We hadn’t seen each other for years, but never in the time we were together cared to once talk about our jobs, wives, kids. We sat, disheveled after the long car ride, but content, staring at a waning fire while idle conversation drew to an awkward but necessary close. The last we had seen of each other was at the ballfield thirty years ago. We had got run-ruled and Harry almost broke down in the locker room after.
You change a lot from then.
Your appearance furrows. You stop giving a shit. You can’t at this point. Will got more round. Dave got a little smaller cause his spine’s starting to decompress. He’s still our Big Weed, him and all his fucking albatross arms, and Harry and Jack haven’t aged a day over thirty.
‘Cept for Will. He gets fatter every time I see him.
Fat Will Slim—that’s what they called Chubby Will—greeted the others with words, as people are known to do. Jack, Harry, and Dave, like a Tom, Dick, and Harry that were named Jack, Harry, and Dave rather than Tom, Dick, and Harry, greeted Fat Will with smiles and chuckles, hiding their respective exasperation at his words. Fat Will was short in stature but long in words, and those two features had not lessened with the years, but had rather increased via his osteoporosis and methamphetamine addiction. Harry wondered how a methhead like Will could still be fat. The answer was that Will would have been even fatter if he wasn’t slamming, smoking, and boofing meth every single day. Yes, Will was one fat son of a bitch.
It was well into the night and the scotch was getting to everyone. Will appeared to be nibbling his own hand. There’d been rumors that the reason Slim’d gotten so big was that he’d taken up eating things that no man dare eat. Wood, grass, dirt…some say he’d started eating household objects.
Big Weed, never being one to keep his mind, said, “Slim, just, Jesus.”
Fat Will Slim kept chewing. Harry was dead out. The coons came in, but we had nothing to offer. We were too old to unpack anything, much less the big ass cooler.
“It’s time,” said Jack, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it with the severity of a John Henry hammer blow, “to cut the bullshit and do what we came here to do. Slim…Slim…for fuck’s sake, that’s citronella you’re eating.”
“Tastes like brie to me,” said Slim.
“Harry, wake up. Somebody wake that son’bitch up. I swear he’d sleep through the return of Christ.”
Jack threw a piece of kindling at Harry’s face. It bounced off his forehead and he said, still asleep, “juniper stockings.”
“We made a promise years ago. To each other. To ourselves. It’s about damn time we got to keeping it,” said Jack.
“Oh, settle your nervous self down, Jack,” said Slim, slapping his jowls. “You’ve always been high-strung. I’m surprised I haven’t had a nervous breakdown just watching you fidget. Thirty years and you still haven’t learned to relax. No, we’ll do this tomorrow morning after we’ve partaken of our breakfast rather than just rushing off nervous.”
A barred owl began moaning from the top of a far off tree.
Harry didn’t even open his eyes when he said, “And just what the fuck was that, the Ghost of Hell?”
Jack was hungry. Watching Slim eat made him aware how hungry he was. He didn’t want to ask him for food because it looked like shit.
“What are you eating?” he asked.
“You want one?” said Slim and handed a bag over.
“Nah, I’m good.” said Jack.
“Shut the fuck up,” said Harry. “I’m trying to sleep.”
Slim dumped the bag of Cheetos over Harry. “Screw you.”
“Oh fuck,” said Jack, as Harry jumped and planted a hunting knife in Slim’s blubber. Black blood poured down and stained Slim’s T-shirt like piss. He started screaming and crying like a girl. He fell to the ground, clutching his wound like a man with indigestion.
“Oh fuck,” said Jack again.
From the living room closet, there was a commotion of beating fists and half-human shrieks.
“I guess it’s time to let him out,” said Harry.
“Him?” said Jack.
“There’s one more guest. I took the liberty of inviting him.”
Harry opened the closet door and a body spilled out, hands and feet tied.
“Chris?” said Jack. “Just what in the hell is going on here?”
Chris was the black star from the basketball team. He was the only black guy at their school. Technically, he was an octoroon, but somehow he’d turned out black as squid ink.
Outside, a group of Indians from a lost tribe approached the cabin. Each of the Indians wore their hair in a feminine fashion. Two of them wore lipstick and all of them wore dresses. But still, each were armed with tomahawks and rifles: you would not want to mess with these fuckers.
The chief Indian began to act out a mime in front of the shack, while the others whooped and yelled.
“What the fuck is that?” asked Chris.
“I think they want to rape our gay asses,” said Dave.
“Goddammit, it’s a tribe of two spirits,” said Jack. “They may look queer as hell, but they’re as savage as they come.”
“Why do you think I brought Chris?” said Harry. “They demand a sacrifice. I’ve been wanting to get back at that son-of-a-bitch since grade school.”
“Yeah,” said Fat Will Slim, “that whore’s turd stole my favorite mechanical pencil in sixth grade.”
“I also thought he was a bitch,” said Big Weed.
“Hey, Chris, come here,” said Jack, waving him over. “They said they want to talk to you.”
“The hell they want?”
Big Weed Dave spread his arm and gently pushed the octoroon into the Indian hive.
The tribe started dancing and shouting “WEEEE WEEEE,” while the chief stood motionless watching the octoroon.
Chris nodded his head, “Yeah, yeah,” he said, “these cats got a wicked beat.” He turned back to look at the white men and made his stupid ass laugh like a puttering Model T with the sound of a “k” thrown in. Kee kee kee kee kee.
The Indian braves stopped yapping and dancing and walked over to Chris.
“Yo, that shit was tight!” he said, raising his hand for a bro shake, but the native put his hand in a lock and another took his left arm. “What the fuck, nigga?” Chris said. They held him before the chief, who was steady as a stone.
The chief held his hand up to the moon and then did a quick skip up to Chris.
“Hey now, muthafucka, you steppin up?” said Chris. “And, yo, tell these faggots to get their hands off me. Loosen up!”
The chief lifted his hand again and the octoroon quieted. The hand was wrinkled like a mitten, but the red nail polish was glistening. He slowly brought the hand down and touched Chris’s forehead. Just when his tender fingertips touched the brow, the old chief said, “Nigga.”
“What the shit,” said Chris.
The old chief raised his hand again and slowly brought it down to touch the octoroon’s head, again saying, “Nigga.”
The chief did this again and again and then backed away slowly. He raised both his arms to the moon and screamed, “WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE ho ho, WEEEEEEE.” The sound made Fat Will Slim cover his ears.
The hive of Indians began chanting, “Wee ho ho ho,” and the Chief began stomping his moccasin foot.
“You muthafuckas, I’m serious!” said Chris. “Let me the fuck go!”
The tribe began whistling and the old chief turned around and began shaking his ass. The way his hips moved was like a female serpent.
“Quick, Jack!” said Big Weed, and an ice cold can of beer landed in Jack’s hands. The beers were handed out to Dave and Harry and the four men sat on the front porch of the cabin watching the chief shake his lovely Native American ass. The way he shook it was a dream of angels and as articulate as a corn spider. Somehow, he could move each cheek like a person can wiggle one ear.
The chief turned around and cupped his breasts in his hands and shook it up like a Moulin Rouge dancer. The hive continued to whistle and one put his fingers in his mouth and whistled louder than them all when the chief spun back around and began untying his buckskin trousers.
“Welp,” said Jack and cracked open another beer.
“Yup,” said Harry, cracking the ice cold beverage.
The chief shook his flowing locks like a supermodel and clapped his hands over his head. The other Indians stopped making any sound. Then the pants hit the ground, revealing the most organically created red ass ever in the existence of man.
Chris’s eyes looked to be close to popping like a cork out of his head and his mouth was opened in complete astonishment. He saw what the men just began to distinguish in the failing light of dusk: two big eyes, one on each cheek, like the false eyes of a Polyphemus moth.
“YEEEEEEEEE!” cried the two spirited tribe as the chief began to wiggle his ass and hop backwards.
“God, no,” said Harry.
“No, no,” said Fat Will Slim, as the Chief mimicked a Great-Eyed Beast and swirled his ass around in a fury to properly reproduce the action of an insidious animal. Then the thing hopped toward Chris, who was now dumb with shock and held down to meet the ass creature face to face.
The faggotry had just begun. Indeed, what was soon to occur would go into the annals—or rather, anals—of history as the gayest shit to occur in the history of North America, past, present, or future. What follows is not for the faint of heart, nor those with strong moral proclivities, or those with a wavering constitution.
Yes, my boys, we are wading into the soiled waters of the Union when I say that the Chief did not stop at that juncture, but continued to back that ass up as his underlings wailed and me and my kind sat sipping the icy aluminum cans from the vantage of the porch.
The great moth was a foot away from the octoroon, who was merely sniveling like a child, when the smell of the ancient asshole began to hit him like smelling salts. The boys winced as the insect rubbed its red face all over Chris’ dumbfounded mug and again all was silent as the Chief scuttled forward.
There was this infernal sort of grunting and then a loud shout—very feminine, like a woman giving birth—when out shot from between the moth’s eyes a chocolate nose all lumpy and warted like that of a witch. And, like Pinocchio, the nose continued to grow until it entered the octoroon’s gaping and hapless mouth, as the Indian hive began squealing like intrepid thunderhawks.
For five days and five nights, the chief fucked Chris’ ass, as the prophecy foretold. Each time the chief came, his awful insect abdomen contracted and he changed colors like a cuttlefish. Chris’ yelps of pain gradually gave way to a quiet, broken sobbing that waxed and waned with the rising sun.
When the chief was finished, he punched Chris in the back of the head, sending him crashing to the ground. The chief let out a roar of triumph that shook the foundations of the porch. Chris lay motionless, his black ass gleaming in the moonlight, a portion of prolapsed intestine sticking out of his anus like a cherry atop a chocolate sundae.
The barred owl descended from a pine bough and pecked at the prolapse, throwing its head back in a resounding “HOO!” as it greedily gulped down the intestinal bilge.
Fat Will Slim was strangely aroused by the ceremony. His pecker, long subsumed into folds of fat like an aardvark hiding in a manure stack, stirred with an intensity he had not felt in years. Dave sat paralyzed, nursing a can of Keystone Light that never seemed to empty.
“My God, my God, no,” said Jack over and over.
***
For all installments of “Win,” click here.
The Juju Writers’ Collective is a project started by Terror House Magazine Senior Editor Glahn focusing on collaboratively written short stories.
