The SATs
Sean Kilpatrick

“I’m hip, once shot make bolt for Mrs. Egg. No more fearful practice. I’d rather die mid-flight than continue walking. I’m a good little sperm. Yeah, yeah.” I’ve never seen Tippy confident, and pat his shoulder, impressed. His metaphors are wrong, as usual, but he looks reasonably serene, or as close to it as we’ll ever know.

Tippy fears buildings. Who could blame him? I hate going in first while Tippy shivers and waits. I want to shiver too. “Don’t bitch-out, Tippy,” I taunt. “Perhaps who the hell ever named you is inside.” Tippy clutches himself, elbows bunched like he’s squishing an accordion. “Meditate. Go like this,” I keep repeating, trying to relax him, but then I can’t think of any gestures to exemplify. “I miss my accordion,” whispers Tippy. “I’m sorry,” I say. “The police took it in for questioning.”

A plaque, torn and spat on, dangling between the ribs of a skeleton that is bent-over and glued to the street, reads: “The Great Cone, where you pay to be tested. The Great Cone of virtue, your future is at stake, my friend, so says the forceful theys of everywhere. Yes, get happy and pay forever, with your lusty sinus infection, through your casket, out your mother’s cunt from A-Z.”

They say the architects responsible for the SAT cone invested in black magic. They say the devil so desperately needed to unzip his fly that he hired men to construct a brick condom, ten feet wide, almost nine-hundred yards tall. The bricks up top are circumcised by clouds. The rounded sides of the cone grow bearded pigs that always scream. One dies, another walks into its bones.

We’re at the entrance: a foot-wide mouth glistening where the sidewalk should encircle the cone. The cement is broken and hot, wafting steam. A continual burping froth extends beneath us. Warm fingers of piss tickle my sock. The great cone is leaking from its base. “Well,” I finally chirp, “hope all that jerking off was worth it ...”

“Wait. These aren’t bricks. They’re human bladders. We’ll have to roll in like a parade through the burn ward.” I remove a number 2 pencil from my pocket and stab the wall. The tip sinks in, tearing a hole that leaks a slow amount of blood. An echoed bellowing ignites from within the cone.

“We’ve come to steal your piss by talking,” I whisper, getting ballsy, forming letters with my pencil along the interior of the wounded organ. “The No-Eyes Dame of Fuck All saw victory in the reflection of her Chlamydia-wet thighs. We’re going to kill this romp with classical eighties tunes, she told me. Give us our stock reports, you malnourished cock of zeitgeist.”

The mouth spreads like panic. Now papers ejaculate in place of blood. “Sign here. Sign here. Sign here ..." We sign our way in, until our wrists get stiff. There is a vein-colored hill we climb like a jungle gym. A sudden pulse of air and we are rushed straight up, hundreds of feet high. I grab a vending machine that juts from the slick flesh wall and pull myself on top of it. Below me, Tippy dangles by three fingers. His face contorts ... in what? Joy? I take his hand.

Tippy eats batteries. That’s why he’s so energetic. His bowels haven’t moved in a decade. This is his most admirable trait. “I should just drop you,” I say. “Okay.” He’s ready, but I hold on, in spite of myself, and pull him up. “Brother,” I say affectionately, but then yawn instead of following it up with anything.

There are rows of old women playing electric organs. None of them sync up. The resulting chaos sounds like a hyena castration party. I am entranced. Tippy disagrees, whispering, “My accordion would hate this.” “Yes, but it already used its one phone call, didn’t it?” I say, annoyed.

I approach one of the women to inquire where the test is happening. Tippy puts his hand on my shoulder. “Be courteous, tactful, display taste; their apparel is dated mid-forties. Approach them in such a dignified manner as to not disrupt the block of bureaucratic salt that has long ago replaced the area between their ears. Remember, they already resent being here.”

“Sometimes there is hope for you, Tippy,” I say, and then, sticking my face between a woman and her keyboard: “Hey, cunt! Unglue your mud flaps and waddle us to the test yard.” The woman starts, but continues playing, working the words “Help, police!” into her song, singing them way off key at random intervals.

Over the music, we hear a conjoined room screaming with machinery. We kick our way in and a mixed group of people are vacuuming. Some continue sideways up the wall with such a concerned violence as to defy gravity. That kind of dedication makes me sick. Tippy is immediately aroused. They work the skin-like texture of the floors and walls in a halfass dance. Everyone’s machine cries together.

“These people have failed the test.” I say in a rare moment of realization. “I’m already more than willing to vacuum forever.” Tippy replies. “Look up,” I say. Tippy doesn’t look up. Opening above us in the ceiling is one large and tearing urethra. A Boston Terrier rushes up to Tippy. I recognize the dog. It’s a dog we shared as children. It was killed by a vindictive ice cream truck driver. “They want us to stay here. But listen, if we make it out through the hole all we do is fall straight down anyway, so.” I finish my statement by stomping the dog’s spine, stomping it until the thing is bent backwards and twitching around my boot.

“Let’s eat our way out, Tippy,” and it is brave, the bravest thing I’ve ever said. Instead of a reply, a metal washer drops in my palm. I turn to exchange whispers with Tippy, because we enjoy the flat out destruction of everything we say encouraged by things and people that move or breathe. But the only part left of Tippy is an arched hand sticking out from under a grape soda machine. “Looking good, baby,” I sigh.

Sean Kilpatrick, out of jail, raised in Detroit, is shopping his manuscripts, ready to work for either a florist or a forensic photography outfit, has been or is forthcoming in The Dream People, Doorknobs & BodyPaint, Bloodcookies, Locust Magazine, Dispatch Litareview, Cthulhu Sex Magazine, Cellar Door Magazine, Exquisite Corpse, Chiaroscuro, Barfing Frog Press, The House of Pain, ChiZine, The Harrow, etc. Heavy petters may contact him at the following email address: cauliflowersuitcase@hotmail.com.