(Published in November 2018 in Splatterpunk Forever anthology, edited by Jack Bantry and Kit Power)
Midday. Syrena, the Bearded Woman of the Suprême, heats up a grenadine of orange crystals in the large silt-static ignition pan, a cult item for circus trailers; her red bean soup, kept inside her fridge inside flexible water cans with a variable-value tag: Expiré le 3 Février, 37 p.U. Three years ago.
“Armand? Armand!” The lady is restless.
“I’m here, sweetmeat,” the dwarf answers in a syrupy voice, hopping and popping his miniature jaws.
“Stop doing that hideous noise, you know I can’t stand it!” the woman groans; she is the size of a career gladiator. “Have you bought sweet potatoes?” she immediately adds, scratching her right breast.
“But…honey, you know this morning I had rehearsals for the donkey show, how could I…”
“Fuck, fuck, and fuck! I should have married Mister Skeleton, not a flea like you… He still fondles my ass, you know? That’s a real man…”
“Sure, sure…twenty years ago, maybe,” the proud dwarf defends himself. “Since they installed the Fabergè electric pick in his prostate, he can hardly walk, all spread-legged… and he pisses more than a horse. It’s those discharges, you know, that contraption doesn’t work well…That’s what you get when you do surgery in a garage…”
“You’re only jealous—always have been. That’s a real man, let me tell you. And next time he fondles, I’m spreading my thighs for him…Knowing that, maybe you’ll get hard again too, Mister Flea.”
“But, sweetmeat, what are you saying?” the tiny man whines. “All this fuss over three kilos of sweet potatoes, eh?”
“I’m serious. No potatoes? Spread thighs. Understood? Let me think about his prostate… I’m going to work that stud with gusto. Just let me finish cooking this shit and feed the kids…that noble ancestry of donkey tamers you had me dump on the Earth. You’ll have to live with it, and don’t you come watch…”
Armand’s cheeks turn red, unlike the violet tomatoes in the bowl close to the woman, dark and weirdly chromed like every vegetable on their table, coming from the illegal magnetic-induction greenhouses in district 4. Though their circus wages aren’t half bad, they certainly cannot afford New Scotland products. Clean products. The little man squeezes his diminutive fists, pops his jaws again and assaults the calves of his granitic wife. A bite, then two more. Not even a piranha would be that quick and lethal.
“Son of a bitch!” she screams, bucking, while her precious red beard dips a few centimeters into the by-now boiling soup. “Jesus, look what you’ve done. If this gets burned, I’m losing my job…shitty flea. Let me catch you!”
A Satanic sneer on her face—like a billy-goat to whom they have just snatched a testicle—she grabs a knife and chases her husband, making the trailer rock. Two dogs, out there, guarding the empty air set beneath the yellowish sky, begin barking, almost resurrecting.
“Stop, or this time I’ll charge double!”
The tiny man zigzags around the table, like a rabbit with its ass on fire; he must find his wife tamer before she grasps his neck, or he will be in trouble. He hid it under the cube of the kids’ entertainment system. The she-bison is strong, but slow; he kneels on the carpet, reaches out and finds the Holy Grail of the sons of a lesser and drunken god, the instrument turning any South Paris 5 dwarf into a superman. He stops shaking and stands, brandishing—with glittering eyes—his electric cat-o’-nine-tails.
“Come here, sweetmeat…” he hisses, like a cobra ready to strike.
Red button? No, come on: killing her would be too much, the usual lesson will be enough…blue button it is. The cat-o’-nine-tails sucks energy in a single breath, excitedly vibrating; LEDs light up on the tips of the claw-shaped whips, then its induction lead spheres animate themselves. Flagellation, without going too far, and then a nice screw to make peace; Armand’s usual schedule, whenever he forgets buying something for his neurasthenic corsair bride. Jesus Christ, sweet potatoes!
The Bearded Woman pulls up short, staring at that hellish device as it flares up in the hand of the man of the house. “Bastard…” she whispers, already exhausted, blood squirting backward in her veins, filling up too soon her disproportionate head; just at the sight of the flail, she feels her back and buttocks burn like hell.
“You know how this is going to go down, right, sweetmeat?”
The little man swings his portable Armageddon upward, popping his jaws to infuriate his wife even more, as she stays unmoving like a presidential guard, the tips of her pink slippers on the imaginary red line of pain, on the threshold. She is going to pass it, it is going to hurt. Outside, the ghost dogs keep barking; the smaller, contaminated by strange purple stains on his back—you really shouldn’t suck on bones buried in Uxor-sick dirt—leaps forward and approaches the flexible water window of trailer 7. He wants to enjoy the scene, his paws laying on the laminal gap where sludge flows, and his tail up straight.
The dwarf stops lingering; he articulates his shoulder and bends in baseball-pitcher pose, ready to unleash the flail on the woman’s massive body, as she foams rage-bubbles from the corners of her mouth. But something does not work: an invisible motherfucker—the same wraith which scared the dogs outside?—snatches the cat-o’-nine-tails off his hand, sucking it upward. Armand raises his eyes to the low ceiling of his mobile home and sees the clawed rosary—his only weapon—coiled up among the blades of the fan. It’s been goddamn hot, these last few days, and the fixing up of the environmental temperature generator has ended up somewhere with Syrena’s sweet potatoes. The blame falls on the donkeys, with their phosphorescent reins and their semi-organic saddles with silvery fringes, affixed to their back via hinges grafted to their spines—may Michelet be blessed for his invention of the neural screw, better than prehistoric Jenner and his smallpox vaccine—and antimony sulfate around their big, stupid bluish eyes. Beasts demanding daily care and training.
Unarmed, the dwarf grins to the Bearded Woman, showing her the small piano wedged in his mouth, made of yellow and black teeth, while its hammers beat on his palate making him stammer, his quick little eyes pointed on her knife—he tries to say something useful: “Can we skip directly to making peace, this time?”
Clenching her teeth, his wife advances walking wide-legged, slowly rocking, as though she wore jeans with a too-narrow crotch—maybe she is possessed by John Wayne’s holo-ghost. She grabs the donkey tamer by his hair, lifts him up and takes him close to her big rage-flaming face, perfectly matching her polished violet lipstick and reddish beard.
“It’s you who doesn’t know how this is going to go down, big man…” she says to him in a hoarse voice, then turning back to check the sizzling pan. The soup is burning, goodbye. “You’re worse than plague…see what you’ve done? Not only will I spread my thighs for Mister Skeleton, but your nice white belly too…”
While Armand tries to struggle out of the she-bison’s grasp, jerking like a jack-in-the-box with his feet in the air, she sinks her knife in his still-empty stomach, spits in his face and drops him, deflated, on the floor.
The man twists on the ground, his short-fingered hand trying to plug the gash; he is dying accompanied by a strange soundtrack: the overheating fan engine, bogged down in the wife-tamer’s tails. It rustles and buzzes like a hornet about to explode in a little glass trap—the last sounds he will hear, besides the blops of the bitch’s knife that keeps raging upon him, everywhere, with its ham blade. The dwarf was hoping, whenever the moment came for him to cross the blue gate, to be accompanied by the bray of his donkey friends: Ingres, Monet, and Cézanne; those beasts have always respected him, more than any biped in his life, kids included; tailed angels with brains cooked by radiation and contaminated horse feed. How good they were, as they marched during the show.
Blop, again, and then sguash, his throat. The blue gate appears, just like Armand had pictured it, but he cannot even reach up to the doorknob to get on the other side.
Will they have a circus in Limbo? And donkeys, maybe?
««—»»
Everything burnt: no lunch, and the kids are about to be back, I’ll have to make do… Syrena thinks, rubbing her beard, soiled with the unlucky guy’s guts. She cleans her hands on the kitchen apron, adorned with drawn plums, and she watches her husband’s disarranged body, there on the floor, his eyes still hooked to that cursed fan. And now I also have to clean all this mess…who knew a fucking dwarf could have so much blood…that’s liters! I might as well have slaughtered a hippo!
Seconds pass, the woman looks out of the trailer window and sees the two dogs, trained to survival, quickly scuttle toward the Baden landfill, until they vanish behind the first towers which lean on their foundations of rags, junk, and old spare parts. Down there, a little on the left, she seems to see a grey-silver rainbow arching between the molecular burners—the great nibblers of the past. It looks like a scythe blade, actually, or a giant meat cleaver ready to drop down on what used to be, what still moves, breathes, in that graveyard, under its flying horizon shaken by the flapping wings of the cloacal gulls.
Cowards! So be it, she mutters in her thoughts, we need a special menu…piglet roast. Of dwarf. After all, we have to celebrate. I’m going to have a real man around, now, and a lot of bags of sweet potatoes. But now let’s think about the kids.
««—»»
“Mmm…smells good!”
“What’s that?”
“Mom, mom, Monet slapped me!”
“Be quiet, and don’t touch anything; wash your hands, change your shirt and then sit down at the table. You little piglets!” Syrena groans, brandishing a wooden spoon toward the empty heads of the three kids. Ingres, Cézanne, and Monet—the abusive one. That’s right, Armand named them like his dancing donkeys. “Come on, hurry up. Special menu today…”
The woman has set everything properly, even though it is not Sunday. The good dish set, enameled cutlery—Mister Skeleton’s wedding gift—and Armand as centerpiece: arms and legs cut off and an apple between his teeth, nicely roasted. You can no longer recognize him, after the treatment; his wife worked hard with the Metzelder carver, then she seasoned the poor devil with pink rosemary, mustard icing and an abundant dose of her signature spicy sauce, purple like a priest’s mourning. It only lacks a pretty circle of chopped sweet potatoes, all around, then the picture would be perfect. Dwarf stew à la Corse. The tiny man still seems to be looking upward, toward the fan blades, with his little blue eyes goggling and sucked out by the suction cups of the oven’s 750 degrees. He lays on the silver platter, the one with Syrena’s mother’s initials on the edge: L.B., one of the early stars of the Suprême: Lady Blackbeard. Too bad she croaked untimely, trying to strangulate her husband with his own guts after ripping open his belly with her teeth—she had caught him in bed with an Egyptian contortionist, a pearl necklace around his stout neck and a radioactive kiwi up his ass. Heart attack, right in the thick of it. A real badass bearded woman.
“Good! I want more!” Ingres, the youngest, brays.
“Don’t choke on it, eat slowly,” his mother commands, cleaning the orange gravy off her beard; thick like mortar.
“Fuck, you have to buy more of this shit!” Chubby Cézanne jumps on his seat, struck down by wet taste-bud rapture, before getting another slap on his neck by his rough brother.
The she-bison groans, “Hey, is that a way to talk? If your father was here, you’d see…and if you don’t quit fighting, you two, I’ll put you in the oven.” Then, she stops a moment to think about that, her fork two centimeters away from her mouth and a piece of her husband’s ear down in her belly, melting away like foie gras, releasing an acid broth of deep mocking. But.
Goddamn, and who knew dwarves were so tasty? You’d never believe that! she thinks, then beginning to eagerly watch, with predator eyes, her own offspring; Armand’s kids. Same breed, same meat. But they must be even tastier, when they’re little. Who cares, I did them and now I can gobble them up…they’re my stuff.
Syrena crosses herself, gets up waving her red-orange beard over the tits which have worked so much and have now surrendered to gravity, letting themselves be sucked in toward the floor like giant dried plums. Milk, day and night, she remembers, suck, suck and suck…they never had enough. Dwarves as hungry as wolves, how the fuck can they eat so much and stay so little? I used to have breasts straight and taut like a boat prow, and Mister Skeleton drooled over them. Time for a makeover—thanks to poor Armand’s savings: she well knows where he took his stash—hard as marble…and a crackerjack dinner.
“So, kids, let’s do a funny game. Dad is coming home soon: let’s hide in the kitchen, so we pop out when he enters to scare him, okay? Come on, piglets, come with Mom…”
As Cézanne grabs his mother’s hand to join her in the game, the Bearded Woman cannot resist and pinches the boy’s fat ass, a nice protein pudding, and she eagerly licks her lips.
“Come on, sweetheart. Let’s hurry.”