The Lankville Daily News

By Ric Royer

I was driving down one of those busy routes when I saw a car dealership. The cars all had balloons tied to them. “MOTHERFUCKER”, I said aloud. I swerved suddenly across two lanes of traffic, drove up on the median and sped into the lot. They all came out from the air conditioning.

“What are you doing?” one of them said. He had on a short tie and brown pants. The rest sauntered back inside.

“I saw the balloons. Might want to buy one of these cars.”

He calmed down a bit. “What are you in the market for?”

“Anything with a balloon tied to it. Anything at all but maybe something with a lot of leg room. Where a person could get down in the well and hide there.”

He showed me around. The heat was terrible. But the balloons held up. They were strong and noble in the stale, windless air.

“What about this one?” He opened the door to a late model sedan. The steering wheel was brown. I looked over the hood and saw the balloon there.

I decided to play it tough. “Can I keep the balloon on it? I’ll only take it if I can keep the balloon on it. What are you going to say to that?” I paused. “Asshole,” I added.

“Sure, you can keep the balloon on it.” He smiled. I called him an asshole again just for effect.

An hour later, I drove the car off the lot. And as soon as I did, the balloon disappeared– it was a phantom. I turned in my seat and saw that the entire dealership was gone. “How can such things be?” I asked aloud. “I’ll drive for an extended period of time and see if it returns.”

It never did.

By Ric Royer

The Lankville Daily News is proud to present a new series by enigmatic Lankville businessman Ric Royer.

The depths of my heart are a pure place to go.

I used to think it was a place of intense confusion, horror, and lewdness and also where the past lived, but I’ve come to find that it’s really a place of deep purity, like beautiful bouncing white soap bubbles caroming gently off a bare wall and onto a lover in a towel. Some people have said that these emotions are intense and for some reason I have experienced some sort of negativity in this world. Maybe it’s the way I am taking it? Maybe it’s the way that I interpret our world? Maybe it’s because there are heart simulacra everywhere and the true heart is no longer recognizable. You know how they have those little candies?

 Nevertheless, I am starting to find that this emotional intensity about life is actually simplicity itself. And therefore, I intend to get more and more emotionally intense. It will be as though there is a knob and I shall turn this knob higher everyday and all days through the rest of my life. If you want to lunch with me– say, for example, in a run-down restaurant with a hubcap attached to the desk and no exterior signage, you should expect long periods of emotional intensity. You may not even get to eat. Emotional intensity can sometimes manifest itself on tables and a full surface clearance is not out of the question. But that is purity.

In doing so, I shall link into the purity of these emotions that I have never fully experienced before.

Maybe that is life right there – fully experiencing emotions.

The depths of your heart can be a place where you go to understand the intricacies, mysteries, horrors, and sexual irregularities of this life. Those little candies are a poor substitute. Although, they are very good. I eat several hundred a day.

There are so many things that we do not understand about our world simply because we cannot see them. Sometimes, you must trust they are there. You have to be willing to put your feet forward while throwing out intense emotions everywhere all over everything before walking into a dense fog. Will it be scary? Absolutely. Will it be worth it? Oh absolutely.

Purity. Probity. Fogs.

Time and time again you must travel into the depths of your heart to find yourself. Only then, will you begin to function in a way that is truly connected and present with the world.

If you can do that, there’s no cork in the bottle of what your life can become.

By Ric Royer

One day, I walked into a gym in a lower-class Island neighborhood. I walked right up to the ring and smashed a bottle of orange soda into the canvas. The boxers looked up.

“I will box you,” I said. The orange soda seeped towards their shoes.

“Get in here, you fuckin’ frog,” said the boxer. His manager, clad in protective gear, backed away.

I was wearing a bathrobe, some camoflauge short pants and a pair of penny loafers into which I had shoved quarters for effect.

“Hey, better get the frog some trunks, maybe some shoes,” called the manager, now outside the ring, relieving himself of his protective burden.

They brought me some proper gear and a small group of Islanders gathered around the ring. The manager rang the bell. Within three seconds I was hit by an uppercut and collapsed into the ropes. I recall a short burst of cheering and then nothing.

Hours later, I was in an outdoor chaise-lounge by a pond. I had a terrific headache.

“That’s what you get for egging on that Island boxer,” said a little man, who sat off among the reeds. He was clad in ancient, unfashionable clothes and wore small grandma glasses. Clouds approached from the east.

“After the fight, well, I don’t know if I can call it that– after your destruction, the Islanders strapped you to a chair and marched you around the pizza block. That’s where they have all those pizza restaurants. They took you in and out of some of the restaurants. They bought a pizza and shoved a lot of it in your hair. I tried my best to get the sauce out but you really should have a shower.”

The little man handed me a glass of iced tea. I took a sip. It was awful.

“Yes, that is awful iced tea,” he agreed. “It’s pond iced tea. This pond is all iced tea.”

“I’ve never…”

“No, it’s completely unique in the world. You would not have.”

We watched the sun go down together.

By Ric Royer

I saw the catalogue sticking out of his bag before he saw me.

“Hey! Asshole! Bring me that catalogue!”

He looked up. He was trying to do the house next door first.

“You do that house first and I’ll shoot you dead, God as my witness”. I was bluffing but he didn’t know that. He walked over slowly.

“I’m a federal employee,” he said, handing me the catalogue along with a batch of other letters that I immediately dropped into some hedges. “I’ll have you arrested.”

“I’ll burn your truck to the ground,” I countered. “Then what will you do?”

He said something but I missed it. I was staring too hard at the catalogue.

Back inside, I immediately opened the catalogue and the laptop and began ordering items in a blind, indiscriminate fashion. About 100 trains, all different gauges, some structures, a huge ferris wheel, some track nails, tons of figures– “Man with pants”, “Cougars and Cubs”, “Hot Dog Wagon”, “Toilet Scene”, they had everything.

In the comments section, below my order, I wrote: FUCK YOU PEOPLE! as I always did.

Three days later, the order arrived in six separate tremendous boxes. The postman shot me a disgruntled look. I kicked him hard in the ass as he walked away. “I’m a federal employee,” he said again.

“I’VE GOT TRAINS!” I screamed. I began crying and removed my shirt. “DISAPPEAR! FOREVER!”

Just as he was climbing into his truck, I crept up behind him and whispered, “You’re inhuman“. He didn’t care for that at all. Then, I dragged the boxes into the basement and began tearing them apart in a slipshod, desultory manner.

I came to the box labeled SCENERY. I screamed for no reason at all as I tossed aside utility poles, bendable armatures, potted flowers and fuel tanks that I could not possibly hope to find a use for. And then I came to the bridge abutment.

It was packaged in ordinary factory shrink wrap. I fingered it delicately. And, in return, I received an awareness of some grim, unmentionable horror. I knew right away that the bridge abutment was haunted.

And I have never truly recovered.