GORGON MATRONS TO GROTESQUE SKELETONS: A MOST CRASS OF MENAGERIES

By Quillon42

Everybody wants to watch the FMVs, but nobody wants to effing move. I thought about this endlessly as I worked my shift at Lurch's Loafers, thinking too about my dear sister and how tirelessly she worked at twirling around our apartment day in and day out, despite her disability.

Mother, for her part, just sits and brags about how many gentlemen callers she's had over the ages; they haven't so much come and gone, though, as just come and stayed. She's gone on and on about trying to find her rock in this life; well, I mean, so many suitors have been turned to stone by now after encountering her…perhaps they had feet of clay in her estimation.

Yea, but she goes on and on about all those callers. There was the insane old man Kap Ka who rambled on and on about the music he could make with his magical spheres as well as with my mom, but he was as inept physically as he was intense mystically. There was the specter of a suitor who became even more alabaster in follicles and flesh once Mother ghosted him in turn. There were the cinnamon-scalped twins Cilantro and Parsley (who were the incestuous parents of that other infamous C and P), who always did everything in pairs and thus took their rejection in stereo by popping up and down and making a ruckus across the Forest of Rue when Mama said she'd go with someone else. Really, she always did have that kind of petrifying effect.

Then Mother tells Sister La Pa that surely there will be such gentleman callers this evening, to which her daughter replies that there would be no way. Certainly, Ma says in denial, there must have been some disaster, some Act of Underworld that made it so that there would be no men brightening our Hades-shadowed doorstep; it must have been a deluge caused by Leviathan, or a conflagration by Salamander, or a cyclone by Jinnee, or an earthquake by Behemoth; one of those Big Four fuckers.

La Pa later asks Mama how her meeting was with GME—the Gorgons of the Mythic Epics. Running nervous hands through her serpentine tresses, Mother bristles and admits that she didn't have it in her to venture out there this time. But then she wheels around with her snaky head and accuses La of skipping dance practice again.

At this Sis says that she didn't need the school, that she could spiral all on her own and go down to the boiling river and watch the people writhe and fight all day. Mother then wonders in her shrieking voice whether that will be their eternity, whether all she and La will do is go to the Phlegethon and watch the battle monsters, if that is all there will ever be for them. Ma then remembers ruefully the way in which Father Skythe had left, how he just put on his stupid-looking avian cowl and spread his goofy-ass wings and took to The Cloud all by his flighty self and never returned. I can still recall the way he set his face when he had that dumbass headgear on, his stark visage locked in a rictus of sardonic glee as if to say "I will be sneering forever."

Eventually Mother comes around full circle to break my madmanufactured balls about where I go at night. She thinks I'm terrorizing the town just by showing my patchy punkass face in public, but in fact I just go to the fashion outlets. How do you think I could get my hands on khakis, loafers, and a sport jacket like what I'm decked out in this instant? I'm the effing Lands End of lurking organisms, the Coldwater Creek of creatures with these threads beaming off my body this instant, tell you what.

My old lady then comes around once more to busting my synthetic-ass chops about finding a proper partner in dance, crime, and otherwise for Sister La. I know my despair-dribbling sibling has always had a hard-on for Heart Heat Harn, that Egyptian-seeming soldier who wears his own emotions on his sleeveless arms and his shiningly bald head in his hands. But last I had checked, the Heady one had still been seeing both of those cheerleading pygmies Chili and Pepper, and this even after we'd all been done with high school.

I tell Mama Naga anyone but him, but Sis seems set as to the one with whom she wants to engage in a La Pa Lambada. So it's time for me to put my manmade ear to the ground.

In time I get Harn's headless ass to our residence. He's certainly attractive, if in a rather unconventional way (no homo sapien); also his accomplishments are to be admired for certain. Building whole passels of pyramids all on his own, pursuing countless Israelites, cultivating carnivorous flora in a hole in the ground he calls the Hungry Cave (how inspired), and graduating from secondary all while doing the same in a decapitated state.

Sister La looks as if she's seen the fearsome feculence that is Drethdok, or as the Engrish call him, "Strawbelly Jam," again as she claims she has seen him haunting around the afterlife apartment from time to time. Seems that she wants to gyrate into a coma. I've got to try and bring the girl out of her galling shell; she can become very animated when she wants to be, but it becomes challenging really at times now.

Mother brings out La's emerald, second player outfit, in a bid to breathe some newer life into the babe, but Sister stands steadfast that she wants so to maintain her ruby raiment for the encounter.

An age later, Harn emerges into our humble lair. Graciously La Pa extends a hand and our guest puts his head forward for her to grasp in greeting. (His cranial one, not the carnal one, mind you).

While Sister La attempts to marshal some modicum of calmness, I take Harn aside and talk shop for a spell. I mention video games to Harn, and at first he doesn't understand what I'm getting at, and I elaborate that, maybe with like movies decades ago, people are just sitting in stifling basements playing them, imagining themselves as being just like automaton me or my nasty Naga mother or her delicate dancer daughter, when they should play at having some kind of exciting and imaginative future outside in their own worlds before they grow too old to do the same in fact.

From there I say that I want to break out of the underworld and try to have some semblance of a life on Earth. Harn blanches, telling me that I need to keep my stitched-together feet on the ground and not entertain such idle fancies; after all, my ballerina of a baby sister and my medusa of a mother need me, he insists. I reply that I want to be just like my Dad and soar off into the unknown (though without the asinine avian getup that he had).

In the meantime Sister La can't stop her spinning around all over the place. She's as nervous as she appears to be because of our vivisected visitor and such. We all finally get to sitting down and the chandelier above crashes down some feet away from us. Then Mother trains a calcifying look upon me and I know just what she's going to sink her fangs into now.

"You didn't trade the pigs and chickens for the electricity invoice like I told you, did you?"

I sigh deep into tungsten lungs.

"Ma, I told you I was saving up for the maroon crewneck that I'm flauntin' right now…"

"Like that's really more important than the utility bill!"

"…

"…You can't spell 'Naga' without 'Nag,'" I mutter on to Harn close by.

"I heard that, you ungrateful wreck!"

"Shigeru Miyamoto probably programmed code for the next Mario on the inside of his new shirt," offered the vacant-necked visitor aside me.

Mother thinks for just a moment.

"Harn, dear, while I go and condemn my son Dom on down to the dishes dungeon, why don't you see how La Pa is? You can take these sparking red sticks of dynamite to use as candles."

"Why, sure thing, Miss Naga."

Sister La told me later, after I suffered with the suds in the cellar, all about what went down with my cranium-displaced crony.

"He stepped outside our apartment to look for me, which I thought was so nice given how horrible the Hadean Sky looked this evening. Thought it would be fit for another deluge of hail and locusts this awful night, I did. For my part, I was obscured in the tightest nook of the fire escape.

"Then he sang up to where I was hiding. It was a very unique voice, I have to say; interesting distortions as the vocal cords were vibrating in such a peculiar way, given that they were exposed to the open after-existence air. It looked as if Harn's body was ventriloquizing the mouth moving within that lump of flesh held right there in his hands.

"After that the old guillotined guy asked me what I'd been doing over the last thousand years, since the last fighting tournament. Oh, Dom, I just had to tell him the truth then; I mean, I really haven't been up to very much at all since I'd dropped out of the circle of eternal torment I'd been occupying.

"Kind of prattling along then was he and all nonetheless, the man reassuring me that my physiological inability to keep still was an asset and not a liability, that my channeling the tendency into the talent of dance was inspired, and that I shouldn't be ashamed of it or anything. He said in his case, he wasn't going to let something so slight as headlessness hold him back from reaching his own goal of becoming a Youtube personality. He'd be the most infamous of talking heads ever, was what he had to say about it.

"Then his noggin bobbed up, Harn nodding from the place in his torso's hands, and I assented for him to come up and join me on the fire escape. I've never seen a man so beheaded yet so buoyant in his demeanor as he was.

"So as to distract Harn from all of his entreaties for the moment, I showed him my collection of creatures I've been hoarding all these eons. I've always found my oversized grotesque skeleton Fangore to be my favorite of them all. There's just something so disgusting yet endearing about that blood red mane of hair he has. He seemed to be impressed, though he blanched for a second; I immediately recovered the conversation, saying that it didn't matter if Harn himself didn't have hair now, or a scalp connected to the rest of his body for that matter."

"And then it was just us two, all up on our lonesome on that small veranda, you know."

I began to extend my arms out in that stereotypical zombielike motion that my humongous homunculus ass tends toward whenever someone's about to go into TMI territory, but it's already too late as Sister La proceeds with all the gory fornicative details.

"Dom, he was wonderful up there…to have someone who was able to cover over me entirely like a comforter, while salaciously servicing me downstairs with his disembodied mouth…he's really a one-of-a-kind lover and such. I let his tongue explore the lengthy expanses of my xanthous thighs then…allowed his maw to make settlement upon my saffron stomach…permitted his pate to interpolate itself deep into my citron-chrome cleavage…enabled his body-alienated face to enjoy respite upon my aureate sacrum…licensed his lips to stake claim upon my amber buttocks…"

"Okay, okay, La! Alright?! If you want, you can be the most articulate of the Wingspan family…I know you've coveted my own eloquence for a while, but damn…"

"Oh, Dom, I'm so sorry…I was just all swept up in the memory. He's an Egyptian warrior who'd gone and lost his head over me, and he still dandles his dome around in an ever-tightening hand to this very day while avoiding carnivorous flora in the cavern he calls home. He's in all the more of a daze because we're in love, you hear, and I'm finally going to be able to spirit myself away from this place!"

And with that, Sister La Pa flourished to her feet, and she spun herself away from my sight and from the cruelest gaze of our gorgon mother.

And now I wonder here, La Pa, while I'm here holding down the house with Mother, if you'll ever come back, if you'll one-up Father the way you did me with your graceful grandiloquence. I imagine you out there, passing some steel mill or such, and you must peer inside there and watch the welding, seeing the sparks and thinking of the crackling atop the red candles that comprise our vitalities in this hell of a home we have. I wonder if it's ever all you can do, when you see such lights, to whirl those candles out.