The Daily Fix

He’s not too proud to hurt someone to prove a point if the need be. He squeezes a bottle of hand sanitizer into his mouth; later he will be sick into a white sink. The scent of hickory smoke nauseates him on the green at the barbecue and he asks to be excused so he can go and vomit into a handkerchief behind a tree. When he turns back the grill is directly between him and the picnic tables. He runs into the taupe concrete building bent low and working his arms up and down, like a cockroach. His feet pad down the carpeting and he takes refuge in a cubicle, not his cubicle. He sits in the office chair with armrests for a few minutes trying to breathe correctly. He finds he has forgotten. The central nervous system begins to take over, and the lungs jackknife his torso like the Jaws of Life as they expand. Swiveling the chair to face his coworker’s computer, he’s filled with a sense of dread. His chest puffing and deflating, his eyes rolling and his mouth hanging open, his spittle drying. He bangs on the keyboard with his fist like an unfed toddler. It wants to know if he wanted to turn on sticky keys. Over the edge of the cubicle opposite to this, a head peers. It wants to know why he isn’t outside. He shrieks and scrambles and falls down in his haste to escape to the bathroom. He pounds furiously on the hand sanitizer dispenser and shovels handfuls of the pink stuff into his fluttering mouth. He sits on the tile in front of the row of stalls retching and waiting for somebody to find him.

The pirate’s dilemma, far from practical piraticism, is neo-classically destructive in its fluttering chaos, so you can see them on street corners; portly shadows sinking into blotted torque-ridden rubber splotches that can never be fully seen; dead is their fandango. Salami stains on your lapel.  Reaching for the mason jar on the corner of the high shelf, the high shelf no one’s ever reached without a stool.  It splinters and clatters and jitterbugs all about the varnished wooden floorboards, and a bald, knobby head makes a wet thumping melon sound as it burps up a jaundiced little brain and some pinkish ditchwater that drags itself across the unswept pine. More gold for the rest of us, but I’ve broken my fucking club.

-Look. Look here. I was trying to have some sort of legitimate establishment, and then you. You and your madcap adventures, clefted robots, and other sorts of madness come and start a kerfuffle (which is nothing like a chinaman riding about in a carriage in the likeness of an orange). If I let you tell your tale, will you leave never to return?

-Most likely not, sir, for I am a man of taste and refinement and

-Fine, then. Just tell the story before my porters arrive and forcibly eject you through the uppermost window of the North-West tower.

“Well, then. Ahem. Where was I? This was last touched upon so many months ago I cannot bring myself to recall the idiocy that occured upon this hallowed parchment. Having newly acquired quotation marks and a codpiece of genuine Pewter, I believe I shall simply concoct a new bunch of ridiculous lies.”

“Uncle Maurice! Why, shame I do cry! Never! Tut tut! Such impertinence, and to have so unfashionably left us pondering your fate for so many months-”

“Nonetheless. Now where was I? Ah, yes. Beginning anew, rising from the ashen hills of Dunkirk like a bedraggled hatchling Phoenix, as though o’er the furthest hill-top Athena too rose fully formed of Zeus’ brow! God’s areolas could hold no smaller glory than that of this beginning, for in the East there rose a full sun-”

“Uncle Maurice, is there such a thing as a sun half-poured?”

“Children, I have but little time for your queries into the overindulgence which is delighted in by many a man, for wither th’  glass is half empty, half full, or even hemming one in on all sides, one can rely upon the near-clockwork precision of the assembled aeronautical associations of the world’s nations to awaken one with great, joyous rumblings from deep beneath your fishing trawler.”

“Uncle Maurice, Great-Grandfather says that was the A.T.F. dropping depth charges below your houseboat.”

“I can’t see why the A.T.F. would be interested in a stock pond. Anyhow, as the story goes, ’twas morning, and the sun rose in the East, to a certain quotient fulfilled in its rotundity. The sounds of cock’s crows and sodomy with goats issued forth with great authority from the farmlands yonder, and I marveled at man’s industry! It is told in some halls that there are some who would say in certain company that a select people speak in dulcet tones, behind closed doors, of the raising and issuing forth of deformed goat/human hybrid foetuses.”

“But what does this have to do with the gold mine in Alaska and the wicked Canadian Clefty Francoise?”

“Ah, that villain. When was I telling you of him?”

“This is useless.”

“No, no. Come back by Uncle Maurice’s feet. The fire burns yet, and I’ve a yarn to spin…”

Thinking is overrated. I find it has all been dismantled long before I come to conclusions. The doctors don’t let me out anymore. Help. Where once sharp objects used to jut from every aperture, from every surface and thistly retort snaking through the air towards my brain- I now find gauze and fogged plateglass. I have trouble remembering things from my past. I can remember, when I was young, standing by a potter’s wheel as the amorphous mass of clay spun round and round in a cycle. It was trapped between Christ and the Devil, the potter said. To be an unformed thing was to be hideous and unloved, he smiled. We must accept the hands of God when he shapes us, or we shall forever be malformed and wrong. His hands flanked the clay and asphyxiated its disjointed hurtling. It became an urn for the ashes of his mother. I don’t recall his mother, but she had died the day before, and the potter talked to himself for long stretches after that, until his neighbors found him catatonic on his lawn a few years later. He had wet himself, but he didn’t seem to mind. He had lived with her his whole life. I don’t recall what happened to him after that- my childhood comes and goes in patches. I tore some of my hair out when I first arrived here, I can remember that much. It’s still uneven in some places. I’m not sure now, but I remember the exterior of a barbershop. Probably it’s because children fascinate easily. A rotating pole with candy stripes fascinates children. They don’t let children in here.

1. The key to understanding this simple story is:

A) the narrator is obviously insane, and the urn is a symbolic displacement of the narrator himself, his memories gone to pot (pun intended, quite tackily too).

B) The Jews run everything! If you go to a mental hospital and set fire to it, it will help stop the Zionists.

C) N/A- The reader is illiterate. Please check if applies.

D) Stop touching me! Get out of my coccyx and stop making me dance! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

2. What literary device does this short piece employ?

A) The Darkys have seized the fortress and the gun-powder! Quickly, while the plantation’s still being set ablaze and they’ve not found the horseless carriages! Flee to the woods, children, or they’ll soon be firing the cannon upon you!

B) Fragmentation augmenting short, terse inverted sentences in first person to give a feeling of verbal relation.

C) N/A- Teh radar is irritant. Peas czech if apples.

D) Oh, the pain! The undeniable pain of being forced to dance by invisible, unseen demons for twelve straight hours! I’ve lost at least seventeen pounds and I can’t reach the phone and I’m losing blood and there’s semen all over the couch! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

3. Regarded as “curiously strong,” what breathmint was imported by the French from the Pyrenees in the late 1800s?

A) Oh god it hurts make the bleeding stop please oh god oh god my feet are numb and there’s blood all over the carpet too and I still can’t stop dancing Jesus lord of hosts I pray to thee please if thou hast still mercy in thy soul please lord amen wash my soul so that I might die cleansed of sin, and go to Heaven where I know I should go instead of Hell! Oh, god! Is that an ember from the fireplace alighting upon my merino wool rug? NOOOOOOOOOOO

B) Irishmen aren’t drunkards, they’re just pretending so they can steal my mugs! well, they can’t have them! Not one, not any of them, hear me you intoxicated gibbering louts? I know you’re listening on the various electronic devices you’ve telepathically implanted in my various ceramic statues of cocker spaniels!

C) N/A- Te reder z ltrait. Piss ceh if apils.

D) Altoids, although what does that have to do with the short story?

4. Who is the narrator talking about in lines 66-67 when they refer to “The Earl of D’arcy”?

A) I can’t do this anymore. This is just stupid. Just give me an F and I’ll drop out of this course, okay? This is ridiculous. I don’t even like mid-20th-Century Literature written by Neapolitans with forked bicuspids, I don’t know why I took the course “Mid-20th-Century Literature by Gertrude Stein and Simone de Beauvoir”.

B) I’ll tell you what else, it’s those despicable Hispanics’ fault that I don’t get welfare checks anymore, because they’re taking all of them from my mailbox because even though they’re unemployed they’re too lazy to register for welfare, so even though every year I compose my own census where Caucasians compose 99% of North America and then send it to the Post Office and they only take one every four years they still get my welfare money I was going to spend on action figures! How is that fair?

C) gajafafnfnnfa..f.a.f.dsslffnnbnbvnakfdjafljdsfhgibfjnal,poiahubmgerklfjcnd

D) Thank the lord, it’s the angel Gabriel coming to rescue my immortal soul from the flames! O, he stretches out his beauteous arm so that he might take me with him to a realm of fleece and wondrous harp-strumming and twice-daily massages by tiny asian women with hands like dolls made of china! Wait- what’s this? He doth not come closer? Am I to leap towards his immaculate appearance? Dare I bridge the gap ‘twixt faith and obeisance, and come hither to my lord and his heavenly host? What folly- what jest! He laugheth yet, as though he too has found this inconcievably trite notion too full of the brief jollity which has punctuated too markedly my short life! He pointeth at me, and with such mirth he cackles! What! A fiery manacle, from the cellar, bursting through the floor and coming round my ankle? I am being dragged towards- NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Kicked! Stuttering and slobbering bloody saliva all over linoleum in a stylized whirligig of frenzied synaptic thrashing and slipping on noodles, scalding palms on the wok still hot from the stove. Piety took second place to indigent fatalism, and now to show for it a painful new scout badge: a fat lip. Later, probably, the delectable tears of intangible regret- an emotional palate too unrefined to appreciate the guilt at the tip of the tongue- although coming so quickly like the headrush of standing up after two and a half beers is vomit. Make way, people! Swollen, unaware of the mental causality, and hurling into the calm waters of your own personal porcelain principate’s pondering position. The stark and brutal fluorescence buzzing from the janky tubes suspended parallel to the single token of narcissism in an otherwise undestated, perhaps even funereally impersonal restroom just make you sicker. Sicker. Sicker. In ungainly storkish tango steps you traverse the oblong expanse of this tiny chamber and smother the light-switch with your palm (one of those little ramplike numbers that click to and fro so delightfully like a retarded see-saw). The hushed tones of this shithouse soothe the stomach. For the third night in a row you sleep in the bathtub. In the morning you wake up and get back into bed, and nobody in the house knows.