Smush

Brian's Narrative

Steven's Narrative

Charlie was a geeky, scrawny, bookworm of a kid – buck toothed with a shock of straw colored hair and thick unflattering glasses. Other kids could be found outside playing football, baseball or kick the can, Charlie was just as likely to be found in his bedroom with his fern. Not that he didn’t play with the other kids, it’s just that he was terribly uncoordinated and scrawny. The one physical attribute that Charlie did have was a modest amount of speed, not great speed, but above average swiftness. This was somewhat handy in a good game of tag or to avoid bullies, but one good bump was enough to leave him a pile of skin and bones akimbo. God didn’t bless Charlie in the arena of athletic prowess, he made up for it by giving Charlie an imagination that was a continuous source of twisted amusement and violent entertainment. The furnace that kept Charlie’s imagination roaring was fueled with ideas.

Charlie was a mental escape artist at a young age. Books and imagination were the tools of his trade. Frankenstein, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and Star Trek, these sci-fi novels captivated him. He was raised in a Catholic family with two older brothers and three younger sisters. His was in a precarious position in the sibling food chain. His father believed that boys’ getting physical with boys was acceptable to a level, but under no circumstance was it acceptable for a boy to get physical with a girl. So when the usual amount of jockeying for position took place to establish sibling dominance, Charlie’s slight stature and younger age had him getting pushed around by his older brothers, but he was unable to act out towards his younger sisters. That was not acceptable under any circumstance, even when he was provoked or the victim of an outright attack. Charlie got it from both sides and had no place to turn to give it back. And when he often felt overwhelmed by the inevitable process of establishing his place in the external world, Charlie would invariably escape to his internal world where he was always the mad scientist with his victims on the slab.

Very early in his life, Charlie learned he could escape the annoyances and discomfort of reality by beating a retreat to the safety of his consoling daydreams in the kingdom of his mind. There, Charlie was always in control. He was the envy of all. Everyone did his bidding, they were all his mindless robots and he had control over them. Yet, his actual life where he was anything but in control and often felt overlooked and overshadowed by almost everyone. In grade school, the way Charlie most easily got the attention he seemed to alternately crave and disdain was to play the cynic. Charlie never consciously developed this strategy of malevolence. He seemed to just innately gravitate toward this path as if he was genetically predisposed toward it. Like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, he did not give the matter much thought. It simply seemed as if this was the role he was born to fulfill. He wasn’t even fully conscious of his actions. Mostly what he did was try to take in what others said to him, alter it, and when he sent the animosity back out in to the cold abyss it would strike the intended victim with a vicious backhand. Charlie would steal other people’s retorts, whether from a friend or sibling or something he saw on television. If something struck Charlie as cruel he would make a mental note to assimilate the material and pretend it was his own. So it seems Charlie was something of a fraud from an early age as well. However, as often as Charlie was acting out to gain attention, he was hiding to avoid the very same. Although looking back, it doesn’t seem Charlie was so much avoiding attention at those times as he simply was very uncomfortable with people.

Charlie read an enormous amount in his formative years, all manner of books and authors. He was especially drawn to stories of horror and science. Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and Dr. Jeckle and Mr. Hyde were examples of stories Charlie lost himself in at an early age. Charlie, while reading “Hannible” in his third grade class, was discovered by a teacher who saw what he was reading she was so disgusting for a child so young that she sent Charlie down the hall to the principal to show him. Charlie burst with anger at being singled out in this fashion. Life added yet another enduring source of pain into his awareness. Charlie was bitter. He had the potential for great destruction. All of his teachers said so.

As the years went by puberty was brutal to Charlie. He didn’t fit in when he was younger and adding pimples and braces to the equation left Charlie, awkward and cold. Charlie’s obsession with science grew, as did he and he found his niche in the science lab. Here for the first time in his life he excelled, well kind of.

“Why had the immaturity of the fern threatened the teacher so much? Surly the disrespect of a child, especially one without responsible parents can’t be held accountable for their actions,” Charlie thought.

The crowd was covered in deep green chunks, the color of chorophillic vomit. “It’s never gotten sick before, I swear.” Charlie in a white lab coat started wiping some of the green ooze off the principal's shirt.

“Get off of me, right now! I don’t know who or how anyone allowed you to create such a stupid science project, but I can assure you for the embarrassment you have caused me as well as the entire school, you will be suspended!” The principal turned almost sliding on a giant bubble, but instead it popped like one of Charlie's pimples casting a final insult into the face of Charlie. No one noticed as he was left wiping off his glasses.

“Did it even occur to you that that was important?” he asked. The scene pulls back, shifts, and comes close up on a giant fern, as nameless and faceless as God. It wiggles. “I needed you to be on your best behavior.” Charlie dug into his pocket, taking out tiny bags of fertizlier. “So, that’s were all those miracle grow sticks went. You’re a bad fern. A very bad fern.” The fern wiggles.

His eyes stretched as large as his face in a blink designed to swallow the whole world. The sweat rolled down his face and pooled below his chest in the obese river formed by the fission of breast and stomach. He needed a glass of water. It had only been two years, he thought. He needed a glass of water. It was only just a break. Everything would pull together, he thought. He needed a glass of water. Charlie got out of bed and farted. He had eaten eggs for all three meals yesterday. Breakfast was an omelet, lunch was scrambled eggs, and dinner was birdie in the nest, his favorite. The room stunk like a funeral for a gangrened paper-mill. Charlie’s face lit up with pride. Sometimes when he got his nightmares down on paper it caused them to go away.

“Puerile actions engender death. The death motif lifts a smile to the mouth of any God fearing man,” he wrote. Charlie wasn’t afraid of God. He soon was back on the bed again, so tired his eyes were nailed shut.

“If I throw my entire weight onto the device maybe it could stop the thing?” he said aloud to the empty room. He held the cup of water up to the unshaded bulb and said a prayer to the oblong beaker. Tiny organisms engendered through filth, or should I say lack of cleaniness, began mating rituals as soon as they realized they were about to be imbibed. A great truth revealed, they fucked despite the potential for viable offspring. “Now if only there was a way to prove the existence of love?” thought Charlie as he drank. “If I could remove the pleasure sensors from them, provide them with foreknowledge of their death as well as that of their offspring, perhaps then, if they mated.”

The room was all wires and tubes, except for a small crib in the corner, blue for a boy. Actually the fern had both male and female spores. When puberty first hit, it would play with itself for hours. Charlie became nervous, not just because of all the masteubatory spores, but because of a knock at the door.

“Honey, open up immediately,” said a soft voice. Charlie opened the door. His mom and dad entered, along with two men, one of them was the principal who had been there for yesterday’s demonstration, the other was a very official looking man. What was going on? Yesterday wasn’t so horrible, he had proven that a fern could develop into a higher range of consciousness, that was a technology that could be utilized. Deploying potted plants to the jungles of the world, he could take over the world!

“What do you want!?” said Charlie, but they pushed him out of the way.

“Hold him,” said the principal to Charlie's parents. He walked straight up to the fern’s crib. It began to water itself and shake.

“What are you doing?” asked Charlie, frenetically.

“This project if formally over,” he said. He picked the dripping fern by its stem and showed it a galvanic flicker. How beautiful it spun, endless flashes of light, lambent sun, a vortex to the other side. The fern shook. It wasn’t scared about what was to be done to it, it was scared that it had so fallen in love with the repetitive blade it knew it would have to be close to it. Was the blade its mother? The principal set the fern on the ground in front of it.

Charlie screamed and hid his face in his mother’s bosom, something he hadn’t done since he was little.

The fern walked directly into the makeshift weedwacker.

The same verdant vomit shot onto the stern face of the teacher.

Another sweat, this time the whole bed was a seaweed pool of low thread count sheets. Charlie needed a glass of water. He drank.

A segment of Trey's original narrative became this. Thank you, Cory!

Indeed, after the park rangers first put the clampdown on Nappy the rabbit, there was an avalanche of aggressive boulders from the Recreation Industry Association of America (RIAA), who seem to have an endless supply of boulders and a will-to-throw-them to match. Nappy's massive efforts to protect the coming obsolescence of his habitat, in coordination with the Digging Micromanagement Copycat Act, the Copycat Extension Act, have made it possible for the RIAA to put pressure on ecological systems and the Fornicating 500 alike. Preying on rabbits and woodland creatures greatest common fear—being eaten—the RIAA has attempted to outsource some of the work to forest rangers, and even directly suing individual creatures who are feeling the backlash of the Nappy incident. After-Nappy creatures such as Kazaa the wolf, Bearshare the bear, Morpheus the cunning fox, and imesh the rabbit trapping equipment used by hunters; these individuals are profiting in the destruction of Nappy’s natural habitat. During Nappy’s wake, the production/consumption distinction (so cherished by skinners, the RIAA and the RMPAA (Rabbit Meat Production Association of America) noticably salivated when communities of hunter and fur-traders brought a new wave of habitat protocols to the forest. This trend first became apparent in Kazaa's decentralized practice of doing business. After Kazaa was sued in 2001, the foxes disappeared completely from the radar, only to remerge with a new rabbit hunting structure that was hardly a structure, at all. Kazaa’s new armature was decentralized completely, dispersed worldwide. Hunting, domain, capturing, killing, and all parts of the preying structure, including fox communications itself, were dispersed in separate nodes, with geophysical touchstones in fox-haven island locations, Denmark, and Australia. RIAA subpoenas might have pressed the issue, but it was Kazaa’s hunters (up to 60 million at the time) that produced this model of business in the rhythmic activity they engaged. Kazaa learned from their supernodes that decentralization, if intensified, could add exponential value to the killing of rabbits.