The Devil’s Peace – Part 3 [Jim #10, Short Fiction]

The angel at the docks pointed north and Jim thanked her for the canoe. He rowed for an hour and came to a place where the lake became narrow and snaked between roots and rocks. It opened up into a silent cove. The water looked like a block of metal reflecting the sky, and in the middle of it a small man fished from a wooden raft.

Jim paddled up to him.

“Uh, Mr. Christ?”

The man didn’t move. He sat on his wooden raft with his wooden fishing pole in both hands. He looked at the water.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Christ,” Jim said. “I know you’re retired.”

“I’ve been fishing this spot for three hundred years,” the man said. “Three hundred years, and I haven’t caught a single fish.”

“That sucks,” Jim said.

“If a man casts his pole into a fishless pond, does he deserve to eat?”

Jim had been a long time getting here and he was pretty tired and a little angry. “I’ll be completely honest with you, Mr. Christ, I don’t give a shit and I’m not sorry about it,” he said. “Your followers are ripping Paradise apart, and you’re out here fishing.”

“Josh,” the man said.

“Josh?” Jim knew a Josh back in Tennessee. He was an old drunk with brown teeth and a lazy eye. “Alright, Josh. I’m Jim.”

“I’m glad to meet you, Jim,” said Josh. “But the politics of Paradise no longer interest me.”

“The fuck they don’t!” Jim said. Then he realized he just said fuck at Jesus – or Josh – and he pulled back. “Sorry, maybe that’s not called for. But you’re the guy at the center of the whole thing. They’re all fighting for different versions of you.”

“No they aren’t.”

“Yes they are.”

“Not really.”

“Goddammit they are!”

“People would rather die for the things they can’t see, than live with the ones they can,” said Josh. “One look at me, and they’ll just go die for something else.”

“That’s the problem. Nobody’s dying,” Jim said. “And isn’t that why you died?”

Josh laughed. It was a deep one from the gut.

“Well I’m glad you think it’s funny.”

“Give it a few thousand years and it will be,” Josh said. “I told her those barriers were a bad idea. What finally brought them down?”

“It’s not important,” Jim said. “They’re down and nobody is special anymore and they’re pissed off about it. I came here to convince you to talk to them.”

“What did you do in life?”

“What?”

“What work did you do? How did you eat?”

“Well, I don’t know, I just worked. Welding was good money. I did some roofing and drywalling. I don’t follow you.”

“We are not so different,” Josh said. “I also just worked. Mending ploughs, building houses. I even did some roofing.” He paused and looked Jim in the eye for the first time. “Would you give another man the road because he had clean hands? Would you accept the sting of his whip because you didn’t give it fast enough?”

Jim cringed. This was the rubbery shit that kept him away from church.

“No,” he said. “I’d pull him off his horse and beat him to hell.”

“Well, we had hammers and empty stomachs, and the Romans had armor and swords. They were chosen by many colorful gods and we were slaves to a black one. So one day, after three Roman soldiers raped and killed a friend of mine, I stood on a crate and said, I am a son of God.”

Jim followed Josh’s gaze. The fishing line disappeared into the plate surface of the water. He expected the line to jerk at any moment, and Josh to finally catch his fish, but the surface never broke.

“Between the Aramaic of the people,” Josh said, “and the Hebrew of the scholars, and the Greek of the Romans, the a became a the. Articles don’t translate so well. I became the son of God, and a few years later the fuckers nailed me to a cross.”

It was Jim’s turn to laugh. He nearly capsized.

“I’m glad you think it’s funny,” Josh said.

“The Articles of Faith!” Jim said. “I get it now.”

“I can’t help you.”

“Seriously though, you’ve got to give me something. I came a long way.”

“Work.”

“What?”

“You said you were a roofer. The firmament is a roof.”

“There’s war in Paradise because the devil lied, and now that the lie is broken the advice of Jesus Christ is that I board it up?”

“My name is Josh,” Josh said.

Jim was at the edge of the cove and still shaking his head when Josh called out some parting words.

“Jim! Before you cast off, make sure there’s fish!”

***

With a bag full of nails, a good hammer, and planks of wood donated by the Presbyterian Church of Canada, Jim went to work. One nail, one board at a time. He started where the crack in the firmament met the ground and worked his way up. He doubted that Josh’s advice had been sincere, but he didn’t care. It felt good to work. Hell, maybe that was the point.

He worked for a long time. Days, weeks, a year. Hundreds of boards and thousands of nails. He didn’t eat and he didn’t sleep. He didn’t look up because it discouraged him, he didn’t look down because he didn’t care for heights. He looked at his hands and the place where the hammer met the nail.

Beneath him the strange sound of a strange war pushed him upward.

But one day the hammer broke and he looked around. He was a mile high over a shredded wonderland. His labor trailed behind him like a dead rainbow. He looked up and saw that he had the whole sky to go.

“I don’t think this is going to work,” he said.

“Jim!”

A friendly and wise old face popped in through the crack in the firmament. Wild hair and the blaze of intelligence.

“You goddamn crazy hillbilly!” Einstein said. “You can’t fix the sky with wood!”

“Yeah, well your dice didn’t work for shit, either.”

Einstein barked a laugh and pulled himself up and mounted the firmament like a horse.

“I’ll make it make it up to you.”

“Yeah?”

“This breach is distorting my antiverse, too. And I think I’ve figured a way to patch it.”

“Alright.”

“Do you remember when you pushed me, Jim? The power of thought and the expansion of Paradise? Well, it turns out that thought travels through the vacuum at exactly the speed of light. This isn’t too surprising, but it gives rise to some wacky results, the most obvious of which is most pertinent. The object of thought is immediately real, but our experience of it is delayed by the intervening distance over c. Everything we dream up exists for a substantial amount of time before we can even see it.”

Jim understood none of it. “I think I preferred Jesus,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Anyway, I’ve examined what’s left of these barriers, and I believe I understand their function. They refract the light as it returns from the object of thought, and whoever originated the thought receives only the frequencies and colors that satisfy the preconceptions of the original. Unwanted information is essentially filtered out, scattered like a prism. It’s simple and ingenious, but I believe I can improve upon it.”

“Listen, I don’t understand what you’re saying, but I’m at the end of the line here,” Jim said. “You’re talking to me because you think you can fix this thing but you need an extra pair of hands. Well, hands are the only fucking thing I got. Give them something to do. I’ll do it.”

“It’s the particles, Jim,” Einstein said, “They’re goddamn crazier than you are.” He poked wild holes in the air with his index fingers. “As soon as you know where one is, it’s somewhere else, in from the wrong direction and out at unknown speeds. We need to make waves, Jim. Waves!” He made waves with his arms. “Wonderful predictable waves!”

“I don’t know how to make waves,” Jim said.

“I’m going to implode the dark star behind me and send out a wave of anti charm-quarks,” Einstein said. “And along this breach I’ll shoot a hyper-frequency energy beam. The energy in the beam must be concentrated in waves. Any particles will rip the guts out of the anti charm-quarks. That’s where you come in.”

“Of course it is.”

“We need a distraction.”

“You want me to distract the particles?”

“The people, the war, you need to distract all potential observers. Matter and energy come in waves until a somebody takes a look, then they freak out and have a particle party. If a single person down there looks up at the energy beam, its waves will particulize and the jig’s up.”

“Are you fucking with me?”

“Take this walkie-talkie. Contact me when the distraction is in play.”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“I didn’t believe it until I was dead,” Einstein said, slipping back into the antiverse. “Do you know the difference between science and religion, Jim?”

“Kind of.”

“Results! Get me that distraction, and I’ll get us a barrier.”

***

Jim did his best to explain the situation. He left out the part about his atomic ejaculate and failed at explaining particle/wave duality, but he got the important stuff. The firmament had cracked, and fixing it required the distraction of a billion warring Christians.

“I won’t do it,” Hitler said.

“Oh come on,” Jim said.

“It is not a good idea.”

Hitler sat in a soft leather recliner. His pineapple pina colada had a pink umbrella. Some true crime novels lay on the table. It looked like vacation, but his fists were clenched on the armrests and his eyes were pale and serious.

“I am relaxed now,” Hitler said. “I golf. I tell jokes. I read interesting articles.”

“You don’t look relaxed.”

“I am learning.”

Jim looked at his hands. Why couldn’t he just do something with his hands?

“You instigated the biggest war in history,” he said.

“I did.”

“And maybe up here you don’t get any credit, but like a hundred million people died.”

“There was a lot of death.”

“I bet a lot of them still think you’re kind of a prick.”

Hitler pounded his fist on the table and spilled his pineapple pina colada.

“I am given neither the recognition of my conquest nor the forgiveness of the conquered!” he said. “It isn’t fair!”

“Well then let’s flip it on them,” Jim said. “Go out there, talk some shit with that silver Nazi tongue, and save the fucking day!”

Hitler stood.

“Just give me a microphone,” he said. “I will unite the birds against the sky.”

***

Einstein. Einstein. Are you there?

Jim! I am in orbit around the dark star. The apparatus is fully operational. Is the distraction in play?

It’s ready, but it might take some time.

After detonation, it will take two minutes for the anti charm-quark wave to reach the energy beam. Not a single person can witness it. No observers! Our timing must be perfect.

Do not detonate until I give the word. I repeat, Do not detonate.

What is the distraction? Fireworks? A John Wayne movie?

Uh, well, not exactly. Would that have worked?

Anything that draws the eye. We only need a picosecond. What is in play?

I went with Hitler.

What?! You goddamn crazy hillbilly!

***

Hitler stood on the shoulders of a smirking angel. He tapped the microphone, and the thud echoed through the sound system of Paradise. There was a wang of feedback and he cleared his throat.

“The – enemy – is –not – here!” he said. He said it several more times, until some of the fighting around him stopped and he had a small audience.

Jim watched from a safe distance, binoculars in one hand and Einstein’s walkie talkie in the other. The small audience became a fashionable one in a matter of minutes. Mostly Orthodox, but some Anglicans and even Lutherans looked on with interest. At first they seemed mildly amused, glad for a break from the war. But Hitler spoke with a hard rhythm and punctuated with his fists and pretty soon they were punctuating with him.

Hitler really deserves some credit for all that death, Jim thought.

When the Catholics came the sounds of war stopped. They outnumbered the others by far. Methodists, Baptists, Mormons, Presbyterians, Evangelists, Congregationalists, Pentecostalists – all dwarfed by the Catholic hoard. Billions surrounded Hitler, high on the shoulders of the smirking angel.

The Presbyterian Church of Canada was the last to arrive. They brought enough cake for everyone.

Hitler had yet to say anything of substance. Given the full attention of every Christian in Paradise he drew in a breath and cracked his knuckles. A second smirking angel came down from the sky bearing an empty canvas. Hitler raised a brush and rounded out his speech.

“The – enemy – is – not – here! There is – another – barrier! The enemy – lies – in wait! I – will bring – the enemy – to us! I – will paint – Mohammed!”

“Oh shit,” Jim said.

***

Einstein! Now! Fire! Fire!

What’s happening down there?

Hitler is painting Mohammed! I don’t know jack shit about Islam, but you don’t fucking paint Mohammed.

Dammit, hillbilly. Elvis, you could have called up Elvis. Alright, we have detonation. Two minutes to arrival.

Can you make it go faster?

Anti charm-quarks do not have a gas pedal.

He’s got the outline of the face.

One minute, forty seconds.

Is that a nose? I think it’s a nose.

And thirty seconds.

You know, he’s pretty good. It’s kind of sad how good he is.

And fifteen seconds.

The lips are taking shape.

One minute remaining to impact. Is the distraction complete? A single observer, Jim! A single eye looking up and the waves of the energy beam will collapse!

Nobody’s turning away from this shit. He’s working on the eyes.

Forty seconds.

The eyes are fucking brilliant. I almost want him to finish. It’s like, they’re looking through me, man.

Twenty seconds. Jim, if this works, there will be an immense burst of light. Following the burst –

He’s on the ears. All he’s got left is ears. I think he’s going to do it. Holy fuck!

***

FLASH

***

Jim? Jim, come in! Jim, did it work? Damn you hillbilly, what’s going on down there?

I’m – I’m here.

Did it work?

Well, Hitler finished his painting and the whole nation of Islam blitzed in from a new breach. But I think it worked. There was a huge burst of light. Something’s weird though.

What is it? Can they see each other? They should not be able to see each other.

It’s like, the opposite.

Sonofabitch. A million pole dancers in Paradise, and you give Hitler a paintbrush.

No, it’s awesome. We can see each other’s thoughts. I can’t explain it, but . . . I don’t know, it’s like we’re all looking inside each other, but on the outside. And it’s fucking crazy because we’re all thinking the same things. Wait, no, there’s some Mormons thinking something different. Everybody’s looking at them. Oh man they’re super embarrassed. I can feel it, it’s horrible. And we’re empathizing . . . alright, they’re cool. Yeah, turns out we all think the same shit. It just got real friendly down here.

Results!

***

Jim found Lucy on a low-hanging cloud. She was all Lucy now and there were bags under her eyes. Jim said nothing and stood beside her.

The throng of all religions was peaceful but stirring. The spectacle of oneness had lost its charm, and it looked like they might start to go at it again.

Then it began to rain fish.

“Are you doing that?” Jim said.

“Nope,” Lucy said.

Jim pulled out the walkie talkie.

“Einstein, it’s raining fish.”

“Is that some kind of hillbilly riddle?”

“No, it’s raining fish. Does that have anything to do with the energy beam?”

“Well, in theory, if enough neutrinos from the antiverse run up against the quark barrier with sufficient simultaneity, any number of strange physical phenomena could be localized there. Fish rain is a bizarre, but possible, outcome.”

The fish fell and fell. Big juicy happy fish. Children played with them, waving the fish around like swords and beating each other silly. Many of the fish were cooked and eaten. Some of the fish landed in water and were fished again. And the fish kept falling. There were rivers and pools that were nothing but floppy and happy fish. The fish were knee high in some places and waist high in others. Grown men made fish angels and fish snowmen and competed at fish throwing and fish juggling and some of them even tried to sell the fish.

Where oneness by itself fell short of peace, the rain of countless fish fell long of war.

“You know what Jesus said to me?” Jim said.

Lucy stopped him with a hand.

“I don’t care,” she said. “I just need a drink.”


Jim Home

 

 

The Face that Employed a Thousand Angels [Jim #6, Short Fiction]

Annual Cleopatra Lottery

Spend a Night with the Egyptian Queen!

Enter in person at:  777 Lay Lady Lane

We accept both chance and fate.

The Cleopatra Lottery is run by the Paradise Grant Committee and is in full compliance with the Pussy Pact.  All participants enter willingly and with full knowledge that their indulgence rights will be abused.

Jim read the flyer three times before he looked at the man who had given it to him.

“What is this?” he said.

“It’s the Cleo lotto,” the man said.  “We run it every year.  Winner gets to bury his bone in the Queen of the Nile.”  He failed at handing out another flyer.  “You must be fresh from the circus if you haven’t rolled for Cleopatra.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”  Jim read the flyer again.  It was a plain piece of paper, black and white and matter-of-fact.  “She’s the one with the face, right?  I mean, the thousand ships.”

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

“You there!  Cleopatra Lottery!  Lay Lady Lane!  Chance or fate, don’t be late!”

***

Lay Lady Lane was a long shining broadway of neon lights.  Marquis flashed the names of history’s most beautiful women.  Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Mata Hari, Pocahontas, Brigitte Bardot.  There were more that he didn’t recognize – Wang Zhaojun, Madhubala, Hwang Jini – and Jim lost count.  Above them all in the center of the broadway Cleopatra glittered.

Jim walked in through the revolving doors.  The lobby was crimson and gold.  The men in front of him and the ones pushing past him went through one of two doors, above which read Take Your Chances and Accept Your Fate.  He went to the help desk.

“First time?” the man said.  His nametag said Butch, Angel in Training.

“Yeah,” Jim said.

“Well, it’s pretty simple.  You go through that door, you get what’s coming to you.  You go through that one, you get something else.  It’s like, you walk the path or you roll the dice.”

“Dice?”

“Yep.”

Jim checked his pocket.  The dice were still there.

“What about this bit where my indulgence gets abused?” Jim said, showing Butch the flyer.  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Jesus.  Really?”

“What?”

“I mean, you’re here to roll dice for a chance to spear the queen and you’re asking me about the fine print.”

Butch, Angel in Training, had a point.  Jim laughed, shook his head, shrugged.  “Man, sometimes I just want to know what the hell’s happening to me.”

“Tell you what,” Butch said, “Here’s the short of it.  Lucy, her whole thing is everybody gets what they want, right?  She hates rules.  But what’s the first thing you want to do when you get to Paradise?  You want to fuck Cleopatra.  So Cleopatra’s got, like, millions of dudes trying to fuck her every day.  And that’s a shitty Paradise.  So Cleopatra rounds up all the scorchers, you know, your Marilyn Monroes and your Joan of Arcs, and they all march on Lucy.  And Lucy’s cool – have you met her?”  Jim nodded.  “Yeah, you seem like the type.  Anyway, she sets up this whole infrastructure and assigns a team of angels to field requests, they sort it all out and pass on the good ones.  Now Cleopatra just gets an email every week, and if she sees something she likes she can jump on it.

“It all sounds good, except Cleopatra – just Cleopatra – needs a thousand angels to sift through all these requests.  There’s a shortage of angels.  And there’s millions of dudes that are pissed off because of the selection process – they know damn well Cleopatra isn’t gonna blow some salesman from Alabama.  So there’s hardly an angel in Paradise that isn’t on fuck request detail, and everything with a dick is crying foul.  I mean, they don’t even have the personnel to do the whole meet and greet thing.  People are getting hit by buses, waking up here, they don’t know what’s going on.  They’re still clogging up traffic.  It’s a fucking mess.

“Finally Lucy comes out with the lottery and the Pussy Pact.  She tells Cleopatra and every other scorcher if they spread their legs once a year they’ll get angelic privilege.  To the hard-ons, she says you’ve got an eternity to win, if you don’t like it the Truth Road is that way.  That cooled everybody off, and we built Lay Lady Lane.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Jim said.  “So, this is just saying I might not win.”

“Pretty much.”

Jim said thanks and went to take his chances.

***

He walked out of the casino, rattling his glossy reds and shitting a grin.  He hadn’t lost a roll.  The room he walked into was all windows and cushions.  Light played on the marble floor.  An angel, not in training, greeted him.

“Congratulations,” the angel said.  “Please, if you’ll take a seat, fate will present the final challenger soon.  Feel free with the fruit and wine.”

“Is Cleopatra –”  Then he saw her.  She lay draped over a sofa, a bare and tan leg dripping from its side, one arm a triangle behind her head.  What fabric she wore was white and pulled taut by golden rings that pressed against her skin.  Midnight hair, cropped short, cut straight across her forehead.  Blue eyes.  They looked at Jim.

“Uh, hi,” Jim said.  He aborted a handshake mid-step, failed to convert it into a wave, tried to save it with a scratch and tripped over a pillow.  His dice skittered over the marble and came to rest at Cleopatra’s hand.  She picked them up and held them in her palm.

“Well?” she said.

“Those are my dice,” Jim said, pointing.

The angel chuckled.  Jim flushed.

“Einstein gave them to me,” he said.

The angel snorted.

“They are lovely dice,” Cleopatra said.  They were still in her palm.

Jim stepped carefully over the pillow.  He stood over her.  She saw him look at her breasts.  He cleared his throat and took the dice.

The other door opened.  A man in a white suit strolled through it.  Jet hair slicked over a sculpted head.  One hand disappeared into his jacket pocket, the other held a boot.

“There’s at least one man back there,” he said, “who thinks if you can throw a boot, you can change destiny.”

“Welcome, and congratulations,” the angel said.

“Angel,” the man said.  “Cleopatra.”  A nod for each.  To the angel – “So which kind are you?  The kind that takes my coat, or the ethereal kind?”

“I can manage both.”  The angel took his jacket, and the boot, and showed him to a seat.

“This is a lovely apartment.  Say, you there, I’m sure the lady loves the view, but mine’s obscured.  What do you say we dispense with flirtation and get down to business?”

Jim realized he was standing right in front of the Egyptian Queen with his ass in her face.  He took a breath, gritted his teeth, composed himself.  He wasn’t any less of a man than this guy.

“Business it is,” Jim said, and sat down.  He could see the angel biting his lip.  God he wanted to punch that fucking angel.

“It is customary for the representative of fate to choose the final game,” the angel said.

“I represent myself,” the man said.  “Fate’s your word, it isn’t mine.  I don’t want any part of it.  Besides, I’ve been out of ideas since I woke up in this crazy joint.  Let the kid decide, he’s good for it.”

Jim held out the dice.  “One roll,” he said.  “High roll wins.”

“Short and sweet.  I like it.  Who’s first?”

“You.”

He rolled a nine.

Jim shook, blew, rolled.  Eleven.

“Yes!”  On his feet, fists in the air.  “Eat shit, Bogart, the queen is mine!”

Humphrey  twirled a finger.  “Reel it in, cod slayer.  I’d say you should play it closer to the vest but you wouldn’t know how to wear it.”  He stood up, leaned over, spoke from the corner of his mouth.  “And I didn’t want to say this in front of the lady, but Joe Louis is taking a dive.”

“What?”

“The unknown soldier is going for a walk.”

“I don’t . . .”

“Your zipper’s down and I can see your testicles.”

Jim coughed and pivoted.  With his back to the queen he checked his crotch.  It was fine.  He double-checked.  No Joe Loius.

*Shit.*

He turned around and Bogart had her slung over his shoulder.  The actor kicked open a window, pulled a gun from his jacket and fired a zip-line into the gardens.

“What the hell, man?  You lost!  Angel, stop him!”

Bogart give him the dramatic profile, the last look back.

“It was a good roll, kid,” Bogart said.  “It just wasn’t meant to be.”

The two of them zipped out of sight.  Jim ran to the window and watched as the actor stuffed Cleopatra into the back of a Packard Super Eight and drove away.

“Can he do that?” Jim said.  “Why aren’t you doing anything?  You should be doing something!”

The angel was laughing freely now.  “Don’t beat yourself up,” he said.  “He does that every year.”  He doubled over.  “The boot!” he gasped.  “Oh, I almost died.”

“But I won,” Jim said.

“Eat shit, Bogart!  Eeeeeheeeheehehe!

Jim Home

Next Jim Story

Infinite Orgy [Jim #3, Short Fiction]

The Orgy was a floating ship with red sails.  It was enormous and Jim couldn’t fit it into his brain.

It’s like New York City flying over Tennessee, he thought.

“How big is this place?” he said.

“You’re looking at it.”

“No, I mean, like, the whole thing.  Paradise.”

Cherry flicked him in the nose.  “Your head needs a leash,” she said.  “Plenty of those up there.  Only one way up.”  She pointed to the catapult.

“Aren’t you coming?” Jim said.

Cherry licked chicken grease from her fingers.  “I need some R’n’R,” she said.  “You know, watch some Ghostbusters, ride some dolphins.  That sort of thing.”

Jim strapped in.  “Well, any advice?”

“Don’t freak out.  Everything grows back.”

She pulled the lever.

Thwump.

“Whaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”

He flew in through a window and landed on feather down.  He stood up and saw that he was in an empty room.  There were four doors, and over each was a sign.  One said “straight”, another “gay”, and a third for “either way”.  The fourth was written in flames that read “MANIAC”.

Jim considered the flames but shook his head.

“Baby steps,” he said.

He went in through the straight door.

***

A woman mounted him.  She had wild red hair.  Jim hadn’t even known he was naked.  Or that he was hard.  She finished after nine pumps, shook with pleasure, leaned back and breathed fire.

“Hi,” Jim said.

But she sprinted away and dove headfirst into a pool of vibrating bedposts.

Jim was hard and lathered and disoriented.  He grabbed another woman and tried to kiss her.  She slapped him across the face and pointed to a sign that flashed high in the dome.

NO KISSING.

“Sorry,” Jim said.  He shrugged and pointed at his erection.  She obliged.

He looked around while she worked on him.  Cages hung from the domed ceiling.  Beds bigger than houses crawled with the wildest sex he’d ever seen.  Trampolines threw couples mid-coitus through a goal post, their form and style judged by three serious men.  Soft strobe lights and a bass drum gave it all a rhythmic pulse.

Jim finished and the woman stood.  There was green on her face.  He sniffed it.

“Guacamole?”

She pushed the rest of it into her mouth and sucked her finger clean.  A coy smile and she was gone.

A brief stroll landed him in twenty-three unique holes.  He climaxed several times, and the contents of his penis seemed to depend on the woman.  One guzzled down his strawberry yogurt, another bathed in a spray of Jim perfume.  The final shot was his, and a single firework exploded over the Orgy.

Beneath its flash he saw an angel standing high on a golden table.  The angel was cut like a diamond with a white shock of greasy hair, violently itching his scalp and producing a flurry of snow.  Five large-breasted woman collected the snow, cut it, diced it into lines.

“What is this?” Jim asked one of the women.

“The dreams of Beelzebub,” she said.  She snorted some and her forehead parted beneath the lips of a quivering vagina.  She fingered it and a dove flew out of her mouth.

“Angel dust,” she said.

Beelzebub threw back his hair and spread his arms.  “Fly like the angels fly,” he said.  “See what the angels see.  Fuck like the angels fuck.

“Okay,” Jim said.  He snorted a line.

Thwump.

“Yyyaaaaaarrrrrrrggghhqwopeinvalsdkjhrlwkch!”

The nearest woman was a tiny brunette and he pounded her into the floor.  He grabbed another and buried his face in her.  When the top of his head sprung a dick, a third began to ride it.

“I’m a fuckin unicorn!”

A crowd gathered.  They began to chant.  “Un-i-corn!  Un-icorn!  Un-i-corn!”

“Fly!” roared Beelzebub.  “Fly!”

The small of Jim’s back grew hard and he was mounted again.

“Fly!”

His fingers ballooned with veins and heads.  There was a soft warm mouth for each.

“Fly!”

Elbows, ankles, ears, thighs.  Jim was a spiny lizard, shaking with pleasure, drenched in tit sweat and twat skeet.  He wanted more.

“Infinite dicks!” he cried.

The chanting stopped.

“Oh fuck!”

“Get down!”

“Abandon ship!”

The feminine warmth disappeared and the music stopped.  Each new erection sprouted two more, and each of those another two.  He soon filled the entire dome.  Glass shattered, beams broke.  Screams fell out the windows.

“Fly!  Fly!”

Beelzebub’s roar was distant now.  With each doubling the red sails faded.

Jim was the groaning nucleus of an atomic cock.

***

And then there was orgasm.

Jim floated in a universe of his creation.  Chicken wings and beer formed gaseous nebulae.  Chevy comets barreled through open space.  Baseballs and hockey pucks bounced around like quarks and kicked up atoms of whiskey, carburetors, fishing poles and labrador retrievers.    Good old fashioned cum swirled in giant balls, combusted, became a thousand shining stars.

“You goddamn crazy hillbilly!”

The voice came from the driver’s window of a Silverado.  The face was old, the eyes were deep, the hair was frazzled.

“Einstein?”

“I finally found it!” the old man said.  “The edge of Paradise!  And you blew it out your nozzle!”

“The edge of Paradise?” Jim said.  “Dude, I was just thinking about that!”

“Well, it was right here before you nutted a big fuckin bang.”

“Where is it now?”

Einstein pointed.  “I’d say it’s about a universe in that direction.”

“Well let’s go!”

Einstein narrowed his gaze.  “You don’t have any Camaros in there, do you?”

Jim blushed.

“Well, if we run out of gas, you’re pushing.”

Einstein floored it.  The engine purred.  A red button throttled them through hyperspace.  Light came in particle waves and time melted.  It’s kinda like Star Wars, Jim thought.  The thought was seven parsecs long.

With one hand on the wheel Einstein pulled a joint from his shirt pocket.  He fumbled the lighter.  “Shit,” he said.  When he bent down to search the floor the Silverado veered.  Jim reached for the wheel too late.  The Silverado rolled.

They were ejected at light speed.  The truck spun like a top behind them.

“It’s okay!” Einstein called out, holding up the lighter.  The joint flared against the myriad.  “An object in motion will stay in motion!”

A flick, and the joint somersaulted through the vacuum.  Jim caught it, hit it, returned it.  “How do we stop?” he called back.

Einstein shrugged.  “How about that Camaro?”

“I’ve got something better!”  He unzipped, closed his eyes, thought of Cherry, and masturbated.  When he looked up, the Millennium Falcon was soaring.

They entered through the hatch.

“Your nozzle’s a goddamn golden goose!”

“Thanks.”

“What’s your name, hillbilly?”

“Jim.”

“Well, Jim, strap in.  Next stop is Nowhere.”

***

The edge was an abrupt black wall.  Einstein parked the Falcon and they went outside to have a look.

“What’s on the other side?” Jim said.

“I don’t have a clue.”

Jim was surprised.  “I thought you were Einstein.”

“Fuck you, hillbilly.”

Einstein paced along the Falcon’s hull, observing the stark wall.  He paused, chin in hand, lost in thought.

“What?” Jim said.

Einstein started.  “Oh!  This place, it seems to expand under pressure from the mind.  If the expansion were physical, a static edge is out of the question.  That’s not a mistake I mean to make twice.”  He looked back at the universe.  “Your ejaculation is puzzling, however.  Perhaps the experience of it pushed the boundaries out.  Then the ejaculate itself merely occupied the resulting space.”

“What does that mean?”

“Observe,” Einstein said.  He put his hand out to touch the wall, but the wall moved back an inch.  “I want to touch the edge.  To want is to think.  Thinking makes this place get bigger.  The wall retreats.”

Jim snapped his fingers.  “I’ll go!  Maybe it’s because you’re Einstein.  Like, your brain is too big.  Maybe I can make it through.”

“I considered it, but your eligibility renders you incompetent.”

“What?”

“You’re too dumb to bring back any useful information.”

“Oh yeah.”

More pacing.  Jim mimicked Einstein’s movements, thinking his brain might follow suit.  It didn’t.  Einstein stopped suddenly and counted his fingers.

“I’ve got it!  Jim, you have to push me!”  He stood on the Falcon’s edge with his back to the wall.  “I’ll stop thinking and you just shove me right through!”

“Really?  Just like that?”

“Simplicity is the engine of the universe.  Do it!”

Einstein closed his eyes and folded his arms.  Jim shrugged and pushed.

Thwump.

Einstein vanished.

“Oh shit,” Jim said.  “Oh shit.”  He peered over the side of the Falcon.  Nothing.  “I did not just push Einstein out of the universe.  Unless I did.  Think, Jim.  Think!”

The universe expanded.

“Shit!  Stop thinking, no more thinking.”

Jim was looking up at the wall, dumb and helpless, when the dull end of a chain emerged.  When he grabbed it there was resistance.  He put all of his weight behind it and drew it out of the wall link by link.  At the end of the chain was an envelope.  He opened it.

Dear Jim,

Nice fucking push.  I’m going to be a while.  Don’t wait up.

Albert E.

P.S.

I found these under a white hole.  I won’t be needing them.  Good luck, hillbilly.

There was something in the envelope.  Jim emptied its contents into his hand, paused, scratched his head.

It was a glossy red pair of dice.

 

Jim Home

Next Jim story

Something different