Burger King Ball Pit

My husband swears nothing is more excruciating than getting kicked in the ball sack, but I gave birth in our Jacuzzi to an infant who shot up his high school with a semi-automatic rifle.

The only place in town where nobody recognizes me is submerged deep in the Burger King ball pit. Whoppers make me woozy, and balls-deep is a scary feeling, but I feel most alive after a bloated somersault, marooned upside-down in a padded box six feet below an orgy of kaleidoscopic hollow plastic balls with my stomach full of melted American cheese.

I’ve made mistakes. During our honeymoon in the Bahamas, sunburned snorkelers were hypnotized by schools of fish swarming our catamaran. The captain said he’d never seen so many colors. Well, they were feasting on my violent diarrhea. I received word of the shooting from my husband aboard the boat. He was double-fisting frozen pomegranate margaritas.

Grandma smoked canoeing blunts of Purple Monkey Balls out of her tracheotomy hole in our Jacuzzi. Heaven is being completely lost in a ball pit, uncertain which direction is up or down. I huddle in a bubble of Whooper burps. Burger King’s balls smell bad, nauseating, the pit reeks of dirty diapers. Rambunctious toddlers are kicking my kidneys and a future elementary school shooter is sitting on my uterus. My eyeballs are squeezing an orbit of screaming plastic. My soul is weeping, swallowing a kaleidoscopic kiss of funk and toddler flatulence. A putrid fusion from a decaying kingdom of innocence from youth.

My trial begins tomorrow. I didn’t know my son was going to do it. I’m not willing to show up to court. Burger King is my executioner. I inhale deep and swim breaststroke to the bottom of the ball pit.

 

Forgotten Baby Syndrome

My daughter melted into her car seat behind a Burger King dumpster smothered by a colony of fire ants. My Ford Focus is a bubble of Whooper flatulence. Nothing is weirder than watching a sweaty tweaker cradling your dead infant like a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken in the drive-thru lane. A methhead smashed the window. I squeeze into a puddle of kaleidoscopic tempered glass shards, singing lullabies in her car seat, puffing a canoeing blunt of Alaskan Thunderfuck. I puncture my jugular with a rusty shish kabob skewer. Sunshine dances on my eyelids like a prayer breakfast.

I chain-smoke Marlboro Reds on the drive home and cook garlic butter shrimp scampi for my gorilla as he stiches me up. Nobody knows I own an adult gorilla. Nobody understands true love ’til they share their soul with a gigantic gorilla.

I’m naked. Che Guevara cradles me. He surgically tweezes the obstinate glass shards twinkling like warm white Christmas lights beneath the sweaty slabs of skin jiggling from my elbows. Che Guevara guzzles seven bottles of merlot to drown his shrimp scampi and ushers me into my daughter’s crib with the convivial wizardry of a fever dream. Her clothes, toys, stuffed animals, and all her possessions are meticulously boxed. Che Guevara licks the tears drizzling down my nostrils like a lollipop or an ice-cream cone and somersaults into the cobwebbed playpen. His drunken snores shadow me into the gorge of girlhood.

I back my Ford Focus into the driveway and crawl into my daughter’s car seat with the majestic squiggle of a cockroach. A moonlit collage of tempered glass stabs my buttocks. Stars sprout from bloodshot eyeballs.

Around dawn, I tiptoe into our kitchen where Che Guevara sits with his testicles festively adorning the countertop like ornaments on a Christmas tree—frying omelets for breakfast before boiling lobsters. He carries me into our bedroom—and tucked beneath the covers—weeks burn into months, crumpled, dazed in our bed. Che Guevara feeds me, bathes me, massages my mastectomy scars in the cathedral of bubbles bouncing over the brim of our jacuzzi, changes my dirty diapers, cradles me. His lullabies catapult a straggling soul.

I stare through the wretched slats of my daughter’s crib—boxes unpacked—all her possessions returned to their proper places. I catch a whiff of dirty diapers marinading in a stubborn mound of sunshine. Che Guevara injects me with a needle camouflaged by jagged jumbles of furry Jacuzzi bubbles. I’m clumsily buckled into the car seat with a colony of fire ants festooning from the dumpster through the missing window into my jugular. Whooper remnants shimmer, scattered in flame-grilled labyrinths throughout the vehicle like charbroiled limbs from blown-up Navy SEALs. Che Guevara eats my face in juicy chunks. I watch my daughter melting in the vitreous humor of my left eyeball as he chews it.

 

Flamingo Spaceship

My fiancé Fred suffers from an irrational fear of flamingos. His nightmares stain our bedsheets with pink puddles of sweat. Fred screams between spasms, suffocating beneath a humongous flamboyance of flamingos, gasping desperately in a bubble of his own flatulence. Fred’s never seen a flamingo in his life—other than lawn ornaments.

Fred’s not a courageous man, but he’s mine. Sometimes when we make love, it feels like I’m an astronaut again. We walk to the pothead park where the weirdos watch from behind bushes, one leg bent backwards like flamingos.

Fred’s nightmares are filled with magnificent fantasies about being ambushed. His psychotherapist recommends a trip to Everglades National Park to confront Fred’s fears.

“Better than a lobotomy,” Fred says.

We make love in our Holiday Inn Express like doomed cosmonauts. We explode and burn into fiery dust. I’m falling through a carnival of cumulus clouds. Fireflies marooned on a soggy cigarette island inside a Budweiser bottle in our bathroom.

Fred’s blindfolded. Our uber driver winks at me as if we’re kinky.

“I’m scared.” Fred says. “I can smell them.”

Flamingos bounce in our Uber driver’s eyeballs.

“Here we are,” I say.

I clasp Fred’s blindfolded face. His pulse is convulsing in his temples. I’m whirling in outer space. I pray as we creep closer to a flamboyance of flamingos. I remove the blindfold warily. Fred curtsies, gazing into a marsh, smiling at stoic cornucopias of flamingos—a miracle—his Phoenicopterus cured. We hug hard like enemies as the flamingos salute us with the grotesque grandeur of wounded children with amputated knees. We shut our eyelids. The flamboyance ambushes us from their camouflage of muhly grass. Fred vanishes beneath a frantic orgy of flamingos.

 

Fred’s fear of flamingos wasn’t irrational at all.