Awful, Ohio

by Sirloin Furr

Baltazar and Troy walked down the sidewalk, weaving through the foot traffic. Baltazar’s eyes scattered wildly through the crowds, searching for their next donor. Sitting on a cold bench was a man without a home, dressed in ragged clothes. He was wearing a wool jacket that was covering his torn flannel shirt, all in an attempt to keep him warm. His face was coated in a scruffy beard that patched his face. The man was accompanied by a shopping cart filled with aluminum cans, which he was very protective of, guarding it with his life. He muttered obscenities at anyone that got too close to his cart, fearing that someone was going to attempt to take away his only material, as he was prepared to die for the only belongings that he had. The man was filthy and desired by no one.

  “Perfect,” responded Baltazar. Baltazar stopped walking and grabbed a hold of Troy, bringing him close to his mouth, so that Troy could hear his whispers. Troy was almost tickled by the rolling R’s, but fended off the distraction by listening to the direction offered by Baltazar, taking his job seriously.

  “OK Troy, this is what you are going to do. You are going to sit down beside that individual on the bench, and here are the lines that I need you to read to him,” said Baltazar. “Just convince him that this actually happened to him. Make your presentation as believable as possible so that we are able to get authentic reactions.”

  Troy grabbed the script from Baltazar, and read the lines. He was reading them out loud so that he was able to remember them better. Troy then looked over at the potential donor on the bench. He was a scruffy man with grizzled hairs, dressed in clothes that have never been washed. His bald cranium was freckled with liver spots that formulated from the filth that covered his body.

  “Look over here again and I’ll wring your eyes from your skull!” screamed the man to an innocent bystander, strolling past.

  Troy then looked back at Baltazar, and said, “and you are sure that this is the guy that you want me to read these lines to?”

  “Troy, we don’t have time for your questioning! Just do as I say. I am the director, and I know what I am doing. This is going to be brilliant, as long as you do what you are supposed to do.” Baltazar held his head high, rolling his R’s quickly and authoritatively, proud of his work, and very unwilling to listen to anyone that would question his vision.

  Troy went along with it. Baltazar stowed behind a mailbox, with his pencil ready to record the conversation, watching Troy embrace the donor. The donor was on high alert, sitting on a bench, listening to the foot traffic, watching the cars pass by. Beside the donor was an empty bag that used to contain bread. The bread had been used to feed the surrounding birds. The birds had consumed all of the bread. But the bread bowel didn’t sit in their system for too long, creating a moat of bird shit surrounding the bench, protecting the donor and his valuables. It was a mode of defense that couldn’t keep Troy away, as perseverance pushed him through the thick material. He carefully approached the man on the bench, gently sitting down as if he were trying to catch a pigeon. The homeless man was dressed terribly, smelling strong of filth and booze. His shopping cart was filled with empty bottles that he had been collecting to trade in for currency, so that he would be able to buy more trash. Baltazar had selected this donor with delicacy, hoping that this donor would react strongly towards the content which Troy was going to recite.

  Troy stared at the donor. The homeless man stared back at Troy, making eye contact, forcing him to acknowledge Troy’s existence.

  “I can’t believe what they did to you?,” started Troy, dramatically, cringing his face in fabricated dismay. The offensive odor of the man encroached Troy’s face like a close-fisted punch, making the required mannerisms easy to produce.

  The homeless man kept staring at Troy. The man wasn’t sure how exactly to respond, and decided not to. The donor threw the empty bag into the shopping cart with the aluminum cans, and was ready to leave the bench. Troy panicked, looking over to Baltazar, stowed behind the mailbox for help. “Keep going,” motioned Baltazar with his hands, nervous that Troy was about to let another donor slip away.

  Troy cleared his throat, hoping that speaking more prominently would get the donor’s attention. “Your condition. Your poor, helpless condition. How could they have taken advantage of someone so innocent and pure, those monsters!”

  The donor stopped, pondered the statement, and turned back around to face Troy. He wasn’t exactly sure what was going on, but the empathy was comforting. But he wasn’t sure why he was receiving it.

  “What are you talking about?” questioned the donor.

  “You can’t be serious. You don’t remember a thing?” responded Troy, dramatically.

  “Huh? Remember what?” asked the homeless donor, defensively, confused that there was something that he should know about but didn’t.

  Troy belted out at the top of his lungs, rhetorically, “You goddamn bastards!” screaming towards the sky while theatrically shaking his fist like a cliché.

  The donor was still confused. He wasn’t sure what Troy was talking about, and he wasn’t sure what Troy’s intentions were. The donor remained protective of his belongings, as he kept a close eye on the shopping cart and its contents, thinking that Troy may be a gypsy and attempt to take them away.

  Troy looked back at the donor. He rearranged his face so that it looked concerned. The donor read the concerned face and responded, “What happened that I should remember?”

  “Good god man! Don’t you remember a thing?” screamed Troy.

  “Remember what?” recited the donor, forgetfully.

  “Those bastards must have erased your mind,” recited Troy, scientifically.

  “Who erased my mind?”

  “Good god. It’s much worse than I thought,” responded Troy, rhetorically, now staring at the ground. His shoe was smothered in bird shit that perseverance had carried him through. Troy looked back up to the donor, rearranging his face, feigning with regret, stating:

  “The aliens. They must have erased your mind. If you don’t remember a thing, then they must have erased it all!”

  The donor was even more confused.

  “Huh? What aliens? What are you talking about?” Responded the donor, beginning to think that Troy was a nut.

  “A few nights ago, you and I were abducted by alien invaders. I don’t know how they got you, but they removed me from my home in the middle of the night. I woke up aboard their space ship, where they had me locked in a cage. I was naked and cold. And you were laying on an operating table. I’m not sure what they were doing to you, but I was sure as hell happy they were doing it to you and not me. But they kept injecting you with something. I did not have any clue as to what it was, but every time you were injected, your hair would reverse back into your head, and then grow out of your face in the shape of a beard, which caused all those liver spots on top of your head. You used to look much different before they performed their experiments on you.”

  The donor was attracted to the story. For a long time, he had believed that something incorrect had happened to him, as he could never remember how he was in his current, homeless situation. He took a long swig from a concealed bottle of gin, feeling that he had been mistreated at some point in his life, and that he had deserved much better. He responded to Troy, intrigued to discover some answers.

  “What did the aliens look like?” asked the donor, unleashing a fetid gas from the catacombs of his stomach.

  Troy was caught off guard by the question. Baltazar didn’t apply any descriptions for the aliens, leaving Troy unprepared for a rebuttal. He was beginning to sweat, unsure of what to say. He started tapping his foot, shaking off the flakes of bird shit that had dried up on his sneaker. But then he remembered the direction of Baltazar, and he belted out, “line!”

  The donor remained in a state of concern, after hearing the information regarding the alien abduction, as he anxiously waited for Troy’s insight. But Troy remained sitting, listening carefully for Baltazar’s lead before he could offer more information to the h
omeless donor. Then the faint response of, “improvise” could be heard from the background, bouncing into Troy’s ears, landing in his brain. The donor ignored the background noise, as he was still focused on Troy’s response, hoping to get some more answers.

  Unprepared, Troy began to improvise his response:

  “Well, the aliens were small and green. They had ant-like antennas protruding from their massive foreheads, which would always twitch when they would communicate with one another. They had mouths, which were shaped like the mouth of a leach. And there were a lot of them.”

  Troy was hoping that the donor wouldn’t turn around, as Troy was staring at a billboard that advertised the bug exhibit in the Awful, Ohio Museum, containing pictures of a variety of insects and annelids.

  The donor took another swig of his gin, then tossed the empty container into the shopping cart. “What did the aliens do to me?”

  “I don’t know exactly what they were doing to you,” responded Troy confidently, “but from what I could see, it was the most vile, distasteful, and despicable thing that any person could go through. Considering the things that were being jabbed into you and everything that was being taken out, I’m amazed that you’re even still alive! But I guess it’s better that you can’t remember any of the trauma that they put you through.”

  The donor began to feel around his body, nervously inspecting everything, making sure that everything he could remember was still in place.

  “My body does feel different. I mean, things seem to be off slightly. They must not have put everything back they way it was before they took me apart,” said the donor.

  “Yeah, well, like I said, you looked much better before they took you apart and pieced you back together,” recited Troy, thinking of Humpty Dumpty nursery rhymes.

  “Do you know why they were doing any of this?” asked the donor.

  “Well, one of the aliens, with his big antennas, did approach me after they were done doing whatever it was they were doing to you. They told me they were analyzing your body to discover its composition. They wanted to know our weaknesses. The alien informed me that they were planning a full-forced attack onto Awful, Ohio, to destroy all of the city and everyone that inhabited the city!” Troy paused, for dramatic effect. “Then the next thing I could remember, I was brought back to my home. I remembered looking out of the window, watching the alien space craft fly off into the sky until I could no longer see it. It made the sounds of a whistle. That’s when I started searching for you. You and I have an obligation! We have been presented with information that we must use to save our brethren of Awful, Ohio! Everyone around us is in grave danger, and you and I are the only ones that can save everyone! We must warn as many people that we can of the devastation that is coming!”

  The donor was shocked to hear what he was hearing. His body felt different, his head was hurting, and he couldn’t remember how he got to where it was that he got to. Everything was beginning to make sense. Aliens did abduct him, erasing his memory, transforming him into his current state of drunken, homelessness, dissecting his body and then putting it all back together again. How else could he explain his current disposition? His emotions swelled with fear. He was scared and nervous that the aliens would come back to get him. He touched one of his liver spots, thinking it was a wiretap that allowed the aliens to monitor his every move. He began to scratch wildly at the liver spot, scraping it off his head in little, bloody pieces, thinking that he didn’t want them to find him ever again.

  “I haven’t done anything to deserve this, brother,” said the homeless donor, reaching out to Troy for comfort. “Everything in my life was going great. I had a job that paid, I lived in a respectable apartment, and I even had a reliable car. But then all of a sudden, this wretched curse attacked me from the sky!” The feigning donor stared up towards the sky, shaking an angry fist towards whatever pagan deity he believed delivered the monstrous aliens upon him. Troy listened intently, caringly.

  For a moment, Troy had forgotten his purpose, as he was overtaken by sympathy, relating deeply with the homeless man, as he watched him shaking his fist towards the sky. Troy stepped out of character, and related to the homeless man, as Troy envisioned himself shaking his own fist into the sky, in disgust, expressing anger and resentment towards the sun. Troy wanted to express to the homeless man the cruelties that he too had experienced from the malicious intentions from above. Troy wanted to share his emotions, to relate with the devastation that the homeless man has endured, just like the devastation that Troy had endured from the exposure of the sun.

  “I know what you mean, brother. None of us have deserved this! This wretched curse that emerged from the sky, breathing down upon us, threatening our existence and disrupting our peace!” recited Troy, honestly, forgetting that he was speaking to a donor. These were not words from the script, nor anything that Baltazar had suggested to Troy to converse about. But Baltazar listened from afar, still scribbling every word that was emitted from the conversation. Troy moved closer to the homeless man, forgetting that he was a donor, forgetting that he was supposed to be acting. Troy wrapped his arms around the homeless man, hugging him lovingly, caring deeply for the innocent being that he was, and despising the wretched curse that had disposed them both to the position that they were in.

  “Don’t worry, brother,” responded Troy, caringly. “It will all be over soon.” Troy and the homeless man began rocking one another gently. The homeless man began to cry, as he had never been treated so kindly.

  “You are a good man, brother,” responded the homeless man, as he and Troy released one another. “I will keep you in my prayers, and I will do everything I can to inform Awful, Ohio of the wretched devastation that the alien forces are planning to impose onto Awful, Ohio.” And the homeless man grabbed his cart, pushing his way through the swamp of bird shit, parting through the foot traffic that eagerly avoided contact, as he shouted, “the aliens are coming. They’ve already ripped me apart and pieced me back together again, to study our weaknesses! We all must evacuate from Awful, Ohio because the aliens are coming! The aliens are coming to destroy us all!”

  Baltazar remained behind the mailbox, scribbling down everything as quickly as he could, fearful that he would forget the scene. But he began to glow with joy, as he had successfully recorded everything that his actor and his donor had authentically simulated. Baltazar was breathing hysterically, believing that what he had just witnessed would win every prestigious film award, and even be the reason to create more prestigious film awards, because of the script’s high literary endowment.

  “That was so authentic. Real emotions, real feelings, real everything! This script is going to be so fantastic! There is no way that anyone will turn down this script. We’re going to have offers from every major film studio. This is so great!”

  Troy heard Baltazar taking notes of everything from behind the mailbox. Troy had then remembered that he was supposed to be acting, and that the homeless man was supposed to be a donor. Troy was worried that he screwed up again, injecting his emotions into the scene. Troy ran from the bench, over to Baltazar. Baltazar was moving erratically, uncontrollably enthusiastic for the results.

  “How was it?” asked Troy, nervous that he was going to be lashed at again.

  “It was perfect! This is going to be the greatest script ever created. I truly mean that, Troy. I mean, the emotion and feelings were so real. This script is going to be so authentic that we will have offers from every major production studio!” assured Baltazar.

  “Well, here, let me read it,” begged Troy, getting just as excited. Troy read through what Baltazar recorded, and was delighted to read how authentic and genuine the script was sounding.

  “Here, let’s keep this going,” said Troy, handing the script back to Baltazar, overwhelmed by how grandiose the results were turning out to be. “I’m so excited, that I just don’t want to stop!”

  Baltazar readily agreed, as he too did not want to stop the progress. T
roy Slushy and Baltazar Garcia continued walking through center city of Awful, Ohio. The sun was still strong, exposing more donors, as Troy recited more lines of alien abductions and invasions, convincing more donors of alien abductions and invasions, as Baltazar eagerly recorded all of the responses that the donors were donating.

  Troy Slushy and Baltazar Garcia strolled through Awful, Ohio, recording their script, following their purpose, and creating the script using the ambitions manifested from the aesthetic caliber, as the walls of center city of Awful, Ohio began to echo with the profound declaration of “the aliens are coming!” from the deceived donors offering authentic lines for Troy’s and Baltazar’s script.

  Chapter 14

  As fate would have it.