SATURDAY MORNING

A woman got hit by a car outside our building. The accident left a blood spot in the road. It was shaped like a foot-high homunculus frozen in the act of crossing the street. The Lotus showed me the spot hours after the accident. The blood still seemed thick and shiny, even in the heat. This morning I walked to work and there it was, still in the midst of crossing the street. How long is that blood spot going to last?

SATURDAY AFTERNOON

I was spotted by two gaunt-bodied and twitchy junkies on a bench. One of them called out "Hey dude! You got a cigarette?" Before I could speak he held up a little brown bottle and blurted out "I'll trade you a bottle of methadone!" "Sorry," I said. "I don't smoke". He looked at me with a weird mixture of panic and accusation. I looked back with polite sympathy. Nobody spoke. I suddenly realized I was stuck in a staring contest with an undernourished junkie whose eyes screamed "Crystal meth!"

SATURDAY EVENING

Nothing. Big fat zero.

FAIRY TALES

Once there was a man in a basement who wanted to get the fuck out and go home, so underneath an increasing mountain of papers he began to secrete away the parts for a silkscreen device. Screen. Ink. Frame. Hinges. Screws. Miscellaneous (squeegee, emulsion, more miscellaneous). Package of T-shirts, dude. Fervently he worked, pretending to search for an important document but really silkscreening his t-shirts with the message: "This moment marks the moment that marks my fervent urge to get the fuck out this basement". They came out surprisingly well. He slipped them on inside out to hide his subversive message. Slowly the layers grew on his torso. Slowly the papers accumulated. Eventually he just looked really fat and red-faced. The papers formed a deep drift. Nobody said goodbye when they escorted him out of the building.

Once there was a woman with superpowers who could run faster than the souped-up Lexus her sister had bought at the police auction. Her sister, who ran a network marketing business that sold dog clothing, actually bought the car for her superpowered sister. The thing was, sure she could run fast. But she got really tired after a thirty-second burst of speed. Plus she usually ran into walls.

Once there was a young computer hacker. He lived the same life that all hackers do, tapping away self-importantly at a keyboard and fancying himself a libertarian seeker of truth, and not just another fat misogynist spewing his social Darwinist rants on right-wing forums and masturbating to the images his pixellated mistress doles out for him. But this hacker was lean, gorgeous and surprisingly athletic for being a desk jockey by day and big ole hax0r by night. The young hacker lived in a buttoned-down, faintly totalitarian world distinguished by gleaming urban surfaces, where men in suits did their best to make our hero feel like a worthless cog in a machine, a squish of the mop, a blip of code in a computer system, a living battery in a power grid in a dystopian future ruled by machines. Eventually, though, through a combination of lousy diet and inactivity, he grew pudgy and greasy looking. He stopped cutting his hair. Women no longer looked at him on the street, and the less they looked, the more he hated them. He died of an aneurysm at his computer, in the midst of an online chat with his only friends, hax0rhero and womynsuckmydyckfor$.

parode - exode