u/Positive_Month_5259

We are in a dinky café at 7 p.m., both of our characters drinking black coffee, the psychopaths, talking about their respective goals.

“I’m in grad school,” says Emily.

“I work in my father’s auto shop,” says her date.

Clearly, there is something incongruous about this. The breadwinner, Emily, and the industrialist date? Would it work? Would Emily be the breadwinner in the first place? In the back of her mind, she feels a shameful urge to head her family in every affair possible. It’s shameful because it’s a masculine urge and the precedent for it, in totality, is a sheer outrage.

The waiter arrives. “What would you like, sir?”

“Goddamn misogynist!” flashes unwittingly through Emily’s mind because the waiter seemingly noticed her date first, the narcissist. Her hands move for some reason in a way to spill her piping hot coffee, landing on the poor 19-year-old, tuition-paying waiter. The waiter looks rather androgynous but with more male qualities than female, for sure. He screams in pain, clutching the bare skin on his thigh, as the 1,000-degree-Celsius coffee burns through the cheap threads of his pants.

“Oops!” Emily says with absolute indifference. The Emilys of the world are always indifferent, as a rule.

“What do you mean, ‘Oops!’? You’ve burned him!” cries her disoriented date.

“Perhaps he deserved it. Perhaps ALL MEN DESERVE IT!”

And Emily throws the remaining coffee, which was still almost supernaturally piping hot, at her poor date’s face—scarring it immediately. A total prune she made of him. It’s a disaster.

“AGGGGGGGHHhhh,” the date obviously cries in pain.

The entire restaurant explodes into a cacophony of reproaches, efforts to console, and even derisive laughter amongst the lowest creatures of them all. It was odd—all of the opposing, differentiated emotions expressed by them almost, one could say, represented the date itself writ large.

To put an end to the foolishness, the manager runs through the Western-movie door leading to his office and puts Emily’s date into a headlock, intending to subdue him in an efficient manner. The restaurant cries harder, because clearly, the one in the wrong here is Emily, and sentiments of injustice spread throughout all of the patrons—even the common contrarians—in spectacular fashion. They rise up and attack the manager. An all-out onslaught of violence occurs.

At 10 p.m., police arrive and attempt to obtain a full account of the tale. A homeless man in rags, who watched from the window, describes the affair in literary detail, perhaps even embellishing some aspects. The police, the useless bunch, laugh at the absurdity of it all. They drive away, declaring it unworthy of their time.

Emily’s sin remains unexpiated, forever and for all time.

The original swashbucklers were an invention of man. They were a generation of hard-nosed warriors, progressing from chivalry to thing-in-itself honor as a virtue, and ultimately the virtue as its Platonic ideal. The chainmail of glorious men has rankled, however, in contemporary history’s account of time as an unrefined expression of the basest emotions. But I object, and this is why:

Urgu Laturgu (1227–1243) from the lands of New Babylon exemplified the Old Generation of “lay your life before the sword, a coward [pussy] is what I scorn.” (They would not have put it like that, but that was the sentiment) He was the third of five, the median to wade through the old obstinacy and the young obstinacy—these are different in nuance, understand! His mother suffered from the common crying delirium that 19th century authors wrote about extensively, her condition surfacing even before it was in vogue. The mother held no position in society anyways, the useless hussy. The children suffered for her suffering, but their father, Bibep Curur, the 2nd Earl of Lower Duchy (His Eminence) kept his composure and recognized Urgu in the midst of this to have a special attribute to him. It was an acute recognition, indeed.

The boy was trained in the old chivalry by his father, something you can’t really blame him for because of his resounding success as an officer, and holding subsequently a high government position—determining the outcomes of hundreds of subordinates. The sagacious statesman had long grown accustomed to the microcosm of responsibility and power of the preeminent monarchical conception in his hands, and had materialized it into an orb, as those with enough experience in a field are often able to do, the manifestation of that non-physical ability in order to mold it and obtain a much more tactile control over.

Urgu’s first test was a harrowing one. Bibep had determined that he was ready (for what, exactly, was unclear) and on a rainy day on the hilltop surrounded by his soldiers in war, having taken Urgu along, he thought, to observe and learn, climbed to the summit and declaimed to the men and sheep alike Urgu’s uncanny ability in combat and how brilliantly he would lead the men that day. The men, tired and worn-down from days of walking in enemy territory, shouted in jubilation with confidence in the sagacious Bibep.

The squire Urgu was bewildered, and in a paroxysm of violent incoherence, ran as far from the soldiers as possible. But little did he know, the enemies were closer than Bibep’s sense calculations and, running without looking back or thinking, in utter impulse, he found himself in the midst of intense discussion by the opposing warriors on a strange subject. They were speaking of the Fair Lady of the East, a name not as ominous to them but further producing grand sentiments in them as their conception of Aphrodite. She was the Aphrodite who didn’t shave (down or up there) and kept a swift, forceful abstraction in her movements. Apparently, Zigalether, the savagest beast of them all, had had a curt encounter with her—with much to say of it regardless.

He had straggled from the path of his fellow men, finding himself in a distant wood. The trees were heavy enough to block sound, sunlight, and visibility of anything else but the discontinuous sticks and scattered leaves on the floor that he automatically turned his sights toward. He picked up a leaf and was remarking on its faded and wet appearance when he was startled by a feminine yelp. In one of the best ways of the old chivalry, he immediately turned to help his damsel in distress, even pulling out his sword halfway to prepare for a potential foe. But it turned out it was just a ruse to catch his attention.

She was beautiful. Zigalether first noticed her eyes. They were strikingly disparate in his impressions of all of her features by the degree of intensity that they forced themselves upon his senses. This was to an extreme degree—the blueness of her eyes was more extreme in its color than the fullest seas he had sailed with his fellow brothers, the blue water and sky the only natural thing available to his perceptions; and still, her eyes were bluer. Her lips were full, her nose was that of a painting, almost disconcertingly straight but in some way erotic just in the sheer appreciation for its mathematical perfection; her face was bold and ovaled; her cheeks were flushed in pink, probably from the blood of the rabbit she had strangled and cooked over her fire, made pink from the heat and the state of the animal being dead. Zigalether was happy.

At once, she walked up and kicked him in the nuts. Zigalether writhed on the dewy grass, completely baffled and at a loss for words from the physical pain and his incredulity at her action. The Fair Lady walked away. She was dressed in a tight cloak, and nothing else—her entire body was visible from the faded threads. The cloak had the effect of a condom or a window, rather than a blackout curtain.

The men huddled around Zigalether, listening with all of their attention. No one noticed the child appearing right in front of them, until Zigalether, after coughing and creating a break in the story, bellowed in pure rage—almost set into action like a mode on a toy—and charged toward Urgu. His first and very last test was cut short by the sword plunged into his chest. The men rejoiced in even more exuberant jubilation than in their Fair Lady erections.

Bibep, the father, still retained his old chivalry and conquered his foes. Zigalether was the last to survive. Before Bibep finished his preparation for the heavens, Zigalether entreated him to “Remember our Fair Lady!” Bibep ignored his imploring and at once cracked his skull with his mighty statesman’s sword (it was a special type).

When he discovered the body of his dead child, he shouted to the sky and his lugubrious men: “O Lord, why me?” He did not receive an answer.

As Rosary wades in the formless water, before her eyes rises a merman adorned in teal scales from toe to areola. Her friend, her fake friend, Elizabethany or LizaLiza (her Wohapitube handle), who jests derisively at her tender, awkward moments, lies on the sand sensually drawling her words to Jack—the 5’4 lumberjack who resides in Pontic Bay for the moment, in the run-down cottage where his unblood brothers smack ping-pong balls and utilize the singular joint rolled from violet construction paper and a dubious strain, lit by the decrepit spiraled stovetop’s effulgence.

Jack Smith is an unthinking creature, an abomination of an amalgam of effusive caffeination, a nanometer weight placed on your weak heart, fidgeting and forgetting value. But the merman talks in Smith’s unseemly hoarse baritone and thrusts randomly at a slight wind—the latter factoid redolent of the unblood brothers’ carnal actions, Rosary noted, while she was, by the way, drowning because she had been almost archetypally swept up by a crude wave in a crude display of nature, which would have been the hypothetical excuse to explain the misguided movements that led to her death.

“Do you swim to impress others?” asked the enigmatic creature. The merman, that is.

“Gurg… gurgle, gurgle,” Rosary brilliantly retorted in one of her quintessential witticisms.

“Wise words,” replied he. “And do you believe in instant gratification?”

Suddenly, a light emerged from the sky. Rosary inhumanly contorted her body in a way to shift her atoms to avoid any of the H2O suffocating her and dominating her physical soul. She rose to the sky. The merman, somehow, rose with her.

“I understand what you have not,” Rosary claimed. “LizaLiza, flicking the bean on the microscopic rocks, attempted to scheme me into a faux pas, but I refused. I ran headlong into the water, to rid myself of her scummy mouth, the mouth that twists licentiously, toxic vomit springing out of it, the trollop sharing that horrifyingly black-tongued Smith’s high (Smith was presently jacking off into the sea in order to raise the PH level, the fool, to yield a lower depth level by way of increasing the alkalinity of the water) …and—”

“I will stop you there,” the merman interrupted. “That is not instant gratification. It is—“ and he went into his didactic. Smith accomplished his goal and the world crushed itself into bits at the helm of his sacred sperm.

“And the sun will rise tommorow… tomorrow!” still thought the metaphorical turtle while he choked on Smith’s sanctified sperm.