Tips, bitter missives, love letters: Clickity clickity clickity whirrrrrrrr; the sounds of the hard disk being accessed under a high-charged reader head.
Chinney tilted his thick neck back against the sneeze-snot car seat head rest and felt the blood drain down his spine. With his dangling left arm he pawed around the side of the desk searching for the tip of an upright 2liter.
He was completely faint for lack of food, deliberately so, because of the crash diet he began four days ago. Now he was eating nothing but bananas and diet coke, and all the bananas were upstairs.
“Ughhhhh, Mother, I am so hungry.”
Mother’s ninth red eye winked with disapproval.
Far in the recesses of Chinney’s elaborate mind, a fomenting pressure was building. Chinney’s eyes sank in the sockets like depressed power buttons. Little sparks were prickling over his brain, causing strange visuals in his eyes. Pixelated shapes became objects, a triangle became a rectangle became a board. Then Chinney thought he could see the drawbridge of a castle lowering; that changed into a road, with cubes racing along it. Or were they cones? and was that a pyramid, not a castle? The red-blue-yellow-pink flashing forms danced with contextual abandon; nothing stayed the same except for the rhythm.
Suddenly a big white flair appeared at the fore of his vision and Chinney felt a sensation of wetness under his nose.
No.
“No!”
Chinney shot forward, his bleary eyes scanning desperately the expansive flats of his desk.
“Mother, where are the tissues?!”
Mother’s extra red eye winked again, as blood sputtered from Chinney’s nose, cascading down the corse hair of his upper lip, running thickly into and over his mouth like a cheap party wine.
“Shit!” Chinney mumbled wetly.
“Muhhvver, TISSUES!”
Mother’s one green eye flicked on angrily.
”Tissues are stored in the top right drawer. Last purchased on April 25th, 2011 from Walmart for $12.35”
Chinney cupped a club hand over his capsized nose as a sea of blood welled up and with the other hand yanked open the top right drawer as Mother suggested.
Nothing but cables.
While blood leaked through his clenched fingers and pattered down on his kakhis in marble sized drops, Chinney’s mind queried the items he kept in the basement where material equaled “fabric.”
Fabric:
Car seat.
Carpet.
Backpack.
Gym clothes.
Socks.
Forget it, I need all those things, he decided. Now he thought of paper…
Paper:
Reference Books
Porno Mags
…
“Mother, Magazines.” he said through his bloody muzzle.
”Magazines are kept beneath the chair,” she replied. “4 subscriptions total. Last issue recieved June 21st, 2011.”
Yes! Of course. Chinney rolled off the car seat and hit the floor with a round thud. Blood dripped from his mouth onto the carpet as his eyes strained like a nocturnal carnivore to see into the shadowy underworld.
All of his skin mags, ordered by best, descending; Chinney knocked the stack forward and grabbed the lowest magazine uncovered.
It was a year old Penthouse with a skanky blonde on the front, Chinney preferred redheads anyway. Even so, it broke his nose-bleed heart to spill blood over his girls, no matter where they were on his party list,
Uncupping his nose he let the blood splash onto the Table of Contents. He turned the page; Letters to the Editor. He wiped his hand, smearing a coat of deep red down the crass words of “readers”. He continued to turn pages, wipe his hand, and let blood from his nose until it was dripping smaller, then he tore out a page with a busty nude blonde in scanty pink panties and a white-transparent blouse she had pulled up, just above her nipples so that they stuck out like wall pegs. Chinney crumpled the page with heavy set regret. It was a good picture.
He sighed faintly and stuffed the page up his left nostril to stop it. The sharp angles of the crumpled page jut into the nostril walls so painfully that Chinney had tears.
He rolled on his back and let the tears run, feeling totally pathetic and humiliated by life.
“Mother, fuck my life.”
Mother winked a red eye in disapproval.
”Scan complete, data recovered. Ready for command,” she told him.
“Profile user,” he sighed.
Chinney closed his teary eyes, and his mind drifted back to darkness like a discarded magic eight ball prediction; there he allowed himself to dream of a better life, one in which he lived in a different town, near a university, where he would teach young, bright, beautiful students who respected him for his brilliant mind. He would earn enough to hire a private trainer to improve his shit health, lose 100lbs or so. He could publish Mother and become famous in academic circles. He would be welcome at parties, invited. People would see the amazing accomplishments of a misunderstood guy, who truly came from the trash heap of society. He would remake himself, redefine his entire persona, every aspect, every detail; and people wouldn’t remember who he was. He wouldn’t be known as the loser at the dump: the Garbage Man.
