Gin’s dreads are snakes now too, worming around in the candle flame, in the forehead of a dozen naked beings. I zoom my vision to see what the naked beings are doing inside of the candle’s flame.
They are a group of Firemites, beings made of energy, living in fire. They originally came from the surface of the sun, where thousands upon thousands of them live, swirling around in the BIG hot. Without fire, Firemites turn into one-dimensional shadow creatures that eventually die if they don’t find fire again, just as we would die without food. This is not a problem for Firemites on their home world, but it is to the ones that are in this candle now. Their sizes change with the size of the fire, a candle will make them tiny, a bonfire will make them man-sized. It may just be a rumor, but the Firemites are supposed to have highly intelligent societies on the sun, that we cannot understand. They don’t seem to be very intelligent to me right there in the flame. They seem rather primitive, moronic.
They gaze as a giant orgy of flames, rolling over each other, exchanging energy-like kisses, large fire cocks penetrating fire vaginas. The only thing that matters to firemites seems to be food and sex, which might be why they are considered so intelligent.
Gin and Nan fall into blissful sleep — the best thing in life — with Gin’s living body part pets, the dreadlocks wave-snaking inside the air, hissing like Medusa, and the family of Firemites are sweating in their orgy of food and sex, hoping the candle doesn’t burn out anytime soon.
When I go back inside my body, I see that Christian has left the room, went to the back of the kitchen, to be with someone more talkative. I totter to the employee section of the restaurant, to where Mortician is working.
Mortician is always the one doing all the work. He’s chopping vegetables and tomatoes now, while we sit on our asses. I think he’s only like that because it’s in his character to do work all the time, no matter what it is. He must keep busy so that he won’t get bored. And I know that once he stops working, his soul is lost. Soul resin won’t have interest enough to do work as obsessively as he does it now.
I hear Christian and Satan talking about the blue women and hurry my God’s Eyes inside with them. I can’t miss a conversation like this, not when the most beautiful creatures on Earth are involved. I still can’t get the face of that BIG-eyed blue woman passing through the festival out of my thoughts. I know Christian is as interested in them as I am. We will both go after them soon enough.
Satan describes the blue women like this:
They look a lot like humans, but they have red hair and what appears to be blue flesh. Their skin is really just white, just like Caucasian skin, but all the fluids underneath the skin are made of blue so the blue women appear to be blue. Actually, they’re much different than humans. On the insides, they’re more like machines, like the insides of clocks, with gears made of cartilage. They have both male and female sex organs in their mouths, and they reproduce by kissing: two blue women become impregnated by a long tongue-rubbing kiss. The sperm that ejaculates is more like lime juice than regular human sperm; very sour if you taste it.
Another reason why blue women smell like machines is that they don’t need to sleep, and instead of eating they run on fuel, a fuel that males produce. Actually, any male mammal produces the same fuel, and all types will do them fine, but human-like males are attracted to them and will get inside their vaginas without being forced. Blue women usually molest every male person or beast they can get their wiry fingers on, because they need to ingest the cum through their vaginas and into a certain gland that isn’t all that different from our stomachs. That’s why they still have sexual intercourse with. To men, it is sex; to blue women, it is food.
Sometimes the blue women carry diseases and give it to the males they sleep with, just like some mosquitoes give people malaria when they drink blood. It’s very dangerous to be around blue women because of these sexually transmitted diseases, mostly because they are irresistible to men. If one comes in contact with a hungry blue woman, there is no escape; even an old blue woman is irresistible. They must remain irresistible their entire lives, in order to attract males. They grow up to full maturity when they are two years old and die at the age of two hundred, before their bodies grow too withered and smelly to attract men. During their two years of childhood, blue women molest animals, forcing the mammals to ejaculate into their vaginas by handling or sucking their sexual organs.
Blue women are also mute. They only speak to each other telepathically, and they have no vocal chords at all. The only sound that comes out of their throats are soft breaths, and smacking lip vibrations. Other than that, they are as silent as a landscape painting.
“Leaf?”
I hear Mortician calling to my body; my mind is in the next room.
“Leaf, could you take out the trash for me?” he says.
I look over at him, dizzy from the mind-body transaction. I don’t say anything.
“That one over there,” he says, pointing his knife at an orange garbage bag.
I tie it up and take it out to the thick-greased dumpster behind Satan Burger, out into the fresh-sober morning. Another cigarette machine hostess, not the one at the entrance, opens the backdoor for me. It’s the employee cigarette machine, made for employees to buy cigarettes conveniently on their cigarette break, on their way outside. Since they’re free, I decide to take a pack. I was never a smoker before — I never cared enough to start smoking — but it’s all right to now. The worst smoking could do is kill me, and dying isn’t something to be afraid of.
I buy a pack of Carlton’s, which were always considered one of the low-tar brands of cigarettes, very sophisticated too I think. I’ve never tried them before, but I always said that they’d be my personal brand of cigarette if I became a smoker.
If everyone had not lost their soul, there would still be a BIG conflict between smokers and nonsmokers. Neither of the two groups would ever have given up until the entire country, or maybe even the entire world, was split into two parts: a smoking section and a nonsmoking section. Many of the people were neutral, like me, not smoking but not complaining about smokers. I hate the nonsmokers that complain. They’re the reason why I take the smokers’ side over theirs. Smokers always seem to be more down to Earth, not so uptight, not afraid to die.
The outside is still morning, infinite morning. Richard Stein always called the morning his cool blue lady. It was the only woman he ever truly loved.
I light a Carlton cigarette with an old book of matches I found under some newspaper wanderers, and fill my insides with acid-pleasant harshness. This harshness is what I enjoy from smoking; the nicotine doesn’t do much for me.
I look up the hill and see a swarm of scorpion flies, circling, no one is below them, except me, but I’m not worth eating. The scorpion flies find a nice cow and settle down with it.
The scorpion flies are buzzing closer than they should be, all wired in some sort of panic. Like something is wrong. Like disaster is going to happen.
Scene 10
Hog World
After the working day is considered fully cooked, and Mr. Satan is left within his cancer-breathing office counting his newly earned souls, licking chortles and rubbing himself with fruition, Mort, Christian, and Leaf, go out for a night of drinking and celebration. The celebration part is meant to stop boredom and make us happy. Without happy, the walm might steal our souls before our first paychecks come in.