A collaboration with with M.F. Korn
Published "THE LESS FASHIONABLE SIDE OF THE GALAXY" by eraserhead press 2001
Dropping out of the sky on to blue-green piedmont of the prettiest little moon they had ever seen, the crew awoke from cold-pak plenty stiff-jointed. The craft landed by its brain pretty as a picture on to sod grass the color of rust. Sensors affirmed the stench of ripe vegetation but nothing serious.
Barber belched some chemical air from cold-pak. “Damn, I hate that gunk they stuff us with...”
The craft opened up by itself. “Hey, we ain’t ready yet! Let a man stretch for a second!”
The men drank electrolyte kool-aid and stuffed themselves on ham-paste.
“So we made it, it looks like...” said Manly.
“Look at that view!”
The ripe stench of the air invaded their lungs. There was a dark blue hill as a crest on the flat horizon, miles long, tapering down to a lake of emerald green.
The various modern accoutrements of survival worked almost in the same way as religion did—kicking in at the synapses before allowing the rest of the body to escape along the rootcanals of the teeth.
Cluella was the last to waddle sodwards. She was on board for a reason other than cooking or cleaning or giving sexual favours. She was there simply because she was in charge—and knew WHY they were there in the first place. She was pot-bellied, she had incipient whiskers, but she was all woman.
Manly and Barber waded towards a subsection of the lake which had wandered beyond its margins, radiating veins of silt like centrifugal strawberry ripples. These two men hoped they would be ignored by Cluella, the rest of the crew being better suited to answering her demands: clones without templates whence cloned.
Manly wielded a Wellman sprouting vestigial cold-paks. Barber merely sported a knowing smile.
“I know it’s some kinda water, but I wouldn’t drink it, Barber.”
“We got plenty. All we gotta do is a little geology-lookin-around.”
“This is my last trip with Cluella runnin’ the show. I can’t take it anymore.”
“Well, rumor has it she’s a woman underneath that flab...”
“I wouldn’t take you up on that.”
They squatted in their environ-jumpers by the shore.
The sky boasted two suns, one yellow and small and the other red and plump, pregnant, about to burst.
“Sure is a pretty place.”
“Get out the seismo, Barber, I gotta take a wee-wee.”
“Yeah, I think there’s plenty of ore that we’re lookin’ for around here. This moon is bustin’ with em.”
“Precious, or industrial?”
“Both, friend.”
Manly picked up his Wellman again after zipping his jumper. The lake was now tainted with human despoiledness.
“What about the hills?”
“I dunno. There’s something weird about that.”
“Watcha mean?”
“Can’t put my finger on it.”
A six-legged fawn was down the shore about quarter-mile.
“I wonder what the wildlife tastes like?”
“We’ll find out. I’m sick of paste, it gives me the squitters somethin’ awful.”
“Oh yeah.”
"Oh yeah."
There were some misaligned echoes making the whole conflab noisier than a million door-hinges opening wide on harsh articulate rust. Their chest dictaphones (deliciously old-fashioned as they were) seemed only to be able to record the echoes, not the master voices. So, when, Cluella, later that night, in her privacy pod, checked up on Barber and Manly by listening to the tapes, she wondered if she were going mad. Both men—as a matter of record—had sunk in the quicksand and, even now, were fast approaching the Moon's Node. The tapes spoke of harmony and delight, rather than the catcalls of despair as one might have expected.
Cluella stared at a photo of Barber. She admired his clean chops. And empty sidebeards. She rubbed at her own grizzled chin and prayed that Barber might return. She had wanted Barber to wield the Wellman, not Manly. Now it was too late.
"Miss Cluella, Miss Cluella!"
It was just as if the pod's door itself spoke through its lock by means of a tongue-shaped key. She knew however it was Dirkly Measles. The only one she trusted to share in her passions for other members of the crew.
"Yes, Dirkly."
"Well, Miss Cluella, there's music going on near the lake."
Music? She queried the key.
"Not sure, Miss Cluella," answered the lock.
She waved her hand in irritation. She was not even in the mood to wonder how the dictaphones had been saved, if not the men themselves.
The men barely got any shut-eye that night. Cluella did because she snorted EZ-gin by the tubeful. Also, even though she fancied Barber, his death didn’t set her back too much. There were the other men still around. That night, the insects danced in tempo to something almost silent. The moon thrived with bugs, for that matter, it was aplenty with every fauna and flora. The ship sat on its haunches as the violet night sky skittered on the horizon. Something was going down by that lake. Something unnatural.
The morning erupted like a pustule of yellow and red sun. Cluella had Dirkly’s hashbrowns and more helpings too. The men’s eyes were swollen with no sleep.
“Who wants to go on a search party? Huh?”
“Oh, Cluella, I don’t feel much good, now...,” said Sonny sheepishly.
“Me neither,” said Wexler, the skinny tadpole of a boy.
“Well, you’se two are my pick. Get a goin’!”
“Aw, come on now. We don’t know what happened to Barber and Manly! They didn’t even have time to fire cold-pak on anything. It’s like they never saw it comin!”
“I ain’t got time for this. Get a goin’.”
“I know why you ain’t making Doug go. Cause you...”
“You shut your trap! Your dirty trap! Git!”
The men adjusted their jumpers for temp. Muttering, cursing, not looking back at Cluella laying like a lump of fat in her extra-extra-large jumper on the swallowchair, they exited the craft. Most men, not just two, after all. Nobody, not even Cluella, remembered why the search party was called for, in any event. The best thing was to assume Barber and Manly were dead: less complications, that way. They didn't have a doctor nor a nurse nor, even, somebody halfway-trained in first aid.
There was only one working Wellman left and the honour of wielding it was unaccountably granted, by Cluella, to Wexler. Despite his physique he managed to use only one hand in the manoeuvre, as he wheeled it gyroscopically to generate power. He yipped with high-pitched delight.
The other men looked askance. With the irreversible disappearance of Manly, many hoped to wield the Wellman. It is said, however, that the art of leadership stems from mis-delegating ... and they all laughed, as telepathically, they ran through yet one more side-splitting satire: a ritual of analogies and false metaphors which gave a bad light to any of Cluella's decisions, even to good ones. She deserved little respect, today, as she had scraped her face too harshly, with skin rawly flayed and the resultant loosening of flaps making a very untidy sight.
Dirkly Measles, meanwhile, buffed up all their shoes with see-through bird-muck polish. Jollity was back on the menu. Better than Dirkly's insipid hashbrowns, any day.
It was at this precise moment that, abruptly, Cluella decided it was the optimum flashpoint of making the expedition's mission statement. Curdling her throat with coffee cantatas, she proceeded simply to enunciate the quest.
"Menfolk, we have landed on this pretty, but, by all accounts, mischievous moon to search out the lair of a creature called the Slug Ouroboros."
“A wha-a-at?” said Sonny, who himself was almost as big as Cluella, with a sweet redneck twang.
“It’s a huge slug a couple miles long; you can’t miss em once you see em. It ain’t small like your peepus, Sonny…”
Sonny didn’t answer. He knew better.
“What colour is a Awraburrows?” someone asked.
“Ouroboros. They are dark purple. Black purple.”
“Why do we want to find one?”
“Well, we’ll probably find em in pairs.”
“But why?”
“Some hotshot gov science men all top-secret said just get um. They never said why, but I think it is because they bend time or sumthin. Or bend light or gravity or some shit.”
“Wha-a-a-t?” said Sonny.
“You’d have to have a brain ta understand, and not be stupid as all shit like you know you are, Sonny.”
“Oh.”
Wexler was birddogging the terrain. The whole crew had gone scouting except for Cluella stuffing her gut with a stowed-away pak of chocolates, almost stuck in her swallow-chair, watching Soap-opera mini-holies.
The men cautiously made it to the shore of the lake.
“Ah don’t see nuthin! This is bullcrud, I’m tellin’ you crappers!”
“Just look for mile long rubbery-like slugs, two of em. And shut your yap.”
So Wexler was actin’ all bigshot, now, the men thought.
They stood by the shore that tapered down from the purple-black hill of some length.
Then, a body in the crew—nobody now, even in hindsight, could name which one—stated that the Slug Ourboros was not x miles long, rather it was x miles round, being a an endless grub.
"A maggot ring?" queried sheepish Sonny.
"A circular worm, blimey!" said Doug.
"No," said Cluella, suddenly emerging from a brown study which had even survived the most arrant sudsy serial on her cabin fever scale of screen to eyeball. "It is not a worm, nor maggot, nor grub. It is a slug. A bullet that's been shot within a time-loop, making it seem slimy." Her voice couldn't keep up with her explanation.
Wexler, dropping the Wellman with a crunch of audible pain on its part, scratched his head. A bullet, going round and round, never meeting its target other than its own backside—becoming gooey and oozy as a result? He couldn't enunciate the words. The question hung there on an interrogative hook, waiting for a bird of prey to swoop and tussle it to the ground.
Spear-carriers, in the shape of the craft's more nameless crew, came to the rescue and set off on the now forgotten search party for folk even more forgotten than lost. Meanwhile, Doug, Wexler, Sonny and red-cheeked Cluella banded themselves into a select group: ready to scour the moon for an oily equator of gunfire.
"Wait!" shrieked Dirkly Measles, lugging the door behind him (the only door, a moveable one, that their craft possessed). "You might need this, if there's a cave or other craggy abode needing to be shut against the dangers of the night." He secretly thought, though, it would make a good stretcher-bed, specially for an Illwoman fast turning into which he deemed the monthly vestiges of Cluella to be.
Cluella, knowing that any moon (not only Earth's) affected femininity more than genes, signalled her agreement to Dirkly's attendance and the five of them set off.
Wexler having more knowledge than the others, came to an epiphanal moment. As he imagined putting his hands on a towering blubbering mass of otherworldly slug flesh, the thing itself jolted and earthquake tremors were suddenly felt by all. The mass of engorged living meat was moving wildly, in huge-mass rhythm, one section at a time!
They come in pairs, huh? He remembered Cluella barking out back at the now-abandoned ship. So this mass is TWO in number! The pair of behemoths is cleaved together, either one inside the other or both occupying the same space at the same time, a physical anomaly, but again, Cluella said all that gibberish about bending gravity, time, light, etc.
He blurted out to the others still standing there, while Cluella fumed as usual, “There’s two slugs! And they are screwing!”
“Screwing?” blurted Sonny. “Makin’ funny business?”
“Yep, they apparently breed for a long period of time, but they themselves are the epicenter of their own time disturbance, so they are in essence, screwing outside of time or something. I haven’t figured it out yet…” he trailed off.
“No shit!” Cluella said, now supine on the door, feeling PMS bloating from the strange gravity of the paradisio moon. “Some gov man said they screw for sumthin’ like 3000 centuries. That earthquake was just another orgasm!” She then muttered, “More than I get from you bastards…”
“Screwin’ for a damn aeternity!” Sonny hawped, and the other four roared with laughter. The slugs went to town surrounding them like Saturn's rings, where now sweet lucid mellifluous music swept over them like siren’s vocalises.
It was when clean-cheeked and fresh-faced Barber appeared, having escaped his close shave with moon-mud, that she swooned. So, now, she happily saddled herself upon the ultimate Wellman and rode its circular cock like a fairground ride, round and round and round, using blood as lubrication.
“Slugfugging!” the others laughed. Cluella later laughed at her dream from atop the abject ship’s door laying on the mushy ground beneath her own mass of quivering, shivering-with-excitement, flesh.
The moon winked. Its cage of silence was perfect, almost musical.
