DOA III

by Bentley Little

  Geoff panics and reaches for his cell phone typing in 9-1-1. “Sir, what’s your emergency?”

  “I’ve been stabbed. The knife just stabbed—”

  But he realizes there’s no blood. Geoff retracts the knife from his foot and pulls off the sneaker. Miraculously, he’s unscathed. Not even the skin is broken. The knife fell directly between his big toe and second toe. Had the knife fallen just a fraction of a degree differently, he would have lost a digit. He hangs up on the operator. The iPhone beeps: 350,000 subscribers.

  The spike in subscribers encourages Geoff. He collects himself, holds the knife close to his face. “What the fuck was that?” he yells at the blade. “You coward, you don’t even have the courage to break my skin.” Geoff laughs and hurls the knife across the room at the wall.

  “And you…” He turns to the banana. “Don’t think you’re getting off easy. Guess what? I’m not going to eat you. So who’s sorry now?” He throws the banana. It splatters and drips down the wall landing in a messy heap on the floor. For a moment, the walls seem to darken. Geoff rubs his eyes. “Screw this kitchen.” He looks around the kitchen and his eye lands on a magnetized menu hanging on the fridge. “I’m ordering out.”

  Twenty minutes later, an elderly man delivers Geoff’s dinner. The poor guy is dripping from the rain, his hands shake, he’s a little hunch-backed. He might be in his 70s; certainly way too old to be running around late at night in the rain delivering heavy bags of food.

  Geoff grunts and grabs the bag. He hates old people. Even his parents. They’re out of touch with the times, technology, and they never understand what he says. “What?” “Huh, I didn’t catch that?” Disgusted, Geoff only tips the sad old man a dollar.

  Geoff tosses aside the cheap disposable wood chopsticks. He takes out a pair of silver chopsticks someone gave him and Isabella for their wedding. He holds them up to the webcam. Behind him, the noodles dangling from his mouth cast monstrous shadows against the back wall of his office. If you squint, the shadows almost look like mutated octopus tentacles swarming around Geoff’s head, ready to attack at any moment.

  The iPhone beeps alerting Geoff that his subscribers have fallen to 300,000. The internet has spoken, and watching Geoff eat dinner is boring. Geoff scowls.

  The noodles slip between Geoff’s smoothly polished chopsticks. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Geoff stabs at his noodles with his chopsticks. “All for show? I hope you are embarrassed. You are a failure as chopsticks.” The chopsticks roll off the table and onto the floor, as if their feelings have been hurt. “Boo hoo, I’m so sorry, did I upset you, chopsticks?”

  The day it all changed

  The next morning, Geoff wakes up and takes his time getting out of bed. Still lying down, he checks his YouTube stream status from his iPhone. He’s smugly pleased to see he’s gained 2,700 subscribers. Geoff turns his head to a webcam positioned above his bed and addresses his followers: “Good morning, you lucky people.”

  Geoff downs a couple extra Five-Hour Energy bottles to rev himself up for the big day. He tries on one newly pressed Anderson & Shephard custom tailored shirt after another. He can’t find one that is exactly right. He drops each discarded shirt on the floor in a heap for his maid to throw out later.

  In between shirts, Geoff admires his naked chest in the mirror. He looks into the camera: “I’m building up my body, ladies; come back next week when it’s bigger and better. When I break a million subscribers, I’ll show you my perfect ass.” It takes a couple wardrobe changes before Geoff is satisfied. He double checks his handsome reflection in the mirror, cat calls himself, and walks to the front door.

  Geoff reaches for his keys. But they aren’t in the sterling silver engraved dish by the door where he left them. “What the fuck.” Geoff turns the lid of a decorative jar over looking for the keys. “I don’t have time for this!” He looks inside a drawer. Nothing. Geoff pats down his pockets. Nothing. Frustration mounts. Then Geoff spots the keys peeking out from beneath a Chinese menu, just inches from the silver dish.

  “You low class, rough cut pieces of base metal!” He wants to scream more, but he is a little concerned that the keys were out of place. He wonders if someone is fucking with him. Did Isabella have a way to get into his apartment? Would she pay someone to come in and mess with his stuff while he slept? It would explain a lot, but he doesn’t have time to worry about it now.

  Geoff swipes the keys. For a second, he thinks he hears the faint sound of laughter. He pauses to listen and looks around him, skeptical. The indistinct laughter stops; it must be the keys jingling. He storms out.

  Geoff’s big day in the office

  Geoff puts the finishing touches on the uniforms deal contract. This is the last step before he prints and messengers the document to the bank to seal the deal. But before he hits print, the computer freezes. All his cursing, banging on the keyboard, rolling around the mouse, pounding the restart button are for naught. The pinwheel of doom spins in front of him at the center of the screen.

  Eventually the document goes through to the printer. “Finally!” Geoff storms from his desk, and heads for the door. BANG! Geoff is on the floor. Stunned, it takes Geoff a minute to figure out what happened. He tripped on something, but what? He looks down, and the horse bit buckle of his Gucci shoes has gotten tangled up in the wire spaghetti mess under his desk.

  In the workroom, Geoff kicks the printer when he finds his pages have not finished printing. “Why are you so goddamn slow? I could hand write each memo faster than you piece of shit machine.” The printer chugs along, one line of text at a time, slowly inching out a single page at a time. Geoff doesn’t have the patience. He bangs the printer’s side. This achieves nothing, of course. He bangs the printer harder. Suddenly the printer clicks, it’s as if it’s shifting gears. With a whirr, it speeds up!

  “I’m brilliant! I’m a genius! I fixed you!” Geoff triumphs. The printer whirls harder, spits out paper faster and faster and faster! It’s literally spitting out paper, and it’s flying out of the copy machine with such speed and force that it is slicing Geoff. He can hardly swat it away. Geoff screams; no one pays attention. A new associate hears the screams from his cubicle. He figures it’s just Geoff, pissed again and being destructive in the copy room. The associate puts his earbuds in to block out the noise and returns to a NSFW but hilarious video his buddy just sent him.

  Geoff struggles to stop the sharp papers flying at his face and body; he is literally covered in paper cuts. He bats his arms furiously, and tumbles out the door into the hallway.

  Freaked out and shaken up, Geoff leaves the office and heads for home. He catches a glimpse of himself in the reflection of the revolving glass door as he leaves his office building. His face is cut up and a bruise is starting to swell over his left eye from when he fell down in his office. Geoff pushes through the revolving doors. But SLAM! He falls again. His suit jacket has gotten caught in the door, and as it rotates, it’s pulling Geoff with it. He yells for the person exiting the building to stop pushing, but the lady is deep in Instagram, checking how many likes she’s received. Head down, focused on her iPhone, the lady doesn’t see Geoff stuck. He tries to bang on the glass but his suit, sucked into the revolving door, has become a straitjacket, and now it’s sucking his entire body closer and closer to the blade-like revolving doors.

  Geoff is inches from being squashed in the revolving door. He drops to the floor and tears his suit in two, freeing himself. Just barely. Jesus, he could have died. He lies on the ground. Inches away, the revolving door whooshes by and spits out the woman. She looks at Geoff, disgusted. “Get a job, you drunk,” she mutters at Geoff as she steps over his body. “The homeless in this city have no shame.”

  Later at home

  In the hallway outside his apartment, Geoff puts on a brave face for his webcam. Everything is going to be okay. He’s home now. His castle. He puts his stuff down and walks into the kitchen. Geoff takes another step and his foot lands on the discarded ba
nana peel. WHOOSH his feet swing up. His head slams down. Were it not for the hollow CRACK his skull makes as it slams onto the marble floor, this slapstick moment would offer his webcast viewers some comic relief. But there is nothing funny about a concussion of this severity. Geoff is knocked out for a moment and totally winded. On the bright side, his subscribers pop up to 500,000, an all-time high.

  When Geoff comes to, he stares at the ceiling stunned. What just happened? He slowly stands up and staggers forward, dizzy. He needs some water; he is parched and weak. Geoff stumbles toward the fridge and opens the door. Inside he looks for a bottle of water; he pushes aside last night’s leftover Chinese noodles and knocks over a set of chopsticks. The chopsticks roll out of the bag from the fridge, then another pair of chopsticks roll out, and another.

  Geoff can feel energy in the room. Something electric, tingly, and dark. He senses the darkness though all the lights are on. The chopsticks pick themselves off the ground. They appear to be levitating. In the front of the pack are his polished silver sticks.

  Woozy, Geoff steps back; he’s hallucinating, has to be. The chopsticks distribute themselves in mid-air, from six inches above ground to about six feet above ground. Two speed toward Geoff and plunge themselves into his nostrils. The chopsticks dive deep into his sinus cavity, spewing fluid out of his eyes.

  Geoff reels back and turns toward a nearby webcam. To his audience, he looks like a walrus with chopsticks for fangs. FLACK FLACK FLACK FLACK; the rest of the pack impale Geoff like a voodoo doll. Totally caught off guard, and still unsure if this is the concussion speaking or if it’s real, Geoff struggles to remove the chopsticks. They are deep. He pulls one or two out. Blood drips down where his skin has been pierced. The iPhone beeps: 550,000 subscribers.

  The walls of his apartment seem to be alive. They breathe in and out, seething with a vengeance, with worth. Geoff stumbles—he’s got to get out of the kitchen. As he reaches the door, his eyes land on the magnetic knife holder above the stove. The magnet is empty. But instead of worrying about that, his attention hones in on a noise humming in the air. Vibrations from somewhere in the house? The noise intensifies, louder; he holds his hands to his head to make it stop, but it strengthens and becomes a loud jingling, louder, louder louder LOUDER. SWOSH! Geoff is blindsided by a set of objects flying towards his head.

  Geoff’s keys have freed themselves from the ring in order to launch the offensive. One sharp metal key burrows deep into each of Geoff’s ear canals and twists through the wax as if opening a lock. The pain alone is acute, but what makes it truly unbearable is the grinding noise so loud and so close to Geoff’s inner ear. Geoff gags as the keys swivel into the eustachian tubes that connect his ear with the back of his nose and throat and unlock a stream of mucus. The keys pierce the eardrum membrane and blood explodes from his ears.

  Word is spreading on the internet about the Tromatic scene unfolding on Geoff’s webcast. Viewers are tuning in and sharing with their friends, setting off a viral chain of new subscribers. House of Worth is climbing the charts as more than 700,000 people tune in. If only Geoff weren’t distracted by the torture.

  A Japanese knife flies in and pierces Geoff’s arm, cutting deep through veins and bone. Hoarsely he calls for help. Geoff looks for his iPhone. It’s fallen a few feet from him when he fell. Geoff crawls his remaining free hand along the floor reaching for his cell phone, but his wrist is stuck. It won’t budge. In fact, the more Geoff’s tries to pry his wrist up off the ground, more of his arm becomes stuck to the floor. The entire floor has become an enormous glue trap.

  Geoff opens his mouth to scream, but before he can get a word out, the fridge door opens, and from the dark interior a banana cream pie is catapulted out. It splatters onto Geoff’s face, silencing him with the thick cream filling.

  Geoff’s final breaths are near; he is past the ability of calling for help. He isn’t even strong enough to wonder who will find him in this position. How long will it be? Surely he will be dead; will the stench of his rotting carcass be what drives a local neighbor to discover him? Geoff fades in and out of consciousness, still stuck to the floor.

  Across the room, the webcast camera records Geoff’s final moments. His eyes flutter and close for the last time.

  On the computer screen, a YouTube window flashes. Geoff’s grand finale webcast is trending. He has made it to 1,000,000 subscribers. Posthumously.

  Lloyd Kaufman is co-founder, with Yale friend Michael Herz, of the 41-year-old legendary Troma Entertainment, which is arguably the longest running independent movie studio in North America. He directed many of their feature films, including the world famous The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke ’Em High, Sgt. Kabukiman NYPD, Tromeo & Juliet, and Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead. Kaufman has written six books on filmmaking and has presented his “Make Your Own Damn Movie” master classes globally from Oxford University to Singapore. His latest film, Return to Nuke ’Em High Vol. 1, produced in association with STARZ, premiered in The Contenders series at New York’s Museum of Modern Art along with movies by the Coen Brothers, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen. Kaufman is currently editing Return to Nuke ’Em High Vol. 2 and preparing The Toxic Avenger Part 5: Grime & Punishment. In 2008, The Toxic Avenger was turned into a musical by Joe DiePietro and David Bryant of Bon Jovi, which ran in NYC for a year and won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Musical. ‘The Toxic Avenger’ Musical is currently available for licensing through Music Theatre International (MTI). To thank Troma fans for over 40 years of support, Kaufman and Michael Herz offer over 250 free feature length movies, cartoons, and new daily content on The Troma Movies YouTube Channel:

  https://www.youtube.com/Tromamovies

  Lily Hayes Kaufman writes, directs and produces original content and documentaries for Pitchslap.tv, a video production company she founded with her sister. Lily Hayes wrote and directed a web series Rare Birds of Fashion which she sold to NBC Comedy. She has worked on a range of film & TV productions including Weinstein’s St. Vincent, Dreamworks/NBC’s SMASH and the relaunch of Troma Entertainment’s YouTube Channel. She has written for Forbes.com, womensworldbanking.org and worldpolicy.org. In a past life, Lily Hayes developed commodity investment strategies for institutional investors to pay her way through the Harvard Business School.

  BURY THEM DEEPER by David Sandner

  DAVID SANDNER

  I hate talking about the bodies in the basement, but Ray-Ray wouldn’t let up. I had to pound him so hard, I’m not sure I ever stopped.

  “They smell rotten,” he said, “like old eggs.”

  “Shut up,” I told him.

  “Why didn’t he bury them deeper? They smell like stale pee.”

  I hit him so he doubled over, gasping for breath. I’m sure he saw stars. His pale little face turned red, then a sort of purple. After a while he straightened up, not even looking at me, just staring ahead, tears in the corner of his eyes, with the strangest expression on his stupid face. Like he’d done what he needed to do, all he could. Then we walked quietly to school after that without any more talking. Every day it was the same thing.

  I always hit him the second time he said something about the bodies. I would tell him “shut up” the first time and hit him the second time. He never stopped after the first time. I had learned to hit him in the stomach, or slap him hard across the face with the flat of my hand. No marks. When he first started in on the bodies in the basement, and I had gotten sick of it, I had hit him in the face, giving him a black eye. My mom had hit me across the back of the legs with a switch, which smarted for two days. The black eye lasted five, though, which made it almost worth it. But going for the stomach was better, since I had to hit him every day we walked to school, five days a week. His mom wouldn’t know. And my mom wouldn’t know and punish me.

  Our moms were friends. They played Scrabble together and cried about how their husbands didn’t talk to them. After awhile, my dad had left. Ray-Ray’s mom said it was better to have a man
gone than hitting you. Our moms snuck cigarettes together and laughed about how they should be crying.

  I was eleven, starting sixth grade. Ray-Ray was the same and lived next door to me at the butt end of a cul-de-sac, the only two houses on the round turnabout at the end. All the other houses were stacked neat in a row way away from us, up against each other, but we each had huge, misshaped yards, mostly choked with weeds, that backed up against a dried-up streambed that took up runoff in the rainiest part of the year. With the deep fall-off, we had no need for back fences. Ray-Ray’s dad had a chicken coop on their property; on ours sat the rusty innards of a car my dad had always intended to fix up when he didn’t have to be hustling up work. Ray-Ray’s dad odd-jobbed it in a seasonal way that repeated, selling in the pumpkin patches in the fall, tree farms in the winter, and mostly taking night shifts at some of the hotels along the coast down the highway other times, or else he was too tired to do anything but sit in front of the TV or tend to the chickens. Sometimes he dug up areas out back, said he would start his own pumpkin patch, but nothing ever grew there. Except tough weeds, rust colored as if with blood.

  He spent hours with the chickens. He used to call us out to watch him kill the chickens when it was killing time. Ray-Ray and I both had to watch. He used to give us the heads in bag and motion out to the weed-choked yard.

  “Bury them,” he’d say. “Bury them deeper than you did last time.”

  We had to use broken-handled shovels. Ray-Ray’s dad had a lot of shovels, from all the digging he did for the pumpkins. The ground was hard clay. Ray-Ray always threw up halfway through and I’d finish up alone. Ray-Ray’s dad seemed to think it was funny.