James Green-Armytage

 

            Death in Life and other stories

 

I am writing this out in the wide open, nuclear white sky as far as the eye can see and grey pavement, nothing growing where it is cracked and broken. The only things that move are the bones, the bodies of bones that haltingly walk about, fight, copulate, eat one another. When one body falls apart into a pile, soon enough some of these bones join together with bones from another pile and begin again to walk about. Ow! My right eye just jumped out of its place and skittered away. Come back, I need you to see! Fuck… Stupid bullshit.

 

 

Rats eat the flesh off of a decaying corpse. “Ah, get back,” he says, “I’m not fully dead yet.” “Neither are we” say the rats, “we must eat.” “Fuck you all” and the corpse just starts swallowing the rats as they come at him. “Ahh, good, I’m getting my strength back, it’s time to go back to my house. Yes, that’s it, back to my house,” so he walks there leaving a trail of ooze and pus and goes in. “Ah hello” says his wife. “Lousy bitch I am dripping ooze.” He throws some ooze at her. She rolls into a ball and rolls out the door. “That was strange” he says and sits down at the dinner table. “Hey wait a second.” On the table is his own body, his own face and whatnot. He is hungry so he starts eating anyway. Why not he starts with the head, cutting off an ear and eating it. “Mmm, delicious,” he says, but then the eyes on the head on the table open. “Hey, I’m not fully dead yet.” “Yes but you’re me and I find the symbolism irritating, so I’m going to eat you.” The one on the table pulls a note out of his mouth and hands it over. “Here, read this.” “OK, what is it?” He reads it and it says lose 30 pounds in 30 days. “What’s this all about?” “A diversion,” says the one on the table and sinks his teeth into the corpse’s neck. I’m going to get even with my wife for preparing such an ironic dinner, thinks the corpse.

 

 

In high school, they are watching TV. They have forgotten romantic love. They are all waiting, their bodies are covered in dust. And under the dust, eyes open and close, eyes, reddened pale. Sitting in a room with them, I open my mouth and pull out mucous, endless like a magician’s handkerchief.

 

 

                Alone on the roof of the Marriott Marquis over Times Square, smoking out of a bong and trying to enjoy the sunset. However, I am in pain:

                My mind is on fire I said to myself. Burning with the fever.

                Can’t I escape?

                Once I leave this place I will no longer exist. I am a part of it, nothing apart.

                No, said I. I tore at my chest. Make my heart stop beating. It hurts! Just chill out, calm down I said to myself. No I can’t, it won’t stop beating. And my spine!

 

 

Mr.A lived in a house with Ms.Z. One evening he jumped out the window of his house and onto his front yard. Ha Ha stomping stomping What is my house doing on fire, he said. Ms.Z Exploded. I have nothing left to lose, said Mr.A, whose name was…

So he set off to seek his fortune in the big city. Oh, what’s, oh, this place is so dirty, he said. A trashcan fell on his head, ow!

So now I have to get a job? no! He got a job as a taxi driver. The mob boss got into the taxi with a dead body. Take us to the graveyard. OK. They all got out at the graveyard. It was nighttime. Help me bury this body said the mob boss. OK.

He opened the coffin and Mr.A got in. He fell through the bottom of the coffin.

Hello said the mob boss, this is the secret:

But then his talking made no sense.

The mob boss lit a cigarette, have one too. Thank you I love cigarettes. I’m going to make you my number one man, said the mob boss. That is good.

But remember that they are inside of a coffin? So Mr.A saw Ms.Z. Why did you set the house on fire, she wanted to know. None of your business.

 

 

“In my dream I had a dream of frightening craziness. When I awoke into my dream, I decided to take the Olanzapine [anti-psychotic medication] …”

The ghost was homeless at that time, sometimes sleeping on a roof, sometimes underwater. Sometimes he got work at the carnival, frying electric monkeys alive. The kids at his summer camp with the poisonous claws had called him a weirdo, but he certainly could jump high, high enough to reach the branches of very tall trees. Sometimes he would stay up there for a while, eating the sweet sweet blue fruits and peering down at the workaday world. He subsisted primary by pilfering sugar cereal from small grocery stores, usually pouring rum in the bowl instead of milk. But what does any of this tell you about him? The truth is that he was massively insecure and oddly contemplative in his fragmented sort of way. He was one of the lucky few to ever permanently escape a certain low-security mental hospital upstate.

Alone in the ballroom of an abandoned penthouse he, so slowly, jumps high in the air--so that he gets butterflies in his stomach on the way down.