If you recall, Totino’s Party Pizzas were the only food The Membrane ever ate. When there were no more to be had, Glont tried buying other types of frozen pizzas for the thing—DiGiorno, Tombstone, Red Barron, Tony’s, etc.—but The Membrane refused to even try them. Desperate to get the thing to eat something—anything—Glont tried feeding it various types of other food—steak, burgers, fries, chicken, seafood, candy, cookies, cakes, pies, etc.—but The Membrane just wasn’t having it. Basically, the thing went on a hunger strike because it was so damn pissed off that Totino’s Party Pizzas were gone forever. All Glont, Ma Ruth, and Ma-He’s-Makin’-Eyes-At-Me could do was watch as it wasted away on their living room floor, basically shrinking and drying up into a dead, white, dried-out piece of dogshit.
(Oh, realizing Ma-He’s-Makin’-Eyes-At-Me would never let him get a new girlfriend, Glont decided to accept his lot in life and got back together with her shortly after Tom Two’s death. They were soon married, whereupon Glont’s new bride and his invisible monstrosity of a mother-in-law moved into the Lamont house.)
Anyway, they buried The Membrane in a grave next to Tom Two’s. In its will, The Membrane had insisted that it be laid to rest in a stately mausoleum, the cost of which should be no less than $350,000. However, should funds not allow for such a lavish place of interment, the will indicated that a towering, phallic obelisk cut from the finest Italian marble available at a cost of no less than $150,000 would suffice as The Membrane’s grave marker, so long as the obelisk was the largest gravestone in the cemetery. Obviously, the financially-strapped Lamonts could not afford to honor either of these requests. Instead, The Membrane’s tombstone was a common cinder block. It was basically a shitstone. Nevertheless, per the instructions outlined in its will, and though the epitaph was a boldfaced lie, the marker was inscribed thusly:
HERE LIES
THE MEMBRANE
THE THING NABBED MORE ASS THAN A CHINESE ZOO
???? – 2020
RIP
***
Despite great protests from her son, Ma Ruth left the Lamont family ancestral home a few weeks after The Membrane died in order to pursue an acting career in the burgeoning geriatric/quicksand/Freddy Krueger fetish porn industry in Hollywood. Who knew that was even a thing? But sure enough, this particular newfangled niche Internet porn category that married the three usually separate geriatric, quicksand, and Freddy Kruger fetish porn categories into one fucked-up thing had been gaining lots of Internet clicks over the past few years.
The morning she left, Glont and Ma-He’s-Makin’-Eyes-At-Me went outside to see her off.
“But, Ma,” he said as she slowly got onto her scooter, her travel tote already strapped onto the back of it, “what kind of life is this for a ninety-year-old woman with bubonic plague and leprosy? Shouldn’t you just enjoy the time you have left on this planet here at home?”
“I’ve spent my whole dang life in this here house. It’s high time I had some excitement and adventure, don’tcha think? Anyhow, I’ll just be gone a few months. I always did want to be an actress in Hollywood. My new boss says he’s gonna make me a star!”
Ma Ruth achieved her Warholian fifteen minutes of fame, even if it was in the geriatric/quicksand/Freddy Krueger fetish porn industry. And she returned home in a few months just like she promised.
But in a body bag.
There had been an accident on the set of her last film appearance. Apparently, the stagehands who dug and prepared the quicksand pit that day made it a little too deep. During the end of the shoot, when the two coked-up crewmen reached down into the goop to pull Ma Ruth out seconds after her Freddy Krueger face disappeared under the surface, they found themselves grabbing at nothing but quicksand. One of them had to dive in while the other held onto his legs. They eventually pulled the old woman out of the muck, but a little too late.
Ma Ruth was buried in a grave next to Tom Two and The Membrane. Per instructions outlined in her will, her cinder block gravestone was inscribed as thus:
HERE LIES
RUTH DOUGLIETTE LAMONT
BELOVED DAUGHTER, MOTHER, GREAT AUNT, GERIATRIC/QUICKSAND/FREDDY KRUEGER FETISH PORNSTAR
1928 – 2020
RIP
***
On a slightly more cheerful note, not long after Ma Ruth passed, Glont got hired to work for the Zeke Creek Coal Mining Company at a mine located about an hour southwest of Selohssa, allowing him to finally quit his hated “job” at Fun 4-Life.
Working as a coal miner was hard and the hours were often long. As such, Glont felt the job was a great improvement over working at Fun 4-Life. But there were problems. For one, the pay was great. Also, the mine had a nearly spotless worker safety record with no serious accidents having ever occurred. The company also offered a great benefits package—unmatched in the industry—and provided all employees with generous PTO and paid holidays so that workers could maintain a balanced work and family life. What’s more, all the supervisors and managers at Zeke Creek were good-natured, concerned about the well-being of their employees, and highly receptive to feedback and criticism from even the company’s lowest ranks.
To fully realize his long-time dream of working a shitty, miserable, go-nowhere, soul-crushing, hell-on-earth job, Glont sought to change these wonderful things. With that in mind, he joined the United Mine Workers of America union shortly after his hire and quickly rose in the ranks to become the representative union shop steward at the mine. Within a year of his appointment to shop steward, Glont succeeded in lowering all the miners’ salaries by 20 percent and eliminated many of the successful safety measures that had been in place at the mine for decades, thereby causing a 13-percent increase in fatal mining accidents as well as a 23.7-percent increase in reported worker respiratory illnesses caused by overexposure to hazardous coal dust. He was also able to reduce the PTO and paid vacation time offered to employees to next to nothing while abolishing all available medical insurance, dental insurance, life insurance, and retirement plans. Glont also succeeded in getting all of the cool, good-natured, empathic supervisors and managers fired and replaced with blithering, insufferable, inconceivable, unbearable, cruel, sadistic, slave-driving fucking motherfuckers.
Within a year of getting hired, Glont managed to make his job terrible enough for him to finally be happy. By then, he was working fifteen-hour shifts without any days off for shit pay. What’s more, he was fortunate enough to suffer from a plethora of coal dust-related lung diseases, among them pneumoconiosis, silicosis, dust-related diffuse fibrosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. And lucky for Glont, he didn’t have health insurance anymore so that these conditions had to go completely untreated, thereby increasing his physical and mental misery. Glont was even lucky enough to be involved in a serious workplace accident when a mine shaft partially collapsed, killing nine of his coworkers while trapping him and twelve others for nearly two weeks. Glont suffered a crushed leg in the accident. Luckily for him, it had to be amputated after they pulled him out of the mine. The accident was the direct result of Glont greatly reducing the minimum structural support safety standards for newly drilled mine shafts!
Though he was down to one leg and had one heck of a cough, he got around the mine shafts just fine by pushing himself around in a mine cart. Fortunately, just after Ma-He’s-Makin’-Eyes-At-Me discovered she was with child, the couple had to declare bankruptcy and foreclose on the Lamont ancestral home due to Glont’s self-imposed abject poverty, but it was okay because he knew a place where they could live for free. Immediately after the foreclosure, he, Ma-He’s-Makin’-Eyes-At-Me, and his invisible mother-in-law moved into the Selohssa sewer system, where they took up residence in Old Crub’s old abandoned lair, a low igloo-like hovel situated at a juncture of four wide sewer tunnels. The thing had been constructed from a hodgepodge of junkyard scrap materials. Glont expanded it and even added on a nursery.
Sadly, Glont never got to see his baby. A week shy of Ma-He’s-Makin’-Eyes-At-Me’s due d
ate, the blindfold that Glont wore to bed every night (for obvious safety reasons) came loose and slipped off his head while he was tossing and turning in his sleep. When he and his wife stirred awake the next morning, they opened their eyes at the same time while facing each other, their noses nearly touching. Neither of them was fully awake, so that they didn’t think to turn away to save Glont’s life. Husband and wife then stared into each other’s eyes for the first and last time.
Glont was buried near Tom Two, The Membrane, and Ma Ruth. Due to her poverty, Ma-He’s-Makin’-Eyes-At-Me couldn’t even afford a cinder block grave marker for her husband, so she stole an old toilet from the local junkyard and used that instead. The inside of the toilet bowl was encrusted with petrified shit, vomit, and blood.
According to local Selohssa burial regulations, all cemetery grave markers had to display the legal name of the deceased at the time of their death. As Glont had never bothered to officially change his name back to Glont Lamont, his grave marker had to show his name as “My Tiny Little Weak Bitch.” But with that exception, the exact words and characters specified in his will were inscribed on the underside of the raised toilet seat lid. It read thusly:
HERE LIES
MY TINY LITTLE WEAK BITCH
SON, FATHER, UNCLE, HUSBAND, COAL MINER
1979 – 2022
RIP RIP RIP RIP RIP RIP
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT
FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK
SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT
THE END THE END THE END
THE END THE END THE END
THE END THE END THE END
THE END THE END THE END
THE END THE END THE END
THE END THE END THE END
THE END THE END THE END
THE END THE END THE END
THE END THE END THE END
THE END THE END THE END
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THE END THE END THE END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born with one extra finger and two extra toes (like, for real), Douglas Hackle received a B.A. in English Literature from John Carroll University, abandoned academia to take a writing-intensive job in the business world, and lost a few marbles somewhere along the way. He lives in Northeast Ohio with his wife, son, and two dogs. He is also the author of the novel The Hottest Gay Man Ever Killed in a Shark Attack; the Wonderland Award-nominated short story collections Clown Tear Junkies (Rooster Republic Press) and Is Winona Ryder Still with the Dude from Soul Asylum? and Other LURID Tales of DOOM and TERROR!!! A selection of his short fiction is featured in the The Bizarro Starter Kit – Vol. Red (Eraserhead Press).
douglashackle.wordpress.com
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