Tarnish
Pisman gropes through the forestry, one hand within grappling reach
of the branches that seem to attempt to smack him in the face with
inanimate malevolence. His lower lip flaps open, letting his
tongue take potshots at the flourishing insect population.
He drools lengths of barbed wire onto the ground from time to time;
these are bent in the Holstein-Mowers double-twist. It's unclear
if his drool pre-dated their patent of this method.
"Rotten!" It, the scream, sits around in the air,
appearing to have gotten comfortable in the bare rafters and to
begin nesting. Flakes of shredded silence rain down around
the large figure standing in the center of the room holding a bowl
of fruits that have moldered away any individual distinctions that
might have existed. The mailbox outside the “rustic”
domicile which contains the scream, figure and fruitrot reads "Binkner,"
and the bluish shirt on the figure has a label sewn over the pocket.
This label reads "Fok."
Similarly, blocks away, there is a neighbor banging on something
with a hammer. Tommy and Jimmy are squatting over the unconscious
body of Jetpack Jack, star of a 1950's serial. They came across
him drinking from the crick behind Tommy's house, and Jimmy hit
him in the head with a piece of gravel propelled by his slingshot.
One of Jack's Binocu-goggles cracked in the subsequent tumble he
took, and what they can see of his face underneath guess he hasn't
seen an 'astro-razor' in a few weeks.
The Museum of the World's Ugliest Things must be missing their security
guard, because she's working at the Matchhead Museum of the Fine
Art. Her name is Maude Isolier. Were one to try to brush
the trio of unflatteringly-placed warts off her face, the sandpaper's
grit would have to be as heavy as the handedness with which most
of the Matchhead Museum's art is executed. In front of her
security command post are three black-and-white screens: two
are wired to the cheap-ass closed-circuit cameras that panningly
glare down at 90% of the floor space of the museum. The last screen
is linked via the magic of television waves to a Matchhead network
affiliate studio which pony-expresses carbon-dateless reruns to
help reduce Maude's effective presence at her job.
Fok Binkner stomps around his house, snarling as if offended by
the smell of internals growing stale and collapsing inside their
cracked bone casing that leaks out of the motionless dog on the
middle of the living room floor. His fists, having long since
set the bowl of fruit down to explode upon impact with the floor,
have refixated on their mostly-tuckered-out bottle of liquor.
He strides masterfully through the impedimentless rooms--every object
that could have been stumbled across has long since been kicked
into the wall or fragments. He yells like a steam-whistle
and swears like frogs being etherized, partially out of general
frustration and partially out of frustration that there's no one
there to appreciate or inflict his emotions on. His ex-girlfriend
springs to his mind and to this next paragraph:
Coriss Monitony, chopping open a head of lettuce with a fat knife
on a wooden cutting board. Her hair is nice; so are her breasts
and rump. Her taste in men, and opinion of the point at which
one involves the authorities after foreshadowed violence springing
therefrom: not so good. Her propensity for providing sex on
emotional short notice has gotten her into trouble multiple times
and the maternity ward once.
The result, Jimmy, is poking at Jetpack Jack with a long stick.
Suddenly, as if on some stage queue, Jetpack Jack reanimates and
leaps to his feet. Jimmy and Tommy jump backwards, and their suspicion
remains unassuaged by the chipped-tooth-interrupted smile that Jetpack
Jack presents them with.
Tarnish Pisman has stopped his bumbling onward rush and snuffles
at the air. The shirt-sleeve-diameter flopping skin of his
nostrils bellowses air into whatever brain he keeps buried under
his shovel-shaped forehead. "Storm," is the verdict of
this weather-tasting; "Loud storm."
In a car speeding by the forest that Tarnish Pisman is running through,
Lasni Kallihust hears a similar opinion from the woman's voice in
his radio: "80% chance of rain tonight in Matchhead,
Hutton and Ghren. 55% chance of thunderstorms."
Unable to help himself, Lasni wonders if this 55% is 55% of possible
events, or 55% of the 80% slice of reality that will involve rain.
He looks at the thin watch around his wrist, and before his brain
has decomposed the analog display into meaningful numbers he's already
read his sports coup's dashboard digital display as well.
5:14 in the afternoon, they both agree. The internet told
him about the Matchhead Museum of Fine Arts, and he's trying to
get there before it closes. It told him that this happens
at 5:00pm (Monday through Friday) but not until 5:30pm on Saturdays
(of which group today is a member). A US Road Atlas sprawls
across the empty passenger seat, failing miserably to overwhelm
Lasni's sensible plaid shirt and Dockers pants with its rugged road-charm.
Maude is laughing; a gangly person has pratfallen onto some thorns
on the third monitor. Somewhere beside the coffee and the
only slightly religion-diluted contempt for her fellow beings, she's
wondering how she'd react if the Museum's closed-circuit televisions
captured anything one-eighth this hilarious. Perhaps her familiarity
with the individuals tripping and hurting themselves would overcome
the disadvantage of not having the event pre-planned, well-timed
and lovingly camera-ensnared from the best possible viewpoints.
Maybe not. She slid open the middle drawer of the filing cabinet
behind her desk. Her hand passed over the quietly antiquating
firearm, still swaddled in its holster despite its years of rest
in the drawer, and pulled a pistachio out of an almost-empty three
pound bag. She deftly broke its hinge with one hand, dropped
the meat onto her tongue and threw both halves of its shell, one
at a time, into the garbage.
Fok has smashed his almost-emptied liquor bottle on the picture
of Coriss he has nailed to one of the walls in his house.
Amber alcoholic runs down the picture's rendition of her hair, teased
up into a bright yellow architecture of bangs. It drips across
her high forehead, over eyebrows that slant down from the center
at angles suggestive of inactivity. A shard of his bottle's
glass has lodged itself near her almost circular eyes. As
the liquor melts over her photographic lips, Fok experiences an
onrush of alcoholically-spiced erection, which peters out into anger
at her
previously-expressed unavailability to him. He begins to pound
his way towards the countertop where his car keys get slammed every
day after work.
Tommy and Jimmy are backing away from Jetpack Jack, who has stooped
to all-fours, getting more mud on the knees of his space uniform.
Tommy, the braver of the two, grabs his friend's hand right before
Jimmy flees: "He's writing something!" says Tommy.
Jetpack Jack has carved "Lost my voice" into the wet riverbank
sod. Tommy repeats this, brushing some of his brownish mop-top
out of his eyes. Jack nods, and begins to pantomime some
grand adventure involving chases, ray-gun fire fights and space
ship battles.
Tarnish Pisman is loping faster now, his rotund gut stilt-walked
along with just his back legs sometimes, and other times with all-paw-drive.
His sense of immediacy is being triggered. Perspiration beads
on his forehead and drops away in the form of buckshot.
Lasni glides his chrome-blue car into one of the three empty parking
spaces in front of the house-surrounded Matchhead Museum, shuts
the engine off and sits through its fart-like grunt as he engages
the parking break.
In the middle of Jetpack Jack's mimed tale, as if to punctuate the
explosion of some Martian Tyrant's starship, the sky belches out
a rumbling thunderclap. Moments later, the boys hear Coriss
calling them inside. Jimmy has already left as Tommy waves to Jetpack
Jack and says he has to go eat at Jimmy's house. Jack tips
an informal salute to Tommy, then walks off into the trees.
Tommy thinks he hears a burst of something that sounds like a jetpack
engine, but objectively, there's lots of other possible storm-born
explanations for the noise.
Maude checks the moonfaced clock, which is inexplicably hidden behind
the same kind of fenced cage that protects the clock at the town's
gymnasium. The time is “close enough [to closing time] for
government work,” she decides, and gets up from the desk.
She retrieves the keys to the front double-doors from her desk and
heads over to lock up.
Coriss stirs the potato slivers in to the greenery of the rest of
the salad, then pours a little Kraft Kid's Ranch (with a picture
of a cowboy on the label) over the mixture. A drop of water
flies into one of the liquid strands of dressing, breaking the trail
of seasoning she's been carefully distributing. For a minute,
she stares at it; her bottom lip falls in between her teeth, and
she gently chews it. A flash of lightning shakes her out of
confusion. She leans towards the screen door and calls to
Jimmy and Tommy again, then puts her skinny arms on either side
of the opened glass window. Levering her whole body weight,
with the countertop digging into her midriff, she manages to force
the window unstuck; it bangs closed.
Fok has found both his keys and his way to the garage. His
toe discovers a plank that fell off of one of the workbenches that
he bumped into with his fender last week, and he curses and kicks
this piece of wood against a tire of his truck. Eventually
he finds his way through the truck door. Before successfully
starting the car, he's flipped through the four keys he owns a
few times, and has tried one or two of the wrong ones more than
once. The garage door, having been permanently left up after
he broke part of it off while attempting to back through it in an
another equally impromptu trip, is unable to prevent him from backing
out into the gentle pats of rain.
Lasni has gotten out of his car and has dashed through the beginning
rain to push open one of the double-doors to the building bearing
the sad-looking “Matchhead Museum of the Fine Art” placard.
He finds a moderately chubby and disturbingly-proportioned-faced
woman with a key sticking out of the back of the same door.
She's been shaken backwards by the door's opening; this has animated
her bluster of thick grayish hair around her face as if she were
a human snow-globe. "Weer clossd!" she puffs at
him, the words losing none of their disdain despite straining through
the flurry of ill-tempered hair she's begun to push back into place.
Tarnish Pisman feels the water running down the wrinkles of his
skin, briefly pooling in pockets where his skin creases to make
that the easiest behavior. It feels uncomfortably almost-familiar
to him. Still, without dedicating too much thought to it,
he continues his cannonball course, accumulating ripped underbrush
and crushed mushrooms betwixt the various joints and fingers with
which he throws himself forwards.
Tommy and Jimmy have burst through the screen door, and Coriss calls
for them to take their dirty crick-visiting boots off five muddy
footprints too late. Coriss inflates her lungs as full as
they can go, stretching out her ribs into the sides of her beige
sweatshirt, and paces it's release into a long sigh. Coriss's
ears are filled with Tommy and Jimmy's babble about Jetsomething
Jake or the like. She has to tell them to sit down twice and
to be quiet several more times. She carries the bowl of salad
to the table, and has Jimmy get up to fetch three small plates for
their servings.
Maude begins to lock the other door, hoping that her previous declaration
and current snubbing will get rid of the foppish would-be patron
currently attempting to simultaneously apologize and ask if it is
not the case that the Museum is open until 5:30 today, as it's Saturday.
Finally, with her nose pointed straight at the HOURS OPEN text painted
onto the glass of the door in front of her, a frown growls across
her chin. "Fine!" she spits, "but just untell
then, not-wun-secun more!"
Fok jerks and lurches out of his driveway, then roars his engine
along his street. The truck weaves like a punch-drunk sewing
machine, clipping the side mirror off a parked pickup, riding briefly
up the edge of the opposite curb, then, as if possessed with some
corrective horse-sense of its own, settling near the center of the
road and speeding along as the rain intensifies.
Tommy pokes at a slice of tomato with his fork. He's fallen
into a sullen quiet after Jimmy's mom had shut up their stories.
There's another flash of lightning, followed shortly by a boom of
the accompanying thunder. Tommy wonders if Jetpack Jack will be
okay amongst the lightning and storms, and whispers this question
to Jimmy. Jimmy screws up his face with thought, then says
that Jack has probably flown into space, which is higher up than
lightning can reach.
Lasni is wandering through the handful of roomettes that constitute
the Fine Art collection of Matchhead. The janitor lady that
he'd just finished haggling with has returned to a small room by
the entrance and her absence has helped calm his nerves and improve
the smell of the air around him. One of the paintings is of a black
knife, a thing inexpertly illustrated to the point where it looks
like it was fashioned from a full Coke bottle rather than obsidian.
Coriss is turning around to get the plate of fish fingers when there's
the sound of tires caterwauling from the street and an inarticulate
but recognizable bellowing. Coriss's hand falls over her heart,
and begins to half-heartedly cross herself in an attempt to jump-start
her stalled breathing. Footstomps are coming closer to the
house, and with a long-legged dash she outstrips them to the front
door, turning the deadbolt's lock moments before a hand rattles
the outer doorknob. Through the pelt of the storm, she can
see Fok's face, thinning black hair
trammeled across his head, eyes squinted into pits to keep the rain
out of them.
Fok slowly realizes that the front door isn't going to open, and
with roadkill fox cunning, begins to circle the house hand-over-hand,
grabbing for it's back door weakness.
Tommy hears the rain, and hears yelling and shaking on the structure
of the house. He sees a shape moving across the kitchen window,
a big man with runlets of black hair shaking around him. He
sees Jetpack Jack accost him, shoulders squared, one fist planted
on his hip, the other hand making a stop-sign in front of him.
There's a brief scuffle, and the big man slugs Jetpack Jack in the
stomach, tossing him into the yard and away from the door.
Coriss sees Fok pounding on the back door, and for a moment thinks
the lock will outsmart the pounding and wrenching arms again.
Then animal ingenuity or brute luck takes over--one of his arms
or legs has punched the lower screen in, and is helping him to shove
the whole contraption into the kitchen. She moves backward,
catches a glimpse of a glass of milk being spilt onto the table,
watches the foremost particle of the white wave arch towards the
tablecloth, then she bumps into the cutting board on the counter
with her behind.
Tarnish Pisman has reached a small crick and followed it to his
destination. The sound of crumpling screen has caught his
attention; with a leap he bursts through the wounded doorway right
after the wounder. A huge man with thinning black hair looms
over an interrupted salad, a short skinny blonde and a retreating
pair of children. He's forming words that Tarnish either can't
understand or aren't really words. His fists are the exclamation
points at the end of his arms and sentences and he finishes one
squarely into the skinny blonde's gut. She poofs out what
could have been words or just a lung vomiting. Tarnish swings
his hand forwards, dipping it's sharp tips into the front of the
man's torso. Unfortunately, the man has bone armor not far underneath
the skin that Tarnish's pierced, and Tarnish's fingers snap off
with a twang. Red spurts from the cut man, jetting up and
down Tarnish's arm; Tarnish smiles at the comfortably familiar feel.
Lasni stares in confusion at one of the works in front of him.
His finger tips rest briefly on his forehead as the pointless lines
and crosshatching of the thing he looks at lends its strength to
what he fears is an oncoming flu. After a few minutes of analysis,
attempting to extract some token nugget of sense or worth from the
piece, he hears an approaching holler. At first, he assumes
the janitor wants to close up and can't be bothered to tell him
in person, but then he realized it doesn't sound like it was coming
from within the building. Then he hears a loud "whump,"
and his car's R2-D2-like distress alarms start to go off.
Some far away sounds were tugging at Maude's mind, but nothing had
quite pulled her away from her rerun until she heard the slap of
the insistent visitor's running exit of the building. She
took her ankles off of the table, grabbed randomly in a filing cabinet
drawer for her keys, ended up with the handgun instead, then took
chase.
Fok found himself sprawled on the hood of some candy-ass blue car,
with hot, feisty pain setting his chest and some of the vitals underneath
on fire. To make matters worse, the rain hadn't let up, and
the car had began wailing like some electric disco banshee.
Fok pulls himself to his feet and starts to do his best to punch
the car right in the mouth.
Lasni's out the door and asking the big, black-haired man who is
breaking the grill off the front of his car what the Hell he thinks
he's doing, before Lasni notices what looks like a chunk of metal
protruding from the man's chest, or the blood that's racing the
rain to soak the man's shirt into nothingness. The man turns
towards Lasni, shouts a muddled "Whathphuck's yor problm, Faggot?"
in Lasni's direction, then turns his bloody knuckles' attention
away from the battered sports coup and towards this new presence.
Maude runs to the front door, and sees a huge man, covered in blood,
choking and bashing the art patron. Channeling a Lone Ranger
episode, Maude kicks the door open and shouts through the thick
beaded curtain of rain for the men to break it up. The aggressor
shows no sign of responding, and the agressee is showing fewer and
fewer signs of consciousness. Maude frisks the handgun's holster,
tugging at the rusty and now slippery clasps, and then has the weapon
unsheathed. She repeats her this-is-the-law call, and fires
the weapon into the air as warning.
Fok is feeling better; the cold of the rain is helping extinguish
some of the sensation from his chest and he's in the midst of explaining
his frustrations at being under-appreciated on someone who isn't
going to run away on him. The thunder bangs again, and then
again, striking him in the chest then head, then the rain's turned
black and rapidly bricks up his eyes.
Lasni feels the air and water surge back into his throat as the
pressure around it eases up. The air he first tries to swallow
is choked with snot from his injured throat and ice water from the
sky. He sees a crone, the kind of thing you'd imagine accosting
knight errants in fairy tales, enter his field of vision.
He smiles, feels some hot liquid run up his throat and over the
rim of his lips, then passes out.
Maude has dragged the patron-turned-assault-victim inside the museum
door, then goes to get the mop to clean up the vomit he appears
to have saved inside of him even after she let him throw up as much
as she thought possible in the parking lot. She stops at the
phone to call the sheriff's office in Hutton. She feels the
sick welling up from inside her belly. She pukes into the bagless
metal trashcan by her desk, unable to keep herself from replaying
the spasming, bullet-bitten death throes of the large man in the
parking lot.