the Archangel of Main Street.

 

     “The suffering brings us closer to God,” I slur in my monotonous drawl, “the brief spiritual entanglement with a higher power offered by the temporal shockwave offers us a momentary pathway through an ever-revolving door to enlightenment.”

          Fluorescent light glows ominously upon the cold, sterile room. A long sheet of paper draped beneath me crinkles with my every breath. I’m lying on my stomach, my face bulging downward through a small hole in the operating table. Incense burns in the corner, a flaccid attempt to suppress the overbearing chemical reek. Sandalwood smoke wafts relentlessly into my nostrils.

          Atop the upper right side of my lip lies a flesh colored bandage. Under the bandage, a source of constant agony calls to me, pleads with me. Its voice howls inside my skull, night and day, begging to be ripped, cut, burnt off. It yearns to be free, and until it is, it will make sure every waking moment of my life is spent in physical, mental and spiritual agony.

          Lo, I must maintain its capture, lest a vengeance and terror be wreaked upon this Earth the likes of which hasn’t been experienced since Sodom and Gomorrah.

          ‘Perhaps it has been caged too long,’ I ponder in my weakest moments. I carry the weight of this duty across my broad shoulders like Atlas squatting the Earth. I’ve only confided in one person about what truly lies above my lip. Alfonso Ribeiro. Three years ago to this exact day. At a high-end children’s clothing store in San Diego. The Spoiled Rotten Boutique.

          Alfonso is best known for his portrayal of Carlton on the NBC television sitcom Fresh Prince of Bel Air, but has been equally revered as host of AFV (the millennial reboot of America’s Funniest Home Videos). He was very sympathetic to my suffering but otherwise seemingly bewildered by my many proclamations.

          “The address here is 555 Main Street whereas in Christianity four hundred forty nine is a representation of the travails of the Messiah,” I say. My brawny, bare ass clenches between thoughts, “forty four plus nine equals fifty five in addition to fulfilling my calling as fifth horseman of the apocalypse, Justice, sets the molecular density of this earthly vessel back to five hundred and fifty five. Hence how we have found ourselves bonded in this moment. Our chance meeting is what English speaking beings typically refer to as destiny. Do you follow?”

          My arms are twisted behind me like a rotisserie chicken. My strong, immaculately manicured hands wrap around the lower portion of my buttocks, spreading the cheeks.

          I lift and turn my head. The employee gazes into his own distraught reflection, quivering tensely on the mirrored lenses of my sunglasses.

          His eyes are vaginas. Their pink, labia eyelids wave serenely as they speak to me in harmony, “I got a half-sister named Destiny. She’s a dancer. Her stripper name is Chastity though.”

          “You’re magnetic infrastructure’s become unaligned. Shunted. Don’t take it personally, you are one of many. There’s demonic interference disrupting your connection to the divine,” I sigh, knowing yet again I am misunderstood. I attempt to break down my vast, chaotic knowledge into layman’s terms, “Dark, eternal forces have established neurological dampeners in the airwaves, they’ve been doing it for over a century. Wifi is stronger than radio waves, which explains the influx of mass shootings, the overall moral rot and decay of society. 5G. If I am to cleanse these streets of unholy entities, my corporal being necessitates freedom from impurity. The color of my rectum must be uniform with its surrounding skin. This is not something that can wait. This is our shared fate. I have Alfonso Ribeiro’s phone number on speed dial in case of emergencies. You can square up with him if you need to, but keep in mind he is both an important and powerful man and his time is not to be trifled with. This is the kind of astrological currency I have to offer. The looming fate of the entire world rests in your hands. Would you like me to sign a waiver?”

          “She works at Cheetah Club,” he speaks in demonic code. It is too late for this one, “I can get you a date with her if you got cash.”

          I loudly command, “Commence application of the appropriate chemicals. Liberally.”

          My orders are followed.

 

******************************

 

          Thirty minutes and one bleached rectum later, the girl at the front desk bids me adieu, “Be well, Mr… Christ.”

          I force a small, robotic grin and prophesize in her direction, “Do not be frightened. When the awakening strikes, which it will, imminently, you will find there will be a difficult but peaceful adjustment period. The consequences of the apocalypse, if you want to call it that, or judgment day, as it is commonly known, may seem displeasurable at first, but will ultimately lead to a better plane of existence for all that survive it. Until that time and forever after, you will truly know what it is to be well.”

          She looks confused. They’re always so confused. It is my curse, like Cassandra in the ancient Greek myths, to share celestial truth with the willfully ignorant. I pity them, though I know I shouldn’t.

          “Oh hey,” she blinks away the glossy film over her eyes, briefly snapping back into consciousness, “you know, if you want, I could have our esthetician check out that growth on your lip.”

          “What growth?” The very tip of my index finger comes extremely close to almost rubbing the thick, beige bandage that covers the corner of my top lip. I abruptly stop myself a mere centimeter away. The temptation is strong. Stronger than my will. But not stronger than my faith. The mound beneath begins to ooze again. I’ll need to get home and replace its disguise immediately. Maybe there’s a closer shade of Band-Aid to my pink, Nordic skin, I think to myself before responding, “The FBI hacked into my Iphone 13 Pro Max and downloaded the Grindr app. Now why do you think they would do that? Hmm?”

          Large germs and microscopic purple insects crawl from her every orifice. She pretends not to notice. They are everywhere on her. Between her teeth. Touching her eyeballs.

          “I’ll be keeping my secrets secret, for now,” I fill my hands with a large puddle of complementary sanitizer and rub it all over my body including my genitals and deep inside my stinging anus.

 

*******************************

 

          I hoist a navy blue umbrella into the air as I limp back out onto the red-bricked roads of downtown Sarasota. The homeless excrete slick toxins beneath the harsh, relentless sunlight. They look to me for a silent salvation and I would offer it to them but the intoxicants they ingest have rearranged far too much of the DNA in the critical thinking portions of their frontal lobes. Most of them don’t realize they’ve become animal people.

          A destitute mother carries her crack baby infant in a moist skin pouch jutting from her abdomen. Her long, rodent tail swishes in the filth of the gutters.

          An oily frog man crouches, whipping his tongue about the horde of flies buzzing about his scummy, rotten, sore-riddled head.

          I used to be an executive for the Hallmark Channel. I left when I could no longer deny the mountains of evidence pointing to their diabolical intentions with satanic mass hypnosis. With my help, the media, corporations, and politicians let loose a spree of decadence and wicked influence that the average citizen was completely oblivious of, before becoming infinitely overwhelmed by. I was fired, technically speaking, after I held a boardroom meeting that lawyers and doctors have since described as a violent, naked, biohazardous and schizophrenic in nature. Now I spend my days fighting the delusions of consciousness I spent decades casting upon humanity. I fear I may never atone for the sins of my past.

          The vagrants crowding the sidewalks divide themselves at my presence, they the red sea to my Moses. A new one, just bussed in, approaches me warily, “Hey mister, my car ran out of gas n’ I need a cuppa’ doll hairs to feed my lil’ orphan baby over there in that dumpster, she’s a dumpster baby, don’t go lookin’ he’s in a nap, help me ow?”

          Five feet away, a bearded glutton layered in his own filth sits on a plastic bucket, holding a cardboard sign that reads: ‘WHY LIE, I NEED A BEER/VORTEX’ and anxiously averts his gaze. The rest of the eyes of Main Street breathlessly await my rebuttal.

          “I could call Alfonso Ribeiro and bring down this whole sick system in three weeks and you all know that. You think it’s a coincidence Obama alluded to me twice during a speech delivered ten years ago on this exact date in the Rose Garden,” I inflect my monotone with only the slightest hint of disgust, “Whoopi Goldberg recently implied several truths about my impending wrath on live daytime television because she knew she was too powerful to be stopped. They couldn’t have silenced her if they wanted to. Why do you think Whoopi shaves her eyebrows? Crunch the numbers and you will find the keys to the doors of enlightenment. Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?”

          “Uh,” the hobo scratches at the pubic lice in his stubble and ponders complexities beyond his minimal concept of reality, “not really.”

          “Think about it,” I brush past the poverty stricken man, having potentially permanently changed his life for the better.

          I continue onward, briskly walking, though my rectum burns and the spot above my lip itches with an intensity unknown to mortal men. The creator has manufactured great valleys of agony for all of mankind, a set volume of pain best filtered through the mighty and blessed, as I am. This is why there are martyrs: to lessen the load for the rest of humanity. I can smell the bandage dripping its sulfuric poison down my chin.

          “Heeey, Justice Chriiist,” a familiar voice calls to me from behind. Virgil, a gigolo with the power of enchantment. He carelessly drags a tiny, furry monster down the sidewalk by its pink leash. The glittery beads tangled in his woolly braids glisten in the sun. He smells of old, tepid cheese, “What’s happenin’ my man? How’s Carlton doin’?”

          “I’m on a mission my friend, I have no time to chat today,” as the prime concubine to one of Sarasota’s foremost royal oligarchs, Virgil is one of the few people who can somewhat comprehend the importance of my work. As such, I don’t mince words with him, “and don’t you dare tempt me with that sexy body of yours.”

          “All right, all right,” Virgil lets out a sad laugh as he takes a sip from a brown paper bag. His wide collared, polyester jump suit droops heavily with sweat, “Keep fightin’ the good fight. Tell Carlton I said ‘Wazzaaaaaaap.’”

          I march onward, moving with speed and determination. A series of floating red lights stop me in my tracks. I try to ignore them, but they’re too obvious. It’s a message. A direct message only meant for me. I’m being mocked. They know I’m in a rush. This is blasphemy. Tending to my ever- moistening deformity will have to wait.

          “Toy lab,” I mutter to myself as I read the smoldering crimson words, “we’ll see about that.”

 

*****************************

 

          I cautiously push a dark, wood-stained door open. Bells on the other side of it jingle. A drunk, obese, homeless woman pushes her way past me to the outside realm, leaving a visible grease stain on my crisp white V-neck shirt. I’ll burn it in the fireplace when I get home. I’m not thrilled about the situation, but I don’t blame her, she knows not what she does.

          Aisles of stacked, shiny toy boxes create a winding, fragile labyrinth throughout the tiny shop. Every available surface is densely littered with plastic propaganda, carelessly crafted to erode the moral foundations of future generations. I confront the small, soft girl behind the counter, “Excuse me, what is this place?”

          “Welcome to Toy Lab,” she says with a rehearsed smile, “can I help you with anything?”

          “So this is a laboratory for toys,” I say skeptically, jamming my fist up a rubber alligator’s sphincter and making it talk with an unintentionally effeminate effect, “you manufacture these… things?”

          “Oh, uh, no sir,” she replies, resisting the urge to hide her teeth away, “we just sell them.”

          “You see, right off the bat you’ve deceived me. You’re lying to your customers,” I walk to the crafting table and run my fingers over a stack of freshly cut paper dolls before my attention is diverted. I approach a Hot Wheels playset in the window display and grimly analyze it, “You’re bold. Reckless. A car couldn’t possibly maneuver through this loopty-loop. What if a child grew up and attempted this in an actual automobile?” I scoot the tiny car through its course. As it approaches the pinnacle of the vertical circle, the micro machine falls to the flat, blue carpet, “This is impossible. I don’t even have a driver’s license and I know that. The blood of the children would be on your hands.”

          She fidgets nervously with the long, slimy, brown snake twisting in her ponytail. It slinks down to her shoulder from the back of her head. Its crimson tongue flickers as it whispers in her ear, speaking for her, through her, a reptilian ventriloquist, “Did you need help finding anything?”

          “But of course you’d only worry about the lawsuit,” I sigh, “what kind of toys do you sell?”

          “Oh, um, all kinds of toys,” she replies eagerly, “Legos, turtles-”

          “All kinds of toys? You sell Intimacy products? Marital aids?” I scan the environment, a predator searching for prey, “the layout here appears to be advertising this as a safe place for children.”

          “Oh gee,” she lets out a microscopic giggle as she continues her deception, “we don’t sell any sex toys here, sir.”

          Blood boils out from my heart, down my arms and into my fists. My fingers tense so tightly they draw blood from my palms. I catch my reflection in a mirrored robot pacing along the counter. As my rage has grown, so has my skin turned from a tranquil pink to fiery-red. The creature above my lip salivates.

          I point to a cheap, plastic banana, “Phallus.” I roam the wobbling, toy-made aisles, picking up a laser sword, “Organ of copulation,” a unicorn horn, “FUNGUS, GENUS.” I find an orange parking cone marked WET FLOOR and set it on the counter, “Any of these could comfortably slide into a semi-promiscuous rectum or vagina.”

          “Are you, is this,” the last, lingering bits of her smile finally vanish, “I apologize if I did anything to offend you, but-”

          “Do you?” A board game about endangered animals rests behind her on a shelf, directly in my eye line. Pictures of koalas, cheetahs, penguins and polar bears litter the box. Agonizing diarrhea pours out of their hemorrhoid infested mouths, “Don’t pretend this wasn’t intentional. You knew I was coming.”

          I’ll have to get better at avoiding the watchers. I’ve trained myself to move fast and stealthily, but clearly my current best isn’t good enough. They are everywhere. I’ll tell my personal trainer, Raul, all about this tomorrow (leg day). He’ll probably have me up my cardio. Maybe I’ll stop procrastinating and try one of those Zumba classes.

          The hair snake hisses at me, “Sir?”

          I walk behind the counter and grab the shimmering cardboard game. I’m holding it uncomfortably close to her face. Though my hands tremble with righteous fury my demeanor remains casual, “You believe children hold the mental capacity to comprehend extinction? Are you trying to numb them to genocide? What do you think you are bracing them for with this ‘game’?”

          “It’s educational,” she answers, frowning.

          “The most direct path to human trafficking starts with the wanton destruction of childhood innocence,” the discharge from beneath my bandage trickles between my lips as I continues my interrogation. Tastes like battery acid, “Did you make this in your toy laboratory? Answer me honestly, I’ll know.”

          My mammoth frame traps her behind the booth. She eyes potential escape routes and tries once more to assert herself verbally, “Please step out from behind the counter, sir.”

          “Look at their dead, demonic eyes,” I lower my impenetrable sunglasses so she can see my bulging, blue irises judging her sharply, “This is how you end up with child sex slavery.”

          The seeping toxins behind my bandage ejaculate onto her forehead. She lifts her hands up and cowers, “Sir… please!”

          A moment of clarity arrives, causing me to immediately correct my aggressive posture. I placidly put back on my sunglasses and recede away from her, “Clearly you… have no…” I take a deep breath and stumble a bit. I’m suddenly very dizzy. The illuminati’s warlock division has discovered my whereabouts. They’re pumping toxins through the air conditioning unit. Blue light. I fell right into their trap, “Regard for the safety of youth…”

          “That’s not true, sir,” she whimpers, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave… have a nice day.”

          I slowly approach the exit, creaking the door open just a crack before pausing to gather myself. I rest a hand along the OPEN sign dangling in the oversized store window. She reaches for something beneath the counter as I flip the sign over to CLOSED and lock the door.

 

************************************

 

          Twelve people in total stroll by the window, catching glimpses of her absurd struggle and ear piercing screams. An elderly couple peacefully sits on a bench in front of the shop, their boney fingers clasped together. Francis, a frail, old, hunchbacked man with the spunk and libido of a fourteen year old Ritalin child with priapism, asks Florence, who he just met twenty minutes ago and who’s pelvis he’s about to shatter after lunch, if he should intervene. She assures him that no, screaming was just something millennials do to get attention.

*************************************

 

          I lunge for her as she dives past me, knocking over stacks and stacks of overpriced knickknacks. We wade clumsily over dolls and balls. She hits me over the head with a glass snow globe, exploding it like the death star. Yes, I’ve seen Star Wars. For vetting purposes. I found it both evil and homoerotic. Shards of glass jut out of my forehead. I remain unfazed and do my best to ignore the blood as it spills into my line of vision.

          “The impurities must be cleansed,” I say, grabbing her around the rib cage and squeezing the air from her lungs. She retrieves a knife off of a shelf and jabs it into my neck. The plastic blade slides back into its handle. Never has more vindication been felt than when I reach for my throat and touch dry wounds that have somehow miraculously healed. The plastic, yellow blade of a lightsaber streaks through the air, cracking my shades. Her snake hair strikes, managing to nip my face countless times in a split second. She wriggles free from my grasp and runs for the exit, pulling down pillars of boxes as she does, burying me in consumerist garbage. I kick away dinosaurs, ninjas, cowboys and Native Americans as she struggles with the lock. She’s escaping. I know now that I must do what needs to be done. No matter the cost.

          I pull away the bandage above my lip. God, forgive me.

 

***********************************

 

          Unearthly light fills the Toy Lab as razor toothed tendrils scramble out from the lesion above my lip. The rashy, sphincter mouth of the horrible entity imbedded in my face squeals. Its gooey, pimpled limbs fling through the air toward the shop girl. Pulsating veins spiral around her head and squeeze. She futilely tears at the slimy tentacles as they force their way into her mouth, slithering down her throat. Her chest expands around their presence. She stumbles blindly through action figure rubble, grabbing a pair of scissors from the crafting corner and jabbing them into my facial mutation over and over again. My growth and I both cry out in pain as acidic slime leaks from our wounds. Our tendrils recoil. She makes it to the entrance and twists the lock. I take a shallow breath and focus my abilities. She gets the door only a crack open when even more tentacles burst forth from my face, flooding the room and slamming it back shut.

          She picks up a small wooden chair and bashes it repeatedly against the storefront window looking out over Main Street. She leaves several substantial scuffs along the hurricane-proof plexiglass, but it’s no use. A dozen swings deplete her, despite making only the most insignificant of cracks. There’s more tentacle in here than air now. In one last ditch effort, she pulls out her cellphone and tries to call for help. One of my unhesitating face appendages swats the phone away. She sobs as my outgrowths wind around her stumpy legs. They knock her over, pulling her through the clutter toward me. “Stop resisting this,” I hold her thrashing arms down with inhuman strength and tell her, “I do this out of love, not anger.”

          Her screams are silenced as more tendrils spill out of from my face, tunneling forcefully through her orifices. They gorge her neck and rearrange her organs as they push swiftly through her body. There’s only a hint of struggle left in her as they finish plowing through her stomach. Her coiled anus gasps. She braces herself for death and shits her khaki capris.

 

**************************************

 

          The tentacles instantly retract. Her consciousness has entered a dominion of blackness and silence. It will be up to her now whether or not she returns to the land of the living. Eventually, her body begins shaking violently on the ground. Not long after that, she wills herself to take a long, slimy breath. Reality comes flooding back into the room and that’s when she realizes there’s something squirming in her underwear.

          “You’re going to want to get that out,” I tell her calmly, using a finger to push the last of the creature back into my puss-filled lip blister, “don’t let it crawl up in there or we’ll have to do this all over again.”

          She pulls her pants off as fast as she can and slides her tan granny panties down milky white thighs. At first she can’t quite tell what’s hiding in her underwear. A blob of pink goo streaks its surroundings, wailing microscopically.

          “It’s okay, you can get closer,” I assure her, “it won’t hurt you anymore.”

          Her underwear twitches over a thimble sized bump. She lifts the cloth just a bit to see a tiny, gelatinous fetus wriggling around helplessly. Two red horns bulge from its brow. It reaches its arms toward her and cries, “Help me, Mommy!”

          The shop girl doesn’t hesitate to kick away her pants, “What is it?!”

          She listens closely to its tiny gasps for air. It looks to her and emits a series of demonic slurs so crude and vile that the memory of what it says will permanently scar her psyche for the rest of her life.

          I help her to her feet, “In the past five months have you engaged in unprotected fornication with a stranger?”

          “I don’t know… I mean,” she thinks about it, “if a few random Tindr fucks technically qualify as strangers, I guess?”

          “You’ve had an STD. A sexually transmitted demon. It’s been clogging your chakra flow,” I peer out of a broken sunglass lens and ask, “does this store have a first aid kit?”

          She motions behind the counter. I lather myself in sanitizer, rubbing my holy tumor with an alcohol wipe, then apply a fresh, blue bandage.

          I go to leave when she calls to me, “Where are you going? What are you going to do?”

          “I’m going to lay in the bath and scan the latest issue of People Magazine for subliminal pedophile propaganda.”

          Eyeliner tears dribble down her cherubic cheeks, “What do I do now?”

          I give her salvation some serious contemplation before finally advising her, “Maybe just don’t be such a slut.”

 

***********************************

 

          Today was inevitable. The laboratory. The girl. The blood. The sex. Everything that’s happening right now has been preordained. Everything that’s about to happen is destiny. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. They know too much. It’s too late for me.

          I go home and burn the contaminated clothes burn in my marble fireplace. After, I lay in my Vespasian stone bath and flip through the latest issue of People, as was foretold. When I’m done, I dry myself thoroughly with a Hermès terrycloth, then hang it back onto a platinum towel rack ever so precisely.

          My iPhone 13 Max Pro rings. It’s Alfonso Ribiero, “Justice, it’s me, Alfonso Ribeiro.”

          “Salutations, Mr. Ribeiro,” this is an unexpected if somewhat stressful delight.

          “I was Carlton on the Fresh Prince,” he tells me.

          “I am aware.”

          “It’s really me,” I can hear Alfonso shushing laughter in the background, “this isn’t just some long-term series of increasingly cruel prank phone calls directed at a mentally imbalanced crazy person.”

          “Of course, Alfonso,” I know, but am impressed by how thoughtful it is of him to clarify that for me, “of course.”

          “I’ve got a special mission for you, Justice.”

          I speak in the tongue of Alfonso’s native people to assure him that I’m hip to his mission, “Lay it on me, soul brother.”

          His warning is grave, “It’s not going to be pleasant.”

          “It never is,” I accept this. Pain builds character.

          I drift, dreamlike into my pristine, all-white kitchen. There, I firmly grasp a cold, metal, meat tenderizer and shove it into my anus as far as it will go. It feels like I’m constipated with a barbed icicle. My cleaning lady, Magdalena, walk in on me, as she has done many times before. She ignores my work, as she knows now to do, and begins, yet again, the exhausting ritual of scrubbing the caked human residue off of my beige, Bottega Veneta sandals.