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Nancy Roundabout sat in the bathroom, browsing a publication that she wouldn't have allowed under any other circumstance. HAHAHAHAHA! It was coming from inside the wall, ominous and unappealing—like a former investment banker serving out his community service as a phantasm in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion. HAHAHAHAHA! It reminded her of something...something slimy and unsettling and buried deep inside where it was only obtainable with a bonesaw and a clinically trained psychologist. Luckily, both were at the scene. HAHAHAHAHA! A memory melted down the back of Nancy's shirt, accompanied by a big brass band of brain tissue: There was a drink special on Dark and Stormies that night and the Roundabout family car was gyrating all over the road. Nancy's father had a social anxiety that made him unable to show his embarrassing jalopy out on the public highways without first consuming massive quantities of liquid courage. Nancy sat in the backseat, determining the contents of her eleventh birthday party's goody bags as if it were her last and suffering from the effects of freezing on a chairlift while two awkward metal strips protruded out of her shoes so they wouldn't miss out on the possibility of watching their close cousin severe a small child's head from his torso, shortly followed by the heartfelt moment of a fat man in a puffy coat looking down at the blood splatters on his waterproof pants and crying for his son. The car was able to come to a full stop before it deforested the trees in the Roundabout's front yard. Nancy crashed through the window and made a break for a better life. Her father smothered her hopes and dreams with a jumbo-sized butterfly net, opened the front door to their house, and deposited her inside. Her younger brother was in the backseat, sleeping off another case of blunt force trauma, and Nancy's father went back for his remains. Left alone with her feeling-her-way-through-the-dark phobia, Nancy worked through the psychological damage accrued through years of clumsiness and her father's habit of using their house as an ancient, and heavily boobytrapped, temple in his unofficial sequels to the Indiana Jones films and never picking up after himself. Nancy cried out for her mother, but she was out of earshot—in outer space, just in case her ex-husband ever decided to determine whether she was telling the truth when he asked, "Would you satisfy my needs as a sexual being if I were the last man on Earth?" Even the replica that her father created out of bruschetta and kept perched on his shoulder would have sufficed, but the weight of her brother's abnormally swollen head had made his transmigration into a two-man job. HAHAHAHAHA! It was coming from behind The Spleen of the Destroyer, odious and infernal—like a dipsomaniac recording a Spooky Sounds of Halloween tape to try his luck at the liquor store clerk's weak heart. HAHAHAHAHA! It sounded identical to the aforementioned laughter, causing Nancy to forget the fifteen years of regret and disappointment and giddiness that separated the two laugh tracks. She sat on the toilet, focusing on that night when her father searched the house to alleviate her fears and came up empty. HAHAHAHAHA! But there's no way it was the same guy. It was probably her stupid next-door neighbor laughing at the funny faces that his children made as they drowned in his backyard pool. HAHAHAHAHA! But after that night, she was too frightened to sleep in the house and had to spend the next two weeks in the barn, where her father hid all the victims from his drunk driving excursions and it wasn't even remotely comfortable. HAHAHAHAHA! Sally thought that everyone had the G.O.D given right to enjoy a good night's sleep on a Craftmatic Adjustable Bed, have the defense of a white goose down blanket to keep the gators from biting off your toes, and rest their noggin on a soft pillow made of sentient foam that caresses you all night long. HAHAHAHAHA! Tapping into the same gland that frantic women throughout the ages have used to lift cars off fleshy bundles of their genetic material, Nancy smashed down the bathroom wall, unveiling evidence of the world outside. EH? A man cowered behind one of her patio chairs. Mid-leap, Nancy braced herself for the removal of his head from his body. But...he had the guilty smirk of an enfant terrible of the silver screen, an accumulation of washboard abs, and a tush that made you contemplate an exciting new career as a toilet seat. And he was around her age. Somehow she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was the laugher from her childhood—now all grown up. And I was born forty weeks later.
__________________________________________________________________ Bradley Sands wrote a novel called It Came from Below the Belt. He edits a literary journal called Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens. He maintains a website called www.bradleysands.com. Bust Down the Doors and Eat All the Chickens is a print journal (usually) that showcases surreal and absurd stories that do not fall into any standard genre classification. We prefer work that celebrates the incongruous, the nonsensical and the irrational, work that defies common sense and sabotages the familiar. However, we also enjoy vividly written stories that grab us from the first line and never let go until the end, stories featuring convincing, active, three-dimensional characters. In short, we want to be told exciting, well-crafted stories, but ones that shatter the boundaries of reality and illusion. Visit us at www.absurdistjournal.com. |
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