Skewed Perspective
by Walt Hicks

   She was giving me a ration of shit about my fast food order, so I made her head explode. Bone fragments, blood and small chunks of brain matter (she didn't have much to work with to start) flew all over the cooking area behind the McDonald's counter. A large clot of thick blood mixed with mucous landed in the deep fryer and I had to giggle. Nobody around me seemed to notice, as the headless body jerked in spasmodic circles (a decapitated chicken came to mind) seemingly searching for its missing cranium, spewing dark crimson blood through the ragged stump that used
to be a neck, in rhythm with her failing heartbeat. Finally she collapsed into the mess on the filthy tiled floor. People kept placing orders as if this were an everyday event.

   "Well, do you want that Super-sized or not, dumb ass?" She screeched, bursting my
wonderfully warm reverie, like a blood bubble from the mouth of an asphyxiated corpse.

  I nodded my assent, then collected my aged food, departing with a whimper, not a bang. She had looked sooooo good without her head, especially without that ragged,
lipstick-caked garbage spewing mouth. Outside, I ate a few bites of the stale, lukewarm food', dumped the rest. Collecting myself somewhat, I trudged back to work.

  In the Wagner Building, I worked in the basement archives of the National Prattler. I did research' for the fantastically unbelievable articles that usually found some basis in malleable facts. The writers hated me, the editors despised me, but I performed a mundane though necessary function that no one else wanted to do. Edgar Allan Poe was who I really always wanted to be . . . well, maybe Poe, except with some cash. Stephen King, maybe . . . yeah, him.

Armed with neither the talent nor the ambition of anyone with a modicum of success, I would forever be a drone, a fact-gathering worker bee, unremarkable except in my own extreme ordinariness. I could do fantastic things inside my own head that seemed
real, but ultimately, they were only fantasies, inevitably shattered by the cold metallic insertion of reality. Sometimes, though, they seemed so real that I could feel the pain, taste the blood, smell the death.

  "Dewey!" the echo deep inside my head was the boss, Warner Kohl, Editor-in-Chief. "I was surprised at his arrival in my dank, dismal domain. They usually called me on an ancient rotary-dial telephone from what I called the Tower. "Dammit, do you sleep with your freakin' eyes open?" "Uh, no sir. I don't think so, sir." I fumbled helplessly.

  "Well, if it wouldn't be too much trouble for you," he cajoled sarcastically, his garlic-laden breath hitting my nostrils like a fetid knock out punch, "we need the
background on that spontaneous combustion death a couple days ago."

  "Huh? Oh, yes the car fire? I have that, sir."

  "That's your problem, Dewey, you have no vision. The cops said that the car fire was
suspicious because it seemed to have started inside the car. No detectable accelerant. The guy was a nonsmoker."

  "Oh, but that doesn't mean -- "

   Mr. Kohl grinned, a hideous yellow-green row of tombstones smile. I could've sworn
something unimaginable squirmed between his teeth. "That's all we need, Dewey. That's all we need!"

   With that, Mr. Kohl's greasy fingers snatched the carefully labeled, anally neat folder from my hand and stomped toward the stairwell and the rarified air of the Tower, his natural habitat.

  Hank Deltone had been motoring down the turnpike in his ancient Dodge pick-up truck at nine in the morning, twice the legal limit for blood alcohol count. One might have expected him to have wrapped the truck around a bridge abutment, or crossed the median and collided head-on with a Volvo, killing a family of five. Instead, the unfortunate Mr. Deltone's truck burst into flames from the inside, coasting slowly to rest against the inside guard rail to the accompaniment of the Lynard Skynard 8-track melting in the dash and the piercing screams of Mr. Deltone burning alive. Oooo,
that smell.

   The police, inasmuch as they cared at all, were somewhat baffled. Mr. Deltone had a
Nicoderm patch melted into the crisp hide of his right shoulder. No evidence of cigarettes inside the truck or a lighter. He had even thrown away the dash lighter in an effort to resist the temptation of slowly killing himself with tobacco. Although there was an abundance of alcohol within Mr. Deltone, none of the Jack Daniels had made it to the interior cab of the truck. The accident' was chalked up to an electrical short in the Dodge's dashboard. Mrs. Deltone's grieving period was most short-lived; Mr. Deltone's insurance paid off quickly, and Daimler-Chrysler made her a millionaire
in a quiet, speedy out-of-court settlement.

  The coincidence was almost humorous, because some redneck in a beat-up truck had cut me off in traffic two or three days earlier, and I caused him to spontaneously
combust -- inside my mind, of course. It was hilarious, watching him try to stop the truck, arms flailing, fire and smoke belching from his open, screaming mouth, fully engulfed in flames. He looked like a cartoon character. Naturally, someone laid on the horn behind me, and I came to the realization that it was yet another happy illusion, a harmless, charnal house daydream.

   The next day, after a near sleepless night fraught with gruesome, nebulous nightmares, I trudged into work, nearly tripping over the crime scene tape draped around my favorite McDonald's. I overheard one of the pimple-faced patrolmen excitedly relating to an investigating officer the morbid details of a robbery gone awry; the sawed off shotgun went off accidentally it seemed, vaporizing the head of the cashier in a crimson spray of gore and brain matter. The perpetrator hadn't even
known why he had done it, and sat down in the middle of the floor, crying until the police arrived. I watched in mild fascination as the gurney transported the headless form beneath the sheets to the waiting ambulance. The city could be such a ruthless, violent place.

   Work was not much better. Mr. Kohl had invaded my insular office several times, taking me to task over trivial, oblique matters of no consequence. At the end of the
day, picking nervously at a small round bandage on his neck, he fired me.

   "Why are you smiling, Dewey?" he inquired, almost fearfully, mopping sweat off his
expansive forehead.

   Starting from a gaping, blistered hole in Mr. Kohl's neck where the bandage used to be, the ample, fleshy meat of his face was melting off of his skull. I could see the white of the greasy fat underlay mix with the gristly muscle and blood to a blushing pink hue. One eye was fully exposed, then bobbed comically onto his cheekbone hanging by the optic nerve. I think I laughed out loud.

   "What?" he demanded, though not too forcefully.

   His tongue fell to the floor with a wet, greasy splat. Blood pooled at his feet as the blistered, violet-colored flesh dropped to the floor. The white bone of his agitated
lower jaw stood in stark relief against the angry purple of his deteriorating skin.

   "Security!" Mr. Kohl was saying loudly into the intercom on my former desk. His face was oddly intact now.

   "That's not necessary, sir, " I sighed, my smile dissolving. " I'm leaving." He smiled
nervously, but triumphantly.

   I slept in the next two days, but on the third day, the first words I heard when the radio alarm clock went off were "necrotizing fasciitis." That rung a bell somewhere deep
inside my subconscious; I was sure that I had researched the odd-sounding subject for the Prattler at some point. A man had been discovered in his penthouse apartment, apparently the victim of a particularly virulent strain of Group A streptococcal bacteria infecting his skin. It was theorized that he had nicked himself shaving, and the evil flesh eating infestation quickly invaded, felling him first with a severe fever rendering him unconscious, allowing the ravenous disease full reign to swarm him like a multitude
of hungry maggots. Most of his face was gone, the announcer related joyously. Name withheld awaiting the notification of next of kin.

   The police arrived that afternoon, doing the bland, mechanical follow-through which was the  real basis for their job: the interview. Mr. Kohl had died two nights ago, suddenly, and although not under suspicious circumstances, it was routine for the police department to follow-up. Especially since he had fired me a short time before. Things so horrible happened to the detective before my eyes (my mind's eyes?) that they defy sane description. Unscathed after a moment, he smiled perfunctorily, thanked me and exited tiredly with a sigh. I plugged an old REM tape into the stereo,
turned it down low.

   The headaches had come that defy Tylenol, Motrin, or even chewed-up Excedrin. I've had them all my life, and have always figured that they were sinus-related. Nothing makes them go away, nothing.

   Just like the silly coincidences that have dotted my life, the foolish feeling of deja vu that seems to come to me with increasing frequency as the years march on. Like the man on our old Zenith when I was a kid talking starry eyed about space and the moon, and my young mind wondering what he'd look like if his head exploded from the rear. The vision of my absent father, folded up into the stove, cooking like a fleshy gingerbread man, his internal organs exploding and his eyes bursting from his skull like overfilled water balloons. The news came a week later that he had died on January 14, 1969 in a freak, fiery flight deck accident onboard the aircraft carrier USS
ENTERPRISE.

   I was working for the research library of Florida State University in the late seventies, when one January morning, five young women strolled through the university commons, completely oblivious to me, as women always were. Sudden annoyance flashed in my mind and they suddenly appeared to me shattered, beaten, bones broken, teeth splintered in their mouths even as they laughed and chattered. That they could walk in that condition was astonishing; of course seconds later, they were restored to their pristine, beautiful appearances. However, two days later, that charming sociopath Ted Bundy cruelly bludgeoned to death three of the five, and
viciously brutalized the other two.

   The preceding was just a minute sampling of the odd happenstances that have effectively ruined my life. Coincidences, I have become so soul weary of these damnable, ludicrous coincidences. I am tired of the deathwatch, the horrific visions of blood, brain matter and gore. I sometimes almost wish for my own grotesque, terrifying death -- almost. It's not really my fault, though, so should I be the only one to feel the cold final embrace of the reaper? I think -- I am sure -- something is incurably wrong with the whole fucking world. Sometimes just outside the periphery of my mental vision, I can see the entire planet engulfed in a raging, tumultuous fireball, a hundred
million people screaming in unimaginable, endless pain.

   From the stereo -- or inside my head -- Michael Stipe whispers to me seductively about the end of the world and suddenly, I feel fine. Fine.

© Walt Hicks

October 1999 HofP