The first time Gark’s Dad took him to a Cellular Screenshow he was just 14 years old. The lazy sentience of the projector light seemed to recall distant energies that were well traversed through every effect of death and boredom, mainly its elemental oddity. They sat in the smelly vehicle with the night saucing out summer heat and watched the potato cells going through autophagy which were morphically irresponsible for their unheeded payments.
“That’s the potato cells eating each other and reusing their energy to keep growing,” Gark’s Dad said. “Wait til you see the monkey skin cells and what they do to each other when they touch. It’s magical.”
“Maybe I can get an idea of what happens when Molly holds my hand between bells,” Gark said.
“What the fuck did you just say?”
“Molly, you know she’s my girlfriend, right?” Gark said.
“Just watch the fucking picture, Gark.” Dad said. There was a long, unholy pause filled with sounds of forest limbs breaking and the silent scream of mutiny. A tree had opened its mouth with the intention of doing CPR on a world which was already gone.
“Dad…?”
“Yes?” Gark’s Dad said immediately.
“Is my body a zoo of these things? Just feeding and fucking and dying inside of me? I don’t want to be a zoo.”
“Well that’s just zoo bad, Gark. Watch the picture.”
“What’s the point of this, Dad? There’s no character.”
“Gark, we believe in cells. The drama of the little guy. These little plankton fucks build up our entire experience. It’s a privilege to have them. Without them, you’d be dead.”
“I wanna be dead,” Gark said.
Gark’s Dad got nice and grim and slid away from the screen, “You know, this won’t stop right?”
“I know,” Gark said. Filling the mutual moment between them was the jaundice flash of a gunshot kill sucking up misunderstood starlight just 34 cars to the back right of the father son dyad.
“I CAN’T TAKE THESE FUCKIN’ CELLS MAN,” the newly minted murderer shouted spraying the rest of his roll of bullets at the impervious dream of grey cloud cover, as he sauntered like an old saint’s atavism out of the ugly scene. Gark and his father sank quietly into a mutual throne of disquiet. They watched as the screen blinked off with a little four pointed star of light closing in itself. A tender little man with a criminal charm and formal attire poised himself for an address to the vehicles.
“Yes, I can tell you all witnessed what just happened. That poor man couldn’t take the cells. The other poor man is dead. You might be a little disturbed by the unfortunate scene this has shaped up to be,” Raphael Morgen said, the CEO of Cells “R” Us. “However, we must take advantage of the opportunity we have just soared into. Carter, can you position the microscope towards the new corpse’s heart. I think there’s science to do.” A tall man who took deliberate strides and wore sunglasses moved freely towards the bullet hole that webbed the windshield.
“It’s locked,” he said.
“Are you fucking. . .” Raphael said just audibly into the microphone. He walked towards the car, grabbed a stray crowbar from the loose strands of gravel constellating the smooth pavement underneath. He swung it like an experienced baseball star at the driver’s window, which crumbled into soft transparent dust that bedded the ground beneath the gold Saturn SL1. An unfortunate calm plagued the venue.
“There you go,” he said, “now we can climb inside.” Raphael Morgen grabbed the sputtering dead body’s clothes and yanked him towards the humble stage in front of the screen, brain bobbing childlike at all the diversity in the pavement. “Help me, Carter?” he said. They lifted him like a flag onto a metal table. A microscope was pointed at his unoccupied core. “More exciting than what goes on in a monkey, I’ll tell you that much,” Raphael Morgen let go of that wordy bundle of luggage.
“What’s going on, Dad?” Gark said.
“I don’t know, but I’m not wasting my ticket to head back home to hear your mother bitch and moan.”
“Yeah, fine, just let the circus of murder continue,” Gark said.
“What the fuck did you just say?” Gark’s Dad said. “Do you know how lucky you are to be here, seeing this? Do you know how much people would pay to see something like this, right here where we all can see it?”
“Yeah, really fucking lucky.”
“That’s right,” his Dad said.
Raphael Morgen circuited the stage like an anxious moon, clapping his hands at an odd rhythm in order to locate a pattern for his next words. After a long expectation he started speeching: “Look how, attendees, these cells which were very close to the center of life are now disrupted by loss of detail and the mitochondria are in a death frenzy. Let this be a reminder that a body is a building full of many residents willing to drive life. Look how willing they are now to drive death, about to be replaced by cells entirely alien to everything the body has ever been. Still, the cells will be receptive to this new habitat like they are becoming a novitiate in a slightly stranger family.” Gark planted his eyes sideways at his Dad.
“Dad, I’m calling the cops.”
“Don’t call the cops Gark, don’t ever call the fucking cops. Do you see any of these people calling the pigs? Big things are happening here, I won’t let you ruin it.”
“Dad, I’m scared,” Gark muttered.
“Everyone’s scared, Gark. It’s a default condition.”
“It’s my decision,” Gark let go of his words.
“Right, just like everything on Gark’s plane of existence.” He leaned his palm on the cold window as well as his forehead and gave birth to a new storm of gelid desperation. “Do what you want. Can’t wait to see what becomes of your life, fuckin’ loser. When I was your age—”
“Dad, shut up, I’m calling the cops.”
“Why don’t you call your precious girlfriend, Molly or whatever her name is,” his Dad said.
“She’s studying for her Confirmation tomorrow, Dad. She’s not to be bothered,” Gark said.
“Confirmed what? Confirmed kill?”
“You know what, I’m not calling the cops. I’m just gonna sit here and watch the stars die.”
Outside of the car the carnival was recruiting more engrossing energy like satellite addiction during an unfriendly breakfast. Carter had his back leaned against the streetlight which was blurring the screen with mosquito glare. He was laughing to himself with an otherworldly smile and shaking his head, ponytail bobbing in and out of sight from the vault of his back. “Right now what we have is,” Raphael Morgen energized, “apoptosis—apoptosis folks, Carter thank you for adjusting the microscope towards the exit wound rib.” Carter nods. “The cells in this rib are now shrinking to defend against digestion from other cells. Don’t check me on that, I have a license. What we see now is a body in defense without the lucid shield of breath. Catch how defensive measures, when we apply them to our force, give us a new portal when our life is snatched. This man’s last lesson was victimhood,” Raphael begins to suffer a little pensiveness, and keeps touching his lips with his fingers like candles tapping a stout radiator, “and now his home is a certified shindig for baby cathedrals, yes cells, they’re little temples, they’re extra special creatures, divine little crowds bustling all over this fresh God seer.” He demands from himself a little more extra poise than he can handle, with his hands on the metal table in a triangle supporting his head, blood pooling in his fingers in a lazy drip. “If you’ll be good excusers, I mean excuse yourselves, I mean excuse me, just shut your eyes for a bit. Ahem.”
Everyone at the drive in placed a hand in front of their eyes, including Gark’s Dad, excluding Gark. His eyes were shivering with metal passion, looping with magnetic repulsion around the place where his pupils locked him to sight. Raphael swiped away the microscope with a primitive lunge that sent it in a hindered spin, and subsequently cracked open the cavity of the corpse and indulged himself with a wet mouth of blood’s lambent slake. “Their saucer discs are . . . filling my esophagus. How long has it been? Carter, how long has it been? Best cells in the galaxy, trust me.” He shouted. Carter just smiled and shook his head again, eyelids preventing his sight. “Oh man, much too long. Yes, much too long.”
A tryst of alternating lights colored blue and red flooded the bereft vicinity. Car doors were slamming and the stage took on an encroached ecstasy of friction. “Police, put your hands up Raphael.” Raphael Morgen raised his arms where the sanguine flux was catching projector light, casting two black parallel arms on the screen. “Keep them up, and we won’t shoot,” said one of fifteen with a barrel hole ready to steal life. Raphael Morgen was locked into a silent darting of the eyes, taking in flashes of Armageddon panic distinctly paradoxical to the little .45’s. “That’s right, we’re gonna take a couple steps and you’re gonna maintain that position, got it?” Carter had already fled over the chain link fence and was sinking his boots into grass and gravel at psycho velocity.
“Can I just have one more drink,” Raphael said with a tear flushing the blood down his cheek and a baby pout.
“If you put your hands down we are liable to shoot,” the cop shook out.
In a guillotine jitter Raphael Morgen slammed his arms on the table and feasted luxuriously as if dueling with his food. “WHAT ABOUT THE FUCKING MURDERER?” he lashed out of his glowing eyes that saw uniforms. Without exchanging words every single cop broke into bullet fire and Raphael Morgen collapsed to marry his last meal.
-- Ryan Bry sent his eyes downstream in order to coax spiderleg nursing on a deadbeat ranch. He knows his way out of a soulmate paradox or two. He once saw two hands holding a baptism, at the end of a solstice mass. Make no record of the way glitter lands plurally on his dreams of you. You are welcome there anytime, with a winged feast or a ballad of cosmic fluid. He has been working on his films. Please enjoy his two published books, Information Blossoms, & The New Organics for the Flickering World.
