catching three circus clowns halfway through a three-way. Kee-rist, I told them, don’t you jokers know there’s no funny business in comedy? Well, they showed me a thing or three, had their act down pat, you see, trained with the best painted faces in Nazi-occupied Paris—je ne veux pas manquer ça!—and they rolled like a tumbleweed while manning each position in the mandala of their ménage-a-trois. Wipe off all the makeup and you’ll find the same hustler, pimp, trick, hooker, landlord, hep cat, jewel thief, and taxman underneath it. You’ll discover the same nervous mark withholding himself from the needle and holding himself together for just one more minute, giving shaky handshakes to the voters while rectal mucus precipitates the jetting flood of shit as the incumbent mayor points at him saying, ‘I now declare this asshole OPEN!’ Wouldn’t you say so, driver?”
“I…” Charlton said. “Yeah.”
“So, there you have it,” Stanton P. Swirl summed it up like this was his point all along. “I’ve been to the fungal toenails of skid row and I’ve been to the plucked eyebrows of the governor’s ball and every single time it’s the same bronze medal dildo. Roll dem bones! Time, money, and jizzum. Spent and spent and spent until you’re in debt and indebted to a detriment. All while The Man looks on as he sucks off the serum of a lanced ass-blister with a shit-eating grin.”
“Jesus, Stan!” Charlton gasped, pulling over to the side of the road. “I need a smoke.”
“Yeah,” Stanton P. Swirl said, uncrossing his legs and getting out. “So do I.”
“Yeah,” my body said, slumping over and getting out, too. “I can dig it.”
I floated up and out the roof of the pulled-over Lincoln Continental and joined the boys.
Out here, the Wichita sun was less oppressive. Even the November wind was just cool enough to slow things down a little. Heard a bird over there, maybe a crow, perhaps a raven? And what else? Was that the sound of a nearby river?
No. I checked. It was just Stanton P. Swirl. Urinating on a bush.
The cawing came calling from afar, from the field up ahead.
Charlton finished smoking his Slap-Dash! cigarette and regained his bearings.
“Giddy-up, gentlemen?” He asked us.
My body stood rigid like a mannequin out of season.
Stanton P. Swirl smacked my arm. “Ready when you are, champ,” he said.
My limbs remained fixed and my eyes remained fixated.
I wondered what my body was seeing across the field, so I looked ahead of it:
Some peeling beat-down warehouse.
“Know what?” My body spoke up. “This is my stop.”
Charlton’s mustache turned upside down. “This is your stop?”
The cawing came closer. “Yeah.” The cawing came clearer. “This is my stop.”
“Well, I…” Charlton removed his chauffeur’s cap and looked as if he’d cry.
I reached into my pocket and gave him a tip for his service.
Told him, “Keep the change.” It was twelve cents.
Then I handed a white rectangle over to Stanton P. Swirl. “My card,” my body said.
He read what was written. “Pleased to meet you, J.J. Look you up sometime.”
Told him, “Call me Mr. Flye. Everybody else does.”
With that, I left my companions behind and followed the zombie footsteps of my body.
To the warehouse.
“Well,” I shrugged to myself, “at least it’s shaded.”
The distant sound of the departing Lincoln Continental faded away into the dirt out there.
Goodbye, Show Fur Chauffeur Company.
Hello, Actual Show Behind the Scenes.
I circled around the sickly lit square footage of the warehouse and couldn’t find anybody else. Resuming my hover post above my Panama hat, I waited.
—reminds me of the spot where I got the stuff from out the dark dark fucking dark—
Well, this was the place. Now where was the buyer?
I didn’t know the buyer’s name and I’d never seen his face before. He could be anybody.
My body tried to check the time, but how? No watch on my wrist. Did I ever have one?
Who was keeping who waiting?
Or…who was keeping what waiting?
Next, I heard the sexiest voice I’d ever heard in my most private and wildest nightmares.
“Just in time, my darling,” she said, unseen, her sultry vocals surrounding my senses in the moistening gloom.
Not seeking it but also not denying it, I suddenly got one mean shouting hard-on.
“Did you bring the stuff?” She asked from the dark. “The good stuff? The purple stuff?”
Tremblingly, my hand presented the nearly depleted glass flask of pretty purple powder.
“Don’t be frightened, my sweet,” she said, that voice of hers honey-suckling my earlobes. “I always knew you wouldn’t be able to help yourself. You just had to sneak your way into the cookie jar, didn’t you? Get a taste of the goods? Share with the other children in the class? Oh, I understand. Don’t quiver. You were meant to spread the stuff far and wide before you’d ever come to me. And that’s exactly what you did, my love. To a tee. To the bone.”
I swelled with pride and then some.
But then, my trembling intensified to the point of squeezing the flask until it burst with a shattering pop! Blood and broken glass mingled with the remaining grains of purple time.
“Don’t move,” she commanded me. “I’ll be right down.”
She came right down. From the murky ceiling. The one place I hadn’t checked.
If I had, I might’ve screamed before ever getting turned on.
Look, there’s no beating around the peed-upon bush: this chick was a spider.
Big. Buxom. Juicy. Hairy. Primordial. Mythological. Boss. Queen.
From the ooze to the blues, she was fucking ginormous.
I was always a leg guy. She had eight.
And those eight legs descended upon my body, straddling it tight, wrapping it up in purple webbing.
Scary? Sure. But her face? The one you can see on the Show Fur logo? Gorgeous.
That’s what it’s all about, as she got in real close, tasting my palm caked in red blood and purple powder. A spider queen’s tongue licking my fingers down to their skeletal leftovers.
“Mmmmm, that’s scrumptious,” she said, smacking her chops, her arachnid limbs looping further up my body in gauzy purple. “As you know, when it comes to the stuff, the good stuff, the purple stuff, a little goes a long way!” She rasped a husky laugh that got me feverish, minus one hand. “Anyone you shared it with,” she said, “anyone who partook…is now out of their minds…out of their bodies. Soon they’ll be teaching everyone else they meet to do the same. Leave their minds. Move out of their bodies. Isn’t it exciting? A new life. The future fixed. To be the audience forevermore.” She cocooned my body, covering everything save for the head and hard-on. Finally, she asked me, “Any questions, my darling?”
“Are you by any chance,” I asked her, “a Soviet?”
You gotta keep the ladies laughing.
Well, it was love at first and last bite: with a snap of her jaws and a snip of her legs, my head and cock flew off. Decapitated and castrated, bleeding and coming myself to death, I’ve had worse first dates and I never had a better last one.
She then added my wrapped carcass to her cobwebbed collection on the ceiling.
Now, I get it: How am I telling you this, right? How can I be rappin’ if it’s a wrap? Dead men don’t tell tales, do they? Horse pucky. I’m dead and I just told you one. But see, the reason most dead men don’t tell tales is because they never had the pleasure and misfortune of getting mixed up with the pretty purple powder. There is no coming down from it. You’re forever untethered. Even after death. Whatever experiential P.O.V. I used to have was supposed to have blinked out with the rest of my lights. But not so. I went from a purchasing agent to a free agent. And as we all know, ‘free’ doesn’t mean freedom and freedom’s never free.
Still, a job’s a job, and I did it.
I’m taking a nice long float over the national landscape. Who needs Can-Do Airlines when you’re in this kind of state above the United States? I can go anywhere at any time. Hear anything I wish. See anything I want. Look through his eyes, her eyes, their eyes…
Your eyes. Yeah.
I like how the world looks through your eyes. Think I’ll just sit back and watch November ’63 as it plays out for you, for me, for the vision in between. Can’t miss a thing from next week’s episode. Wanna know where the action is? You gotta reach down and pull up every screaming rose in every bleeding garden.
While supplies last.
Let’s take a ride together. To see the big show. To go where the ticket is torn. To Dallas.
Alex Rogers is a satirical fiction writer whose words range from goofy to grotesque to unexpectedly grounded, often blending surreal speculation with comedic commentary. His stories have appeared in Santa Barbara Literary Journal, Starlite Pulp, Grub Street Online, Bizarro Circus of Madness, Foofaraw Press, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety. He lives in Los Angeles with his two cats, Merlin and Osha (the Tuxedo Twins).