Satan Burger (13 page)

Scene 14

Listen Day

           Bladder: puffed to full, teeming with truncheons and pressure pain, the creature’s weight motivating it tighter tighter . . .

I awake early today, underneath the blue-skinned woman, whose sweating-smooth face is pressed into my flabby chest. Soothing skin against my body, eyelashes fluttering on my nipples and tickling . . .

I do not want to wake her, so pacific, but my bladder can’t hold in the pain for much longer.  Her hair combines with the fire sheets, motions to billow-waves, a sea of flames crashing against my coast-like ribs . . . I’m still not moving.  Still contemplating how I can get out from under her without waking her . . .

I’m still not moving.

God’s Eyes:

I go to Christian.  He’s pacing in a dust suit, chalk white against black.  His pacing goes back and forth from the thin of the warehouse to the metal-work sculpture section.  Faster-faster . . .  Then he slips into the teleporting portal and transfers himself to Satan Burger.

My vision follows:

There’s a sign on the Satan Burger window that tells me, "Satan Burger Closed For The Holiday.  Reopens Tomorrow at 8:00 a.m."

All the demons are resting.  When no work needs to be done, the demons go back to standing still, acting like normal furniture.  They let the warm sun dry their skins, and let the dust collect on their backs.  Dust-bathing is very smoothing to furniture.

Satan is also dust-bathing.  Cherry-red face pressed asleep against the table.  Dreaming dreams of stories older than Earth I imagine, when he was God’s favorite invention, God’s first born son, born several minutes before his twin brother.  His dreams make him cry, like my dreams used to make me cry.  When I dreamt of the past - the time before my parents turned their back on me, just as Satan’s father did him - crying was frequent.  It’s hard to stop remembering.

I don’t cry these days when I think back to my childhood, to the happy times before my mind caught a disease.  I guess I just don’t care enough to cry.  I lost the part of my soul that found caring necessary.  Even when I’m sad, I cannot show the tears.  I can only show a silent expression.

"Where is everyone?" Christian wakes Satan to ask.  "Why is Satan Burger closed?"

Satan awakes.  He shakes the bad dreams from his skull and flops them onto the demon table like jelly.  "It’s Listen Day, nobody works on Listen Day.  My twin brother is having a get-together to celebrate, and he invited your friends.  Hopefully, he’ll be able to make Gin’s body parts dead again."

"Why didn’t they ask me to go?" Christian complains.

Satan places his head back on the cold of the table surface.  He says, "Nan is still here.  You can go with her."  And then he closes his eyes so that dust can pile onto the lids.

Today is Listen Day, a holiday that the gods and everyone from the god worlds celebrate.  Even Satan, who doesn’t believe in celebrating any holiday, celebrates Listen Day.

Everything was invented by someone or something, even time, space, love, sight, physicals, mentals, sound - and whatever you can think of.  Most of these were all created by the Creators, which came from outside the universe’s understanding.  They’re the gods of the gods, you could say, and they made time and space and the universe and the gods.  Almost everything.  Nobody knows who made them.

Sound wasn’t invented until recently, though; about a few billion years ago.  It was invented by a god named STNT (pronounced Stint).  He chose to stop existing so he doesn’t exist anymore.  Some say he’s in hiding, others say he went to join the Creators.  But according to history, he just stopped existing completely.  He wanted to be
nothing
, and now he is.

At the end of Stint’s life, he invented sound.  His last gift to the universe.  Though his inventions were all revolutionary, humans have yet to understand the importance of the things he created.  They’re all ideas that exist in the god world; we can’t even begin to comprehend them.  "Complex things are easy to invent," Stint said after he created sound, "it’s making something basic that is difficult."

Sound was then known as the forty-eighth sense, and to the planet beings like humans, it became the fifth sense.  Stint created only the plans for hearing.  He left the universe before he got the chance to hear anything.

The manufacturing of sound took months.  Millions of workers offered their services for free.  Needing to make sounds for every object, they made creations called
vocal chords
to communicate sound, and objects called
ears
were made to hear them.  They made loud sounds for BIG objects crashing, and shrilling sounds for small objects rubbing together.  Every sound all had to be different.  Every sound needed to be special/unique, like how every being is special/unique.

On the last day, sound was thrown across the universe.  Every entity that existed had the capability to hear.  But nobody was allowed to listen until the start of the next day, waiting with earplugs through the remaining hours.  It was decided that the next day would be a celebration, dedicated to
sound
.  It would be called Listen Day.

On the start of morning, everyone was allowed to use their new sense.  The beginning of a world with sound. They spent the entire day listening to their new hearing worlds, listening to everything and everything, whatever they came across.  It was a feast of audio noises.  The first BIG celebration in millions of years.

From then on, Listen Day was considered an annual holiday and nobody was to work on that day, every year - though years go by differently depending on where you live in the universe.  There were celebrations where everyone would make noise in the gathering areas.  A festival phenomenon arose.  Eventually, music was invented, and the whole celebration became a music festival, where a non-stop concert replaced the noise-making.  And beings would feast their ears to several music compositions, and they would sing.

All over the universe, these festivals are cooking up right now.  But my God’s Eyes don’t go far enough for me to see them.

Christian finds Nan masturbating in the bathroom.  She’s holding a picture of Jesus Christ.  Jesus is hanging dead from his cross.  Blood prickles from his nails, from the crown of thorns.

"GET THE FUCK OUT!" Nan screams, throwing the picture at Christian.

Throwing the picture was an act of violence.  It was an attempt to explain to Christian her level of anger.  It wasn’t meant to cause him pain.  But if Nan was using some kind of dildo or any object pretending to be a dildo, she would have thrown that at Christian to cause him both pain and disgust. Getting a smelly dildo thrown at you is extremely insulting too.

Christian steps out of the bathroom with the picture of Jesus Christ.  He doesn’t seem to be bothered by Nan’s performance.

He says, almost laughing, "Nan still masturbates to pictures of Jesus."

Satan hears this, since Listen Day is all about listening. "She’s attracted to Jesus?"

Christian nods.

"Why?" Satan asks.  "Jesus is BIG and fat.  Why does she masturbate to him?"

"Jesus is obese?" Christian smirks slightly.  "She’s obsessed with raping the messiah, got a sick little head on her shoulders.  She only knows the paintings of him though. Nobody knew he was fat."

Satan says, "You know he’s here, right?"

"What do you mean?"

"Jesus.  He lives here in Satan Burger."

"I never saw him."

"His room says
Men’s Bathroom
.  Haven’t you been in there?"

"Actually, I did see a fat guy in there before.  I thought he was a customer."

"He was kicked out of heaven just like I was, so I let him move in here.  Our dad doesn’t like it when we rebel against him.  It’s a common thing for kids to do, but God doesn’t accept rebellion from his angel children.  After awhile, he banishes you to a place where you can only interact with humans and demons.  It’s called damnation when your God banishes you, but it’s not all that bad - I guess."

"I thought you and Jesus were enemies," Christian ponders.

"We were, not anymore.  Now our father is the BIG enemy.  We team up together so that we can take him out of power, to make heaven a more democratic place.  Of course, we’re only kidding ourselves.  Angels can’t destroy gods."

"So you and Jesus are friends?"

"Let’s not go overboard now."

Nan gets out of the bathroom and starts out the door.

"I’m coming with you," Christian tells her, ensuing.

"Fine," she says.  Incensed.

They go blue, bottomward to Lenny’s autotruck, no Silence but it’s quiet, and Christian remembers her masturbation sequence.  He laughs . . .

"Talk shit and you’re dead!" Nan says.

But Christian laughs again.  He doesn’t need to mention anything to be teasing.  And he mostly laughs at the idea of Jesus being a large fat man instead of the
perfect
man that Nan fantasizes about.

I go back to my body:

The bladder is in worse shape than before.  I see a large yellow pulsating creature as I go inside my body with God’s Eyes.  Neglecting to urinate any longer will give me future urinary problems, like kidney stones or golf-ball-sized testicle disorder, so this blue woman needs to roll off me, or I need to wake her off, or push her off.

          
I hear somethings crawling in the walls. Rats?

           It’s okay, rats in the walls aren’t uncommon for warehouses.  Right now, nothing in the world matters except getting rid of my bladder pains, even if the rats are really squirrel-sized spiders.  And a spider is the only creature left that scares me, besides the scorpion fly.  The pain pounds hell-fists at the surface flesh.

           I try to move, but it only makes the pain worse.

           The somethings in the walls continue to make crawling sounds.

Eyes to Death’s house:

           Gin, Mortician, and Vodka are sitting in a sitting room there, drinking dog tea, with Gin’s living dreadlocks serpenting, jellyfish.  They’re waiting to meet Satan’s twin brother, but they haven’t seen him yet.  Supposedly, he’s doing business somewhere.

Mrs. Death is there with them, petting her daughter, who has three years.  Her other daughter, who has eleven years, is in another room, listening to things that have interesting sounds.  Mrs. Death says Death will be back soon, and Gin says that Nan will be encompassing shortly.  The word
encompassing
is a good adjective for Nan

Mrs. Death says to them,  "He is out with our son, Jerry Jr., getting some music for listening today."

She eats from a pretzel-cheese mix, crunchy-crumbs crumble and fill her dressy lap with snacking food.

Mortician says, "Is that Mr. Death’s first name?  Jerry?"

She looks up.  Her pudgy lips, cherry red lipstick (a child’s brand), smacking at the cheesy pretzel mix.  "Oh, no.  He was named after me.  I’m the Jeri that Jerry Jr. was named after.  My husband’s first name is Chuck.

She pauses to choke down a mouthful of martini.

"Our other daughter, in the listening room, was named after him.  But we call her Charley.  Do you like that name for a girl?  I always thought Charley was a cute name, but she doesn’t find it aristocratic enough.  She wants to change it to Adelaide."

           "I like the name Charley," Gin says.  Breakfast spasms to the discomforting cold.

"Good.  I like it too."  She smiles pleasantly.

Jerry Jr. has six years.  He is Death’s only son, and he is Death’s love and pride, his will to live.  Everything that Death has accomplished means nothing in comparison.  The universe means nothing, life means nothing, everything means nothing except for his son . . . and the rest of his family.

But Death has never been able to touch them, because of his Death touch.  He could never caress his wife in passion, could never hold her, never sleep with her.  Just a little brush of his fingertip would put her down . . .

They still created three children, but it was done in the least passionate way possible, without even touching, without even having sex.  He didn’t want to risk killing his wife, even after she suggested handcuffing his hands behind the bedpost, where they would be safe and clear from touching her.

Worst of all, Death will never be able to pat his son on the back when he gets an A in geometry, or when his football team goes to the state championship.

Because his touch brings death.

Back at the corpse:

The infested spider-sounds refuse to stop.           

The blue woman still in her position on my bladder, pains do not desist.

I move, quick without hesitation without worrying about her, or the pain in my bladder. 

A sharp blunt pain, but not as bad as I anticipated.  It’s just like me to exaggerate something so inconsequential.

The blue woman doesn’t even wake up.  A slight vibration-fizzle whimpers from her throat, which is supposed to be snoring, and she plops down where I was groaning.  Her ocean breasts squishing into the mattress brings me a smile.

Then I rush out of my bedroom-closet to the toilet, which is still situated in the middle of the room instead of in a bathroom.  And I leak away a pain-filled balloon.

I am surrounded by people that I have never seen before.  All walm comers, all
new
.  None of them stare at my penis, but it’s still disturbing to have it flashed out to them.  My pissing is more important to me now than my embarrassment.  I let the urine leak completely away, but there is still a slight pain in my bladder from the stretching.

For one reason or another, the new homeless people in my home aren’t much of a bother.  There’s about three or four medium-sized families that all look human and decent enough.  The overpopulation in the streets was too much for them, I’m guessing, and forced them to take refuge inside of the warehouse.  It was going to happen sooner or later.

On the way back to my azure woman/thing, my mouth speaks to the new people - and let me mention that my mouth says this and not
me
– as if my mouth is their governor: