Status Updates From First Aide Medicine

I CAN'T go back to the surfboard shop today. I sit on the hillside above the beach slicing my wrist to give to the flowers all my medicine.

Maybe the funeral was just some charade, like the moon landing. We begin drinking ourselves into oblivion outside my parents’ basement crypt. I walk through her piss. Her blonde hair is the color of piss and smells of freshly-killed cobras. The yellow spider stretches across my brain with the cracking of a crystal ball.

We are still vagabonds in a manner of speaking: vagabonds of the heart. Life is too slippery to try and stick to.

We grow dumber and hungrier as the years pass. We drink more. Have fewer ideas. Become more perverse and wretched.
Our memory grows lazy of you. Hazy of you. We are cold here. There is too much time.

As the skin and skull of each of our heads parts and widens with the ease of a peapod, it is, perplexingly, not brains that we were greeted with but strawberries, cream, a rose, and a dove, the last of which coo amiably in unison.

Nostalgia is a weather worn ship where I have traveled forever. Regrets are my oars; skeletons, my powder monkeys.

The creature starts coughing then crawls over to us and lies on his back at Karen’s feet. Little fists punch up against the skin of his stomach, stretching it so we see the grayness of his skin beneath the black and red fur. A child’s face rises up... and another face...the face of one of the princesses or very fair maidens...these faces pressing up against the creature’s stomach’s skin howl mutely in desperation.

I am a monster in the pale moonlight wanting to chew her milk flesh into all the bloody bandages, at one with the mummies and the vampires. Fur sprouts from my face. My fingernails grow wicked. The walls offer no protection against her parents’ threats. Every boy and man she’d ever slept with was with us tonight too.

I jumped in the water to prove I wasn’t afraid. But then blood poured out of your mouth. I rushed to the other side and the blood flow lessened. Then you, Rob, Jeremy, General Hook, & the naked old man from the pricker bush swam across. The red and black striped creature peaked out from behind a tree at the old man. The old man had many red ants crawling all over him. There were so many that he didn’t even look naked

“I wore a peach-colored nightgown when the creature followed me home to my penthouse apartment. He was waiting for me in the elevator.”
It is horrible to talk like this. She is almost done bawling her eyes out. I have to hold the phone away from my ear for a while during the loudest parts. This is my first phone call from beyond death.

The hunchback shark held a football between his fins. He threw me a screamer and I ran it into the end zone just for the hell of it. He motioned me over with a fin. He cradled the football against his human-looking gut...like a beer gut.
"You’ve been doing a good job," he said, placing a slimy fin upon my shoulder.

I just do a little cut now and again to attract the sharks. Nobody can see me way out here past the blue buoys. I wish a shark would come and eat me. I might even put up a good fight. [...] I don’t have to work today or tomorrow so that probably means I’ll head to the bar if I survive this swim. Pull down the curtains and cover your eyes. I’m growing tired of treading water and there are wolves in my eyes.

Coming out of rooms with boys or girls or without them, we could never act natural. But we couldn’t not act natural. Then again it was too natural. We were over-thinking it. It was already over before it began. There were as many red flags as goose bumps. Millions of warning signs. But we changed each other.

Kissing her is bittersweet. Sangria fangs. Berry mouth. Bug juice. A creature attached to Karen’s face is how her kisses feel. Like she is mocking me—overly eager, her tongue probing, her lips sucking forcefully as if daring me to turn away. Rummaging through the cut-up valentine organs in my heart, I feel her dying. She asks me what I want from her late at night when we are alone. Bug legs squirming out of her mouth

THE smell of the sea makes me as happy as when I finally approach Karen’s lifeguard chair. I see an older, bald man staring up at her like she’s a goddess. One of his children buries him up to his neck in sand. What do you see in her, old man? Why do all these antediluvian douche bags want to rip off her panties with their dentures? He stares & stares but Karen is no longer sitting there. It’s over old man. She died.

I’m not afraid. Not as much as who you are in dreams would think. Not as much as the you coming to meet me naked under milky moonlight would think. You wear a wet dress of leaves. I see your poison ivy bra and hear rattlesnakes. Cobra of my fondness, cheetah blood pumps through my brain.

KAREN and I met in a video store. Sweating up a storm, my sickly eyes scanned each overloaded shelf in search of a horror movie I had not yet seen. Our eyes met and locked between the shelves. Who was this girl alone so late at night in search of a faded cassette illusion to disembowel the clocks of time’s intrusion? Those eyes belonged to the most beautiful maniac I’ve ever met.

A question remains: Who were you? Who...the fuck...were you? I redial and redial, watching the whites of my eyes turn red. Now it’s almost time to say goodnight, old man. Are you there? I’ve got time to burn and a wistful death-wish for all concerned. Are you ready to change your number?