Zombie Bitches From Hell
could
make sure her skinny metabolism would slow down in Heaven so she
would not need to eat more clouds than her fair share. My mother
and particularly my father ate more than their fair share. They
were fat.”
    I’m suddenly aware that good old Rick is
confessing to murder. Is this a good thing or a bad thing, I’m
worrying. I’m not skinny but I’m not a fatty either. Just sorta
middlin’. Never had a weight problem either way but should I be
worrying about this now with what I’m certain is the end of the
world going on below us a few thousand feet. I’m going to let him
keep talking. Maybe he’s just having some sort of schizoid reality
break. Maybe an LSD flashback. Who wouldn’t? People are eating
people alive. That would be enough to make anyone a tad batty.
    He looks at me to make sure I haven’t dozed
at the wheel. “A chubby guy in a white, short-sleeved shirt gave me
a lift from New Orleans to Biloxi. He had a tie that said, ‘No. 1
Dad.’ His shirt had yellowish armpits that matched his eyebrows and
the whites of his eyes that were not white at all. He was very
friendly but the air conditioning in his car did not work so the
wind, moist and putrid from the south swirled in the car like we
were in a sleeping bag together. I could smell the lynched Black
people ever so faintly. The odor of the dead, they say, never
entirely leaves but rises and falls with the humidity like cat piss
on the rug. It is always humid in the South.
    “The driver was from the South. He sold
repossessed printing equipment and he talked about this on and on
until I went nearly crazy. Then he put his hand on my knee and
kneaded it real gentle and told me he was lonely, so lonely, even
though he was married and had children, so he said, and that he
would pay me a few dollars, he did not have much. He said he would
let me stay with him in the Motel Six just over the next state
border. I said that would be nice because I had not been in a bed
in nearly three weeks and I was tired of washing up in gas station
men’s rooms. A hot shower would be nice. He rubbed my thigh and I
got relaxed. He was chubby like a guy that sits and watched TV all
the time and eats jellybeans and Raisonettes. He said he would wash
my back. My mother and my father did that. I said, OK, that sounds
nice. It did.”
    “I wouldn’t mind a bath myself right now,” I
say. Rick looks at me and then he looks at Tim who is still sound
asleep. I’m sending telepathic waves to Tim, telling him to wake
up! We got a situation here! But Tim does not stir.
    “Somewhere in Mississippi, on a long stretch
of mossy-treed highway I asked him to stop by the roadside; I had
to urinate. He said he did, too. We walked a ways into the woods.
The trees were forlorn having had so many Black people hung on them
the last century. The clouds were embarrassed to be over
Mississippi. The shadows were deep and blue, lovely dark and deep,
the gray moss like Father Time’s beard hanging everywhere. He
watched me urinate. On the way back to the car, I saw that he had
three large sweat stains on his shirt and two small ones. That
number five was his number. My blade went into his neck quite
quickly, crunching in a way that reminded me of the sound of eating
a potato chip in church. I left him there under the mossy trees.
They were his mourners, more than he would have at a real funeral,
I guess.
    “Thinking all these things sometimes gets me
confused but it doesn’t matter. Maybe the skinny girl drove me to
Biloxi and the chubby guy took me to San Angelo and so on and so
forth. I never liked geography. My geography teacher was really fat
and I paid her no mind, none at all but only day-dreamed of what
she would look like with those maps on the wall and her with no
skin but only yellow globs of fat and all the other kids in the
class laughing at her instead of at me.
    “I drove myself to San Angelo, Texas where I
parked the car in a bowling alley parking lot. I went in and bowled
a

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