Arthur Graham’s Reviews > The Four Gentlemen of the Apocalypse > Status Update

The time spent tumbling down a dune passes so quickly, yet every time it brings the sensation that exists between forever and an instant. The roll of each tumble. The calming reflection of existence in the face of mortality. The face of the monsters laughing, surrounding them. The faces frozen in time as they can do nothing but witness the velocity.

“In my youth, you could not throw a stone without hitting a wolf. Farmers and hunters have killed or chased them all off. I’ll be lucky to live to see another. The last time the wolves came, no one could see them. I just heard their heavy breaths. They were too cunning to howl. A secret mission. A moon mission, in the moonlight.”

“I don’t want to be a cat anymore. I just wanna be Russell.”
“Sorry,” the Black Cat said, running his tongue over his teeth, which Russell now realized were pointed like fangs. “That ain’t how this works. You can’t just quit one day because it’s too hard. That ain’t how life works. If you’re man enough to be a cat, you’d better be cat enough to be a man about it.”

“I assure you, there is absolutely nothing to worry about. I’ve performed this surgery thousands of times, and it hardly ever goes wrong.”
Bartleby grabbed his manhood protectively. It shivered in his hands like a scared child, or a falling leaf. Whichever.
“If it’s all the same to you,” he said, “I’d rather keep my balls. In fact, I think I’d like to go home now.”
“Not with those balls you’re not!”

Russell fled the field in terror, spraying juice behind him like peacock feathers made of shit.

Now the shit’s gettin’ primal, G,
We got TERROR TINY TIM scratching vinyl, see?
He a zombie, and he barely over three feet tall.
But no one scratches records like Triple T, y’all.
Triple T, yeah, he my son and my ace.
Beat you down wit his crutch,
Then he eat you in yo face.

When lowercase, it took the form of a small vertical line that appeared to be projectile vomiting in a rightward direction. In its uppercase form, it resembled the profile of a little T. rex facing right. This new letter had always been a part of the alphabet, but no one had noticed it until now. And just as the letter had lain unseen in the alphabet, so had it lurked dormant in many of our existing words.

Mama always said life was rough, that we don’t always get the things we want. Even really basic things — like, for example, an undemolished butthole.