Elmer--at Horror Sleaze Trash

My story, Elmer is right below! Thanks to Horror Sleaze Trash! 

ELMER

 

Head Case

   

He was abrupt with people. Many people didn’t like him because he was so abrupt. He answered questions with a hatchet. He urged you to stop wasting his time.  His name was Karl and he was eighty-seven years old and he worked as a greeter at the local Wal-Mart. He was abrupt with the customers.  “Yeah, just get in.” “Okay. Great.” “Keep walking.” He had a metal plate in his skull (he’d incurred a serious head injury in Vietnam) and had been struck by lightning four times in his long arduous life. He blamed the metal in his head for attracting electricity and for his abruptitude.

     “Does it hurt to get struck by lightning?”

     With deep rich sarcasm, “No.” 

     Karl died on the job. Cerebral hemorrhage. He expired in the store. Those who saw him collapse swore that sparks shot out of his eyes. Davey Jones (23), a nearby cashier still maintains that his wristwatch stopped the second Karl’s brain misfired. Davey likes to tell his coworkers his dreams. He dreams a lot. The night after Karl’s collapse he dreamed of meeting a beautiful woman in a grocery store. “I like my men tortured,” she told him, standing next to the grapes.

     “I’m tortured,” he said.

     “Then you’re for me, sweetie.”

     She enveloped him in a warm hug.

   He awoke from the damp dream feeling jagged pangs of loss and futility and disgust.

     He went to work anyway.

    They’d already stopped talking about Karl. Davey manned his station. He wanted to tell people about his dream but the fact that it had ended with a nocturnal emission left him with a feeling of deep shame.

     So he kept it to himself, hoping guiltily for a sequel that night. He was in love with a dream girl. His shift couldn’t end soon enough. He ate grapes for lunch.

   

    

ADIPOCERE

 Peeled from the pages of Pancreatic Carburetor!

The story begins.

     Becky stood on the sand, listening to the edge of the ocean. The lap and scatter of small, seaweed-laden waves. She’d hoped the sudden change in environment would loosen the choking, unremitting clench of her life. Therapy wasn’t going well. Her counselor suggested this trip. He said that getting close to the ocean would improve her mood and put things in perspective. Something about the ocean’s vast majesty and finding her simple little niche in the universe.

     It wasn’t working. What’s the big deal about the ocean?

     She looked out at the faded gray horizon. Maybe if she saw something dramatic. Maybe if she saw a whale it would fix things. No, one whale would not instill sufficient awe. She needed a herd of whales (did they travel in herds? Schools? Whatever...). She needed to see a mass suicide of whales—fearsome giants beaching themselves right before her astonished eyes. An advancing, lemming-like mass. And she would walk among the flopping, encrusted behemoths—sperm whales or blue whales, the biggest the sea can provide—and she would listen to their dying cries and feel so overwhelmed that her meager little life would take on a new context. Her small concerns would float away with the mournful death-songs of the failing whales.

     Or maybe an oil spill. Maybe a huge tanker could run into a reef and spill black poison into the water. A wide, oil-slick would eat into the beach, engulfing birds and seals and naked bathers. Dying animals would wash ashore, gasping and struggling, mired in the sticky, ink-black pollution and she would witness an extinction.

     She needed to be a part of something.

     Or what if a dead body washed up on shore? Maybe a man carrying unrelieved sorrow could walk out into the water and drown himself. Or, no wait, he stands on a rock. He has a gun. He utters his last words to the wind; a brief suicide note instantly erased.      

     Then he blasts his memories into the churning sea.

     Becky let her thoughts merge with the sounds of the shoreline. They drifted into the salted wind and the whispering words of the surf.

     She did feel a little better after all.

     The story ends.    

The Chatter of Dragonflies

Dr. Sandra hung around the Dumpsters every day all day that summer, recording the buzz of dragonflies as they whizzed past her sensitive, scientifically calibrated microphones. By the end of the summer she had recorded over one thousand dragonfly “sentences” (as she called them). It took her five long painstaking years to translate them. Each dragonfly “sentence” was unique but they all mentioned Vincent Bugliosi.