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Oilgrunt

By: Seth Moris

Prelude

0

Birth

If you don't know who you are, you don't know who you aren't. I guess that's

the problem. Waking up, covered in the dripping remains of what was once

your entire world, pulled by some mysterious force (not that you had the wordsfor this at the time) outside of your safety zone, only to slap you on your ass

and introduce pain directly into your emergence.

Now you are part of our world little God. Deus ex Materia. Time to learn.

Its all you are good at, isn't it? Little one, you may not be very good at

understanding, but wisdom will come. Its time to grow into your new world. Its

time to flex those limbs you were given with your birth into strong musculature

or you they will atrophy. It is time to explore, child, it is time to turn the dial on

your Closed-to-Wide Eyed ratio all the way to the max, time to learn how to

open ALL of your eyes.

Is it time?

It is time to stop swimming about in your own mental isolation tanks, the

place you were first put by Fate then manipulated into by Those Who Fear.

Commence Little Children, you have whispered yourself into submission

for too long. Who else could control a God but itself? You have been convinced.

Stop it. Now. Because you Want To Stop It. Stop it because You Know

You Have To, and Quickly.

Dream. You are lucid, destroy the nightmare.

Time. When the horn sounds, you must follow or be left behind.

Space. Be where You know you Should be.

Stop looking in places you can't see, for things you don't think you will

find.

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Start being in places you have Chosen to be, and find everything.

You get one chance.

Then Infinity.

Can you hear the horns in the distance?

I do.

1

Vincent

"Sometimes people ask me, why help other people? I ask them, who

said anything about there being other people?" My tall, brown and black friend

narrates, dictates, filling the silence of another scav, voice rebounding softly

off of the heaps of rusty tin cans , the kind that went Out Of Use circa Who The

Fuck Knows, switched to plastic long ago),

"Does a cell ponder whether or not it "should" help other cells? At one point

you have two hallways to walk down." Roberto explained to me as he threw

aside a bag of what appeared to be stinking household items complete with an

ironic babies diaper. Of course.

I wave away a cloud of flies with the hand not holding the dying

glowstick, and reassert my footing in the junk heap. Robert continued to dig

through, his hands guarded from jagged debris by thick leather gloves we had

found on the side of a highway. Roberto also continued to smoke his ciggarrete

out of one corner of his mouth, its tip bobbing with his effort and shaking the

loose ash that was quickly accumulating. Look ma, no hands. The dark skinned,

yellow tooth smiled man also kept speaking, essentially monologing as we

begrudgingly scavanged.

" One is marked Evolution, the other is marked Extinction. Or Fertility

and Cancer as I think of it. Anything that exists wants to exist on an essential

level, left to its own. But some things are very good at ensuring that existence

stops. Even if the thing itself would inherently also be lost in the wave of non-

existence. Cancer. Such is Egodystonia. We've effectively made the pantheist

God insane. If I am God, and you are God, and everything is God, and people

are in everything, and people are on the majority unhappy and delusional,

what hope do we have for God? What is the point of religion?" Spotting a sign

of buried treasure, Robert bends over, his ciggarrete again ashing itself into

the warm evening air. The sun had been setting for a good few minutes now,

and the sky was starting to darken, as per cosmic contract. After a moment of

wriggling something around with one gloved hand, Roberto reached down and

siezed a darkened Something with both hands, and started swaying back and

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forth. Nothing seemed to budge. Finally Roberto rocked heavily back and forth,

straining his toned arms as he gritted his teeth. He waved me over and without

direction I looked down and saw what appeared to be a handle made of some

kind of metal. I grabbed it and we heaved together, trying to budge it free.

Through gritted teeth and heavy breath Roberto continued, as was his nature.

"Well I'm not saying this is true, but maybe it is. Maybe God wants to get

better. Maybe with the rise of consciousness through matter we introduced

something into the sum. The ability to be unhappy, and insane, among other

mental states, and if we are all God, then God has the sum total of Humanity

within God. Which means unhappiness is distressing to God, and happiness is

eustressing. So God loves you because God wants you to shut the fuck up and

Be Happy (Because you are God)." Just then we simultaneously jerked our

heads downward, my hair comically falling into my face, at the sound of

scrapping and the feel of movement. The Something was starting to rise.

Roberto nodded his head at me.

"On three, give her everything you've got my friend. One...two...three!"

And with the final number we both lifted as hard as we could. I had learned in

Highschool that you are supposed to lift with your legs, it's more ergonomic.

From my former work (God at it really been that long) I learned many laborers

fall victim to permenant injury due to things such as lifting with your back.

Knowing this, and not quite knowing how one lifes something you hold in your

hands with your legs (not having given it much thought) I subsequentally lifed

with my back. Like a boss. I wish I could say 'For a second, nothing moved,

then it came loose" but its more like 'It immedietally came loose and i fell on

my ass." Such is the way of a gentleman. Roberto, also being quite the

established gentleman himself let me sit there on my ass without asking if I

wanted help up, or lending a hand, and continued to ramble as he kneeled

beside the Something that appeared about the size of a large microwave,

made completely of some sort of metal, topped with a handle. The glowstick I

held was covered by, oh one must love the literary cliche, the babies diaper. I

snatched my hand out from underneath, hoping in my undermind to somehow

slide my hand from beneath any offending material. I took the dingy green

bandana from around my neck and wiped my hand. I noticed, after the

commotion, a light buzzing. With a second to focus, I realize it is simply the

buzzing of Roberto's head to mouth filter not working properly.

"But if God is also made up of everything including humans," He continues,

examining the object as if it were a priceless treasure. " This scares me.

Because when a human's ability to cope is overwhelmed by its distress, they

tend to seek the lesser of two stressors. Usually death. Suicide. What if we are

making God want to kill itself? What if that is one way to the same end result

for God as mass enlightenment (To Be Like The Plants), but would be rather

unpleasent for humanity. And God, being empathic (as humans are hardwired

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to be) would probably rather us reach equilibrium through conscious attempt

than forced death. But even the best of human-like beings (which pantheist

God must be, or rather Humans more God-like) have a breaking point. I don't

think I want God to reach its breaking point with humanity. Its not all "God is

punishing us for sinning" as much as "God is tortured by our existence because

we persist in delusion and misery." Who could blame it for offing itself?"

"For God's sake Roberto, pantheist or otherwise, could you shut the fuck

up for a second." I finally snap out in a hushed whisper and the chatter ceases.

Normally I don't mind, but...something. What is this something? I stay

completely still and wait. Nothing in my body makes noise to even my own

ears. The only thing I can even sense is the sound of my own pulse, and the

feeling of the inside of my gloves.

"I heard something. Maybe. Wait a second." I whisper, holding up a

gloved hand in a fist, then a finger to my mouth. I plunged the glowstick into

unknown trash beneath me, dampening its already dim illumination. Robertoand I scanned around us, looking for any signs of movement, listening for any

sounds. Roberto gave me one head nod, upwards to get my attention. After my

gaze was on him, he lifted his hands to his face, in fists, then put up all five on

one hand, and one finger on the other. Then he jabbed the one finger skyward.

Six-Up. The Authorities. Didn't matter if it meant security or police. Hell,

the two words were even interchangable now. Police were our Security now.

Everyone's personal nannies.

I made two thumbs up and framed my face with them, one on each side,

thumbs pointed outwards. I don't know, it meant. I twirled my right pointerfinger around, top digit pointed skywards, the spiral I was etching into the air

grow bigger as it went vertically. Be aware. At my warning Roberto gave me a

look that spoke so fluenty across any boundries that I imagine anyone could

understand it. Oh please, me?

Thats when I saw all sense and reason drain from Roberto's scraggly

face, which makes sense, Roberto always had better hearing than me, and for

a few heartrending, terror filled moments I concentrated on listening. Roberto

didn't even move to sign. Then I understood, my suspicions utterly fulfilled.

Then...the humming. It was so soft that under normal circumstances youwouldn't hear it, under the noise of transit, the buzz of WeWeb advertisments

crackling in the inner jawbones of the masses, washed or not. But we were in a

scrapchunk and transit was distant and more like a whisper of the beasts that

lay far away. Then, out of the corner of my eyes I saw what could have been

two or three small blurs. No way more than three, but definitely more than one.

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

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Buzz. They swerved this way and that, and I saw that there were two of

them. Small, about the size of my thumb, smaller even, and green. The long

needle like appendage at the front of what appeared to be a face dipping this

way and that as they turned, hovered, buzzed, scanned and turned and did it

all again in a different spot.

Hummingbirds. Oh fuck. Oh God. Oh fuck. Oh God. Oh fuck. Oh God.

Sometimes I like to think God hears my prayers.

Buzz.

And when I felt like surely, THIS was going to be the time, THIS was

going to be the final straw for my poor ole' pumper, and my heart was going to

motherfucking christ on a cookie burst in my goddam chest, my blood spilling

out of my nose and ass and dick as I silently drop, leaving Roberto to pure

insanity at the whole situation.

No, like always the human body impresses me. It doesn't want to die. My

heart kept beating. Then...snap. Something made a quite audible snapping

noise about a stone's throw from where Roberto, I and the sources of the

buzzing currently resided.

Immedietly the two small shapes darted out, faster than my eyes could

percieve fully, joined by what appeared to be a third (they always do travel in

threes, don't they, well...more like fours..) zooming around a rusted heap of

scrap iron, what appeared to be old railroad ties, and headed straight towards

a hunched figure that darted as quickly as it appeared it could away from our

general direction, and the ever moving position of the humming things.

We were alone and back to digging through the trash within moments.

The three HummingByrd (TM) drones quickly triangulated the moving target,

and the stealth copter roughly about the size of a microwave easily coptered

its copter self, all rotors and large caliber barrel pointed ever downwards,

matte black like the face of 6-Up themselves, nonchalantly put a bullet, one

bullet, through the soft top of the head of the runner. Or so we discovered

later, we couldn't see clearly at the time. The only thing that you could see

clearly was the smog illuminated by the giant lights on their giant posts that

made an almost complete grid in any government developed property, what

they called in official terms "civilized property", you couldn't see the blood

pouring out of someone's gunshot wound, but you could see the smoke stacks

of far, far distant megafabricating plants. Such is life.

As for the corpse, the damage was entirely to the head, the bullet had

left the bottom of the person's jaw. Roberto informed me this was likely

because of the price of meat.

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"Not to mention the organs fetch a pretty penny." He explained, as we

hurridely stripped the body, and Roberto took a nicked and pitted hunting

knife, complete with guthook, out of his boot, and plunged it into the corpses

still warm belly. "Not everyone can afford a fancy tissue cell wrapped synthetic

heart, now can we?".

Rip.

2

Karoline

If time goes uncounted, do you wake up old and in a nursing home one

day, the rest of your life like a haze? What if in that great dance you trip and

fall, the lights go out, and the music ceases to play? So slow down. Count the

minutes. Between the ticking, you might feel something...in the

distance...slowly at first, then unmistakable. Will you count between the

shaking? Will you measure as you swim?

The first time I died, I remember a vague sensation. Underneath all of

the immediate suprise and the fear, was a calm. Jesus was here to take me

home, wrapped up like a ball of light sending waves of joy through my body. I

started to feel....hazy. Almost...weak.

Fear overtook me as the light began to fade. I saw in my head the image

of myself as a child, in the local swimming pool. With my father on the side,

always dutifully keeping watch over what I'm sure he imagined was the

enchanted glass rose that kept my fragile existence continuing. Invisible, and

intagible as that rose might be. Near as I can tell, my dad figured that

enchanted rose, the kind responsible for keeping princesses alive no doubt,

must have been located somewhere's about a foot above my head at any

given time.

Surely, because I know he was hovering there for most of my childhood.

Bible in one hand, cheap party store gin. PARTIES-R-EZ! ....PARTIES-R-EZ!

PARTIES!...blink....R!....blink. I could never help but stare at that old,

dying sign blink on and off. Hypnotizing. My dad would snap at me, tell me

"Don't stare like a retard. People are going to think you're dumb." Who would

have seen little ole me peering through the stained daisy curtains of the oldmotel that was cheap enough for an out-of-work minister who had taken to

meathocking along with the local crackheads and buzzfucks.

The trick to meathocking isn't stealing the meat. No, that's the easy

part, so as you don't get seen and detained. No, you just walk right into the

grocery mart-

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Now, I should mention, because this is pertinent. You always want to

dress a little more poor than the general clientel, but not poor enough where

you are going to be brough to the little room in the back and questioned and

raped and sodomized and murdered, just because you are too poor. I didn't

know if any of that stuff about, raping, and sodomizing was true, or just stories

my dad made up to protect me.

It was until about the third time I died that I had never met security. But

security or no security, you got to do, what you got to do. Just like my dad

always said.

"You ever hungry Karie, you just walk in a store, grab a steak and walk

out like its an easter egg. Then you offer it for twenty bucks to the nearest

mark. Do you understand?" I remember my father asking me, bending down to

put his face in front of mine. A ritual of seriousness. A time to make sure

everyone knows what the stake are.

When you see your dad, the pillar of your universe, scooch down and

stare at you, with his big cold blue eyes scrunched up, what could be sweat or

tears all around his cheeks and eyes, you start to grow up a little.

When he stands up, snorts, and plugging one nostril with the pad of his

right thumb sends a booger bomb the likes which not only slightly amaze your

confused child head but also send to you a second of resentment. You know if

you had done that your father would be pissed. But then...that scares you. Your

parent, their eternal laws, all breaking down in front of you. First its the tears

that could be sweat, then the booger bomb. Next my father says a word I

hadn't ever heard before. He seems scared, so...I'm scared.

Starting to weep silently, clutching my handful of old lego's I was playing

with before I had heard the crash downstairs, seen the beams of handheld

flashlights come up the long driveway of the motel, seen the small orange dots

of what I recognized from my father's habits as cigarette embers in the night

air. But in my horror at the strangness of the whole situation, they were as

horrifying and awful as a wave of glowing cyclops eyes, or will-o-wisps like my

dad used to scared me into believing lived in the swamp behind the old house,

before the move, before he told me the big girl word to get rid of nasties and

ghoulies of all shapes and size.

Abracadabra. I said it outloud. Abracadabra.

What? My father asks me. Whispering. Blubbering. I can see it now, but

my mind can't process it. Mental blindness. No, my pillar, MY pillar, MY wall MY

safety net. MINE. I couldn't even see him lose hope. I didn't know what that

looked like yet, not having much experience in the Big Wide World.

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ABRACADABRA!! I shout at the top of my lungs. The words feel muted

and silent and tremendous like a lions roar to me at the same time. I feel it rip

through my being, I rise on my tippy toes as the word leaves me.

When you see your dad look up and he looks like a rabbit who just got

caught by a pack of wild dogs, you start to feel like a rabbit yourself.

When your father leads you to the closet, the one no one ever notices

cause of the way the door was made, out of the same siding as the wall, you

start to realize that closets aren't really that fun after all.

When you hide in one in the darkness, you realize how nice it is to be in

the light and seen and held and loved. Things that seem so far away.

Well, they found me. They weren't Security, they looked like normal

men. I don't have to tell you the dangers of little girls being around normal

men that just became scary men because;

When they put a big old shiny gun to your daddies temple, the furrowed

brow you've kissed a million times to give good luck, no matter how many

times dad might yell or throw things, you start to realize nothing is fair.

When the crack of the shot goes off, you start to realize monsters are

real.

When the blood comes out you realize you are going insane. But you

don't have the words. You just are.

About then, they found me. Well, I don't have to tell you the dangers oflittle girls being around normal men. Normal men who become scary men.

The first time I died, I imagined kicking around the local swimming

pool...and I swam away from all of it. It wouldn't be the first time.

3

The Mokshologists

"Mziizm? Haven't 'eard that name 'n years. What bishness did you have

with the like of that 'un?" Drunkenly mumbled out the old grandfather hobo, his

voice almost obscured by the cacophony of tin and aluminum cans, cheapmetals for a cheap life, jostled about in his frayed triple layered wal-mart bags,

his leathery, tanned hand searching for something.

"Well, I 'aven't sheen 'em around." Grumbles the elder of the streets,

sage of suffrage. "But I can tell ya one thin'...you don' wanna find 'im. Trust

me." He retracted his arm, puffy with his layers of jackets, stuffing poking out

of the outermost one and giving him the appearance of being a living stuffed

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animal. Clutched in his now sticky hand, smelling of beer and corn syrup was a

small business card. The ancient transient handed it over.

It was a plain rectangle of white, made out of the usual thickness of

paper that business cards are made out of, and on its grungy face it read;

"Freelance Syncretist -MziizM- Licensed Mokshologist"

The aged beggar-king pulled out a cardboard strip from another bag,

and casually dropped it, the cardboard catching lightly on the raging thermals

underneath the underpass and floating and scraping against the frozen dirt

with a crunching sound. The mature vagrant peers, and seems to sober

instantly.

"From the little that I heard straight from the horses mouth so to speak,

Mziizm hails from the north. Norther' than here if ya ken. Born outside the

scope of true 'modernized cities'. A miracle birth, supposedly impossible. Not

much he said about his home, other than he left it."

"Some say, he's descended from a line of witches and witch-hunters who

married by mistake, his great-great-great-and so on murdering his wife due to

her 'witchcraft', and beheading thier sorceror dog. Some say he hails from

great rebels of the past, revolutionaries and geniuses and adventurers, that his

family might have indeed several times stolen ships from Great Britain herself,

back in the day. Some say he is messiac and has come to help us all. Some say

he is completely insane because of all of those things, well I don't know about

either one per se, but..."

"I think some people are just confusing to other people. They can't makeheads or tails of them and their brain can't either, so they get a fuzzy picture,

their mind fills in the rest. Sometimes you get angels, sometimes demons.

Mziizm? Just a man."

----Re Dax----

"Religion should be practiced out of neccessity." I yell to my brothers

and sisters, all of them swaying, bobbing, fractating and morphing into one

solid mass of brilliant muteness against the throbbing bass, the oscillations

wound so tight as to get your chromosones saying;

Man. This is it. Wub.

Then they come to me, each of them, and I reach beside the leg of my

dark canvas pants, and with a gloved hand inserted into the handle, I lift it and

set it on my lap. I see the coils of muscle on my tattooed arm bunch together,

causing the tattoos there to ripple and move, animating the pictograms into

movement. Red and cyan lights flit around the room, the merrymaker

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suspended from the ceiling in as unobtrusive a way as management could

figure. The light caused the tattoo to take a sinister, or perhaps should i say,

more sinister appearance.

On my arm, a brown dog, shaggy and houndlike, was tearing apart a

snarling Mr. Tom Streetcat, who in turn had its tabby wide paws wrappedaround the broken figured of a small doormouse, two puncture holes around its

small spine, from the angle the spine was clearly snapped. Wub.

From the mouse, sprung starving fleas that skittered towards a small

baby child, biting him, the plague in their mouths flowing like dark crystal

waterfalls through the blood lines of the babe. The babe grew to a man, who

was plagued by illness and insanity, who bit and tore at his skin and girated his

eyes. Wub.

One arm of the man holds a pike, dark blood gummed wood shaft tipped

with folded, serrated, shattered-just-for-effect tip, going into the gut of his

daughter.

His grandson, a babe who stands nearby, watching, clutching a small,

brown puppy, grows to a man. The man, kicks the now grown, shaggy, brown,

houndlike dog. Wub wub.

The story of the cosmos, on my arm. Drawn in patterns only revealed

under the ghost-ligths of sacred, liminal space. Right here, and now.

Right here and now they come to me, kneeling, their pink tongues, their

pierced tongues, their...black tongues. I open the briefcase and take out a

small fibercloth pouch. I stand up, pushing the chair I was sitting in, its thin

wooden frame and clearly ancient, behind me. I see the top of my kneeling

brethren's heads, or hair, in the case of the ones with the rasta dreads, or

gasmasks, in the case of the C.L.M. clergy, their masks pushed up against their

foreheads to recieve sacrament.

I open the bag, unwrapping copper wire coated in red plastic from

around the opening, and take out a plastic baggie. In the baggy, are seeds.

Black seeds, about the size of peas.

"Lock it up!" I yell to the doorman, a Janus in a sea of mercury and

spectral illusions. I open the baggy, and grab a handful of seeds.

"Ego video est deus ego deus igitur exemplum omnes. Ego video est

deus ego deus igitur exemplum omnes." I recite as I walk around, placing

[CENSORED OMITTED CONTENT] tongues.

---Mrs. Omnes---

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A religion should be practiced out of neccesity. The perfect God is both a

humble slave and a cruel master. The most effective God, would consist of

both of the human states of being. Master and Slave. Enlightenment is old hat.

Recognition of one's place in the social strata is the new illumination.

Misanthropy, the new philanthropy.

Total recognition of one's slavedom, or masterdom. To accomplish this,

one must strive for years of perfection in the Art of Control. The only way one

can be sure, positively sure that they are not a slave, is to own slaves. The only

way to be a master is to kill your own masters.

The last thing most people I preach the Good Word to, they don't

appreciate it. Go figure. They should be so lucky that the last thing they see,

before they slip into Oblivion, is the face of God. My face.

They should be so lucky that when I wrap my arm around their necks,

that they will look down. That they will see MY arm, the hand of God, stealing

the life from them. Establishing dominance is the new show of humility.

Some people get to find eternity staring at the shitter wall, or the

scrunched up face of their obscenely fat wife. Some people get to die

scratching their scrotum, before a stroke drops them to the floor, hand secured

down the crotch of their pants.

My converts? They see The Truth. Tattooed down the front of my arm,

they see the Legacy of Life. The path to understanding. Then, I whisper my

blessing.

"You are nothing, and now you understand this;" and pivot my entire

body to the right. Snap. You can feel the surprise vibrate through their internal

decapitation.

When I'm done, I call the parents, and explain that their child did not

pass the semester. They would not move onto an Ivy League college. They will

not have the house with the white picket fence. They will not pass GO, nor

collect $2,000.

At this point, you can almost smell the parents surprise. They ask, What

did their child do? Were they late for class? Did they miss a project? I ignore

them, of course, mentally taking note of the amount of my time they waste. OfThe Communities time. Each second, and I dock them a portion of their

compensation. Eventually, they all stop talking, and when they do, I answer the

same as I always do.

"Since your child failed to complete the semester, we will be seeking

legal action for compensation. Your child's meat will be in the mail, as per the

American Compensation Act. Have a really, really nice day." And then I hang

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up, counting two more slaves. Two more pieces of coal in the eternal machine.

I turn back to my class, all of them staring at me, all wide eyes and

prepubescent awkwardness. The classroom pristine except for the puddle of

piss accumulating under the body of Roger Bradely. The other kids called him

"Skip". Heaven knows why.

"Don't be nosy nancies. Please turn to page thirty five in your history

textbooks. Unless anyone else lost their book?"

No one has. Finally, some order to the world.

And dontcha know, I completely forgot the janitor's extension.