When I saw this image, I just had to write a story about it. It’s gory in all the right ways. There is a comedic quality here – at least that’s where my weird mind went.
Thanks for reading.
Artwork by Rishiraj Singh Shekhawat
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/48qEVl
DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what is done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
Gray’s hot dog took a red shit on Clint’s flourescent white t-shirt.
The civic screeched to a stop.
Gray’s hot dog took red shit on Clint’s dash.
The civic always idled hard, but tonight it idled harder.
Clint said nothing, the quiet type. Ball bearings for a brain, though polished, colliding in his head. Hands gripped the wheel at nine and three, because he was a big man, and something about looking over his knuckles at the black spines that grew there didn’t sit right with him.
“S-sorry,” Gray said through a mouthful of dog. He was slipping through the seat cushion seams.
Clint sighed phlegm. His thick neck didn’t allow him to turn and look at Gray, the no good son of a bitch who he shouldn’t have waited for. The bastard was nine minutes and three seconds late, and Clint was never late. But he couldn’t show up like this.
“I can’t show up like this,” Clint said to the crystal-clear windshield. No bug dared die there. Not on his watch.
“I-I know,” Gray said, two-fisting his hot dog that was shrinking as much as him. He scanned the street for something, anything, anyone. Crammed between a Chinese place and a DVD rental place was a laundromat, neon letters flashing DRAIN THAT STAIN.
“Must be fate,” Gray said. “Look at that.” He pointed with his hot dog, which drizzled yet another red turd on Clint’s forearm.
Gray stuffed the hotdog in his coat pocket and zipped it up. Clint’s entire face was a straight line. Gray took of his shoe to toe the door open, since his hands were red as murder.
Clint pulled the car to the curb and got out. His ketchupped forearm was locked to his side as if he had lost use of it.
Gray opened the laundromat door for him. Clint entered as if he were alone.
Inside was as cramped as the outside looked. A row of machines stood to the side, a few on the wall. Graffiti, as to be expected. Clint noted the bench, how clean it was, and he sat, closing his eyes to take in the umblemished surface. From his new vantage, facing the machines, he saw they were clean, too. Sharp lines, gloss topped, and at attention. Soldiers waiting to serve him. This’ll do, he thought.
Gray paced the entryway, fishing condiment-greased quarters from his pocket. Clint eyed him and shook his head, sighing more phlegm.
Gray slotted as many quarters as the peeling label instructed before offering his help to right his wrong. Those muder-painted hands hovered in front of Clint, to which Clint didn’t oblige with another head shake, getting dizzy from all the disappointment.
“Oh, right,” Gray said and pulled his jacket and shirt off over his head to clean himself.
Clint stood three heads over Gray, breathed on him long enough for a drop or two of piss to eject from his retracted penis, and then tossed his shirt into the washer. He went back to the bench, rested crossed arms on his belly, and wished Gray would get the fuck out of his line of sight.
Gray didn’t. He leaned against the running machine, ribs and nipples sticking out as if he were something to look at. He sniffed.
“Smells like a pet store in here, don’t it?” Gray said. He sniffed his hands, then himself.
“It is,” Clint said.
“Huh?”
“Animals. Use places like these.”
Gray guffawed, did the leg slap, too, the walking cliche he was.
Then Clint saw a transluscent flake jostling on the running machine. “Animals,” he said again.
Gray laughed again like Clint said a new joke.
What looked like a black thorn shot up from between the machine and wall. Clint flexhed his hands as it tumbled overhead to land on Gray’s head.
Gray flinched, then grabbed at it. Cross-eyed, he examined it closely.”What the …”
Clint’s nose tickled. He sniffed. Gray was right. It did smell like a damn pet store. A particular part.
Clint followed the scent. Colder. Warmer. Warmer.
It was strongest at the wall. The three black portals looked back at him with their emptiness.
Then he smelled ketchup. He turned, enough to bump into Gray, who was standing too close, always, always standing too close. A coldness smeared his back, tangled the hairs with its half-dried thickness. Blood, Clint thought. That’s what it felt like.
Gray backed way, knees touching, 9mm aimed at Clint. Clint threw himself to the side, but no gun went off.
Between Clint’s crooked legs the blackness of those machine doors slithered aacross the floor. Wet and thick and spined with more black.
It encircled Gray’s leg, and he fired a clip’s worth of rounds. By then another tentacle wrapped around his torso and dragged him to its hole. Actually, two holes, one coming from each, above and below.
Gray would have screamed if a third handn’t coiled around his mouth and neck. His arms were free, though, and they grabbed at the air between him and Clint.
Clint had his own piece drawn and ready. He sighed phlegm and put a bullet through Gray’s head. He went dark as one tentacle twisted his head off, the other fighting for his lower half. Soon, Gray was in two.
Gray’s body took a red shit all over Clint. Not a spot was clean. Even his backside dripped with it.
Clint emptied his clip, and when that was done, beat at the tentacle now around his waist with the stock, losing his grip in all the slipperiness, fell to the ground where he clawed tile and everything he could get his hands on, but it all felt like air.
Far-sighted as he was, the sign didn’t come into focus until he was halfway inside one of the machines. The neon flickered irony, bright, and intense enough to where he could see it far back in the depths of the machine that wasn’t really a machine, while he was slowly consumed.
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