Tumour-Djinn

by Komor, Zoltan

  The powdered carbon of the night peels on to the world. The louver boards of nightmares spring open. The river finally spits out the long carried crocodile body onto the shore. A beautiful naked woman steps out from a bush, holding a sharp lance before her wild face, and she looks at the carcass. She hears stifled cries coming from the reptile. The woman discovers the stitches in the animal’s belly, and she cuts the wound open with the weapon. Then, she picks up the baby and smiles. The child keeps kicking the night with his soft feet, crying as loudly as he can. The woman offers the little boy one of her round, black breasts. The baby begins to suck the fat nipple, which turns into a sharp prickle between his lips.

  Far away, the Alligatorhunter sits on the shore on a throne made of reptile bones and skin. Sometimes he coughs up crocodile voodoo dolls and begins to poke them with a knife. The sounds of painful squirms fill the night. His long lost bride whispers in his head: “My dear husband! I walked so much in the other world that my legs have frayed. Now I’m crawling on my pelvis, which lessens and lessens, too. I’ve been dead for a long time; please leave the crocodiles in peace! I threw flower petals into their mouths. Sometimes, I turn into a tiny bird and peck out my own remains from their teeth. There’s a door in every crocodile, my love, and if you open and look behind it, you will find the god of this river!”

  The Alligatorhunter tries to understand her words, but he can’t listen. The ugly buzzing of the mosquitoes echoes in his skull. He looks around him and sees fish skeletons stuck in the slop. They glow with green lights in the dark like fallen, poisoned stars.

  THE OTHER HALF

  THE MAGICIAN HAS a crush on his beautiful assistant, but so far, he doesn’t ask her out on a date. Later, a great opportunity comes along, when the old “sawing a woman in half” trick goes somehow wrong, and he has to conciliate her. So he asks her out to dinner. The assistant says yes straight away, blushing. Now the only question is, which part of the woman the magician should take out tonight. He would seem too pushy if he chooses the lower half, so he eventually drives the upper half to a restaurant.

  There’s a strange, awkward mood around the table. Every bite of food the assistant swallows falls out from her bisected body. The magician tries to look away, kicking the undigested bits under the table, but soon, he can’t bare it any longer and takes the woman home. There, the assistant winks and tells him he can take her lower part into the bedroom, if he wants to. She doesn’t have to say it twice. After a wondrous night, the magician asks the upper part for another date.

  But as the weeks go by, he begins to get more and more bored by the upper half. After a few more dinners, he gets fed up with the food stains on his shoe. At the same time, he and the lower part of the woman gets along better and better in bed. The man arranges secret meetings with the lower half, but the other half presses for dates, too. Time to time, he carries the upper half to the restaurant. He orders some food and a bottle of wine, and then he excuses himself to the restroom. He sneaks home to the lower part before the torso would start putting food in her mouth. After an occasion like this, when he’s romping with the lower half in bed, someone knocks at his door.

  He dresses and opens it. To his surprise, it is the upper half of the assistant—she’s drunk, and the waiter carried her here. She clings on the man like a spider monkey.

  “We’re here for my pussy. I promised this guy he can have it.” She burps and nods at the waiter.

  “You can’t do this! We…” The magician’s look glances off the girl. “All right. She’s… it’s in the bedroom.”

  The excited waiter puts the woman’s upper side into an armchair, and then he rushes into the bedroom. A key turns in the lock, and the magician begins to pace with a resigned visage. He sighs, and then he fixes a glass of wine for the upper half of the girl. She drinks it. Some of the fluid flows out from underneath her, onto the furniture.

  “You have no heart,” says the woman, rolling the glass between her fingers. The magician tries to lighten the mood with a joke:

  “But I have. I keep it in one of my trick pockets.” He slips his fingers under his shirt. To his surprise, he feels something soft and hairy between his skin and the cloth. He pulls out a drowned rabbit. He shakes the dead animal, and then he throws it into the corner of the room and fills a glass for himself.

  THE WOMB-TAILOR

  THAT DAY, THE tailor boy is called again to help with another birth. According to the elders, the evil horses from the sky were responsible for the black magic that impregnated every female in the village all at once on a mysterious night. And it only took two weeks for everyone to deliver the fruit of their wombs.

  Normally, an old, blind lady helped out with the laborsin the village, but after a flaming thorn bush jumped in her window and killed the old witch, the job was left to the tailor boy, who had some smattering of childbirths. But what surprises awaited this young man! A celestial curse-pregnancy is never like a usual: the girls began to give birth to the strangest things possible. One woman delivered a sewing machine to the world that stitched the feathers to the birds, the birds to the sky, and finally the sky to the souls of lovers. Another girl wasn't this lucky, a giant kitchen knife was growing inside her womb, and when the time came, it sliced her birth canal in two. Fortunately, the tailor boy always had some needle and yarn in his pocket, but after some time he decided it will be much easier for everyone if he starts with a caesarean section. So he began slicing up the girls. Once, balloons filled with helium flew out from an open wound, another time, he found a large gaping catfish in the uterus. It was a nasty job picking it out, the skin was so sloppy that the fish slipped through the boy’s fingers, splashing back into the bloody hole over and over again. He had to knot a hook onto a string, and fish out the animal, while the mother was shouting in his ears,"Look at the little bastard, ouch, he has a moustache just like his father’s, I tell ya', ouch! But how could it be his? I open my legs for him only twice a year, just when he's dancing on the ceiling with the pain of blue balls! Ouch! But first, I order him to bring mirrors! Lots of lots of mirrors! So he can admire my body from every angle! And after he praises every inch of me, I order him to count all of my hairs. So the whole procedure takes about four days! Ouch! Oh no, no, I haven't opened my thighs for him this year, it can't be his brat, I assure ya!"

  "Stop squirming so much, or I'll accidently leave this hook in you, it will be a fine job pissing it out!" growls the tailor boy, then he looks aside and his eyes make a teacup explode.

  That night, they cook the fish for supper, and the villagers put their heads together over the soup to discuss this whole birth situation.

  "The Celestial Stable!" whispers an old woman. "From where the evil spirits come! At first glimpse, they are just like any other horse you ever saw. But if you give them a second look and stare in to their eyes… you’ll see the melting faces of people, who's souls they’ve stolen. If you’d cut their skin with a knife, screams would ooze out from those wounds… Beware the horses from the sky!"

  The saw-teeth of goosebumps. You could cut out a tree with the children. The villagers stave off every horse from the neighborhood, letting them out from the stables, not even looking into their eyes anymore, they beat them with sticks, watching them disappearin the line of the horizon. The village border now is full of sauntering stallions rooting around in the snow with their snorting noses, eating the pages of thrown out books, and sad ghosts chase each other in the clouds of their breath.

  The next day, the tailor boy is called again, to help with another birth. They lead the boy into a room, where a fifteen years old girl is bathing in her own sweat. Her parents are standing next to her bed, crunching their skinny hands, broken butterfly wings fall out from under their nails.

  "Don’t worry! The procedure is easy, like making wine from shirt-sleeves." Says the tailor boy, and with his self-confidence, he has already won the heart of the parents. The mother boils some water, the father takes out a bottle of palinka.

&n
bsp; The tailor boy looks at the girl's giant belly, saying, "Place your bets, folks, I say it will be a bucket full of stones! Or a cage, with a mad rooster in it!"

  But no more jokes, the boy starts to work: his scissors fly out of his haversack, they grow and grow, and when the instrument is large enough, the tailor sits on it, riding it like a horse, yelling, "Giddy up, free that child!"

  He flies up and down in the room while the mother claps a jolly folk rhythm. The father pours some flaming alcohol into his daughter's mouth, who begins to yell, "Countess, oh my dear countess, you left your beautiful hair in the cabinet last summer! I preserved it for you, blowing my nose into it only once or twice! Oh, the frame of mind is more than good, the bathtub is full of prayer books, can't wait to go and wash my sins down!"

  "No time for illusions, let’s do it quick!" the boy encourages the young mother, cutting her open. The blood sprays biblical scenes onto the wall.

  "Oh, but it's empty!" yells the tailor angrily, his hand moving around in the hole. "There's just thin air in it. What a scam!"

  The father slaps his knees, saying, "Maybe the baby’s invisible! Don't forget, we’re dealingwith black magic!"

  "Maybe, maybe." murmurs the tailor, but he doesn't really believe in it. "Well, you shouldn't take the risk! You should raise the child, or just pretend that you are raising something. Rather raise the nothing, than leave something unseen unraised."

  Cotton balls gather in swarms, like flies, they buzz, drinking up all the blood in the room they can find. The family promises a meal for the tailor boy, and while the food boils, they sit him down on to an old armchair. As soon as he puts down his butt, the furniture begins to cry. Jumping up, the tailor finds a large bulge under him, so he takes out his scissors, and cuts up the textile. Inside he discovers a crying pink baby.

  "Ah, here's that prodigal son!" he cheers, fishing out the child. He brings him to the young mother. "Neither a bucket of stones nor a cage with a rooster, it's a real boy, I tell ya!'

  He hands him over, the tears of the girl washes the baby. The newborn keeps reaching his fingers, he hooks his eyes into her mother's gaze. It must be her imagination, but the girl catches a glimpse of her own melting, screaming face in the baby's pupil.

  After eating, the tailor boy sits on his giant scissors. He lifts and flies away over the snowy roofs, yelling, "Behold, here comes the womb tailor! I'll nose out every fetus, and throw them into the deep water of the world!"

  A red swarm of used cotton balls follow him.

  In the village border, loud neighs scare away the crows that leave their thin legs standing in the snow. A brown horse arrives, snorting angrily. It ascends, and disappearsamong the grey winter clouds.

  That night, giant sperm cells rain from the sky. Like long white worms, they squirm on the roofs, then crawl inside the houses to impregnate the sleeping girls.

  February. February. All stillness is temporary.

  SLAVES IN A CLOSET

  THE GIRL DISCOVERS that the boy she moved in with is secretly a slaveholder. While hovering, she finds a coffee plantation under the bed. And when she wants to iron the sheets, she discovers thin, beaten Negros in the closet. She realizes this is something she must discuss with her boyfriend.

  Soon, her lover arrives home – riding a muscular thoroughbred, a whip sways back and forth on his side.

  They sit at the kitchen table to drink their coffee, and the girl tells her boyfriend about her discovery. She also says, that she can’t commit her heart to a slaveholder; her parents raised her as a liberal. The boy listens for a while, then he asks: “But the coffee’s good, isn’t it?”

  The girl wants to say something, but she can’t deny that.

  “Maybe they would do the cleaning and the washing too, if I would teach them.” adds the boy. The girl doesn’t say a word. She just drinks her coffee. She stays mute for the next couple of days. She shuts her ears at nights, when her boyfriend crawls out from the bed, and disappears in the closet. But still, she can hear the crying, and the cracking sound of the whip.

  In the morning, she pours fresh beans into the coffee-grinder. It must be her imagination, but she sees the coffee beans as tiny crying Negro babies. Her eyes glimmer with tears, when she turns the machine on. Then she begins to cry, as the sound of bone cracking fills the room.

  INTERLUDE 2: GLOOMY SUNDAY

  NO ONE THOUGHT the celebrity chef of the weekend cookery program was really the leader of a suicide cult. Just after finishing a sauce she showed the housewives how to stick their heads into a gas oven, to get relief from everyday pain, and thousands of husbands found their wives dead in the kitchen. Everyone started to suspect.

  But of course even suicide cults aren’t what they used to be. You join one, waiting for them to carry you into a field where a big bald man walks around with a six-shooter between his praying hands, kissing cyanide capsules into your mouth. Instead, they all just sit in armchairs, eating fast food, not doing any exercise, saying that the most efficient way to kill yourself is eating microwave popcorn. Even a shot to the head isn’t always effective. Sometimes the bullet doesn’t go through the bone; it just runs around inside the skull and flies out the other side. That’s why better schools teach children that they should look around carefully before blowing their brains out.

  “I’ve seen many people who weren’t brave enough to pull the trigger, but have never seen anyone eat popcorn with a shaking hand.” A fat cult follower burps, proudly showing his terrible cholesterol results. The company cancels the cooking program, desperate housewives exchange old recipes on the black market, while a twelve year old girl is interviewed on a new talk show. She was raped by her father and the blood on her blanket formed the face of Christ. The dad hugs his little girl, an APPLAUSE sign lights up, but the viewers switch to another channel and the ratings drop. The talk show host opens a tiny door in his microphone and fishes out a cyanide capsule. The channel gave it to him; it’s all in the contract, you see.

  After a week, they start a reality show starring the suicide cult members, so we can watch how they poison themselves day after day. Our new, lazy spiritual leaders burp up new slogans, for instance “Life is the new suicide.” Well, Sunday’s programs always sucked, so no one stays at home. A small crowd gathers around McDonald’s to watch the young girl marry her father. They pass around French fries and cola, saying it’s the body and the blood of The Savior (and yes, it’s sugar free). They remember Christ, who was strong enough not to swallow the cyanide capsule hidden in his crucifix. The moment we’ve all been awaiting finally arrives. The voice of a bored worker comes from

  Ronald McDonald’s plastic statue: “Do you take this man to be your husband?” The girl with the bloody blanket on her head looks at her father, and when she says no, the crowd is outraged, picking up pavers from the parking lot. The good old stoning lures some hungry cameras.

  Stones fly like the bullets God once shot into his head, but didn’t kill him—they just ran around inside his skull and flew out the other side. They’re floating now in space—we’ve overpopulated one of them, and now we’re searching for a new one. Our little robots carry HD cameras on them as we switch and switch between planets. Then we switch to another channel, where an infomercial pitchman tries to sell us a new detergent. To demonstrate its effectiveness, he washes out the blood-Christ from the little girl’s white blanket. Then he advises us that we should also try drinking it, to get relief from everyday pain. Who would have ever suspected this nice infomercial pitchman?

  WET DREAMS

  THE GIRL IS watching her sleeping boyfriend at night. Suddenly she discovers a small door on the boy’s forehead. When she opens it, and peeps inside, she notices laughing girls, running on a beach totally nude. She becomes jealous, and starts to shake her partner. As she jolts the sleeping boy, the little nude girls fall out from the boy's forehead, on to the bed, and then onto the floor. The girl treads them with anger.

  Eventually, the boy and the girl reconcile,
and they make love, while little red puddles are drying on the carpet.

  HORSES FROM THE SKY ATE HER SUGAR LUMP EYES

  THE GIRL STANDS at the window with a slingshot in her hand. She scratches out her eyeballs and shoots them into the clouds, yelling, "Go! Go and see the world!"

  Her eyes fly over the snowy roofs of the village, where birds stand aside to give them way. Finally, the eyeballs slam into the side of a sauntering cow in the village border. They sink deep under its skin, into its flesh, and a painful moo tears up the grey clouds on the sky.

  "What a prisoner I am in this ugly house!" sighs the blind girl, cowering to the ground, hitting the old boards of the wooden floor with her weak little fists, trying to cry without eyes. "This whole village is just a cage. The world just grows and grows outside, while I’m shrinking here."

  Hearing the noise, her stooped, old mother steps into the room. When she glimpses the deep, red pits where her daughters deep blue eyes use to glint, she screams: "Oh, you fool! Your beautiful eyepearls! Come on, stand up, you'll catch pneumonia down there! Lizards will build a nest into your throat, I tell you!"

  "Enough, mother! Stop telling me what to do!" mutters the girl, but she's too weak to resist. Soon, her father arrives too and puts her in the bed, blanketing her.

  "Stay there, young lady!" groans her dad. "You know you are such a weak little child, if you would go to the kitchen, the spoons would crawl under your skin! If you would step on to the doorsill, maggots would bite into your toenails! Ugly germs lurk in this world, and even dewy air can destroy your beautiful paper-skin!”