Sex and Murder Magazine

By Lorna D. Keach

Wiz knocked over a fireworks stand in Omaha a week before; busted two of his teeth when the hick at the register pulled a baseball bat. But Jeepers had his chain, and Tank had an empty bottle of beer, so the hick ended up in the emergency room where Wiz got to walk away just fine.

For the last few days, they’d been lighting bottle rockets over the 12 street bridge.

“It’s never fucked up enough.” Tank sighed.

Jeepers had a good idea, which pissed Wiz off, because Wiz usually had the good ideas, and it was never fun when somebody upped him. After a short brawl with Jeepers behind the Hobby Lobby on Cheshire, Wiz agreed that, yeah, they should tie a bunch of model rocket engines together with the mortar shells and see what shit got fucked up.

Jeepers’ lip bled. “I’ll steal some fuses from my Dad.”

His Dad got kicked out of MIT some twenty years before for unethical practices.

Wiz and Tank didn’t know what the hell Jeepers brought back from his Dad’s basement; it was all a tangle of silver wires and circuits and metal bits. It was fucked up. But Jeepers managed to put together one fuck of a bomb, so Wiz wanted to punch him again.

They balanced the Frankenrocket on the cement rail, dragged the fuse to the sidewalk, and waited until the 5-o-clock Monday traffic was at its worst. Wiz lit it with his cigarette.

And it went off. The boxy amalgamation of rocket engines, cheap fireworks and alien technology flew up, jerked to the right and the left, swung over the windshields of the oncoming cars and exploded with a force so loud it almost blew out their ears.

When the smoke cleared, they saw a hole in the sky.

It was a shimmering hole just above the bridge railing, a loose diamond shape, floating there like a sideways mouth. Or an ethereal vagina. Cunt was the first thing Wiz thought of when he saw it. But he paid no attention to the gnawing voice in the back of his head, the one that said that was what reality looked like when it’d been torn up.

Something screeched and crashed on the road under them.

“Wanna get unborn?” Wiz asked.

Then he shoved Jeepers’ face into the hole.

Jeepers’ head disappeared, swallowed by the ethereal cunt, and his body jerked. His arms flapped like boneless wings, his legs seized up and locked stiff.

Blood sprayed. Jeepers dropped.

Wiz and Tank stared at the headless body of Jeepers spurting black blood all over the concrete. Below them, more cars piled up on each other, singing twisted metal.

“Fuck.” Tank said.

By the time the cops got there, the hole had shrunk and popped out of existence.