Gutmouth Read online

  “Attacking me here would be wholly ineffective and would only go a long way towards the acceleration of your pending punishment,” said the doctor.

  “Mellow out, doc, I wasn’t planning on it,” I replied, trying to ignore the fact that tearing out the doctor’s jugular had crossed my mind.

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “Where are we? What the hell are we doing here?”

  “This is a composite of your memories, Mr. Dedmon. You are actually in control of what you think you’re seeing. In this environment it will be easier for you to tell me what drove you to…dispose of your partner with such thuggish tactics.”

  “I see,” I said while looking around.

  A rat ran out of a hole somewhere to our left and scurried his way down the empty street.

  “As you can see, Mr. Dedmon, you have a hard time letting go of the past. The presence of regular rodents tells me your recollections predate MegaCorp’s governance.”

  “Guess so, doc. Maybe life was a tad better before you guys came along.”

  “Tell me about that life, Mr. Dedmon.”

  I approached the doctor and noticed he was at least eight feet tall. “Well,” I said while taking a look around, “the city was a mess, but at least we had rats. Regular rats.”

  “Do you miss the rodents, Mr. Dedmon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you miss?”

  I looked up at the dark sky. Huge artificial asses hung from extension poles on top of every lamppost. The asses had been installed as method of crowd control when the whole New World transition began. The devices were designed to rain down acid diarrhea. Kind of like a postmodern version of a lachrymatory agent with an olfactory punch. They had been one of the worst ideas MegaCorp had actually tried to implement.

  “I don’t miss anything,” I said, my eyes still on the mechanical butts.

  “Then why did you eliminate cyber-service provider #1,344,617?”

  “Because that deceitful cunt betrayed me!” The scream, just like the rush of emotions I suddenly felt, came out of nowhere.

  “So you believe the killing had nothing to do with the changes brought on by MegaCorp?”

  “It had everything to with MegaCorp.”

  “How so, Mr. Dedmon?”

  “Because this damned thing started it all,” I replied while lifting my shirt. Underneath it, my belly was whole again; no hole, no teeth, no Philippe.

  “You blame your silly mutation for the crime?”

  “You know what, doc? Fuck you.”

  “I see this crime is the result of a flawed coping mechanism. I don’t think any of our products had anything to do with it,” Kahoohalphala said looking skyward.

  “Who the fuck are you talking…”

  A sound resembling the mysterious “bloop” of a few decades prior, which eventually turned out to be a Cthulhu fart, brought Dr. Kahoohalphala and me back to the room we had been in before our little trip to brainland.

  I opened my eyes. The pulsating ticks glowed on top of me and the doctor had disappeared. The lock clanged open and then the door was slammed. There was a merciless pounding in my temples. Just looking at the pulsating light-ticks hurt as much as a hammer to the head. I closed my eyes and listened to Philippe’s wet moaning for a while. At some point I drifted into sleep.

  When I awoke, I was back in the pink cell.

  Accepting imprisonment was tough for me. My cell resembled an irritable stomach. The thrice-daily slush they served was actually edible, so my problem was not with the physical circumstances I had to deal with, although I was sure that could change at any moment. No, my despair came from being treated as a delinquent. Such treatment can be hard to swallow for those that consider themselves good people.

  Although I had enough brain power to know that “good” was nothing but a floating signifier, my feelings were stronger than semiotics and those dictated that I didn’t deserve to be locked up. I had never molested kids, cheated MegaCorp or kicked puppies around. In fact, I had even refused to buy one of those dogs with no legs that a small MegaCorp affiliate flaunted as the latest advance in pet convenience.

  No more running after Spot!

  Stop worrying about speeding cars!

  These dogs will never go where they’re not wanted!

  No more jumping on the human-skin sofa!

  The whole spiel had struck me as a fad, and I had reason to think so. Marie, my girlfriend, had bought into the previous pet craze: bottled cats. A small neighborhood MegaCorp pet store had managed to stick felines into bottles, but they had forgotten to leave enough room for them to take more than ten or twelve dumps. When the crap started to pile up, Marie had smashed the bottle. The result was a fat, wriggling, hairless, crimson worm with the head of a cat. One night, tired of listening to the unremitting gurgling meows, I flushed the damn thing away. Pets? No, thank you: I know how stupid animal-fashion can be.

  Despite having flushed the Kitty-In-A-Kan, I did not consider myself an evil man. I had fucking feelings. In fact, I found myself craving some company. The brain-rape Dr. Kahoohalphala had performed on me had some side effects—one of them being the recognition that my predicament was the result of life playing a little trick on me.

  Life, Philippe and Marie that is.

  How I hated that two-timing one-legged whore! How I craved to strangle the petulant, back-stabbing British bastard under my navel! How my past life now seemed positively amazing!

  I had been a repo man before MegaCorp took over. When they did, my tracking and recovering skills landed me a position as a hunter for MegaCorp. The job, as the name implies, involved hunting down people who refused to comply with MegaCorp rules and regulations and bringing them to the local Consumer Rehabilitation and Punishment Center. I would usually get a call or text with a crime, a name and an address and then I would track down dissidents—folks that refused to buy their allotted quantities of products each month, stubborn citizens who wanted to grow their own food, horny individuals that raped someone else’s pleasurebots, things like that. From the inside of a cell, that life looked like paradise.

  Catching criminals had been my life for about a decade and all those good memories were flooding my brain while I helped Philippe swallow the cerulean porridge.

  While the mouth ate, I wondered about the tickling sensation in my lower abdomen. It had been there since my second day in prison and I was sure it forewarned some occurrence of epically shitty proportions.

  As an insider of sorts, I knew that MegaCorp enjoyed using death row inmates as guinea pigs for new products. The magenta walls that surrounded me were probably radiating some brain-melting waves at me while the mouth chewed. Maybe the stuff Philippe was wolfing down so eagerly actually contained some new conscience-altering drug that would have me swallowing and then birthing myself through my ass just like that time Marie had talked me into trying her favorite drug.

  Between the chewing and the fear, I was having a hard time not freaking out. The fact that Marie haunted me didn’t help, either. Every time I thought about her, my sanity danced a tango at the edge of a gigantic black hole.

  Torn between the way I loathed her and the love I had once felt, I couldn’t help but feel like she had me in her claws and was slowly squeezing the life out of me. Marie’s three marvelous breasts, brown tresses and soft stump bubbled from the dark recesses of my brain and kicked around the pieces of my broken heart. I also felt like sticking a sawed-off shotgun into Philippe and pulling the trigger.

  “Can you swallow faster? I’m tired of feeding you.” I started a conversation to keep my sanity.

  “Pardon me for not having any bloody arms, Princess,” replied Philippe, spewing purple crap all over the front of my legs.

  The conversation didn’t help much because it was always the same. We had started having it the second Philippe began asking for food. It made me dream about better days; days when I had only one mouth.

  I had once been a normal guy
, but after MegaCorp took over, everyone and their goddamned freckled, unicorn-dog developed some sort of mutation. Mine happened to be a mouth that grew just below my belly button. Well, not just a mouth—a fucking British prick of a mouth that wouldn’t shut the hell up and was always hungry. Sadly, the mouth had also fucked Marie as a way of thanking me for feeding him every pathetic day of his limbless, dickless, aimless life.

  Philippe had started like a big pimple I found one day while showering; a small, itchy, red bump that hadn’t been there before. A few days later it turned into a nasty, purulent infection. I went out and bought a new psychotropic antibiotic that was supposed to use my own brainpower to heal the infection. After a few days taking it I went deaf and could only hear Stravinsky playing inside my head. It almost drove me to suicide. I stopped taking it the same day yellow-brown shit started leaking out of the hole.

  I stuffed the hole with gauze and covered it with duct tape, but it became bigger and then stopped hurting and oozing stinky stuff. The fact that the entire area went numb was as much of a relief as it was a worry. Procrastinating and not making an appointment with a Health Provider was about to turn into a life-changing experience.

  When the whole mess started caving in, I decided to sit and wait for whatever was coming. Although I was afraid of the hole expanding and somehow killing me, sucking my body into a parallel universe inside my own stomach, it seemed improbable. The hole stayed the same size, but teeth came out and lips began to form. Before I had time to figure out what the hell was happening, a 9-inch tongue came out to explore as I watched a chapter from an interactive book. A month later, the hole started talking.

  Food. It would just ask for food. Constantly. After the thing ate, I felt full, so I guessed there was some connection between it and my stomach. Soon the conversations became a bit more elaborate. The mouth introduced himself as Philippe and waxed poetically on the perfect level of crunchiness olives should have, the ideal snap of deep-fried sausages, the unpleasantness of a carrot’s texture and how Angora cats tasted better with a side of fried butter.

  Unfortunately, the conversations didn’t last long; our chemistry sucked and we couldn’t stand each other. Philippe was misogynistic and racist, which made me feel guilty about having him. Plus, his extravagant tastes clashed with my financial reality. A hunter couldn’t afford a steady diet of bipolar midget brains, Angora cats and chocolate-stuffed Greek olives.

  The whole thing was bound for disaster, and after a rough night of drinking, disaster ensued.

  I had been out with my friend Tony, indiscriminately imbibing PCP-laced absinthe and endorphin beers until reality became a bag of colorful worms singing opera.

  After the drinking was over and the worms had quieted down a bit, I stumbled home and tried to get Philippe to wrap his wet, strong muscular hydrostat around my raging erection. The mouth refused and after I repeatedly tried to force-feed him, the fucker bit down on the head of my penis. Hard. The gushing blood freaked out both of us. The relationship was never again as cordial as it had been up to that point. In fact, I would eventually come to blame that night for the way Philippe had betrayed me later on.

  Standing in a pink cell feeding Philippe, watching his long tongue come out to clean my surrounding pubic hair, I realized that procrastination was what had landed my ass in prison. If I had taken care of the pimple when it first sprouted, maybe my life would have continued its course with nothing of this crappy magnitude ever happening.

  “All done, mate,” said Philippe.

  “You know we won’t get anything else until dinner, so don’t even think about asking.”

  “I thought you said you were going to let me starve.”

  “I forgot.”

  “You scatterbrained cunt.”

  “I’m really getting tired of your shit, Philippe.”

  “And just what are you going to do about it, mate?”

  “I’ll find a way to watch you die before I leave this world.”

  “Still bitter, are we?”

  “Shut the hell up.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, I’m part of you, mate,” replied the mouth with a giggle.

  I wondered for the millionth time what would happen if I took a knife to my own gut.

  I woke up with a bloated stomach and something stirring in my bowels. Philippe remained strangely quiet, which meant he was also feeling something. Letting Philippe enjoy the purple porridge the guard brought us three times a day began to seem like a mistake.

  I tried to take a crap twice, but failed to produce anything. Then, just as I was about to call the guard, something started coming out of me. I ripped my pants off and found the thing squirming around in my underwear just as a second one plopped out.

  It took only one look for me to identify the cylindrical, fist-sized creature born from the depths of my colon. It was an overgrown acidophilus bacterium. It twitched around a little and I felt something that closely resembled affection.

  More bacteria were slowly sashaying out of my ass so I spread-eagled on the bed and waited for the exodus. Afterward, I picked up all the seven wriggling giant bacteria, and gently placed them in the toilet. Flushing would mean the end of my new pets, so I started thinking about a solution to my new scatological conundrum.

  Beside birthing some overgrown acidophilus, the day was dragging along like the rest of them. In a nutshell, I sat in bed trying to predict when the walls would shake next and hated Philippe with all my being.

  Although concentrating on hatred struck me as a very unproductive enterprise, I couldn’t help it. The teeth-hole had screwed my girl. True, Marie had allowed it to happen, but that bitch had already gotten what she deserved.

  Marie had never been the perfect girlfriend. She was a one-legged stripper and cyber-prostitute who worked at a MegaCorp place called the Ampu-titties Club. I went there once to get some cyber-action and that’s how we met. I came in, paid for half an hour, took a pill, strapped on a helmet, stuck my unit in a silicon tube, threw myself on the Spanish leather reclining chair and waited for the hum.

  I had emailed them a fantasy the day before. Their recreation of my description was amazing.

  After the hum, a perfect world came into focus. A brown linoleum floor stretched before me. Bonsai palm trees dotted the landscape and dead, skinned cats and marble Ed Gein busts hung from a turquoise sky by ropes made from the blondest, shiniest hair ever. In the distance, a group of shrieking furries ran for their lives as a giant basilisk chased them on two legs, alternatively shouting passages from the Bible and shooting the furries with an enormous shotgun cock.

  As soon as the first furry went down in a gorgeous explosion of fake fur and real blood, I looked around for my hired companion, my mercenary of love. She stood right behind me—undoubtedly soaking in the otherworldly beauty of the place. Her perfectly round body and shiny, bumpy green skin were just what I had asked for. I grabbed her hand and together we ran toward the trail of dead and twitching furry bodies.

  The linoleum was perfect for the slick sensation I wanted to achieve. I took the sweet avocado woman and gently laid her on the linoleum, right on top of a deliciously slippery mixture of furry blood and organ tissue.

  We made hurried, passionate love under a swinging Ed Gein bust while screams, strange biblical names and shotgun blasts resounded in the distance. Just as I was about to pop, the avocado woman ripped open her own chest and pulled out a big seed. It was covered in green veins and pulsated in her hands. The woman cracked it open as I came and the light of the sun burst from it, blinding both of us just as the buzzer announced the sad end of the perfect fantasy.

  This was not the first time I had created a great fantasy, but none of my previous lovers-for-hire had been as fervent and involved as this sweet avocado woman. On my way out, I slipped the equipment guy a few bills and got the name of the seductress: Marie.

  I left the room with her name flashing in my head like a neon sign on steroids. I had to find Marie. I asked a
round and a fat man with no arms salivating at the edge of a stage told me her performance was about to start. I ordered a drink and lit a downer-cigarette to calm my nerves. A floating chair in front of the stage was empty, so I sat on it and waited.

  The lights dimmed and the sound of revving industrial machinery came from the overhead speakers. On stage, a stump appeared. The round, scarred appendage teasingly bobbed up and down while the rest of its owner remained hidden behind the mauve velvet curtain.

  When Marie finally came out the crowd went into a frenzy. I didn’t blame them. She wore a bologna bikini and a Viking hat. The thin slices of fake meat barely covered the nipples on each of her three breasts. Her skin glistened like a wet olive. Hooting and hollering were accompanied by chest pounding and hair pulling. A gang of crazed baboons would’ve acted more civilized than the bunch of animals surrounding the stage.

  A guy sitting two chairs away from me passed out and the kleptomaniac cockroaches that infested the city swarmed him, leaving the guy completely naked in a few seconds.

  I stared at the marvelous dancer on stage. After some more posing and dancing, six scantily-clad, heavily muscled shemales brought out a huge fat woman on a stretcher and put her on the floor. An ear-splitting crescendo brought the sound of the machines to a sonorous climax as the shemales lubed up Marie’s stump with some transparent substance that reflected the stage-lights.

  When their job was done, the shemales left Marie alone. She began to move her hips back and forth, stabbing the air with her lubed stump. She approached the fat woman on the floor. The lard monster stuck her tongue out and opened her legs, exposing a dark, gaping, glistening hole that glistened. Marie slowly inserted her stump into the woman. The moans that escaped the obese lady’s throat were like mating calls from a moose. Marie responded to the groaning and moaning by thrusting her stump deeper and faster in the wet cavern.

  By the time Marie was done jumping with her slimy stump buried deep inside the convulsing fat monster on the stretcher, I knew I had found the love of my life.