The Land of the Cheddar Monster Vivisectionists

-¡Mmmmmm! ¡Mmmmmm! ¡Mmmmmm!

Kris Powell furiously poured lamb down his sister’s gullet.

Lindy Powell looked like a watch, complete with dial and stem. It made her look like she always knew what time it was, but, if the truth were told, Lindy really looked like a bomb had gone off in her mascara, coloring her entire face a shade of red that made Kris shake his head.

-Thanks for the lamb -Lindy said, poorly feigning enthusiasm. And then, with one rapid movement, the lamb came back up, trying to reanimate itself.

-¡Oh, man! -Kris protested when the mascara exploded, not to mention the regurgitated lamb part.

Lindy knew she was so right:

-Take a chill pill.

Instead of grabbing a chill pill, Kris grabbed the book that was Lindy’s neck and started choking the title page out of her.

-¡Die, you fucking question mark! ¡You wouldn’t know a schwa if it smacked you! -He exclaimed. He knew that his sister detested every page in her own book.

Lindy never ate anything except books. She’d down One Hundred Years of Solitude before Kris could even decide what part of what animal carcass he was going to gnaw on.

-It’s fucked that bombs are always going off in your life -Kris said rabidly.- But it’s no coincidence that your mascara always wins “Honorable Mention”.

-I could make better bombs if you’d help -Lindy said, despicably.

-In his defense, I don’t think you could stand his shit -Their mom murmured from the kitchen with a “40” in one hand and a pile of rope to wash and play with the doppelganger of pies that had come to be known as Kris in the other-. ¿And now you’re complaining about gobs of mascara?

-No, we’re not complaining -Lindy grunted-. It’s just that the echo in here is so cavalier and it goes so round and round that I can’t concentrate on the book I’m being.

These kids weren’t just rotten, they were ruby red and listing to port. And Lindy was jackass enough to believe ALL of the generalizations she’d ever heard in her life. In other words, she knew that Cowboy Curtis cooked without a ladle. Kris, on the other hand, moved his head without using his cerebral cortex.

This made the two dumbasses reconsider who they were because when your identity is called into question it’s always by dumbasses. And when your front side looks like an anchorman and your back side looks like “Dawn of the Dead”, blue eyes ain’t a redeeming feature. And when you have the face of a bulldog in the middle of all this, it’s time to run. And when you know it’s time to run you should take all of these facets with you to the greener and rosier grass on the other side of the velodrome.

And when you think that the narcotics you’ve been taking for the past few years are little anchors hanging off your messy hubris, you’ll want to seriously dust-off an atlas. Alicia, Lindy’s lamb-loving friend, has three heads bulging from her four shoulders and that makes her think that she’s not twelve yet.

-¿Will you QUIT taunting me? -Kris asked, frozen by the thought of all these heads and shoulders.

-Not today -Lindy said, looking for the bookmark in her throat-. You know, you have a tiny, pea head.

-¡That’s not my fault! -Kris re-zing’d. He looked for his miniscule head in the mirror, but couldn’t find it. There was nothing there except a gob of mascara.

-You can peel out now -Lindy said, readdressing the rain dog-. You’re such a simpleton.

Kris groaned furiously:

-¿Why are you always molesting my dome?

-¿Moi? ¿Molesting your dome? -Lindy left her eyes hanging in the air with an air of innocence-. I’m an angel. Just ax anyone’s cold comfort.

Exasperated, Kris ran to his mommy so that they could meet the media and tell them what an Amarillo, Texas Lindy was:

-Mommy, ¿when are you going to tender me my props?

-Never -Mrs. Powell responded and wasn’t sorry.

Kris knew what to joke about:

-You’re always dissing my sorry ass.

His mom knew not to encourage the boy:

-You know that we don’t have enough room for two kids, Kris -She said and returned to staring out the window, searching for the sun’s brilliant rays and waiting for them to travel psychically to her cornea.

-It’s a beautiful day. ¿Why don’t you two go outside before I tear all of your teeths out?

-Mommy, you know we don’t have any teeths -Lindy said, volunteering her eyes for vivisection-. And I’m already twelve years old. Someday you’ll have grandkids who’ll slit your jugular when you’re not juggling.

-¿Are you quite done threatening people? -Kris asked, resisting the urge to stop using his feet to gob on Lindy’s rosy red mascara.

-God, I hate you. You just don’t know how cute you are -Lindy led with her own jugular.

-I like it when you two go away, running -Mrs. Powell said, channeling her pirate days.

She had repented her pirate days many weeks ago, but sometimes it looked like the veneer was still on the peg leg.

-¿Why aren’t you two walking Barky? -Mrs. Powell must’ve said. That terrier, Labrador or whatever the fuck it is was was costing her serious coin-. In fact, ¿why don’t you walk him ‘til he passes out?

-I don’t have the gonads -Lindy murmured, picking up a book.

-And when was the last time you dragged that dog behind your bike? -Mrs. Powell said to Kris, with the wisdom of a man-. That’s what bikes are for, morons. But you wouldn’t know that with your “I’m toking a bowl” and your “The garage is full of dimes”.

-That’s nice, that’s nice -Lindy said, closing her book. She got up, spat at her mom and threw her book at the family camel-.You don’t have to be so fucking sarcastic, Mommy,

-¿¡What the fuck?! -Kris asked Lindy.

-¿What the fuck what?

-¿What the fuck is it with you and bicycles? We go to the school patio and all I see is your Madone SSL parked outside.

-Look, I don’t know what you see, because all I see when I’m on the school patio is Roberto. ¿Isn’t he a dream? -Lindy said, covered in mucous.

-¿What the? -Kris said and so said all of San Jose.

-Come on. Let’s taste some fresh air -Their mommy said-. And we’ll taste some verisimilitude. We’ll all go to the supermarket.

Kris knew that what he spied with his little eye was that the time and space to go out back and toke a bowl was shrinking. He also knew that his knack for knitting the mayor a legume of mascara was wearing thin. Another thing he knew was that he’d been as regular as a Calaveras County cowboy with three hands.

-Let’s git. Let’s sally forth -He said-. Last one to the salad bar is welcome to my hairy balls.

They decided to take public transit and Barky decided that he’d go to the Laundromat and eat Good N’ Plenty®. He was such a Brillo® pad pud-puller that he didn’t know that the sky was only a nub on the end of someone’s pen. And that the air was only the second of God’s creations after circumcision. And that it seemed more like a summer day than a primeval one.

The kids were all wearing blue corduroy pants and goofy red t-shirts with drawings of mangos on them. Lindy said “¡Ah-choo!” but the garage door didn’t open and it didn’t point and laugh. She didn’t have the same luck with Kris.

-Look... your tah-rah-rah-BOOM-dee-ay tah-rah-rah-BOOM-dee-ay’d -Kris said.

-It’s sophomoric humor like that that is rapidly tiring our collective national senses of humor -Lindy replied, looking like she’d just donned her man-sensibilities.

The “constructors” had demolished the old house during the invasion. The new house sat on a bed of concrete and roses and listed toward March. Lindy and Kris were getting used to eating boiled ostrich eggs in strange corridors when no one was looking.

Now they were being paraded around listlessly and atrociously and construction had only just begun on the “House of Truth.” In the middle of all this, a woman was levitating a monument to TERROR. Barky had thought that it was a monument to TERRIER that was being levitated, but it was just the ritual levitation of concrete blocks and roses that was routinely done for new houses, variety shows, hermits and mannequins.

-That’s a lot of work -Lindy said.

“Duh” was a word that passed through every one’s lips at the new house.

-¿Whose brilliant idea was it to build a house of truth? -Kris asked-. Probably a very good boy who will get his Marcello Mastroianni in the end. And, to all the girls out there, ¡I’m a VERY good boy!

-¡Pwawguh! -Lindy said, ponying to the car in disgust-. ¿Girls? ¿Whose brilliant idea was it that you somehow appeal to girls? I can’t believe that you and I even seem to be from the same family.

Kris usually put on a costume in response to Lindy’s sarcasm. Then he’d get in an ambulance and look for girls and all the time detesting his surly sister. Because here’s the entire package: you’re born, you’re alive, you’re dead... and the only thing that matters is how many major babes you get in between birth and death and the sheets.

But being a tan iguana also had its exasperating counterfibularities.

-You’ll never get laid. And if you haven’t figured that out then you haven’t seen the new house -Lindy said.

Kris was the last guy to travel to the patio. He turned in the middle and was hit by an elephant’s trunk, an armadillo’s ass and The Last Words Of The Great Explorer.

They had to go through a heck of a lot of shit just to divide the patio into three sections. We won’t talk about the first section or the third section, but the second section had a floor of butter and dirt and underneath that was a concrete escalator.

In the van, where everybody started congregating, the kids stuck plastic forks into their parents. Kris held his fork over his head and entered the house.

Inside, it was obscure and fricking freezing. Like a new toupee. You could count the recombinant DNA on three hands but you couldn’t pin the tail on the DNA.

-¡Stab their clavicles! -Lindy advertised, sensing A Canticle For Leibowitz and the urge to urinate.

-If you stab us in the clavicles with any thing other than pie you’ll get tetanus and ¡DIE! -When Mom offered advice, it was usually cloaked in death.

-¡That’s disasteralous! -Kris said.

-I don’t want any one to stab me, and if they do, I’d better goddamn get tetanus

-Lindy reasoned the reason of the so-called right-to-lifers.

-Yeah, yeah, yeah -Kris responded with a Beatles song-. That’s just what I’d expect you to say -And goddamnit if he didn’t kneel down in front of the fireplace like a parrot fondue.

-¿You know who’s a rat’s ass with a cat’s drawl? -Lindy said like a Vegas demigod obscured by Venutian blinds-. Lindy do.

-¿Is that any better than the same old ass with a straw dog? -Kris said like Carmen Miranda had just hit him over the head with the blind side of a cow.

-Haole delicious -Lindy said as she pirouetted-. With a little tartar sauce, Haoles taste like pine cones.

They went through the corridor and took an exam in the kitchen.

-¿Do you know what the capital of Alhambra is? -Kris asked, sounding more like a lounge singer in Salem than a pyrotechnics assassin in Las Vegas.

-¿Why are you talking during this test? -Lindy said as she gyrated.

-Your mom takes tests -Kris said quietly.

-The kitchen is no place to take a test -Lindy said as she watched a pair of vultures cleaning the cabinets. She looked again, and knew she had seen this only once before - and even then she had only heard it-. ¿Got it? -Her eyes closed and opened again-. ¿Are there vultures cleaning the cabinets?

Kris knew that quesadillas congealed in this kitchen.

So, instead of responding, he listened.

Silence.

After listening to someone taking a rapid and righteous piss, Kris stopped actively listening and started actively suspending disbelief.

-¡Let’s go, you monosyllabic sea slug! -Lindy hissed.

Kris was fit to be wrapped in plastic, but then he saw the family van through the door. He put salt on his sluggishness and started trying to leave the house’s patio.

Lindy knew that they’d have to bend down low to the escalator and then get up and stand up and tell someone what they now knowed.

-¡Oy vey! ¡Look! -She gritted her teeth between her chewing tobacco and her gums.

A centipede salad looked through the window at their costly, caustic and mounting articulation of terror. It moved its little quadrumilliopeds and escaped the patio faster than Kris or Lindy could say “Klindy”.

Lindy swore like a carjacker:

-¡We only have two legs, fuckface!

Kris’s steady head swiveled unsteadily:

-¿Are you sure? -He said in a tone that said “I haven’t been sure of anything since I last swept Ventimiglia-. Because I’m hissing in the middle of a patio that is surrounded by centipedes.

Whenever they finally get from the patio to the house they’re going to have to pretend that they didn’t see Lindy in her utter state of desperation.

-¡Oi! ¿Where are we?

-We’re right here -Lindy responded-. And right here we’re going to ¡DIE!

Kris started praying for a local anesthetic for his sister. Lindy could’ve been a contender if she could ever 1) stop fondueing the speed bag and 2) get off of the patio.

Kris protected his eyes from the sun with his hand because he didn’t have a Velcro® parasol. Lindy protected her eyes from seeing that she was on the border of being a contender, and a contender looking for her own lazy ass so she could kick some ass.

-¿What are you looking for? -Kris asked.

Lindy was tired and because she was tired she paid the haircutted lad no mind.

-¿What are you hiccupping? -Kris insisted on asking, dangling his Degrassi Jr. High decorative mug in front of the contender.

But Lindy didn’t respond.

Later, much later, they’d get off the patio. They had lost their collective senses and their hands were bruised from using the barbecue as a punching bag. They were seriously cruising for a Dan Castellaneta bruising. Kris could see that his head had become the size of the cast of “Cabaret”.

-¿”Cabaret”? ¿Are you both brazen and Pier One imported?

-¡Oh, no! -Kris exclaimed, horrorizontally lifting his hands to his cabaret.