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rainbowfic2015-03-10 12:08 am
starphotographs) wrote in rainbowfic2015-03-10 12:08 am
Clean Again 6, Admin Yellow 9
Name: starphotographs
Story: Universe B (still has no tag, I don’t care but don’t want to get in trouble.)
Characters: “Scissors” (POV), Frankie
Colors: Clean Again 6 (Damage Detox), Admin Yellow 9 (Oh dear. Look at it. It’s squishy.)
Word Count: 3725
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: When Frankie tells you that you need to see something, it can be a crapshoot. Just pray it isn’t a literal one.
Note: A story from the Earth side of the universe depicted in “Sleep Standing Up.” Questions, comments, concrit, and inquiries in to what the fuck is wrong with me all very welcome.
That Which Must Be Seen to Be Believed
“Skizzy, dude, you have to come look at this.”
As soon as I jerked awake, fumbled around for my glasses, picked up my phone, squinted at the blinding screen, and saw, through my burned-out eye sockets, that it was Frankie, I got all puffed-up and ready to finally use my “call 911 and not me, for fuck’s sake” speech. I’d been preparing it in my head ever since last month, when he coughed up and promptly aspirated one of those gross-ass things and had to go to the hospital. I was mostly asleep, and pretty sure I was still drooling, and more than a little bit pissed off, and god help me, I was ready. But, luckily for him and unluckily for me, his tone of voice indicated that this wasn’t a “dramatic medical emergency” kind of call.
“The hell, man? It’s like four in the morning.”
Frankie was undeterred. He sleeps at random intervals throughout the day, so “four in the morning” doesn’t have much meaning to him beyond literal fact. For all I knew, it was more like ten AM, or six PM, or midnight in his world. He might be sitting down to breakfast, getting ready for a walk around the block, or pulling on his pajamas as we speak. You just never know with him.
“Like, seriously, you need to see this.”
“See what, Frankie?”
“You have to see it! Get the heck over here!”
Fair enough. By now, I was wide awake anyway, and in all honesty, heading over there was a risk I was willing to take. Two out of three times, when Frankie calls you at the ass crack of dawn so you can look at something, it’s a bronchial cast. The third time? It’s actually something really cool. Like when there was a huge, perfectly-formed web, housing a spider the size of a gummy bear on stilts, in his attic. Which isn’t so much an attic as a triangular crawlspace that serves little purpose beyond making the roof look pointy and stereotypical, but either way, he keeps shit up there, and there was a spider, so a spider in the attic it was, and we spent a good hour flicking dust bunnies at the web and watching Mr. Spider chase after them, utterly mesmerized.
Better still, there was the time when he called me to look at a bunch of cracks and potholes in the blacktop behind a supermarket because they looked like a smiley face. This was actually so interesting that I didn’t even question why Frankie was wandering around a parking lot in the pre-dawn hours, and we sat on the roof of my van and stared at the thing until sunup, eating curly fries and milkshakes from the all-night fast food place across the lot and listening to the late broadcast of our favorite radio program, getting into a heated argument about something a caller said and whether it was possible. We also got into an argument about the disgusting practice of dipping fries in a milkshake, but Frankie defended himself to no end, on the grounds that it was something that he’d picked up from Satchel, and thus was beyond reproach. Aside from that, it was a great time. And so was the spider, and so were those loud guys in party hats playing midnight basketball and setting off illegal fireworks at the end of Frankie’s block, so whatever this was, it was probably worth checking out. If it wasn’t, I could tell him he was acting like an idiot and go home. I staggered around for a dirty shirt, a pair of sweats, my coat, and my keys, then left the house dressed like a hobo in the middle of the night. As one does. (Well, as I do, anyway.)
*****
Since he hadn’t given a location, I assumed him and whatever I was going to look at were at his house, but there wasn’t a single light in any window, so I started to wonder if he’d just forgotten to tell me where to go. Because that‘s been known to happen. Once, before all the shit with his lungs started up, I got as far as the porch, knocked on the door five times, then ended up having to call him back to ask him where the hell he was. Turns out, he was two miles away at the library, leaning against the back of the building, bicycle locked to a sign, sipping on a cup of gas station coffee and staring up at a pair of shoes slung around a powerline. Which doesn’t sound too exciting in and of itself, but these weren’t the same old sneakers you usually see in this position, like the ones I tossed up in the air myself while I was wandering the country as a teenager. (Kind of a stupid decision on my part, since they were the only shoes to my name, but this did give me a reason to make my first pair of duct-shoes.) No, these weren’t sneakers. These were an impressive pair of what could only be described as advanced-level drag queen boots, five inches tall and made out of some kind of sparkly pink plastic. The two of us stood there in wonder for god knows how long, gazing up at those huge shoes, swinging and twinkling in the winter night air. But, it wasn’t like Frankie could go quite that far afield on his own anymore, so I assumed that whatever oddity I’d come here to see was in the house, and may or may not have required darkness for some reason. Which was kind of an unsettling thought, really.
Also unsettling was the idea of entering Frankie’s house in the pitch dark. That place is enough of a sketchy maze of weird crap in broad daylight. And when the sun goes down and the lights turn off? It becomes impossible to navigate without the constant worry that you’re about to capsize some kind of bizarre, vitally important artifact that had been sitting just so in its place since the beginning of time. Or, you know, since Frankie came home and plopped it there. With that in mind, I cracked the door open and stepped inside the loathsome cave, feeling my way along with my right foot. If I tried to proceed in a quicker, easier, slightly less moronic fashion, I might step on a goddamn copper pipe. If I step on a copper fucking pipe, it’ll roll right the fuck out from under me, and I’ll break my fucking butt. Which is something that actually happened, to me, twice. Frankie’s favorite hobby is making these fucked-up little druid circles out of pipes and cement and some kind of nugget that looks like a hideous paperweight your great uncle would make in a resin casting class, then force the whole family to disingenuously ooh and ahh over it at every family gathering until his wife throws it out or he dies.
…Well, anyway, Frankie takes the unsightly nugget, and all those pipes and shit, and builds one of those stupid things and leaves it sitting in the middle of the living room until the cement dries. Then he digs a hole in his backyard and shoves the whole mess in like a fencepost. Frankie can’t really breathe properly, so this is something of an event and takes all afternoon, him panting and wheezing and pitching dirt, with a few jars and some alcohol solution on standby in case he actually manages to hoark something up. Now, why someone would go through all this trouble just to erect a bunch of those ugly motherfuckers in their yard, I do not know, but apparently they act like some kind of bug candle for chemtrails. I’ve always been tempted to ask him why, with so many of these structures standing around, he still feels like he has to stand on the sidewalk and shoot at every passing contrail with a spray bottle full of vinegar, but that would mean attempting to reason with someone who thinks this is a viable lifestyle choice in the first place, and that would be just a little out of my depth.
Either way, the lack of pipes indicates that he isn’t making one now, so if I do decide take it up with him, it can wait. In the meantime, I just had to find the little asshole in the first place.
“Frankie? Are you like, in your house?”
No answer.
“…Frankie, god damn it! Did you forget to tell me where you were again?”
No answer this time, either. I was just about to take out my phone and ask him where on god’s big bouncing blue ball he was, when I finally heard a small, somewhat distracted voice from upstairs.
“…What? Oh. Yeah. Hi! Come on up.”
Oh, great. Somehow, I took whatever he wanted me to look at being upstairs as a bad sign. And that’s without even taking account of the stairs themselves. Frankie’s creepy little townhouse was designed and built by a shining assortment of morons. Or at least that’s what I always assumed, because, among other problems, the stairs don’t have a railing and are thus a bit of a deathtrap. Which would probably be manageable on its own, but Frankie likes using the ends of the steps as yet another place to sit weird shit he drags out of the neighbors’ trash.
An assortment of things I tried not to knock over on the way up:
A foam wig head, wearing a pair of flamboyant sunglasses Frankie bought at some bizarre year-round Halloween store we found while driving around in the boonies for no reason.
A plastic skull, wearing a fez of unknown origin.
A dusty dead blowfish that would shatter in to a thousand pieces if you looked at it funny.
A bronchial cast floating in a pickle jar.
A smaller bronchial cast, this one in a peanut butter jar.
An old space heater.
An economy-sized cinnamon candle, a leftover relic from the month when the aforementioned space heater was exuding a rank stench.
…Okay, I probably didn’t have to worry much about that last thing. It was glued to the carpeted stairs with so much wax that it had started dripping down the wall. In fact, I gave it a little nudge with my shoe, just to test it, but it stayed stuck, dusty and smug on its perch.
“…You coming?”
I sneered at the candle, because its immobility almost seemed personal, somehow. If you asked me, I’d say it deserved to be kicked down the stairs for its very obstinacy.
“Yeah. Um, sure, Franks.”
Reminding myself to stop feeling spite towards inanimate objects, I looked down the cramped, narrow hallway, until I saw a weak light from an open door. It was the fucking bathroom. So I told myself to just be brave. If I’d made it up a flight of carpeted stairs, with no handrails, in the dark, I figured I could handle whatever was behind that door. Even if it was in the bathroom.
“…So I should just, uh, come in?”
“Door’s open, dude!”
I popped my head inside, just to make sure Frankie was decent in there.
He was. Well, mostly. Sure, he had a bathrobe on with no shirt underneath it, which is a pretty repulsive thing to do in any situation, but at least he‘d thought to put on some pants. I noticed he also had a flashlight, the cold glow of the LEDs gleaming off the metal frames of his glasses and backlighting the hair around his face, creating at sort of dirty halo.
“Hey, you’re here! Man, check this out.”
I didn’t know what he was going to do next, but for some reason, I didn’t expect him to aim the flashlight into the toilet bowl. That, of course, was exactly what he did, and really, I can‘t say I was exactly surprised. Resigned to my fate, I peered straight down into the illuminated shitter.
Right off the bat, I didn’t know what, in the what, I was looking at. All I can say is that it looked for all the world like the most intentionally disgusting depiction of a filthy cartoon toilet I‘d ever laid eyes on. Only just that much worse for not actually staying in a cartoon, where it belonged. The water was a swampy brown, which seemed to be arranged in some kind of horrible gradient, from nearly clear at the top to so dark and murky at the bottom that the flush hole was invisible. But what I really didn’t understand were the translucent green orbs of varying sizes that drifted to and fro on the surface of the water. I squinted. They bobbed around listlessly. And I still, for the life of me, could not figure out what the fuck they were.
“…Okay Franks, that’s… Gross. Why the hell did you think I’d want to see this?”
“Because… Just look at it! I’ve never seen anything like this in my life!”
“Yeah… I guess haven’t, either. So like, did your pipes break or something? Should we call the landlord?”
“…Nah, man! All that? Came out of me.”
Not knowing what to say, I looked him up and down. Frankie didn’t look like he could have even half the gut-space required to produce something like this, but I‘ve certainly seen stranger things drop out of his orifices, so I took him at his word. My first thought was that I wanted to deck him for dragging me out of a sound sleep to come look at a bowel movement. My second thought was that I wasn’t sure if that was even what it was, because I couldn‘t quite match anything that looked like this with a corresponding human orifice. My third thought, and I was pretty astonished I could even manage a third, was that I should probably call an ambulance. Frankie is sick all the time as it stands, and in that context, whatever the heck I was seeing in that hellish toilet probably wasn‘t a good sign.
“Er… Which end?”
Frankie was as serious as I’d ever seen him.
“Back end.”
If nothing else, he looked pretty damn proud of what he’d just made in there.
“Are you… Um… Alright? And everything?”
“Oh yeah. Never better. I mean, look at everything I just got out of me!”
I glanced back at the toilet. It looked like diarrhea and ectoplasm.
“…You took a dump, Frankie. What, is this your first time or something?”
“I didn’t… Well, okay, yeah, I took a dump. But it’s not, like, a regular dump.”
Again, I looked in to the dark bog of the toilet, those weird green ovals still floating around.
“…You got me there, Franks.”
“Yeah, see!? What you do is like, drink a bunch of apple juice and Epsom salt all day, and…”
Now, I could smell bullshit, to say nothing of wildly abnormal human shit, a mile away. I spent my adolescence subsisting on almost nothing but fake fruit punch, jam sandwiches, and cherries straight from the jar, so if a steady diet of fire engine red sugar didn’t have any amusing aftereffects, I’m not really sure what would.
“I’m… Not seeing the connection between that and what I’m looking at here.”
The other reason for my being a bit skeptical of this explanation is that Frankie has a history with tracing dangerous medical symptoms back to the wrong source and then assuming he can deal with them himself.
“…Let me finish! Anyway, then when it’s time to go to bed, you drink like two cups of olive oil and a bunch of lemon juice, and then you, like, lie still so your organs can relax.”
Okay, now things were starting to make sense, but admittedly, I had a few questions.
“…I don’t think lying down works like that. I don’t think organs work like that.”
“Well, they obviously do, because look at the freakin’ toilet! But yeah, it’s supposed to clean out your liver and gallbladder and shit.”
“Frankie, you don’t have a gallbladder.”
“…Well, I have a liver! And either way, it must have worked.”
“You took a crap. Something tells me that was coming either way.”
“Maybe, but look at all those gallstones.”
I squinted at the toilet until I remembered what I was looking at and couldn’t stand it anymore. I saw nothing that looked like a gallstone. I did, however, see a glassy-eyed oatmeal-brained dimwit who was fully convinced that he’d just done something physically impossible, which, though some mysterious process, fixed something that not only wasn’t broken, but wasn’t there in the first place. I might have lost my cool.
“…You don’t even have a gallbladder! Why the hell would you have gallstones? How would you even get them? And what, pray tell, in this toilet, gives you the idea you shat out a fuckin’ gallstone!?”
Frankie let me finish shouting in his face and gesticulating at the toilet bowl before speaking up.
“…Well, what do you think all those little green things are?”
“I think they’re what happens when a guy who doesn’t own a gallbladder chugs a pint of grease before bed! Jesus, you have that jam jar with all your old gallstones in it, go dig it out of the closet and compare.”
I wasn’t even sure if he heard me, let alone parsed anything I’d just said.
“…I was told they might look like this, though.”
Frankie gets “told” a lot of things, and he takes all of them as absolute fact. Then it’s up to someone else, usually me, to deal with the fallout and set him straight. I took a deep breath.
“…Alright, who the heck told you that?”
“Gail.”
Of course it was. Gail lives in Frankie’s neighborhood, across the street and a little ways down. She lets him smoke on the porch with her even after being told a thousand times by at least two different people that Frankie has plastic bronchitis and probably shouldn’t even open the oven door on a burnt pizza. She’s the kind of person who thinks dolphins are aliens, chakras are real, rocks are magic, and you can record shit in a bottle of ice. And when Frankie does something potentially dangerous as opposed to just stupid, there’s a fifty percent chance that he got it from her. Case in point, she once dragged him off to some sketchy meditation retreat, the kind where idiots walk on hot coals and glass and marvel at how they only got a little bit maimed. Except Frankie is as unlucky as he is uncoordinated, so what ended up happening is he got cut up pretty bad, which ruined everyone else’s good mood and suspension of disbelief.
…And, oh man, when Satchel found out about that? He was furious. He actually attempted to sue the crooked enlightenment peddlers over the whole thing. They had a good case, too, and probably would have won, but here’s what you need to know about Satchel: if you want legal advice, he’s your man. If you want a document released, or want to benefit from some kind of government program, take him down to the office with you and watch him open doors you didn’t even know existed. But never, under any circumstances, ever actually bring him to court with you. The whole thing fell apart when Satchel spied the gold fringe around the flag and started ranting about maritime law and speaking in some kind of bizarre nautical gibberish. From that point on, it was no longer about the actual case. It was now about Satchel proving some kind of theory he had about the entire institution, and so it remained right up until the judge banged his little crab mallet five times and told him to sit down and shut up, lest he be held in contempt of court. And thus ended Lennox v. Zenpowerment, the court finding in favor of the defendant on the grounds that the plaintiffs were fucking bozos. And since I was the one who took the pictures of Frankie’s fucked-up feet, I had to watch the whole thing. As did a bunch of innocent people who probably wished they’d never registered to vote. It was kind of an embarrassing mess for all involved.
Not like either of them even gave a turd. Frankie in particular was very “oh well, you’ll get ‘em next time” about it, like he didn’t even realize that his dumbass crackpot brother just cheated him out of several thousand dollars by deciding to proceed from the assumption that the courtroom was some kind of demented boat, governed by crazy boat laws. Point is, if Gail was involved in any way, it can’t be good.
“…Jesus, didn’t I tell you not to listen to Gail?”
“Yeah, well, I was feeling kind of not great, and this was supposed to help.”
“Frankie… If you’re not feeling well, you should talk to, like, some kind of medical person. Or even just me so I can tell Calvin and he can look at you. Or, I don‘t know, just take a nap or something?”
“Hey, I just figured it wouldn’t hurt to try.”
I looked back at the toilet one last time, trying to figure out how long it would take to produce something like that.
“…Well, did it hurt to try? Are you, like, alright?”
“Eh, sure. I kinda felt pretty barfy through the whole process, but it’s, yeah, you know, out of my system by now.”
I tried, and failed, to avert my eyes, and wondered if it would be in bad form to reach over and close the toilet lid so my brain would stop going back to those godforsaken oil blobs.
“I… Can see that, yeah.”
Frankie, on the other hand, seemed perfectly capable of unseeing it and getting on with life.
“Hey, I told you I had something you needed to see! …Anyway, you hungry? I’ve got some like, cans of raviolis downstairs.”
For some reason, I felt like I probably wouldn’t be hungry for a good month.
“…I think I’ll pass.”
Frankie gave a shrug, and then, in the most manner-of-fact way possible, reached out and flushed the toilet.
starphotographsStory: Universe B (still has no tag, I don’t care but don’t want to get in trouble.)
Characters: “Scissors” (POV), Frankie
Colors: Clean Again 6 (Damage Detox), Admin Yellow 9 (Oh dear. Look at it. It’s squishy.)
Word Count: 3725
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Choose not to warn.
Summary: When Frankie tells you that you need to see something, it can be a crapshoot. Just pray it isn’t a literal one.
Note: A story from the Earth side of the universe depicted in “Sleep Standing Up.” Questions, comments, concrit, and inquiries in to what the fuck is wrong with me all very welcome.
“Skizzy, dude, you have to come look at this.”
As soon as I jerked awake, fumbled around for my glasses, picked up my phone, squinted at the blinding screen, and saw, through my burned-out eye sockets, that it was Frankie, I got all puffed-up and ready to finally use my “call 911 and not me, for fuck’s sake” speech. I’d been preparing it in my head ever since last month, when he coughed up and promptly aspirated one of those gross-ass things and had to go to the hospital. I was mostly asleep, and pretty sure I was still drooling, and more than a little bit pissed off, and god help me, I was ready. But, luckily for him and unluckily for me, his tone of voice indicated that this wasn’t a “dramatic medical emergency” kind of call.
“The hell, man? It’s like four in the morning.”
Frankie was undeterred. He sleeps at random intervals throughout the day, so “four in the morning” doesn’t have much meaning to him beyond literal fact. For all I knew, it was more like ten AM, or six PM, or midnight in his world. He might be sitting down to breakfast, getting ready for a walk around the block, or pulling on his pajamas as we speak. You just never know with him.
“Like, seriously, you need to see this.”
“See what, Frankie?”
“You have to see it! Get the heck over here!”
Fair enough. By now, I was wide awake anyway, and in all honesty, heading over there was a risk I was willing to take. Two out of three times, when Frankie calls you at the ass crack of dawn so you can look at something, it’s a bronchial cast. The third time? It’s actually something really cool. Like when there was a huge, perfectly-formed web, housing a spider the size of a gummy bear on stilts, in his attic. Which isn’t so much an attic as a triangular crawlspace that serves little purpose beyond making the roof look pointy and stereotypical, but either way, he keeps shit up there, and there was a spider, so a spider in the attic it was, and we spent a good hour flicking dust bunnies at the web and watching Mr. Spider chase after them, utterly mesmerized.
Better still, there was the time when he called me to look at a bunch of cracks and potholes in the blacktop behind a supermarket because they looked like a smiley face. This was actually so interesting that I didn’t even question why Frankie was wandering around a parking lot in the pre-dawn hours, and we sat on the roof of my van and stared at the thing until sunup, eating curly fries and milkshakes from the all-night fast food place across the lot and listening to the late broadcast of our favorite radio program, getting into a heated argument about something a caller said and whether it was possible. We also got into an argument about the disgusting practice of dipping fries in a milkshake, but Frankie defended himself to no end, on the grounds that it was something that he’d picked up from Satchel, and thus was beyond reproach. Aside from that, it was a great time. And so was the spider, and so were those loud guys in party hats playing midnight basketball and setting off illegal fireworks at the end of Frankie’s block, so whatever this was, it was probably worth checking out. If it wasn’t, I could tell him he was acting like an idiot and go home. I staggered around for a dirty shirt, a pair of sweats, my coat, and my keys, then left the house dressed like a hobo in the middle of the night. As one does. (Well, as I do, anyway.)
Since he hadn’t given a location, I assumed him and whatever I was going to look at were at his house, but there wasn’t a single light in any window, so I started to wonder if he’d just forgotten to tell me where to go. Because that‘s been known to happen. Once, before all the shit with his lungs started up, I got as far as the porch, knocked on the door five times, then ended up having to call him back to ask him where the hell he was. Turns out, he was two miles away at the library, leaning against the back of the building, bicycle locked to a sign, sipping on a cup of gas station coffee and staring up at a pair of shoes slung around a powerline. Which doesn’t sound too exciting in and of itself, but these weren’t the same old sneakers you usually see in this position, like the ones I tossed up in the air myself while I was wandering the country as a teenager. (Kind of a stupid decision on my part, since they were the only shoes to my name, but this did give me a reason to make my first pair of duct-shoes.) No, these weren’t sneakers. These were an impressive pair of what could only be described as advanced-level drag queen boots, five inches tall and made out of some kind of sparkly pink plastic. The two of us stood there in wonder for god knows how long, gazing up at those huge shoes, swinging and twinkling in the winter night air. But, it wasn’t like Frankie could go quite that far afield on his own anymore, so I assumed that whatever oddity I’d come here to see was in the house, and may or may not have required darkness for some reason. Which was kind of an unsettling thought, really.
Also unsettling was the idea of entering Frankie’s house in the pitch dark. That place is enough of a sketchy maze of weird crap in broad daylight. And when the sun goes down and the lights turn off? It becomes impossible to navigate without the constant worry that you’re about to capsize some kind of bizarre, vitally important artifact that had been sitting just so in its place since the beginning of time. Or, you know, since Frankie came home and plopped it there. With that in mind, I cracked the door open and stepped inside the loathsome cave, feeling my way along with my right foot. If I tried to proceed in a quicker, easier, slightly less moronic fashion, I might step on a goddamn copper pipe. If I step on a copper fucking pipe, it’ll roll right the fuck out from under me, and I’ll break my fucking butt. Which is something that actually happened, to me, twice. Frankie’s favorite hobby is making these fucked-up little druid circles out of pipes and cement and some kind of nugget that looks like a hideous paperweight your great uncle would make in a resin casting class, then force the whole family to disingenuously ooh and ahh over it at every family gathering until his wife throws it out or he dies.
…Well, anyway, Frankie takes the unsightly nugget, and all those pipes and shit, and builds one of those stupid things and leaves it sitting in the middle of the living room until the cement dries. Then he digs a hole in his backyard and shoves the whole mess in like a fencepost. Frankie can’t really breathe properly, so this is something of an event and takes all afternoon, him panting and wheezing and pitching dirt, with a few jars and some alcohol solution on standby in case he actually manages to hoark something up. Now, why someone would go through all this trouble just to erect a bunch of those ugly motherfuckers in their yard, I do not know, but apparently they act like some kind of bug candle for chemtrails. I’ve always been tempted to ask him why, with so many of these structures standing around, he still feels like he has to stand on the sidewalk and shoot at every passing contrail with a spray bottle full of vinegar, but that would mean attempting to reason with someone who thinks this is a viable lifestyle choice in the first place, and that would be just a little out of my depth.
Either way, the lack of pipes indicates that he isn’t making one now, so if I do decide take it up with him, it can wait. In the meantime, I just had to find the little asshole in the first place.
“Frankie? Are you like, in your house?”
No answer.
“…Frankie, god damn it! Did you forget to tell me where you were again?”
No answer this time, either. I was just about to take out my phone and ask him where on god’s big bouncing blue ball he was, when I finally heard a small, somewhat distracted voice from upstairs.
“…What? Oh. Yeah. Hi! Come on up.”
Oh, great. Somehow, I took whatever he wanted me to look at being upstairs as a bad sign. And that’s without even taking account of the stairs themselves. Frankie’s creepy little townhouse was designed and built by a shining assortment of morons. Or at least that’s what I always assumed, because, among other problems, the stairs don’t have a railing and are thus a bit of a deathtrap. Which would probably be manageable on its own, but Frankie likes using the ends of the steps as yet another place to sit weird shit he drags out of the neighbors’ trash.
An assortment of things I tried not to knock over on the way up:
A foam wig head, wearing a pair of flamboyant sunglasses Frankie bought at some bizarre year-round Halloween store we found while driving around in the boonies for no reason.
A plastic skull, wearing a fez of unknown origin.
A dusty dead blowfish that would shatter in to a thousand pieces if you looked at it funny.
A bronchial cast floating in a pickle jar.
A smaller bronchial cast, this one in a peanut butter jar.
An old space heater.
An economy-sized cinnamon candle, a leftover relic from the month when the aforementioned space heater was exuding a rank stench.
…Okay, I probably didn’t have to worry much about that last thing. It was glued to the carpeted stairs with so much wax that it had started dripping down the wall. In fact, I gave it a little nudge with my shoe, just to test it, but it stayed stuck, dusty and smug on its perch.
“…You coming?”
I sneered at the candle, because its immobility almost seemed personal, somehow. If you asked me, I’d say it deserved to be kicked down the stairs for its very obstinacy.
“Yeah. Um, sure, Franks.”
Reminding myself to stop feeling spite towards inanimate objects, I looked down the cramped, narrow hallway, until I saw a weak light from an open door. It was the fucking bathroom. So I told myself to just be brave. If I’d made it up a flight of carpeted stairs, with no handrails, in the dark, I figured I could handle whatever was behind that door. Even if it was in the bathroom.
“…So I should just, uh, come in?”
“Door’s open, dude!”
I popped my head inside, just to make sure Frankie was decent in there.
He was. Well, mostly. Sure, he had a bathrobe on with no shirt underneath it, which is a pretty repulsive thing to do in any situation, but at least he‘d thought to put on some pants. I noticed he also had a flashlight, the cold glow of the LEDs gleaming off the metal frames of his glasses and backlighting the hair around his face, creating at sort of dirty halo.
“Hey, you’re here! Man, check this out.”
I didn’t know what he was going to do next, but for some reason, I didn’t expect him to aim the flashlight into the toilet bowl. That, of course, was exactly what he did, and really, I can‘t say I was exactly surprised. Resigned to my fate, I peered straight down into the illuminated shitter.
Right off the bat, I didn’t know what, in the what, I was looking at. All I can say is that it looked for all the world like the most intentionally disgusting depiction of a filthy cartoon toilet I‘d ever laid eyes on. Only just that much worse for not actually staying in a cartoon, where it belonged. The water was a swampy brown, which seemed to be arranged in some kind of horrible gradient, from nearly clear at the top to so dark and murky at the bottom that the flush hole was invisible. But what I really didn’t understand were the translucent green orbs of varying sizes that drifted to and fro on the surface of the water. I squinted. They bobbed around listlessly. And I still, for the life of me, could not figure out what the fuck they were.
“…Okay Franks, that’s… Gross. Why the hell did you think I’d want to see this?”
“Because… Just look at it! I’ve never seen anything like this in my life!”
“Yeah… I guess haven’t, either. So like, did your pipes break or something? Should we call the landlord?”
“…Nah, man! All that? Came out of me.”
Not knowing what to say, I looked him up and down. Frankie didn’t look like he could have even half the gut-space required to produce something like this, but I‘ve certainly seen stranger things drop out of his orifices, so I took him at his word. My first thought was that I wanted to deck him for dragging me out of a sound sleep to come look at a bowel movement. My second thought was that I wasn’t sure if that was even what it was, because I couldn‘t quite match anything that looked like this with a corresponding human orifice. My third thought, and I was pretty astonished I could even manage a third, was that I should probably call an ambulance. Frankie is sick all the time as it stands, and in that context, whatever the heck I was seeing in that hellish toilet probably wasn‘t a good sign.
“Er… Which end?”
Frankie was as serious as I’d ever seen him.
“Back end.”
If nothing else, he looked pretty damn proud of what he’d just made in there.
“Are you… Um… Alright? And everything?”
“Oh yeah. Never better. I mean, look at everything I just got out of me!”
I glanced back at the toilet. It looked like diarrhea and ectoplasm.
“…You took a dump, Frankie. What, is this your first time or something?”
“I didn’t… Well, okay, yeah, I took a dump. But it’s not, like, a regular dump.”
Again, I looked in to the dark bog of the toilet, those weird green ovals still floating around.
“…You got me there, Franks.”
“Yeah, see!? What you do is like, drink a bunch of apple juice and Epsom salt all day, and…”
Now, I could smell bullshit, to say nothing of wildly abnormal human shit, a mile away. I spent my adolescence subsisting on almost nothing but fake fruit punch, jam sandwiches, and cherries straight from the jar, so if a steady diet of fire engine red sugar didn’t have any amusing aftereffects, I’m not really sure what would.
“I’m… Not seeing the connection between that and what I’m looking at here.”
The other reason for my being a bit skeptical of this explanation is that Frankie has a history with tracing dangerous medical symptoms back to the wrong source and then assuming he can deal with them himself.
“…Let me finish! Anyway, then when it’s time to go to bed, you drink like two cups of olive oil and a bunch of lemon juice, and then you, like, lie still so your organs can relax.”
Okay, now things were starting to make sense, but admittedly, I had a few questions.
“…I don’t think lying down works like that. I don’t think organs work like that.”
“Well, they obviously do, because look at the freakin’ toilet! But yeah, it’s supposed to clean out your liver and gallbladder and shit.”
“Frankie, you don’t have a gallbladder.”
“…Well, I have a liver! And either way, it must have worked.”
“You took a crap. Something tells me that was coming either way.”
“Maybe, but look at all those gallstones.”
I squinted at the toilet until I remembered what I was looking at and couldn’t stand it anymore. I saw nothing that looked like a gallstone. I did, however, see a glassy-eyed oatmeal-brained dimwit who was fully convinced that he’d just done something physically impossible, which, though some mysterious process, fixed something that not only wasn’t broken, but wasn’t there in the first place. I might have lost my cool.
“…You don’t even have a gallbladder! Why the hell would you have gallstones? How would you even get them? And what, pray tell, in this toilet, gives you the idea you shat out a fuckin’ gallstone!?”
Frankie let me finish shouting in his face and gesticulating at the toilet bowl before speaking up.
“…Well, what do you think all those little green things are?”
“I think they’re what happens when a guy who doesn’t own a gallbladder chugs a pint of grease before bed! Jesus, you have that jam jar with all your old gallstones in it, go dig it out of the closet and compare.”
I wasn’t even sure if he heard me, let alone parsed anything I’d just said.
“…I was told they might look like this, though.”
Frankie gets “told” a lot of things, and he takes all of them as absolute fact. Then it’s up to someone else, usually me, to deal with the fallout and set him straight. I took a deep breath.
“…Alright, who the heck told you that?”
“Gail.”
Of course it was. Gail lives in Frankie’s neighborhood, across the street and a little ways down. She lets him smoke on the porch with her even after being told a thousand times by at least two different people that Frankie has plastic bronchitis and probably shouldn’t even open the oven door on a burnt pizza. She’s the kind of person who thinks dolphins are aliens, chakras are real, rocks are magic, and you can record shit in a bottle of ice. And when Frankie does something potentially dangerous as opposed to just stupid, there’s a fifty percent chance that he got it from her. Case in point, she once dragged him off to some sketchy meditation retreat, the kind where idiots walk on hot coals and glass and marvel at how they only got a little bit maimed. Except Frankie is as unlucky as he is uncoordinated, so what ended up happening is he got cut up pretty bad, which ruined everyone else’s good mood and suspension of disbelief.
…And, oh man, when Satchel found out about that? He was furious. He actually attempted to sue the crooked enlightenment peddlers over the whole thing. They had a good case, too, and probably would have won, but here’s what you need to know about Satchel: if you want legal advice, he’s your man. If you want a document released, or want to benefit from some kind of government program, take him down to the office with you and watch him open doors you didn’t even know existed. But never, under any circumstances, ever actually bring him to court with you. The whole thing fell apart when Satchel spied the gold fringe around the flag and started ranting about maritime law and speaking in some kind of bizarre nautical gibberish. From that point on, it was no longer about the actual case. It was now about Satchel proving some kind of theory he had about the entire institution, and so it remained right up until the judge banged his little crab mallet five times and told him to sit down and shut up, lest he be held in contempt of court. And thus ended Lennox v. Zenpowerment, the court finding in favor of the defendant on the grounds that the plaintiffs were fucking bozos. And since I was the one who took the pictures of Frankie’s fucked-up feet, I had to watch the whole thing. As did a bunch of innocent people who probably wished they’d never registered to vote. It was kind of an embarrassing mess for all involved.
Not like either of them even gave a turd. Frankie in particular was very “oh well, you’ll get ‘em next time” about it, like he didn’t even realize that his dumbass crackpot brother just cheated him out of several thousand dollars by deciding to proceed from the assumption that the courtroom was some kind of demented boat, governed by crazy boat laws. Point is, if Gail was involved in any way, it can’t be good.
“…Jesus, didn’t I tell you not to listen to Gail?”
“Yeah, well, I was feeling kind of not great, and this was supposed to help.”
“Frankie… If you’re not feeling well, you should talk to, like, some kind of medical person. Or even just me so I can tell Calvin and he can look at you. Or, I don‘t know, just take a nap or something?”
“Hey, I just figured it wouldn’t hurt to try.”
I looked back at the toilet one last time, trying to figure out how long it would take to produce something like that.
“…Well, did it hurt to try? Are you, like, alright?”
“Eh, sure. I kinda felt pretty barfy through the whole process, but it’s, yeah, you know, out of my system by now.”
I tried, and failed, to avert my eyes, and wondered if it would be in bad form to reach over and close the toilet lid so my brain would stop going back to those godforsaken oil blobs.
“I… Can see that, yeah.”
Frankie, on the other hand, seemed perfectly capable of unseeing it and getting on with life.
“Hey, I told you I had something you needed to see! …Anyway, you hungry? I’ve got some like, cans of raviolis downstairs.”
For some reason, I felt like I probably wouldn’t be hungry for a good month.
“…I think I’ll pass.”
Frankie gave a shrug, and then, in the most manner-of-fact way possible, reached out and flushed the toilet.
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FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF... yes XD.
" got into an argument about the disgusting practice of dipping fries in a milkshake, but Frankie defended himself to no end, on the grounds that it was something that he’d picked up from Satchel, and thus was beyond reproach."
HEARTGASM
"Also unsettling... ect ect"
I had to stop and laugh at that whole paragraph for a good, longass time XD.
"at least he‘d thought to put on some pants"
ROFLMAO
HOLY SHIT- pun intended -YOU ACTUALLY WROTE IT. You just. YOU DID IT.
"probably shouldn’t even open the oven door on a burnt pizza. "
XDDDD
" judge banged his little crab mallet five times and told him to sit down and shut up, lest he be held in contempt of court. And thus ended Lennox v. Zenpowerment" AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I LOVE IT
I love everything and you are awesome. Thank you.
no subject
Thanks for reading! (And sorry for the late reply. ^^;)
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Also everything about Satchel made me crack up laughing.
eta: ALSO your Universe B tag has been added. Sorry for taking so long about it!
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Satchel is indeed hilarious! Writing a 20+ page kudzu of a story from his POV kind of sold me on him even more. He's just so... I don't know. A weird mixture of hypercompetent and inept.
Thanks for the tag (don't worry about it taking long!), and thanks for reading! :D