Vortex Lingua

Sean Kilpatrick

Some kid down the street lifted my weapon. He went about presenting himself as a fellow sleuth, but nothing more than a juice box cutout unfurled from his wallet. I’d just turned ten and three quarters, too erubescent to double check anyone’s credentials. Besides, goddamn kid really did resemble the shiny bottom of most produce. A cute older cousin stood waiting on the thief’s porch. I wasn’t sure if she picked up the scent of my other crushes through a fugue of competitive animal desire and felt compelled to spar with her ilk, or if the horny act came as subterfuge, but she shined my badge with her person. When a woman offered prospects, I knew enough to know only one of us verifiably wanted the other. I was always incidental to the sex I’d had. Wiping herself with a Beanie Baby, she blew smoke into my eyes. Little boys are the best at sex, she insisted. Can’t bust for nothin’. Only puberty can relieve them. Sweetheart, I came when they spanked me. Doctor couldn’t find a fucking operating table through the deluge. I live my life in honor of expiration dates everywhere. Shut up and squeal on your blood. I was a dot in the celebration of her pad – ovoid egg avoidance – wings more protuberant than thong, month of iron macerated from both our bodies once she dropped the lamp. Portals dazzled by, chased through a bullseye I charged apart, lasers outlining my person. Kids in hovercrafts unleashed plasma rifle spew only gymnastics could avert. A nano-worm disemboweler might’ve been transmitted near certain sources of booby-trapped light. If they read your forehead from fifty-mile distances, cellular shock dox bots could flash a family member’s private parts over the battlefield. The enemy then posted critiques with text bright enough to read even if the moon was full. The sky lowered its drones, probing the girl’s lingering viscidity, reconstituting our act as compilations of fog. I was traumatized by my own vigor. Was she worth that much sweat? I split a window headlong, flicking ooze at a marksman’s helmet. The cousin was asleep atop bouquets laid out for the thief she protected because their family went to so many funerals they had a florist on standby. A robot dog she also seduced for favors got swept flat, all-fours to none, stomped insensate. Fists of the beast’s trainer snapped forth beneath a robe, an embarkation striding forward to close the distance. Oriental characters entangled the jiaolian’s chest, further shrouded by his insectoid Wing Chun demonstration. I barreled through the barrage, ingesting volleys of knuckle to knock us prone, leveraged a great distance with a dropkick. He kip-upped in my periphery, wheeling topwise in time to receive a flung clump of dirt to the eyes. Blind, he crouched, swapping between snake and leopard styles. Extravagantly roundhoused, lost in every phase of a throw, spatial intelligence subverted, trapped as I advanced, I collapsed into a boxer’s hug with his leg. American burger-paunchiness being no facet of Shaolin tutelage, a delicate eastern femur split under me. I scalped his Manchu queue with a Bowie knife. Fractured that Fa Jing, I spat at an injun, damp as a love interest tied to a railroad tie, which he shoulda built faster. Take me to my gun, savage, or I’ll industrialize another of your shoddy practices on this interminable land you also cut in line to gank. In the smoky, stink-shit square of a village sat the culprit, cuddling my revolver. Shucks, feller may never get his revenge, ‘cause it would require more firepower than humanly possible, I spat, gutting three injuns and knotting their haruspicy together. Never met a reference I was ashamed to know, he began to spit, skimming the chronology with me. Back when cable set fake sects divided against a pie chart, and we shored our equalities till art stopped working, you know, when ten was the age of marital consent, but sex was abstract, not involved with procreation in anyway, because the stork hadn’t died of shame when he toured his first data center, I abracadabra’d into a lady, dosed myself at parties to become pregnant without experiencing another man’s scratchy weight atop me, and repeated the process, dimensional turntablism, to eviscerate my baby on its every birthday, smearing our vomit across the epoch, DNA splay mythologized out of us, different-sized bones compiled of this always-dying child my body held but couldn’t deliver as we became the penultimate hourglass, cultures tumbling, weaned inside ourselves, because what you love was always just fibbing, cored down to the bittiest extension of sentiment, then you win yourself another drive-thru McDonalds hospice, Snowden’s secret on Broadway, experiment failed. Sounds like you use a butt plug to walk upright, crotch-commie, I spat. He shot me with my gun. In hell, my best case was reinstated: only girl who ever asked to dance. I followed her around, casing her motivation, tiny weight elevated by the hips, hands predisposed around not much waist, so she could lick the drinking fountain. Picking apart a carton of chocolate milk, pale wafers of cardboard ardently extracted from the beverage for an hour, I handed over the indented shambles, savoring each fructose slurp of syrup, hoping to be decapitated in her honor so the erection would be less noticeable. She dropped earrings in the neck hole, kept the head to play horsey with, combed some water torture scars into my life. I was lapping upwind at the memory when my trigger cocked again. Maybe I’d fit myself in the barrel and end this romance. You’re like a young author experiencing his first Dunning-Kruger effect, my bad guy spat. Too lucubratory. I arose, full of holes, and shot him back, even though, and especially because, I was unarmed. But I got you! he whined. I got you! The story before you is a confession that he had, in fact, despite my tacky and incessant opprobrium, gotten me.

Sean Kilpatrick has been published in: Lamination Colony, No Colony, DIAGRAM, New York Tyrant, Sleepingfish, The Collidescope, Action Yes, NERVE, VICE, La Petite Zine, Pindeldyboz, NOÖ Journal, Jacket2, Exquisite Corpse, MiPoesias, Tarpaulin Sky, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, elimae, Alpha Beat Soup, The Glut, Everyday Genius, The Volta, 5_Trope, Spork, The Quietus, 30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers, Dzanc Best of the Web Anthology 2010.