Weird, Weirder & WEIRD: A Collection

By Aaron Garrison

Weird is a sad clown in church. Weirder, that the congregation is all clowns. Weird: you’re a sad clown, too, and you think you like it.
That says it all. In 'Weird, Weirder & WEIRD,' descend into the depths of A.A. Garrison’s particular brand of strange. Begin with the traditional, sci-fi weird (“Suffer,” “RIP, Krokinski”), progress to the hauntingly peculiar (“Faith,” “Chesterfield Drive”), and then end with some full-throttle, no-apologies bizarro (“The Enema Flower: A Love Story,” “GG Allin Must Die”). Altogether, these twenty stories deliver a full spectrum of weirdness–and then some.
Come on, don’t be shy. Everyone likes a little weird. Or are you afraid you’ll like life as a sad, church-going clown?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aaron Garrison
• Release date: Nov 14, 2015

Aaron Garrison

Aaron Garrison is a thirty-year-old man living and working in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina, USA.

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WEIRD, WEIRDER & WEIRD

by

A.A. Garrison

Smashwords Edition

©2015 A.A. Garrison

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FIRST PUBLICATIONS

A Blender, A Neurotoxin –Spacesquid

Cinnamon Road –Zombies Galore anthology

Comfort –Theme of Absence, 1/23/15

Money Machine –Two Sentence Stories, 9/2/14

RIP, Krokinski–Unsung Stories, 7/17/15

The Fall of Man –Hobo Pancakes #21

The Game –The Subtopian, 3/13

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

PART ONE: WEIRD

I. Ghosts

II. RIP, Krokinski

III. Suffer

IV. Money Machine

V. Herbicide

VI. The Crossing

PART TWO: WEIRDER

VII. Faith

VIII. Feeding the Beast

IX. The Moany Sea

X. The Button Girl

XI. Chesterfield Drive

XII. Comfort

PART THREE: WEIRD

XIII. The Fall of Man

XIV. A Blender, A Neurotoxin

XV. Prison Break

XVI. The Game

XVII. Cinnamon Road

XVIII. The Emperor’s New Skin Suit

IXX. GG Allin Must Die

XX. The Enema Flower: A Love Story

INTRODUCTION

There’s weird, and there’s weirder. And then there’s weird.

It applies to life as much as fiction. Think of it this way: weird is a sad clown in church. Weirder, that the congregation is all clowns. Weird: you’re a sad clown, too, and you think you like it.

Okay, corny analogy (why do analogies so hound the sad clown?). But you get the point.

These stories comprise an eclectic mix of those three categories of the bizarre (and, toward the end, might even plumb some further depths). Off the bat, I’ll tell you this: my flavor of the lattermost category tends to cross boundaries, as the truly weird is wont to do. That is, the book waxes grotesque, if not downright raw. So, if you’re squeamish (or are too young to meet the height requirements on a roller coaster), perhaps you should stop at Part II of this collection. Indeed, when the tone shifts from the idyllic teenage whims of The Moany Sea to the mindless ultra-violence of The Emperor’s New Skin Suit, shock is understandable–along with some awkwardness and inconsistency, as a critic might point out. Then again, one reader’s incongruity is another’s variety. The book is what it is, I suppose.

In any case, be forewarned.

I should note, also, that this collection was nearly aborted before it was born. I’ve written a fair number of short stories, and even after culling the herd, the A.A. Garrison catalog has no shortage of collections. Another one? It felt excessive. But man, I just couldn’t say no. Time and again, these stories demanded to be collected, to take their rightful place alongside their brethren. So, like a politician bowing to public outcry, I complied.

And with that apology explanation, let the weirdness commence.

PART ONE:

THE WEIRD

I. GHOSTS

He awoke from a nightmare of the men he’d helped kill.

His eyes shocked open and then puckered shut. The sickness was raging, from head to toe, pinning him to the mechanical hospital bed. People were all around, in the linoleum-floored room, but they could have been ghosts. There had been ghosts as of late.

He tried to sit up, and couldn’t.

Dad? the people said. Two or twenty of them, there was no telling. Dad? Dad?

He tried to complain but there was a mask, odd-tasting air issuing from it. He instead watched the people until they quieted, and tried to rise again. This time, a large man in whites kept him down.

It’s okay, it’s okay, said the people–his children, he saw now. It’s okay. But it wasn’t okay, no matter how many times they said it.

A businessman, they thought him, in exports. They’d asked no questions when he flew out, to that island where the men were made and studied and killed. They don’t know me, he thought, staring into the ignorant faces of his children, now the adults scattered about the deathly little room. His wife had known no better, or had at least understood pretense. Businessman. What we’ll tolerate when it’s done out of sight.

He moaned aloud, a butchered noise from the chest.

Dad. Oh, Dad.

Noises everywhere, like it might be raining. Footsteps. Machines. Conversation kept strictly from him. He was lousy with penetrations, tubes and utensils and miles of white tape, in every orifice and new ones made special. Even one atop his head, it felt, in the bald smooth where hair had once been.

Then, a vision: a ghost, at his left, beside the riot of machines. It was Berners, and himself too, as he’d been decades ago, before the gruesome offshore enterprise which haunted him to this minute.

They aren’t men, Berners was saying, jowly and red-faced like Santa Claus. They have no feelings, no thoughts, no souls.

Just organs, right? the ghost-him replied, the sarcasm thick.

Yes, Berners fired back, cold, stern, perhaps affirming the life of something long since perished. But I assure you, no pain. They’re just meat. The men are just meat.

Don’t believe him! he cried out, muted by the mask. Don’t believe that bastard! He flounced and struggled, nearly leaving the bed, but the nurse was strong. The children froze, exchanging vocal looks among each other.

Berners and the other him vanished, their space left an empty stage.

He pooled over the bed, recalling the rest of that watershed conversation, which had wed him to the whole sordid affair. The men were brewed in test tubes, Berners had said in his specious, comfortable way. Brewed up and born as adults, walking, breathing, eating; but there was no one behind the wheel, they were cars without drivers. So they could be experimented upon and dissected, in ways forbidden by international law, as many would pay to do, corporate fronts with deep pockets and no qualms. And so he’d agreed. He’d agreed.

More ghosts, now: again him and Berners, but years later, after the videotape.

Out? Out? Berners said, livid. What do you think this is, an elevator? You don’t just get out, Walter. There is no out.

Walter. Who’s Walter? Him?

Who’s Walter? he cried. Who! Who’s Walter?

The people looked on. None answered.

You’re in this for life, Berners continued, translucent and sienna in color. He slammed an ethereal fist. You hear me, Walter? Life!

He–Walter?–tried to yell more, but something dislodged from his chest, splattering the mask dark. The nurse removed the mask, cleaned it, and replaced it, deadpan as a fire hydrant. The ghosts were gone again.

There is no out, Walter thought dismally. It was a lie, though, like the rest: there had been an out, at least for Berners. Walter said so, out loud, repeatedly, but no one paid attention.

Quieting, he recalled Berners’ exit, with the same awful clarity, too clear to be anything but real. Walter had been the one to find him, in the office, after the bang–

The scene materialized in the hospital suite, conjured by these thoughts: Berners’ massive oxblood chair, him slumped low as though hiding, the ceiling of his head missing, the gun still dangling. Out. Out-out-out–

Walter screamed, thrashing discursively over the bed, feeble old legs slicing this way and that. Heads turned to him then away. More conspiratorial conversation. Walter caught power of attorney, and it meant nothing.

The ghostly vision of Berners’ suicide faded out, and Walter remembered his jungle of tubes. No drugs, he said hoarsely, to the nurse, to the world at large, pulling at his body’s many conduits. There’d been no drugs for the men, even after the videotape and the investigations. Too expensive, Berners had claimed.

Oh, the tape ...

Before Walter’s eyes, the room once more crowded with phantoms, now solely of himself, watching that surveillance tape mailed to him and others. The TV showed a test-tube man supine and punctured, much like Walter currently, accompanied by smock-clad figures who studied and cut and wrote. One took up a scalpel and brought away flesh, the patient stressing his restraints, hands starred out like cement casts, face wearing a pain beyond description–

The Walters screamed in concert.

The living Walter flailed about as to clatter the tubes, his mouth shouting of its own accord, his expression much like that of the test-tube man’s. The nurse tended him. The children stared.

Then the ghost-Walter turned from the TV, and he too wore that wretched face, cramped and distorted like a puzzle completed wrong. And then so did the children, even as they lit over the bedside in consolation, Walter shrieking and fetal, fighting to the extent allowed by his failed body.

The face, everywhere, all bespeaking pain and accusation.

And that was the last Walter saw, a multiplicity of that outraged face, in a bitter irony he would never know. Then his heart ceased, and he finally got out.

II. RIP, KROKINSKI

Yeah, I heard the news. Everyone has, just like when the thing crash-landed here, all them years ago. It had to die eventually, I reckon.

Krokinski. I don’t know what it means. Russian, I guess, since that’s where it crashed. Really, it don’t matter what it meant before–just means Krokinski now, like how the moon’s the moon. I doubt the Russians had a name for it any more than we would. And maybe that’s just what the word means, nameless.

Around here, we just called it the worm. Not that that fit any better, mind, but it says more’n Krokinski. But there was a semblance, I always thought, with it sort of slithering like it did. That big long black shape, no head or tail, sweeping through the horizon. The worm, or the turd. Heh. There wadn’t no comparing how it moved, come to think of it. Compared to anything on this earth, it would always be apples and oranges.

I seen it once, you know, in person, or as in-person as you saw the Krok. Happened when I was a kid, I guess twenty year ago, when my dad had us on vacation at the beach. We was out in the sun and surf–and there it was, that big black worm, way far out in the water, doing its thing. It looked closer’n it was, being so damn big–how tall they ever measure that bugger at, few hundred feet? I read once, in some textbook in school, but I forget now. My folks and me all took a look, sure, but that was about it. We’d growed up seeing the Krok on TV and whatnot, and so it was just like, So, there’s the Krok. What time’s supper? Even my grandparents was young enough to be born post-Krok.

I won’t lie: I did get scared a little, seeing it. I mean, yeah, the Krok was the Krok, and it ain’t never hurt nobody in all its hundred years on the planet. But no matter how familiar, it was still ... alien, you know? And not just because it crashed here from outer space. No head, no arms or legs, just this huge black body that could take any form it wants, sprouting any utensil necessary for the task at hand. More, what did the Krok think? It obviously could, was intelligent, prolly way the hell more’n us. But that’s just it: how do you get in the head of something without a head? It just throws you for a loop, you know, that sort of one-hand-clapping crap.

And besides, it was watching my family and me as it sailed through the ocean, as it did everywhere it traveled. Maybe that’s what Krokinski means in Russian, watcher.

But that ain’t here nor there, I guess. Whatever that old boy was thinking, it wadn’t how to hurt us, that’s for sure. Know what I read? It never once hurt nobody, literally, even when slithering across continents, or flying around, or burrowing down through the ground. And if anyone got close–and oh how folks tried–it would just pick up and take off, making sure to avoid the daredevil. I mean, think of that: something that size, traveling the world as it did, right past cities and whatnot–and it don’t once slither over someone, or cause an accident, or knock over a boat? It’d be like driving a car for a hundred years without splattering a bug.

Good old Krok.

It respected us, I think. Why else go so far out of its way to leave us be, ‘specially if it really did want to study us like they say? I mean, when we wanna study something, we just bull right in and do it, if not put the poor bastard in a cage. It certainly wadn’t our manners that won the Krok’s respect, I’d say. Ain’t no secret we tried and nuke it, back when it crash-landed in 2013. Put yourself in the Krok’s shoes: first it has the misfortune to crash its big fancy spaceship on this little blue rock, and then, for all its treating us good and keeping distance, it gets a nuclear warhead. And yeah, I know that’s our way, to lay low whatever’s bigger or bolder; and I know things was different then, this being back when we thought we had the universe all to ourselves. But damn! What’s worse, we try and pretend the nuke never happened, just because it didn’t work. You look in any history book, and that nuke is just plumb left out.

Consensual silence. It’s just like our PR with the Russians, them lucky stiffs. Just because the ship crashes in their territory and they get to claim it and reap all its technological goodies, suddenly the world’s playing nice with them. I seen the old video footage: folks flying Russian flags, diplomats getting real diplomatic, brownnosing out the wazoo–all because the Russians got better guns, and we was afraid. Just like with America after bombing the Japs, or so some folks say. You won’t read about that in a textbook, neither.

I’ll bet them Russians loved the Krok the most, seeing how it made ‘em the world’s lone superpower.

To be honest, I have a right hard time imagining how it was before the Krok. I mean, I grew up with it around, but how must it appeared to folks without precedent for such a thing? Not to mention something so damn alien–and so damn big. It’d be like taking a neanderthal to Las Vegas at night–whoa! So I guess I can understand the upheaval after the crash, with all the apocalyptic prophesies and the death-cults. No wonder the stock market went to hell–sure gave the Russians an edge there, too. But still, craziness. All the Krok did is zoom around the world, doing its Peeping Tom thing, whatever that was–but we freak out. Just because it’s an unknown, and we’d all agreed there wadn’t no unknown.

Man, I’m glad I didn’t live back then.

I’ve given the old times some thought. There’s something to learn from ‘em, the contrast there–can show you yourself, sort’a. Or, show what you don’t wanna be. Like, what if the Krok ain’t never crash-landed here? Would we still be swaggering around, thinking we’re the upperclassmen of the universe? A sad way to go through life, I say, believing you’re the top of the food chain when you ain’t. For us post-Krok folks, it’s just a non-issue, and I think we’re better for it. We may kiss Russia’s ass, but at least we know our place. All these years, the Krok’s hanging around kept that enforced. Hard to be a bigshot when a skyscraper-sized worm is zooming around the world, playing anthropologist on you.

And ain’t that what the Krok was, really, an anthropologist? If that wadn’t anthropology, I’m the Russian Prime Minister. Yeah, I know everyone has their theories about what it was doing, touring the planet and surveilling us for a hundred years; but what else could it be? Sure, maybe the Krok’s anthropology was a bit different–more advanced, like–but I’d be right surprised if I turned out wrong.

Maybe that’s Krokinski’s Russian meaning: anthropologist. I’ll have to look that up.

And now the Krok’s dead. I guess it must be true, since folks’ve been crawling over the corpse like ants and the Krok ain’t shot off as it always had, these last few days. You can’t say it wadn’t time, the Krok having done its thing for a good solid centennial. Strikes a chord with me, I’ll be the first to admit. Have anything around your whole life, and it’ll give you pause when it’s gone, no matter how far it kept from everybody.

I saw it once, in person. I mention that?

What irks me is how we’re treating the Krok now: as a science experiment, to be cut up and turned inside-out and passed around. Treating it with the same disrespect we showed it in life, like. How many folks did that old boy ever cut up and put under glass? But it won’t help getting my bowels in an uproar, I know. I suppose it’s just what we do, try and figure things out, even if it kills them. Maybe the Krok would’ve wanted it this way. The Krok impressed me as the type.

And ain’t that the Krok’s biggest gift of all, to show there’s an alternative to reckless arrogance, that it ain’t so inevitable? That’s the best the Krok ever gave us, I reckon: not its ship or its big weird body, but its example. How much consideration do we show things big as our pinkie toes? Not too damn much, I say. Maybe that should change.

Well, I guess that’s that. The end of a chapter of Earth, you could say–which means a new one’s beginning, don’t it? After all, what secrets might the Krok’s corpse hold? And this time, it belongs to good old Uncle Sam, if the Krok can belong to anyone. Maybe we’re starting a good chapter, the kind where we get to cure cancer and fly to the stars. Or, maybe a bad one, where we stop kissing Russia’s ass and go to war with it instead, since now we can match its toys. I suppose we’ll find out soon enough, God help us.

For now, I think I’d like to be alone for a piece. That Krokinski had a place in my heart, and now it’s a right empty one.

III. SUFFER

Allergies. Food intolerance. Viral infection. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Fibromyalgia. Encephalitis. Meningitis. Encephalitic meningitis. Heavy-metal toxicity. Nutrient deficiency. Radiation poisoning. Parasites. Multiple Sclerosis. Lyme.

Etcetera. Etcetera.

Fill several pages, and you’d have the potential causes of John’s illness.

He reviewed them all now, sitting feebly in his chair, with an air of sick contemplation. Had he missed something, not given one of them enough attention? It was a riddle, and thinking was hard, these days.

The only thing harder: standing up. Weak legs, one of the more prominent, and more unmanning, symptoms. For John, vacating a flat surface now required the use of his arms, and no small amount of will. The dizziness did not help; same for the nausea.

John tensed in his chair, gathering whatever strength there was to gather. Get up, he thought, but as soon as he made a go, the exhaustion and headache heightened, sitting him right back down. If he didn’t know better, he’d say his disease was intelligent, playing cruel games with him.

John stayed seated.

Back to thinking, troublesome as it was. Bipolar disorder, chemical sensitivity, Steel’s syndrome, psychosomatics ...

Ten years sick, now. Nearly 3,700 days. 88,000 hours. Never mind the minutes, or how big they felt. It had started