Hello DEAR READER,
The following is Chapter 4:2 from my first novel, The Pupa Woman. You can read Chapter 4:1 here.
You can get the PDF over at my gumroad! ^_^
Available from our unfortunate tech-overlords over at Amazon both in paperback and eBook.
“The trash which surrounds us has really lost any meaning it might have once had. No-one cares about plastic wrap or food containers when it’s thrown away; it’s all stuff drained of any presence, right? Even tho’, if you think about it, the vast majority of our city consists of garbage & trash– it’s stuff that loses its meaning as soon as we’re done consuming its worth. Either we can make it a part of our existence, our living, or wait for it to destroy us.” Deluxo-Worldbank exposed their arms and parts of their body, wires & circuitry held together by egg-cartons and snack bags. The mud on June’s face cracked, it was Deluxo-Worldbank who wiped away the hardened residue with parts of a newspaper as she wondered whether she’d renounced her own membership to the human race. “What we now call humanity will one day be liberated by all this garbage, as long as it embraces it as a part of its existence… its everyday life, just as I have. Fulfill our parasitic destinies.” Cockroaches covered June’s feet ‘n she no longer feared them as she looked into Deluxo-Worldbank’s eyes and for the first time saw a representation of what was once only all too human ‘n she grabbed their hands and felt the softness underneath its plastic and a warmth which responded in kind… a basic continuity existed between them, “just like it does with us and these insects. We die and become the matter which sustains their love. That really used to scare me, but I didn’t know why. They live with us in harmony, and I guess I now realize that it’s kind of beautiful.” Deluxo-Worldbank wept tears of acid and held June in their arms, while Susie poked her head out of the window to hurl explosive vomit into the thick air. It splattered & tumbled down the walls, landing on the children who responded with screams & shouts of “ewww!” Deluxo-Worldbank’s body had melded with the consumer goods which once only formed their outside world, physical form in perfect symbiosis with plastic & advertisement. Susie’s stomach churned in fear, her face deadened by the realization that she was looking at a shadow of a future where there were no longer boundaries between the flabby adipose flesh and the product– where there was no longer a distinction between what was merely bodily and what belonged to a greater collective of immaterial communication, the physical vessel only a machine which carries the signal through space.
As Susie drifted leisurely through the abandoned military bunkers which decorated the waterfront like boils on a diseased face, she was struck with a feeling of inadequacy which possessed her nervous system and struck with a fearful twitch. The boys who had built these bullet-riddled structures to defend their proud nation-state couldn’t ever think that they’d become the habitats of those rejected by that very same structure, nor did the architects of that bright futuristic metropolitan sunset ever see their designs as the rigid prisons the shell-shocked youth would soon struggle to escape from. The saying she’d rescued from that garbage-can-bound fortune cookie suddenly came to mind: “our destiny exercises its influence over us even when we have not learned its nature… it is our future that lays down the law of our today.” Right on, man– eventually all that will be left of the Earth is our refuse and the insects who consume it.
Following the conduits & cabling which seemingly ran down from the pipes & the sewers towards some greater central telephone exchange, Susie followed a staircase up towards a warehouse overlooking an abandoned loading dock where a rusting container ship sunk into the green murk of the water. In the receding moonlight, only the glow of machinery illuminated the path through the torn metal grates into a chamber… filled with the horrific buzz of rectangular mainframes which transformed the soggy cardboard remnants of industry into a waterfall of orange & red light weaved together by flame-like scatterings. Nestled between the vibrating frames providing palpable heat, a bespectacled woman surrounded by cup-o-noodles & cans of green tea stretched open her blanket-draped arms wide in a creaky welcoming display. “Hey, look it’s ‘suzyq666.’” Her glasses slipped from her greasy CRT-lit face, prompting a quick push on the center of the frames. The warmth of the computers which surrounded her and the wonderfully leafy smell of the tea seduced her into comfort; she laid her head on a bulky monitor which transmitted a soothing hum into her ears. “How did you know my name, stranger?” The she-creep’s pimpled face came alive with a strange joy as she rubbed the surface of a mainframe. “Even though I’ve never met you, I feel like I know you intimately. I recognized you the second I saw you– it’s in the way you walked, the way you dress. We’ve spoken for hours, shared our deepest thoughts through our computer screens.” Without an expectation or even consideration of physical form, there was no disappointment in their meeting for the unspoken understanding between them seemed to be that these bodies had little to do with the lives they’d built together on the user-networks. “‘ladyoftheleaves?’ You look just like I’d imagined you.” Susie smiled and touched the little she-creep’s oily scalp, tryin’ to not take her sudden stiffening & retreat personally.
“Sorry, I’m not used to… that stuff,” the frail sysop muttered. Susie placed her arms under her head, her eyes still puffy from the toxic fumes… but tears began to stream from her face, flowing onto the glass screen and distorting the green text which flickered & fluttered with magnetic disturbances. “I’ve had the worst day, ‘leafy.’” A sudden sleepiness struck her body with a strange paralysis. “I think I killed Judy, burnt her to the ground.” The little she-creep laughed as if Susie had something really stupid and sipped at her can of green tea. “You don’t have a clue what’s happening out there, huh?” Susie looked at the blurry streaks of black still on her arm; the numbers “8.8.8.8” had taken on a meaning she felt was only inches beyond her grasp. “A thousand Judys are walking amongst all the normies in the streets, ready at any minute to strike at the heart of some perceived revolution… but the revolution is happening in here,” the little she-creep muttered as she pulled her keyboard closer to her body. “A revolution doesn’t have to actually happen for it to happen. Pop-stars don’t really have to exist to exist. They’re like root vegetables, growing fatter and fatter but without a center. Do you get what I’m talking about?” Susie’s eyes fell shut as she passively listened to ‘leafy.’ “And the tendrils of that root vegetable grow into every part of life, until the distinctions between root vegetable and the rest of the world become blurry and hard to see– and so one day you figure out the root vegetable was keeping you alive the whole time. It’s been nourishing you– it’s been keeping you alive, even though you don’t know where it came from and the harder you pull on it the longer its tendrils get. You dig further and further but that massive network of tendrils running through the soil becomes so dense that you can’t distinguish its different parts anymore, there’s no greater root that spawned it all.” Susie muttered and then wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I’ll tell you right now as fragile as we are, we’re gonna lose against the authorities, the coppers, the system, the man. That’s the thing about bodies– they’re too easily crushed by the authority. The kicker is though; they can control your body but not your mind and if we lived in a place where there were only the things in our hearts, in our minds… a free space where we can await the final days together and we can see visions… visions as beautiful as any sunset, or an exploding star, and we’ll look at each other and finally we’ll recognize each other and we’ll see ourselves… the way we really are, the way we know it was all meant to be. You see, technology didn’t change us, Susie. It only gave form to the things we’ve always had nursed in our hearts.”
But what had Susie nursed in her heart, after all these years? Behind the career perversions & the pop-star obsessions, what lurked within those dark marshes covered with snake-y vines which brought life to her dead & quiet face? Could she really have been transformed, or was she simply now growing into what had always been her genetic purpose in this world? Maybe Sylvania was right when she tried to crush Susie’s throat within her grasp, the joy of violence muted by the disappointment in Susie’s willing desire for pain. “You’re a damn coward– you’re a coward, a little bitch who doesn’t have the will to do shit… that’s why you are who you are, why I is who I am.” But who are you, Susie? A choir asks. “Susie Q the Weak, Susie Q the Lame, Susie Q the Dead, Susie Q the Destroyed, Susie Q the Great, Susie Q the Vat, Susie Q of the Past, Susie Q the Discouraged, Susie Q the Square, Susie Q the Right, Susie Q the Useless, Susie Q the Vast, Susie Q the Flower, The Susie Q Network, Susie Q the Negative, Susie Q the Mountain Spirit, Susie Q the Reckless, Susie Q the Restless, Susie Q the Forgetful, Susie Q the Excellent, Susie Q the Sunset, Susie Q the Dreamer, Susie Q the Dark, Susie Q the Vigorous, Susie Q the…”
June’s eternal sobs now begun to rattle with increasing volume in Susie’s skull, her feet blackened by mud and her fur coat now only a collection of fuzzy rags which dripped with dirt. Susie stirred from her sleep, watching June’s bony body glow in the light of the machinery which made her encrusted eyes seem like glowing embers in some fading fire. “I’m so fucking sick of cockroaches,” she yelled in a tightly-coiled voice raspy from the noxious free radicals which swirled around her dirt-clumped hair. Susie had never seen a more beautiful sight and she crawled on her knees heavy with leaden-weight towards June with begging sighs & lustful grasps ‘n with her arms around her legs she tries to pull June towards the ground as she struggles to free herself while ‘leafy’ only watched with voyeuristic pleasure these broken creeps still married to the trivialities of physical pleasure. “Now, what would you think if I said… ‘I think I love you, baby’”– Susie hissed with her teeth, a hysteria pumping away blood from her brain to the rest of her body. June scratched Susie’s head with her chewed-up nails, drawing blood from her chubby face & winces from her puckered lips before running further into the recesses of the warehouse. She yanked at the wires which pulled at her feet, screeching with panic as she trashed around… her hoarse voice surrounding the air with ripples of reverberated terror. Sprinting past the water-damaged boxes, the bent decaying metal, the offices lined with humanoid dust & rotting paper– each chamber revealing a new flavor of degradation, a new veneer ready to crumble into nothingness as the oxygen chips away at its fragile surfaces.
At its end, the pipe’s rusting interior melted down onto the cold concrete, brown & orange hues dully glowing in the haze of the rising sun– the plastic, dusty faces of discarded bodies which all once resembled Judy’s skeletal frame before withering & surrendering to the oxidizing air. Thousands of them filled the cavities surrounding this garbage dump beneath June’s dirtied feet, beer cans & computer chip squashed up against ersatz flesh. The stench of rotting food brought tears to Susie’s eyes, piquantly detailed with overtones of still water & dead fish brought from the waterfront by the morning breeze. Above June’s shaky head, the lights of the city reflected with ripples onto the lake of sludge bubbling & shambling as garbage & refuse sunk into the darkness of the earth. June continued to run with large strides over the Styrofoam islands & plastic bushes, Susie in pursuit but unsure of where she’d be running too for there was no escape from the walls of this dump– the city only blinked with silence while June wheezed & coughed, her tired face ever more lit with beautiful orange light and Susie stood watching as her sobs returned yet again and her body found its rest on an old molding fridge lodged into the ruins of a widescreen television, the fine hair of her muddy legs standing on end & turning white as rays of yellow touched the dust & garbage particles flowing through the air lookin’ like fireflies who’d burn into the brightness of the early morning.