What r ur dreamswap headcanons :3
Have to redo this bc Tumblr hates me:
* 7 each
* Human Ver. Specific
Dream
Dream 100% has something that’s dedicated to Ani, (hospital, orphanage, medical organization, etc.)
To add more depth to him being Latino, I choose to believe he’s Chilean-American
He doesn’t like to be touched, but would never correct anybody on it because he doesn’t want to offend anyone and he doesn’t view it as a priority or concern 
Only has one scar and it was prior to the incident (tm), nightmare, dropped a bowl, and a shard of the ceramic cut dream deep enough to form a scar, and subconsciously Dream doesn’t want it to heal, so it doesn’t fully heal, though it is fairly faint, it’s on his wrist directly above the bone 
He’s probably some form of genderqueer, yeah, doesn’t know it and refuses to look into it because he just doesn’t view it as important, he probably goes by pronouns 
His magical blondness, skips a few streaks of his hair, so he has black streaks that he dies blonde to match the rest of his hair
Canonically multilingual, speaking both English and Mandarin, though I would like to add that he can fluently speak Latin, modern Spanish, and French
Bonus: Dream does that OCD thing (w/o actually having it) where all of his pens when they’re laying on his desk are at the exact same place, in a perfect little row
Nightmare
He sits in trees and people watches, like he sits up in trees, kind of in forests and watches people on picnics and fun little family outings, and tries to imagine what his life would be like if it hadn’t been what it is 
His hair is extremely heat damaged, because he totally straightens it (it’s the only thing about him that’s allowed to be straight /j)
Extension on him canonically being Latino: I think he’s Peruvian-American
For some reason collect bottle caps (like the little metal ones you get on alcohol bottles (he doesn’t drink though))
He has a peanut allergy
Despite being an insomniac, whenever he does actually sleep, he starfishes
He doesn’t like looking in mirrors, there’s anything wrong with it, there isn’t really reason why he doesn’t like it, he just find it unsettling and he covers the one in his room with a blanket
Ink
He has one of those canopy beds, but the actual canopy part is custom painted and embroidered (by himself) with band logos, TV show logos, characters he likes, etc.
He is really bad at spelling, professional emails are more like word scrambles
If someone were to ask him to draw them, he would draw them, claim he made mistake, tear it up, then draw a stick figure, and give it to them
Usual Ethnicity one: he actually doesn’t know his ethnicity beyond being Latino, but he is Cuban-American
He’s emo and claims his favorite color is black, but it’s orange which is equally as bad
He has no real gauge of his own pain tolerance and usually has to be forced into medical situations by other people, usually Dream when he reports back to him
Ink’s allergic to bleach and ant bites
Cross
He hasn’t had his first kiss
He uses Old Spice cologne in the classic scent. But he does it to a NAUSEATING level.
He’s Irish, ethnically. I don’t make the rules.
He’s minorly lactose intolerant
This man owns like five Tamagatchis
He makes really good bread for some reason? Like this man SLAYS a sourdough
Cross uses 3-in-1 bodywash
(This is a Tamagatchi if you don’t know)
Blue
This man wears hair curlers to bed 100%
He’s really bad at math
Probably advocates for eating healthy (being a yoga instructor, possible influencer)
Blue is so ADHD to me
American-Italian/Portuguese
Has never made a bed in his LIFE
Blue seems like the kind of man who would burn water
Error
Clean freak, he prefers to keep the house clean, but it ends up a mess anyways because Cross and Nightmare always end up messing it up
Easily the best driver of the Meme Squad
His lock/homescreen is an inspirational quote
LOVES the rain, finds it calming and loves the smell of it, but hates getting caught out in the rain (loves the aesthetic, hates the actual thing)
Maybe American-Moroccan?
He likes dark fantasy books
Was top of his class when he had been in school, prior to his amnesia
Kevin
Can read. (Can’t write (no thumbs))
Can and does steal from the meme squad
Bonus:
How long I think it takes DS to get ready in the mornings:
Dream takes a solid hour and a half
Blue takes an hour
Nightmare takes 45 minutes
Cross and Ink take 15-20 minute for the sake of layers
Error and Finch take like 5 bc they dress really basic
dreamswap by @\onebizarrekai
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The Mandrake, Pt. 1 of None
The girl’s skin is green with the softness of battered flesh.
If she were brown, her innards would be tart and firm, but she’s mostly tasteless mush. What remains of her face is a wrinkled depression implying the outline of eyes and nose. A slanting molar column mars the slope where her body tapers from stem to base.
A faint gurgle bubbles from her insides. The skin beside the teeth flaps in and out, spewing what sounds like “kill me.”
Bulges of necrotic tissue, still shaped like breasts, shoulder blades and fingers, slicken against the latex suit of her dermis. The name she had as a human is classified. Lost among an avalanche of file folders in a mountainous region of dusty filing cabinets.
She sits in a field outside a plastic pseudo-suburb and smog’s gushing from the mortar lungs of cutout factories mid in the near-distance. With midday resurging, the black veil recedes and decaying radiation shines in a vast tanning bed of yellow dawn. Crows gather on the tops of power lines and radio towers, hunger gleaming in pebbles black and shining with acid rain. Within minutes, the flock could descend as a hurricane of feather and sinew and pick apart the girl to a slimy pit of black bone.
The birds are set dressing placed here to inform me that this is a wet operation. Or, due to the impairment of the target, a thankless execution.
Sickle Cell’s dressed all in white, looking a bit like a barn owl resting on top of a ceramic mall mannequin. Under a wide umbrella, in a beach chair, she’s lounging in a matching sundress and hat with oversized circular sunglasses, the rims of which gleam impeccably. She crosses her legs, squeaking leather boots that she can’t possibly afford, and enters into a staring contest with the girl’s eyeless visage. It is one not one which is unfamiliar to the eye which trains itself on remaining untrained. The subtle curvature of her apricot lips and the tautness of her cheeks display mutual sadness and repulsion. She gives this look to herself in the mirror after coming home from dinner. Behind those opacified lenses, her eyes are running down the curvature of the girl and she’s laying that impression like tracing paper over the memory of her own body.
“Do you pity it?” Sickle asks.
Sweat’s soaking through my new shirt. My jeans are shit, but my back’s held up rigidly straight to draw attention to my upper body.
Certain details are not clear to me. As the hot sun beats down on my head and the long walk simmers in my legs, it’s best to put-off dwelling on them until the last possible second.
“Can’t feel much of anything, sorry. Slept through breakfast and skipped lunch.”
“I know; I’m a bit peckish, too. I still can’t help but feel something for her. It, I mean.”
Kneeling down next to her, my fingers run through her expertly mussed hair.
“Are you planning to meet somebody later?”
Her shoulders retract as she looks at the horizon. She slips off her sunglasses and sunlight strikes her eyes in a golden censor bar as she lingers with a dignified melancholy—a look that you can’t help but dismiss as a display of holier-than-thou mock-sentiment.
With a deep breath and the smells of ash, burning fat and dry dirt fill my lungs. Plastic glove on my hand, my legs swagger toward the girl.
“What’re you doing?” Sickle asks.
“We were tasked with this case for a reason, love.”
The scarecrow standing ten feet away is a hanged-man with a noose made of straw intestine. A burning hot pole enters his rectum and pierces the cap of his skull. This tells me the girl committed a crime worthy of two deaths. The fingers of his right hand cover his lips while the fingers of his left hand cross behind his back. This outs the girl as an informant or snitch. The cosmetics caked on his face tell me the girl had an active nightlife, possibly moonlighting as a hair metal singer or party clown.
I linger on the scarecrow’s bright yellow sundress and the string of doll-heads hanging from fishhooks in the straw rope.
Kneeling beside the girl, dry grass scratches my knees through frayed denim knotholes. My fingers run delicately over her exposed teeth, which have the soft smoothness of porcelain. The textures of her flesh alternate between the weave of canvas and the chunky ripples of papier-mâché. Living animal warmth radiates from her skin. Her body muffles the audible machinery of digestion and blood circulation.
She reeks of lilac perfume and red wine. The latter could be either a leftover from her last night as a human, or the onset of fermentation. On her back is an unspoiled patch of milky white skin emblazoned with a tramp-stamp depicting two worms wrapped around an oar.
I snap my fingers and weakly mumble “totally called it” and it’s only a few seconds later, after a few crows caw like they’re congratulating me, that I wish I’d made more of a show of things.
“Did you check for STDs?” Sickle asks.
“Hell no. I’m not reaching into those fetid depths unless my life depends on it. I bet she has more crabs than a Red Lobster.”
She moans softly to herself. “I could go for some crabs right now.”
“This bitch has the mark, dearest. She was definitely one of CHERRIE’s. From the detail in the tattoo, I’m going to say she was classy enough to be more than a fuck-toy, but from the location, too slutty to be in his harem of silk-clad vampire wives.”
“You think he ever wined and dined it? Candles, violins, clam chowder. Everything.”
“He’s totally the kind of asshole who deludes himself into thinking he’s sophisticated. We’re going to interrogate the vegetable to our heart’s content before commencing with the execution.”
“Are you positive that it’s no longer a person? I mean, it still has teeth!”
“Flytraps have teeth.”
“Not human teeth, dear.”
“What differences does it really make?” I shrug my shoulders and only realize now how heavy my upper body really feels. “We’ve got calcified husks specialized for tearing and grinding. They’ve got thin sensory prongs. It’s the difference between a meat-grinder and a steak knife.”
“Is feeling up an empty bra as fun as groping a full breast?”
“That depends on how lacy it is, now stop changing the subject. This woman, dear Sickle, is going to die because she deserves to die. That decision was made by people smarter than you, who are more willing to assess reality by hoisting their responsibilities on me, a capable agent.”
“What reality is that?” She slides her sunglasses back on. “That all life is equally worthless, but the law carries weight to a degree that it’s pointless to question it, though you'll question everything else?”
“Sickle, you need to lose that tone. It’s simple pragmatism, come now. If we wanted to determine if she was more human or vegetable, we’d need to perform a dissection, so she’s fucked either way. We could kill her, leave her here, rip out her guts and throw them at geese. It’s all going to accomplish the same amount of nothing, so it’s sensible to drain the last remnants of her miserable life pursuing information.”
That shuts Sickle up for a bit.
The crows caw like they’re laughing at her. Now that she’s drained her capacity for rational argument, she attempts to implore my emotions in a passive-aggressive manner without seeming at all obvious about it.
“It’s different, you know. Wishing harm on something and witnessing it. I knew it a bit. We weren’t friends or anything. In fact I frequently found it irritable on good days and obnoxious on bad days, but I’d never wish this on anything, not even my worst enemy or my best friend.”
I’m not paying much attention to her.
My body stinks of sweat and rotting fruit salad. My hands finger the cap of a bottle of cologne in my pocket and I’m pretending to stretch and yawn so I can discreetly spritz myself.
“Dearest, you wouldn’t have the imagination to wish this on her.”
She’s rummaging through a white leather purse. “I used to think it was a convenience to hang out with someone who felt so little. It was nice to not be expected to fake tears when I had none to shed.”
“Always a pain, isn’t it, love?” I ask. “Doesn’t it diminish the worth of empathy to falsify it so regularly? They blow soldiers to bits in deserts, cork children with assault weapons, and I’m expected to fake tears for a fruitcup like a thunderous orgasm in the great porno theater of life.”
Sickle opens an eggshell compact from her purse. She can’t see her own eyes. “Cruelty is understandable when it’s either anonymous or personal. I weep for the dead children. Really, I do. I’m only human after all. They’re so young, so unsure of everything. The girls I watch after look at me with such warm smiles that it crushes my heart whenever they so much as frown. I suppose there’s a sort of lull in the spectrum of human empathy. I simply cannot be bothered to care for someone I barely know. Nothing needs to be said about the raw nerve of a loved one in pain, but with strangers, there’s a sort of purity in aimless victimization.”
Crouching over Sickle’s lap, the prongs of the umbrella poke my scalp. My hands fall upon her shoulders and my face slides inches from her nose. She has to smell the cologne. In the reflection of her sunglasses is the first haircut I’ve had in months.
I lick my lips and whisper in her ear. “What I’m taking from that stirring oratory is that I’ve got carte blanche to torture the veggie.”
Her lacquered gaze glides along the barren earth. She pushes me off, takes two steps toward the girl and stops as if lost in thought.
I smell my forearm and spritz myself some more.
The crows look like they’re nudging and shushing each other. When I walk up beside her, she’s giggling.
“Maybe instead of an interrogation,” she says, “we can perform a firsthand investigation of certain, uh… dineries in the area to see if we can find any… um, physical evidence of occupation by hostile forces. You said yourself that this mystery man might take his prospects out for dinner.”
“Why do I bring you out on field work? You’re a useless combination of hungry, lazy and female.”
She whines so suddenly her glasses fall off.
“I want crab legs.”
“Crab legs do sound nice.”
“Fried shrimp.”
“Oh fuck, fried shrimp…”
“Lobster.”
My stomach rumbles. “Maybe we can just nibble on the vegetable?”
“You’re not even sure if it’s still human. That could be cannibalism.”
“Jesus Christ, can you go five seconds without pointing out another ethical ambiguity?”
“Why? I was planning to make a game of it.”
“I bet she would taste good with applesauce.”
I had anticipated she would moan the word “applesauce” in the throes of muted orgasm, but her mind is elsewhere else and she’s probing the girl with squinting eyes and not a hint of appetite.
“Can it hear us?” she asks.
“Does she have ears?”
“I don’t think so? What’s that thing on its side?”
“The beginnings of an asexual budding?”
“Throw a rock at it.”
I hoist a chunk of broken granite from the base of a pile of stones. The edges scratch my naked palms. I whirl and toss it through the air and watch it rip through the soft flesh of her growth. A glistening bright red wound, like overripe watermelon in the harsh sunlight gushes a rivulet of blood and fluorescent mucus with the viscosity of corn syrup.
The girl lets out a horrible shriek that rips through my ears and forces the perched crows to take off and block out the sun.
I can’t even hear my own obscenity over the ringing in my ears.
‘I’m going to fucking kick that thing, I swear!” yells Sickle.
“She’ll scream again, you bimbo! Don’t fucking touch her!”
Sickle reaches up to her ears and watches blood run down her palm.
“I won’t,” she says, “but only because I’m thinking of the glop it’ll get on my new boots”
“Can you repeat that darling, I fear I’m a wee bit deaf in one ear.”
“Huh? What did you just say? Try talking into the ear that isn’t bleeding.”
“She’s developed the perfect defense mechanism to endure any interrogation. How could she have started evolving so soon after transmogrification?”
“Nope, still can’t hear you,” shouts Sickle.
“No method of polite coercion will get her to talk if she can scream that fucking loud.”
“I’m still trying to figure out how you expect it to talk when it doesn’t have a mouth.”
“Our only hope is to forsake the threat of pain and force upon her the fear of an instant death.”
“I like that you’re not answering my questions.”
“She’ll talk if we drag her up someplace high and suspend her on the edge of vertigo. There’s no way she’ll be stupid enough to scream and risk us letting her go, as that will set into motion her rapid descent to a delectable splat on the pavement.”
“It really is the only way,” she’s twirling her sunglasses on her finger. “There’s no way it would talk if I sat down and tried to ask it questions. We are, of course, one-hundred percent positive that it wants to withhold information. Poor dear would never think to buy protection.”
I reach under my shirt and spritz my chest. “You really need to learn how to mix business with pleasure, you know that?”
The girl mumbles something again. It sounds like “For fuck’s sake, will you shut up and kill me already!”
Sickle walks up to the girl. “Hey sweetie, how are you feeling?”
The girl screams something unflattering about Sickle’s figure.
“Oh fuck you, fat ass!” she says. “You’re one to talk. That’s not an apple bottom, it’s a bean-bag bottom, bitch!”
“Sickle, stop while you’re ahead,” I implore lucidly, so sick of saying. “The interrogation is a delicate art and frankly I’m Bosch at a triptych and you’re a kindergartener with finger-paints.” I walk up to the girl and calmly ask, “Well, fat ass, what’s your relationship with CHERRIE?”
She says, “Eat a dick, faggot.”
“Mmm-hmmm,” I rub my chin. “Sickle, darling, cover your ears.”
Yanking the penknife I always carry in my pocket, I stab her with dozens of vigorous jerks until she screams so loudly, my blind furor slows to a wobbly stutter. White circles flash against my collapsed eyelids and I fall back into the sun-drenched dirt. Red sticky heat fills my ears and runs down my cheeks. When I open my eyes, Sickle’s face is hovering over me, out of focus, her mouth flapping with hysteric jaw contortions, but no words are coming out. When I push her aside and try to stand up, my head throbs with a pulsating buzz and a static whine fills the silent vacuum of the world. My arm is numb and my elbow is on fire with a peroxide burn. The girl’s twitching like she’s in the onset of an epileptic fit. An assortment of fluids, all some shade of green, red or brown, pours down her corkboard flesh as it succumbs to black splotches of rot.
I sit down on the dirt completely of my own volition. I don’t stumble backwards and land on my ass. Sickle pulls a cluster of movie theater napkins from her purse and clutches two wads to my ears. The cheap pulp scratches at the swollen cartilage and bloats with blood so quickly that after a minute it’s not soaking in anything.
Ten minutes later, after standing hunched over a particularly eroded bit of soil sutured by railroad spikes, blood pouring ontp the ground and not my clothes, my hearing comes back.
Sickle’s mumbling to herself about how I either don’ t think things through or over-think everything for so long that I end up not doing anything and that I should really pick one or the other already.
I turn to her and say “I can hear you clearly now.”
She smiles and says, “Well, thanks for that brilliant display of your interrogation skills.”
“Do you have any bright ideas, love? I’m ready to chuck this bitch off a building regardless of how much she talks.”
She puts her sunglasses back on. “I propose we retire the old phrase ‘draining blood from a stone’ and from now on use the far more topical ‘stabbing information out of a vegetable’.”
‘You were a fool for ever questioning my blood-lust, dearest” I turn to the girl, and with the solemn voice of an executioner ask “What say you, veggie? If you speak now, we will grant you entrance to immortality on your own terms. If not, we, who are now death incarnate, will make you suffer to your last breath.”
The girl does not answer.
She continues to twitch and bleed and I can’t tell if she’s purposefully biting her tongue or vocally impaired due to the severing of a vital nerve.
Frankly, I don’t care much and mournfully intone, “Then suffering you shall have.”
Sickle pauses. “You should light it on fire,” she says. “It might explode.”
“I’d rather crush it under something heavy,” I say. “There’s something immensely satisfying about the splatter of cracking bones.”
“These are all pie-in-the-sky ideas, dear. You don’t have anything that can burn or crush. You’ll need to be more down to earth and I don’t think you can do that on an empty stomach.”
There’s a gnawing rumble in my guts. I say, “Let’s leave her on the train tracks and call it a day.”
“Who knows how long we’ll be waiting for a train to pass by? It could take hours. I don’t want to sit here all day. I’m hungry now.”
“You’re right. Who wants to be a passive observer when it comes to murder? I want blood on my hands, goddamn it.”
“Did you ever think about witnesses,” Sickle says, “who’s to say whether or not this is murder?”
“Darling, you can’t expect the common man to decide for themselves what deaths are justified. Their sense of right and wrong are as shapeless as puddings left out overnight. There’s no objective measurement for the value of a human life. When a soldier is shot, we mourn. When a gangbanger is shot, we sing praises and thank Christ that thug is off the streets. Really, though, they’re both thugs; but time and money goes into a soldier, while a gangbanger becomes what he is because he comes from a home with neither, but some people even the government don't fuckin wanna buy, praise the fuckin secondhand market!”
She flutters her eyelashes. “It’s like when I was five and you let Gabrielle eat the neighbor woman’s cockatoo and the old lady spanked you with a cane. Then you cried because nobody cared that I let her tear a bunch of ‘filthy, disease-ridden’ pigeons to bits of pillow stuffing?”
I stop talking for a while. She’s smiling. How can she be smiling? I stare at Sickle’s face and see only obsidian self-portraits. My own eyes stare back at me; eyes that see my own slumped shoulders and wonder how someone who loves me can be so cruel and why, as time keeps moving and I don’t say anything, the smile settles into practiced apathy. Her cheeks slacken into silk bed sheets unruffled by sleeping bodies and my teeth are pressing together so hard that my jaw aches, and she’s about to speak, but I open my mouth and talk like nothing happened.
“It’s polite to say that human beings are irreplaceable,” there’s a tension on my vocal cords, “but they’re an infinitely renewable resource. The only value inherent in a human life lies in the whole of their collective experiences. Why do you think we take pity when celebrities or geniuses are on death row? The problem is we extend that sympathy to those who don’t deserve it. It’s all right to kill a senile old man because his brain has atrophied into a viscous mixture of dust and mucus liable to confused with aforementioned overnight pudding, left out on the same counter as the catfood, not at all east to conflate at two in the Am. It’s all right to kill a child in the womb because they have worthless brains made of undifferentiated jelly, and hardly have much flavor without the fear of death. There is always a correct amount of drama to indulge, my dear”
Sickle stands in silence. What I can see of her face shows the collision of guilt with composure. I raise my hands and invite her to stumble into my arms where I’ll coo her and tell her that she’s not guilty; that she’s not a predatory hawk, but a sweet canary whose love warms the frozen cockles of my heart like some kind of nasty microwaveable meal.
She doesn’t move.
She says, “I’ve seen septic tanks less full of shit than you.”
I move forward. “But none have smelled so nice, have they? Did you notice my new cologne? I got it yesterday. Here, come smell me. I used like half the bottle.”
“The only things I’ve done today are smell you and listen to you, and frankly, I’m a bit tired of both. Let’s get this thing out of here. If you’re gonna kill it, stop talking about it and do it already, because it won’t be daytime forever.”
“Do you think she’s going to be heavy?”
“I never imagined you carrying it, dear. I assumed you’d have no qualms about kicking it on its side and rolling it.”
“Hey, I’m sorry.”
“I know. You’re always sorry.”
“You’re not the only one who can dress up like a high-class whore, you know,” I spritz myself until the skin on my neck is irritated. “This shit cost me like five dollars.”
The girl screams when I push her onto the hot pavement.
She rolls a few feet before she seems to jump and wobble back onto her base. A leathery punching bag is sweating olive oil. With my still gloved hand attached to my still numb arm, I inspect her stab wounds to find the landmine field of punctures exploding into lumpy clusters of fluid-filled sacks. I continue to push and roll the girl. When the weight of her body pushes down on the growths, they act like a spring.
It takes careful diligence to hear the watery boing sound, as each one’s eclipsed by a perfectly timed scream. By the end of the block, she’s either exhausted or too overwhelmed with pain to let out anything more than a tired yelp and frankly, I’m tired of pushing her.
I collapse on the curb and languish in the oppressive sun. The concrete grain’s cutting into the thin layer of flesh around my pelvic bone.
“All right, Sickle,” I say, “I’ve done my part, now you kick her the rest of the way.”
“You’re kidding, right?” she asks, panting as if walking beside me was already too much work for her. She fans herself diligently. Looking around, as if it must be here. “You don’t even know where you’re going!”
“Then it’s hopeless. I guess I’m going to sit here all day and stare at your massive thunder-thighs.”
She takes the bait and gives me a look that says, “It’s on now, bitch.”
Her eyes run up and down the girl’s body. There’s two dents in her flesh: a footprint on the left bottom and a handprint on the right top. Sickle rips off her sunglasses in a way that I think she thinks is dramatic.
Practiced shit-talk is running through her mind. Inches away, she folds her arms and gives the girl a look that says, “What you gonna do, bitch?” Both hands on the girl now, she’s straining for a powerful shove, but dry-heaves, slips down the slope and rubs the pavement with her cheeks.
I’m too embarrassed to laugh.
She starts to cry. “I got dirt on my new dress!”
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” I ask, “I regained my breath. I can take back over if you like.”
“No,” she wails. “I’m not being bested by a vegetable.”
I watch until my body aches through osmosis.
She pushes, slips, gets back up. Over and over. Can’t hardly move. The glucose engine that’s my brain’s runnin’ on empty. My bones and fibers rotate the useless analogue coil.
A Coke machine’s beyond a factory gate.
My autonomous body shuffles that way. Can’t read the sign, pull quarters from my pocket, probably enough. Click, click, click, beep, buzz, plop. Oh, it’s cold. Blood’s pouring back into my brain. My throat’s massaged internally with a glycerin clam.
I walk back over to Sickle and ask, “Making progress?”
“Of course,” she says, “I’d managed to shove it at least two inches this way.”
“Good work. Now how many inches in a city block? At this incredible momentum, it’ll only take us however many minutes that is.”
Sickle dashes at the girl with her elbow as hard as a battering ram. There’s a wet plop and warm droplets of sticky gunk splash my face.
I back away, but she keeps charging and charging. Sickle stares at a massive brown stain seeping into her dress. It soaks through to the skin, making the material cling to the outline of her tits. Chunks of mushy flesh stick to the dimples in her chest and melt to yogurt between her cleavage.
I wave at her while discreetly rubbing my nipples. She yanks on her neckline, and the dress turns from shrink-wrap to garbage bag.
I ask, “Do you want to find a sprinkler or something?”
She screams and tugs at her hair. Pointing at the girl, she yells “Die, bitch, die!” Sprinting in place with her squat legs, she’s throwing out all the weight her little body has, but the growths swell up into speed bumps.
Now Sickle’s barely standing, hunched over with her hands on her knees and sucking in air harder than a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner. Throttling my hands around her waist, I lift her up, give the girl a good kick and we’re halfway down the block before I dry-heave and fall over.
We lie in the grass, our lungs contracting and Sickle lets out a cry with the staccato vibration of a cough.
“Why are we so out of shape!” she cries. “You said you were going to start lifting weights!”
“I did start,” I say. “The hard part was continuing.”
The girl’s toppled over in the shade beneath a tree. She’s laughing and rolling from side to side. Laughing really isn’t the most accurate word to describe it, but I think it’s what she’s going for. It’s a sort of guttural bubbling from the intestines buzzing through pussy lips.
A sound that makes your asshole clench.
Sickle sits up. “If I was that ugly, I don’t think I’d find much of anything funny.”
“I’m sure she meant to cry. She’s so stupid, she screwed up a reflex.”
With each laugh, the flap of skin on her mouth balloons out, sucks in and clings to her throat lining.
“Shove it, fish tits!” I kick her teeth and what starts as a scream breaks down into dry hacking.
“Hey, move aside!” Sickle runs up and spin-kicks the girl’s soft flank. “You ruined my outfit, fatty!”
Juice splashes my pant legs and Sickle’s white boots. My foot breaks through the girl’s skin, into some kind of warm pothole and with a loud shlorp I’m sucked in up to the ankle. Burning petroleum jelly seeps between my toes. Pricks crawl up and down my foot. The hole clenches tighter around my ankle as white plumes of steam whisk from the girl’s pores. Sickle runs to my back and gives me the Heimlich as the tendons in my jerking leg tighten into a hemp rope. I plop loose and fall on top of Sickle. The scorched wrinkles of my red foot are tender in the sun.
My shoe is still inside.
I wiggle my toes, peel off the other shoe and shove it in the hole.
Sickle stares at me with wide eyes and flat eyebrows.
“Really?”
“This makes it even,” I say.
An old woman no doubt owns the house we’re squatting in front of. White siding sags and grey shingles on the roof thin into the gutters and walkway, exposing patches of rotted plywood. Angel statues swallowed up by shrubbery, flowerpots shaped like nesting fawns asphyxiated by vines, plywood dogs clawed by twisting branches.
Sickle heaves a stone garden gnome holding a sign saying “Welcome” and drops it on the girl’s teeth. My shoe shoots out of the hole with a wet plop and the other inches out in slow contractions. They’re both coated with yellow mucus and reek of burning rubber.
“Thanks,” I say, and drop the shoes down an open sewer drain.
“Listen,” she says. “I am very, very hungry.”
“Are you still on that? Now that fish tits isn’t screaming, we can probably take another stab at interrogating her.”
She slides her sunglasses back on. With a breathy giggle that comes off more like a bitter sigh she says, “Listen, I’ve got a dinner date. I need to be leaving soon. Do you understand?”
I scratch my neck.
“Well, you look like shit now, so you might as well ditch it.”
“I’m afraid that’s not an option. You’re going to have to find some way of getting me there, or find someone else to help you move this thing.”
My fists clench.
“I should have left your ass at home and forced Key Lime out here instead,” I say. “He’d whine a fraction as much, then do twice the work, and he’s the laziest guy I know.”
“Oh, but I work so hard at being lazy!”
“He can help you push the damn thing and I can stroll behind and whack your ass with a newspaper. Tell him he owes you for staying over in your room the last few days.”
“He hasn’t been staying in my room; I haven’t seen him since last week.”
At this, I sit up. “What do you mean you haven’t seen him? I haven’t seen him.”
“Why would he be with me?”
“He’s your best gal-pal. Why wouldn’t he be with you?”
“I have a life outside of him.”
“Does he have a life outside of you?”
Her pleading eyes tell me she knows I’m right, but she’s going to pretend I’m not.
“I don’t have any idea where he could be,” she says.
She dials his number, I crouch down beside her, and we press our ears together into two funnels of cartilage tuned into the digitized ring of the dial tone. “Hey…” comes a groggy voice.
I say, “Key Lime, where the fuck—”
“I’m not here right now. But if you’d like, you can leave a message and I can get back to you… Except, I probably won’t, so don’t be angry next time I see you and ask why I didn’t call back. I don’t understand phones, okay? Now how do I get out of here? … Push what button? Hurry up, I think it’s still recording…No. No, I think it’s still on … Don’t yell at me. Okay, fine, if you know how to do it just take it!”
She sighs. “My poor boy,” and the beep flares out. “Hello Key Lime, it’s me. We’re near the train tracks down by 69th and K—”
“He doesn’t understand streets.”
“We’re across the street from the Baskin Robbins! We’re trying to move something. Come help us.”
“You couldn’t mention a different landmark?”
She glares at me. “If you come we’ll get you a smoothie, you don’t have to ask. Good-bye.”
“Ask him where he’s been for the last few days.”
“We’ll ask him when he calls back.”
“He’s not going to call back, we’re wasting our time.”
“It was your idea to call him!”
“What, you do everything I say now? Flash the next car that drives by.”
“I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing that with a dry t-shirt.”
I pat her on the head. We somehow roll the girl out to a busy street and this is where we need to make things count if we want anyone to help us haul the fat skank away. I collapse against her rough, leathery hide and the smell of fermentation is so strong my first instinct is to pull away, but I think I’m getting drunk just sniffing her, so I lay still in a stupor.
My shirt’s soaked through with sweat and my eyes fall straight across the street. Sickle steps up to the corner, pointing at the girl, and then waving at passing cars. A guy stops, asks if she’s a hooker and drives off.
Her face puffs up in a cantankerous balloon and I laugh for a good minute before realizing I’m part of the punch line.
I turn to Sickle. “We can run with the hooker thing.”
Fifteen minutes later, Sickle and I stand on the side of the road, my jeans rolled up to my knee and my long, pretty legs nestled between her thighs, sticking out through her dress, her two legs wrapped around my hips and joining into a stump wiggling behind my ass. My back hunches into an arch under her linen dinner jacket and the effect was that we look like a single woman with a lumpy hunchback, two disproportionately long legs and a mysterious fifth limb that could be a tail or the gaster of a giant ant. We are an entity that nobody but the vilest degenerate would find doable. It’s at this moment that a thin Chinese man in his fifties, whose eyes flutter with a pronounced effeminacy, gilded and regal as a celluloid closet star, pokes his head out of one of those organ-harvesting execution buses that go from prison to prison, then out to the cobbler fields.
“Hello pretty girl,” he says. “Do you need lift?”
Sickle flaps her mouth in such a manner that nothing matches the high-pitched whine squealing half-muffled from beneath her jacket.
“Oh kind sir! I am but a lowly street performer who seeks fame and fortune in Las Vegas or Fown, but I’m so, so hungry. I would do anything and I mean anything for a quick bite to eat.”
“How hung are you?” he asks.
“Not too young for you, stud.”
“What do you do in act?”
“I give this here vegetable a lap dance. I get as nude as indecent exposure laws will permit me. And then some.”
“Oooh. I like and then some. You get naked as duck in butcher window?”
“Honey, please, I make duck in window look like virginal school-girl.”
“I am intrigued and perhaps possibly aroused. All right. You get in back of van now.”
“You are simply too kind, sir. I have always benefited tremendously from the sexual neediness of strangers.”
“Do you need help with vegetable?” asks the Chinese man as he opens the driver side door.
I grab Sickle’s arm and pull it back against her head and we fall back so the only thing keeping the two of us upright is my other arm planted against the warm pavement, and Sickle now looks like a melodramatic plantation whore in some life-threatening woe, like perhaps she dropped a handkerchief, or will perhaps be encroached upon by a solar body.
“Oh please sir!” I moan. “This sun has become intolerable! I’m hotter’n a cross at a Klan rally!”
The Chinese man lets out a prolapsed evil laugh as he sashays contemptuously from the driver’s seat.
The doors at the back of the bus fly open and out walks a cute girl, probably about nineteen, flashing a toothy smile with both her mouth and her long necklace of human teeth. The driver hauls the girl in both arms and throws her to the girl. She stumbles backwards into darkness.
The driver turns to us and says, “Please get in.”
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