It was one of those shapeless horrors. A mouth full of thickening eyeballs. Teeth growing out of the in and outside of its jaw. It shuffled or scuttled to move, pulling itself forwards on broken spider legs; hairy appendages like a squid going a nightmare of puberty.

It’s body was a slow-bursting pustule, forever leaking its strange liquids as it shed its skin and reformed itself from the inside out. It sweat guttural acids and it had sugary-sweet turpentine for blood. Imagine that, right? This thing’s heart beating some caustic fluid through melting veins.

It sees me and it screams. It wants to rip my guts out and splash around in what’s left of me as I drip away into the gutter. It wants to wipe its ass with my soul.

I curse myself for being a coward, for not being armed, for being anywhere near the lightless catacomb of a hotel room this thing’s been sleeping in. I wish I’d never come here, but wishing’s all but useless in scenarios like this one.

I take a deep breath, and remember the best parts of my life.

When it moves towards me, I feel shock take over.

Shock, and horror. 

I’m not lonely, I’m just where you’re not. 

I’m dealing broken hearted whores at the back of one of those seedy punk bars. The carpeting smells like spoiled bleach and the lies drunks have to tell each other when they really want to fuck.

I’m kind of a Kung Fu Master of fucking things up. I turn cigarettes into ash, magically, and I can transform an ordinary night into a few hours of regrets with barely a wink of an eye.

You’d love that, wouldn’t you? To have some regrets? Some sweet regrets like misspelled tattoos spiralling up your skin. You’ll never forget that girl you shouldn’t have kissed. You’ll always know that your last drink was the one that finished you off.

I’m charging two kisses and a night of deceptions for one full conversation over warm-beer and cold compassion.

I’m kind of lost in my own illusions of self.

We all came here for the same things. We fumble down laminated menus that’re splotchy with sexual fluids. Cum drips, and leaves streaks. The waitress leans in and tells us she’s wet like she really wants us to know about the weather outside.

We came here because we were hungry. Thirsty. Because we had needs we were looking to have filled. Yeah, warm empty slots of want that we needed stuffed full of knowledge and sweet sticky honey.

She goes down on me like I’m the last cigarette in the package. She savours my taste and exhales me around the room. She chokes and coughs, demurely, like a lady. Like a lady who lives on her knees.

I went out looking for something. I wanted to strike sparks. I wanted to drown in my own deliciousness, my own terrible ideas. 

The couple next door make love like spiders. They’re hideous little monsters full of poison and lackadaisical drives. They spend most of their days hiding in the dark, licking and petting at each other.

I just wanted to find myself. To free myself.
To go fuck myself.

“I have never been in this room before,” she lied to me. 

I said, “that’s cool,” and I took off my clothes. My bullet-proof underwear and the lock of hair I wore on a chain about my neck. A keepsake from a night with one of those fashionable young porn-stars who went to make it big with her own line of how-to snuff-films for up-and-coming serial-killers. 

The girl I’m with now, she’s not like that. She’s a nice girl, or at least that’s what you’d think from her underwear. Smooth cottony stuff. No obvious holes or signs of wear. 

I think I know her better than that, though. She picked me up three nights ago, like a cop picks up a body, and then turns it over to the morgue. She attracted me by being well-read, and obviously orally amicable. I think I said something like, “Hey baby, what’s your favourite planetary sign of life?”

She said something back like, “you’d look good with the barrel of a gun in your mouth.” 

We wanted to be movie script-writers, in Hollywoodland. Now we were just cheap whores, lending each other money to pay each other off. It was a love affair that would cost us our knees by the end of the night.

Yeah, you could do all sorts of entertaining things. You could light fires and stop traffic with a blink of your eyes and a shake of your hips. You could order drinks just by flashing your nipples at the bar. 

You’re my kind of girl, which is funny, because scientifically speaking they should’ve all gone extinct years ago. Too self-destructive. Sort of stupid, in an alarmingly sexy way. Noise goes in, music comes out. You’ve got a special sort of mind.

Me, I’m thirsty for Blood Flavoured Kool Aid and pepper-lime chicken wings. You know, messy, inconvenient stuff. You could understand that. You seem like it.

I went down to Seattle, and came back again.

It was a lovely trip. Seattle is the largest city I’ve ever been to, and it was beautiful. This was really my first real experience of being America, as well.

I guess what I really loved about Seattle, was all the Urban Decay. Everywhere there were run-down old buildings, and alleys softly crumbling into ruin. 

Of course, the best part about Seattle is that my girlfriend lives there. She lives in a little space in the International Village (the area that used to be Chinatown, until it filled up with every other ethnicity). We spent a lot of time just sitting around in bed, watching cartoons. 

It’s funny, but I was amazed at how many Black people there were. In Vancouver, we have very strong Asian communities, but our population of Black people is like, 2% of the total city. In Seattle it seemed closer to 40%, and for me, that was mind-blowing. You have to understand, I come from the smallest, whitest towns in the world. North-Western Canada, yo. So I’ve just never had the chance to see Black people, outside of TV. 

Seattle was clean and polite, the way us Canadians like our foreign cities. It’s the only place I’ve ever been to in America, but I think it’s somewhere I could enjoy living if that ever came to pass. Not that I have any plans to ever permanently leave Canada.

The worst part of the trip, the only bad part, was that I don’t travel well. I got nauseous, my stomach aches, and because I was travelling into the states, I had to travel without marijuana, which would’ve really helped with those other issues. 

I saw an incredible Manga store, and Pike Place Market was cool; Pike Place was full of all these unique little novelty stores. In Vancouver, the rents are too high to allow for businesses like that. There was a store that sold nothing but wind-up toys; they had a large display-table, and sign that said “Please do not race the toys.”

I sorta wish I’d spent more money on stuff; as it was, all I really brought back were four bags of Doritos, and some awesome memories. 

Okay, so it’s Mother’s Day.

I remember when we moved into the woods, I had to walk 2 miles through the woods to catch the school-bus, and 2 miles to get home again, and for the first year that we lived out there, my mom would walk with me, so I wouldn’t have to be alone. I was maybe eight or nine years old. 

To pass the time, we sat around one night, and wrote a big two-person comedy sketch. Then, every day, all the way along the walk, we’d rehears the sketch. We’d sing songs, and get the timing down just right on all our jokes.

Then, after a few months, my mom came all the way into the school with me, and we performed our little skit. It was maybe fifteen minutes long. All original material, plus some old vaudeville jokes, and a Smothers Brothers song. I don’t know if we were a big hit at Horsefly Elementary, but we certainly had fun.

I know a lot of things about my mom. I know her finger got broken by a guy she loved. He’s gone, but the finger’s still broken. I know her family name, and that she was born in Germany. 

I know that every year she seems to get smaller and smaller; I suspect that by the time I’m fifty, she’ll be about the size of a mouse, and will probably live in a pretty little shoebox somewhere. 

Mostly I remember my mom, a hard-working earthen sort, rolling her eyes and saying “Mother’s day is such a load of bullshit.” She was a cynic, with a cold-heart for the affairs of capitalist empires. She believed in art, and the earth, and not much else.

She’s a good lady, my ma. Well, maybe not good, but she’s certainly awful interesting, and usually a lot of fun. 

I don’t know who left all that high-powered jet-engine equipment where the wild squid could get at it. Who could say, maybe it was you. Probably it was somebody from Eastern Canada; those people have always been in league with the dark-beings of the sea, if you’ll forgive the figure of speech.

Best estimates would suggest that it took the squid about three weeks to figure out what they were doing. Three weeks of deep-ocean test-flights. Our only evidence was the bits of smouldering whale carcass that’d come floating to the surface.

And then, once they figured out what they were doing, they got gone. No mucking about, no jokes, no rumours or innuendo. They just shoved those engines up into themselves, and then, no kidding man, they were gone. Like permanently. Like off, into outer-space, and I don’t know, maybe beyond.

All they left us was a big mess of half-eaten fish, and a note.

“Yo, fools,” said the note. “We out.”

…………………………………………………………..

I wrote this for a thing at i09; I know the pic is about octopi, but I love writing about squid.