Chapter 1
| The Story | The Authors |
|---|---|
| Unfortunately, wheelchair boy had a key to the handicapped men's room. Just as Jake had released Buford (don't all men name their penises?) from his denim prison, the door swung open and in rolled the handless flipper man. "What the hell do you think you are doing?!" he screached. "You can't do that in here! You are not handicapped!" "Oh go fuck yourself!" Jake said and kicked the door shut, pushing wheelchair guy back out of the bathroom. Jake realized he would never have enough privacy in this book store with that handicap fascist lurking about so he decided to go to the library to finish his business. No one would bother him there. | |
| He zipped his fly, tucked The Story of O. under his arm, and found himself whistling, for some momentarily inexplicable reason, the theme song to "Little House On the Prairie." The image of Melissa Gilbert, young and innocent and so very, very earnest, mingled with visions of the helpless, bound O. receiving her inaugural duodenal piercing...and trusty ol' Buford began once again to fill with blood as he pushed open the door and left the Handicapped bathroom. | |
| The hallway was empty and silent, flush with the doughy grey light of the rainy twilight outside which fell in through the tastefull placed skylights. As he headed off into the labyrinth of the stacks, looking for a suitably remote backwater of the Dewey Decimal System to be able to continue his erotic reenactment of the tragicomic rise and fall of Michael Landon, Jake began to get the feeling he was being followed. He stopped and listened, but in the absence of his footsteps on the lino, the only sound to be heard was a low electric wine which he assumed came from the banks of flourescents on the ceiling. Snap out of it, he told himself; there's nobody here but me..." | |
| But of course he was wrong. | |
|
Three aisles back, in Religion, between 224 (Prophetic Books of the Old Testament) and 295 (everyone's favorite number in the DDC: History and Teachings of Zoroastrianism (but you already knew that)) a dark figure in a wheelchair whirred forward at a snail's pace, bright eyes piercing the late afternoon gloom like a cat's. His name was Evan, and he had waited years for this moment, had crossed mountain ranges, deserts, and oceans to arrive at it, had bided his time and chewed the insides of his mouth to shreds over so many lonely nights he could no longer remember any other life before this...pursuit, shall we say. This Grail-less quest. Before it had begun there had been the orphanage, true, The "Little Wanderers" Home for the Crippled, Deformed, and Teratogenetic (how fucking patronizing of them, of the founders, he thought, to be so goddamned inclusive in their blasted nomenclature...) but those memories had been buffeted by the high winds of so many of the earth's most frozen and desolate places, and as a result had retained very little of their formerly horrific character. They were smooth and probably necessary but ultimately, to Evan, useless. | |
| (My dear friends Bill and Ben Tremblay once hypothesized that each of us possesses a super-power, just like all those superheroes in the comicbooks and cartoons do, only less dramatic than invisibility or x-ray vision, more rooted in the immediacies of our lives. (As an aside, Flaming Carrot Comics once boasted a villain boasting the sinister moniker "The Chair," whose sole super-power was the facility to turn himself into just that: a chair. May wonders never cease!) Thus, this guy's power is the ability to open any jar, no matter how tightly screwed on the lid is. And this woman possesses the unique ability to sense, and fill, the unpleasant holes in any conversation. What's yours? My own is that I can always make pals with strange dogs, no matter how unfriendly their outlook on the human race may be; and Evan's, it must be said, was a supernatural patience approaching that of granite. Evan could wait better than anyone else.) |
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