Amputation & Them Cool Sakura Gelly Roll Pens

[Gum do Mugu]

“I don’t have a story to tell, really.”

Spitball Willie wasn’t lying, he really believed he didn’t have a story to tell.

“But, they found you… both of your arms, both of your legs. Amputated.”

“Yup,” Spitball fired back through the gap in his butter bean teeth.

“Tell me,” she pined, squeezing her (quite unprofessional) Sakura gelly roll pen, “just how did you end up in that situation?”

“Well," Spitball said, lolling back in his tatty recliner, "it was the old boys who done got me.” He tore into a mighty belly laugh! But, soon strangled it with a wheeze when he realised he was laughing alone.

“Old boys?” she asked, dryly.

“Old boys.” he replied, matter-of-factly.

“Oldd bboys?” she asked.

“Yeah, them good old boys!” Willie jammed his rusty, crusty, mechanical finger into his temple. "You know 'em," he insisted with a little foam in the corner of his lips. “Real memorable guys. Patches, Jazz-man, and… hmpphhhffff… Lil’ Kats I think it was. Or no, was it Lil’ Dogs?”

She flipped the cover of her notepad closed, aware she was underscoring a futile day.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Willie.”

The only thing this coot could help her with would be widening, thickening, and cementing that august worry line across her sweaty forehead. Hooking up the auld fella with robotic limbs was a techno-medical breeze, but gluing together 300 years of brain rot was a bridge too far.

On to the next clue...

[Gum do Mugu]

She schlopped hopelessly into the flight cradle of her +DBLNA dronecraft. Frustration like today’s made the extra payments worth it, she was glad she forked out for the comfy seats.

“Milton,” she begged into the microphone.

A video connection fizzed across the viewscreen. A bold young gal pulled her brass-rimmed goggles off and winked happily. “Jenibber,” she said sweetly, and slowly, like treacle, “what can I do for you?”

“I didn’t expect you to answer right away,” the reporter explained ruefully, “let me key in my journey.”

“Ah, yes, keep me waiting… vintage Jen behaviour,” Milton’s muddy cheeks dimpled out a smile.

Beep, beep, boop. “Just let me!” BEEEEEP! The dronecraft’s blades cut into the night, and left old Spitball Willie’s shack behind in a cloud of rich, red, desert dust.

“Jen…” Milton encouraged painlessly. The judgment in her voice was hidden, lovingly, within a drowning, irresistible, gooey kindness.

“What can you tell me about Patches, Jazz-man, and Lil’—”

“For fuck’s sake, Jen!” Milton snapped angrily, this bullshit was going to be the death of them both. “Just go the fuck home,” she pleaded, “it’s not worth it.”

[Gum do Mugu]

Wilmaria’s husband had slipped in the bathtub, then the heart attack gripped him like a handshake and a pat on the back for 77 years of good service. And good service it was. No house on the block went without juicy damsons, crimson strawberries, or a paper bag of autumn’s apple harvest.

She rubbed her fingers over the interlocking boards of cherry and walnut, and that friction kindled a warmth unsuited to her old grey eyes. Wilmaria’s memories, in spite of the years, were fresh and gentle. Heaven’s call, like a slab of granite, was impervious to her protestations. So, why bother with heartache?

After all: cut, crafted, screwed, and glued by her woodworking husband—the worktop persisted in functionality (and would continue to do so).

“Snip!” she said to herself in the confines of the potting shed.

Wilmaria was taking cuttings from her favourite flower. Her blade came down across the stem, just beneath a node, and then she dipped each cutting in rooting powder and placed it directly in the damp soil.

Some will take, some won’t.

[Gum do Mugu]

Galactic Public Radio blasted a boom bap beat from the inter-planetary asteroid belt transmitter into Milton’s spacewave headphones. The chill retro vibe kept her bubbling anxiety on a simmer; Milton needed every bit of help to cool her worries about Jenibber and the case.

The case… oof!

“Fucking shit, Jen,” the New Saharan mechanic bellowed as she jammed the red RETRACT button on her ICT (Imperial Combat Turret). The turret shuttled beneath the desert sand, and with it went all of Milton’s hopes for that promotion.

“I guess this is my final assignment,” she grumbled to herself as she prowled, emboldened by the dope jams still pumping through her headphones. She felt like everything was pushing her. The narrow corridors acted like echoey blinkers, amplifying her stubborn drive to a star-crossed destination.

“Take it.” Milton threw her access key at the base commander. Without waiting for an answer, she turned and pulled a biodegradable trash bag out of her pocket. Her bunk’s collection of knick knacks and keepsakes had a date with the dumpster.

“MECHANIC!” her (former) boss screamed, spitting out the chewed up sand spinach of his lunch salad. “Return your damn uniforms and consider yourself a fucking fugitive!”

They both knew he’d let her go. They both knew she’d earned it.

Should I steal a dronecraft or just walk to town?

[Gum do Mugu]

Humid as fuck. It was humid as fuck. “It’s like being at the bottom of the ocean out there.” Not really a fair comparison. Because: “No, it’d be cold at the bottom of the ocean. It’s more like being at the bottom of a swamp in Louisiana.” Nobody wanted to suffer the fat, flushed, mug’s hyperbole any more than they wanted to suffer the 200% humidity.

“Oh. My. Fucking. God. Shut the fuck up!!!!!!” Jazz-man swung his metal knucks at his accountant’s big, glistening, baldy forehead. Splat. Crack. Thud. “We’ll get a new books guy, don’t fucking worry about it.” Freshly squeezed vein juice ran red down the grout channels in the tiled floor.

A couple of vapours grabbed the twitcher by the leather loafers and grunted while pulling that mama hog weight out to the dumpster. A couple more bottom rungers bustled in with a grubby mop and an unreasonably soapy bucket of hot bubbles.

Scrub-a-dub-dub.

“Good riddance,” said Jazz-man, while pushing his Bret the Hitman Hart shades up his nose and flush to his blood-craving eye sockets. “Is that reporter bothering senile old Spitball gonna drop her story or what? I'm sick of fucking killing people."

Jazz-man really wasn't, but hey, it was a figure of speech.

[Gum do Mugu]

The enveloping shadow of the courthouse shook the little girl with doubt. The words of suits, ties, and judgmental eyes ran through her mind. She was worried sick.

“You’re not supposed to do it, you know?” she whimpered up at her mother.

“Don’t worry about it,” came the curt reply, as they hurried along the enduring streets of La Ville-Lumière. “Nobody cares,” mother insisted, tightening her grip on the child’s hand. “They don’t enforce most of the laws. They don’t have the time. They’re just there to scare you. Remember that.”

Iconoclasm was a jarring notion to the hopeless tyke. On one side of the scales: mother; on the other side of the sales: teachers, police officers, politicians, et al. And the courthouse, she worried, it was so scary to a child’s eyes. The architect's intent to intimidate with bricks and blocks was beyond the babe's comprehension.

They were on their way to the river to release their pet goldfish before they hit the rails.

This was, of course, the crime she was worried about. Releasing a goldfish into the city’s river was illegal. “God help the native fish”—that was the logic at least. But, a bright orange fish—no matter how ravenous, no matter how gluttonous—would soon find itself prey for the herons and the pike.

From the apex of the arched bridge, mother tipped the bowl and Goldie splashed into the river and was gone.

“Do you think Goldie will be okay in the river?”

“She’ll be fine.”

Parenthood challenges the most honest of us.

[Gum do Mugu]

20 years ago...

The plastic just felt better. It clicked enough, but not too much. Mario just moved right, and Bubsy just didn’t. When kids played video games (in a romantic past we’re not sure was ever real) they just knew what was right. And by right, I mean, what was fun. Now, we just chug buckets of hot air and we ask each other…

“Hey, so was that good?”

Who fucking knows, right? But, hey, let’s analyse it, review it, post breakdown videos about it, and indulge in the full sugar soda of fandom. And that’s not to be rude, or cruel, or disparaging to those who do have that lifeline of intravenous pleasure that whatever format of entertainment can provide.

But, for the rest of us, translucent shells dwellers, it’s pointless… I must have flushed my lust for life down the toilet with the rest of my shit.

“Hey...” said a teenage Jenibber to her buddy Milton. “So, I read your post,” she continued. “...Everything… okay?”

“Nah,” replied the similarly teenaged Milton. “I gotta fucking do something else before I take a one way trip to the rope store.”

“Big oof,” Jenibber sighed with a ruffled handful of Milt’s shiny, black hair.

[Gum do Mugu]

“Alright, Milt… I hear ya.” A honey and sandpaper voice hushed his words over a supposedly secure line. “This is some shitty fucken wrong ass tree to bark up.”

The poky L.A. office was choked in smoke, lined with Amazonian hardwoods, and lit by the good fortune of dim streetlights filtering through the closed blinds; the resident private detective was a comforting trope his clients appreciated.

“Just drop the comm link before I change my mind!” the detective continued, while Milton—buzzing on the other end of the line—kept talking incessantly.

CLICK.

Jamaica Justice rolled over to his authentic 1920s filing cabinet (life was a game, and he had to keep up the immersion). The steel drawer rolled open on its runners, and Jamaica began thumbing through the grubby documents.

Didn’t expect to get a call about some of the Old Boys.

But thumbing wasn’t fast enough though, so he started to flick, alternating between index and middle finger.

He was a fast flicker.

I am a fast flicker.

Rollen Detszl a.k.a. Lil’ Dog

Justice clenched his lips and sighed through his nose. He had been hoping for a supernatural intervention and that the file just wouldn’t be there. After all, Milton was a good friend, from a good time. He knew it. He stewed on it.

But...

I don’t wanna die for this shit.

[Gum do Mugu]

Patches tugged his fingerless glove tighter over his fight-swollen hand. “Look,” he said while placing his palm flatly on top of his Philly Flyers bucket hat, “we all got a job.” He was a piggish brute of a man, sneering his words out of a snout filthy with the shame of poverty and violence. “We all got a job to do,” he repeated with a snort of his flared nostrils. A third time: “WE ALL GOT A JOB TO DO.”

Jazz-man’s ferocious enforcer, Mr. Patches, reared back over the prone body of Spitball Willie and devolved into a diatribe. “So you went to war? That was your job?” Willie wheezed as though to answer. “No!” Patches snapped, “asking you a question don’t mean I’m asking you for an answer.”

Patches crunched Willie’s wrist with his black and red Yeezy Boosts. “You think fighting wars for this fucken country means I gotta respect ya? Fool, you gotta understand something… this fucken country ain’t mine, I don’t got no passport. They won’t let me out, and fuck… if I did get out, they wouldn’t let me fucken back.”

It was true, Patches wasn’t allowed to leave the country owing to his well-earned period of incarceration. Discovering antinationalism was convenient; a nationalist society rejected him, so he rejected a nationalist society. Besides, that ideology offered him license to be the feral fuck he loved to be.

“So, that shit you did in the past for something that I don’t recognise don’t mean nothing to me.” Patches jammed an index finger in each of Spitball’s ear holes and proceeded to drag him across the cracked concrete of the back alley. “You gonna need to get yourself a new job to do! One that’s gonna put the money in your pocket.”

To his credit, Spitball Willie was—grimace and whimper aside—tight lipped. After all, what could you say to a pair of bulging eyes and a frothing mouth? Willie knew Patches was right, there was only one thing that could talk back to Jazz-man and his Old Boys: money.

“You were a soldier, I’m a soldier,” Patches continued. Willie bit his tongue with what teeth he had left. “You might think you’re better than me,” Patches said as he stomped on Willie’s other wrist, “because you got a rubber stamp to kill people.” Patches paused, confusing himself with his own logic—realising, maybe, that there wasn’t much difference between taking orders from the government and taking orders from Jazz-man.

“Difference is,” he said after experiencing a relative light bulb moment, “that I get fucken paid for the fucks I shoot.”

The truth that the government, in spite of his sacrifices, had abandoned him, was an agony as genuine as all of his broken bones.

“I’ll set ya up,” Patches sneered, while pulling his phone out of his pocket, “I’ll call ya an ambulance.”

[Gum do Mugu]

A set of dull headlights, hazy with age, shone out into the American road. The cracked paint lining the asphalt ran out ahead; like the days, the nights, the weeks, the months, shit, the years—he thought of that dreadful lyric “the years are falling by like the rain”.

Hyperbolic drivel.

Years didn’t pass by like the rain at all, because the rain fell in a shower; sure, some drops fell in succession, but they also fell simultaneously.

Years, on the other hand, were decidedly lacking in any kind of interesting multiplicity. We know that when this year ends, the next one will come. And isn’t that quaint? A harrowing parade of lost moments. Yesterdays are strewn with, littered with, discarded regret. And (for fun) consider success: a happy moment? Time takes it and wrings the life out of it, casting it down to become the putrid roadkill of the highway of our lives.

Still, he thought, the hills and curves came fast enough to keep him breathing—what’s around the bend or over the hill?

A cemetery crept into view as he peaked and descended the other side of the slope. “A little on the nose,” he swore back at the universe, cursing it for its blunt and boorish retort.

No matter what he did, a black cat called melancholy stalked him to the end.