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OPINION: I Step Aside for No Earthly Being
You’ve seen me. A demon in a kind of nightmare, perhaps?
Out at Twin Removed Pines Mall, over in the corner of Lot B by the frozen meat store. The boarded-up fotomat.
I live there. But maybe not for long. The Lankville government wants me out.
Back in June, when I set up my patio furniture around the fotomat, was when they first noticed. A man from the mall, his face like a pitiless crag and bearing the degenerate name of Kites. He told me I’d have to leave. I issued a hard challenge.
I pointed to a nearby half-demolished grove. “Over there. Shirts off. Five minutes.”
Turns out Kites was as chickenshit as his profligate handle. Never showed up. And time moved forward.
Then, it was October. I was planting some bulbs in the aprons of dirt on either side of the fotomat. I take care of that which I am owed.
The interlopers pulled up in a fancy town car. One of them was the pretender king, Pondicherry himself.
He looked at the fotomat for awhile. Tried the door (I hinged one of the plywood cover-ups for easy access).
“The spirit of Lankville is resiliency,” he said. “From a small seed grows homes. This is nice, what you have here. I admire your frontier spirit.”
I couldn’t understand anything he was talking about. This was no frontier. It was merely the soil of the Eastern Lankville Suburbs. Born and bred, I am.
Pondicherry spoke again. “I’m afraid there are people, deep within our government, who disapprove of you living in this abandoned fotomat. I am not one of them. However, the people have spoken.” And that’s when he handed me my eviction papers.
“You can hand me these papers,” I said. “But you’ll have a fight on your hands. The Dunn’s are bound to this here earth. And we possess an implacable and bitter reserve of undefeat. I will fit you into a world that is smaller than the one in which you find yourself. It is my intent to summon the effluvium of hell.”
He looked dazed. Then he vomited. It was a grotesque farrago of candy and pancakes. His seconds whisked him away. The paper I buried. The men who wrote it– they shall one day emerge from a holocaust which will take all security from them. Slashes of light shall not penetrate the dull gloom of their wasted lives.
I continued planting bulbs. I acquired the frozen meats and seared them across an open flame.
It was December. I looked across the lot. A wild Outlander on a ladder, hanging glitzy decorations over the lamp poles.
I approached him.
“It is my intent to annex this part of the lot,” I told him. “You witness that homestead?” I pointed to the fotomat.
“What? You mean that old photo booth?” His tongue was of a lower-order. An inscrutable creature.
“Aye. It can no longer hold me. I intend to build.”
“…This is the mall’s property. The fuck you think you can build there?” Colorful whorish balls ringed in gold appeared from his box. Monstrous.
I spat and went back to the ancestral edifice.
Construction began this morning. Men ringed me as I worked. But I worked consistently through dinner. They know now.
The opinions of Carl Dunn are not necessarily the opinions of The Lankville Daily News or any of its subsidiaries.
LETTER SACK