Doomed

ready to spread to the rest of the temple, the mountain, the continent. Even subjected to my cardiac arrest I’m forced to choose between kissing my panicked mom and dad with wormy, diseased lips… or advancing in a new direction to extinguish a rapidly spreading conflagration of potentially epic proportions.

Even as I vacillate in indecision, a lissome hand emerges from a slit in the velvet draperies of the sedan chair. A melodious voice says, “Fear not!” The hand, this perfect ideal of a hand, elegant and otherworldly, its fingers sweep aside the red velvet to reveal the chair’s occupant: a winsome maiden. A youthful goddess.

Even as the bubbling fire grows to feed on more plastic steps… a Styrofoam pedestal… the base of a polystyrene obelisk, the perfect maid enthroned at the center of this populous crowd, this slender girl swings her willowy legs and steps forth from the chair. Her hair is lustrous, supporting a gilded wreath of olive leaves. Her limbs smooth. Her face unmarred by eyeglasses. Her sylphlike frame is adorned in a simple yeoman’s tunic of familiar blue chambray.

This ideal maiden points a perfect finger at me and demands, “Be gone, noxious abomination! Retreat, you overweight pretender!” She squares her shoulders and proudly announces, “Behold, for I am Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer—returned from the grave to bring mankind eternal life.”

DECEMBER 21, 2:31 P.M. HAST Denounced!

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Gentle Tweeter,

In a leap, the beautiful stranger pounces. Even as I sprawl, dying on the plastic ground, she launches her winsome form from the sedan chair and lands squarely upon my bared, quivering spine.

Beneath her, I scramble. I crawl to escape. For a struggling moment the perfect child is astride me. Her toned buttocks planted in the small of my back, she beats me about the head with her fists. Clutching my ragged hair, she pushes my face toward the growing candle-kindled fire until my skin blisters. The heat swells my lips like an overdose of collagen, stretching the skin so tight that it splits.

So close are the flames that the tasseled end of my oily pigtail smolders. The braided strands begin to burn like a stinking, slow-motion fuse.

My bones, broken… my heart, ailing… I’m helpless, unable to raise myself. No one comes to my aid. The ghost Mr. K stands off to one side, sobbing. The succubus, Babette, is off to the other side, howling with demonic joviality, while the assembled Boorites weep and gnash their teeth.

It’s clear: My parents don’t love me. My parents don’t even recognize me. They love this, this skinny, Barbie-dolled version of me.

Be warned, my predead followers: When you take occupancy of any physical form you must remain in residence until its ultimate demise. You must suffer until life’s accumulated insults render the vessel inoperative. That said, my spirit cannot flee. I’m forced to undergo this painful battering.

I writhe beneath her surprising weight. Twisting to face her. As her uniform, the Barbie-Madison wears the infamous, gunk-despoiled chambray shirt, the tails rippling above her bare legs. As her cudgel she bears The Voyage of the Beagle, that book so much annotated with dried blood. Wielding the not-lightweight missive, she pounds my borrowed face. My head lolls, coughing spit and mewling incoherent protest. Scalding tears geyser from my borrowed eyes.

Despite these exertions, the impostor Madison seated atop me, she doesn’t perspire. Nor is her breathing taxed by her sustained strenuous efforts. In my own meager defense I pummel her torso with my knobby elbows and knees, but I might as well be slugging the great black-rubber tires of an upstate eighteen-wheeler.

The book’s leather binding collapses my nose, flattening it sideways, leaving me gasping. My ears boxed and ringing. My vision filled with bright stars.

Desperate, my fingers grasp a handful of her garment. To this I doggedly hold fast, wrestling the blue shirt from her svelte frame, leaving her not clothed, but to no avail. Modesty does not stem her efforts. To all Boorist eyes we must appear as a depraved naked pervert, a poorly complexioned, libidinous skeleton, grappling to molest a nude lass.

Gradually, I offer less resistance. After the first half hundred thuds, one slug in my kisser is pretty much like another. A trauma-induced lethargy sets in. Not even the pain can hold my attention, and my thoughts wander. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross never mentions it, but there’s another stage of dying. Besides anger, denial, and bargaining, there’s boredom. Yes, boredom. You abandon yourself.

A strange sense of peace settles. Even as the hardcover tome batters me senseless, my struggling is replaced by a resignation more deadening than Rohypnol. If I’m to die… so be it. If she’s more to their liking, let my mother and father adopt this pristine Maddy doll. From farther and farther away, I can smell hair smoking. Faintly, I can hear fists smacking jellied meat, my body already splashing-wet with blood.

This isn’t anywhere I haven’t been before. I’ve given up. In words muffled with exhaustion I whisper a prayer for my heart to stop.

You, the predead, you must hate hearing this. You hate a backslider, but I am. I’m shirking my life. Not living up to my full potential, I quit.

If there is a grand plan, I surrender to it. I give up to my fate.

Subjected to such a violent skirmish, even the Beagle book begins to disintegrate. Coming apart, the pages dissemble, sentence by sentence. Fluttering down upon me are scraps of paper. Penciled words. Of these falling shreds, one appears to be on fire. An edge of the torn page in question flickers with bright orange light. It’s Festus, wee Festus escorting the scrap of paper. His golden hummingbird wings fluttering wildly, he hovers, holding it within my view.

There, scribbled in childish blue pen, is written, Set yourself a goal so difficult that death will seem like a welcome reprieve….

Here, Gentle Tweeter, my failing brain issues a final inspired belch. Perhaps this… this violent engagement is the battle against evil for which my family and generations of telemarketers have been grooming me.

Here is the trial which Leonard has so long foretold.

Survival of the fittest versus survival of the nicest.

To stem this hail of blows I lift my twisted hands to grip the volume. My wasted fingers hold fast, and my trembling arms wrestle for possession of Mr. Darwin’s cruel travelogue. Please take note. A magic reversal has occurred: Once again a dying cadaver-man is engaged in a dark tug-of-war with a gamine child.

With a great cry of anguish I seize control of the book. The weapon is mine.

Once more swinging the blood-and-sperm-saturated memoirs of C. Darwin, that disillusioned theologian, I invest the last of my dwindling strength in a great swat that connects with the crown of my adversary’s comely noggin. This crippling smack-down drives her backward, stunning her for the moment. That same impact dislodges a final shower of desiccated violets and pansies from between the book’s sodden pages.

Likewise do more fragments of the paper detach and cling to my attacker. The castle of Mr. Darwin’s mind crumbles brick by brick. A dissolving inventory of the natural world. Blasting my foe is this buckshot of memes: bifurcation… crustacean… flocculent, and Diodon. They papier-mache her like a pinata. Wollaston… wigwag… Fuegians and scurvy. These smother my foe. Her perfect not-nearsighted eyes, they’re invaded by a stinging grit of facts and details. All of Mr. Darwin’s lizards and thistles. My mom and my nana’s long-archived flowery specimens.

The beautiful not-Madison screams in frustrated rage, her peepers pasted over. She’s blinded.

In the next instant the smoldering wick of my pigtail flogs her much-combustible paper coating. She’s set ablaze as the disgorged words and blossoms attack her with their immolating heat. No longer assaulting me, instead she’s beating at her own flanks, swatting to subdue her flaming loins. Even as she struggles to quell the fire, she’s clawing away great softened handfuls of herself. Tearing herself to pieces.

At the same time, she’s screaming. She capers. Her banshee wails distort her features even as the temperature of burning paper melts and buckles her feet, her knees, her annoyingly slender thighs.

Continuing to clutch the yuck-infused chambray shirt and the flaking book, I cower on the nearby ground. Babbling wildly now, as bloodied and nude as the newborn me in the birthing video, I sob, “I’m sorry I was such a