I carry my dead pit bull around the block in blankets of fur and tears. Nobody asks what\u2019s inside the baby blankets. Not even my wife. Wendy fills the humongous bathtub with bubbles bursting merciless in the orbit of our ceiling fan. That\u2019s her way of saying goodbye. Potheads suffer differently. Nobody knows how we\u2019ll mourn \u2019til our dog dies. I walk around the block all night \u2019til blisters burst, my tennis socks heavy and soggy with a fusion of serum and sweat. Neighborhood pets trail me at dawn. I welcome a few by their names. A couple strays, shaggy coyotes, rabid racoons, an inquisitive skunk.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhatcha holding, Dick?\u201d<\/p>\n
My neighbor Nicolas is reclining on his dental chair smoking a Cuban on his rickety porch. He\u2019s a drunkard dentist. Nicolas digs to the root of most rotten things fast and ruthless. Pit bulls are an affectionate breed. None of my pits attacked anybody before. Yesterday was a calamitous accident.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve been circling all morning,\u201d Nicolas says. \u201cThis isn\u2019t a drill?\u201d<\/p>\n
I hobble across his manicured lawn. The cigar clouds are inviting, like a light from heaven. Nicolas shivers and his porch trembles with the spasms of an anxious patient battling a botched root canal. His eyeballs bulge, brutal and bewildered.<\/p>\n
\u201cJesus, Dick\u2014what\u2019s that smell? Is this a coyote?\u201d<\/p>\n
Mumbles linger inside my esophagus, a soul floating from a furry cadaver.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s putrefying in your blankets, Dick?\u201d<\/p>\n
Nicholas hands me his slimy glass of bourbon and staggers backwards.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy dog died.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nicholas nods.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe bit somebody bad,\u201d I say. \u201cHe killed somebody yesterday. Mauled a little girl to smithereens.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJesus Christ, Dick.\u201d<\/p>\n
The bourbon burns but smells better than death decaying in splintered sunshine.<\/p>\n
\u201cDamnit, Dick.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI know.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cJesus, Dick\u2014that\u2019s not your dog\u2014that\u2019s your daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA family member,\u201d I say. \u201cBest damned pit that ever lived.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s your little daughter, Dakota!\u201d<\/p>\n
Nicolas scrunches the baby blankets. Bubbles of saliva bounce from chapped lips. Nicolas\u2019s screaming grows garbled. He sobs into an empty eye socket, his perfect teeth whiter than the exposed bones in his hands.<\/p>\n
\u201cSay something, Dick\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been walking all night. It\u2019s difficult to say goodbye.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I snort the heads, thoraxes, and abdomens of fire ants scorched by my magnifying glass. The slumber party suicide pact decimated the nerds of our cul-de-sac. Four tweens swallowed a\u00a0cornucopia of uppers, downers, laughers, and screamers from Mrs. McKensie\u2019s medicine cabinet. Mrs. McKensie found them in a mound of body pillows: eight bloodshot eyeballs. Souls catapulted the cul-de-sac, drizzled on rooftops, whittled the calcium from our uteruses. The pajamaed tweens entwined\u2014their parents opted to cremate them even though the mortician promised she could separate the human octopus\u2019s carcass their children morphed into.<\/p>\n
I do my own algebra homework these days.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m the lowest common denominator, destined to become the most popular tween on the cul-de-sac. Algebra equations scald my esophagus and grow arduous. I carve cursive initials of dead pop stars with a razorblade in the cartilage between my toes, elliptical galaxies blistering like dappled shrapnel of stardust on a butterfly\u2019s wings.<\/p>\n
Slumber parties are satanic.<\/p>\n
Nerds are nothing but cremains in the bellies of bottom feeders. I focus my attention on fire ants\u2014impaling kaleidoscopic colonies with shish kebab skewers. Nerds are extinct on our cul-de-sac. No more singed into our memory than dinosaurs.<\/p>\n
I carve a Brontosaurus with my razorblade beneath my left areola, sculpt a Tyrannosaurus rex into my groin. My soul is an asteroid on fire plummeting toward your grandmother. A cul-de-sac of shadows sweating into sidewalks where slumber parties never end.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I burn NyQuil Chicken breasts on the rusty hot plate in my son\u2019s wobbly treehouse. My fourteen-year-old daughter is throwing a rainbow party in our basement. Thirteen girls are wearing different colored lipstick to give blow jobs to eleven boys. I\u2019m on hospice. If fellatio makes Molly cheerful\u2014less likely to mutilate her wrists in the bathtub again\u2014I condone it. I snort a Trojan BareSkin Raw condom and yank the latex from my chapped lips. Our basement refrigerator is humongous and oozes a weird funk\u2014filled with cans of cold Coors Light and lukewarm Budweiser bottles. My pothead son is car surfing on the roof of his dilapidated Honda Civic around our cul-de-sac, fireflies bouncing against bloodshot eyeballs. The breeze is blowing in horizontal drizzles. Giggles escape reluctantly\u2014like clipped-winged cockatiels freed from a cage\u2014fluttering from the cracked egress window of our basement. A sticky carnival of sweat and raindrops rolling down my collarbone, the treehouse balloons with NyQuil smoke, soothing my soul. Molly is moaning and the moon is slowly shrinking, like a worldly magician wrestling a balloon animal into an elephantine cumulus cloud\u2014and all I know is that my family is finally coming together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nicolas digs to the root of most rotten things fast and ruthless. Pit bulls are an affectionate breed. None of my pits attacked anybody before. Yesterday was a calamitous accident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":21963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[3942,3939,3940,3941,3943],"class_list":["post-21402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","tag-nyquil-chicken","tag-pit-bulls","tag-slumber-party","tag-suicide-pact","tag-treehouse","writer-matthew-dexter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21402"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21964,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21402\/revisions\/21964"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}