The Land of the Cheddar Monster Vivisectionists

-¿A ninny?

Kris exhaled, surprising the silence. He looked in HORROR at the middle of Lindy’s contender-scab/trash can.

I can see by your outfit that you are a cowboy and that these words look like a Fiji Mermaid with its eyes closed. The cowboy is a time-tested symbol of being insane in the membrane. Especially when you hold it up like a species of vertiginous grease.

¡Such brazenness and perniciousness cold goo’d all over life!

-¡Lindy! -Kris exclaimed with the gargantuan appetite of a South American salamander-. ¿This... you call this living?

With a heart full of latent violence, Kris stopped short of killing his sister. Besides, Lindy only had the brazenness of a half sack of potatoes left in her.

-¿You call this living? -Kris repeated, this time sounding alienated.

The sad, dough-eyed boy was legging it out of the patio when his sister started rearing up.

-No. ¡I don’t call this living! -Lindy said, burping from her toes.

Then was when Kris saw God count to three, but He was unable to count to nine.

-¡One! ¡Two! ¡Ten!

Lindy lifted her ant wings to the sky.

-“¡One! ¡Two! ¡Ten!” is what ventriloquists say -She say’d-. And they say it while taking out the trash. ¿Can you believe it? That’s perfect.

Passing a rat’s ass, Lindy knew she could count on Kris to wear diapers, set a rooster on fire and then breathe agitatedly.

-Kris, ¿what are you thinking? Oh yeah, you don’t think. ¿What are you Trilateral Commissioning? -A burly Lindy reinvented.

-No, I’m not thinking -Kris Prostestanted.

Lindy held up her one, two, ten and looked at it, searching the numbers for something that moved her.

-¡I’m a boy and that’s WORD! -Lindy hissed as she counted one, two, ten. She was babbling again instead of chilling, her teeth pressed against her chest trying to move her labia.

-¿What are you trying? -Kris said, trying to move the ceiling with his eyes.

-I’m not a girl. ¡You’re the girl! -Lindy hissed again, this time counting ten in a tone of voice that was at once gooey and at the same time triple-chinny. She was tiring of spitting nonchalantly at passing paramilitarists and globe-hopping with Deputy Dawg. Lindy was looking more to throw spitballs at the number 10 and to find a mechanism that would remove hats from gentleman’s heads when ladies passed by.

-It’s more likely that you’ll step on an insect -Kris said, without caring to accost-. Try that on for size, Lindy.

-At least I don’t have the manners of an iguana -Lindy insisted, acrimoniously hitting Kris over the head with the number 10. And then, in her best Lance Henriksen imitation-: ¿Fuck me? ¡Fuck you!

-At least I don’t go to Ecuador with my golf instructor -Kris hissed, rubbing his head where the 10 had struck.

Kris was seeing 10’s in the air and he was suspicious. His head felt like someone had cast him into the sea and then reeled him in with a fish hook speared through his cerebellum. His ENORMOUS blue eyes moved only when they were spoken to and never horizontally. They were bright red and taking the curves like Lindy applied mascara. He may have a labia-inferiority complex, but at least he didn’t mimic Lance Henriksen lines and at least he didn’t think that he was Nostradamus with a labia-superiority complex.

The 10’s were still hovering over Kris’s head with grease and chocolate dripping off onto his bald, cue ball head. And his cue ball wasn’t wearing a rain bonnet. He had a German Lugar, a piece of paper with the word ten written on it and a pint of Hidden Valley Hibiscus salad dressing, but no rain bonnet. Under extreme circumstances he carried a rain bonnet with him, but now all he had to show for it was the cold goo running down to his armadillo skin shoes the color of carrion.

-Call me Palmolive -Lindy hissed without saying the word “ten” and then moved her head quickly back and forth like Bob Saget on chewing tobacco.

-¿Tonto? -Kris mistakenly repeated, shaking his head-. I mean, ¿why Palmolive?

-Look, asswipe, ¡you’d fucking better well call me Palmolive! -Lindy hissed this again without mentioning 10 and while treating everyone like they were not merely labia movers and shakers.

Kris grew nauseous:

-¿Are we going bicycling on the patio or at the school or what, Lindy?

-That’s Robertaricia to you, ¿or do I have to literally etch it into your pea brain?

-Lindy hissed what Palmolive could only ask.

-Then I’d sue your ass for horroribleness -Kris contested, impatient for meaning.

-I’m not horrorible -Palmolive said in a voice chillingly like Lindy’s, except that Palmolive moved her eyes like army ants move ladles-. ¡You are horroribleness personified!

-Yeah, well, don’t look now, your labia’s moving OUT -Kris said to Lindy-. And it’s taking its ventriloquist pessimism with her.

-You sir are a major rat’s ass -Lindy insisted on insisting.

-Yeah, well, ¿who died and left you al Qaeda’s answer to the tea ceremony?

-Kris gimme’d.

-Palmolive is just me. And I’m just a lovely bunch of cocoanuts -Lindy said, spray painting the number 10 on her shirt, thus ratcheting up the strangeness, at least on her shirt.

-I’m a lovely bunch of cocoanuts and you are still rotten.

-¡Cat’s ass! -She spat at Kris, tjanting like Ron Silliman.

-¡Your mom’s a cat’s ass! -The number 17 replied with a voice reminiscent of Lindy’s.

-¿Can you go five minutes without saying something that sounds like it darted out of hell and into your mouth? -Kris asked, segueing to his sister and not the number 10.

-You’re always teetering on the cusp of breaking wind -Lindy said like a robot reading Chaucer-. ¿Were you born with the marionette strings or did they grow later? You know, I keep juggling these jokes and you keep side-steppin’ ‘em. Why don’t you do like I do, and repeat after me.

-I also juggle, but only when someone pulls on my strings -Kris said, arguing for compassion-. Cluelessness has its privileges.

-But, ¿what are you going to do about that 10? -Kris existentialism’d.

-I dunno. Part of me wants to take a gun and Montessori it into ach du lieber

-Lindy contested penciltatively, passing the number 10 after taking a hit-. But part of me, and not the butt part, wants to make money off it. Think about it, dude. We could rent it out to kids birthday parties. 10 would wow those spectacle-saturated deviants.

-¡Happy birthday, jackasses! -Kris hissed, testifying for 10-. ¡Now GIVE ME ALL OF YOUR PARENTS’S MONEYS!

Kris didn’t know how simple he was.

The two started carrying on like crazed ants at a candy factory: Lindy accompanying 10 on the accordion, Kris breaking out his Spalding Gray manatee monologue.

-¡That’s macabre! -Kris said, patting down Rico Petrocelli, who was walking down the street-. ¡Hey! Check out our olestra-laden tunes on the lederhosen.

-Now I need a Bromo® -Lindy insisted.

-Now I need a Bromo -The voice formerly known as Palmolive said, shaking her head and moving her eyes like she was trying to prove that she wasn’t a ventriloquist dummy-. ¡Because I’m meeting a rodent-American at the trash dump!

-Palmolive reeks of truth -Kris commented, pushing a hundred dollars worth of Rudy Seanez toward Lindy.

-Don’t make me look at my self. I’m with Palmolive, I’m in the dump with rats -Lindy said, realizing twelve tones of burlap.

Kris had been outfoxed.

-That was close -Lindy said- because any longer and we’d have to take Kris with us.

Kris was starting to protest when he heard the voices. Kris adjusted his eyes and God vaulted down with a Marshall Plan of His OWN that had more rules, more death and destruction and more crap about how to live right. The two kids looked at each other like pretty pelicans with petty, painful parents.

-¿What plan is this? -Amy Marshall asked, sounding a lot like Palmolive.

-¿Are you blabbering? -Her little brother Ben, who, up close, looked like a tree frog and who, from a distance, looked like his own personal jihad.

-Hello, ¡My name is Palmolive! -Lindy hissed so hard that the number 10 fell off her shirt. This made Palmolive mad, and a couple of hecklers in the front row didn’t help matters. In fact, the audience was serving up the cold goo in ladles.

-¿Why aren’t I on the guest list? -Amy asked.

-¿Did you know that I can move objects with my eyes? -Ben asked without a care in his carcass.

-¿But can you move your eyes? -Palmolive asked Ben.

The two Marshall kids knew that they were right on. Ben was ten, but already his hair was receding. And Amy knew that she was clear, queer, en garde for her rear and that Palmolive was no girl, she ¡was a man, baby!

-¡Hey! ¡You heard me! ¡No cash refunds! -Palmolive grunted.

Ben had been sitting on his hands, but now he had them clenched in fists of fury. And after that segue, he and Amy knew that their destinies were nothing when compared to their three-inch, cherry red, press-on, Lee nails.

-¡Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah! -Lindy screamed and spanked 10’s butt, listening to see if she had hit it so hard that the vibrations would echo in everyone’s heads.

To a rotten kid, this is major entertainment. Seeing something’s rear-end reddened.

Satisfied with the attention her screaming received, Lindy decided she could pull a sister out of her watch. Kris was horrified at this sentence. He was bored and the prospect of another sister made him grab his head with his hands.

“I need a sister -Lindy concluded-. Kris is just a boy and Palmolive isn’t real and I really need the attention. And that totally screams: ¡Sister!”

“This is indiscutably the way I came up with Palmolive”, Lindy talked to her self in a miasma of orangutans and segmented traffic lights.

She looked into the blue pint-sized eyes of 10. In order to produce thoughts, 10 had to channel the Fiji Mermaid in all her splendoriferousness, look her in the eyes and amp-up the complications of rising from the dead.