Seagull Anti-Matter from Beyond
Cameron Pierce

We crawled into the basement when father died. It was mother’s idea. She said he would have wanted it that way, because all the jelly jars down there would spoil if we didn’t keep them company.

“But can’t father’s body visit them?” Suzie asked, blinking her green eyes.

Mother told Suzie to hold her eyes open and scraped the green out with her fingernails. It was like color-changing Kool-Aid.

“Suzie, you have red eyes,” I told her. “And they’re all drippy.”

“Be quite, children,” mother said.

According to mother, father’s corpse was only upstairs in the physical form. He was really riding on a plane to Taxidermy World, where the dead people went to get judged. If he was a good man — and most of the time I don’t think he was — then he’d get a ticket for Werewolf Heaven. Otherwise the seagulls would come.

Mother must have said, “Your father was a bastard — the seagulls will doubtless come,” a thousand times that night, and it was dark in the basement.

“What if you’re a seagull?” I asked her. “Can we still sip your breast milk and let our fingers swim in your aquarium?”

Mother looked hurt. So did Suzie. No way was mother a seagull.

§

I don’t think we thought about the jelly jars being seagulls until they started squawking. But by then Suzie had bled all her life out through her sockets in the same way she was always greedy for dessert, and so she was too dead to scream like a little girl.

“Will Suzie be alive again tomorrow?”

Mother didn’t respond. She was touching her aquarium and petting the black eels who lived there. The seagulls spiral-fluttered around us and mother said, “Let me tell you a story about your father. Did you know his name was Momo?”

§

The gunshot startled Momo Barda awake. He wiped his blue, six-year-old eyes and waited for Papa. The yellow angel-shaped nightlight failed to protect Momo from the mute stillness that had settled over his room like a red womb-state dream. Momo scratched at his eyes until the skin flaked away. Soon young Momo had no eyes, and dead eye-flesh masked the gray carpet. Hours passed. Before Papa’s manta ray form scuttled through the doorway, morning came.

Around noon the skin was piled up to Momo’s waist, but he kept clawing and waiting. He never cried. The hollow sockets of the now blind child blinked like empty flower vases.

Finally, Momo spoke. “Papa, Papa.”

“What is it, Momo?” his father’s voice whisper-croaked.

“Papa, is that really you?”

“No, son. It is my voice.”

Momo stopped wiping his eyes. “Then where are you? I can’t cook, how will I eat? And now I can’t see anything. Help me, Papa.”

“I shot my face off, Momo. I have no mouth. I speak through your discarded flesh. Go into my bedroom, where I killed myself. My body is fresh. It needs no preparations. Eat it.”

“But how will you be buried if I eat you?”

“Eat me and bury yourself. We can be together forever. Trust me, Momo. Trust your skin.”

“Okay, Papa.”

§

When mother finished, I told her, “But I didn’t eat father. I never ate him.”

“Oh,” she said, laughing, “we cannot marry. The seagulls will eat us before then. Besides, you’re my son, and even if your father is dead …”

Grandma came downstairs wearing a rubber lobster mask. “Don’t spell aardvark backwards,” she warned, “or the seagulls will get you.”

Mother dribbled a rainbow-swirling bouncy ball in the dark corners.

On that long night, I wrote my first and last letter to Santa Clause in the dust on those brick basement walls.

§

I am the heart’s synthetic pulse. The blue veins in my cock burst, but my cock is hard and dotted and curved like a question mark. My identity: negative. The phenomenon of being-in-the-world slices gills in my chest and inserts a sick, constant throb.

My fingernails drown in blood that is green from photosynthetic decay. Syndrome-operation: skull tumor and angels plotting lung cancer. Earth dies, masturbates, dies again.

This is where isolation melts into red and ceases to be terror-abstraction. Inside the machine: life-shame. Black paper wails torn in half at the waist. Paper-blood, green. Christmas feeds the starving razorblades. They sit like ducks in tomorrow’s garden.

Being the first-death, entrance-exit downward.

Destruction: no attic exists outside flesh-nirvana. Heaven commits suicide with umbilical cords.

God-pilot on the intercom says, “Death is foresight.”

Lobsters breach outer dark, deteriorate the sperm-eggs. They land in EUS (Expiration Umbrella Spacecrafts). Mission: rape the womb.

A shadow begs for change, pleads sterile genitalia.

§

It was dawn when I finished. Feathery claws pinched at my eyelids to keep them shut.

“Don’t sleep,” mother said, “the seagulls will get you in your dreams.”

“But grandma said they’ll get me if I —”

“Grandma isn’t real. She is not gold.”

§

I remember when Santa Clause gave all the kids around the world seagull beak razorblades for Christmas. He cut himself on everyone’s roof and bled down the chimneys.

That was the only year he ever left me a note. It said: My eyes are yellow with use.

§

Santa Clause and I will never be full-time pen pals. Not so long as father is dead.

§

Suzie prayed to her angels all night, but she prayed like she read: out loud.

I shoved her backwards. “Keep your silly words to yourself.”

“They’re not silly,” she grumbled, scuttling back onto her knees.

“You look like a crab,” I said, “and seagulls eat crabs. I bet five dollars they’re going to eat you.”

Mother drew an invisible cube around herself and tuned us out. “Goodbye, children,” she said.

The room grew dark. Suzie looked at me. “Is that curious blackness closing in some outer shell of the seagulls?” the worry on her face asked.

The worry on my own did not reply.

§

Seagulls must not exist. If they do, we’re unsafe, unclean. If it isn’t seagulls, it’ll be manta rays or horseshoe crabs.

“Listen, Suzie. Death is getting bored playing chess with himself. He’s going to call on us, and when he does, jump into the ocean and swim as deep as you can. Even if it means drowning, because at least he’ll never find you.”

§

Santa Clause has worms tucked beneath his belly. They tickle Suzie. I tune in to the brick-hollow noise of a grape jelly funeral march. That’s where my father said I’d be preserved best.

Cameron Pierce has been featured in far less than 300 publications. However, you can find his stories and poems in past/current/future issues of Bare Bone, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, The Dream People, Susurrus, Atomjack, Lullaby Hearse, Sein und Werden, and many other magazines and webzines. Cameron is also the editor of The Primordial Review (a slug-like animal that won’t see the sun for eons), a recovering Jean-Claude Van Damme enthusiast, and founder of what may be the first consciously nonexistent publication ever, Horse Rectum. If you’d like him to send you a box of used paper or cricket stamps, send an email to this address: CameronPierce@hotmail.com.