Twelve Mad Men

by Ryan Bracha et al.

  How can they acknowledge that we hold veracity in our hands? Voracious veracity is a crime now. They are the deluded ones. I know the nature of skin.

  We live in simulation. These residents of the replaced world echo man and woman. They started with my wife. I saw what they had placed inside her.

  Each night their clone visited me. She danced naked, her genitals gaping in insane arousal. And within her sliced peach I saw it swell as she stretched her lips apart. Its head jutted out of her like an obscene clitoris, the penis that inhabits the female body now. They are re-gendering us.

  They began replacing skin years ago. Piece by piece they reassembled man and woman until we became this violated mutation. Inside her I see the phallus, it emerges as she spreads her lips, ushering desire into her fetid body, but I didn’t yield and so they sent me to this place. Soon the guard will be penetrated from the inside. The skin will become theirs, the cloning complete. The politics of skin is an industry on a vast scale, and we have threatened its profits. But I know how to penetrate them.

  The prime minister is feeding on them. He is the detritus of our times. Cloned man. They want our skins. I have told this to countless people while I stand at street corners, a ragged piece of flesh in my hand to prove to you, don’t you see? They’ve replaced our flesh with the factory. They’re replacing you as I speak. I howl at my cell.

  But I know the porcupines. I penetrate with quills, I urge flesh towards sexual oblivion.

  The replicants are breeding. But they do not conjoin in fluids or a blind ecstasy fetched from the tombs of Roman Emperors, they copulate like small black ants beneath the shoes of waitresses while you are served the rotted meat. They are eating you from the inside. The food they serve will corrode your intestines and make you their butter. They will fuck you with their sad and pointless drills, rape your wives and send you to that place of sorrow.

  I escaped to the castle of David, for they do not know my brothers are amassing for war here. We have been hired by the one called Bracha, he holds the sword and it is dripping with blood, their blood. I lacerate them with quills, I remove their genitals and place them smouldering on fires and make them eat their offal.

  No newspaper will dare utter the truth, that man is extinct, a replicant made of ash. We twelve are the world of flesh. We twelve will revolutionise their black extinct world, I will empty the politicians of their hideous lies with razors sharpened on their small sharp teeth.

  They invade our homes. They emptied my wife of her genitals and tried to insert the slithering reptile inside her womb. But I saw the serpent woman at dawn, her gaping cunt spewing semen, gonorrhoea, the legs and arms of sailors washed there by desire, while it erupted from her womb, her cock in the cloned world. This strap on jack lesbian whore screwed by all the politicos, drunk on come in back alleys where the faithful never wander at night. I hacked its head off and threw it to the gulls. And the porcupines came along and ate it.

  They showed us the way. All my brothers know, we have sharpened spikes and we pierce the empty flesh and bleed them dry of lies at night.

  I’ve hacked and emptied them of liquid deceit. David was a porcupine and this is our home.

  They think they’ve locked us up but we are there. We dwell on your doorsteps, our hands clutching the spikes.

  The only way to tell the flesh is piercing, and the porcupines know the way. I sliced her apart and removed the snake and fed it to them. They smothered it in quills and made it a living writhing thing of meat, for that is all they are, beneath their lies and rhetoric, red raw meat just like the thing that visits you at night when the guard has gone home to his phallic wife. She rapes him in bed. She inserts the serpent in his anus.

  George Bernard Shaw told his children he would rather they become prostitutes than politicians. Porcupines know about skin. I know the false skins they wear with their lies and machinations. They want woman to enter the body of man that they may feed upon you, they have phallicised the female that she may penetrate you and bring forth the replicated world. To what do you succumb by dawn? To what lies have you sold your houses? You are being replaced while men touch the soft surfaces of your loved ones, their faces saintly, an apotheosis of sexual sin beneath the guttering candle at your fading windowpane. For they are hired by the cloned world. They defecate on your mattress and feed you sandwiches made of fur. But only the quill knows them. I made them the pin cushion, I emptied them while they spat blood. The porcupines know, with quills I win.

  Only the poisoned flowers hang outside these walls, we live in the age of venom. Hypocritical reader, there will be no guillotine here, no hanging, I confess all, into your dumb indifferent ear, while you lick away the crumbs of politics at the breakfast table next to your yawning wife.

  This is how it happened. One night I noticed that the prime minister had cameras in his skull, it was apparent to me from the moment I turned on the TV. I told my wife but she laughed. She wouldn’t listen to me when I told her he regularly masturbated in supermarket windows waving his semen-dripping cock at passers-by then rounded them up and buggered them routinely before police officers removed their genitals.

  The government is collecting genitals. The prime minister has two penises, one he rapes and buggers with, the other he uses to spin his lies, it flickers from his grey mouth like an ill-fitting clitoris, an offensive lump of aroused meat. He is employing a police force of sexless mutants. They never piss, never copulate, beneath their trousers are antennae. He wants to be the father of the new tribe. But the new tribe is not made of man, but clones. Night by night he sends the cock woman to rape you in your sleep, and she carries away your penises and vaginas, your balls and wombs to the place where they manufacture the new world. Empty the politicians of blood, make them paper so we may write our tales upon them, walk wild into the wind, summon all revolutionaries from this band of brothers, unlock the doors and let us take the streets.

  I saw her the first night while my wife slept. She entered our room and raised her dress, parted her cunt and put forth the snake, but I lopped his lying head off and inserted it in her anus. She began to crap foul sewage, a river of faeces that stank up the garden. I was accused of burying bodies, do I look like a murderer? Are these a murderer’s hands? You may say I carry scars, but I say to you your eyes deceive you in this hollow light.

  They failed to remove my genitals. I bore children, I armed them with weapons, and they sent us here. I knew their skins were new. I passed them in the streets, their eyes shone out of the sheer material, there is no flesh left any more out there, the only flesh is here in this place they call a prison, where we watch you all.

  I found a way to test their skins. I knew it from the moment they came to me with ink and I began to find the several uses for their quills.

  The government tried to exterminate them. All porcupines. But they hid in my cellar. I spoke to them at night in their strange nocturnal language, they told me of the way to discover the true properties of skin. I learned how to unhook and use their spikes. And I dipped them into the cloned flesh.

  When the penis woman came again, I skewered her with their quills. I entered her until the chattering lips she used to guile us were like a pin cushion, then I emptied her. I found them out, the females of the hidden cock. I punctured their sick and sleeping lies with the sharp points, and their skins gave way. The world began to see the cloning.

  And so they branded me a criminal, insane. What madness made their politics, what dark body do you rise with at dawn when the caterpillars flee from your brain?

  With porcupine quills I penetrated the false flesh. I searched for skin in the empty dawns. You cannot remove skin that is covered in spikes. My skin is beyond you, and the weak clutches of your enterprise. For the men who masquerade as leaders are nothing more than imagery. Born of pornography, they seek the eternal object. They want to cover our bodies with their creed, they inscribe us, they write their manifesto on our flesh and sexuality. Only the porcupines know the wa
y to defend man’s flesh. Only the porcupines pierce their cloned bodies, and unravel the harnessed sexuality that they fear so much. Crave, crave. Desire the body of woman, penetrate until you know that it is skin you touch and not some vile and alien thing.

  I entered them, their bodies yielding to me. I spiked and pierced them until they were nothing more than paper.

  I would inscribe them, not be their depository. They want to fill you with semen, own your minds, I say check their genitals at the door.

  Of course, it was a clever ruse, to bring in a leader who’d raped hundreds of men and women, a vile pervert who needs to puncture holes all day. Watch him speak, the shit dripping from his phallic tongue while he touches himself beneath the podium. They thought they’d come up with the invisible lie. For who would believe me when I told them?

  What happened? Beyond the piercing and the finding out of false flesh? Beyond the discovery there are clones in our streets? Beyond the fact that they have altered you?

  I lacerated the cock women. I tore their genitals from them and watched them atrophy like poisoned muscle.

  Then one bright morning I fed the prime minister a penis and let himself choke to death on his own orgasms. They wanted to elect me. They sent me here instead, his police were still at large. They placed the bodies of mutilated women in my cellar, hideous deformities full of needles and sharpened objects placed there by a madman. These were the politicians’ crimes. Everywhere they are replacing bodies with clones. You do not know because perhaps you are one. They will imprison your, lock you up if you suspect that the women you fuck are fucking you with cocks placed there by them. They want to re-gender us all. They think they can keep me here. But I know the way to the guard’s heart. Each night the porcupines visit me with ink. They leave me with quills, they have no need for skin, for by the morning it will be covered with weapons.

  My fellow inmates are gathering weapons. We are amassing for war. The guard will be the first to fall. He thinks he is a priest listening to our confessions, taking away his tidy version of us to his tired wife. He pores over documents in his office where we watch him. But he doesn’t know that each night he is violated by her, she bears the cloned penis.

  She is inseminating him with self-replication. His skin scales away like scabs. We observe him while he labours under the illusion that he is keeping us prisoner. I may well free our guard with quills. I may show him that penetration of skin still living will save him from their vile plans.

  The quills unlock the jail. I turn them in the rusting mechanism, let loose my brothers into the streets. They are metal, machetes, all form of war now, we are armed to the teeth and enter your homes to deliver you of the cloned lives you lead. What idle hours do you pass each day digested by the political body?

  They say the bodies of punctured women were found beneath my house. They claim their skins were unrecognisable, a shredding of the flesh by a maniac. I say I returned them to their skins, and removed from them the scale of replicants. The porcupines come to me, I ride their smooth backs into the streets, a sailor on a sea of spikes.

  Four

  The paper drops from my hands. The sheets curl and swirl as gravity does its thing. The first thought that comes to mind is that I’m glad as fuck that I didn’t go into his room. If that’s what he’s scared of, or prepared for, or fuck knows what, then I’m pleased that I’m not in there with him. The second thought is Bracha. Furchtenicht mentioned the name, he says he’s another nutcase, but now it’s there in black, or I suppose red and congealed brown and white. Godwin says he was beckoned here by the man. Once again, I have no fucking clue what is going on here. Is Bracha the warden? Just some influential piece of psychotic shit that acts as top dog? I might not have had any banal questions about who the woman who cleans the blood from the walls is when he invited query earlier on, but I sure as shit have some questions for Benny’s tour of the funhouse now.

  The lights flicker on, once again, above my head. The lights outside of the mad Yank’s door spark and switch off. Surely somebody is taking the piss out of me here.

  “Would you mind passing those back?” asks the stifled voice of Godwin behind the door. I don’t know what else to do other than comply with his request, and I slide the papers back to him. “And the mirror?”

  There’s this urge in me to smash the mirror, to crunch it underfoot until it’s dust, but I don’t do it. It’s not my property. I smash it and there’s a chance that I’ll be up in court for destroying an inmate- A resident’s property and infringing upon his human rights. I slide the mirror under the door an inch and it is snatched away with zeal.

  “Thank you,” he says, “now, kindly fuck off.”

  “Wait,” I say.

  “Hmm?”

  “Who’s Bracha?”

  “If you don’t know,” he says, “then I can’t tell you. Benny knows.”

  “But-”

  SLAM.

  The door at the end of the corridor opens. Benny.

  “Kill him,” says the voice behind the door, “before he kills you.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Huh?” Benny says through heavy breaths.

  “Nothing,” I say.

  He seems happy with that.

  “Okay. It looks like I can get one light working at a time. Not ideal. I’m sorry to be putting on you like this, especially on your first day.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “How’ve they been?” he asks, looking pointedly at Godwin’s door. I shrug.

  “That good, eh?”

  “So-so. They’ve-”

  A wail from the next door interrupts me. Keith. Benny rolls his eyes. His sweating face reddens in the light above our heads, and he stomps over to the door. Punching it hard with the side of his fist.

  “Shut the fuck up Keith! Don’t make me come in there and burn your arse.”

  The wail quietens. A sobbing response from the room is barely intelligible.

  “Yeah, I thought so,” says Benny, “trying to fix these fucking lights and you’re whining like a bitch.”

  He turns back to me. Smiles. Shrugs.

  “I’m only kidding around,” he whispers, “we’re not allowed matches or anything up here,” he whispers, “you don’t smoke, do you?”

  I make a face. I do smoke. He returns the look with another trademark eye-roll. He beckons me to the window at the end of the corridor. I follow, and watch him creak the archaic handles upright, before pushing the window open.

  “Yeah, me too,” he says, pulling a pack of cigarettes from his trouser pocket. In the glow of the moonlight his huge cock casts a bizarre shadow on the pale blue floor of the corridor. He hands me a cig and tugs a Zippo lighter from his tight trouser pocket. His double chinned face glimmers orange above the flame as he lights his smoke and then holds the lighter my way which I gratefully take advantage of. The nicotine doesn’t take long to weave its goodness into my bloodstream and a woozy rush grips my brain.

  “Don’t tell anybody though, eh?” he grins. In this light his beard is three or four different colours. The chin and cheeks are brown, around the moustache it’s more yellow, and around the sideburns it’s a definite ginger. Everywhere else it’s white. Something clicks.

  “Have you always had a beard?” I ask. He shakes his head, no.

  “No, only grew it recently, the wife asked me to, said she liked beards suddenly.” His free hand comes up to rub against the growth on his face. Then he laughs. “Maybe her boyfriend has a beard, maybe she wants one at home too.”

  “No, I mean-”

  I pause. He stops laughing. His joke obviously failed to hit the target.

  “Huh?”

  I shake my head.

  “Nevermind.”

  We each smoke in a silence that’s punctuated by screams from Keith. Each wail draws an impatient sigh from Benny.

  “What’s up with him?” I ask, blowing an arrow of smoke out into the cool air beyond the window.

  Benny shakes his h
ead.

  “You don’t wanna know,” he says.

  A Burning Passion

  By Keith Nixon

  I’m putting the finishing touches to my latest work. This one is oil on canvas. I like oils because of the texture they deliver. Makes the visual rendering more lifelike. I drop the brush, ignore the splatter across the floor. Hold my head in my hands as the memories kick in, so (painful) my vision distorts. I can hear screams.

  Eventually the convulsion passes.

  I turn back to my easel.

  "What's today's work?" she asks me. Always cold, always professional.

  She's always there, my shrink. Hates being called that. No idea what she prefers. Don't care. The word had generated an outburst from her just the once, the single time the ice-hearted bitch had reacted. That was in the early days. Never get anything now, which is best for both of us. It affects the patient - which is me, by the way.

  Because, as usual, I ignore her she's driven to stand over my shoulder, to see for herself what I'm up to.

  I feel her presence, flickering eyes taking in everything. There's a breath like a bull's snort. The temperature is up a notch, but perhaps it's just my imagination. It could be the guards playing with the temperature controls again, despite my repeated complaints.

  "Very good," she says. I imagine her tongue flicking out, like a snake's, testing the air.

  "Must you?"

  "What?" my shrink asks, although she knows damn well what is, because we've discussed this desire of hers to invade my personal space many times previously in the years I've been incarcerated.

  "Back up."

  I'd swear she laughs, but I know that's my fucked up imagination. Her sense of humour withered and died with mine. She can't display anything. I'm not here for fun. I'm here for punishment. For retribution. For balance.