Wethorsemane69 4iu6t

Wethorsemane69 Ashley Bradley

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Wethorsemane69

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George paid the five-hundred dollar application fee to submit his Taco Bell application on the Jobbie app. He hit "submit", then a millisecond later a DENIED! page popped up, to let George know Taco Bell had no use for his kind. They could take his chalupa money, he thought, but they'd never take his freedom. However he wanted them to, actually. He craved to trade in his freedom for employment. He needed chalupa money. Did Taco Bell expect him to eat like rice or cabbage or something? Not that he could afford any of that shit, either. George’s last job was at Planned Parenthood, selling bags of dead babies to Ebay sellers. He was a middleman, really. It never occurred to him that he should just cut out his role and sell on Ebay directly. However, he was afraid to open an . George was terrified of opening any website . He avoided websites, entirely. Every time he went on one there was a prompt and it startled him and he felt sick. Give us your email this and can we have your cookies that. It’d leave George in a cold sweat half the time. He’d be shaking and so tired. Anyway, George got fired from Planned Parenthood after saying “You should go back” to some African woman who’d come in to have her baby sucked out. She complained about how cold it was all the time. Back in Florida, she said, it was like a sauna. So George suggested to her to go back, and she complained, saying he was xenophobic. George thought it was fine to say “You should go back” in America, to another American, about a place in America. It was fine, he felt. Actually, he’d never thought about it. But his boss said that Florida wasn’t “really counted” and basically George had done a hate crime, so he was out. “What about the hate crime you commit against these innocent childs on a ritual basis?!” he’d screamed to his boss, a Dominican man with a Sharpied-in beard and soul patch, who’d previously been fired from the T-Mobile store for cooking plantains in the back office. “Listen,” he said, “I don’t care about that African bitch and her little Kunta Kinte feelings. Getting all triggered and shit. She should hop over Florida and go straight back to Hell where she’s REALLY fr-” “Oh, okay,” George nodded vigorously, and he thought, Wesley—that was his boss’ name for some reason—he thought Wesley should go with the African woman back to Africa, too. Wesley was the same color and smell as her, and

George thought how they should both just get on a canoe and take off. But later he felt bad for thinking that. It wasn’t a racist thought, really, he was just upset for having been fired. Where would he get chalupa money, now? But he knew that wasn’t the African woman’s fault, nor Wesley’s. Though, still, he thought, they should eventually return to the motherland. We all should, he thought cheerily to himself. All of mankind. After using the last of his bitcoin shillings to buy a totebag full of crack (his dealer was some huge NPR freak named Gaston), and then after he smoked all the crack, and then after he woke up in the sewers and felt like he was going to be dead, and then after he was able to stop feeling like he was going to die from having done all that crack and started feeling like he was just going to regulardie from existential malaise and general lack of purpose and also lack of money, George decided to hop on the Jobbie app and look for a fucking job. George hated websites, and he hated apps, too. But at least apps were smaller. George’s intelligent idea was to apply for jobs at places he liked to go to, so that he could cut down a lot of his day to day busy work. He liked to go to the library to look up Japanese sex books, so he thought he’d apply to the library, but apparently you can’t just be some scrub from off the street to work in the library throwing books on the shelves. You need a fucking Master’s degree for that mess? The world is a freaking disaster, George thought. So the library gig was out. Then he thought how he liked to go to the park the most when he was in a crackdoing mood. He liked to just be there, standing at the playground, staring at the children on the swing. Usually the screams started once his high kicked in and it was a magical experience. It was like transcendental meditation but not boring and also useful. So George looked for park jobs, then it got weird because he couldn’t figure what job one would actually do at a park. Who runs the park? Is it just there, free? George got a chill when he thought about it. The naked, untamed, beastly park.

It was grotesque and unseemly to him, the thought. He felt disgusted and uncomfortable. He would never go to the park again. It was like some lawless void just sitting there, waiting for you to come to it and be inside of it and there was no guide; no one to look after what was happening. George felt sick, and hurriedly moved on to applying to places he liked to eat at, and loiter around about. So that was how he came to apply to Taco Bell, and then get immediately rejected from working there. “What the heck?” George breathed out loud to the app, and he felt a tear come down his face. But then he realized it wasn’t a tear, just the ceiling in his rented room was leaking again. It wasn’t raining outside. It never rained. It hadn’t rained in five hundred fifty-five days, actually. The water wasn’t water. It was some mystery gloop that oozed from the walls. It was like the building was undergoing some sort of purge-sweat. The goo wasn’t exactly a goo consistency. It was between gloop and watery. It was too thick to be a water, but there was no structure to it, so goo just seemed like a reach. It dripped consistently on George. When it first started he was fearful. He did not know what the substance was. But after a year, nothing too bad had happened to him. There was some fuzz growing by his eyes, but other than that he was fine. Not dead. That was what George qualified as “fine”. Also, he could still walk, unfortunately, so that meant he couldn’t be a wheelchair person and have an “excuse”. God, how he craved having an “excuse” to just fucking give up. He could get a doctor’s note saying he was physically incapable of contributing to society. He would now be a fullparasite and the note would say it was okay and he could show it to the mad crowd to prevent them from beating him to death with their spears and sticks. The life, he thought wistfully. “Oh god!” George screeched aloud like a woman in the cold, damp darkness of his little room. He was completely alone, and he always had been. Some sort of notification popped up on the app. GO TO SPACE! it screamed. Is it threatening me? George wondered once he’d gathered some of his bearings. He wondered how the app expected him to do that? He couldn’t even get to Discovery Zone because his car had been stolen by ruffians. Surely the Jobbie

app didn’t expect him to have the tools to reach space when he couldn’t even get a couple of blocks down the street to Discovery Zone which used to be like a game place for kids but now was just a public bath house and place for street people to have sex. ENTER TO WIN A TICKET TO SPACE WITH BILLIONAIRE BAD BOY EURYDICE MCORPHEUS!, the pop-up further screamed. George momentarily wondered if it was some sort of sex ad. Maybe some spam or virus. But then he ed that the Eurydice name sounded familiar to him. At first he thought it was some internet sex person. Because that just made the most sense, but then he ed Eurydice was one of their overlords or whatever. He was one of the vampires who owned all the shit they needed. Except, Eurydice wasn’t exactly a vampire. Or, he was part vamp, but his main thing was that he had the head of a cat. A mostly humanish body (though quite long at eight feet tall), and then his head was that of a cat. Just a small, regular cat head. Not even a large cat like a Maine coon. Just a normal regular one that stares at you with disinterested contempt. George wondered how he could forget that Eurydice McOrpheus was a thing. A whole eight foot tall man with the head of a cat. George excused himself, thinking how could he possibly be expected to every fucking thing that was happening. It was just non-stop shit and he couldn’t be expected to just know all the shit. So he forgot about Eurydice. So what?! Big deal! George clicked on the “enter” button to add his name to the raffle. Might as well. George wasn’t a space person. He didn’t like anything, really, except Taco Bell. He’d never really thought about it, but he definitely wasn’t a space person. He did not like being on Earth, but the idea of having to go to a whole other planet to be a failure and suffer over there, too, appealed to him very little. But George was at a point in his life where he was always being like “Whatever, fuck it” and just doing shit, because none of it mattered, so whatever, space.

George got the notification he “won” a ticket to space while he was standing in line to be a sex slave. To become a sex slave you just go to your local Walmart and there’s a little booth you go up to and you say “Hello, I would like one application for Sex Slave” and they hand you an application and you go somewhere inside the Walmart to fill out your application and then when you’re done you go back to the booth (you have to stand in line again usually) and you give them your application and then they will tell you they’ll call within two to four weeks to let you know if your application has been accepted and you’ve got the Sex Slave position. It was all very primitive. George was standing in line again to hand in his completed application when his phone moaned with breathy urgency. George looked down at it and groaned a “What now?” “Congratulations!” the little notification shouted in a way that irritated George, even though, right away he understood his life was wholly changed and it’d never be the same again. He was to go up into space and have a new life and be a whole new person, probably. Right away, George felt exhausted with the energy he felt he’d have to expend enduring all of these new impending changes. It’d be easier for him to stand right where he was and never move and that was always the preferable option, but it’d never been exactly realistic for him. Even in small, sad ways, he was always changing and being different. For instance, this idea to apply to be a sex slave. George wasn’t the sexy type. He had a small, flat head and his eyes were these empty black little dots. His body was both skinny and obese. He hunched in an ape-like manner, and made ape-like sounds when he was both aroused and afraid. He’d pointed this out to his grandmother who’d been the one to suggest he apply for sex slavery. She said, “All of that is just what they’re looking for.” George thought his grandmother was just another old timey idiot who figured the way things worked in their generation was how it worked for the younger generation. He said as much to her and she said, “George, you are not even a little bit a part of the younger generation. You’re fifty-four, and the astronauts can see your bald spot from space.” Curious she’d mentioned space. This was before he’d even entered the raffle to

go. Everything’s connected, he thought to himself in a homosexual sort of way. Then, he stepped out of the sex slave line to read the entirety of the notification. “Congratulations! You-” “Move THEE FUCK out of the way!” some Walmart slob shouted into George’s ear as they bumped harshly past him. “What are you - standing in the fucking middle of the road?” some whole other Walmart patron accosted George as they walked towards him from a different direction and they were like twenty feet away like George wasn’t even in his way, also there was no road. George didn’t fight back though or defend himself. These were the underpeople of Walmart. It was the same as if a bear approached you in the woods. Just avert your eyes and turn your back to it and it’ll go away probably. George continued reading the notification. “Congratulations!” Jesus, get on with it. “You are (1) of (5) winners of Eurydice McOrpheus’ Ride with Me 2 The Moon and Beyond Contest!” Gross, I hope we’re not going to the moon. “You are expected at the space station a week from the date you receive this message. Do not bring any luggage or possessions. Everything you need will be provided for you onboard. If you like ravioli you can bring that, though, because they don’t have that in space, or on the Wethorsemane69. Salutations, your one and only, Eurydice McOrpheus.” George blinked at his phone. “I wonder if this guy’s a homo,” he said aloud to himself. There was a very large woman walking by pushing a shopping cart. A kid stood in the larger basket segment of the cart, clutching a fishstick, or what looked like a fishstick - it could've been poop or a mashed-up doughnut. George looked at the kid in the eyes and thought, At least I’ve only had sex three times and none of those sweaty, sinful endeavors produced a child. George thought kids were gross, and even grosser was producing one with your whole body. It was like a permanent reminder that you had sex and were too mush-brained to use a condom. Not that George ever used a condom, it’s just he didn’t have any semen and didn’t need to. Also the last two times of the three total times he had sex the woman cut it off in the middle to sob for hours instead. So, there hadn’t been any completion. Like, even if George did have semen, it wouldn’t have mattered much, anyway.

George arrived at the space station on the expected date, bright and early, bringing nothing but his lovely self, and a large ziplock bag filled with uncooked cheese-stuffed ravioli. The notice hadn’t specified what kind of ravioli was okay to bring, but George felt that he was a grown man and that he did not need, as a grown man, to needily ask for permission regarding all the different types of ravioli that were or were not allowed into space. A large henchman reached out to snatch the ravioli from his grip. “Gimme that!” the man said, and he roughly opened the bag to inspect it. George was standing in some sort of anteroom that led to the spaceship loading base. He was instructed by some space station underling to go there and wait, and that the other guests would be there shortly, and soon after that, they’d be able to board the ship, and a little while after that, they would take off from Earth and “be disappeared forever”. George paused at that last bit, and started to question it, but then thought different and carried on to the waiting room. If they were to disappear forever, fine. He wasn’t leaving anything special behind on Earth, anyway. His grandmother was a big nasty bitch; his home was slimey and uninhabitable; he had no job or money; and those teenagers who went around his neighborhood were very scary and George hoped he would disappear in space, if only so he’d never again have to pretend to be brave while walking past them into the 7 Eleven. There had been three other people in the waiting room when George entered: the henchman, a lesbian-looking woman with hair cut very short to her head, and a stereotypically Italian stallion looking man with like greased-back hair and a leather jacket and he just looked very Italian in the face. Or Maybe Puerto Rican. George didn’t know all the types. “That’s Axel,” the lesbian offered as an explanation for the henchman. The henchman threw George’s ravioli into a small wastebasket in the corner of the room, causing the wastebasket to knock over, and all the ravioli to lamely spill out onto the floor. Axel had a sort of Aryan Knight, pure-race sort of look to him. He had comically

yellow hair, like a cartoon, but his eyebrow hair was clear, and from certain angles it looked as if an explosion had gone off in his face and seared them permanently into the ether. The expression frozen on his face was that of a person who has the disease of brain slush, which is when you have a brain but it isn’t in the normal meatloaf shape, it is formless, because it is slush. Axel fixed his empty, crystallized gaze onto George, and in turn George almost shitted in his pajama jeans. Axel smacked his lips in anticipation (it wasn’t clear in anticipation exactly of what), and they were both very moist and non-existent. He said prominently, “They call me Mr. Bootcut Jeans.” Instinctively, George looked down at Axel’s crotch, which was wet. Or, it looked wet. Possibly, it was just the design of the jea“Yes, I pissed myself,” Axel said to George’s just standing there gaping at his crotch with his mouth hanging open like some animal. George looked up and met the man’s chilling eye. “Right,” he said stupidly. Axel said in a small baby voice, “I’m afwaid.” George coughed suddenly and it got in Axel’s eyes. The man screamed, then, from behind George came a big whoosh of air, and fifty or so different people piled into the little waiting room, and one of those people was Mr. Cathead himself, Eurydice McOrpheus. Eurydice said to the room, “You all, the first riders of the Wethorsemane69, you are like my family. We share a bond. You all can call me ED, which is an abbreviation of my name.” George thought he sounded ineloquent, awkward. He thought perhaps the cathead prevented him from being as articulate as he wanted to be. After all, his tongue was meow. Maybe it was hard to force through the human language. But ultimately, he sounded like a fucking idiot, and looked like one, too, with that tiny little cathead atop his skeletal eight-foot long form. Eurydice gestured to Axel, who was bowled over in hysterics. He said, “That’s

what you want to see. My ship’s head mechanic a blubbering mess.” Some randoms fake-laughed. Axel tried to pull himself together. He said something about having allergies. Eurydice smiled. His cat tooth veneers were the shade of dysentery. George wondered if that was some sort of new rich people trend. “Fret not, Mr. Bootcut Jeans,” Eurydice said to a sobbing Axel, “for in space there are no allergies.” Axel sniffed, then said lamely, “Cool.”

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Wethorsemane69 figured to be Eurydice’s veritable Noah’s Ark, except instead of bringing 2 of every animal aboard it was approx thirty or so of his closest friends and family , plus the ship’s captain, Bingo; Axel, the ship’s bitch boy; the five winners of the peasant raffle; and Jackie, the ugly daughter of the present leader of the free world. His cute daughter was a writer for Juicy Fat Boy, an obese baby kink sitcom you could only watch at bus station glory holes. (She was also the cool daughter.) Eurydice clapped. His clap sounded like bones clanging together in the wind. He said for them all to get together in a circle for a bit of an icebreaker experience. This, after the thirty or so minutes of nonstop screaming they all engaged in as the spaceship took off and exited Earth’s gravity. Once they were fully expunged and in the clear darkness of the galaxy, Eurydice tried to put on a brave face, despite the bib of vomit hung loosely about his mouth and neck. He looked out of one of the ship’s tiny, futuristic looking windows and he waved out of it, saying “Bye bye” with a little cat meow, that was also a quite hoarse meow from all the vomiting. “Alright,” Eurydice said, clearing his throat to stifle a meow. “Let’s get to know one another, shall we?” He meowed a bit at the end there.

“I’ll start,” he paused dramatically, homosexually. He delicately touched his long, skeletal fingers to an equally skeletal and emaciated collarbone. He looked like a petrified ghoul, but he had like, a ton of credit cards, so no one would say anything. “I, Eurydice McOrpheus, son of Sam the Peasant Killer, have recently been diagnosed with cancer of the anal cavities.” Some guy was like, “Gross, from gay sex?” Eurydice nodded solemnly, now unquestionably homosexual. He made his neck long and important, like Ghandi. He almost definitely also had HIV. “From gay sex,” he confirmed, “I have anal cancer from doing gay sex.” “Gross,” that same dude from before said. George recognized him as James. A kid he went to school with back on Earth, and now he was a bloated, balding, middle-aged slob. Just like George. He felt strangely comforted by the sight of James on the ship, expressing homophobic contempt towards the man with the cathead. Nostalgic thoughts of old times washed over George, and he felt a great, enveloping warmth, as if he was Axel, pissing himself silly. George never liked James. He’d always been a musty little kid, and sometimes he smelled like pure shit. One of their classmates had confronted James once about his perpetual stench and he tried to say it was cuz he was being abused at home, and then had to retract his claim when they were going to drag his disabled grandmother down to the prison for child neglect. Turns out he’s just gross, and no amount of ass-whoopins from his grandmother could make him wash behind his ears and in between his thighs. George waved to him. “James.” James cut his eyes across to George. He was one of those black people who looked inappropriately asiatic. His hairline was situated really far back on his head, and he had a covering of ash about his face where a beard might go. Still as disgusting as ever, George thought affectionately about his old school chum, James. (They were never chums.)

A sudden look of recognition washed across James’ face. “I know that’s not that faggot George St. Johns!” he hollered excitedly. Everyone in the circle looked at George. They were sitting in the Quiznos cafeteria aboard the ship, and it smelled like shit, like James. Actually maybe it was just James. George flashed a creamy, grey-toothed smile to James. “In the flesh, baby,” he said. In response to this, James turned up his lips with guttural disgust. Eurydice, looking upon the scene, decided, “Two of the peasants appear to know one another.” He considered for a moment, then gestured to James, “You, there. Tell us: Who are you?” “Nigga, I’m James,” James said like it was obvious. Like everyone should already know this. Eurydice nodded, then said in some affected philanthropist voice, “And who is James? What can you tell us about James that we wouldn’t be able to ascertain by simply glancing upon your person?” James looked on at Eurydice’s cat head twitching about, with immense disgust, and a small amount of fear. You could tell in his eyes he thought he’d be able to fight off any regular man rapist, but an eight-foot long man rapist with a cat head was something else entirely. It was certainly nothing he’d considered before, and therefore, he was wholly unprepared. “Well, I’ll tell ya one thing,” he started. “I sure don’t got no damn anal cancer from taking it up the butt - I know that much!” Eurydice pressed his fingers together and nodded. It brought to mind Einstein sat on the toilet, bowled over with dysentery, inventing the Zune. He moaned in approval at James’ bugged-eyed expression. George wondered if James was regretting going up into space at the behest of an eight foot tall cathead freak of nature. It was no longer PC to call them freaks. It’d been banned, actually. But that was then on Earth - this was now, in fucking space of

all places. “Freak,” George said. Everyone turned to look at him, mostly with disinterest. Their necks craned and twisted instinctively. Their eyes looked upon George’s questionable form dully, and he felt safe. Initially he felt panicky, thinking they could see him, but they weren’t really looking, they couldn’t see him. Well, most of them. Eurydice’s cat eyes were glowing in an uncomfortably alert sort of way that made George itch in his penis. George wanted to scratch it, but he knew he’d never be able to get at it all the way. “You,” Eurydice said, and his voice was strange, like an old timey vampire, or maybe some gross South African. “Say you,” Eurydice said, his eyes flashing upon George. He looked like some type of man who lived exclusively on a yacht, sipping canned tuna out of a margarita glass. George just looked at him, saying nothing. “How do you know our James?” Eurydice said. “Tell us,” he pressed. “I know him from middle school,” George explained hesitantly, glancing over at James, who sucked his teeth in kind. “School chums,” Eurydice said, his mouth full of chit (cat shit). George nodded, then said “Yah” for no reason. It occurred to him a few milliseconds later that perhaps he thought it was a cool thing to say, and, for some non-discernible reason, he was attempting to impress Eurydice. “We went to high school together, too, dumbass,” chimed in James. George looked at him. He felt like James was the type of person who’d respond with the most energy to rudeness and abuse. George was aware James never knew his dad, and that he was raised singularly by his grandmother, who’d had her legs chopped off by the mob because she’d tried to count cards at a casino in Vegas.

George said to James, “Oh, I wasn’t aware you made it to high school.” “Nigga, you saw me!” James cried out in desperation. It was true. James had been in George’s History class, sophomore year. When they learned about the Holocaust, James had raised his hand once and asked the teacher “Why the Jews aint just run up on ‘em? If I was back then I woulda kicked the nazi in the head! Hi-ya! (this was him doing like a karate chop in the air. It was unclear if James actually knew karate, but maybe, because the only businesses they had in town at the time was the five and dime where that midget killed a veteran, and a karate dojo, ran by a convincted sex pest with a ton of priors, because who the fuck else would run a karate dojo?).” Their teacher, a depressed alcoholic fat slob who used to do law but got disbarred for requesting his clients pay in rimjobs, said to James, “Just like you would run up on your slave master, right?” James responded, “Nigga, what?” and got suspended for a week. The history teacher eventually went on to become the principal, then he got killed in 9/11. He was in one of the less-famous planes that didn’t hit the Twin Towers. Forever a lame. “Oh, right,” George said, looking on at James with a blank, disconnected sort of expression. Unbeknownst to poor James, it was all a ruse, a farce. George ed him, of course. He ed everything, unfortunately, which was why he was a huge crackhead, and also a lot of the time he did ketamine. James sucked his teeth, then some guy said “Who are these idiots?” Eurydice looked on at him, the guy, then he got an expression on his face, like he wanted to know the same. He looked at George. “Who are you? State your name.” “I’m George,” said George, and he internally cringed because he knew he sounded like a retard. He already looked like one—what with his head all flat in the back—but he never let how he presented on the outside hold him back, because he knew on the inside, he was at least one percent not as mush-brained

as he appeared. Except, when he really thought about it, he was pretty slushed about in the head, actually. He couldn’t even get hired at Taco Bell. A freakin’ actual ape that escaped from the zoo worked there! Though, that wasn't the best example. Apes were inherently more intelligent than humans, even the nonretarded humans, so it wasn’t a fair comparison, really. Eurydice nodded like George was some disgusting, dirty ass, idiot little fly. “You’re one of the peasants,” he mewed. “From the peasant raffle.” “Yes, indeedy,” George said, and he didn’t know why it was he would say a thing like that out of his mouth. He wished he could pray to God to end his life right then and there, but he was pretty sure God only lorded over Earth, and they were off that now. Whom do you pray to when you’re in space and shit? God has to have some guy above him. Or, ugh, maybe a lady. Eurydice looked on at George for a very long time. Whatever time was anymore, if it was anything. It felt like an eternity, which it could’ve been. Nothing mattered anymore. It was all meaningless now, up in the void, but it always was anyway. Eurydice had a fucking cat’s head for idiotsake! “Well, George,” Eurydice said, and his head twitched, everso, like some malfunctioning robot. “It’s nice to have you here with us,” he went on. “You’d never be here without the raffle,” Eurydice reminded George. “No matter how many hours you grinded away at the Taco Bell, you’d never make enough chalupa bucks to afford to fly into space on your own accord.” Eurydice paused and smiled at a grey-faced George. George thought how Eurydice probably thought he really gutted George right there, and he’d be right. What was that shit about Taco Bell? Why would he even say that? George opened his mouth to say “Yah” but only a bit of spit-up bubbled out. Eurydice smiled more, then he looked at a woman sitting to his right. A brownskinned BBW with hair the mysterious texture and countenance of a racoon. Eurydice said to her, “You are raffle winner number three, eh?”

The woman didn’t respond; she only looked. George wondered if the other raffle winners were like him, and assumed, somehow, everyone already knew everything about them. Eurydice was one of the primary investors of the AllSeeing machine. All you needed was an e-mail address or old Tumblr name to have a complete profile on any person. Though, Eurydice was merely an investor. He hadn’t invented the thing. He didn’t know the “code” or whatever mathy shit. But, surely, he had access to the device, as a primary investor? Perhaps Eurydice had used the machine, but forgot all the info, or maybe he just didn’t care. Likely, the latter. George felt like if it were him and he were an eight hundred billion bucksanaire, he’d simply never find out anything about anyone. He’d kill them all, everyone, then he’d go to Taco Bell (the one where the ape works, since all the humans are obliterated and someone needs to be on-hand to flip the chalupas). The brownskinned BBW seated next to Eurydice got uncomfortable with him staring at her so long after a while, so she coughed into his face, which made him twitch his gaze away for a moment. His whiskers moved around on his face, then he said in some warm, gentleman’s voice, “And you are, milady?”, which is something George’d said once to a school crossing guard and she took his bookbag off his back and proceeded to beat him with it. George wondered if things would’ve gone differently if he’d had a cathead and eight hundred billion dollars and also the crossing guard could not escape due to being trapped on a spaceship in who the fuck even knows. It was mostly just total blackness when you glanced full of terror out the spaceship window. The brownskinned BBW gave a look like Eurydice was being intrusive and that his cathead smelled like piss. “I am Jackie Jenkins,” she said at last. “I’m Jackie,” the polar opposite of a brownskinned BBW protested. It was the president’s ugly daughter. She had an exhumed look to her and a rock-heavy, rhombus-shaped head. The nicest thing you could say about her face was that it looked like it’d be hard to draw. There was a complex network of thick green veins snacking about her massive forehead. She pulsated about the skull. The BBW said, “I am Jackie Jenkins, the one and only.” Eurydice turned to tap Jackie J on the head, but she moved herself before he

could make . He went ahead anyway, saying, “I christen thee Deborah.” She shook her head. “No.” Eurydice reached his increasingly long arm around the back of her seat and patted Jackie J’s neck fat, this time succeeding in actually making with her physical form, and he wiggled his fingers, attempting to reach through to her aural form, as well. “Miss Deborah, big and nasty,” he said, and you could tell he was gonna try to make it a thing. Jackie J moved her neck away from Eurydice’s skeletal touch. “I am Jackie Jenkins. Always have been, always will be.” Eurydice just kept his hand hovering in the air where Deb—Jackie J’s neck fat was previously settled. “Tell us about Deborah, Deborah.” Jackie J was getting a little fire under her, even though they all knew it was pointless. No one would hear you scream from space. “I’ll tell you about Jackie Jenkins,” she snapped. Eurydice caught up quickly and said, “Tell the circle whom Coretta likes to fuck. Get nasty with.” Eurydice was tryna make Coretta happen now. Jackie J looked Eurydice strong in the eye, even though it was literally like looking freaking Medusa in the eye, except no cool snakes, and you weren’t blessed enough to be instantly turned to stone, relieved from the rest of your life. At length, Jackie J explained, “I only let into me my husband, and the Lord.” Eurydice was intrigued. “The Lord of...?” Jackie J gestured upwards with her hands. She had acrylic nails with Paddington Bear decals on them.

“The Lord, our savior.” Eurydice said, “Oh.” He gathered himself, then went on. “So I take it you won’t be bussin’ it open on the ship, then?” Jackie J looked at him like he was nuts. Then she said in a dignified, elegant sort of way, “I certainly will not.” “Shame,” Eurydice remarked, but he was a homo, so why would he care? James raised his hand, “I’ll take some.” Eurydice looked at him, as if for the first time. “Who are you?” he said. James wavered a bit in his face, but quickly recovered. “James.” Eurydice looked at him. “Alright.” Then, “What will you take?” James was unsure. “Nevermine.” “No.” Eurydice stared at him. “What will you take?” James, pressured, gestured crudely towards Jackie J, “Her. That.” “No, thank you,” Jackie J demurred. Eurydice looked at James, then to Jackie J, then back to James. “Are you her husband?” “No,” James mumbled. “Oh, I assumed because you are both colored.” He looked at James for a long time, then said, “Coretta says she only has eyes for her husband, and a Lord of some sort. I doubt highly someone wearing skidmarked route 66 jeans is any sort of Lord.” “These aint skidmarks - it’s dirt!” James defended his jeans. “Salt-o-the-earth,” Eurydice remarked. Then he gestured to Jackie, the president’s ugly daughter, “Original Jackie, I already know you, but introduce

yourself to the rest of the class.” Jackie was acting shy, after making a scene from before. “Wh—What do you want me to say?” Eurydice groaned with impatience, his eyes dramatically ripping to the back of his head with a great heave-ho. “Just fucking tell them—Introduce yourself!” he screamed, cat fangs bared, spittle flying. It was a fairly chilling scene, but there was nowhere to run, no escape. So everyone just sat there dumbly and tried not to explode from the internal screaming. Jackie leaned forward in her space seat. She made sure not to make her eyes meet with Jackie J’s. “I’m...Jackie Gaylord. I’m-” “A lord!” Eurydice interrupted, looking at Jackie J with an eerie amount of excitement. “Would she your muster?” Jackie J said “Absolutely not” with disgust and someone smirked. It took a moment for OG Jackie to recover and continue her measly introduction. “I’m sure most of you already know of me,” she went on. “Famous child of the president of the United States.” “Shut up,” someone said. There was a long pause and James started snickering, then full blown cracking up. He was hunched over in his space chair after a while, in near-hysterics, even after a tear-filled attempt to go on with the thing. Eurydice tried to get things back on track by explaining to everyone that Jackie and he were good friends. “Old school chums, in fact,” he said, and then he gave both George and James warning looks. Or maybe it was some sort of flirtatious homosexual glare. Gross, George thought. If he was ever gonna fuck a dude, it’d be like, Michael Shannon or something. Not this freak.

George nodded at Eurydice. He hoped in a way that was not suggestive or inviting, though he had assumed, as a condition of his “winning” a ride on the Wethorsemane69, that he’d be expected to “buss it”. It hadn’t been, up til this point, a real tangible thought for George. Nothing he could reach out and grab. But now on the ship, with Eurydice glaring at him with that dangerous homosexual glint in his eye, George could feel how real it was. The idea of him having to buss it wide open on this ship. An offering, to say thanks for the ride. A ride for a ride. I don’t even fucking like space, George thought to himself in a panic. As a child, he liked pigs. He’d always ask his grandmother if they could go see the pigs. She’d look at him and say, “There’s something seriously not right with you. I think your mother might’ve went to bed with something nonhuman to get you. Some sort of poltergeist, or one of them malicious little thievin’ leprechauns you see on the cereal box.” But one day, George’s grandmother took him to see the pigs. At the slaughterhouse where her boyfriend Hank worked as a breeder. Hank only had part of his skull left after the accident. After that, George decided not to be into anything anymore. But if he was going to be into anything, it certainly wasn’t going to be the vast, unknowable, booty ass galaxy. Eurydice decided to finish up Jackie’s introduction for her, so done was he. “This is Jackie,” he said, sighing sharply. “She wants to fuck an alien. That’s why she’s here.” Jackie looked around sheepishly and it was grosser to see that, than to know she wanted to lie down with some eight-dick extraterrestrial monstrosity. Jackie raised her hand a small amount. Eurydice widened his eyes at her. “What?” he snapped. “I’d also fuck the Frosted Flakes beast.” A veil of embarrassment lowered itself upon Eurydice’s cathead. He did his best to look everyone in the eye with courage as he attempted to address Jackie’s provocative statement. “She means Tony the Tiger,” he said, then he lowered his eyes in shame. “He’s pretty thick,” some guy said approvingly, and everyone looked at him. He

looked like a Josh. Jackie looked at him, “You don’t think it’s gross?” Josh said, “What - that you want to mangle a cartoon tiger’s loins?” Jackie said, “Well he’s more a cereal mascot manbeast. It’s a more dignified title.” “Yeah, like President’s Daughter.” Josh kept his eyes on her ugly, misshapen dome. “Look, you should be killed. I’d do it myself if I had the tools, or the wherewithal.” Jackie nodded, accepting this. Eurydice put his eyes on everyone and explained Josh, “This is our fourth peasant.” Then he looked at Josh, “Your name, sir?” Josh had a laid-back surfer bum sort of look to him. He had long beachy sort of hair and had a jaundiced sort of tan to him. You could tell deodorant was just something he used occasionally, like maybe if he was going to a friend’s dog wedding or something along those lines. He said “Josh” like he was Tom Cruise or something. Eurydice disproved. “I’ve never met an okay Josh.” Josh laughed. A jolly, from the belly sort of laugh, like Eurydice was Katt Williams or some shit. “Nah, me neither,” he smiled, and his teeth were yellow, but like in a cool, seventies-era cool smoke guy in tiny shorts sort of way. When Josh moved his fingers to absent-mindedly rub at the few whiskers he was attempting to off as a moustache, you could see his fingers were stained with tobacco. Coincidentally, Eurydice’s next prompt to Josh was “Have you smoked at least one hundred cigarettes in your lifetime?” Josh chuckled to himself, like he understood some deeper context to the question. “Oh, yeah,” he answered like Eurydice had asked him if he ever went

to tenth base with a three-tittied cyborg prostitute. Eurydice was taken aback by how chill and yellow this Josh guy was. So he decided to shake the table a bit. He leaned back in his space seat. His cathead twitched with smugness. “Why are you poor? Why are you a peasant?” Josh reached into his shirt pocket. It was the kind of shirt you’d wear if you were, like, on a bowling team for some reason. He pulled out a pack of cigs. He hit one out and set it to his lip. His mouth had freckles sprinkled all about and you could sense he’d be dead from skin cancer soon. Which was a cool way to die. The sun hates you and kills you. Pretty cool. Cooler than butt cancer, anyway. “Aint got no money,” he said, lighting his cig. Eurydice looked pressed. “And why is that? Do you have a job?” Josh nodded. “Sure.” Eurydice leaned forward in his space chair, imbued with fake-interest. “And what is this job.” Josh blew out a stream of smoke. “Bowling alley photographer.” Eurydice just looked at him. After a while, he asked, and it was genuine, “What in pray tell is a bowling alley.” Josh put a little smile to his face and gently shook his head. “Way too complicated to explain, man. And even if I did, you still wouldn’t get it.” Axel aka Mr. Bootcut Jeans cut in to say, “I’ve been to a bowling alley. It’s where my stepsister was abducted.” George instantly assumed Axel was responsible for her disappearance. He asked him, “Is she alright?” Axel said, “How should I know. She’s abducted, isn’t she?”

It was all so convenient. Eurydice tried to ask Josh what it was he photographed at the bowling alley, but Josh quickly waved him off. “You wouldn’t get it.” Eurydice’s whiskers were twitching. “Why don’t you try to explain it to me,” he pressed. Josh lightly laughed to himself, then crossed his legs in an extremely gay way, but it only looked mildly gay when he did it. He shook his hair, “It’s two different worlds.” Axel said glumly, “They never found my sister.” Eurydice rolled his eyes from annoyance, and said in a snappy, brattish tone, “Well, alright, Mr. Mysterio, Mr. Secrets.” “Nothing secretive about it, man,” Josh said. He was a “man” guy. George didn’t think it was an okay type of guy to be, but mostly everything else about Josh was so motherfreakin cool that he decided he could gloss over it, just this once. Not that anyone cared what he was deciding in his head or how he felt about them. “The bowling alley is something us peasants get, is all,” Josh explained. “You wouldn’t know it.” Eurydice huffed while Axel was saying, “I’m not a peasant. I have a good job with benefits. I own like two RVs, and those aren’t cheap!” Josh gave another gentle shake of his head. “If you’re not one of them,” and here he jutted his fingers at Eurydice’s twitching cathead in a hatecrimish sort of manner, “then you’re one of us. A peasant. A lowly serf.” “There’s only five of youse on this space boat,” that Italian guy piped in to mix things up. He pointed to himself, “Mees. I’m not a peasant. Run my own pizza t in Brooklyn. I’m a business owner. Got a house in Staten Island. And a freaking mini cooper.”

Josh turned up his cancerous lips, “I don’t know what any of that you just said is.” “Enough from you!” Eurydice barked. Josh just laughed quietly to himself and went to work on his ciggie. George asked the Italian how it was a lowly pizza shop owner managed to find himself aboard the Wethorsemane69, without winning the peasant raffle. The Italian pointed two fingers at George and said, “And who the fuck are youse?” “George.” Had he not been there before when George’d introduced himself? Maybe George had not made an impression. Usually he didn’t. The few times he did make an impression, police were informed. “George,” the Italian repeated back with disgust. “Kind of a fucking name is that?” “I’m named after George Washington.” The Italian furrowed his brow, “Carver?” What was that? George thought. What was the Italian mongoloid saying? Was he speaking English? Was it some sort of Italian slur? To play it safe, George said, “Yah”, but tried to make it sound more like a noise than a word so it could be open to heavy misinterpretation. Then George turned it around, “And you?” “No,” Eurydice cut in. The Italian gave a stony look to George, “And me what?” “Who are—” Eurydice put his hand up to stop George from talking. “No, it’s m—That’s mine. My job. I ask the questions.”

“Oh,” George gripped his loose, flappy turkey neck in an exaggerated manner. “Sorry to encroach on your territory, Mr. Question Asker.” George didn’t know why he said that. Eurydice’s eyes widened and narrowed extravagantly on his form and George, for a few moments, was sure he’d be swallowed whole and digested by Eurydice in front of everyone and then after he was all gone, everyone would just go on as if nothing ever happened. That would be fitting, he thought with a resigned sort of sigh. He’d made it all the way to fifty-four, which was both depressing and impressive. He hadn’t done shit with his life. He’d just coasted along, somehow managing to never get killed or abducted, though, of course, never making much of an impression to land on anyone’s radar enough to have either of those things happen to him. Depressing and impressive, the same. Eurydice turned to the Italian and said, “Introduce yourself.” The Italian introduced himself by saying, “Youse already know who I am.” “I do, yes,” Eurydice nodded, “but introduce yourself to everyone in time.” The Italian said, suddenly not as Italian as before, nowhere near as racist, “They’ll find out in good time.” “Yes, yes,” Eurydice nodded with growing impatience, “existentially, and spiritually, and emotionally and metaphysically and all that jazz, yes, in time, we all will come to ‘know’ one another. But for now, a basic introduction will suffice for the present exercise.” The Italian’s face betrayed very little. He didn’t overtly acknowledge what Eurydice had said, with a nod or brow furrow, he simply turned his head to the general group and said, “I’m Anytonies.” “Anywhat?” the lesbian looking one said. Anytonies looked at her with black, robotic eyes. “Anytonies.” “It’s Anytony,” Eurydice corrected. Anytonies looked at him. Then his eyes widened with recognition. “Yes,” he

nodded. He turned back to the general group, “Anytony,” he said, and then he looked at the lesbian specifically. “His accent,” Eurydice explained, with this fake sort of embarrassed look to him. James jutted his thumb at Anytony, and said to Eurydice, “How y’all know each other?” Anytony said robotically, like a computer reciting facts, “Eurydice McOrpheus, fifty-seven in Earth Years, one million and thirty three in Galaxy Years. He killed every youngling on the planet Faggish. He traveled to your planet Earth and there he set fire to the entire Amazon Rainforest, in an attempt to find the perfect crack rock. He is responsible for the Burger King massacres. Now he escapes the planet to travel to a newer destination, to find the perfect crack rock, and to try to make Burger King happen again on some other, untouched, unsuspecting planet. I am Anytony, and I am here to assist him with his efforts, on this doomed journey.” “Now, now,” Eurydice said with a chuckle, doing his hand in the air like he was trying to get a dog to sit. George said happily, “You do crack?” Eurydice looked offended. “Yes, but not in the pathetic peasant poor people way you’d do it. I do it in a dignified manner, while sat in my Kill Chamber with a glass of chianti listening to Stravinsky.” George said, “I heard about chianti in some chintzy horror film, so there’s no way that’s a classy thing to be drinking. If they mention it in a movie, it might as well be freakin’ Mountain Dew Code Red.” James said, “Hell wrong with Mountain Dew Code Red?” George figured him as more of a grape or orange soda type of guy, so this ionate defense of Mountain Dew Code Red was an odd one, to be sure. “Nothing, James,” George said in some weird, pompous, butt-burgular ass voice. “Nothing at all. Just like there’s nothing wrong with Chianti, or smoking crack.” “Lots wrong with smoking crack,” James said judgmentally, as a freaking fan of

Mountain Dew Code Red. “Had an uncle that smoked crack. He almost definitely killed JonBenet.” Eurydice shook his head. “My friend did that. I doubt I’m friends with your poor, colored uncle.” James was taken aback in some prissy, ass-pinched little manner. “My uncle drove a bus for the Detroit public school system for forty years, I’ll have you know. Far from poor.” Eurydice gestured vaguely, “But colored all the same.” James nodded. Eurydice smiled his little cat mouth, “Case closed.” George glanced around with alarm, “Shouldn’t someone phone the police?” James immediately snorted, jutting his thumb at George, “Pig fucker over here.” Axel oinked at him and James laughed. Eurydice looked on in composed amusement. George felt embarrassed. It wasn’t like he was some stan of the police. If he was a stan of anyone it’d be, like, Chester Cheetah or someone really cool and hip like that. Maybe he’d stan Josh, even. But not a police guy. Unless Josh or Chester was a cop, then yeah, totally. “Whatever,” George said, looking away with tears in his eyes. Some guy raised his hand and said with a sigh, “Could we maybe wrap this up?” He was greasy and wearing a sleeveless vest with no shirt underneath. Josh was sitting next to him and he looked at Josh and murmured, “Starting to regret coming on this trip. Buncha lames.” It killed George to see Josh nod slightly in agreement. Did Josh include George in this “buncha lames”? Surely the vest guy was only talking about the ugly president’s daughter and the lesbian one. The feminists. Also probably Eurydice, too, because of his cat head which was gross and small in an unseemly sort of

way. Like cats are cool, but not also if they’re a human, too. All the cool bits about cats are instantly deleted if they’re mangled up in the human form. George thought with a condescending shrug, I don’t make the rules. Eurydice looked suddenly interested. He said to the vest guy with wide, enthralled eyes, “Tell us of yourself, earthling.” Then coughed and a huge chunk of some vacuum cleaner dirt spewed forth from his throat. “Ew, gross,” Jackie the ugly president’s daughter exclaimed. “Oh, shut up, bitch!” Eurydice half-shouted, half-meowed, then he flung his throat chunk into her face and it got in her eyes and she screamed bloody murder. OG Jackie, Jackie J, well she had a good chuckle over this. To heighten her enjoyment of the moment, she reached down into the purse that sat upon her lap like some heavy, slovenly cat and she opened it and took out a peppermint, then she unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth, and she closed her eyes in ecstasy as it melted into her mouth and went into her nostrils and down her throat like some great, refreshing virus. George almost got hard watching her, but his penis only worked when he had his foot caught in a bear trap, so it just sat there, vaguely twitching. He decided to look away to relieve himself of the discomfort. When he did his eyes landed on Josh’s. George’s heart jumped as Josh gave him a little wink. Was it a homosexual wink? Did George care even a little bit? Sometimes gay shit is fine when it’s someone cool doing it at you. Plus, it was just a wink. It’s not like he’d been asked to take on something really heady right away. It wasn’t like Josh’d walked over with some giant fist-fucking machine and told him to go prostrate or anything. George could digest a wink. Only, he really couldn’t, and in a few moments he realized he felt sick to his stomach, in a half girlish school crush butterflies in a tummy sort of way and then the other half was him knowing he was for sure about to shit his pants, and then worrying with great panic how exactly you were meant to shit in space. Were there new rules? George was terrified he’d go look for the space bathroom and the toilet’d be like hovering in the fucking air and he’d have to raise his butt all high to use it. Worse, what if he was expected to suit up and go outside into the darkness and relieve himself there. Space was a lawless, black void. Anything could be

expected. George almost shit himself just thinking about all the ways he’d be potentially expected to shit himself. After the big to-do, and Jackie running off into some unseeable distance in the ship to wash her face of Eurydice’s throat debris, presumably, the vest guy introduced himself as “Jay Crew”. He said he was a failed sex slave. George, ass full of shit, raised his hand and asked Jay Crew if he’d applied at Walmart. Jay Crew looked annoyed, and disgusted that George would even talk to him. “Where else?” he said nastily. Or maybe he was just from New Jersey. Axel said, “How do you fail at sex slavery? Just have your holes available.” “Yeah, wise guy,” Jay Crew said, and he looked at Josh like they were best friends who were already on the level of nonverbal communication. George was violently jealous. He thought of killing Jay Crew, but he didn’t have the cajones. Literally, he did not have testicles. But it soothed him to know he likely could get away with murder in space. Who would arrest him? Certainly not any cops. George felt triggered thinking about cops, so immediately stopped. He forced himself to continue saying stuff at this Jay Crew. “Why did you fail?” he said. “Was it hard?” Jay Crew softened toward George, and suddenly George, in less time than it took for Jay Crew to look at him with a warmer, more vulnerable expression— Suddenly he was obsessed with befriending Jay Crew alongside Josh. If Josh liked Jay Crew, and was willing to communicate only with his eyeballs to Jay Crew, then, George thought, Well, I’ll like him, too. We’ll all three rub our eyes together into a bloody pulp. Bestie behavior. George had never been besties with anyone. In all his fifty-four years. One time at an old part-time job he had, this coworker of his gave him a chocolate bar, and George thought they’d be friends, but then the guy disappeared from the job. A few years later George saw on the news his coworker Ted was like some hugely famous serial killer. George liked to think that had things progressed with Ted, that Ted would’ve brought George on to his little schemes. They’d be a team. Sure, doing murders was wrong, but only when you viewed it from a superficial,

pedestrian standpoint. People have to die. It’s an accepted fact of life that everyone will die, so it’s actually not that big of a deal if someone dies. People get all bent out of shape about murder because they have control issues - it’s as simple as that. Get therapy, everyone, George thought patiently. Jay Crew said being a sex slave was like, super hard. “It was annoying, bro,” he said, his eyes all watery like a puppy’s. George almost came in his already stained with diarrhea blood Joe Boxer boxer shorts when Jay Crew called him “bro”. Jay Crew had that Italian sort of look that Anytony had, but darker and greasier. He was either more authentic meatball, or perhaps less. George wasn’t privy to all the ins and outs. He was just regular white. His grandmother told him they were descended from the Chickenman, Colonel Sanders, which George had tried to forget, actually, because for most of his life he thought Colonel Sanders was a lightskin black man. Apparently the chicken slaver was as white as a KKK hood, but George still felt suspicious. He quickly tried to put it out of his mind again and refocus on Jay Crew and his juicy, shiny lips. He’d been applying lip gloss the whole time during the icebreaker exercise. It was like a habit. How dry could one's lips be? Maybe he had some sort of dry lip disease. George wouldn’t know anything about lips because his were nonexistent. He just had a little slit for a mouth. He was convinced this was why he was never molested as a kid. His grandma said it was cuz he was a “little troll boy” and had a severe case of scoliosis. That, too, probably, yeah, George thought. Jay Crew shook his head with a heavy gloom, seemingly triggered by the memory of it all. “So many ugly broads.” He choked up a bit, “It was so...gross. So many flaps, so much...curdled cream..” Everyone looked on at him with sympathetic eyes. Everyone except Eurydice who commented, “Well, what were you expecting? A bunch of gorgeous models to want to pay for you?” Eurydice gave a haunting, operatic sort of laugh. “The models are also slaves.” “Sure,” Jay Crew nodded, sick. “Of course. It’s just...you don’t think about the realities of these sorts of things til you’re right there in the mud.” Eurydice looked pleased with himself and said in a haughty voice, “Well, that’s what keeps you people peasants, and people like me,” he gestured to his abnormal head of a cat, “with foresight, with brains, always moving up. Always ahead. Never anyone’s slave.”

Jay Crew was unimpressed. “There’s no way you’d get hired on as a sex slave.” He looked over at George and gestured, “This fucking guy could get hired, but you couldn’t.” Eurydice froze in momentary silence. George felt a rush from the compliment. He’d never made it all the way to submitting his application for sex slavery, but it comforted him, somehow, to know he would’ve been chosen to experience all the atrocities sex slavery had in store for him. Eurydice snapped out of his coma and said, with a sharp tone to Jay Crew, “Whose ship are you on, slave?” Jay Crew was undeterred. “You only have this ship because of slaves. It’d be one thing if you’d got it all out of the mud yourself, with your own bare hands, but that isn’t the case. So be proud of getting everything you own off the backs of all us peasants, I guess?” Axel was saying how he wasn’t a peasant, he had a good job with benefits, as Eurydice was saying, “Why do you keep fucking talking about mud??” Eurydice shook it off. “It’s the language of primates,” he said to soothe himself, waving the air before him as if shooing a fly. “They’re obsessed with mud,” he hissed to the air about him. Jay Crew was Peasant Raffle Winner #5. They were a bunch of other people on the ship. George zoned out when they went around the circle introducing themselves. How much was he expected to bear? he wondered. He’d already discovered Josh, and his bestie Jay Crew. He’d already decided they were his gang. Who cares to know about Eurydice’s mother who was just a horse. She was just like a horse standing there on the ship? And when she introduced herself it was only in neighs like bitch what are you even saying? And who cares to know of Eurydice’s nursemaid? Or his nursemaid’s “special friend” with the caesar cut and Timberland boots like bitch what the fuck. George’s Who Gives A Flying Fuck reserves were entirely depleted. He simply could not endure to hear anymore people say their name, and then like one minor

fact about themselves. He was pretty sure one of Eurydice’s cousins had said he thought Cruella DeVille was the “ultimate girlboss” and that anyone who criticized miss thang was misogynist and a “special snowflake triggered little brat”. Like literally why did these people even exist, George could not discern. After Jay Crew, like why did people keep speaking. The coolest one was Josh and no one could top Josh so why? Second coolest was Jay Crew cuz of his vest. No one else had a vest except Eurydice’s mom but George was pretty sure that was some sort of thunder blanket for animals to wear to comfort them when there’s a storm which is like the pussiest article of clothing you could wear so thus, coolness voided! After forever and a day, Eurydice clapped and said for everyone to turn around in the Quiznos cafe where they sat and go and get a “slice”. George had never been to Quiznos because the name of the business started with a “Q”, which he considered to be way over the top homosexual. He also did not understand what a Quiznos even was. That wasn’t a thing. Burger King was named that because the Burger King lived there. McDonalds, because the food smells and tastes like farm shit. Okay, alright. Taco Bell because it’s a fucking taco bell, like makes sense great, very clear and straight to the point. But what in the heck is a Quiznos? At Subway you knew what you were getting: food from the floor of a subway car. Not as clear as Taco Bell, but mostly clear. Quiznos was so far from being even remotely discernible or knowable, so George did not go there. He had guesstimated in the past that perhaps Quiznos served Cheez-its melted down into a porridge? And so, stuck on the Wethorsemane69 with this establishment as his only food source, George almost salivated over the idea. It’s not like he was back on hellish Earth with unlimited options. Of course if he could choose he would go to the gas station and take a hot dog off the hot dog roller thing with his bare hands and swallow it down in one gulp right there in the store without even paying and no one would call the police out of fear, because he is a balding old man wearing open toed sandals who didn’t even wait for the hot dog to cool before swallowing it whole into his body. But, alas, this was not Earth. He was in hellish space and only Quiznos presented itself as a viable option, and so George was excited to get some of this Cheez-its sludge he only realized too late he had entirely materialized as a thing in his own mind. Unfortch, Cheez-its porridge sludge was not a thing this Quiznos made, and so when he went up to the counter and tried to order it and was told “I’ll kick you right in the dome askin’ bout some damn Cheez-its soup”, George choked back his tears and asked, well, what could you order from Cheez-it—Quiznos—and he was thrown a plate with a slice of cheeseless pizza and the sauce was just ranch dressing. So

it was just this soggy, triangle-shaped bread, slathered in ranch dressing. Cool. George went to sit next to James who was sat on one of the space benches located in the Cheez-its cafe. The Quiznos cafe. He didn’t want to go find Josh or Jay Crew because he had tears in his eyes and they’d think he was a baby and not want him to be in their gang. James sighed at the sight of him. “Nigga, why are you here?” He looked about him in an exaggerated manner, then gesticulated wildly, “All these motherfucking seats and you gotta sit here with me??” George just looked down at his plate and tried to stop his tears from flowing down onto his plate and making his triangle bread even soggier. James sighed again, but this time his source of pain was the contents on his plate. “Look at this,” he said under his breath, and then he lifted his slice of ranch off his plate and held it up slightly in the air. The ranched oozed ever so slowly down from the sad slice of bread and dripped in a glueish sort of manner back onto the plate from which it came. James snapped his eyes up to George’s face and said, “They gon’ try to do slavery up in here, I bet you.” He darted his eyes over to the chained Cheez-its cafe workers. George followed his gaze, then looked back at James and said stupidly, “Why do you figure?” James looked at George like he was the stupidest bitch to ever live, which was possibly true, but George was too stupid to know. James put his elbows up onto the table which George’s grandmother always said was for the uncouth and trash, for the demonically possessed, which was possibly true, but George knew for a fact that his grandmother had been the one to throw that bag of shit into the yard of that Vietnamese family who moved into their town, so he never really thought it was all that big of deal to put your elbows on the table if someone who willingly shits into a empty KFC bucket, then scoops her turds out of the bucket to put it into the KFC to throw on the Vietnamese family’s lawn says it’s bad to put your elbows on the table. Probably

also it’s not couth to like, shit in a KFC bucket and then scoop it out into a KFC bag and then throw it into someone’s lawn, even if they’re Vietnamese. Also, George was pretty sure you were meant to set the bag of poo on fire? Not only was George’s grandmother a gross ass bitch, but she was entirely retarded. But George didn’t dwell on that fact too much because they shared genes. And also bodies. They were twins really and he felt sick to think he was basically her except less hot. He felt just sick about it. James said, “Why you think they brought us up here on this space boat? These rich motherfuckers not tryna have no peasants goin’ with them to the New Earth. Not as no friends or nothing. They finna make us be slaves.” George considered this. He looked back over to the Cheez-its cafeteria slaves. He looked back to James, “Seems they already got their slave crew,” then he jauntily jerked his head towards the Cheez-its cafeteria slaves, like he was some idiot character in a musical. James just stared at him, flabbergasted, or maybe he was waiting to see if that incoming fart was actually a fart or would he have to shoot up from his seat and go running towards wherever the space bathroom was and hoped he’d make it in time. George thought, Speaking of space bathrooms. “Where is the bathroom?” he said to James’ frozen mug of disgust. James’ contempt for George’s lack of purpose softened a bit and he said, “S’what I been wondering. Been needing to shit since we got up in this bitch. How they gone jolt us into the never-never and expect I’m not finna shit on myself?” George looked at him. “Is that what that smell is? I thought it was the Cheez-its soup..” Shut up about that dang Cheez-its soup! George’s exasperated brain screamed at him. George clenched the side of his head in pain. He groaned in misery. Through the screeching shriek of the indomitable wave of agony, George could hear James go, “Ew nigga, wtf?..” Then out of nowhere, there was this immense, unceasing wet slapping noise. It entirely overpowered the thundering pounding in his head and in his chest.

George froze with disgust. It reminded him of summers in his youth when his grandmother would take him down to AC to do the slots, and get nailed by some boardwalk rentboy. She never got a second room at the casino for George because the one room they had was comped and she was a cheap, old, nasty bitch. So George had to hunker down in his bed, adjacent to hers, with his hands collapsed furiously over his ears. His Grandma’d say “You know, you could sleep in the bathroom”, but George had a fear of bathrooms, from his time in Boy Scouts when his scout leader would take their troop to the YMCA to get their swimming badge, but they never left the locker room. Their scout leader would spend the entire time in the locker room showers, naked entirely, screaming Mahalia Jackson at the top of his lungs like a maniac. He’d force them all to watch. They’d all be standing there patiently sobbing, pissing themselves because there was no fucking way any of them would dare move to use a urinal soundtracked to that man’s demented cauterwaling. “Look at ‘im,” George snapped awake from his dissociative state to hear James saying under his breath. Eurydice was standing there in the Cheez-its cafeteria, all eight feet of him, clapping in some straight-backed, ass-stuffed sort of manner, as if he were at an opera. He appeared to be attempting to summon or conjure something. “Here, here!” he chopped. They all looked at him. “What’s that cat shit on his head?” James was saying in a way only George could hear him. “Why he got a cat for a head?” George shrugged his unevenly sloped, mangled shoulders, and said in a low voice to James, “I don’t know. Maybe he’s Eurasian.” James sucked his teeth. “Nigga, shut up!” he hissed. George shrugged in acquiescence. “Soon it will be bedtime!” Eurydice shouted too loudly. Like, bro, it’s space. It’s mad quiet up here, calm down. He caught and corrected it the next time he unhinged his little cat jaw to say, “We will do bathroom first,” he gave a regal, elegant sort of pause, then continued. “Bathroom, and then bedtime.”

Bathrooms, George thought with a shudder. Jay Crew raised his hand from where he sat, and you could see his underarms was shaved and oiled. He said, “Yo, what’s the itinerary?” Eurydice raised a cat brow in confusion. Jay Crew sighed with irritation. “Like, what activities do you have planned for us to do up here?” Eurydice blinked with disinterest. He sighed gently from a sense of obligation. He said, “Is Space not enough for you, peasant? You must have scheduled shuffleboard after brunch, and fly fishing in the evening, too?” He was being flippant and glib and this was when George understood that for sure, they would all be killed in space. And he only mildly cared. He’d been alive for more than half a century and he hated every minute of it, and he was tired, and he thought, Okay. George saw Jay Crew flash a look at Josh at their table, and he felt a tug on his heart, and in his loins. Jay Crew kept on to Eurydice, saying, “Well, space is merely a vast nothingness, so yeah, I expect some fucking activities planned to keep us from boring ourselves into fucking ether.” Eurydice gave a flip of his bony hand, as if to dismiss Jay Crew. Then, a swarm of bees rushed into the cafeteria, descending upon them, and everyone ran screaming. Well, everyone except the chained-up Cheez-its cafeteria workers, and everyone except Eurydice, who simply stood there in the middle of it all, looking upon his guests with only mild interest. George had no idea where he was running, but while doing so—running, arms flapping wildly, screaming at the top of his lungs—George had enough space in his head to notice he was running for no reason, really. Sure, he could escape the more pressing, present threat of the bees, but that would offer only momentary relief, and a false sense of security and calm. They were in fucking space, after all. That’s as scary and ridiculous as it gets. Space. Vast, unknowable space. For a moment, George considered the buzzing presence of the bees to be frankly comforting. Bees were from Earth, where he was from and what he knew to be true. He’d always run away screaming from them like a girl then, there, but he

was in a strange land now, and so bees had lost their meaning. Or, at least, they could no longer be viewed in the same context as he viewed them back on Earth. George was still running and screaming as he thought along this train, but then he stopped. He was under an arch of sorts - it glowed white, and beyond it, George saw familiar tiles and he understood he’d reached the bathroom. George used his eyes and their degraded vision to peek cautiously into the entrance of the bathroom. He thought of the mall. He always hated malls, generally, and specifically, their horrible, ominous bathrooms. They were like pathways to Hell, mall bathrooms. George’d always been creeped out by the number of stalls in them, the endless hollow echo of intense pissing and turd plopping; how it felt like he’d stepped into another dimension whenever he entered one. George shuddered under the archway. He was relieved when James spooked up behind him, unnecessarily shoving into George’s brittle, mangled little shoulder. The shorter one. “Nigga, move!” he said rudely, but George noticed that he wasn’t actually standing in the way of anything. James didn’t try to move forward into the bathroom. He set himself beside George and together, they stood and looked. The skin of James’ arm rested on George’s and George could feel he was hot, and vibrating. “Man...” James said after a while, and they kept looking on into the sterile blankness of the bathroom. “I gotta booboo, for real.” George nodded. Same, he thought with a neutered panic. “I been had to since we took off,” James kept on. “Soon as lift-off, my whole asshole came out. I’m sittin’ here wit’ shid in my pants, crying like a lil bitch.” George nodded. He didn’t relate entirely, but yeah. Totally. In an alterverse, for sure, George’d be the one with space shit in his long johns. He said, “I think...shitting your pants when shooting out of Earth’s gravity is normal, probably. Because of the change in atmosphere and like.”

“Knickur, shut up,” James said gently. “Stop tryna act like you a scientist and shit. I’m a grown man wit’ shid in my jeans.” Shid? George pondered. “Maaaaann...” James sighed, wiping his face. “Only reason I came on this damn spacecruise was to get out of paying child .” George was curious. He looked at James, “You have a child?” James started to say yeah but George cut him off, asking, “Someone let you do a load in them?” James scrunched up his tiny, dry little face at George, “Niggur, what?”. James had these dusty, micro cornrows, but like a huge bald spot in the back, and then his hairline started like halfway behind his ears. George concluded James’ babymama was probably some special needs hire at the local Pathmark, and he stopped feeling insecure about not having any balls. George tried to fix it and say, “It’s cool you’re a dad.” James shook his mushed-up little head, “Not even a little bit.” George started to say something weird about how he would’ve loved to have James as a dad, if he could’ve chosen - some fake shit to say to make James uncomfortable, to make it real weird - but James kept up, saying, “If it was up to me, I’d’ve sucked that kid right out with one of those little vacuum hoses they got down at the car wash.” To relate, George said, “I used to work at the abortion store.” James blinked in confusion. Then he reset himself and said, “Yeah? Well, that’s where I should’ve dropped the broad off. They should have like a remote device for us to have—us men—so when our bitches get knocked up alls we gotta do is press the button on the device, and boom, no more baby.” George, balless, nodded like it was something he, too, would find useful. Suddenly Eurydice was upon them, saying, “My company Fuck It, Whatever Inc. actually has invented an app that mimics your idea. However it won’t be available until we’ve chipped everyone, and that whole project has just been...one giant headache, let me tell you. S’why I’m here taking a bit of a vacay

to cruise around space.” George looked at him. This was the closest he’d been yet to Eurydice. He smelled like kitty litter. He opened his mouth to say, “Anytonies said you were trying to discover a raw planet to look for the perfect crack rock, and also to inflict Burger King upon whatever unsuspecting alien species happens to be inhabiting said planet.” “Right-o!” Anytonies affirmed, sliding up behind them. Eurydice moved his eyes over to Anytonies and then back to George in one fell swoop. He said, kind of mumbling, “Well they wouldn’t be called aliens on their planet, as they’d be native to the...planet..” “Rightcho!” Anytonies beamed, mechanically bobbing his head. Eurydice reached over and patted him on the shoulder and he righted. George looked at the Italian and gave a perfunctory nod. “Anytonies.” “Anytony,” Eurydice corrected him. “Anytonies,” Anytony said and he bowed. Eurydice reached over to press him on the shoulder again. “Anytony.” He gave a closed-mouth cat smile at the unwanted guido. Anytony bowed again, ever so slightly. “Anytonies.” Eurydice gave a sharp, dramatic sigh. “Fuggedaboutit!” Anytonies chirped. Eurydice reached to squeeze him quickly on the shoulder. He gave a tight smile. “Fine, old chap. That’s just fine.” George glanced at James who bugged his eyes out back at him in return. This happened behind the scene of Eurydice and Anytonies, so there bore no witness. Eurydice finished gripping a bowed, deflated Anytonies and he turned to George and James. A bee landed on the back of his cathead, but he didn’t seem to notice.

He gestured with one of his cat ears to the bathroom beyond them. “Are you ready?” he said. “Everyone’s waiting.” George felt a chill, then the back of James’ tight, crispy hand graze upon his own. George was careful not to react. Eurydice stepped back and indicated to the beckoning bathroom archway. “Shall we?” he said. George’s brain screamed “Bolt!” but his legs stayed put. His brain wasn’t in charge. After Boy Scouts, George had trained himself to ignore it. No, every occasion did not call for him to pull off his pants and start flinging shit about everywhere. Almost no situation called for that. It was a temporary fix to a usually permanent, lifelong issue, at best. Eurydice jerked his head back at the bathroom, “Let’s go”, and he was very dark and serious. George felt James smack the back of his hand. George smiled dumbly at Eurydice and said, “After you.” Eurydice sort of jolted down into George’s face. “No, after you,” he said with sharpness. He was like, weirdly intense about them walking into this fucking bathroom. At last, James found his voice, and said, “Nah, you. Host first.” Eurydice was no fool. “Guest first,” he smiled cattishly. James jerked his head back with a wild groan of annoyance, “Maaaaannn...” he did. Then his head snapped back forward and he barked, “Just go!”, then he began to wave his hands in a directional sense, “You go in there! Go!” Eurydice moved his body at an angle, as if James had mind control over him but he was trying to fight it. He looked unsure but tried to compose himself.

“Why are you making a thing of this?” he asked with a soft desperation. “Just go in there!” James boomed, flapping his hands. “This your motherfucking spaceship, Mr. Meow! Show us the way!” Eurydice looked as if he’d exhausted his reserves - he’d used all his moves, and yet, the peasants still remained outside of the bathroom. “Well...” he wavered, and he looked with hesitation beyond the archway. “I suppose I could lead the way, since it’s my ship.” Like it was his idea. George looked at James, and then James looked at George. Was he defeated? George thought. Had James won? Eurydice started into the bathroom, and said with a resigned voice, “Alright, after me.” Still, they’d have to go in, but at least he wouldn’t be trailing behind them, watching the backs of their heads. James smacked the back of George’s hand, and they waited a bit as Eurydice moved forward. After Eurydice was a ways ahead, James said so only George could hear, “I aint walking behind that nigga...”

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Unfortch, they kinda had to because Eurydice kept looking behind them with his neckless cat head - just turning the whole cathead around at them while his body moved onward, and he would sort of snap with his little cat mouth, “Keep in step!”. He’d make this little hissing cat noise. “Step it up!” “Ew, who is he talking to?” James said to George under his breath. And even quieter, “Why he got a cathead?”

George cut his eyes over to James as they walked somberly behind the freak. He tried to say as small as possible, “Maybe his mom fucked a cat? Which is like, gross. But he’s from rich people - they fuck anything.” James gave a sort of partial nod as Eurydice’s swiveled around cathead glared at them. Eurydice’s cathead was that of a sort of grimy, greyish-brownish alley cat. Definitely a cat with worms. George’d wondered why he couldn’t have a more regal cathead. Like a jetblack spider cat, or some disgusting Siamese. Why was it just some rough and tumble rapist alleycat? Very odd, George thought. “Uh huh,” James was saying out of the side of his mouth. He had a bunch of salty crust around his mouth like he’d been sucking on the bottom of an old boat. “Yeah, but ‘splain why his momma a damn horse? His damn parents a damn horse and cat? Why he got a human body?” George was exasperated with this line of questioning. How on Earth would he know? Or even How in Space? Did James think George was Einstein or something? And even if he was Einstein, like...Einstein couldn’t even comb his hair? Surely he wasn’t stable enough to fucking deal with the monstrosity that was George’s genealogy, for goodnesssakes! George shook his small, largely vacant head, “I do not know, and frankly, I’d prefer to keep it that way.” He gave James a knowing look, “All you gotta know is that something messed up happened to get him like that.” “Oh, that’s a given,” James said while looking into the staring face of Eurydice’s cat head. After a bit, James said, “I keep thinking about that horse and a cat getting it on together. Some Peabo Bryson shit.” George kept looking forward, into the cat’s eyes, “I don’t know what that means. And I don’t want to know.” “You living in the dark,” James criticized. “Just because you close your eyes to it don’t mean it aint happening.” “Yeah, well, at least I don’t have to see it.” James shook his dented-in little head, “Don’t mean it aint happening, though.”

“Yeah, well, I won’t have to look at it!” George pressed, indignant. He would not think about a horse and a cat being together. It was bad enough to just have to take in all that was Eurydice. Why did he have such a long, skeletal human body poked up underneath the tiny head of a cat? There was more than just your regular, every day bestiality. Something much worse, much grosser, and far more complex and involved than George’s little mind was even capable of processing, so he wasn’t even going to glance in the direction of it. He’d literally explode if he even tried to try to start comprehending. They entered the bowels of the bathroom shortly after Eurydice. They could hear what sounded like a shower going and once they were fully in the bathroom, they could see Eurydice’s mom, a horse, standing in what looked like some sort of open-plan, communal shower. It looked like a shower they’d have in prison. George’d never been to prison. He was too scared to do crimes. Too shy; too gormless. He wasn’t morally opposed to crime, it was only that he was too clammy, too sickly, too thin-blooded for a life of risk and danger. Even something small like stealing a candy bar from the drugstore - he’d throw up on himself, rushing from the store with his stolen wares, then immediately he’d return to get peppermints and Pepto for his upset tummy, which he will pay for in full. George turned to James beside him. He figured James’d know what a prison shower would look like, how it’d be. James had a desiccated bottom bunk buddy sort of aspect to him. George could also see James at a prison on a more employed basis. As a guard, perhaps. It was true that James did not necessarily look exactly employable, but George was only considering prison employment for him. People who worked at a prison— people who voluntarily went inside prisons—they weren’t really people, were they? Not really. So even if James had the look of someone who wouldn’t even be hired to clip the toenails of the Loch Ness monster, he did look like he’d be a perfect fit standing in some prison with a flashlight on his belt, watching a bunch of criminal man ass jumping around as they endured some dehumanizing group shower that no one is pointing out is basically how every great gay porn begins. “Jim,” George said, and James looked at him in pure disgust. George was afraid to say now. Behind him he heard Eurydice saying to his mom,

“What are you - taking a shower?”. He said it as if she’d clomped into his house, unbeknownst to him, and then charged upstairs, stealth-like, to slip into his shower. He comes home and finds her there, just taking a fucking shower. There’s a huge, steaming pile of horse dung on the floor next to the toilet. Eurydice sprays air-freshner over it, but that only seems to create a cloud which absorbs the moist stench wafting up from the pile of shit, only to then rain that exact same shit smells back down into the room, creating this never-ending shitsmells sort of cycle. George wondered to himself if that’s how clouds and rain and all that shit worked. He thought to ask James, but would someone wearing cornrows, or named James, or both named James and wearing cornrows know a single thing about science and shit? It wasn’t likely. George decided he didn’t need to know. Who cares? He was in space now. It wasn’t like he was still back on basic ass Earth, having to prove something. He was a space traveler now. His whole life was science basically. Anyway, he didn’t feel like thinking. Plus, he was scared to ask James a question in front of everyone. What if they thought he and James had formed some sort of alliance? Josh in particular. It might make him cancel any ideas he had of asking George to his gang with Jay Crew. George couldn’t have that. If he had to live out the rest of his days not being accepted into Josh and Jay Crew’s crew, he would have to kill himself, which, frankly, he was afraid to do. What if in the middle of it he started crying? He didn’t want to experience feeling even more depressed and suicidal while literally in the middle of ending it all. It was absurd, the idea, and just the sort of humiliating thing to happen to him. Suddenly Anytonies was in front of George and George jumped from the shock of seeing him and from being snapped awake from his dissociative spiraling. “I’m Anytonies!” he chirped. He smelled like plastic and kerosene. “Alright,” George said, irritated. Was this dude retarded or what? Then he felt bad for thinking Anytonies was an r-word. Like, he probably was, but that’s not his fault. Just like George couldn’t help having slightly green skin from that factory explosion. He was just like that and it was fine. Well, no, it wasn’t, but nothing could be done, so it was best to just pretend like it was all fine. What was the alternative? Acknowledging all was not fine? How would George go on if every day he had to acknowledge he was always actively glowing with uranium? Who would that help or benefit? No one.

Anytonies twitched. “Melatony!” he said like he had Tourettes or something gross. He twitched his perfectly square head again, “Melatonies!”. He locked up, then twitched forward mechanically. He said with a deep, metallic sort of drawl, bowing, “Melatonin...” James said, “Ew, nigga, move!” George thought the same, only the n-word was censored, obviously. George was pretty sure God could hear and read your thoughts. George thought God could easily not read your thoughts, but that he is a messy bitch, and does. George thought God was definitely black. Anytonies shifted awkwardly to James. He opened his mouth and out came, “Jumanji!” James backed up, saying, “...What did you just say?” He sounded like he was trying to be intimidating, but his body language suggested he was in the hood, the only person in the street, and some big ass rottweiler is running right towards him. James was like five feet tall, so if the rott wants to impregnate him, it’s definitely happening. Eurydice walked over and lightly tapped Anytonies on the shoulder. The Italian powered down and went slump at the waist. Eurydice gave a tight, closed-mouth smile. He said, “We outsourced the construction of these bots to some Punjabs on Fiverr. It was cheap labor, of course, but you get what you pay for.” “That was a robot?” James gestured with disgust. As if he’d been duped. Or pretending like he’d been duped, because it was something to do. “I thought he was just Italian,” George said. He didn’t care. He wanted Eurydice to go away. He looked weird and it was gross. Suddenly Anytonies powered back up. “I’m gonna mcfreakin kill myself!” he chirped with bright panic.

Eurydice reached to press something in Anytonies backside. The Italian Stallion powered down once more. The cat man forced another tight smile. “Making robots isn’t hard. Just a little bleep and a little bloop, really.” he seemed to be explaining. “I shouldn’t have to pay a to have them made. It’s like paying someone to put Legos together.” “Can you build a robot?” James said. The eyebrows on Eurydice’s cat head raised, as if he’d never been asked that before. It should be so obvious. “Me?” he said. “Why, of course not. I’m a billionaire, many times over, as you know. I just pay people to do it for me.” “How are you a billionaire?” James asked. It came out accusatory, but George wondered if he was genuinely asking. George too wondered. That’s a lot of money to have for a guy who can’t even build a robot, or even properly outsource to have a good one built. Eurydice directed James to visit his website (George shuddered at the mention of websites), where James could purchase the book he wrote. It was called Big Billy Billionaire, which George had seen at the library and he thought it was like some erotic novel about a billionaire baseball player who impregnates a soccer mom from Kansas. “I aint readin’ no book,” James dismissed. “Just tell me now.” Eurydice’s eyebrows raised again. “For free?” he said. James was beside himself. “Nigga you got a billion motherfucking checkmarks! What’s my little four dollars gon’ do?” George wanted to be pedantic, to be included. “Books are like thirty dollars now,” was his contribution. “Thirty dollars?!” James explained. “Why don’t I just cut out my motherfuckin kidney and throw it in the ocean, if it’s all that!”

Eurydice calmly explained that his book was only twenty-seven dollars. James was unimpressed. “I wouldn’t pay twenty-seven pubic hairs for that. Minus well throw my wallet down the sewers.” George accidentally laughed and Eurydice looked at him. George felt sick. He was so ugly and gross. Why is his head a cat? Eurydice brushed his hands down his pants for no reason. He straightened up and said to James that the reason he was poor was because he refused to buy Eurydice’s book. “What’s twenty-seven dollars to a billionaire?” “Exactly,” James said. Eurydice shook his head, blinking. “No,” he went. “I mean, you pay the onetime fee of twenty-seven dollars, plus tax. You read how I arrived at the plane I am now on, and then you have the tools and knowledge to arrive on the same level. After you’re a billionaire yourself, you won’t be thinking about that twenty-seven bucks. Plus tax.” James gave a purposeful pause, then said, “If I gotta read, I’d rather stay broke.” Eurydice gave a small little smile. It looked like a victory smirk. He wiped his hands on his pants again. Ruched corduroy. Were his hands wet? They were so skeletal and dry-looking. They looked like just bones. “Fair enough,” he said, and he gave another little smile. He had a far-off look in his eyes. George thought, He’ll kill us. But he didn’t care. Who cares. He was in fucking space for christ’s sake.

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Eurydice turned away from them and faced the rest of everyone in the bathroom. There they all were, just sitting around. Only Eurydice’s mom was showering, just standing under the shower spray thing like some braindead statue. Not even like most horse statues, which are clearly sentient. Just a regular non-haunted statue with zero consciousness. Everyone else, however, was just sat around on benches, like in a locker room. George shuddered. Eurydice clapped his hands. “Alright, everyone,” he announced strangely. He clapped again, “Time for everyone to shit and piss!” They all had to get in line, like at a work camp, and one by one use the bathroom in front of Eurydice. Then you were to get up from the toilet or urinal and walk over to the shower and take your shower and Eurydice watched and everyone else watched, too. Eurydice’s mom never left the shower when you went in, so you had to stand there next to a horse already standing there, and awkwardly start soaping up your naked body, while everyone cringed and looked on in silent horror. It was humiliating. When it was George’s turn, he thought he would collapse and away. When he didn’t, when he pushed through and was still alive, he felt strangely exhilarated. Was it Stockholm syndrome, he wondered. Likely it was just permanent brain damage from the trauma.

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Later, in the peasants’ quarters, Jay Crew was saying, shocked and astonished, “That was like some Jolocaust shit.” Everyone stared at him in petrified agreement. Eventually Jackie J broke their horrified silence, saying, “It was giving very concentration camp.”

Jay Crew responded by furiously nodding, “The food was very Auschwitz as well!” This time Jackie J gave a slow shake of the head. “Nawl,” she drawled. “In the Holocaust they got soup and stuff. What’s a piece of bread wit’ ranch on it? They tryna kill us. I don’t even give ranch to my dogs, and I hate them damn dogs.” Jay Crew was sitting on the edge of his space cot, nodding so much it looked like his head would break off. He said, “I also hate my dogs. Buncha blue eyed huskies. Freaks. They run my household and I’m scared. That’s why I signed up for this shit - to get away from those beasts!” “You can’t let ‘em take over,” Jackie J was scolding, as Jay Crew was nodding with a slight sense of shame, like he knew this, but still, it happened. “You dun let them take over your whole shit,” she reiterated, and it was clear she found Jay Crew weak, and thought him a general disgrace to humanity. “I got em in a box as puppies,” Jay Crew was saying with tears in his eyes. “So cute, like in an anime. It was like I was in an anime.” Jackie J said, “What is...an anime?” Jay Crew looked sick. Josh snickered from his cot. Jay Crew turned to him and said nastily, “Mr. Haircut!” and Josh’s face fell and it looked like he was gon’ shit himself. Back in the bathroom, when it was Josh’s turn to have a shit and a shower, Eurydice took it upon himself to give Josh a shave. At first, Josh, and everyone, thought Eurydice was going to shave his little moustache, or maybe his underarms, which was weirdly sexual enough and everyone got scared they might get a boner, but then they saw Eurydice wielding a great big pair of space scissors in his hand, and before anyone could even think how he might shave Josh’s baby stache with such gigantic scissors, he was sawing away at Josh’s head. After that, it was just screams. Nonstop, high-pitched, girly screaming from Josh, and a few ionate yelps from the general audience. It was a traumatizing sight to behold. But everyone was privately glad it was only Josh got scissored. Eurydice ignored the rest of their heads. In a way, they were all

offended, but also mostly relieved. Josh rubbed self-consciously at his head. Jay Crew said “Mr. Haircut” again, looking Josh deep in the eyes. Since Josh was Mr. Snicker all of a sudden. Josh tried to restore himself. He rubbed his head and forced a smile. He looked at them and said, “Well, how does it look?” James said, “You look like that retard from Forrest Gump.” Josh’s face fell. “You can just say Forrest Gump...” James crossed his arms, “I’ll say what I wanna say. Forrest.” Josh cringed. He looked like he wanted to die. Same, George thought, then he tried to override it. He was in space. What would happen to their bodies if any of them died. Their souls? Would they just be suspended forever in the eternal void? Did you get to go to Heaven after you went up into space? George felt like if he died up there his body would just dissolve into the general ether and that’d be that. He didn’t want to be lost in the blackness for all of eternity. He’d rather go to Hell forever and be annoyed by all the tryhards down there then go nowhere and it’s just blackness and quiet forever and ever. To make his brain stop thinking, George forced himself to talk. He said to the group, “James said they’re probably gonna make us be slaves.” “Who?” Jay Crew was saying as James was hitting George’s arm and saying, “Nigga don’t be tellin’ people shit I’m saying.” George looked nervously at James, then to the group, then back to James. James sucked his teeth. George looked back at the general group. He said, making sure to look as weak and wavy-lined as possible, “Uh...well, James had mentioned they were going to probably make us be slaves. Like the Cheez-its cafeteria workers.”

“The Quiznos caf workers, you mean?” Jay Crew said and George rolled his eyes. Jay Crew stared at him and George tried to fix his face but it was so hard like literally why did that matter right in the moment for him to correct George about the Cheez-its cafe actually being the Quiznos cafe. It literally made zero difference and it was weird how over the top Jay Crew was being about it. Literally it does not matter, what is your problem? “Yeah,” George nodded, trying to override his impulse to rush across to him and kick in his head. “The Quiznos cafe.” He almost choked and died. Jackie J was chewing on some popcorn she had in her purse. It was a large purse that you could probably keep several cats in. She said, mouth full, “Them cafeteria workers is slaves?”. She didn’t seem necessarily alarmed. She didn’t really even seem all that terribly interested. It was like she was watching TV, but not particularly committed to any one channel or show. Def a channel surfer, for sure. “Course they slaves!” James confirmed. “They chained up and shit.” Josh mentioned that when he used to work at the Amazon warehouse they’d chain him up to his station ‘til his shift was over. “But they’d let you go once your shift was over, though, right??” Jay Crew was saying. He needed this. Josh nodded, “Sure.” You could tell he no longer considered Jay Crew his bestie, after that whole Mr. Haircut business. George felt a pleasurable warmth snake through his body, as if he was all-over body pissing himself. “Maybe they let the Quiznos caf workers go once their shift is over,” Jay Crew said, playing devil’s advocate. “And then what?” James said. “Where they s’posed to go after they get off work? Take a nice little stroll outside?” Jay Crew shrugged. “It’s not about if they are able to take a nice stroll. Since when do we as a people care about our fellow man getting to enjoy nice strolls? As long as they get unchained every now and then, it’s not slavery, sorry. Shoot,

who knows, maybe they agreed to be chained up. Maybe the pay makes up for it. Or the healthcare.” “Alls I know,” Jackie J was saying, chewing on her bag corn, “They better have some better food for breakfast. None of this ranch pizza business.” They all were nodding, but also all were secretly thinking there was no way the food would improve. The first impression was literally dumpster food. It was clear no one gave a shit. Why would you make the first meal just a cleared-off pizza slice dipped in ranch? There was no plan for better. The menu would only depreciate in quality, and you could tell they all were silently wondering how you could make food even worse. Would they serve grub worms next? Dogfood? Josh said, “Maybe that cat guy doesn’t know what real food is supposed to be. Is he even human?” And as if someone had rung a tiny little bell, Eurydice appeared. He was just standing there in their peasants’ quarters. He’d arrived silently, without announcing himself, and when they realized he was there, they all jumped and gasped from shock. “Guy,” Josh said, out of breath. He didn’t know Eurydice’s name. George thought how Josh’d be the first of them killed off. Even though it should obviously be Jay Crew. Life was dumb sometimes. Actually, all the time. They were literally in fucking space like what. Eurydice stood before them in his karate gi. He looked at them. They tried not to look away. He tucked a sliver of hair behind his cat ear. It looked like a strange, random collection of seven to ten human hairs. Blonde. That was his only human hair. Just one tiny sliver of blonde hair, and he tucked it behind his twitchy cat ear. He looked at them more. Eventually he said, “I’m thinking about kicking Tom from Myspace off the ship. He’s bringing the entire mood down. He keeps talking about bringing Myspace to the new planet we’ll discover. Why does he insist on insisting? It was the reason for his downfall. Doesn’t he get it? Doesn’t he understand no one wants to see or hear from him?” Jackie J, still chewin’ on her pop, was saying, “Ohhhhhh is that who that ugly white man was?”

There weren’t as many whites on the ship as you’d think. Most of the whites were stuck in the peasants’ quarters. Most of the...uh...who made up Eurydice’s party were beasts and animals. His horse mom. There was like some giraffe slash kangaroo hybrid Eurydice introduced as his cousin Sars. There was an actual vampire. His name was Billy. Eurydice said he was named after him. George had assumed he was some sort of uncle or family friend. Eurydice had to explain that one of his names was Billy, because the peasants had no idea what he was talking about, or, they didn’t care, he couldn’t tell from looking into their glazedover eyes. Really, he just wanted to talk about himself and have his mouth open and have things coming out of it. It didn’t matter if they understood. One of Eurydice’s friends was straight-up Bigfoot. None of the peasants even blinked in his direction because none of them were starfuckers, really, plus Bigfoot was ugly. It’s not like it was the black glasses guy from This Is Us. They couldn’t care less, really. The only whiteys in Eurydice’s crew was Tom from Myspace, and Jackie the president’s daughter, but she had a suspicious mongoloid sort of look, so perhaps she was secretly Asian. No one knew her real mom because her dad had her killed back in the day at Woodstock. He pushed her down one of those mud hills and she just disappeared into the mud and was gone forever. Coincidentally, that was also where Jackie’s dad met Bigfoot. She was going around calling him “Uncle”. Mhmm. Eurydice nodded at Jackie J, “Yes, that’s him.” He considered her. “You know, you don’t really fit in here, do you? You’ve got a classy look to you.” He examined her more thoroughly. “Is that Dress Barn?” he said. Jackie J wanted his eyes off her. She said quickly, “It’s off the clearance rack from the Trick Daddy Educational Resource Center. There aint no actual store name, it’s just a rack when you walk in.” Eurydice raised his head and slightly opened his little cat mouth. “Ah,” he went. “Well, it’s quite fetching.” You could tell Jackie J was getting sick from him looking at her. Finally, she could no longer take it and she looked quickly away from his gaze. “Thank you, my husband bought it for me. My husband should be here any second now, he just stepped out to get Chinese.”

Eurydice looked as if he’d just taken a hit to his ego. He fumbled awkwardly at his ascot. “I see,” he said, and his voice quivered a bit. He fumbled more with his ascot. So much so that his gi began to slip off, revealing a bare, pockmarked, caved-in chest the color of a fresh sheet of printer paper. It was grotesque. He was grotesque. Jackie J was lucky because she had been brave and turned away, but the rest of them kept looking on. George thought maybe his eyes would start bleeding. Thank god, he thought. I can finally stop looking at shit. Eurydice finally was able to pull himself together. He stopped fixing his ascot and pulled his gi back correctly over himself. “Well,” he said, but his voice was still weak and reedy. He sounded like Justin Timberlake. He tried to fix it by coughing. Some cough spores got on George and he yelped as if a drop of acid had fallen upon him. Eurydice looked at him. “Are you okay, Gramps?” George forgot he was old. Why am I in space? He thought. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t killed that time he got mugged in Gotham a handful of decades ago. It was total fake news that that place was super-lit, crime wise. He only got robbed of his freakin’ metrocard. Like, bro, take my life, what the fuck. A total waste of a mugging. George tried to nod at Eurydice normally but it came out like his head was falling off. There was drool. So much that George had to slurp it noisily back into his face. He felt sick thinking that he was also slurping in some of Eurydice’s cough spores. Eurydice looked at him a bit longer, and every second was torture for George. He was sure he was perspiring rapidly, and that it was blood, and that little bits of blood would start showing all over his clothes and then Eurydice would make him shower again, next to the horse. Next to his mom. “Well,” Eurydice eventually continued. “I only came to tell you chaps that it’s bedtime. So night night. Time for beddy bye.”

James stupidly raised his hand and asked, “Why you got a cat for a head?” No one even cut their eyes at James. It was futile, plus they all were wondering. Though there was danger in the truth. Suppose Eurydice said something like he had a disease and it was contagious. There was no way to even run away screaming. They would have to just sit there and get his disease and have their heads be cats, too. Thankfully, Eurydice said some weird shit like, “I was touched by an angel”. He smiled his cat mouth and you could see his two front fangs. “What the fuck?” James whispered at the side of George. “I was asleep in my mother’s womb and an angel reached down from the Heavens and made me be a cat. Well, part cat. The best part of a cat.” “I would argue the best part of a cat is the butt,” Jay Crew said for some reason. Eurydice looked at him. “That’s a weird thing to say,” he said. “Your mom is a horse,” Jay Crew said, and George felt happy, thinking now it would definitely be Jay Crew the first killed off. He was sure it’d be Josh, but for sure now it was Jay Crew. Sometimes life was good. Eurydice didn’t even try to slash Jay Crew to death. He just chuckled and said, “The lads at school were always on me about that.” Jay Crew blinked at him. “But not about the cat head?..” Eurydice shook his head like it wasn’t a cat. “Uh uh. My best school chum, his dad was a velociraptor, actually. And my second best school chum, he was a Jew - Abner or some such. He was literally part-lizard. So no, the cathead thing was no big deal at all. But I’m from a different...world,” he gestured at Josh, “As Mr. Bowling Ball Photographer would say.” Josh spit up a bit in his cot. It looked like yogurt and suddenly George was starving. Eurydice put a bright look to his face, then clapped, and they all jumped in their cots.

He chuckled, then said, “Best be off to bed, then.” and he was gone. After they waited a while, to be sure he was gone, Jay Crew looked at the general group and was like, “That was like antisemitic, right? That thing about his friend Abner?” “Dude, who cares? He literally has a cat for a head.” George said. “Dude?” Jay Crew said in disgust. “You’re like eighty.” “I’m fifty-four, actually.” “Jesus!” Jay Crew exclaimed. George patted the air before him. “Okay,” he said, and he was sick. James nodded himself into the convo. “He do be havin’ a cathead, though.” “And what’s with him being friends with Bigfoot?” Josh said after a while. George was sure they weren’t gonna talk about it. Jackie J resumed chewing on her popcorn. “He ugly,” she offered. “Very ugly!” Jay Crew was nodding. George wondered if Jay Crew had a thing for Jackie J. His energy was very, let’s just say, enthusiastic, towards her. But if she’s not about to fuck a cathead billionaire freak, she’s not about to even think about twerkin’ in Jay Crew’s direction. He didn’t have elephant ears or alligator skin or anything cool to make him stand out. Women like men who stand out and have a special thing. He just looked like a regular bloke, if a little greasy. “He’s grotesque,” Josh was saying, “And I try not to be mean about people’s looks because it’s mean and it’s bad karma and it’s superficial. We’re all but souls stuck in human bodies, after all. But-” “But he literally like...a monster and shit,” James finished his thought. Josh nodded, “He’s a monster. And sure, maybe he has a soul, but he’s gross and I don’t care to think about that. I’d rather dismiss him as a grotesque freak and keep it at that. Every situation does not call for empathy and grace.”

Jackie J nodded in a churchly sort of way. “Amen,” she said, and George looked quickly at Jay Crew to see if he was jealous and he was. Jay Crew hurried up to talk next and get an “amen” from Miss Jackie J. “I totally agree!” he said stupidly. Jackie J just went on eating her popcorn. Jay Crew sighed softly with depression. He sank depressingly into his cot. He started talking, but it wasn’t clear if it was to them or just to himself. He lay back on his cot and covered his eyes with the back of his hand. “If only I got the job at McDonalds...” he breathed wistfully. His chest was moving up and down like he was trying to control an oncoming breakdown. James said he’d tried to get hired at McDonalds. “They said I had to lie down with Ronald.” He scrunched up his face, “I’m thinkin’ this nigga a cartoon or some shit. They gon’ lead me to the back to some room wit’ a mattress on the flo’ and there he was, legs all in the air, like he was waitin’ for me. I was like nah, nigga, that’s nasty. That’s homosexual. I’m against that. I’m homophobic, feel me? I aint wit’ that shit.” Jackie J was nodding along. James waved before his face as if swatting away a swarm of gnats. His face was crumpled up like he was suddenly taking in a huge waft of shit smells. “Nah, never that for a job. For some little change. If I’m finna do some gay shit and fuck on’ a clown, best believe it aint gon’ be for minimum wage. You gots to wine and dine me. You gots to break me off a few of them bills. Not some little change, no sir.” He was shaking his head. James was for sale, like everyone, but not for some little pocket change, and not for a clown, unless the clown wined and dined him probably. Couldn’t James work it out so he’d get free mcnuggs or whatever after work? Or was James fancy? He was too good for Ronald’s nugs. James was a Chik-fil-a typa binch. George rolled his eyes internally at how delusional James was. Like he was black and didn’t even use lotion. If he did it was Queen Helenes. McDonalds was the height of luxury for a dusty like James, come on. George was thinking these bad thoughts about James, but his face expressed agreement and he was nodding along, because Jackie J was, and she was the queen of the peasants, it’d been decided silently.

Jay Crew was sat upright in his cot again. He’d become very absorbed in James’ tale. He said, “Well, did you find another job after that?” James was less interested in discussing the follow-up to this, you could tell. He put a dismissive look on his face. “I went on ahead to the sex slave line at the Wally’s World, but I aint heard back yet. They aint hit my line up yet, but it’s not like I got a phone, so how could they call me?” Jay Crew asked how he’d entered the contest to get a ride aboard the Wethorsemane69. “Was a little scratch-off on the back of my cigarettes. Scratched it and it said ‘You won!’. I said ‘Won what?’, cuz I never won shit. Well, one time I won the school spelling bee, but er’one in my class then was mangled up from the toxic waste they was dumpin’ in our town river. Me and this Mexican kid Pueblo the only ones not all the way retarded. So it’s either me winnin’, or him, and he Mexican, so t’was me.” They all were nodding along. Pretty much everything was adding up and made sense. Well, except for George, who was from James’ town, and not retarded. He ed that spelling bee. The winning word was “Burger”. You could tell Pueblo thought the proctor said “Booger”, because that’s what he spelled. Pueblo was partially deaf from underground street fighting. It wasn’t really a “win” just because you aren’t partially deaf. George said, “I was there. I’m not retarded. I just didn’t feel like g up for a spelling bee. I thought spelling bees were like a joke from TV.” “Oh, it’s a joke?” James said on the defense. “No, what’s a joke is you. Bottom line, if your mush-brained ass could spell, you woulda been up there spelling shit - period. Aint no need to be makin’ excuses now. You aint win cuz you wasn’t up there cuz you can’t spell. Now, aint shit wrong wit’ bein’ a retard. We all gotta be some shit.” Jackie J was nodding. “But what’s not gon’ happen is,” James continued, and he pointed at George with an ashy gnarled little finger, “you tryna make me feel some typa way because I’m smart and aint nothin’ messed up in my brain from the toxic waste. Me and my gramma, we had the Brita filter, so none of that water got in us. We was

takin’ baths with the bottle water from the five‘n’dime. If we could do it, y’all could do it. But I know your nasty ass grandma wasn’t buyin’ no Brita filter. Ole’ broad was probably out back drinkin’ straight from the hose.” It was true. “So,” he went on, “blame her, not me.” James sat back with satisfaction on his cot. He was finished. George felt deeply ill. He tried to recover, but he was sure if he tried to speak he would start throwing up a ton of blood, and he didn’t want to have to go back in that bathroom, for fear the horse’d be there, lookin’ at him as he tried to clean himself up at the sink. George couldn’t bear having that horse just standing there looking at him. George was going to open his mouth and say something, but was glad a wrench was thrown in his plan by way of James receiving a sudden phone call. George was over the moon with relief. For sure, he would have shit and puked himself if he was forced to go on in the moment. James reached into his jeans and pulled out his phone he said he did not have. Jay Crew was saying, “How are you getting a phone call?” to which James responded by holding his hand up like a crossing guard stopping traffic. James answered his phone by pressing answer and then just waiting. He did not say “Hello?”, he only was silent, forcing the caller to be the first to initiate the conversation. Which made sense, as they called him, afterall. After a while of James sitting there with a blank, dull face, seemingly listening to whoever was speaking on the other end, he finally spoke and said, “Nigguh, I’m in space...” He huffed with annoyance and was rolling his eyes at whatever the person on the other end was saying. Eventually he clicked down his phone without saying goodbye, and returned it to the pocket of his jeans. Jay Crew took this as a sign he could get an answer to his question and asked again, “How are you getting a phone call?” James flashed his gaze upon Jay Crew with moist annoyance. He turned up his face and his lips and said, “What are you asking me? Is that some philosophical shit?”

Jay Crew looked unsure. Was he being philosophical? “No...like, how is your phone working up here? We’re in space...” James was annoyed and you could tell he barely considered Jay Crew, but if he did consider him, it was only as a non-sentient bean, who had no right to be considered. He said to him, with a dismissive flip of his bony, ashy hand, “It’s modern times and shit.” “It’s a cellphone,” Josh was saying like Jay Crew was that retard from Forrest Gump. James gestured at Josh, like, Right. Jay Crew was up to here with it. “Cellphones don’t work in bunkers so how the fuck does a cellphone work when we’re in the goddamn stratosphere? My cell doesn’t work when I go to my dealer’s house in the hood but somehow in the fucking galaxy this old black man can receive a call clear as day?” George wondered what drugs Jay Crew partook in. He seemed like a Monster Energy Drink type of guy. Maybe he took steroids to make his dick smaller. That seemed like something he would do. He’d be on all the dick-smaller forums about it, getting advice. George asked James what his phone call was about. “You in my business,” James said. George didn’t know what to say. He just looked at him. They all were looking at James. George didn’t feel like any of them were looking at him in any particular sort of way, but James started to fidget on his cot a bit, and was looking nervous. Or maybe he just had to poop. When they were in the bathroom, and it was James’ turn, he couldn’t go. He kept screaming that he was “poop shy!” and that he could not “perform” for an audience. George thought he’d be that type but when it was his turn the poop slid out of him with very little effort. It sheathed out of his asshole so smoothly that it was embarrassing. After a while James was saying, “T’was my manager and shit. Talkin bout ‘Come in’. Bitch, I told you I was going to the moon! Fuck you mean!” Josh said, “Where do you work? Do you clean up hair at a barbershop?”

James shook his head “Nah, I couldn’t get that job because I’m not cleaning up shit and the hair makes me itch to look at it, plus when I tried to sell bags of it to a local voodoo witch she tried to lock me up in a cellar in her house and cook me in a cauldron, and all that for minimum wage and you don’t even get tips, like bitch if I’m scooping up your nasty ass beeduhbees least you can do is tip me a little five here and there. Errbody always tryna have a slave, like, no, that shit is over. And,” he turned to George, “that cathead muthafucka not makin me work at no Quiznos, specially when I’m in space, like bitch I’ll strap on the suit and float somewhere else, you can’t hold me nowhere in outerspace, you have no dominion over me whatsoever. That’s why I signed up for this shit cuz I’m not about to be on Earth sweeping up pubic hairs and shit and I only make enough money to buy half a honey bun from the gas station - fuck outta here. That’s why I dipped out on McDonald’s. They don’t even let you take home a little burger after your shift, any shit they don’t sell they throw in a locked dumpster out back like the fuck you locking up garbage for? That’s why I broke the lock and was taking the bags of burgers home then they gon’ take me to the back office and show me stealing out the garbage on video, talkin’ bout this your first warning but next time we callin’ the pohlease. How tf you callin the pohlease on a bitch for taking some shit out the garbage can? I’m doing the environment a fucking favor! Fuck you mean!” Quickly, Jay Crew was pouncing on the McDonald’s thing. “I thought you said you didn’t get the job at—” James was instantly screaming, with tears in his eyes, “Well I lied! Harriet the spy!” Jay Crew turned to George for some reason and said, like he was James’ translator or some shit, “What is he sayin’?” George shrugged as an instant reaction, then thought differently and explained, “He lied about not fucking Ronald to get the McDonalds—” “Lil snitch ass!” James was saying, as he delicately scratched his fingernails against the side of George’s cheek. It was a light dusting, a sissified swipe, and George would be surprised to find even a small mark the next time he looked in the mirror, which would be never, because there is no way he’d ever be able to face himself again after showering next to that horse. That would never happen,

so he would not know if James’ fingernails left a scar or not and he didn’t care, he’d never care about anything ever again. Suddenly there was a great big bash, and a great amount of noise began to whoosh about. They began to be whipped back and forth, to and fro, on their cots with violent abandon. “Oh boy here we go,” George heard Jackie J say to no one in particular, in a sort of hohum, what else is new sort of tone. They were thrashing about quite wildly and it wasn’t exactly a neat little spin on the merry go round. It was certain they’d all be chucked eventually, after the great violence, to their horrific and very painful deaths. But then that didn’t happen. Suddenly the wild thrashing stopped, and it was quiet. Then they heard some ear-piercing banshee screaming coming from some other wing of the ship. Josh rolled his eyes. He didn’t look cool anymore, so him rolling his eyes just made him look gay. He said, “Some gross alien probably got into the ship.” He sighed with lack of interest. It was terrible how they were all just stuck up there. Nowhere to go. George, usually if he was bored or anxious or whatever, he could leave the slimy room he rented back on Earth and go to Taco Bell and loiter about in the parking lot. Or he could go to the playgrounds and be harassed by all the children accusing him of being a pedo even though he would never want to date a child they are stupid and they are ugly and they don’t even know how to make lasagna. He could go to the mall, and walk around and look at all the closed shops and the general abandoned state of it. He could just loiter and walk and stare and be free. But now he was stuck in space on some idiot ship and if he tried to open the door and get some air he’d be sucked out into the void and choked to completion by some invisible octopus tentacles or something George didn’t know what happened but in movies people always died when they tried to walk around in space maybe it was propaganda maybe it was fine maybe it was like the atmosphere back on Earth where it was all polluted and shit, sure, but you could walk around alright mostly. Or at least you didn’t die right away from going outside. Usually. If you took your machete with you and wore your pollution helmet.

Eurydice flounced in with his faggoty cat head flopping all about. He appeared in good spirits. “Unfortunately, I have terrible news,” he said in his straining to clamp down a long, screechful meow, faux-clipped, prim and proper sort of voice. They all knew there was a big flaming beast in there, longing to burst free. Eurydice couldn’t fool any of them. But they weren’t going to, any of them, bring it up or cause a scene. They were in space, and he was gross. They weren’t in the business of creating any situation beyond absolutely necessary to talk to him. Eurydice put a solemn look to his cat face. “Jackie,” he began, “the President’s daughter...has expired.” They all just looked at him. Why did he keep being alive and not expiring like Jackie? Eurydice had an expectant look to him, as if he were open for further questioning, and now he would wait to be exploded upon with inquiries. George decided to take it upon himself to put a thumb in the widening chasm of the yawning, interminable silence that lay before them. That surrounded them on all sides. It was like a sticky, humid heat that went into their ears and noses and down into their lungs and clotted out their life. George said, “Wow, that’s a bummer.” Eurydice looked at him, down to him, and said nothing. George thought maybe it wasn’t enough grieving on his part, so he added, shaking his head mournfully, “That’s really tough...” Eurydice looked on at him, a flash of disgust rippling across his visage. He cupped his skeletal hands together, delicately, though they still made that bonetouching sound. He said to George, “So listen...”, then he paused to look away, cup, then re-cup

his hands. He turned back to George, “Alicia told me you were a homosexual.” He turned his bony finger toward himself to point at his concave chest, and his mouth hung open for a long while before he spoke again. “I am homophobic. I did not know you were a homosexual, I just thought you were retarded... I don’t want to be associated with that kind of thing.” George was thinking, Is he talking to me? He heard Josh be like, “Dude, your mom’s a horse...” “A whore? Quite.” Josh said louder, “Horse! Your mom is a horse!” Eurydice nodded at him. “Yes.” James was speaking now, saying, “Nigga, how you gon’ be homophobic when you so homo you got butt cancer from the shit?” “I’m a billionaire, many times over.” “Here we go,” Jay Crew sighed aggressively, then he looked quickly at Jackie J, and she gave an irritated look of agreement and you could tell Jay Crew almost squirted in his joggers. Eurydice was looking on at the little moment that occurred between JC and JJ. You could tell he felt proper sick to his fucking stomach. “Yes,” he said out of nowhere, and he burped an ugly wet burp. He was nodding ferociously to no one and looked like he was going to throw up. He whipped his head demonically towards James, and there was a fire in his eyes, or conjunctivitis. “I am not a homo,” he was saying deeply to James. George wondered who Alicia was. He was sure it was that chained up Cheez-its cafeteria worker who’d been giving him the stick eye. Or maybe she had conjunctivitis. Why would she say those things? he thought damply.

“I have gay sex. But I am not a flamer. Men are the best at doing sex to other men.” He gestured to James, “As I’m sure you know.” James was shaking his head, “No...” Eurydice continued on, saying, “Us men, we know all the good spots in other men, all the nooks and crannies.” “No...” James had been repeating this over and over since Eurydice had gestured to him and suggested James understood that only men get other men. “You not even a man,” Jackie J chimed in. “You got a damn cat on your damn head.” She was fed up, and they all shared her sentiments. Eurydice looked at her, trying to be brave. “I have a babymama, actually. Maybe you’ve heard of her. Sha’knees from Teen Mom.” He nodded smugly as if he’d said his baby mama was Anita Baker or something. Jackie J seemed vaguely impressed, but she hid it well, saying coolly, “Oh, I think I saw her on Dr. Phil.” This was stupid to say to Eurydice, as it only seemed to embolden and gratify him. He went to adjust his ascot with a noble smugness, only to say, “She’s been on all the shows. Dr. Phil, Maury, Steve Wilkos, Iyanla - all the shows anyone who's anyone goes on. She was even on Grey’s Anatomy in a guest role as a teen who is pregnant by her stepdad. Initially they wrote it that she was pregnant by her cosmopolitan billionaire playboy boyfriend—as a little pop culture nod to the audience—but she had them change it, because really, how many sixteen year old girls do you know whose baby daddy is a eight hundred dollar billionaire many times over? She wanted her appearance to be grounded in realism. She’s a true artist, not some phony just seeking their fifteen minutes of fleeting fame and fortune.” (He said fortune like fourchoon). Jackie J rolled her eyes. Eurydice’s head jerked back quickly in response, and he made some great, cartoonish gulping noise from his throat.

Josh started snickering from his cot. It was that kind of snicker that is muffled because the person laughing has their head buried in a pillow. Eurydice looked at him and his cat ears began to twitch and a buzzing sound was coming from his body. Josh curtailed his laughter for a few moments to ask through only mildly damped-down laughter, “W-w-w-wait...wait.” He went on laughing, but it was only a short burst, and he was able to continue. “Wait,” he laughed. “What happened again? How come Jackie is dead? Did she get her period?” Eurydice looked at Josh with stone eyes and said, “Nice haircut by the way.” But it was too late. Josh had already quickly cycled through the seven stages of grief concerning his humiliating hair-shorning experience. He was out the other side now as New Josh. Plus, anyway, they were in space, so who gives a shit about anything. He didn’t blink at Eurydice trying to son him and said, “Why is Jackie dead?” Josh narrowed his eyes in mostly a joking way, cuz, again, who gives a shit? “Did you kill her?” he said. Eurydice looked annoyed he’d even been accused. “The only people I have ever killed are those people who were in my first spaceship launch. The trial launch of the Wethorsemane69. What I now refer to as the Wethorsemane68. They all exploded. All except for me, as I was adorned in my special anti-explosion spacesuit. My only mistake was not getting a suit for everyone. However, I was the only billionaire on board, and no one even re all those servants who perished. Now,” he clapped, “on to the matter of Jackie. She is dead because aliens have climbed onboard and they have killed her.” “Here we go with the bullshit,” Jackie J was groaning to herself as she began to unwrap a caramel candy she had procured from her purse. They all looked at her and waited for her to offer one to everyone, but she did not. “Jack,” Josh shouted to her, and he made a gesture with his head. Jackie J looked at him like she didn’t know why this white boy thought he could address her in any way, but you could tell she flipped right over to ing she was in fucking space, held captive by a crazed catheaded lunatic, so fuck it.

She reached into her horse bag of a purse and retrieved another caramel, then tossed it over to Josh who caught it in his mouth like Airbud. George immediately went back to thinking he was cool. Even though he’d been marked by Eurydice. He was still Josh, afterall, only uglier. Eurydice put out his hand like some judgmental little butler. Like, literally you clean my toilet what is all this attitude about. He put his hand out and he said, as puckered as a peach, “May I have a candy?” “No you may not,” Jackie J said, nodding her head forward with disgust. She jerked it right back and said, “No you may fucking not.” Josh started snickering again. Eurydice was in a rage, screeching about how dare she this and how ungrateful that. “I bring you onto this ship out of the graciousness of my good heart. You paid nothing to be here. You are here entirely because of my goodness and kindness and charity! You would never see space if it were not for me, and all I ask in return for everything I have given you is a small piece of candy! Is that so much to ask?!” Jackie J wasn’t having it. “What seems small to you, may seem too great for even the eye to see and the brain to comprehend for another. For me, giving you a piece of candy would take everything from me, and I simply do not have it to give.” “You do have it to give! I see your great purse! I know it is filled with candies!” Jackie J was shaking her head. “It is not about giving you a piece of candy. It is about doing anything even remotely kind for you, which I cannot do. I will not do it. Such a gesture will ruin me. You will not take anything from me. I will not give it, and you cannot have it.” Eurydice sucked his little cat teeth, then turned his head so only George and James could see it where they sat. Josh was snickering away beyond them. He proceeded to sigh extravagantly in George and James’ general direction. James shook violently on his cot, as if blown away by some great gust. He was

making a bunch of grunting noises from disgust. George tried to be less ghetto and harsh about it and sit there as his nostrils singed with the scent of kitty litter and cat butt. George’d never really had his nose up to either, but somehow he knew both. He thought perhaps he’d been a cat in his last life, then shuddered with disgust, worrying that perhaps he’d not been a normal, very cool and detached cat, but a freak like Eurydice with only the cat head, and the abnormally long human bodice following after it. Eurydice tried to right himself, and he did, but on shaky ground, at best. He tried to give them all a bright look, and he looked crazed, more so than usual. He had a cat for a head, but it was a calm head mostly. In the moment, it looked like he was squirming with rabies or something and like he had some sort of cat-specific wasting disease. Some ailment you get from living down by the river, and fighting and eating the river rats. He said at long last, “The alien came aboard and screeched at us in what can only be described as hieroglyphics.” “Aintchu an alien?” James interrupted. He twisted up his face. “You ackin like you aint know what the fuck the alien was sayin’?” He nodded disingenuously. “Okay.” Eurydice closed his eyes, and he let it be quiet for a while before opening them again. He was constantly restarting, reinventing. Every day, every second. It is not possible to survive as an eight foot tall catheaded freak if you don’t. He reset himself in the moment. He was capable of this. It was a learned skill, and quite useful. The most useful skill and tool in his tool belt. He eventually acknowledged James, saying, with a long sigh, “I did not say I could not understand the alien. He—Or I assume it was a He, because he was big and strong and had a deep voice and a large, horse-sized penis, though it was in the back and not in the front like we are used to.” “We?” James asked with disgust. Eurydice closed his eyes and said, “Like we are used to back on Earth. His penis was in the back, under where his butt should go, except this alien’s butt seemed to be its face. Quite strange, but I’m sure it was a man alien.” “Wrap this up,” James said with irritation, and they all the rest of them quietly

agreed. Eurydice wasn’t what you would call...a riveting storyteller. He was quite dull and long-winded actually. He meandered and he was too ugly to indulge in such extravagances. James started wrapping his hands around one another. “Wrap it up,” he said again. Eurydice winced with pain, but carried on. “Jackie,” he said too loudly, “she understood the alien. The alien wanted us to leave this ship and go to his ship, so he could have servants to make sandwiches for him and his crew. Apparently they ate the other crew, but didn’t possess the foresight to know if they ate their crew, their servants, they’d have no one to serve them sandwiches later when they are hungry and there is no more crew to eat.” “Yo, wrap this up!” James exclaimed. It was honestly very dull, but the others were too scared or bored to say anything, and it was just the thing that if you were forced to address Eurydice you had to look at him, and he was just too gross to set your naked eye upon for longer than even zero seconds. Eurydice looked James strong in the eye. He was fortifying from the jeers. You could see James was slightly shaken, but alas, he was in space. It’s not like he was on Earth and being a coward mattered, or even faltering for a second in your reserve. He was suspended in the ether and nothing mattered. It was the truth, and he wanted to die. But what would it mean if he did. The suffering wouldn’t end, so he kept on sitting, and looking at the cathead. This is all it would be forever til the end, and there would be no end. “Jackie always wanted to fuck an alien,” he went on. Josh sighed from his cot. Eurydice looked at him and started directing his words towards Josh. “So she goes up to him and she picks up his penis. She lifts it up in her palm, and what this alien did was, he whipped his penis around like a whip and he wrapped it around her neck like a noose, and he used his penis to jerk her up into the air and sort of violently yank her, and in the process of all this, Jackie’s neck snapped, and then her head came loose, and it was quite a gory little scene.”

“That sounds like a tail, not a penis,” Jay Crew said, so he was Eurydice’s next target and Eurydice started talking only to him. “After Jackie was killed, I went up to the alien and said that we weren’t interested in ing his ship, and that he could just go on and harass someone else, and he didn’t like that much, but he turned around and walked out, so it’s fine now, even though Jackie has died, but she was only a President’s daughter. Her father isn’t even a billionaire. My father hired her father once to come to our house and get in a cage and fight with the tigers we keep on the land. Well, it was only one of the tigers, not the whole gang - he’d never win against the whole gang.” They all quietly wondered if Jackie’s dad had been successful in defeating the one tiger, but no one dared to ask, as that only encouraged Eurydice to remain in the room and keep spewing forth from his disgusting cat mouth. Eurydice looked about listlessly, bored. “He was a hideous cretin,” he seemed to be saying to no one in particular. “Very grotesque in the face, which was a butt, actually, but I’m used to that. Back on Earth, there was so much ugliness, so much hideousness, that’s why I had to get out.” George thought how the ugliest thing on Earth had been Eurydice, and that he’d done everyone a favor by getting the fuck off it. “So let me get this straight,” Jay Crew was saying. “Instead of using your billions upon billions of Chuck E. Cheez tokens to solve hunger and poverty, you decide to use all your money to build a gigantic spaceship and take off-” “He aint build shit,” James was saying. Jay Crew looked at him, then continued to Eurydice, saying, “You just take the fuck off to a new planet just so you don’t have to look outside your window and see the poors; see the world burning and shit?” “It only cost me a couple of hundred million to build this ship.”—(“You aint build this shit,” James said)—“I still have many billions of dollars left,” was Eurydice’s response to this. “So what good is all that money if you’re not going to help people with it?”

Eurydice was confused. “Why do you keep talking about money? We’re on a spaceship. We’re in space. There’s no money here. No currency or economy. It’s not relevant to anything.” “But when we were on Earth,” Jay Crew kept on, and he was fearful. It was like only in the moment did he realize he wasn’t talking to a person. “You could have helped people. Given people money for food and housing and healthcare.” Eurydice softly shook his head, “Oh, I would never do that.” “I would do it if I had money,” Jay Crew said. “You wouldn’t,” Eurydice said. “I would,” Jay Crew insisted. “I’d hel-” “You wouldn’t have money.” Eurydice double-downed. “You aren’t a chosen one. You would never be in my position to make any grand choices about curing all the world's ails, because you would never be chosen to be in my position. Only people who would never think to do a thing like that are chosen to have all the world's material possessions. What is the point of blessing a man with things if he only wants to give them away?” Jay Crew just looked at him. You could tell finally he understood he’d never been talking to his fellow man. He just sat on his cot and stared off aimlessly. Eurydice was still on it, and he was saying ionately, “This is why I had to leave! Because of small-brained peasants such as yourself. You are like ants, like roaches and bed lice! You crawl into all the cracks in the dark and you never leave. Even when the lights are flicked on, you are still there in the shadows, waiting for your chance to pounce. I could not endure it! The suffocation of the expectations of bugs beneath your feet. How blessed you are that I do not squish you with my shoe!” He looked insane, and very ugly. Jackie J piped in, saying, “Wasn’t you the one kicked that child in the head at Whole Foods?” Josh was nodding, “Yep!”, while Eurydice and Jay Crew both looked on sick, for

different reasons. Jackie J was pointing at Eurydice now, “Yeah, I that. It was all on the news and on Facebook and everything. You kicked that little girl in the head and now she in a wheelchair and got brain dama-” “She was eating the grapes!” Eurydice screeched. Jackie J shook her head, she was sucking on a caramel candy. “No, you was eatin’ the grapes. That’s what it said in the articles and they had a little video from the Whole Foods security camera. You was eatin’ the grapes and the little girl told on you to her momma and that’s when you kicked her in the head. That was like two weeks ago, so now I see you tryna run away from the scandal by goin’ to outerspace, but if that was my family, wouldn’t no outerspace stop us from findin’ you and whoopin’ your lil’ ass. But that was a little white girl. I don’t know if they got shooters like that. You better hope they don’t.” “Oh, I that!” James was saying, pointing at Jackie J, and Jackie J nodded at him and Jay Crew was devastated. George wished he could contribute to the rigamarole. He hadn’t heard this wonderful news, due to his fear of websites. He wished he had more context on this child kicking story. What kind of grapes? he wondered. For some reason he assumed moon drop grapes. “Why you kick that baby in the head?” James said to Eurydice, and George could tell he was being disingenuous. If Eurydice hadn’t gotten to that girl first, it’d’ve been James for sure. Eurydice tried to look regal and elegant when he said, “She was in the way of my foot. Her head was in the way of my foot path, and my foot path happened to be in the air at the moment, not on the ground as usual.” “You a real summabitch,” James said, and he was smiling from ear to ear. You could tell he was aroused by the idea of a child being severly hurt to the point of needing to be in a wheelchair. “Oh yeah?” Eurydice said with a shaky voice. “How when I’m going to make tea for you guys? I bought special tea.”

James looked at George and said in a not quiet whisper, “What he sayin’?” “He said he has tea. He bought special tea?” James scrunched up his face, then he looked back to Eurydice, “Tea? For what?” “For drinking!” Eurydice said in a gay, grating voice. “For merriment!” James was uninterested. “You got Hennessy?” he said. Eurydice sighed, let down. “No, I don’t got Hennessy, James! Why is it always about Hennessy with you people?!” “Why it’s always ‘bout tea witchyall??” James rolled his eyes in a Mr. Sassafras sort of manner, but nobody looked gayer than Eurydice at the moment, or ever, also. “Tea is nutrients,” Eurydice said oddly, then he walked strangely to the corner of their peasants’ quarters where the whole time was a little electric kettle none of them noticed, or maybe they thought it was some random space shit. Eurydice brought the first cup over to Jackie J and she immediately rejected it. He pulled back from the rejection, then did some weird thing with his sleeve over the mouth of the cup. He bent back to retry handing the tea to her. She shook her head, holding her purse on her lap like it was a giant bomb she would absolutely not hesitate to detonate if need be. “I saw you put that tablet in my drink. You did it right in front of my face.” Oh that’s what that weird sleeve thing was, George thought. He was bored. And disappointed. Eurydice was trying to kill them and it wasn’t even anything cool. Just some weirdo date rape shit. They were in space. Didn’t he have some lasers or some shit? No alien pals to rush in and chop all their heads off with their sword-sharp butt dicks? So lame. George was rolling his eyes in a flippertyjippert sort of way as James was saying for everybody, “He tryna kill us.” “Get it over with,” Josh said, laying with disinterest on his cot.

Eurydice pulled back from strangely hovering over Jackie J to look at him. “Well, you have to drink the tea,” he said. “I’m not drinking tea,” Josh declined. “Got any cold brew?” “No, I don’t have any fucking cold brew!” Jay Crew asked if Eurydice had Baja Blast. “No!” he screeched. “What even is that?!” Jay Crew was shaking his head saying, “You don’t know anything. You’re so...out of the loop.” “So bring me in the loop, dammit!” James was annoyed. “He don’t got shit on this boat!” Jackie J nodded at him as Eurydice was screeching, “It’s a spaceship!” George raised his hand in a small way and asked, “Why is the ship named this?” “It’s a spaceship!” Eurydice screamed, then he fixed himself. “Oh, uh...it’s named after my mom.” George felt sick. “The horse?” he said. Eurydice looked at him. “My mother, yes.” James looked at George and was like, “Whose momma a horse? I’m boutta flame this nigguh.” George thought how James’ own mother was a crackhead that he barely knew and that’s why he was raised by his grandmother who had no legs, but he didn’t say it. And it wasn’t worse than being a horse. At least she was a human. That’s why she did crack. Being a human is terrible, and super dumb.

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