As the last of the orphans piled upon me, their diseased and rotting teeth gnashing at my exposed flesh, I could only lament that I hadn’t bashed their precious skulls with a fruitcake.
It was the winter of ’99, a season marked by a precipitous increase in claims of Sasquatch rape. That is, claims of being raped by a Sasquatch, not vice-versa. I mean who has the upper body strength to pull that one off? I was midway through a sixteen step confidence scheme called The Electric Dowager when I was tasked with delivering a semi loaded with toys to Mrs. Tisdale’s Child Sanctuary & Discount Thresher Repair on Christmas Eve.
Now, I am not particularly averse to acts of charity. Several times I have volunteered at battered women’s shelters, though I should tell you that battered women’s shelter are what I call vaginas after I have had sex with them. But this was a situation where there was profit to be made in abusing the generosity of others, the most satisfying of the profits.
The merchandise went to Peter Has a Hoof, a Sioux black marketer who’d lost a section of his foot to a pack of weasels. Pirahna of the land, the furry bastards. He’d arranged for sixty percent market value on my haul and provided a suitable replacement in the form of five thousand Lincoln Logs.
“What better present than the building material of the cabin in which one of our finest presidents had tons of dude sex,” he said. I offered no argument.
“I rate Lincoln third best gay president, fifth best overall.”
I hesitated to ask him to explain his ratings system.
“The gay president scale, that one factors in how good they were at being homosexual. Like, Martin Van Buren was the worst gay president, but he’s the best Dutch president. There are different scales.”
FDR was the best disabled president and third best cigar-smoking president. Nixon was second sweatiest. Taft was the fattest, but Chester A. Arthur was more than his match as greasiest. Peter agreed.
The truck sped towards the Orphanery, falling snow be damned. The sound system played a Norwegian minimalist dubmetal Christmas album I’d found at the bargain bin of a roadside brothel and gas station. It had the side-effect of driving most listeners into a suicidal depression marked by spontaneous utterances of an alien tongue, but it mostly brought about in me an appetite for lutefisk. And a half-chub in my boxers, but that’s a given.
I arrived, at my destination and at orgasm in roughly the same length of time. Tisdale’s architectural taste veered to the gothic, in that the place looked like it’d been pillaged by the Goths. I’d heard the lady was of the stern taskmaster sort, a six-time black widow operating a house of blood.
“Unflinchingly cruel, a real piece of shit,” she’d called herself on the phone.
I’d explained that I made no judgments, and simply wanted to deliver the toys in such a manner as to provide the dear children with the merriest possible of Christmases. She said I talked like a faggot from a faggot school where I majored in talking like a faggot. I replied that if I did, it was only because her hag-like, withering voice was causing me to doubt my attraction to the female gender. She said that I could suck the marrow from her pelvic bone. I asked if it was an insult or an invitation.
“Both,” she murmured. A chill ran down my shaft.
An orphan met me at the gates. He extended the one hand he still possessed.
“Merry Christmas, sir,” he mumbled through shivering teeth, “Mrs. Tisdale sends her greetings. You are to pull the truck to the back of the manor, then proceed inside. She ordered me to tell you that ‘there awaits a feast both culinary and sexual.’”
I offered the boy a ride back to the house and bade his name.
“Bless you, sir. I am not yet allowed a name, but the Woman has derisively referred to me as Shitbucket. I would accept your gift of travel, yet my exposure to the elements is punishment meted by a vengeful authority.”
I inquired what crime could be so grand.
“Well, the day previous I lost my hand to a thresher’s blades. The Woman offered me neither care nor medicine, but directed me to seek strength in the love of the Lord. I asked what loving deity could remit me to these circumstances. She did not appreciate the tone of the question, and here we are.”
This was a fine chance to explain to him the tenets of secular humanism. Shitbucket seemed taken with the idea. We debated the merits of monotheism versus the worship of prehistoric octopus gods, and agreed that Christianity would be a more palatable religion if Jesus had been a sword-wielding barbarian, with a giant flaming tiger he rode into battle.
“Before you part, sir, a word of advice. Do not accept gifts of food or drink, for they shall be laced with foul substances.”
I thanked him, though it was unnecessary. As part of a con years previous, Taiwanese surgeons had replaced my kidney with that of an albino chimpanzee, thus granting me the beast’s herculean tolerance to downers. But it was good to know I was walking into a web of sexual intrigue. If I kept my wits about, I’d avoid a spider chomping on my balls.
The rig slid into park behind a dozen barrels of rendered pork fat, the smell of rotting pork byproduct instigating the memory of my first sexual experience. Next to a slaughterhouse dumpster, a lady hobo had given me an expertly choreographed handjob for a portion of a meatball sub. I would gladly have given her the other half of the sandwich, but she didn’t ask and I didn’t offer.
An older boy, scar crossing his brow, held the door of the place. He introduced himself as Pudlow, the Named One. He stuck a single finger in his buttock as he conversed, occasionally removing it to sniff.
“Yea, it’s a right bastard getting a name around here. You wouldn’t believe the skulls I had to crack for the honor. I mean, it’s not like I’m complaining. I beat up kids for a living. That’d be like complaining because I made chief inspector at the blowjob factory.”
Having been chief inspector at the largest blowjob factory in the Pacific Northwest, I wanted to tell the boy that it was a punishing task. By the end of the week, the head of my penis looked like it’d been attacked by a monster made of razorwire and sandpaper. But I let him keep his idealization, best let him realize on his own. Some lessons you learn from others, some you learn from a chapped dick.
Pudlow showed me to the crone’s room. The door was an oak and gold construction wreathed in images of a disturbingly sexual nature, like a monument to a rape demon.
“Her adventures, sir.”
There was a blank section near the bottom where I assumed she intended to carve her conquest of me and the sweet casing of sausage I called a sexual organ. Worse hags had tried, but I remained alert. Vigilance always, especially in times of sexual peril.
Pudlow knocked on the door.
“What fucking toil must I attend to now?” screamed the bitch.
“Your visitor, ma’am.”
The door swung open. She stood in a mockery of seduction, bonesaw hips grinding against the door frame.
“Join me,” she purred, “Pudlow, be a dear and fuck off.”
“With pleasure, ma’am.”
I entered her chamber and inquired as to the whereabouts of the feast I was promised, the culinary one.
“I’ve got them both right here,” she murmured, hoisting a turkey leg above her now exposed labia. I informed her that I did not make a habit of eating spoiled food. I insisted that we finish our business and be done with it, but she locked the door and stashed the key in her stinkhole. I remarked that she may as well have thrown it into a hairy Stargate. She howled that she was taking my dick by any means necessary; I asked if Brother Malcolm would approve of this. She snatched from her mantle an antique maple hand-crank dildo, still crusty with ladyfluids, and bashed me about the head.
I awoke half an hour past, strapped upside down to a brass rack. Tisdale stood before me, insane lust in her glaucomic eyes.
“I’ll have your taint, your shaft, your arse, the whole damn thing,” she growled.
An explosion rocked the property. Globules of flaming pork fat arced through the window like greasy meteors. Burning lard coated my attacker’s face, her she-bitch screams pierced the ringing in my ears. The fat burned through my ropes, allowing me a chance at freedom. It was a Christmas miracle not unlike the time my Uncle Vincenzo ate fifteen turkeys before finally succumbing to explosive gastrointestinal expansion.
I leapt from the second story and broke my fall on a snow bank shaped like William Shatner’s kidney. I wiped the frost from my eyes in time to see a tea kettle crack my jaw. The orphans encircled me, torches illuminating their unlovable faces.
“So what are we doing with this poof?” a young legless girl asked, “How about we poke him with sticks until he bleeds out his butthole? Then we can dump him in the pork fat that ain’t been exploded yet.” A three-fingered boy offered to fillet, bread, and deep fry me. Another suggested hanging me from a flagpole by the length of my foreskin while he played the Star-Spangled Banner on a guitar crafted from my ribcage.
“Do not hurt him!” a stern voice commanded, “This is our savior, the man who has given us the strength to resist the crone’s will!” The youths separated and Shitbucket emerged, the severed head of Pudlow mounted upon his pike.
“Friend, it was your gift of words that inspired me to take arms against authority. With but a few makeshift weapons and pork fat hand grenades, we destroyed our oppressors This is your work! Your doing! Your ravenous pack of children braying for blood!”
I complimented the boy on his ability to raise an angry mob. My current angry mob formation record was forty three minutes during a con I termed The Mother Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
“It is a mob of righteousness, not a mob of anger.”
Whatever it was, it had released me from a situation which threatened to turn unnecessarily sticky. I bid Shitbucket adieu, wishing him luck as a leader of men and reminding that he now owed me a blood debt which I would one day redeem.
“You mustn’t go! We have yet to open the toys.”
My sphincter contracted in such a way as to form a small tear in the space-time continuum which consumed the dump I had been brewing and spit it into an empty dimension, where it eventually formed sentient life. Three hours of work, wasted.
“Your gift of toys has been the sole thought allowing us to survive these dread conditions. I would wish that you join us in the celebration.”
I accepted, hoping the children would find the logs palatable the way a man dying of thirst would enjoy a glass of piss. We marched to my rig, stepping over puddles of coagulating fat. I asked what the boy expected to find.
“Oh, action figures, dolls, all that jazz. Maybe some Lincoln logs, but we’ll give those to the dumb kids. I mean, who wants to play with the building material of the cabin in which a president had tons of dude sex?”
My sphincter tightened, releasing a high-pitched squeal which would be picked up centuries later by a civilization in Alpha Centauri and interpreted as an offer to drop a deuce in their society’s collective mouth, prompting the first intergalactic war.
The anticipation was palpable, the hopes of abused youth riding on the contents of the cab. As they lifted the gate and revealed the legion of logs, emotions cascaded against each other. Disappointment, hatred, pure animalistic violence all battling for dominance. They could only agree on one thing: they wanted my head separated from my body and made to look like I was giving myself oral pleasure.
Shitbucket grabbed the single wrapped present in the cab and tore away the newspaper depicting Cathy strips to which I’d been pleasuring myself. Disgust possessed him.
“There is a turd wearing a Santa hat in this box,” he announced.
It was meant to be the last of the boxes opened, long after I had departed. The final insult, the pink ribbon of mockery atop the entire scheme. Icarus flew too close to the sun, I muttered.
“Where are the toys?”
I explained that by now, they had probably reached the hands of several crystal meth dealers who ran toy scalping operations during the holidays.
“Why?” asked the boy, hero worship gone from his eyes, “Why would you do this? To children. Why?”
This was a fine opportunity to school the boy in free-market capitalism and the various economic forces which pushed me to such an endeavor. I had scarcely explained the self-regulating hand of the market and the need to sate my constant thirst for liquor and whoring when he began viciously beating me with Pudlow’s severed head. The children set upon me, a single mass of seething rage.
I exploded from the thrashing pile of bastardry, shirt ripped from my pulsing bodice. I’d fought a silverback gorilla atop a raging waterfall, a great white shark in its own tank, fifteen Shaolin monks on the roof of a moving train, but none fought with the ferocity of these betrayed youngsters. Heads smashed together, bones snapped apart to expose the delicious marrow, orgiastic violence ruled the day. I spelled my name across the snow in the children’s blood, making it four bodily fluids with which I’d now accomplished that feat.
“Cut the racket, pissants,” a voice crowed, “I’m throwing you all in the thresher and flipping the switch with my clit!”
The children froze, wreaked with a terror bred from years of familiar maltreatment. Mrs. Tisdale lurched from the darkness, her body still covered in sizzling fat, grease burns twisting her flesh to the consistency and texture of an Arby’s roast beef sandwich. Which may have been an improvement, all told
“I’ve had it up to my tits with you goddamn kids. Sapping the youth right out my snatch, killing me with every whine. ‘Oh, we need bandages for our stumps! Oh, the gruel is infested with silverfish! Oh, there are no weapons left to fight off the feral cats!’ I’ve been too nice for too long. I’m going to celebrate the birth of our savior the Lord Jesus Christ by crucifying every one of you!”
She brandished her wooden dildo and entered the melee, mowing down orphans three a swing. I suggested to Shitbucket a truce, as it would take our combined forces to route the crone. Though the thought disgusted him, the hag was shredding his army. Better to spare his vengeance against me than again fall under her rule. He asked if I had a plan; I held up my fists. I had named them Plan A and Plan B, and would alternate between the two in rapid succession.
We faced Tisdale, crippled children now made even more crippled lying at her feet. Like a member of a terrible improv troupe, she unholstered a pistol and fired a round into the air.
“I’ve made my point. The children are properly resubjugated. Shitbucket, your parents should’ve made the right decision and thrown you in a goddamn pit of cobras instead of leaving me to deal with your law and kindness and human decency faggot talk. And you, I’ll finally have your cock when I slice it off and laminate it.”
I voiced that I wasn’t sure they made a laminating machine big enough and she shot me in the foot.
“Merry Christmas, dickwads. I hope they fuck your ass with pine trees in hell.”
In the moment before she could pull the trigger, she was crushed by a falling reindeer. The hairy, disgusting animal let out a final bleat before expiring. The reindeer died too, bleeding from a gunshot wound in its throat.
In the spirit of this incredibly convenient miracle, Shitbucket and I made amends. I had given him the mental fortitude necessary to take his freedom, and that was present enough. The children would rule themselves until their society implodes, as per Lord of the Flies rules, but until then it was Christmas, and they would celebrate. I unloaded my stash of moonshine and opium from the truck and we spent the night getting drunk, getting high, playing with Lincoln logs, and eating reindeer roasted over an old woman’s funeral pyre. Just as the Lord intended.
