Genital Grinder

Section VII

“Think starlight,” Ursula said. “By the time it gets to us, it’s thousands of years old. Those stars could be dead, but you’d never know it to look at the night sky. We’ll think they’re alive for millennia after they’ve burnt out.”

Lee smirked. “Now there’s a fresh metaphor for you.”

Geoff said, “Personally, I think you’re wasting your time trying to convince him that way. The important thing is that a woman who never existed before was very alive before we ripped her from our reality like a page in a notebook. We believe this wasn’t something anyone could do before the end of the century. Something shifted in the relationship between art and its limits, maybe because it had to.”

Ursula wasn’t about to be denied another metaphor. “If you accept the idea that the universe was a clock wound and abandoned by a creator, what happens in the time between when it is stopping and rewound? Maybe something new. We felt it. This wasn’t something we accidentally discovered. We knew it would work. We weren’t waiting for the right time, but no time. That’s where we are now. Artists all over the world could interpret the same subject to no effect, but when the three of us do it, it lives.”

Section VIII

The trial and error behind this had been the cause of its obscurity. It was not the kind of thing they wanted to publicly experiment with, because they could not afford any attention before mastery. To do what they’d just done with Rebecca . . . to make her exactly as they wanted . . . wasn’t innate. (I can’t say it took time to learn, because by that point there was no longer any such thing.) Their ideology valued art over humanity, and in their hands art was no idle expression awaiting admiration, condemnation, or indifference. Their golems were still hostile, but not toward the authors. It was the audience endangered now. Don’t blame the messenger; kill the recipients. I was like-minded, but that didn’t explain why Ursula wanted me there. The why behind their new talent was of secondary importance to me anyway; I wanted to know what. What could be done with it? And how. How far could it go?

“Want to try an experiment?” Geoff asked.

Section IX

If somewhere there is a race of almond-eyed extra-terrestrials bending time and space to travel great distances and dislocate the rectums of unlucky homo sapiens with their excruciating probes, perhaps they will land on this planet long after it is deserted and wonder where all the potential rape victims absconded. Maybe they will sift through the ruins to find clues to the great exodus. This would be the first.

From The Herald, article by Jackson Zirnheld.

“MAN CLAIMS ASSAULT BY ANIMATED VILLAIN”

While walking home from work, Peter Swaggerty was undeniably attacked. Beyond that, the facts are difficult to establish. Swaggerty insists that his broken limbs and extensive bruising resulted from the assault of a figure he claimed was an animated drawing.

“Sure, I know it sounds crazy,” he concedes, “but I know what I saw. It was like some kind of insane dream that I still haven’t woken up from.” He describes his assailant as “sleek and very powerful. We’ve all seen him for years on those old neighborhood watch signs, the guy who’s a black silhouette except for his crazy eyes. He’s the one who attacked me last night, as if he stepped right off the sign to pummel me. He looks like that Marvin the Martian cartoon in his face, but Marvin the Martian never said stuff like ‘I’m gonna pull your entrails right through your [backside].’”

Swaggerty suffered six cracked ribs, eight broken fingers, elaborate facial damage, a dislocated shoulder, a compound ulnar fracture, and two broken legs as he attempted to crawl away. He was walking the three blocks to his house from his job at a movie theater when he was ambushed on Bava Lane.

“No one will believe this, I know, but that guy’s still out there, and he’ll keep taking people down. I’ll be scared to walk the streets when I get out of here. From now on, I’m taking the bus.”

Police declined to comment on how seriously they are taking Swaggerty’s account of events.

Section X

It was the best review we could have asked for. Peter Swaggerty had seen what we could do, and he was afraid. Everyone was laughing at him, of course, and there would be no reappearance of this mysterious hybrid of Marvin the Martian and Edmond Kemper, but the skeptics would learn in time. It went like we’d hoped. Lee sculpted him, and Ursula and Geoff painted before and after representations of his violence to Swaggerty, whose routine they had noticed months ago. We probably didn’t have to model the victim after a person we recognized, but to be on the safe side we did. Swaggerty might have invented the dialogue, but maybe that was the kind of thing a black silhouette with crazy eyes was born to say. Lee speculated that Blackie (as we called him) used Swaggerty as the author of his own pain. After that, we took more chances in preparation for our masterpiece. I gave my input on what we might utilize in these unorthodox manifestations, such as the neighborhood watch assailant (which had always haunted me as a child; being kidnapped was my worst fear), but I could contribute little else. Lee, Geoff, and Ursula worked tirelessly, and the experiments multiplied.

A steel incarnation of Baphomet showed up at a highly publicized environmentalist festival, resulting in the deaths of six at the hooves of the uninvited guest and another twelve trampled as by-standers fled, screaming in abject terror. Blood, it turns out, was not seen as very “green.’ A midnight screening of Demons was interrupted when a helicopter inexplicably crashed through the theater roof. Miraculously, the propellers continued whirling, and a full house was treated to the privilege of live decapitations and torso halving (provided they weren’t the decapitatees and halvees). No crew members were ever found, nor was anyone ever able to determine where exactly the chopper had come from. That something almost identical happened in the movie was actually comforting to many, as though it proved it was simply a bizarre stunt rather than a paranormal phenomenon. No interpretations were offered for the letters EOTA painted on the side of the helicopter. The dream factory of the Gard Theater proved tragically cruel for another audience, some of whom were ground up in its cogs in something that would ultimately be called “the Gard Incident”. A teenager texting a friend (about something nobody cared about even after what happened) suddenly stood up, shrieking that she couldn’t see. Her boyfriend and another friend on her row came to her aid, while other jaded movie-goers told her to shut her trap. They needn’t have worried. The friend (the recipient of the text, two seats away) held her illuminated cell phone screen up to the screaming girl’s face. The faint blue glow revealed busy spools of blood gushing down her cheekbones. Her friends promptly joined her in a choir of ear-splitting hysteria (the boyfriend arguably more so). Someone else’s makeshift cell phone flashlight added some unfortunate radiance to the macabre display, just in time for the