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Prayers to Sheos |
| Chapter Two, part two | |
| Sheos, our resident god, lives in solitary confinement at the Cedar Hills Psychiatric Hospital, where he writes his flights-of-fancy, AKA lies. If you'd like him to compound your problems and possibly mock you, send him a prayer: sheos@susurrusmagazine.com. |
The Rev was being choked by a woman in a cream colored dress. Her thin fingers clutched on to the Rev’s neck and squeezed, forcing him down to the floor, where he was then mounted and having his head smashed repeatedly into the tile. The woman’s dress pushed her breasts to the point of overflow, and every time the Rev was brought up for another slam, his nose came millimeters away from touching the skin. At these moments the Rev’s eyes bulged, his greed to take it all in for as long as he could unmasked.
Rabies and I weren’t so lucky. Here we were experiencing pain. This was the first location on Earth where I had felt such sensations for a prolonged period of time, and while I normally would be intrigued by such a development, it turns out that pain is not that wonderful. In fact, it hurts like a bitch.
The Rev’s death was preventing him from feeling things like pain, but this came at a cost; namely, parts of his body that he’d rather not lose.
For every slam that the Rev endured, teeth departed their station, patches of hair were shaken from his scalp, or skin would flake from his body.
I’d have felt bad for him if it wasn’t so funny.
Dear Sheos,
You break a mirror, you get seven years bad luck.
What’s the time frame on a globe light?
Ernie
The calculations that dictate bad luck years are ridiculously convoluted in design. I wonder at time if they even employ numbers mankind hasn’t thought to use for centuries. So I can’t really say what the exact sentence would be for breaking a dome light, but my gut is telling me its somewhere in the neighborhood of 197.
I didn’t wait for the party to attack me, and instead ran headlong into the group, shoulder poised for maximum damage, only every body I’d prepared to come into contact with vanished in a puff of smoke, and I ended up on the other side of the ballroom near the bar, a clean path cut through the crowd where I had gone through.
“Shit,” I said, honestly disappointed.
Rabies walked into the center of the path and touched a finger to the nose of one well-dressed gentleman. The guy burst into smoke at the slightest contact.
“It’s like popping bubbles,” Rabies said, and dispatched another three of the dancers, keeping his selection deliberately sparse throughout the group.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
Another one turned to dust and dispersed throughout the room by a light breeze.
“I could do this all day,” Rabies said, smiling, until his finger touched solid on a man’s overcoat. “Oh…”
The man jabbed Rabies in the stomach, doubling him over, then slammed a fist into Rabies’ nose. Blood splattered on the man’s pants, but it didn’t seem to bother him.
Rabies landed with a solid thud and was kicked in the ribs.
“Hey,” I called out to the guy, but instead of the one dancer turning to me, they all did. I thought about what to say next, but could only come up with an old standard as they all started walking in my direction. “Shit.”
Dear Sheos,
Which did you like better? Ang Lee’s Hulk or The Incredible Hulk?
Sean
Are we seriously talking about a fictional green man as though it had anything to do with the betterment of the world? That’s always been the problem with humans: they care too much about shit that doesn’t fucking matter in the least modicum in terms of continued existence.
Should we create a viable food and fuel source that will eliminate poverty and environmental crisis? No! Instead, let’s rant about how two movies were made five years apart from one another and watch as fanboys bicker about which was better.
Should we focus all our energies on the topics of the day? Death in South America? Corporate overthrows in the far east? Loss of public consciousness in modern American society? No! Fuck all that shit! Some D-list celebrity is spending $40,000 on earrings for her cat.
This is why I hate you! This is why if I prayed to some borderline retarded being that did dick to help his creation, I would pray for all of you to walk around for a few days with a hair-pulling howler monkey that quotes Ruskin on your back all day long so maybe, maybe, you can feel the enormous amount of discomfort that I have to put up with on a daily basis. That’s what I would pray for.
Also, I was particularly fond of Hulk, and didn’t see why everyone got in such a fuss over it. But that’s just me.
The bar had wine glasses hanging upside down from a set of rails, so I pulled them off like apples from a tree and launched the glassware at the approaching hoard. One glass took out a minimum of five dancers, so instead of wasting them, I used a cloth napkin to wrap around three glasses and crushed them into broken shards. I slung the collection of glass onto the group and watched as the majority of them went up in smoke, leaving only five figures left to continue the approach.
I smiled and grabbed a knife that had been used to slice up limes, jumped away from the bar, and got to business.
Without the element of surprise, the dancers were pushovers, each falling to my blade with a scream of pain and a look of disbelief. The bodies fell to my feet and bled on the lacquered floor. By the time the last one was down, all the other figures in the room had stopped what they were doing to stare at me in horror.
“Jesus,” one said. The disgust in his voice was thick and he vomited onto the floor.
“Hell, mister,” said a younger gentleman. “We were just roughing you up. You didn’t have to get so violent.”
“You were smashing my friend’s skull in,” I said, pointing at the Rev and his attacker with the point of my bloody knife.
“He’s already dead,” said the woman in the busty dress. She stepped away from the Rev and pointed to the bodies of her fallen dancers. “Those were our friends. They were alive. What were you thinking?”
“I—” My voice caught. “I thought that you all were trying to murder us.”
“Murder you?” said the woman. “How are we expected to do that? You’re a god for fuck’s sake. How are we supposed to be murdering you?”
The room silently watched as I pondered through this question. Even Rabies had a look of displeasure in his eyes, the fucker. Only he would band against me in such a situation. After the silent treatment, the dancers started fading into the walls of the ballroom, walking backwards so they didn’t have to lose their view of me. Me, the murderer of the evening.
“Shit.”
Dear Sheos,
Have you ever considered therapy?
Natalie
Often, and in various forms.
With the ballroom emptied, Rabies, the Rev, and I regrouped at the exit door and pulled it open to reveal a different room that was filled with ogres. On seeing us, the ogres pushed back to make a path for us to follow to the next door in the asylum.
“We don’t want no trouble like what you dished out over there, all right,” said an ogre in a particularly high-pitched voice. “Just pass through and leave us be. No funny stuff.”
I nodded, and with that, we were on our way.