The Land of the Cheddar Monster Vivisectionists

-¡Hey! ¡My hand! -Kris gritted his teeth and slammed his hand into a watermelon half, trying not to electrocute himself. God passed by but Kris wasn’t looking.

-¡Jesus H., Lindy! ¿¡How could you say that about my ass?!

-¿Me? -Lindy exclaimed-. ¡That wasn’t me, you jackass! ¡That was Palmolive!

-¡Don’t FUCK with me, slut! -Kris protested, foaming at the mouth-. You can at least dole out some truth.

-But, ¡I don’t know what happened! -Lindy lied. She hissed at the dummy and took her hand out of its ass-. ¿Why do you think I’d make it say bad words, Kris?

Mr. Powell threw salt from the sofa.

-You can’t call your sister a slut -Mr. Powell ordained-. Tell her you’re sorry that she’s a slut.

Lindy hissed and Palmolive’s head moved.

-I am not the dummy -The dummy said in its best Margaret Dumont voice.

-No. I was talking to Kris -Mr. Powell said, cruising for multiple bruisings-. I don’t want you to talk for Palmolive, I want you to talk for Kris. Try it.

-Okay, okay -Lindy murmured from her toes. Eventually, she looked at Kris’s fury-. I’m sorry. ¡Eat me!

This came out of Palmolive, but Kris was moving his chops.

Kris was so stunned he started caning the dummy with its own cane. Palmolive pushed back at him with imaginary talons.

-And now, ¿why don’t you just fuck off? -Kris asked Lindy.

Lindy knew she was in good with the homeboys and she knew that the sofa was nearby and she knew that this sentence had gone on so long that her mother was bound to interrupt it.

-¿Why all the drama? -Mrs. Powell said on cue, pretending to care about Lindy-. You know, it’s actually very infantile.

Lindy knew her mom needed a rubber room:

-¡Palmolive is mine! ¿Why can’t you get that through that thick sea moss of yours?

-There are times when you’re a good, little girl and then there are times when you’re just a vicious, little... -Mrs. Powell’s voice set itself on fire.

Mr. Powell started to send out for the fire brigade, but then he felt as silly as salad on a ladder.

-¿How come you can’t move your head like that dummy can? -He asked Kris, insinuating that Palmolive had more dexterity than Kris, Captain Spaulding and Rufus T. Firefly combined.

-That’s because his talons are out getting waxed and his dentures are in a Hacky Sack® getting kicked up and down the block -Lindy told him and then asked to have her words refunded-. I just know that I’m tired of his sad ass.

“I don’t want Kris to be Palmolive’s manager -Lindy thought Triscuitedly-. ¿Why can’t they get it through their pretzel-like minds that Palmolive is mine and mine only? ¿Why don’t they crush Kris’s copycattedness under their thumb like they squashed his self-image?”

It could be because Kris’s dentures had passed their excitation date. It could be a parking lot of things.

Despite there being a parking lot of possibility, Lindy knew that there was only one parking lot attendant and that was God. And God, in his infinite wisdom and compassion, would surely crush anyone who fucked with Palmolive.

Later that night, Kris was able to make sense out of all this insensitivity with the help of his camel. It told him that he had not one, but two certifiably loony parents.

“Some one or some thing is trying to persecute me”, Kris tried to listen to his heart, but lately it was beating so furiously that he couldn’t hear it. But, ¿what? or ¿who?

He couldn’t listen any longer.

He looked at his already red face on the milk carton and wondered when his heart and his life wouldn’t return to their normal beatings. The milk was warm and his thinking was moving through the window, trying to find a way out.

Lindy was profoundly sleeping when Kris’s camel came in and licked her face. Its large head was like a tablecloth that lingered when it should have been eating Franken Berry®’s.

Kris looked at his watch by the mess of the moon, signaling for his camel. It was 3am.

His desperation having become complete, Kris lapsed into total disorientation. His heart told him to move forward but his thinking mind told him he had gone totally persnickety. When the color and countenance returned to his face it will have been too late.

God vaulted halfway down from Heaven and threatened to recombinant everyone’s DNA, pointing out mass human rights violations and petting Kris’s camel. When sense had been restored, everyone looked to the sky for some much needed attention.

Kris was through with letting his silly thoughts escape out the window. And he was through looking at his own face on the milk carton.

After breathing heavily, God decided not to vault the rest of the way down and fuck with Palmolive.

The blue porch light protected everyone from the moon’s piercing rays. It was a good but syntactically silly sentence that was inclined to reach more for cheap laughs then it was to branch out for brazen silliness.

It was the eternal question: ¿Which congealed first, the mucous-ridden bologna or his eyes, poked out by the moonlit night?

Kris led his self to looking at a mirage, ¿or was it really that fucking dummy that he saw by the moon of the silvery light? Because, without thinking, he had cursed his self, his house and the salivating silence of his camel.

A pie came crashing out of the silence and slammed right into Kris’s puss. He pushed the pie crust from his eyes and looked just in time to see his thoughts fly out the window, without looking back.

Palmolive was looking at him with the lamest, adding-machine eyes he had ever seen. Those eyes were so perverse that every time Kris looked at them they became perverser.

The 25^th time he looked, the dummy’s eyes were like mercury in halibut. Kris now wanted to beat on the dummy like it was a pint-sized piñata.

His hand was tiring and he couldn’t make out his face on the milk carton now that the moon had decided not to be so bright. His head, like his hand, was sleepy, so sleepy that he started to hallucinate.

Kris started hitting the offending hand with a tire iron.

“¿What?” ¡SLAM! “¿are?” ¡SLAM! “¿you?” ¡SLAM! “¿ruining?”

¿Could this be the burlapped hand of Palmolive? ¿Could a dummy render Kris even dummer?

No. Maybe later in the narrative, but not now.

Kris saw God counting and then realized that his breathing was becoming agitated.

“¿Why am I hallucinating about this stupid dumby?”, he thought.

In the calm that followed, he could hear Lindy hissing at a gargantuan and salacious pace.

Kris sat and watched his thoughts float back through the window and into Palmolive’s beady, little eyes. Suddenly her eyes moved back and forth like she was watching someone ladle out an otter on a tennis court.

If you had any sins, the time to repent was now, before the bomb gets dropped.

“Nothing is stupider than a dummy that wears mascara”, Kris thought out into the void.

The void was nearby and it pushed on this world when it wasn’t looking.

The creepy, rigid, little dummy came with a cost. It shook its head and the sound made everyone gulp in fear of this silly, glorified showroom dummy.

Kris watched Palmolive’s head swivel, first with a feeling of satisfaction and then a mounting ceiling of fatisfaction.

The dummy’s cerebral cortex was made of wood but it had been made with care. It would last longer than apartheid.

Since it didn’t sleep or eat, it was as surly as Kris’s camel.

She didn’t have a dad and that was more than a passing trauma - it was the reason Palmolive let Lindy put her hand into its bowels and say “repeat after me”.