a body part from a lardporn novel called Ricky's Anus
Outside the house the house had sunk into the sidewalk, the sidewalk around the house with all the names cut in it, the sidewalk where so many hours Ricky had ripped the skin off of his body. In turn the sidewalk had sunk into the lawn, the mealy mat of half-conditioned growth so neon brown with all the terror, and the lawn too had moved to kiss the window. Ricky could see the way the wires that had fed the lamp light and the electric duster the will to eat the dust hung on the half-split hull of nowhere that grew in throbbing on the multi-plaid horizon, from which where the gulls had barked up the gray linings of the their intestines to form a barrier or film.
In the film, buoyed by the smudge light seeping through the flashlights in the eyes of god, Ricky saw the x-ray of his urethra where he’d hid the idea of his life, and the lidless answer he’d kept buried from his mother to the question she would never, even in sleeping, ask.
Below the cusp of crap the street around the house had sponged against the siding, marbled smooth, no dent or dam or door from which the court of gone blood could recur.
Ricky had seen the dogs and cats and fish and gerbils of the neighborhood dumped from their sack beds or wet bowls in the night. He had heard them flounder in high-power pain there on the pavement through the window from his room— a billion animals as if on fire— their bodies corkscrewed and run through with chill and ache before the lawn had sucked them under. The cats that he’d collected in the evenings had also burst, spraying the soil before they became mustard, the packy gold-brown smarm of each one spattered on the hot heat, ejecting sloughs of stuff Ricky knew he himself had eaten.
In the bowl of the street’s lip now, half hung and blackened, lit by weird light from half-dawn, the house was going under.
Ricky stood and tried to keep standing, his leg muscles gobbled in the wrong gravity the front yard now commanded, having fully lifted the earth up around it and bowed the night sky to a bump around the house from which something other wet was jumping. Ricky felt the weight puddle in his belly, the weight of all his excess blood, the weight of years of nights of breakfast cereal cold one bowl after another with his head against the oven, the weight of every pin he’d snuck from his mother’s pin cushion and worked up into his foot’s sole one by one, knowing the color-flavor of each further incision, all of it hulled inside him now, feedmachines.
Ricky moved toward the window with the glow heaping out of everything he couldn’t see, his eyes coming to focus through the weird light in time to watch the white laddered minivan arrive. The van had no windshield, doors, or mirrors. It came to a rest half moored on the gray-green lawn Ricky had not mowed in several years.
Sometimes when Ricky picked up the telephone there were prods sticking out of the receiver cup but Ricky put his head against it anyway— he’d spent 18 hours as a toddler on the phone with a man from Texas he’d dialed while practicing his counting on the dial pad, when his mother had taken the phone away the man had hung up, after all that.
Ricky had tried for years to record his own voice singing and yet everything he spoke to remained blank— though he swore he could hear himself in the backgrounded layers of the posthumous rapper’s shit-pop single bleeding nightly through the silence of our beef.
In the driveway several men emerged from the car despite that Ricky still could not see any burp in the van’s surface. The men stood on the lawn in some corked configuration. There were several of them altogether and yet Ricky could not count. Their bodies slurred against the shade of evening spreading out, the men’s clothes were white, their heads were tilted, they wore no expressions on their face and yet their eyes were stuck to Ricky unblinked and glossy as he stood on the other side of the morning glass. Ricky with the burn marks in his ear rivets and under the nape of his nose where in his sleep he sniffed and sniffed, Ricky with both thumbs indented with a million microscopic marks where a breed of pest had wandered in and settled, annexing the anterior regions of where he licked to turn the page in books and with which he clicked the button on the TV’s remote control. The men’s arms hung limp at their sides— their index fingers were quite massive, thick as the middle of their arm. He could feel their eyes against him searching the pores. There was a music locked inside the van. Subwoofers, black metal bass, throb vocals— the front bumper was vibrating so hard it knocked the air on both sides of the van in puddles. The men did not move. The men’s hands were in their pockets, watching.
At the window Ricky closed the blinds, the pattern on the blinds were massive flowers each as big as Ricky’s head. The pattern the leaves of the flowers made each held a whole forest of the flowers in them. Ricky leaned his head forward and topped it lightly on the curtain so that through it it touched the hidden glass. Ricky felt the curtain’s print imprinted on his forehead sinking in. He stepped back from the hidden window and judged it from afar. The window on the wall was set a bit off-center to the right. Ricky closed his right eye then his left eye then his right and watched the hidden window jump. Ricky got down on the cold kitchen floor against his stomach and listened for something,
Ricky stood back up and walked into the next room. Ricky made a point not to look out the window that looked onto the front yard at another angle where just before he’d seen the men. He moved with his head held on straight aimed at a point on the far wall toward the TV.
Ricky walked halfway across the room not breathing. His mother was still spread out in the floor, though she’d turned over to face up. Her body had grown at least one quarter bigger. Her tits had sunken back into her, her skin aglow. Her eyes were wide and blinking— the flutter of the lid made the light in the whole room slightly strobe. She was wearing a different dress than she’d had last time. It was the dress she’d had on when she got fucked for making Ricky, except with the color all drained out. The pattern had several thousand stars. The dress was the same white as the men who’d come into the yard. The dress was cut open at the middle and hiked up so that you could see how Ricky’s mother’s vagina had been recently shaved. The clit was swollen neon red, the color the house’s brick, and of the mother after bath time. The lips around the clit were swollen even worse. It looked like a rooster’s head. The air was hung with film.
In the picture of the room hanging in the room behind him everything was exactly as it was there now except in the photo his mother’s body was not there, and in the photo there was a large red cube placed on top of the all-white coffee table. The cube seemed to have no seam. The corners of the cube were sharp and glistened in the white captured photo light. In the spot on the wall of the room in the photo where the photo in the real room hung there was nothing there except more white wall, yet when Ricky touched the spot his mouth roof tickled. Ricky could feel with his tongue the way his mouth roof had lost its ridges, was so smooth. There was a slight metallic tint in his saliva.
Ricky hunched down against his mom again. His ass rested on her tits where something cog-veined wriggled. Ricky put his mouth against his mother’s encased ear. Ricky could feel the billion tiny bones hid there behind the folds of hair and flesh, and Ricky whispered. Ricky moved his mouth to say his mother’s name into her, inside his throat his larynx scattered, and what came out was his own name. Ricky, Ricky said again, again, trying to force his tongue to form the other, he could not think of what the name was. Ricky’s mother’s head inside the hair was spurting foam. The soft slather of it welled through the thread-grain and burned Ricky on the lips. Ricky saw his mother turn her head away and more foam came out the other side. Ricky touched his mother on the shoulder and Ricky's mouth was full of more hair. He kept spitting out the hair onto the carpet, the hair was made of blood, the blood dotted on the carpet here and there some in a pattern, the hair would not get out of Ricky’s mouth. No matter how much he spat his mouth was still full, something else was moving in the chew. Ricky could not roll her body over. He could not find the words to pray.
There were rooms somewhere in buildings, rooms with doors which when opened, opened into Ricky, vibrating through his butt. Ricky could feel their knobs knocking against him in the light, and the footsteps, and the rare air, the gnawing of his bone— so many rooms and all this wanting and still nowhere yet to go.
Ricky stepped over his mother and fell into the loveseat with his whole body. The creaking groin of the couch made lather up against his legs, culled from what he and so many other bodies had given up to it unconscious. Ricky could not find the remote. The window to the front yard hung behind him and in the light balled down from god Ricky could feel the silhouette of the men’s disruption and yet he did not turn around.
The inside of Ricky’s head was itching. Ricky could feel his name writ in the lining of his briefs, burning into his flesh’s waistband. Ricky could not find the remote. Ricky’s dick was hard against his thigh, curving down and inward rather than the usual condition. The head was as big as Ricky’s head. Ricky flicked the tip of his taut corroded prick with both pinkies at once and watched it deflate to a point. Ricky leaned back on the sofa with both his arms slid between the cushions, feeling. Ricky could not find the remote. Ricky’s hand moved across something soft again and something so deep and wet it stretched forever. Ricky felt something bite him and he stood up. The TV was already on.
The TV had a picture of woman that kept her eyes on Ricky either way he went. The woman had a birthmark that covered her entire face with a plum color. The woman was dressed in a man’s suit and sat at a news desk with her hair combed into waxy lines. The way the woman looked into Ricky made his erection sink and curl up into him in inverse. The woman’s eyelids had pictures of something on them but she never kept them down long enough for Ricky to see quite what. The woman held a news report and did not read it. The woman kept looking up from Ricky to the window over his shoulder. The woman’s eyes were so wide. Ricky saw his half-reflection in the sheen of the screen. Behind him the light of the window was so massive. Ricky watched his body turn around toward it.
Through the window from this angle Ricky still could see the men. They had not moved except with their heads slightly to see Ricky. Ricky’s pubic hair was fat with static. It seethed at the wide curve of his gut. Ricky smoothed the bulk of the hair with his right hand until the curls all stayed out straight. Some of the strands of hair were adorned with tiny padlocks with no entrance for a key.
Ricky looked up and saw the men again, he felt the pressure brimming in their eyes. The van still idle in the street behind them had become dented all around itself from the music beating out from the inside. There was the shape of a large hand or head stretched in the surface. The car’s a/c unit gave off a steady stream of liquid under the car. Ricky felt something in him bending. Ricky moved toward the glass. Halfway across the room, Ricky tripped across his mother in the floor still, her body had swollen by a quarter yet again. Her labia in particular resembled two bread loaves. The hem of the dress was coming out. The thread led outward from her body along the carpet into another room. Something was pulling. Ricky’s mother moaned as Ricky nudged his foot up in her side fat. Her fat arm slithered from their prostrate position and went up the tight leg of Ricky’s pant. Her nails caught on his leg hair. Get me a napkin Rick, Ricky’s mother said through her nostrils, I need a napkin in this life several times for certain. A well of goo up from her throat then turned any further words to burble. Her fingers squelched in the mass of clot hair way high up Ricky’s leg.
Ricky shook his mother off and approached the window where now the glass was tacky and stuck to his forearms as he leaned. Ricky waved his chub arms at the men. He flashed gang signs and flicked his thumb and middle fingers. He lit a tiny fireworks and watched it burst before him. He grunted at the beading window and nudged the tremor with his shoulders. The men did not flinch. The men’s hand in their pockets made nice bulges. Ricky breathed his inside air out onto the glass until it was wide enough to know, then with two fat fingers wrote the warning. Ricky threw himself against the glass. Ricky beat the plane with all ten fingers. His belly made a screeching. Somewhere a plane fell out of orbit, a young man with a colostomy bag suddenly became a vacuum, there were apple pies in many ovens overflowing, there was a baseball in our hearts. The men. The men were. Ricky had a.
Ricky walked back through the house. Ricky walked to the front door and opened the front door and Ricky walked out onto the lawn.
On the lawn the light, which from inside had seemed forever now, felt far-off, under a cake dome. There were more men now, perhaps a dozen, their bodies fixed in traction on the lawn, where, now among the light Ricky could see, the lawn had expunged a light brown ring of blood— caked just underneath the lip of grass, Ricky could feel it squish between his toes. He could sniff the animals underneath him all wallowing among their magma. The light held warm and calm.
The men watched Ricky waddle up the wet slope, the driveway having given into the new surface which for years had held below. The men’s heads craned at waning angles, their eyes unflipped and dry, as Ricky walked among them. Their arms did nothing. The air between was small and coarse and stunk of milk. Ricky went to the first man nearest to him and opened his mouth with teeth and tremor but no words would come out. Ricky grunted, inner-shouted, flexed and burped. There was no mode— the man stared on into Ricky as if a cursor. There was some fold behind his eyes. Ricky saw the other men and more now arriving, spread all around him in a circle, from close up the men’s clothes smelled like bleach. Ricky raised his fat arm in the air. Ricky swung down on the first man against the shoulder to shove him and there was a small popping of a bulb inside him. The man did not flinch, though the eyelids blinked once. The man looked at Ricky, same as he had been, the many men around them looking too. The other men around him did not move. Ricky swung down on the man again this time with both arms, and then again. He used his elbow, knuckles, knees. The man could not be bodyslammed. The man would not bend except a little. He seemed very heavy though he was thin.
Back in the house Ricky went to the broom closet. He did not notice how the wood floor in the entry hall was slightly warped— the reflective sheen of the long zone showing not the ceiling above it but several years of sheen of sky and none of Ricky. Ricky rummaged through the hanging clothing for the softball bat he’d found wedged in the guest bathroom sink covered in bile. He took the bat back outside with him and went not to the first man but the man 3.2 yards to the man’s northwest. This man’s face was slightly more tense with age and his half-smiled teeth seemed brittle. The man’s pantleg vibrated from the pressure of the van. The roof of the van had been banged far out from its original shape as if to form another room. There was no wind. Ricky went to the man with the softball bat and in his approach raised the bat swiftly and brought it down swiftly, in a hard arc. He brought it down between the man’s eyes. The bat connected with the faint flush of the man’s unibrowing flesh. There was no sound. The breadth at the bridge of the nose up into the slightly cleaved forehead weathered a little with the impact, smudging as if a thumb had been ran across it during birth— otherwise in the man there was no change. His eyes closed once, saw the inside of their lids, reopened seeing Ricky. Ricky swung the bat onto the man again with the muscles in his shoulders going white— the worms in Ricky’s muscles' tissue spurring and spooling in the pleasure of new heat. The bat connected to the man’s head again and Ricky saw the man’s eyes still looking at him. There were even more men now, so many, all with eyes all on him. Ricky looked to the left and to the right and maybe slightly up. The moon was the whole sky, to the point it seemed a night with no moon.
There was a cluster of some crap hung at the edge of Ricky’s vision, such that as he turned the crap continued hanging just out of his cognition, though it was dark gray and slightly see-through and seemed to have a bell hung in its center.
Ricky swung the bat into the man’s head again. The flesh spot dented, making an oval. Under the flesh Ricky could see a flat gauzy panel a slightly lighter gray, puttied around the flesh around the head that puckered only a little further with each beat. No blood came out, no sputum, and yet Ricky continued again, again, to swing. Ricky did not swing at any other part of the man’s white body, the man did not make a sound.
Ricky saw on his own wide wrist there while his arms were moving how his camping wristwatch had begun to glow, this was feature supplied with the watch to allow the viewing of time marks in the dead of night far from all lighting, in caves and underwater. Ricky had never once been camping, Ricky would never go camping in his future life— the air among the trees in the local water was full of lice and crying, the air had rat’s blood laced in it outside the suburban perimeter, anyone could be smothered in their sleep by enormous unseen babies. The time on the watch read all 8’s, more 8’s than a watch should hold, on and on in columns. Ricky heard a sound like 700 records having the needle dropped down onto their noise.
Ricky with the bat abused the center section of the man until finger grips began to ache. Ricky tried to keep the bat there up above his head, his arms seemed to weigh a fortune. By now the men’s van had malformed into a white metal slur upon the air, a oceanic mansion in which the blast-beat shitstorm reverberated. Ricky could not see how high the van had risen, how the van had moved to scrape against the inseam of the sky.
Ricky’s body wanted to approach the van and yet he did not. Ricky could feel the untying of his shoes. He could feel how now his pubic hair had knitted across the fiber of his deflated dick as if as a bodice or a wig and tugging down tight against his urethra. Ricky looked down and saw that he was leaking— his pants were wet and caked with goo that pooled around him into the yard— where the liquid hit the grass the grass began growing, shooting upward with bright unsatcheled blooms, Ricky’s whole head flushed with dry blood and sand. He moved the bat across his crotch. He turned back again to look at the man he’d dented, the man by now had turned his head. The men were not looking at Ricky any longer, the men were looking toward the front door of Ricky’s mother’s house from which now the front room extolled an ooze, a gelatinous liquid wide and flowing in slow-motion with the mother’s hair floating upon it and long strips of the mother’s shredded gown coursing in rivulets. The liquid lolled through the door and down the house mound into the grass where unlike Ricky’s urine the mother’s liquid made the ground go gold and inside the house the house was glown. The house was three-eighths underneath now. Ricky turned in skin cells screaming to see the way the men were watching but the men were no longer there. The street around the van had also puckered up toward it, the van stretched into the overhead so far Ricky could not see where it ended and where the moon-ruined sky began.
Ricky inside Ricky had the light gushing out around him, through his eye and ear holes, through his nostrils, from his nipples and his balding, from his knees. The light burned spurting between his teeth and out his dick hole, from his anus, from the staple mark ripped in his chest. Light whirred from his pores and small contusions, except where the oil and scarring was too thick and so here instead the light refracted back down into Ricky and became curled, became a gun. Wherever Ricky looked the light was in the way. Whatever Ricky touched.