Round
Acid     The
Clock
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Story One
source: DSM-4
posted: Oct 12, 2004, 3:01 PM
by: jhc
He was walking nonchalantly down the street, trying to be cool. He fell into the open sewer because he was so successful at being cool that he was way TOO cool to notice that the manhole cover was off.

But it was only a short fall and he landed feet first and when he looked around he spotted the million dollar stash of loot recently left there by probably whoever was too lame to put the manhole cover back on.

He reached over to snag it and start divvying it up amongst his current and former selves but it was coated with battery acid to burn off the hands of anyone who tried to rip it off, but fortunately he was wearing big thick gloves, but unfortunately there was a hole in one of the fingers, but fortunately he did not use that finger to lift the battery-acid-coated briefcase with the million dollars inside and so he climbed out of the sewer with it.

But when he got back to street level the police were standing there waiting and immediately moved to cuff him, but a sniper from a nearby building nailed the cop in the shoulder, and the man with the stash of loot in the acid covered briefcase took off down an alley that lead to the beach, but when he got there he was attacked by a pack of ravenous dogs running free. But the dogs' owner came along before they had bitten too deeply into his leg and clapped a few times and they ran off down the beach, playing some social dog game with the attack and recession of the water's edge.

But the dogs' owner, once the dogs were far away, pulled a gun and told the man with the briefcase to hand it over. The man handed it over but the man with the gun shot him anyway and he fell over. But underneath his shirt he was wearing a bulletproof vest so when the guy who'd shot him turned to walk away, he jumped him from behind and grabbed his gun and shot him and took the briefcase back. The dogs, hearing the gunshot, came running back at the man with the briefcase, their tongues hanging out, hyper-energized by the ocean air, hot for a quick legal kill.

The man ran up the nearby cliff but the dogs were only inches away so he dove through the picture window of a small cottage right near the edge of the top of the cliff and the dogs were unwilling to leap through the broken glass. There appeared to be no one home, but a sick child came down in a bathrobe from upstairs and started screaming and crying at the presence of the now bloody stranger who also stank of sewage and had a pack of wild dogs howling at him from outside the broken window and had left a dead man on the beach.

The man went to the refrigerator to get some raw meat to throw out to the dogs through the shards of glass but when he got back the kid had called 911 and the police were on the way so he threw the meat to the dogs and headed out the back and ran up to the street and hailed a cab and got in and started heading back downtown, but an oncoming car jumped the divider strip and smashed head-on into his cab instantly killing the driver, but he was able to get away with the briefcase and run up the street a bit and get on a bus. A few stops down, the suicide bomber on the bus blew himself up and the guy with the briefcase was blown out the back and one of his arms had come off but it wasn't the one holding onto the briefcase.

He hobbled down the street and went into a cafe as the screaming and the police sirens started up outside and the patrons of the cafe ran to the doors and windows and out into the streets, so he didn't really have to order anything, he just ate whatever was lying around on tables, and put some quarters into the juke box and listened to a few Sunny Day Real Estate tunes before the patrons started filtering back in to find their Danish's eaten their coffee drunk and the man with the briefcase on his way out.

He walked a couple of blocks over to an apartment where an old girlfriend lived. He walked in and she was fucking someone who tried to kill him but eventually they talked it out and the guy left but the girl treated him like shit and wouldn't let him hide out there especially since he was covered in blood and sewage and pock marked by shrapnel and had just a bloody stump where the right arm should have been and even though he had a briefcase filled with a million dollars, don't put that fuckin thing on my sofa she said, and I'd like to help you but could you please get the fuck out of here instead as I don't like blood but then she had a change of heart and started kissing him on the forehead and cleaning and bandaging his wounds and washing off the sewage and then they fucked but he couldn't get it up and she said get the fuck out of here but then her sister came in who the man had always really loved and the sister said yes that she had always really loved him too but had always been too shy to show it and he said that he had always been too shy to show it too and then they kissed each other for hours and then went down to her new Mercedes to drive off into the sunset together and start a new life of perfect love and bliss but as she got onto the on ramp of the freeway heading for California, an SUV carrying fertilizer and hi-octane jet fuel on the way to a suicide bombing smashed into the Mercedes and blew everything up but the man and woman were miraculously blown free of the car, but were decapitated and their heads rolled down a hill and landed next to each other at the edge of stream. A fish jumped out of the stream and licked the part of the neck that had broken off from the body and come along with the head. This sealed it and allowed the heads to go on living and they were able to locomote by thinking very emotional thoughts which caused their heads to bounce around. In this way they navigated close enough to kiss each other forever, and when they got tired they could get emotional and bounce away far enough to have a conversation about literature, but then they got into a big argument over Pynchon and told each other to fuck off and how they had nothing but the most profound contempt for each other and what a douchebag each of them was.

Later that day, a fish marriage-councilor jumped out of the stream and without the ability to speak and only the ability to flop around on land before returning to the water, made them see how ridiculous they'd been and they apologized to each other and started kissing again but then the guy had a phantom erection in his phantom penis and before long had had a phantom premature ejaculation, but he was able -- by means of brain waves accessing the wireless internet -- to order some premature ejaculation prevention cream from an online website but while he was online, a virus got into his machine and crashed his hard drive which had the novel he'd been working on for years which was just a few more sentences away from complete and would certainly guarantee him many Nobel and Pulitzer prizes in the years to come to tide him through his old age, but fortunately a guy came walking along, taking his family for a Sunday stroll along the stream which had the only clear water for hundreds of miles around, and he turned out to be a computer repairman who was able to retrieve all the data from the hard drive, and so the guy with the briefcase who was just a head now though he was together with the head of the only perfect love anyone had ever found in the history of the world, finished his novel and transferred it over the internet to his enthusiastic publisher and the book came out the following week to much great critical acclaim but it sold no copies and the publisher sent him a note saying, we never believed in you anyway, and we always thought your book was shit, but we published it because we thought the audience out there was just stupid enough to go for it, but obviously even THEY aren't THAT stupid, and frankly we're glad so go fuck yourself, but then he got a letter from the greatest living writer of his day which said your book so completely blew me away that I have given up writing because it would be impossible to surpass it on any level, but then the sister of the guy who wrote the letter called and apologized for her crazy brother who was suffering from some extreme mental disorder which made him pretend to be the world's greatest living writer and then write people who've just recently published a book and tell them he's giving up writing because they were so much better than he was, but the sister turned out to be a nurse and when she found out the guy was just a detached head by a clear stream she said hey this doctor friend of mine has recently come up with a technique for reattaching severed heads to the original or a random body and she immediately came over to the stream in her SUV which was set up like an operating room and the surgeon was there and he'd brought 2 fresh cadavers from the morgue and the man's head and the head of the love of his life were attached to their new bodies and functioned almost perfectly normally except the two people didn't think their new bodies were hot enough to be able to go out now and pick up all the ass they wanted, now that their appetites had been so hopped up by being severed from their bodies for so long and from having been together in perfect love for so long that they were sick of it and starting to make each other puke, and so, if their new bodies weren't hot enough to allow them to go out and score all the fucking hot ass they wanted, then, you know, why even bother living?

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copyright © 2004 by HC