The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade

by Aimee Bender

  Dean’s answer—Cockroach Suit. Thousands of cockroaches hand-stitched through the thorax, tightly sewn to a Penney’s business suit bought on the cheap.

  Dean’s days and nights were occupied with the spreading of wings and the careful puncturing of his pathogenic pals with needle and thread. He positioned them all feet-out, so their mouths could still feed.

  Dead roaches were of no use to Dean. The live ones carried the instinct.

  The instinct had kept them alive for four hundred million years. Their bodies were natural radiation shock absorbers. They could live for ten days after being decapitated. Dean knew that in the event of Apocalypse, he’d be rolling with the right crew.

  He knew they were training him for war, and for suffering. He’d already borne the brunt of their bacterial ballast. He’d coped with clostridium. He’d dealt with dysentery.

  He was becoming impervious to disease, like them.

  He kept and catalogued the roaches, separated into clusters of speedy Smokybrowns, ravenous Germans, and over-eating Americans.

  Jars upon jars of the bugs were stored in his deep freezer. They slowed down in the chill. The cold goofed them like opium, kept them still.

  It kept them from eating each other.

  That insatiable appetite had been the primary problem with the first cockroach suit. Dean had left it out in the muggy tenement warmth at night, stored along with some chocolate cereal in a microwave-sized cardboard box. When he opened the box in the morning the cockroaches had not only eaten all the cereal, but had ravaged each other. His carefully crafted suit had gone cannibalistic.

  He bought another suit. Dean didn’t sweat his cash flow. Daddy Dean Sr.’s estate was still kicking out cash in steady intervals. The primary source of cash—royalties from the sale of Daddy Dean’s Ivy League approved books on entomology.

  Daddy Dean Sr. had been a big time bug man and serious scholar until his car accident. A deer had run into the road. Daddy Dean Sr. swerved hard with his right hand on the wheel. His left hand gripped a cherry Slurpee with a thick red straw. Daddy Dean Sr.’s car hit an elm tree straight on. The dependable airbag exploded and jammed the fortified Slurpee straw straight into Daddy Dean Sr.’s left nostril and right on through to his frontal lobe.

  Dean had shown up at the scene in time to see the cops detach the straw and blood-filled cup.

  Dean had heard one cop on the accident scene call it a “straw-botomy.”

  Dean didn’t think it was funny.

  Dean didn’t think a single fucking thing was funny for quite a while, and resolved to find happiness however he could.

  For a long while that meant spending Daddy’s textbook royalties on hallucinogens. The “straw-botomy” had taught him that the world made no sense anyway, so he traveled the world hunting head-trips. He tongued toads. He feasted on fungus. He inhaled ayahuasca. A bad encounter with a sodomizing shaman and some industrial strength desert peyote finally scared Dean straight.

  Then he moved back to the states and began his survival training.

  He knew the world wanted to erase him. He’d seen it in visions. He’d seen it in the eyes of the priapic shaman. He saw flash frames of his own father felled by a plastic straw.

  Dean moved to the slums of D.C. He wanted to move to a place that resisted and destroyed life. He knew there were survival secrets in the daily struggle.

  He holed up and watched television. He watched El Presidente taunting nuclear armed countries anxious to see if they could one-up Hiroshima.

  Y’all ain’t got the bomb, or maybe y’all just ain’t got the balls to use it!

  C’mon Korea-Bear, show us you got a pair!

  Dean read books about roaches. He studied sewing and stitch types. He bought spools of thread and heat sterilized needles.

  Dean developed his cockroach suit and watched it fail.

  He cried and sucked up the sick, musty attar of roaches when his first suit dined on itself.

  He cursed himself when the second suit crawled through a hole in the crumbling apartment drywall. Fifty seconds to piss. That’s all he’d taken. That was all they’d needed. He heard his roach-riddled jacket and pants skittering around in the crawlspace above his kitchen.

  Every time he failed, he felt as if Apocalypse was seconds away. He got weak, the blood flow to his head lagged. He thought he could hear the roar of approaching bombs overhead. He worked harder, his hands shaking with fear.

  He ignored the doubt that crept into his skull and took up permanent residence.

  Dean, don’t you know the bomb is coming for you? You think some bugs and some cheap threads can stop a holocaust?

  He ignored the fists that pounded on his door, the angry screams, the vulgar notes slipped through the crack of his mail slot.

  The note last Tuesday read: Mister room 308, you are the cockroach man and ever since you came all up in here they’ve gone crazy. My little sister has to wear cotton balls in her ears to keep them roaches from digging into her head and laying eggs, like they did with Brian. You ain’t right at all Mister room 308, and you ought to leave and take your roaches with you. I see them coming out from under your front door right now. My dad says if Brian has eggs in his brain, then you die. Go away. Love, Maysie.

  The neighbors thought Dean was bad mojo. They threatened litigation. They threatened worse. Dean knew it was part of the world’s plan to erase him. He kept working.

  Dean actually saw the first bomb hit. He knew it was coming.

  He knew from the silence. El Presidente had gone silent for three days. No more TV broadcasts promising patriotic retribution. No more shots on CNN of El Presidente grabbing his balls and shouting, “Eat this, Iran!”

  El Presidente was quiet because he was hiding, somewhere, from the grief he saw coming America’s way. El Presidente was crafty, even more survival driven than Dean had given him credit for.

  In the calm before the atomic shit-storm, Dean finished his third cockroach suit.

  It was perfect. A living tapestry of twitching legs and chittering mandibles. Add to the threads a pair of Kroeg blast goggles, a crash helmet, a refillable oxygen tank, and a thick pair of foil-lined tan work boots, and Dean was suited for survival.

  When the first newscaster started crying on air, Dean geared up and walked from his apartment to the street. He didn’t want to be inside that roach trap when the Earth started shaking.

  Dean walked by apartments, heard the crying of the tenants. They could sense the bomb was coming. Their cries were weird and strangely complacent, the mewling of doomed animals with no options. Baby seals, waiting for the spiked bat to spread their skulls wide.

  It made Dean sad. He cried and fogged up his goggles. He felt the suit writhing around his body, taking in his warmth, seething. He stayed in motion.

  Dean made it into the street and turned to his left, not sure quite where to go, hoping the cockroaches’ instinct would take over soon. Then he would just lay down on his belly or his back and let them carry him to survival, like a God.

  The D.C. streets were packed with people looking up at the sky, waiting. Dean expected chaos and conflict. No one even gave him a second glance. They were waiting for the Big Delivery from above.

  They got it, twenty seconds later.

  The flash blinded Dean, even with the goggles and helmet on.

  He crouched behind a cement stoop and heard the most cohesive and unified scream any dying species had ever let loose.

  Then there was silence, and heat, terrible heat.

  And, of course, darkness.

  The cockroaches carried Dean, like a God. He woke to dark clouds and electrical storms and drifting gray ash. His retinas were blast burnt, but functional.

  He was alive.

  That was the part he could not comprehend.

  He was fucking alive.

  The roaches were too, and they were moving quickly towards a perceived food source. Dean felt them moving, swift and single-minded, driven by constant hunger.
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  His hands were cold. Nuclear winter was just beginning and the air already approached frosty. He’d forgotten to buy gloves. He hunched his shoulders, pulled his hands inside the living suit. He relaxed and enjoyed the eerie quiet, and reveled in being alive. Being a survivor.

  He moved without effort through the ash of nuclear winter. His suit surged beneath him as it crawled up onto a sidewalk. The legion of tiny legs pushed onward as Dean zoned out on the gray snowfall floating down from the sky.

  He watched the sky darken. He saw thick red and green clouds of nuclear dust float above him. He saw an obelisk in the distance, stark and tarred jet black by the bomb blast.

  It was the Washington Monument, just like he’d seen on T.V. There was something walking back and forth at the base of the monument. It moved like a human, but glowed bright yellow.

  Dean let the suit carry him closer, and then stood up when he was within ten feet of the yellow shifting mass.

  Dean lifted the visor of his helmet and de-fogged his goggles. He could see clearly after that, aside from the bright imprint of the blast that wouldn’t leave his sight.

  The peripatetic figure was a man. A man in a Twinkie suit. The thousands of Twinkies were half charred and oozing cream filling.

  The man turned to face Dean.

  The man’s face was slack, and the eyes were empty of thought or feeling. Despite this lack of emotion, El Presidente was still the most recognizable man on Earth.

  He looked at Dean and started to weep.

  Dean opened his arms, offering a hug.

  El Presidente stepped forward, and then hesitated. It was too late. The cockroach suit was upon him, a thousand mouths demanding to be fed.

  Dean looked into El Presidente’s eyes, caught dilated pupils, animal-level fear.

  The eyes no longer promised Dean’s destruction, as they had from the static screen of his television. The world’s plan to erase Dean had failed; it was vaporized to dust, silt in sick Strontium-19 winds.

  The scarred sky above Dean grew darker, the air around him even colder. Dean shivered; El Presidente screamed.

  Dean reached up and warmed his hands around El Presidente’s throat. He felt the pulse under his hands drop to zero.

  The weeping had ended, and the feasting had begun.

  HOTEL ROT

  AIMEE BENDER

  They came to town in long cars, and gathered up all the birds they could find. With tall nets on stems and cleverly seeded traps. Then they stuffed them into one huge room at the biggest hotel for miles. Birds up to the ceiling, birds struggling in the middle, birds layering the floor in featherbeds. Clucking and quacking and trying to build a nest in the tile which was impossible. Trying to make nests of each other which was a bad idea. There was nowhere to fly, the air was so clogged with feathers and beaks, and so each bird flapped in place, or chirped at the floor, or wedged itself into the ceiling. With so much wing pollen in the air, it was very hard to breathe.

  Then they charged tickets to go in. Room of Birds, they called it, and they figured people might like to go and look. Twelve dollars for a day-long pass. But it really made you want to explode, when you put your eyes in there, all that flight stuffed inside a corporate auditorium. A few locals jumped at the chance but it was so tightly balanced in there that new bodies upset the equilibrium, and all the birds began shifting. Seagulls dropped out of the ceiling and bluejays panicked and banged against the wall and several robins flew into the window and the emu crumpled into a beige heap. Hysterical chickens ran back and forth on the floor.

  Next door. Get away from that infernal squawking. You can hear it from a mile away.

  Next door, they took all the flowers they could round up in a day, vans and wagons and twelve-wheeler trucks-full, every floral shop for miles wiped clean, and they crammed them all into the hotel’s second ballroom. Room of Flowers. There wasn’t space here for terra cotta pots or watering cans or cellophane, so all the tulips, gardenias, wisteria and morning glories were spread on the floor in a huge petal salad. All the roses made triangles with their stems. You paid your six dollars and went inside, and the rainbow spectrum softened the eyes. The whole room smelled so warm, like grandmother’s wrist, or July Italy, or a fresh towel on the morning you wake up with new hope. The smell was so intense it actually put color in the air. A couple of folks had asthma attacks and had to leave after a few vivid seconds.

  It was very beautiful, briefly.

  Most corporate hotels have at least three auditoriums, for cross-over conventions, and the third one here did not get passed over. First Fauna. Then Flora. Finally Bones. Here was an utterly static room and the only one that after several days wasn’t a rotting theatre of wings or petals. Bone Room stayed put. In it were the frames of everything you could imagine: femur, skull, bird wing, snake back, spine of woman, feet of antelope, shoulder of gorilla, tiny fish head. All packed in the room, all shades of white and brown, all ready to decay eventually but on a much slower time scale. From inside The Bone Room, you could actually catch a whiff of the flowers biodegrading next door, and hear those birds yelling and weeping in heaps next-next door. The Bone Room itself was silent, and smelled mildly of dirt. The people who paid their three dollars and went inside stayed for awhile and sat with the bones. Calming, it was. Humbling. Not unlike looking up at the wash of stars on a clear night. After a meditative trip to The Bone Room, you might walk in the bare gardens beneath the silent skies and think of the shifts in your life so far.

  The Bone Room managed to stay in business.

  Four days after Room of Flowers opened, it had to close. The inevitable wilt had turned that corporate auditorium into one huge compost heap. It smelled awful now, withery, and big sympathy for those janitors that had to scoop those piles upon piles of petals into their arms and dump them into the garbage. By the end of their day, all they could stand to sniff was something spicy and nonfloral, like salt or cayenne pepper. One janitor came home to his wife who had dabbed perfume on her throat to entice him into her arms and unfortunately for both of them, as soon as he caught a whiff of her, he had to run in the other direction as fast as he could and throw up, sighing, into the dirt. They had a long talk after she’d showered. He never picked a flower again. Very few were left growing anyway.

  I looked back into the Room of Birds on day five, and all the toucans and eagles and doves and pigeons and parrots and seagulls and hawks were dead. All the parakeets and robins and pelicans and bluejays and condors and terns and the two emus and the one ostrich. All seventy of the hummingbirds had slowed to a stop and were strewn like old rosebuds on the floor. All fourteen herons, in leggy piles. All five woodpeckers and both magnificent frigates. All dead. The room was now just a mass of multi-colored stilled feathers.

  This was the worst moment of all. Please write a letter to the world, and tell them to stop it.

  THE MOBY CLITORIS

  OF HIS BELOVED

  IAN WATSON & ROBERTO QUAGLIA

  Yukio was only a salaryman, not a company boss, but for years he’d yearned to taste whale clitoris sashimi. Regular whalemeat sashimi was quite expensive, but Yukio would need to work for a hundred years to afford whale clitoris sashimi, the most expensive status symbol in Japan.

  Much of Yukio’s knowledge of the world came from manga comic books or from anime movies which he watched on his phone while commuting for three hours every day. He treasured the image of a beautiful young ama diving woman standing on the bow of a whaling boat clad in a semi-transparent white costume and holding sparklingly aloft the special clitoridectomy knife. An icon far more wonderful than that of Kate Winslet at the front of the Titanic! Americans might have their Moby Dick, but Yukio’s countrymen (or at least the richest of them) had their Moby Clitoris Sashimi.

  The beautiful young ama woman would take a deep breath, dive, swim underneath a woman-whale, grasp her 8-centimeter clitoris, then with one razor-sharp slash cut off the clitoris and swim away very fast. On the deck of the whaler the crew
would wait for the ama to climb back aboard, her costume now see-through due to wetness.

  And then the whalers would harpoon and kill the whale, because it would be too cruel to leave a female whale alive after amputation of her clitoris. In this respect the Japanese differed very much from certain Islamic and African countries which cut off the clitorises of human girls, so that men should not feel inadequate about their own capacity for orgasms.

  Whenever the Japanese were criticised for hunting whales, it was the harvesting of clitorises which empowered them to continue. And of course Japan observed a strict clitoris quota, so that enough female whales would continue to copulate pleasurably and repopulate. Thus, while it was true that whale clitoridectomy directly pleasured only the richest individuals, every Japanese citizen who enjoyed eating whales also benefitted.

  This Yukio knew. Yet he still yearned to taste whale clitoris sashimi for himself! Most men have licked a woman’s clitoris, although probably they haven’t eaten one; but the organ of ecstasy of a female whale sliced thinly was said to possess a taste beyond words.

  When Yukio’s vacation came—the usual very hot and humid fortnight in August—he didn’t surrender his holiday back to the Nippon Real-Doll Corporation, as he had done in previous years, in the hope of more rapid promotion through the copyright department. Instead, he took a train from Tokyo (and then a bus) the hundred kilometers to Shirahama City where ama diving women lived. He would seduce an ama to love him. They would marry. She would get a job on a whaling boat. For him she would smuggle clitoris sashimi...