Touch me. Touch me like you didn't touch me last night.

So, just yesterday, somebody sez to me, they sez, “How did you ever think up flesh eating worms? I love your brain, did you know that? Cuz I do.”

Spoken like a true flesh-eating worm.

I see through your lies, Ms. “Wheatcroft.” What the hell kind of a name is that, anyway? Only a WORM wouldn’t see what a DAMN SILLY NAME THAT IS! It’s like the aliens who run Meijer, you know? Only people from space wouldn’t know how to spell Meyer. And they have those red shirts like the people in V. And their Orange Juice is all “not from concentrate,” which they can only be doing if they’ve enslaved members of the human race in their vast orange-grove spaceships. And the night manager eats rats whole. But I digress.

I guess I don’t really believe Ms. “Wheatcroft” is a flesh-eating worm. She must be a small colony. Otherwise it would take FOREVER to type a whole e-mail.

Moving on…

---

RECEIVER, back a few pages from before…

…

“That woman’s boyfriend is cheating on her.”
“What?”
“See that woman over there? Red sweater, natty hair?”
“Yeah.”
“She was just on her cel phone with her boyfriend. She thinks he’s at home. He’s just outside on the sidewalk. He peeked in to see if she was really here drinking coffee. I wonder if he thought she was cheating on him. Anyway, he just made another call. It started with the words, ‘Hey, honey, are you busy? I’ve got an hour or two on my hands, and I was wondering if I could have you on my hands for an hour or two.’”
“Jesus, people really say things like that?”
“Apparently so.”
“So now what’s he talking about?”
“Dunno, I spaced out for a second and started listening to public radio. It’s that goddamned grain futures and hog bellies show. I wonder if it bores the shit of farmers, too.”
“So, let’s go back a bit.”
“I’ve lost him by now.”
“No, no, back to how something like this happens.”
“Luck. Good or bad, depends on the day. Or maybe the minute. Anyway, it started with braces.”
“Braces? Now I know you’re messing with me. Is this going to be like when Lucille Ball claimed she picked up Morse code from Japanese spies during World War II through her fillings?”
“Yes, it is, and I have fillings, too. Old metal ones. My family has an enamel deficiency, so we have terrible teeth.”
“Urban legend bullshit.”
“Somebody once told me that it’s like those old ‘Build-Your-Own Crystal Radio’ sets. They had wire wrapped around ceramic that worked as a receiver, and if you were lucky you could pick up AM signals, from close stations at least.”
“Huh. Learn something new every day.”
“Anyway, the braces weren’t too bad. It was getting hit by a car that really fucked with me.”
“You were hit by a car?”
“In the head.”
“Fuck.”
“Beautiful car, too. Red Sunbeam Alpine, like the one in To Catch a Thief. I was looking at his car; he was looking at some woman. I tripped, he swerved, POW.”
“In the head.”
“Yup. Got a steel plate in there now.”
“You’re the first person I’ve ever met with a real steel plate in their head.”
“I feel blessed.”
“Go on.”
“I’ll skim the rest. Worked in a restaurant in the mid-nineties. The dishwasher exploded – the machine, not the little Mexican guy – and shot pieces of cutlery all over. I’ve got about 3 ounces of stainless steel in various places. You can even feel one of the fork tines here by my elbow. It’s stuck in the bone.”
“That’s kinda creepy.”
“Two years later, broke my arm trying to leap over a fence in England. Well, I made it over, I guess, but I noticed my right arm was a little too floppy. Snapped my forearm bones in half. One piece of steel for each. All because I was in too much of a hurry for some warm beer.”
“There’s something to be said for warm beer.”
“And it’s not very nice. Then we’ve got the nail in my foot, the pin in my hip, the pacemaker…”
“Pacemaker?”
“Just kidding. But I do have a tattoo needle stuck in one of my shoulder blades. Guy had a seizure while tattooing that Chinese “Double Happiness” symbol into me.”
“Irony.”
“Irony tastes like metal to me.”
“I like that.”
“Thanks.”
“I assume you have papers for all this when you fly?”
“Yeah. They used to list it all, but after a security guard hits about the sixth line he thinks it’s fake and I get strip-searched. They eventually shortened it.”
“To what?”
“’Extensive rebuilding has left a lot of metal in this man.’”
“Kinda brusque.”
“But you get the point.”
So, after all this shit, you just started picking up signals? Like some kinda stupid 80’s TV comedy plot?”
“Nah, it didn’t work like that. I had to play golf first.”
“You don’t strike me as the golfing type.”
“Miniature. I was lining up for the giant hippo’s mouth when I got hit by lightning.”
“Ouch.”
“No shit. But by then I was used to that kind of thing. The place left the burn-prints from my feet on the Astroturf as some sort of weird memento. Essentially, I got the Frankenstein start. IT’S ALIVE! and all that. My parents were surprised that *I* was. I’ve still got scars on my hands from where the club’s plastic handle melted onto my skin.”
“So then you picked up radio signals?”
“Not immediately, no. Or maybe I did, but I was too busy being in excruciating pain to notice. The first thing I noticed wasn’t voices in my head, it was that the Doctor thought I was having a heart attack when he plugged me in at the hospital. EKG goes crazy, Doctor screams for all these drugs, and one of the nurses just grabs my wrist and tells him my pulse is fine, the machine must be broken. I think he looked a little disappointed. He came down off his E.R. high and told me I’d be fine. I didn’t hear him, of course. All I got was “Papa, can you hear me?” really damn loud.”
“Yentl?”
“The hospital had a satellite dish.”

---

benjamin sTone
Urbana, Illinois
1:46 a.m.
CURRENT MUSIC: “Jai Govinda,” The Dum Dum Project
LAST MOVIES: Theatre: HARRY POTTER 3, Home: MY SASSY GIRL
CURRENT BOOK: IN THE POND, Hai Jin.

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Also archived online at www.livejournal.com/users/benchilada