TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE LAST PREY
THE MONKEY WITH THE BIG HEAD
PIECES OF EDEN
THE DEAD CIRCUS
GREEN APPLES
KOO-O
INTERIORA II
EASTERN HEAVEN
RED MONSOON
A MODERN BERSERKER
THE HALF BRIDE
EDEN UNDERGROUND
CARLOS, DIEGO,VAMOS!
THE WRATH SINGS, GODDESS
THE RIME OF THE MAD MARINER
LACRIMOSA
THE PAWN SHOP
THE COCKROACH KING
THE GARDEN
DAMES DE VOYAGE
ELECTRIC MONKEYS
THE TENTH CIRCLE
ALMOST TO THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Copyright 2015 Crystal Lake Publishing
All Rights Reserved
www.crystallakepub.com
ISBN: 978-0-9946626-7-5
Cover Design:
Vincent Chong—http://www.vincentchong-art.co.uk/
Illustrations:
Paolo Di Orazio—http://paolodiorazio.wordpress.com
Back Cover Design:
Ben Baldwin—http://www.benbaldwin.co.uk/
Interior Layout:
Lori Michelle—www.theauthorsalley.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“The Monkey with the Big Head” has been previously published in the Spring 2015 issue of The Horror Zine Magazine. “Interiora II” has been previously published in the second edition of the collection The Shaman and Other Shadows. “Green Apples” will appear in the June issue of the Disturbed Digest.
THE LAST PREY
Eva has a snake tattooed on her arm
and a blue orchid in her hair;
fossil ovaries
are carved on the buckle
of her chain mail belt;
her hands are full of blood.
I’m hiding in the tall grass,
grey as the sky,
as the rats show me the way
to escape.
I’m the last man
in this heretic Eden, in this game preserve.
I’m just a flesh trophy,
an aquarium of dried, floating sperm,
poisoned by a powerful pesticide.
I crawl like a worm.
I hear Eva’s steps
trampling my trail,
her hallucinated chants;
the smell of female and nightmare
spread all around,
dripping on dry branches.
There is no horizon
to reach.
The land is endless.
A rustle behind me,
then in front, left and right.
I’m fucked, surrounded.
I stand up unsteadily.
I give myself to the cloned Amazons,
to the many copies of Eva,
singing as sirens without a sea,
rubbing male skulls on their thighs.
THE MONKEY WITH THE BIG HEAD
The man with the big head
crosses the gate of the asylum.
He leaves behind himself the smell of iron,
the rough sheets and the fleas’ claws,
the walls of his too-white room
scrawled with numbers, broken lines,
roads dangling from the ceiling,
small one-eyed faces—
his son nibbled from memory.
The man with the big head
gets on the bus.
There are too many people around,
too many thoughts rustling,
that buzz, those moths—
those black scribbled wings—
who live in his brain,
confuse him.
They make the same noise—
a blender of souls—
of those people crowded,
sweating, looking at his big shoes,
at the round scars on his neck,
counting his bestiality.
The garden, the exhausted willows,
pots filled with snail shells,
a bike without chain, the new roof,
his sister, her big boobs,
the nest of a spider in her red hair,
long, tired as the willows,
agonizing on her shoulders,
a crucifix that can’t breathe
in that niche of flesh
beneath her goiter.
The man arrived home
smiling, toothless.
The TV is on, blaring.
A pissed preacher
covered in black silk armor
shoots large caliber prayers
with his baptized Kalashnikov.
His sister doesn’t smile;
she sits back down in the chair,
her velvet spaceship to heaven,
and whispers to him:
There’s something to eat in the fridge.
Get what you want.
The man with the big head
sticks his head inside.
He looks at the lights, the colored packaging,
the bottles of beer and holy water.
He feels the fresh sting on his face,
then the moths resume flapping their wings.
Those flying bastards
have formed a black halo around his head—
they came from his brain,
out through his mouth, nose, ears.
They want his sister now—
to go into her holes.
The man grabs a knife
sunk in an apple pie, a holy cake,
turns off the TV and moves close to his sister,
still hypnotized by the electric preacher—
a noiseless electroshock.
He rips her throat, freeing her from the moths,
from those dark insects that have eaten the brains
of the family Stone for generations.
She will not cross the iron gate
as he did a long time ago, entering Hell
as their son did,
the boy whom everyone called
the monkey with the big head.
The deformed angel
flew away
after the last electric shake.
The man opens his backpack,
pulls out a silver frame—
there is no picture inside.
He puts it on the belly of his sister,
which should always remain empty,
then he leaves the house and
slowly approaches the bus stop.
PIECES OF EDEN
Many rats live in my Eden,
in this garden full of millions of empty boxes,
of cut cables, of rusty circuits.
The silence roars in my Eden,
while the cries are closed off,
sealed safely in a vault,
hidden with flesh’s bullion—
my many Eves torn to pieces.
Her head is in a glass jar.
Her bust is on the table,
painte
d blue, glossy and glazed.
Her chopped arms and legs
fill an oval copper bathtub—
this is the place where I dive
into her purple marmalade,
where I dream,
where I rise and fall to fish—
at the bottom,
the black pearls of my madness.
My Eden is an old abandoned warehouse
between the crooked streets of the suburbs
where ghost cars are parked,
where I drag each new Eve,
still in one piece.
THE DEAD CIRCUS
Around the circus,
the ground is black.
There is no life for miles.
The tiger without a tail, without teeth,
growls at the shadows
that lick its nose.
It has a lock around its neck
and a ghost as a master.
The fat lady
exploded two years ago,
eating her husband
and the bronze diamonds
of her stage python,
its radioactive skin
green, like the mud from the Apocalypse
fucking the city.
The dwarf, the tightrope walker,
who has never been afraid of anything,
married a young sow
and now goes to the slaughterhouse every morning
with his sons still alive on a leash.
The owner of the circus,
the great Hector,
the magician who could make
the faces of the audience
and their wallets disappear,
now continues to dig,
finding pieces of his daughter
trampled by the elephant’s feet
beneath the dirt of the center ring.
The bearded lady
is chained
to her throne of thorns.
At her feet is a long line
carved from the curse of Medusa
by the acid rain of the Apocalypse
frying everything.
The knife thrower, Modì,
still wears his mask of death.
He is the only one to continue the show.
Ghosts applaud from the stands
while he launches his blades
toward the wooden wheel that spins,
empty, without its flesh target.
That squeaky wheel is the only noise
of the dead circus,
of that show you bought the ticket for
when you were born.
GREEN APPLES
Juanita wobbles on her heels, earrings shaking like rattles,
fifteen years old,
fifteen customers a day,
a father swallowed by the couch,
and a mother, a hooker like her,
chewed up two years ago
in the village of worms
underground.
“Juanita!”
He wants his cold beer.
“Juanita, holy shit!”
He wants to celebrate his gods
with steel helmets and numbers on their chests.
“Juanita, I’ll kill you one of these days!”
The screen turns on to the Super Bowl.
The temple is open,
but the customer honks.
—Fuck!—
Juanita must hurry.
She has to open the fridge,
and then her skinny legs.
The pig in the suit waits for her,
out there in his sticky car.
Stories of skinned knees,
curses, and drool
dripping down her back;
stories of Sundays in a January
of quarterbacks and crumpled dollars
tucked into her panties—
green, soft bullets
planted in the depths of the soul.
Juanita runs down the stairs.
She stops on the first floor
and sticks two green apples into her empty bra.
Now she’s ready.
“Juanita!”
The father starts to yell.
He finished his beer, again.
His empty green bottle roars.
He hates his skinny boy,
without real tits,
who earns a third as much as the mother.
—Fuck!—
He spits another day on the carpet.
“I’ll have to go back to work,
sooner or later.”
Juanita opens the car door.
She smells of fresh fruit,
unripe, peeled,
cut into thin slices.
“Ten dollars.”
Love can be so green.
KOO-O
The cage is on the beach.
Koo-o raises his scepter of bones.
All the others kneel,
while the neck of a blue parrot
twists right and left,
toward the ocean that touches on
the edges of the new cemetery,
the plantation of burnt human heads
emerging from the sand.
The plane sank into the ocean long ago.
Grey morays live in its iron armor,
darting through the windows
with purple eyes
and pieces of men between their teeth.
The survivors had reached the island,
wading through its algae guts,
coming up against the white eyes
of Koo-o and his clan.
The man in the cage
has a long beard
and two parrot wings tattooed on his back,
carved by a shard of stone—
wings that bleed again—
above a nest of deadwoods.
Koo-o orders the others
to bring the torches,
to inflame the body of the man
who can’t shout his thoughts,
who can’t hear the drums of death;
his tongue, his ears
have become trophies
hanging on Koo-o’s necklace.
Survivors fallen from heaven
were welcomed to the island,
like angels, like divine birds.
Koo-o and his tribe
wanted to see them fly again
from the rock towers at the top.
They wanted to learn, to discover the secrets
of the people who live between the clouds,
hidden from the eternal eclipse
of the radioactive dust
of the Apocalypse.
The man in the cage burns.
Koo-o approaches the bars,
smells the acrid stink of cooked flesh,
motioning for the others to approach
to see how a fake angel dies,
just like all the other gods
who can’t fly anymore,
buried on the beach.
Koo-o is the emperor of the island,
of the latest Eden,
with his crown of blue parrot feathers,
with his dead necklaces.
He will pierce the clouds,
the green siege of the Apocalypse.
He’ll discover the secrets of the sky
and teach all the other gorillas
now that he has learned how to kill,
how to burn angels,
to enjoy and rave
between the black thighs of Death,
the queen of the murderers.
INTERIORA II
Lightning. The sky is pissed.
The suburb of Rome
is an appetizer of the Purgatory
you can see on the high tide of asphalt,
broken bones, corpses of sirens,
fish bones, and remains of oceans.
It’s raining. A dog limps
toward the tent o
f an abandoned circus,
looking for its master—
a clown without a head or a smile—
with dust on his tongue
and black grease on his rump.
Venus is sleeping
in the yellow building.
She’s polluted, as are her dirty sheets.
Her flesh is gone.
Ribs and bones triumph,
waiting for someone else adrift
on her solitary raft,
floating on the edge of reality.
Two hundred dollars for a whole night
with her, with Venus,
with her remains.
Then comes the morning light—
so sharp—
along with the roar of a mower.
The client wakes up
and opens the window.
The stink of gasoline and sadness
enters the room.
He looks out
toward the cemetery of cars
waiting for souls, drivers.
Venus is still in bed.
She’s without armor now.
Her teeth sparkle,
showing a skeleton smile.
Her flesh is gone,
along with the subway of her uterus,
the generous glands,
the Byzantine back, and the skin of a mango—
all that she was yesterday.
“Where is my Venus?”
thinks the man leaning against the wall,
eyes popping out of his head.
He tries to break down the door
to get away from that velvet-tongued monster.
Two hundred dollars for a night
with Venus’ sister
(Death? Life?),
for her black ring and white bones,
for that damned room,
close, immense,
sealed by an old welder.
The subway swallows its passenger.
All the church bells ring together,
making the ears of the dog prick up,
holding one of its master’s bones
in its rotten teeth.
EASTERN HEAVEN
Heaven is overbooked.
There is no place for anyone else.
Outside is a great borderless Hell—
above ground, underground,
there is no difference.
A trident made of stone
rises among the peaks of the Himalayas,
a tail jutting out from the
sulphurous ass of the world.
Heaven is now protected by a wall,
by cement guard towers,
by checkpoints and loaded machine guns.
Off Limits
If you die—
and one day you will—
and the mollusc of your white pearl soul
tries to crawl to the entrance
and pass the red line,
the guards won’t think twice about shooting you.
Everyone will see through