fiction || John Pursch

Skid Mark

Ball-peen bulimic breath erupts in burbled spendthrift sunrise, flooding daily hail from glorious counter charge to spinnaker oven disease, melting highball sprints to wallowing business charts. Allowances peter into coronal mismatch, flaunting coverall germicide’s befallen bedrock tics with cranberry pasties. Reflective zealots immerse sweltering laggards in steely-eared groupers, loudly impaled on hooded carp extrusions, whisked away by clattering poltroon chaff.

“Erstwhile vermin, report to simian warehouse for ingestion of exfoliant gruel,” eternal speakers blare. Clem and Skid careen through scarred hairball scrapers, igniting catfish antennae with burgeoning broods of stentorian patriarchs, blunt and tumescent till Dearth despins.

Parietal flapjack wheezers hover their eyes on peanut gazettes, filthy rune-like MJ-speak going easy on earwig quotient peers, flopping candied murals of pseudo-Swobodian game trickle to Shame Stadium gymnastic fouls, bowling over rotunda menace with horse cart munition playboys. Wending through brunch selection motifs, Kabuki Clem vents riddled amethyst surmise, gaveling entire stadium to panic, stampeding Flashing Demos with old tea bags, soggy rolls, job control shards, mechanical hamsters, fragments of noon, peacetime overhangs, sliding ventricles, contract measles, proxy shamans, cloying tar pits, germinal angles, avuncular donuts, …

Pauses arm extorted terriers, flinging loose palettes in steel erector swoons to feast on bandstand irrigation folds of earthworks in fume platoons, glomming onto swollen eardrums. Phosphorescent nightingales vow to brace for umpire tonic, swelling towards skylight tunnels, smoothing out biologic regret in swampland mystique, sneezing verdant causeways into algae supper. Timed rattlers spoon crutch mechanics to Kabuki in glass strainers, feeding maniacal giblets in podlike exterior molds, satiating him with furious ploys of eyesight gel. Aching ponds empty into his mouthlike internal flukes, fired by worn mimetic corridors of silken grease, swallowing torn ploys in swirling touchstone seizures. Promised shards of fakery, blanked to rumination weekend pies, loin retractors glimpse effulgent orators, dying to claim elusive disemboweled hobo towns for indigent warriors on stipulated girth retreat, fouling conquest’s dueling highball stoops with diurnal rocking chairs.

Clem, he cackle high, long, and lewd beyond austerity’s musical nylon embrace, swilling down diluted slipstream youth, Juans that got in the way, mowed towns of sacrificial flummoxed toll booth recluse pox: “Whadaya lookin’ at, Skid? Tell me ya never slurped, just purged and parked her? Hah! Good bosons gone to waste, millions slip away, recombine; identity’s bygone, boy. You’ll learn,” plunging sodden face first into overflowing egress. Sloshing aft, flooding all compartments, bound for MJ-52, some merge, some wallow and dissipate before illusion obtains, most simply escape to empty space, to drift in stellar silence, vacuous, alone.

Skid Mark waits for Clem’s entire head to submerge, then hits the purge valves, sending trillions of gallons into deep space. Graylien freighters follow close behind, sucking up most of the effluent. The rest is fuel for distant systems, far away in time. Beached on suddenly landlocked steel, Clem’s slobbering face leers, drooling life histories, huddled hordes of respun casualties, drowsing into soggy sleep. Skidly swings the ship around, heads for Dearth’s refueling moons, plotting transparent regress via JFK-26, stoppage vectors drained to filial row house juncture, watches Graylien escort slip away.

Later Skid switch known selfish monitor with old Kabuki, swapping stories in bathhouse realm amidships, bobbing in alluvial wastage, spillover module rippling old floozy context, musty captor floss for spectral post-mortem.

“Why, when I was you, Clem my good man, oils brewed the slovenly seas in punctured pinnacles of gloppy girth,” Skidly waxes laconic, memorizing Clem’s nostalgic dreams in dreary drams of daylight trader parasites.

“Ahem, dear Skidly, do declare mein oyster ruptured tentacle coat’s interior to spied lineal grapefruit snouts, beyond any sense of yore datum might’ve culled from pseudopodal vestiges, gearing up for charmed recoil semantics,” Clem counters, hoping to climb the groupoid’s final tower.

But handholds lead to armpits and proctored hair, spatial flops galore, when swap pools enumerate bimodal cistern ooze of countably infinite lusty souls, all from canned terminators, Dearth rebuttal glossed impending solar sheath tureens.

“On to munchies, moaning all the wayward breath disease, homely two left loafing, heresy for hearsay, bubbling quenched tornado meal interring trance mechanics, fleeting rhapsodic sequestered police,” Skid opines, floating blissfully in slowly decomposing vernal outwash sluice of casually tied reposing quilt, memorial tonic slowing to bland congeal.

“Yeah, who’s enveloped, who’s to scatter, soaked together dreading suppurated tolls, nightly to declare a customary prolix grate’s eternal gridlock, teaming out to feathers,” Kabuki gleams, crawling out to blowers.