Satan Burger

Satan Burger

All rights reserved © 2003 Carlton Mellick III

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Double Dragon eBooks, a division of Double Dragon Publishing of Markham Ontario, Canada.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 1-55404-070-1
First Edition eBook Publication July 9, 2003

Satan Burger

A novel of nightmarish absurdities

by Carlton Mellick III

To some people, a hamburger is more important than a soul…

FROM THE AUTHOR

I wrote this book (basically) when I was 20 years old and on the verge of self-murder.  Not sure if my verge was due to a fascination with an unknown afterlife or due to utter boredom.  Most likely the latter.  The world becomes clearer and clearer the older we become, much less mysterious/exciting and all of its appeal we experienced during childhood turns logical, and
logic
is a dirty and boring word.  This story is from the viewpoint of the rebel, who I am still deeply in love with, who refuses to accept the beliefs (the
logic
) that have been issued to him like a uniform: I refuse to be a slave to money, I refuse to accept clarification of the afterlife, or the opinions others might believe to be fact, I refuse to learn foreign languages, I refuse to make up my mind, I refuse to remember all that I’ve learned, I refuse that one plus one always equals two, I refuse to be good, because we are not sure about the definition of good just yet, and I refuse to become blind, lose my hearing, misplace my legs…

Satan was a rebel too.  The bible teaches you to hate rebels. 

- Carlton Mellick III, 3/10/01 1:58 pm

Dedicated to Food Fortunata, a genius in his own retarded little way.

"I want God to see me."

- Doug Rice,
A Good Cuntboy is Hard to Find

ACT ONE

Hero Accepting his Journey

Scene 1

Acid Ocean Eyes

Acid Ocean EyesAcid Ocean EyesAcid Ocean Eyes

The world is still new.

It is still developing/mutating like it is sludgeling through its puberty moments, within the tricky awkward stages of physical and emotional development, just finding hair where it did not have hair before.  It seems old to us, but it only
seems
because our lives are so short.  Not to mention that time goes faster for planets than it does for us humans. Just how time goes faster for humans compared to small sandwich bugs, which
need
to live at a slow pace in order to get a good view of the world before their scheduled expire, since the life span of a sandwich bug is only 2.51 days.

To the rest of the universe, Earth is just an adolescent boy, whine-crying around the legs of the aged worlds in the universe.  His older brothers and sister —Jupiter and Venus as example — are also considered immature, but compared to Earth they are the top of sophistication, and Child Earth looks up-up to them all day long.  Since the elder worlds prefer not to probe into the matters of brat-hooligan planets, the universe doesn’t recognize our solar system on a regular basis.

And our human race has been around for such a brief amount of time that the universe hasn’t had the chance to detect us yet.  One blink is all it needs to miss our dance through actuality.  

In contrast, there are many other worlds inside and outside our galaxy that are considerably older than ours.  They are like hundred-or-so-year-old humans, crippled and drooling all over their selves – drool being the ocean water spilling onto the coast, which is a tidal wave, sometimes called a tsunami – and because of their senility they forget all about the laws of nature and accidentally kill their parasites, which we call living beings.  Forgetting to spin on its axle is the most common mistake of a senile planet, which splits the world into endless day and endless night, both of which are life-ending positions.

Another way a world kills its parasites is journeying too close to the sun, from sleep-strolling or mindless-wandering.  This gives the world a nice brown suntan – or sunburn, depending on how long it bathes – and in less than a week its crab-red skin flakes and peels away; along with its burnt animals, vegetation, and most of its water supply – revealing a fresh surface to build on.

Earth won’t grow senile enough to do this, at least not in our generation, and not in a thousand to come.  It will most likely die long before it goes old, when the sun grows and grows up into a red giant, swallowing the Earth into its fire stomach. Unless Earth figures a way to detach itself from its orbit and find another system to live in, which in turn will destroy living kind anyway.

So God (who called Earth the spoiled brat of his nine planets) gave him the dinosaurs. Dinosaurs were Earth’s first toys, fun and BIG and cute for infant games, but they got boring rather quickly, just as stuffed animals get boring to aging human children.  They were fun in a physical sense, but they were lacking imagination and the ability to form a society, so Earth wiped them out.

Then God gave Earth a being which was capable of forming a society – which was mankind.

Child Earth putter-played with us, watching us build up civilization and grow and flourish, then every once in awhile he’d wreck us with earthquakes and hurricanes.  Though cruel to the human society, Earth found destruction quite amusing.  It was much more fun than watching dinosaurs eat each other.

Now the human race isn’t enough.  There’s only so much entertainment you can get out of a single brand of toy before it gets boring.

Recently, Earth approached the idea of trade.  He wanted to swap his toys with the ones owned by his friend worlds.  This idea came to him by watching human children in little schoolyards, who had action figures quite like the ones Earth has.  The only difference between human beings and action figures is that action figures come with rocket packs and laser guns. 

God was the being that made it possible for Earth to swap action figures.  He set up a door called a
walm,
which gives our Earth access to beings from other worlds, times, and dimensions.  Now Earth can pluck any creature from any place in the universe and put them into his personal collection, and he’s been doing it all decade.

So God is keeping Child Earth clear from boredom.  But as children always are, boredom only stays away for a little piece of a while.

The walm is located in Rippington, which is now the most populated city in the world.  About five years ago, it wasn’t that large at all and was being recognized only as the capital of New Canada.  The walm changed all that. 

A young man named Leaf was born in this town, before the walm was born.  He came into place the same year they re-elected Pat Paulsen for his second term as president of the United States of America, in 1976.

Over-populating Rippington created a difficult lifestyle for the Rippingtonians.  A sick-hard struggle.  It also made life a jumble-confusing subsistence, with the majority of the population consisting of foreign action figures, who rarely learn to speak the native language, Canadian.

Once the rest of the citizens of the world found out about the walm causing an overpopulation problem, they just stared at their walls and shrugged.

Nobody cared then, nobody cares now, not even the New Canadians care and they are the victims of this situation.

Nobody cares in the least bit about
anything
anymore.  It’s like there is a drug in the air that makes everything seem unimportant, no matter how important anything is.  A mother will witness her own child convulse and die, right in her chubby lap, and all she will do is stare at her wall and shrug.

Then she’ll say, "Guess I’ll have to make another one."

Actually, I am exaggerating. 
Some
people still care, especially the younger people.  But
most
of the population is lame/untrue to their human emotions and nobody has found out exactly why. 

I can only think of one man who even tried to uncover this problem’s cause.  It was an Alaskan psychologist who called it a
disease
, but he could not figure out why so many were so numb in the spirit.  Even after several years of research, the only thing he came up with was that the world and its population had come into a plain state of endless
boredom
.

After the fourth year, he put his notes and books down.

And said, "oh well."

Staring at his wall, shrugging.

The people of Rippington are not quite as
bored
as the rest of the world for one reason or another.  I suspect it’s because of the walm, but I’m not sure.  Nor do I care.

Leaf is on the border between emotionful and emotionless. He cares a lot about some things and a little about others.  Maybe it’s because some things are boring and some things haven’t bored him yet.

Let me correct myself:

I
am Leaf.

I apologize for speaking in the third person when explaining myself, but that’s just how I seem to be.  I catch myself doing this quite often.  It’s because I can
see
in the third person.  Anywhere in the world I want to go, my eyes will go.  They will pop out of their sockets and wander the countryside.  Just as a god or a movie camera would go.  Even
myself
is just another character to me, hovering over my body from
God’s Eyes
, watching someone else moving and talking to my commands, my own living corpse.

I call my body a corpse sometimes.  It is because I don’t like it at all.  It bores me.  I’d much rather live inside a strong man’s body.  Then maybe I’d have more self-esteem and I wouldn’t need to look at myself in the third person.  My body is all dangle-lanky and weak.  It whines when I ask it to move, and the bones creak and complain as they labor.

My last name is no longer in use.  I am just plain
Leaf
.  It was Cable in the beginning, if I remember correctly, but Cable is retired now.  I am just a Leaf.  And I don’t feel that I need to have a last name.

I feel pathetic sometimes, and I think that it is funny.

My parents were Mr. and Mrs. Cable.  I don’t care to remember their first names.  I’m sure they don’t care to remember mine either.  Actually, they
better
remember my name.  They gave this weak-wretched title to me.

They said to me, "Leaf is also a name for a person and not just the vegetation that grows on trees and plants."

However, they meant
Leif
.  Leif is the person and Leaf is just a leaf.

Great, eh?  I’m a leaf, not a human being like my parents once told me.

People always took my parents for hippies for naming me Leaf.

I would respond: "No, take them for idiots."

I would not capitalize my name if I hadn’t been named Leaf.  My personality calls for a spelling in all lowercase letters, like mike or bobby or stephen or joey.  Spelling your name like this shows that you feel inferior to the rest of the world, as I certainly do.

But if I were to spell my name
leaf
, then someone might suspect that I really am the vegetation that grows on trees and plants instead of a person.  Maybe even God would believe that.  And during autumn, when all the leaves crumple and fall from their branches to die, I too would curl into a crispy ball and drop from the surface of the planet, to suffocate in the breathless areas of the universe. 

I’m not very good at talking either.  I am utterly confused, sometimes.  This is because I took too many drugs when I was in high school.  Actually, I wasn’t in high school during this period.  I was dropped out.  When I say something like "back when I was in high school," I usually mean: "back when I was
supposed to be
in high school."

Anyway, I did a lot of Felix back then, and snoopies and cucumber seeds and slur corn – this was back when I had the money for such high society drugs – I also did a lot of opie, but that was usually free from friends.  Nobody really sells Opie thinking there’s a market for the stuff.  It’s basically dirt, the chemical version of Groo.

After my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Cable, figured out — it did take them a while to figure anything out — that I replaced doing homework with doing expensive, mind-altering drugs, they decided it would be best for their selves to not have a child anymore.

So I left my parents, off on my own, working at corner shops and thinking they’d miss me.  But they didn’t, and to hell with them.

One day, I called up Mrs. Cable (mother) to ask if she missed me.  After I asked, there was a long pause.  I’m sure she was just staring at her wall, shrugging. So I never called again.

After I was on my own, I resorted to drugs that were easier to come by.  Actually, I can’t relate them to
real
drugs.  They were just chemicals, household products that you can buy in any/every store.  Air-fresh was the first product I tried.  It was invigorating, like taking a bubble bath with your brain.  Cough-away was good too, but your vision strobe-battered and made you sick.  Later, I experimented/gambled with anything that had toxic ingredients inside.  Some things made me gorefully sick.  Some things could have killed me.

I hate to think back on those days.

About fifteen months after I left home, I found myself

permanently deranged by these drugs.  And I haven’t been cured.

Because of my drugging experiments, I can no longer communicate like the rest of the world can.  My mind is locked away from reality somewhere; the thinking is perfect/straight, but my voice doesn’t come out right when I speak my thoughts.  I have a stutter, and it takes time for my thoughts to process into words people can understand.  Maybe that is my problem, I think in thoughts instead of in words.

I have a bad attention span too.

Speaking eventually became so difficult to me that I gave it up, almost entirely, and I have loads and loads of free time to think now, which I actually enjoy.  Who needs a voice anyway?  I stay silent during the whiles, usually talking in my head, speaking only to my best good friend and those who are blessed with patience.  I do partake in conversations with people, in a way, but my opinions are only expressed to myself, within my brain, and nobody gets to hear them.

I
do
have friends, plenty of friends. This is an odd thing, now that I think about it, since I’m so antisocial and mind-screwed and all.  They think I’m funny for being the way I am, the
silent
character of the group.  Every group has one.  I guess.  Somebody has to be in the back of the crowd, following.  They say I appear and disappear without any of them noticing.  Sometimes they say I’m a ghost.  Sometimes they say I have magic powers.

Since I don’t speak so much, I write words on my shirts to express myself to the world.  I wrote
ghost
on one of them. 
Slave
on another.  The most descriptive shirt says
crippled.

Other shirts tell people:
I am a sandwich, I am a dildo
, and
I am the drunk driver that killed your kid
- an attempt at being mean. 

But my voice is only one thing that the drugs screwed up.  The worst part is what happened to my vision.  It is all cracked up, kind of like acid-drug.  Everything I see is always shifting and melting, like the world is made of water, streaming down and around and up again.

It’s like schizophrenia, I guess, but my thoughts are completely normal. Maybe it’s half schizophrenia; my thoughts are sane, but my vision is insane.  Maybe it really is schizophrenia and I just
think
I am sane.  I don’t know.  I just know I have to go through this alone.

I call the watery world,
Rolling World
. 

My friends call it,
Acid Ocean Eyes
.

But — I  can see in the third person without everything rolling, thank Yahweh (or whatever God likes to be called), so I don’t miss my old eyes so much.