QUEER HORROR DAY #21 - THE DOGS IN MY HEAD

QUEER HORROR DAY #21 - THE DOGS IN MY HEAD

The dogs in my brain keep me up all night with barking. When they wrestle and scamp around, I get headaches  Their poo mucks up my thoughts, their urine trickles down my spine and across my rib cage, spreading a warm iron-scent over me — usually when I'm at a work function. When they're hungry, their  incessant, whimpering grinds my teeth. I only sleep when they do.

They're getting bigger. Occasionally a large hairy paw slips down my brainstem into my throat, and I gag. Sometimes their slobber makes me drool when I'm eating. When I fuck, I do it doggy style, growling and raking my claws down their backs.

My eyes are as yellow as the moon. 

NyQuil used to make them drowsy, now it just makes them angry. I can feel them bristling at its taste in my bloodstream, baring their teeth and raising their hackles in resistance. They retaliate by pissing, gnawing at my short term memory and tearing my most beloved memories to shreds.

Look what algebra and Islamic culture hath wrought!!

photos by mohammad reza domiri ganji in iran of: (1) the dome of the seyyed mosque in isfahan; (2,8) the nasīr al mulk mosque, or pink mosque, in shiraz; (3,4) the vakil mosque in shiraz; (5) the ceiling of the fifth floor of ali qapu in isfahan; (6,10) the vakil bathhouse in shiraz; (7) the imam mosque in isfahan; (9) the jame mosque of yazd

Sometimes the bad guys deserve to win :)

100 DAYS OF QUEER HORROR 19 - ZOO

When you work at a zoo, you kill more things than you keep alive.

I entered the rat room: shelves with rat-filled wire cages containing a hundred rats each from floor to ceiling. The room stank of piss and death. Thousands screeching, clawing and gnawing  each other's guts out. I put on a welding glove and shoved my arm into the cage, feeling their dull bites and scratches as I'd grabbed one or two rats by the tail.

I bashed them against the floor with a crunch and a squeak, then take them to the reticulated python — a 22-foot long, 200-pound serpent as wide as a basketball hoop. The snake needed the rats while they were still warm. We would've fed it live rats, but the rats might have bitten or scratched it, so...

Eventually, it started taking 11 rats to feed the beast, so we started feeding him pigs about the size of basset hounds instead.

We put a live one in the tank; the python ignored it. So we put two pigs inside of a non-operating freezer and let them suffocate to death. It took  a couple hours. Then we put them in the tank. Still... nothing.

Finally, skinned the rats, dropped their skinless bleeding bodies into a crushing machine for the slurry we used to feed the crocs, and draped the  skins over the pig corpses.

With its forked tongue,  the serpent smelled his familiar meal and slithered over, swallowing it whole.

This is what the children never see.

THE GREAT UNFRIENDING #3

(2/4/14) Deleting people from my digital world does give me some petty God-like pleasures. But moreso, it has made me wonder what I really value in people. Who do I let into my little world? I've been thinking of people in terms of how much love or respect I have for them, their geographic and emotional distance, what they offer me in terms of support, advice or job prospects. Whether they have hot friends, whether we share some bonding memory that I will never want to delete, how amusing they are (the weird honest ones are the best). "We define ourselves by the ties we keep," as sociology professor Bartt Dredge used to say. So based on my profile, who the hell am I?

Queer Horror Day #22 - Tomb

The warm air in the condo always had the distinct smell of mildew and dogs. Everything — from the yellow and gold embroidery on the couch, the itchy teal upholstery on the recliners, the tangles on the shag carpet and the orange and green striped wallpaper — felt moist. I inspected the books for water damage. None. When visiting, I’d do my best to sit in one place, wash my hands often and breathe only through my mouth.

His mother died and left him the condo. He was her 38-year-old freckled son with uncombed and receding orange hair, smudges of his full-moon glasses and Elmo shirts (always Elmo shirts). He began began sleeping in her old bedroom and left everything as it was: crowds of prescription bottles on top of cardboard boxes, necklaces spilling out of a wooden jewelry box by the glowing vanity mirror, brown stains that showed slightly through the fitted sheet on the mattress.

When we slept together he couldn’t get hard. He kissed me apologetically and when I left the next morning, he insisted I take home some cookies badly wrapped in aluminum. Half an hour later, while showering at my place, I found a red bedbug behind my ear. I never saw him again. Months later, I heard his condo became a meth house, that he had gotten HIV and that he attacked one of his best friends with a champagne bottle for telling another man “I Love You."

He, his mother and the house… all rotting from the inside out.