LET LIONS RUN LOOSE IN THE CITY STREETS
“It’s a slow burn.”
Steady raindrops, fat, and red as blood, flowed in vertical streams. The rickety-clack rainfall pounding loud as a train at the roadside motel’s windows and awnings. The heavy clouds of Heaven above, opening, as if God were gutting an elk…
“It’s quantitative, the cucks and their boogeymen, using sticks of dynamite as dildos… Like it’s an easy enema, you know… But the cat’s out of the bag, and it’s the foulest of beasts…”
A flush crept up Fuckethead’s pendulous cheeks as he counted his blessings. His eyes popped. After all, he’d just escaped the rampaging lion that’d been terrorizing the city for weeks.
“A slooooow burn…”
Fuckethead then convulsed, briefly, then did angry fits of ballet as Europe’s “The Final Countdown” began blasting from a phone in the bathroom…
“ … “
“It’d been a slow but controlled burn, beyond any cozy assumptions. Our assumptions arrested in motion… Our gunboat rowing upstream. But hey, look, goddammit, calories do burn quicker when you’re running away from a rampaging lion.”
A reading light in the corner of the dim motel room was flickering. Neon, animated hieroglyphics were dancing on the room’s white walls. Moving like cartoons, the hieroglyphics displayed scenes of utter depravity: A man with one leg sawing off another man’s arm… A camel, with a large erect penis, doing jumping jacks and lunges…
“The slow burns… They were seasonal. Comforting as a kidney stone, welcome as a swarm of wasps at an outdoor wedding… But the burns, for all their flaws, the burns never shook the pillars, were never used as anti-think weapons… But the burns eventually blistered, became the violence of insatiable desire… Triggered a host of consequences…”
“It’s children’s worst nightmares, really, and even men of steel will rust… But that cowardly cat… That cat is fucking suicidal. That cat is going kamikaze… That cat is clawing its way out of a wet paper bag…”
A naked 90-year-old woman lay sound asleep atop the motel bed. Her frail body had been painted bubble-gum pink, head-to-toe, and she lay spread out like a starfish.
Fuckethead sat on the right edge of the motel bed and became illuminated by a white halo, surrounded by it, the same way the white of an eye surrounds the black. Then Fuckethead started sobbing and panting sighs as he sharpened a sickle…
A wrinkled lion suit was covering the old fridge-sized TV, opposite the motel bed. The lion suit splotched in bloodstains…
“I’d been watching the Will Smith slapping Chris Rock video clip from the Oscars…” whimpered Fuckethead, choking back tears, “I watched the video 794 times. I watched it in slow motion. I watched it sped up. I watched it on a continuous loop for over two hours… I just couldn’t take my eyes away…”
Fuckethead really was weeping nonstop, shedding enough tears to rival a rain cloud. Fuckethead lamenting his many misfortunes, the captivity of his introspective exile…
“The pink elephant was the size of a show pony. But it was focused and prepared… It played matador with the lion. Got bloodied real good. But, even after innings, its tusks were still intact and gleaming like desert mirages… A real triumph of the spirit, I’d say…”
“You see? You see what happens? When we bring snowflakes and sensitivity into the lion’s den? You see what happens? When we worship Kardashians and butt stuff instead of an omnipotent God?”
“… After all, it’s that plunge, into the hazy idea of gloom. It’s the plunge that’s attractive, not the splat, not the mess left for the cleaners… Nah… It’s the pink elephant, on IG, with its dick out, bungee jumping off a house of cards…”
“It’s more than the implications of candlestick charts and international penis size surveys… It’s the question of who exactly is measuring thousands of penises, their methodology, and, obviously, such a survey’s motivations…”
Around Fuckethead flew a noisy, baseball-sized mosquito. The insect had a face like Mark Zuckerberg. But Fuckethead paid the mosquito no mind…
Bloomberg TV began broadcasting from the phone in the bathroom. The phone was propped above the toilet, and the phone’s reflection bounced off the toilet water…. But still… no news about the recent spate of lion encounters…
“It’s the masses kept clean by Reddit mods in trench coats… It’s every Hollywood action film where the hero has to race against time to rescue his kidnapped wife/girlfriend/daughter… It’s the silencers of voices… It’s the masses kept hungry by zookeepers… It’s the masses’ migration patterns, and the human farmers, human farming, until the masses lose that certain softness of youth… It was all once manageable, the creature’s pacing… But now… Now not so much, fucko… Now the burns are beginning to pick up… Burns imitating that feeling of Chernobyl…”
“We’re getting molested by invisible hands… Forces of fuck… God getting Uluru in a slingshot… But it’s the burns, the scarecrow sun still expanding… It’s an imp progressing with the reddest eye…”
Aside from his helmet, the pink bucket, with its two arrow slits for eyes, Fuckethead was entirely nude. His slim body slick as a dolphin’s. He’d long tired of shaving and waxing so he had all his body hair removed by electrolysis, and underneath his tailored business suits, in the boardroom, in panoramas of blond-wood serenity, Fuckethead would wear women’s underwear, often with crude penises, breasts, and curse words, drawn in eyeliner, on his chest and thighs.
“The yields, goddamn you, the yields weren’t matching. We were at an inversion point. And it was truly believed transitory forces, flare-ups, were at work. But it was wildfire. Hellfire. An uncontrolled burn. Nothing slow. Nothing like gonorrhea, or even a simple setting of genital hairs afire…”
“That lion… That lion is hunting, dammit. That lion is muting voices…”
Fuckethead rose from the motel bed and padded over to the window, which was misted.
“It’s the hungry ghosts, kept hungry, the ghosts getting herded, like sheep. It’s the ghost collectors, hedging, with their data and baseball card collections of souls. It’s the ultimate hippo bankers. Who says the lion is the foulest of beasts?!”
Fuckethead then prepped himself, sucked in a deep breath. After all, he was taking on the destroyer of delights, the killer of companionship…
“Stand tall as Tyson Fury… Be heavy and hot as a flaming pile of alligator guts…”
“It’s never an easy choice, the slowness, the heat. It’s never easy. And it’s never going to be easy. Never… Be it running away from a rampaging lion… Or firing a flamethrower at a housefly… Or even just slap-hunting holograms of Harvey Keitel… It’s not easy… And it’s nothing, NOTHING, like our pastime of forcing intellectuals to jump on a trampoline… Nothing at all… None of it is easy… Dammit… None of it… Axl Rose was wrong on all counts…”
Trumpet sounds blared from the phone above the toilet.
“It’ll be thousands, thousands of rampaging lions, thousands of lions swarming the city streets… It’ll be ‘The Running of The Lions’ instead of ‘The Running of The Bulls!’”
“It won’t be a pink elephant… Or a new popular mood disorder… It’ll be the next Madonna or Taylor Swift, covered in lion shit, running up a down-moving escalator.”
Fuckethead squatted and scooped up a utility hammer from the manky, orangish motel room carpet. Then Fuckethead rose, like an animated corpse, and his halo slowly shed, like a snake’s skin, falling to the floor in fading ribbons. Then Fuckethead thrust his sickle into the air, like an Olympic torch. Then Fuckethead yodeled and kicked open the motel room’s front door.
“Run, Fuckethead, RUN!!!!” shouted a young girl’s voice.
Then Fuckethead ran, barefoot, right into the blood rain. He was a naked man, wearing only the pink bucket on his head. The crude drawings on his chest and thighs were tattoos and bled as Fuckethead tore off running into that cold, red rainy night.
Mr. Fuckethead, crying a string of pearls, ran clutching his hammer and sickle. Fuckethead yodeling and waving the instruments wildly as he sprinted into everything.
“The sun coming out from behind a cloud! A slow burn coming!!!!!!” Fuckethead roared, his frantic voice fading and finally vanishing with the rainfall. “IT’S A SLOW BURN!!!!!!! A SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
