my warm mouth and we will investigate the night together.
WARM MOUTH: Bentneck, why are you lying between the bed and the wall, stuffed into a few inches narrower than a grave, when the whole night spreads out dazzlingly beyond the Wooden Indian?
BENTNECK: Do I look pretty? It’s hard to speak twisted up like this. My mother brings me here to meet men. They like me in my princess nightie and sometimes I do a few ballet steps from my Barbie DVD. Afterward I get a treat — a Slurpee, and I can choose the color. I hardly ever drink it all before I fall asleep. Everything is not always very nice for me but eventually it is over. Tonight was different, though at first it was the same. And now I’m shoved down between the bed and the wall with all these carpet fibers up my nose and something wet on my head and my hair’s not very clean.
WARM MOUTH: Bentneck, we are also dirty, smashed up, bored, curious, and thirsty. Get up from under that bed, bad girl. Climb up into my warm mouth and we will investigate the night together.
BENTNECK: From now on, I will be called Beauty, for I will narrate this tale. That night, the Warm Mouth conducted similar interviews with a shot-up dog, the suppurating shinbone of a horse, and a blue egg impaled on a stick. All climbed up into the Warm Mouth until its lower lip ballooned like a bullfrog’s and it grew harder and harder to move around. The stinking troupe tried to make camp on the walkway outside the public library, but hinges and bolts, bottle glass, and the plastic remains of a cheap pair of sunglasses littered the ground, irritating the Warm Mouth’s skin and threatening to pierce its distended lip.
WARM MOUTH: Ow!
CHINSCRAPER: Ow!
KNEESCRAPER: Owl!
BENTNECK: Wowl!
DOG: Bowel Wowel!
WOUND: Yowl!
EGG: Buy a vowel! BENTNECK: Ach, nothing’s free! Life’s a peep show, not a look-see!
BENTNECK: So they continued on. They came upon a shipwrecked motel in which people were sleeping behind blinds pinched or rifled or skewed in a pointed, irregular semaphore.
KNEESCRAPER: What does it signal? What can it mean? This pattern in the blinds and shades. This blind pattern. And how a gunshot’s made a sunburst of the cashier’s booth.
WOUND: You can’t make a pattern without shattering a few pasterns.
DOG: But not a very large gauge. And the cashier’s long since gone away. No cash changing hands here. These people are on the squat.
EGG: You can’t make a cat without swallowing a canary. You can’t make a Gatsby without firing a few gats.
CHINSCRAPER: Tell you what. I’m as worn out as a lobby rug. I’m falling apart here. Laid out flat. You can’t make a catcall without catching a few winks.
BENTNECK: Just then they detected a spray of light behind the rightmost room. They pressed closer to the glass, nearly bursting their viscous vehicle, peered through a chink in the blinds, and found themselves looking over the shoulder of a young man who was smoking and playing a boxing game on the TV. The room was bare and worn, but the troupe still thought it would be very nice to be inside lounging on the couch playing a boxing game instead of hunched up against the wall of a motel that looked ready to sink right through the ground. That is, it would be better to sink with the motel than fall in after it.
ALL: Sink Hole
Whack a mole
Bitch and moan
All roll home
We need the sink
We got the hole
We got the rust
We need the blood
We got the broke
We need the mold
All roll home, all roll home
A hole that will take
What we pour down its throat
At the end of the day
When daddy’s come home
Listen honey it’s been sweet
But I got honey of my own
I’m shunting it off
From a hole in my gut
I’ve got jars of the stuff
I’ve got problems of my own
BENTNECK: But now you’ve got only me. Byoo-tee.
BENTNECK: They were lost in this harmony when the young man relit his pipe and then, in a single motion, jumped up and swung around. He yanked at the blinds and peered out into the street. Then he pulled the blinds down so hard that they gave way from the ceiling on the right, exposing half the room. He went out of view and came back, tugging at his lower lip and rubbing at his gum.
YOUNG MAN:
Think and think
Thunk and thunk
Trunk and glove
Land the punch
Bury the pitch
Meat on meat
Whore on whore
Slunk and strove
Strunk and White
Struck and struck out
White light from light
Flight from white flight
Trove, trove
Soul’s trove
What God through me Hove
The bad night I was born
& became a lug
— Nut in this case
Historee.
Locked up with the screws and the bolts.
BENTNECK: But now you’ve got only me. Byootee.
BENTNECK: At that, finally, he looked down and saw them: some roadkill, a starving boy, a murdered girl, a shot-up dog, the suppurating shinbone, and the impaled egg, all tucked up inside the Warm Mouth, which was stretched so thin it was nearly transparent, a clear fluid traced with pus seeping from one corner. They all blinked at the young man through their wounds, and their shattered and cramped limbs shifted wetly. Then they all started
