The lady one floor above me had long conversations with guys tucked away in her teeth, the CIA spy boys or Pentagon gongos, or some kind of cloak-and-dagger megillahs that don't have a name but suck up whole budgets for wars that don't make the news until later.

They told her they're coming to take her away and put her in space, to a place called the planet Xarandax; part of the war against terror, they said, a good chunk of which is lightening the tax load at home…

It was One Million BC, a Saturday night as it happened,  and Bork, Bubba, Barney, and Fred sat shivering around a sputtering fire; stiff winds whistled right through the cave they were in, rain blew in with it, the place was skank to begin with--bear shit for days--and they were a long way from home.

It had been one fucked-up day: they'd gone on the hunt and couldn't even bring down a dik-dik, and then finally they did and a troop of baboons came pimping on by and…

Some mamas would have their babies stay babies, especially boy children, the next set of dicks in the world, who learn soon enough to spit like their daddies.

My mother came to my bed in a dream; I was three. She started in eating my feet and then up she came, chewing through muscle and tendon and bone, and then at my guts she looked up at me and grinned like a Gorgon and kept right on coming. 

Later I took my food in the alleys and learned above all the value of shadows and…

Walking in rain, I come to a gingerbread gift shop, the proverbial one in a village of dreams, that summons the children to wish and to plot and to envy like burghers of old.

Inside, cornucopias: cookies and cakes, the latter three-tiered, with groom and bride blushing on icing on top.

Bone knives awaken in boys the impulse to murder; rag dolls in cribs whose lives are a sigh take girls by the throat...

I stare and stare down the years and hear a nun rapping for order, a…

It's almost a law like gravity or something: think with your dick and sooner or later, some kind of way, you get it lopped off.

Dennis shagged his old lady's kid sister, in their fucking bedroom, the nitwit cocksucker, and then found out he'd married Geronimo's daughter. She brought out a breadknife and carved him while he was asleep, and later that night slipped Skeeter their spaniel an extra taste treat with the Alpo.

Dennis moved to Las Vegas and hooked up with old…

"Look, man," the vampire told me, "that folklore is bunk, you know, the part where they're sayin' we gotta kill nightly to keep our cheeks rosy and all that good shit, like we're some kind of junkies or something. I mean, c'mon, that stuff's for the grandmas: there's nine of us livin' in town that I know of, which,  give us one year that's 3,200 corpses and change, just lyin' around in the alleys and shit and--think of the stink in the breezeway, you know?

"I sip and tip like a…

They stuck me back in the Cretaceous Epoch and said they'd be back to pick me up later, soon as I'd gathered the data they needed.

Sixty-five million BC, what a trip: T-Rexes, Triceratops, Gigantosauri, and talk about Kings of the Jungle and shit, but man, they were dumber than plywood.

And wouldn't you know it, they came to me with their problems and stuff, the usual snivels, i.e., the climate is changing, the swamp's drying up, and they've all got brains the size of…

One

Trouble was brewing in London that summer: Vampires, it seemed, had kicked ass in the Horror Department since Anne Rice's soft porno novels, and Werewolves were pissed; they felt shut out of the action bigtime. They had other gripes too, starting with their feeling that Vampires were "fags" and then just the fact that they let all that meat go to waste and--what kind of half-dead mango-pangos do that kind of stuff and--these guys were supposed to be…

He died, and whereas he'd always thought that death meant the ballgame, he actually went somewhere after.

He found himself whirling face-first down a pipe, like a pipe in a sewer, though it didn't smell, not yet anyway--he still found it tacky--but after awhile he noticed these bluebirds straight out of Fantasia flitting around like billy-be-damned, and he thought, well, hey, let's have some music--but all the birds did was belch like Bob Uecker, albeit in rhythm, but still,…

They fell in love and got married, and stayed happy as clams for seven months tops.

They'd looked good to each other, that is, they each appeared to embody the virtues the other sought in a spouse; the ones that sparked lust were especially appealing to him, and she fell in love with what passed for his brains and success in the world, and meanwhile they both made the right kind of noises, the ones strangers warble when they are in heat.

Down the road though, as happens when…

One

What they found in his eyes the night that he died were images cropped from his life evidently, though he was in none of the pictures. It's just that his face had been stamped with a pattern of wound-tight emotions that seemed in accord with the strafings depicted therein.

One picture held their attention, actually a triptych that might have been rendered by Bosch, except within this one everything moved, changed shaped, disappeared, was…

The land of the dead is much like the land of the living.

In fact, the mathematics check out, down close to the very last dime.

The birds sing, your bowels move, food tastes in a way that it didn't when you were a kid.

There are heroes and villains galore, now running to gray, yet each with his or her name in lights.

Memories abound and blood drips the same.

And love is a theory, only now desert-bleached and silent as calcified tears.

They're around four feet and skinny and fish-belly white, and hairless, red-eyed, and man, they are fast. Twelve dead in two months and one witness, Old Mary, and she'd been dead too if John hadn't fought the thing until it got hold of his neck.

They feed just like gilas, clamp on and chew you to pulp's what she said, and they're strong, because old John was strong, but the fucking thing busted his arm and two ribs, and then climbed right up on him and that was the…

I heard the low moans and then, peering out, I saw these thin, white-robed...phantoms, some 25-30 in all.

They were women, or had been, their flesh and robes now rotting off them.

It was pitch-black outside and, there they were, and they came toward the house, shuffling and stumbling the way I imagine I would if I'd been unearthed as these women had been, some after five years' interment.

I remembered the picture of Rosa Gonzales they'd published. Rosa, Mexican, 15 years…

Nothing like killers arrayed in your bedroom to light off your dreams and reweave them as flesh...

Eyeballs slit, bloody, time running out, I whispered and dodged through a darkness made darker by neon downtown, toward the club at the end of dead blocks near the water.

A pale green light there over the door, wraiths in and out, top-hatted, gowned, from an era I'd missed, before men and women bled into each other.

Some Midwest town by a river...trains mourning toward…

He kept the tortures and rapes in the crawl space all to himself, him and his his victims, they knew alright--he always made sure that they were awake, if not for long.

He kept the killings a secret as well, for awhile anyway, until all those dead found their voice.

They finally busted his ass, and dug up 34 bodies, most in the crawl space, some in his yard, and then there were four that he'd tossed in the river.

And this was the funny fat man in the clown suit who said…

Just as Woody Woodpecker figured prominently in Assyrian astrological projections in the Second Millenium BCE, so too did he give lasting resonance to Bertold Brecht's Threepenny Opera, albeit in the guise of one Mac the Knife, who mowed through Berlin in the last stricken days of the Weimar Republic.

Woody likewise pecked through the hit lists of Europe from Roman times through the Renaissance Era, laughingly, without compunction, for sport so it seemed, and the money was…

One

He flew out on the 29th and touched down at Orly some twelve hours later.

He got a small room in Rue whatever as per instructions and waited a day. He liked to starve; his French was shit, a near-hanging offense in the City Of Light, and thank God his place had a down-the-hall bathroom or he'd have had to jump in the Seine and be done.

God, he felt lonely: this wasn't the Paris of Stein or even Genet, not even their echoes, just…

Her hands could coax Mozart from stone, Mendelsohn from the blue skies above, and Beethoven from all the mad rush of waters on earth.

Those hands help point her young son toward manhood.

Knead feasts in kitchens for hundreds.

Once held a man crying to help bring him through.

Her hands and the memory of what they could do in the service of beauty went with her through hell.

And helped bring her out toward the light.

They found Perrine dead in the parking garage, his carotid artery severed. Three days later they found what that meant when the bomb went off in Anduro's limo, sending El Jefe in pieces to hell.

Amazing how little pixels of info thrown in with others add up to big pictures; a last tiny squiggle, snatched from the laptop Perrine left untended to play in the parking garage with the woman, put Anduro's name on a coup set for Friday.

The whole thing, in fact, was amateur…