John's

Mom was first. We were parked outside the ice-cream store.
“That movie was disgusting. I only like happy things.”
“You are the fucking scum of the Earth.”
My sister was acting Asian. I could just picture her with those squinty little eyes.
Anyway, mom was first. She walked into the ice-cream store and I watched her intestines whiplash against one of the windows. The blood, having blindsided us from watching mom being dismembered into meat slush, left our imaginations unhinged. It gave me the feeling of someone else using my bathroom, taking a shower or bath, and then leaving it in a state of foreign disarray afterward.
It gave us ample time to flee, but instead we just listened to it slaughter. I was somewhat enchanted; its slithering made a smuckering kissing noise. My sister was on a catatonic fringe of panic.
I didn’t care much about mom. I believed devoutly in philosophy. People were disposable. I would walk off the emotional attachment I had to mom later.
My sister was one of those people that if upon walking into a stranger’s home and happening upon a closet full of cereal boxes, she would would open a new box instead of one of the ones exactly alike that had already been opened. Once she told me that she visualized me as always wearing a hockey-mask, to depict that I was an established freak. This mask was lathered with war paint, as was my costume, that barely clothed me. She distinctly noted that on my spare time, I would read Moby Dick, and it’s the only book I ever read, over and over, and over.
The SWAT team eventually demanded our attention. They surrounded the entire building. They reminded me of football players, grunting incomprehensible orders to each other, hiking the ball, hut hut hutting, pre-gaming, punting the ball.
Meanwhile, whoever entered the ice-cream store was within seconds churned into spew and vomited in a roiling salvo against the window like a wood shredder’s feces. The SWAT team jogged around the perimeter of the ice-cream store. I got the impression they didn’t get out much. Every single one of them had a trigger-happy grin on their face.
I wanted to see it. I poured around eight to twelve Xanax bars in my hand and shoved them in my sister’s mouth. I didn’t want her to start seizing or something. I didn’t want her to know I’d rather watch the onslaught than deal with her irrationally ardent emotional discrepancies.
She felt too much. Too survive in this world you can’t feel as much as her. I pity her. They have drugs for things like that.
Helicopters swarmed overhead like wasps. Dad was still drinking in the pizzeria across the street from the ice-cream store, oblivious to the recent headlines. I climbed into the driver’s seat of the car, looking in the rearview mirror at him. Even if he had been watching what was going on I don’t think his course of action would have altered.
My sister was beginning to relax, to sink into the moment. Her eyes glazed over with an unctuous remoteness. I motioned for her to hop into the passenger’s seat, next to me. I wanted to care about her more than I did. She fumbled into the seat, putting her seat belt on.
The SWAT team continued to jog in circles around the ice-cream store. Their overzealousness was infallible, but had not as much as breached the building. Each SWAT team member reminded me of a fly; their masks, their intrusive, suicidal curiosity. Except the SWAT team members weren’t so much as curious as inexorably caricaturing the contrast between what they must’ve conjectured as good and evil. The obvious problem, however, was that evil did not recognize themselves as evil, so that good was only fighting against what they perceived as evil.
Suddenly a bionic rumbling can be felt like a distant dream shaping itself into nothingless reality, as in the sense that this sentence fades back into the present tense. I lock the car doors and look at my sister, who now seems eager and restless. A tank broils into sight, followed by a steaming, grinding unit of tanks as far as the horizontal sunset buttered. They chewed and ground everything they seemed intent on saving; however, this was irrelevant, as their delusions to conquer evil now outweighed the preservation of good.
I wondered what use the tanks would actually be of. They couldn’t fire at the store without killing everyone in the vicinity. I began to question the actual threat of it. It didn’t seem to want to expand its domain; it was almost as if it was…waiting. Despite the sheer display of human theatrics, I was still under the impression it had the upper-hand, that it knew exactly what was going on and had already premeditated its stratagem. We were flaying ourselves at it; it was obviously, at the moment, content with the ice-cream store.
My sister’s eyes glistened sinisterly with obsession. Her hands where smugly tucked in her pockets; she was slouched against the passenger’s seat. My father was still chasing vodka with beer, nibbling on slice after slice of pizza. I glared at my mother’s intestines, slobbered across the windows of the store.
“We live such solitary lives, even social animals,” I whispered.
“I’m eating a bagel.”
I continued to ruminate, my head tilted in the direction of the steering wheel. We could have driven anywhere at that moment if I knew how to drive. My sister knew how to drive.
“So,” she said. Fighter jets streamed past in a blitzing mirage. I expected her to say something else but her thoughts must’ve trailed off ambiguously until she had reached some snug stump. Ignoring this I watched as army troops sprinted into the ice-cream store. My sister didn’t so much as wince at their entrails propelled against the window.
I got out of the car. My sister epically unstrapped her seatbelt.
We needed guns. And shades.
No one noticed us. I crept towards the remains of a mutilated corpse that had been wrung and tossed out of the store. Luckily, the corpse’s hands were still holding onto an assault rifle, or at least, what I thought resembled one. I had only seen them in computer games. I snatched the gun, catching a glimpse of it.
My sister waited by the car, one foot up against its grill. I was still shaking by the time I’d returned to the car. All the headlights of the vehicles around me seemed to me staring at me. She was smoking a cigarette.
“I didn’t even know mom smoked,” she said remorselessly. “What are you all in a hoot for.”
“I saw it,” I said. My sister waited in apprehension like someone who was in love with me that I didn’t love for me to describe it. I wanted to tell her the fact that I had saw it kind of stripped the mystique from it, and yet, it was…a sight to behold. It didn’t disappoint. I told her the sight of it was ineffable, which was accurate, after all.
More troops fed themselves to it. Their morale was unflappable.
“Why don’t they just nuke the fucking place,” my sister drawled, her eyes fluttering. My thoughts were pacing back and forth for me.
An inhuman shrieking began to reverberate from both entrances of the ice-cream store. The windows shattered. The roof of the building began to cave in. I grit my teeth. I imagined myself munching on a stalk of corn.
Some guy with a bow-and-arrow charged at the capsizing ice-cream store, hollering like a Native Indian. For some reason an inexplicable rage pulsed through me at the sight of this…naked, despicable man, charging at my mother’s spotlighted intestines. I raised my rifle and aimed at his head. I fired, unzipping a part of his face, chunks of flesh revealing a bubble-gum pink brain. Despite that half of his face was missing, the snarl on his face remained, as did the hate in the eye he had left. I emptied the entire clip into the rest of his face.
My sister choked on the smoke of a cigarette.
I’d never killed someone before. I never even knew I was searching for an excuse to kill someone—in this case, my mother’s intestines.
I realized I had no ammo to reload the rifle with. I swore into the wind and signaled for my sister to get back into the car. She had stumbled onto the asphalt of the parking lot.
The building erupted and collapsed completely. As the dust settled it’s groan resounded throughout the entire town; it sounded similar to a whale rubbing up against the bottom of a ship. I told my sister to switch seats with me and back the car up; she did, fumbling for cigarette after cigarette.
And there it was, in all its magnificence. In all its glory. My sister gasped. Everyone did. The ensuing hush cast a chill up my spine.
My sister had the look of a teenager on hallucinogens having a revelation on her face.
“This is like one of those fucking Korean horror movies,” she whispered. “They’re so fucked up and everyone gets fucked in the end.”
I didn’t have time to agree with her. Despite that Koreans did make grisly horror movies, I was too busy thinking of how our situation was starkly akin. My sister gaped as it began to spread carnage amongst our, now, resilience. It sliced tanks in two; any human in its proximity was frolicked into a lurid combustion. It whacked helicopters and planes out of the sky.
I had never heard my sister swear before she saw it. Now she was ‘fucking’ all over the place. ‘We’re so fucked’ were her last words before she fainted.
My cell phone started ringing. I tried to telepathically stop it from ringing but when I realized this was impossible I reached into my pocket to see who it was. It was my girlfriend, Sandy. The thought of her hadn’t even crossed my mind. Love was insignificant to it. I didn’t even love her; she was just my social outlet.
It hovered over the decimated ice-cream store, groaning. For the first time I felt myself relating to it, something about it. Every time it groaned it reminded me of a man having sex with a woman, both unable to attain an orgasm, their greasy bodies colliding futilely. I supposed for some people, sex wasn’t only about what it physically felt like, but who was I kidding. I watched it swat another fighter jet out of the sky; it seemed to do so reluctantly. It seemed bored. It seemed to merge our resilience together like the internet did to music and moil it out until everything sounded the same, until the whole industry was controlled by one person, digitalized, a robot that lived in that person’s stead so that person wouldn’t have to even bother living.
It reminded me of my father, cradling his forehead, alienated from my generation, smirking at their demise, at every technological pitfall.
All he would talk about was Gestalt. In any argument, somehow, he’d mention Gestalt, and he would all of a sudden
incarnate omniscience itself.
My father knew everything.
Like all the rest, for some reason I didn’t think it would hurt me. For some reason I thought I was immune to it, that it was harmless, that I could just walk by it and it would slump it shoulders and ignore me. This thought residually tormented me from its emanation, like a drug addict in denial.
I never was into that existentialistic bullshit. If I was responsible for my own life than why did it defy human logic. Someone would have surely theorized that it was impossible. But it wasn’t. This wasn’t authentic. The choices I had were drawn out for me like a stalemate of tic-tac-toe; I had the choices but I couldn’t win.
It represented technology. It represented advances in human luxury. It represented superfluous escapes for the talentless. It represented god. It represented man. It represented my dog. It represented my sister, coming to. It represented brewery. It represented the span of human emotion. There was nothing that it couldn’t feel. It probably had feelings that we couldn’t even begin to describe.
It was better than us. It swatted down fighter jet after fighter jet. It was like watching TV, except that it was real.
My sister opened the door of her side of the car. She stepped out; I immediately felt alone, crippled. I was only the partaking audience. She reached her languid arms out like a zombie, limping towards it. I knew she was going to die and even though I was crippled I didn’t really care; yet, I insisted on saving her. She was only my sister. I was rummaging for meaning; her being my sister was all I could come up with.
It engulfed her. What it did to her was so disgusting that I was stunned; it was similar to cleaning up someone else’s shit. You know if you don’t clean up their shit they’re going to start shitting in other places than their designated shitting spot, but you can’t clean it up because it’s so disgusting. And that’s what happened to my sister, and why I couldn’t save her; as if I could.
I knew it was my time. I looked at my father, coffined in the pizzeria. I sighed, closing my eyes and opening the door, my thoughts itching. There it was. Groaning, hovering, swatting, slicing, bored. I approached it without hesitation; I incorporated a sense of rhythm. Every step closer I prepared for my inevitable doom. Panic nearly rendered me catatonic, but I preferred appearing rigid, confident.
When I realized I was too close I was already right next to it. I looked up, into what I assumed were its eyes. It didn’t return the look. It turned its back to me, slumping its shoulders. It groaned. I clamped my bottom lip over my top and threw a rock at it. I wanted it to kill me. All the wrong people had survived.
It wouldn’t kill me. It slithered away, despairingly forlorn. I yelled at it. I chased it. I sank my teeth into it. I refused to exist.