Welcome to the serialized story of Mr. Harmless Bullet! Since I was away for a while, I will publish two to three chapters a day. For the audio version - scroll down.
Genre: satire, absurdist comedy, adult humor (16+)
Written with the Tristan Tzara method - read about it here
Complete story, chapter by chapter:
Angela Marrant
CHAPTER 19. THE GOSSIPS
"That's another thing I don't understand," my mother interrupted my incoherent words' livestream, "Why you, of all people in Rsa-city, should save those poor sick souls in that desolate wild land? You aren't a doctor!"
For a second, I stopped my confused revelation and asked myself: Really, how did it happen? Why am I here? What was the reason in the first place?
To my shame, I realized the answer was quite simple - perpetual horniness. After the divorce, my body and mind had been constantly plagued by a profound thirst for romance, by which I mean having sex with a real woman instead of jerking off to images of explicit porn or the tight bathroom conversation with Thatcher's smile.
"I used to ask myself that all the time, Mom… I guess I just got caught up in the middle of it all. So, to speak, unfortunate circumstances… or maybe the God of Luck, Shai, brought his misfortune down on me? Because as it is written in the divine instructions of Amenemope, 'Do not set your heart upon seeking riches, for there is no one who can ignore Shai; do not set your thought on lustful matters, for every man, there is his appointed time,'" I cited.
Armadillo Jack looked curiously at my blushing face, awakened by the heat of the conversation in the dwarfish room of his personal restoration.
"Please, don't be so melodramatic!" my mother hissed over the phone.
I gave a weak smile towards the damp wall and continued, "I'm not a brave man, Mom."
"I'm glad we agree on some things," she replied with satisfaction.
"And I'm not a saint either, Mom… Don't worry, I'll make our family proud!"
"It's better this way," she concluded before delivering the latest gossip from our city.
My parents lived half an hour from my town in a small village called The Big Pump. My mother was the gossip queen of the community thanks to her unique position - she was the book club chairman and a local fortune-teller.The book club was named 'Anime Antiqua' and often charged members (who had not had time to read the whole book or could not answer my mother's carefully prepared questions) penalties.
Without asking me, she shared the information about her latest read, Ann Radcliffe's book, The Mysteries of Udolpho. She told me that during our short conversation, she noticed the similarities between me and Emily St. Aubert, who had been kept imprisoned by her rapacious guardian and his sadistic wife.
After those words, I attempted to break my mother's sick ideas, making an effort to convince her that my arrival in Hamilton's Kingdom is not a Gothic battle in some gloomy medieval fortress, and most of all, I'm not an orphaned hero with melancholy fancies or pensive visions.
Of course, my mother didn't agree with me because she saw The Mysteries of Udolpho as a landmark of psychological pre-Freudian exploration of the psyche.
"O Heavens! Am I a psychopath now?" I exclaimed, feeling that I was losing the verbal war.
But as always, I had to accept that my mother was right, primarily, when she passed on the dangerous information from Mr. Vegas and Mr. Domination, which had been transmitted via the local channels for the past week. Apparently, my name was at the top of the most wanted list in my city.
"Can I get you anything, my boy?" asked my father's voice in the far distance.
"He can't hear you, Pilgrim," my mother replied to him.
"If you are unhappy about your penis, then it's fixable," my father continued.
Then I heard the fight near the phone. It seemed that my mother defended her position, and not only with words. Something heavy dropped on the floor.
She sighed and said, "It is so hard to be a mother."
Then, she extended our chat and overwhelmed me with various suggestions about medical books I should read. She even came up with a couple of dangerously mad plans to escape Gunung Kinabalu without a fight.
I sat and listened, but my heart was full of anguish - I understood, more clearly than ever, that life goes on. Nothing changed in Rsa-city: a hard-boiled life joyfully passed from one to another, so-and-so would vanish or die, and nobody cared about it.
I didn't hear when the sheriff entered the room. The rays of the sun behind her were like orange velvet, and they gave her surprised face a warm glow.
"What is that?" the sheriff hissed.
"What is what?" I gave my voice as much innocence as I could.
Then, I followed her angry gaze to my right hand where the screen of my unfinished call shone in blue and green, and my mother's voice shouted, "Take a picture of this barbarian, I want to see if she is real… She speaks just like that witch, Martha!"
I quickly ended the call.
"Let me go," I begged. "The humidity in this room is unhealthy for my jaded brain cells!"
The anxiety mixed with terror escalated in my voice. I could almost read the question in the armadillo's eyes: If you can't handle some tiny chick from the Screw Quarter, how the fuck are you going to handle 11,000 bitches at the Farm?!
I climbed up, pressing my tired back to the moist wall, but fell on the floor.
The sheriff smirked, looking down at my funny position: "Well... Alphonso Beard is waiting for your arrival at the Warrior Farm. Let's go, Doc!"
I silently followed her out, crawling on all fours.
WANT TO LISTEN?
Are you new here? Check out my WHO IS ANGELA page to learn more about me. I write spicy absurd, satire, comedy, and adult humor.
Do you have a friend who could use more fun in their life? :) Feel free to share this (or any) post with anyone interested in absurdity or surreal humor.
