There was a puddle on his doorstep, and Turner didn't have much of a short term memory on account of the drugs and the booze. He liked to peer out of a slight gap in the curtains. Watch the post man. Watch the garbo. You never can tell, his father always said. You never can tell what kind of sick fuck you're likely to run into one day. You just better be ready. That's all.
The water splashed up, above his ankles, soaking his soaks. Turner, with an overwhelming sense of deja vu, cursed God Almighty and continued walking - shaking his leg like a dog that has stepped in it's own shit. Melbourne had betrayed him again. The promise of blue skies, exhausted by trickling rain and grey clouds.
The cigarette means nothing. It burns. Feeds the tumors, wherever they are. Turner takes some satisfaction from his suicide. His last, his only, good deed. He breathes easy; coughs up blood into his handkerchief, and smiles. If only. They're so lucky, the cancerous. The HIV positive. The dying. Turner looked at the sputum in his embroidered velvet handkerchief. No blood. Nothing. He sighed, shoving it quickly into his pocket.
"If trams have their own personalities, the 243 should be institutionalized."
Same old bullshit conversation. Same fucking jokes. Craig, or Peter. Something like that. Fucking suits. Turner fixed his gaze indiscriminantly through the window, instantly fantasizing about cutting his throat. Craig, or Peter. Whatever the fuck his name was.
He was right though, of course. The 243 was a fucking nightmare. Junkies are a given with any metro line. No; the problem with the forty-three, is the drag queens.
"Here comes a bunch of them now," Craig-Peter said. "Faggots."
An asian guy, wearing skin-tight leather pants, with bright red lipstick; a person if indeterminable gender, the poster child for androgyny; two transexual cheerleaders; and an Elton John impersonator. They sat down, metres away from our protagonist.
"Frank?"
Turner shifted.
"He's talking to you," said Peter-Craig.
Elton leaned forward and lowered his glasses. "Frank Turner?" His leg turned back against itself and extended, by the joint, until it had reached twice it's initial length.
Turner smiled.
"Are you," Peter, or Craig; he said, "Are you one of them?"
Meanwhile, Elton had transformed into a spider. They watched, as it spread eggs across the metal floor. The arachnid anus retracted, loose and swollen, to the ground. Translucent shells, displaying fierce fetuses like baby sharks. Elton made some sort of sound. If it was a language, it was unrecognizable. Sounded more like a screech. Like a cat.
The smile on Turner's face had begun to hurt, sometime before the evolution of Elton spider. He no longer remembered why he was smiling, which terrified him - because, maybe there was no reason. Maybe he was a dribbling idiot, sitting alone and laughing about nothing. Senile, like his grandfather. Turner looked at the spiderman. Fuck, he thought. Maybe I am my grandfather. And, he reached into his pocket for some more mushrooms.
The Asian guy with the lipstick, he was floating approximately one foot from the ceiling of the tram. A bogan, who had repeatedly introduced himself as Mr. Fuck, was taunting the gravity-defying ass pirate. Turner, as always, was paying close attention.
"Hey," Craig, or Peter; he said, "We're here."
Turner, tucking his erection into the leg of his underwear and stuffing a handful of pocket lint and hallucinogenic mushrooms into his mouth, stepped out onto Collins Street. The fresh ulcers on his gums from that morning's coffee throbbed in protest as his body detected the drugs. As they walked, the ground changed from flat to peaked. The sidewalk became narrower and narrower, until they had to walk on tip toes, one foot after the other.
"You're fucking losing it, Turner," somebody said. Craig. Or Peter.
Turner mouthed, "Fuck you." He was smiling weakly, and waving.
* * * * * * *
Focus groups attract a certain kind of scumbag. They don't tell you this during training. You go in thinking your going to be conducting serious market research. In the end, you get the same group of people. Professional samplers. They go from job to job, for thirty-five dollars a pop, eating free food and saying sweet nothing. Turner hated them. He hated them more than he hated his golfdish, Fool. He hate them more than he hated himself.
There are two kinds of samplers. Small teeth protruded from their limbs. The lizard people. The other ones, the sheep, they didn't have any visible teeth. Or limbs. Just big balls of wool. Wool, Turner mused. Weird word. Wool. One of the lizard people was excreting something onto the table, from a gland in her face. The urge to vomit was instant. Turner stared, horrified, as it dribbled across the woodgrain and started splattering on the floor - near his shoe. Four seconds later he was outside, running down the street.
The remaining population had, at some point, become completely transperant. Turner could see directly through them, like looking through water. They were everywhere. This liquid nation. He collapsed, against the gutter, and began to cry down the drain.
The spider, and his floating Asian gimp, appeared from nowhere. Turner looked up, past the giant arachnid's hairy legs, to his drooling fangs. "They're made of water."
"Frank," said the spider. "We're all made of water."
Turner screamed, and started running wildly down the street muttering to himself.
"Turner?" said a liquid man. Probably Craig, or Peter.
Without thinking, Turner punched Craig (or Peter) in the face, causing Peter (or Craig) to disintegrate into a shower of liquid nothingness. Soaked with what used to function as bones and blood, Frank Turner screamed once more - much louder this time - before continuing his rampage down Burke Street. He ran through seventy-eight people that day, before the dirty lizard people got to him.
They laid eggs in his brain.
Now Turner loves his job.
I read them all. Didn't know we had an art section.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
