Unpublished novel. 63,293 words. (Three chapter sample.)
1. Sylvia
The anteaters were eating her face. It was the worst day of her life. Or maybe it was the second worst, if we get technical about it. Even while the anteaters ate her face, she did get technical about it, because with so many anteaters on top of her, she had some time to think. I’ll explain that part later. The worst day wasn’t actually a day but a night, two years ago when her parrot died. It was not just any parrot, though. It was a parrot from outer space. A space parrot, which had flown to Earth from the other side of the galaxy in search of gold nuggets. But the space parrot is a different story. This is the story of that horrible zoo.
It was really the worst zoo in the world. Not because of the terror, though. All zoos have some terror. This zoo was just really overpriced. They charged $45 for admission, and $35 for senior citizens, who the animals all attacked because they smelled so bad, which is why they were given ten dollars off. Children under 9 got in for $25, because they spent most of their visit crying about the dead puffins and getting diarrhea from all the spoiled animal-shaped ice cream bars they ate.
But this girl, Sylvia, the one getting her face eaten, wasn’t in charge of admission prices, she was in charge of the anteaters. These were a special breed of anteaters called Madagascar Face Eater Anteaters, and they weren’t from Madagascar, they were from Indiana. But the zoo decided Indiana didn’t sound very scary so they changed it to Madagascar, even though there are no anteaters in Madagascar, which is why that country is still ruled by the Ant King.
The zoo had been warned repeatedly about these anteaters by the zookeepers at the Indiana Zoo, but had purchased them anyway because they were very rare and very delicious and they were the only way to justify the zoo’s ridiculous prices. And it worked. Thousands and thousands of idiots came to see the Madagascar Face Eaters.
What they didn’t bargain for was seeing the Face Eaters eat someone’s face. In retrospect it’s easy to judge them for not thinking of this. But it was the 1970’s and remember regular people were dumber back then. And zoogoers were even dumber than regular people, even dumber than people who work in grocery stores.
The zoo could have bought their employees a protective mask (called a “Face Eater Beater”), but they cost almost $100, and the zoo owners were crooked and had spent all the company’s profits bailing their sons out of juvenile detention centers for selling drugs and raping people.
So today was the second-worst day of Sylvia’s life (after the parrot thing) because the anteaters were eating her face, but that part wasn’t that big of a deal because her face had already been mangled at her previous job at the bird sanctuary in Cincinnati, where she had been attacked by a flock of rare Madagascar Facepeckers, which are from Texas. It worked in her favor, you see, because the anteater job was a huge pay increase, and the job listing had asked for someone specifically with “facial disfigurement or severe ugliness” in case they were ever attacked by the Face Eaters.
The 1970’s were a great time, when things were being named very obviously to prevent confusion for stupid people who went to overpriced zoos or worked in grocery stores. Like I said before, the girl, whose name was Sylvia, had named her own children Girl 1 and Girl 2, both because being obvious was fashionable but also because her husband suffered from a condition where he was unable to identify a person’s gender, despite all evidence presented to him. This had led to great confusion when he met Sylvia at the local pool because, in addition to thinking she was a man, he thought himself to be a woman, and things got messy when they went to have intercourse and she was unable to enter him with her penis because she had a vagina and you can’t penetrate someone with a void. That’s just science.
Sylvia had a really beautiful vagina, maybe the most beautiful vagina in the world, and most men agreed it made up for her disfigurement. She was thankful that she had never been transferred to the jaguar cages, because this zoo had a special species of jaguar called Paraguayan Vagina Shredders, although this was a misnomer (they had been named in the 1870’s) because they didn’t so much shred vaginas as chomp them. They should have been named Vagina Chompers but it was olden days and people wanted to be very elegant. The Vagina Shredders are the reason Paraguay is so poor.
Anyway, Sylvia’s vagina was so beautiful that her college boyfriend, who was studying to be a vagina photographer (a popular job back then), had asked her to model her vagina for a textbook for gynecologists he was working on, but the publishing company had turned down the photographs because they gave the gynecology students big boners. The publishing company only wanted photographs of sick, prickly, saggy, sad vaginas and vaginas with really bad diseases in them or disfigured vaginas.
The 70’s were a great time for disfigurement and also for vaginas. The 1960’s were a little better for vaginas than the 1970’s, but the 70’s were pretty good, too. The 1980’s were terrible for vaginas. Really the worst. But that’s a different story and also involves a space parrot but a different space parrot from the other one. A lot of great stories involve space parrots but not this one.
Sylvia had learned to wear special pants with a little plastic viewing window so men could see her beautiful vagina. This caused men to believe she was very charming and interesting, when in fact she was dull. It was all just the magic in her magic vagina (which did also have some actual magic in it because she fucked a wizard once). Since she was married now she didn’t need to wear the viewing pants to attract a mate, but the ’70’s were a good time for vagina viewing, too, and she wanted to be a modern woman in a modern world.
The real reason this was the second worst day of her life was because a crowd of senior citizens had gathered around the anteater cage to watch the anteaters eat her face, which was a better use of their time than being attacked for smelling so bad which is what they were used to, and she was embarrassed to have been so easily overwhelmed by the Face Eaters, even though Face Eaters are pretty big for anteaters and she was pretty small for a person.
Some of the seniors had cameras and one man was even filming her. (He was a pervert and had heard about her vagina and was hoping to film it and masturbate to it later.) Sylvia was afraid she would be on the news that night and would be even more humiliated. She had lots of time to think about this because the face-eating anteaters liked to chew their food thoroughly with their tiny ant-sized teeth.
In the 1970’s everyone chewed their food thoroughly. Even anteaters. However, the anteaters were doing it a million years before humans which is why today we always call them Original Hipster Anteaters. Most people don’t know this but before 1971 almost 40% of deaths were caused directly or indirectly by inadequately chewed food. Before that, most Americans swallowed all their food whole, like a snake, by unhinging their jaws with a fancy prybar, called a tipping bar, then tipping back their heads and stuffing the food in. This was how all good American capitalist patriots consumed their meals back then. It kept American stomachs busy.
There was a vocal grassroots movement to get people to chew their food more, but it had its roots in the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, and due to the anti-communist sentiments still alive in the US, chewing your food was assumed to be a Bolshevik plot. President Lyndon Baines Johnson had attempted to get legislation through Congress to create a government agency that would promote food chewing, but it was rejected in committee by lingering Senate McCarthyists, including Errol Sampson Layover of North Carolina and Chelio Neckring of Montana. It wasn’t until 1970 that Richard Nixon, America’s greatest patriot, was able to quietly pass his own chewing legislation during the height of the Vietnam War when everyone was distracted by all the napalm being dropped on China, or wherever it was. I don’t read history.
But even after his own legislation passed, Richard Nixon continued to swallow his meals whole. That’s why he had such nice teeth, because he never used them. If it wasn’t for Spiro Agnew’s awful teeth (he drank a lot of Pepsi) the White House dentist would have probably died. Starvation is a common way for dentists to die. Most dentists kill themselves, though, because they’re dentists. But the White House dentist didn’t get a chance to kill himself because he got stabbed by another dentist. That’s not really relevant to this story. I just thought it was interesting.
2. The Pervert
The man filming Sylvia, who everyone thought was a pervert (even I used to think he was a pervert), was not a pervert at all, even though he definitely liked masturbating to vaginas. Masturbating to vaginas is a very normal thing to do. In fact, masturbating to most things is pretty normal. Exceptions include masturbating to pictures of your parents, masturbating to fractions or multiplication tables, and masturbating to some cake recipes. Don’t even tell your doctor if you’re doing these, just stop doing it.
This man filming Sylvia was named Carlo. He was not a pervert, but a Soviet spy. His interest in filming Sylvia’s vagina was part of a massive Soviet state program, which had agents in disguise as perverts all around the world.
In the 1950’s, birth rates in the Soviet Union began to plummet dramatically, because young people coming of age in the ’50’s had all been born to mothers who, swept up in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, had begun chewing their food thoroughly. The whole thing was Leon Trotsky’s idea and it’s the real reason Stalin hated him so much. An unfortunate byproduct of this behavior, which the Trotskyists didn’t know and which is still not completely understood, is that children born to mothers who chew their food thoroughly all have really ugly genitals. And so nobody in the USSR wanted to have sex with each other, even in the dark, because you could even feel how ugly their genitals were. If you ever go to have sex with someone and they turn out the lights, you should ask, “are you turning out the lights because your genitals are ugly?” They will appreciate your asking and will politely leave without speaking to spare you the horror of touching their ugly genitals. It is considered proper to send them a thank-you note for leaving.
The Soviets began a program to reconstruct Russian genitals through the emerging field of plastic surgery, in hopes people would fuck each other again voluntarily (the USSR had been forcing people to have sex for decades). But Russia had forgotten what beautiful genitals looked like because the Bolsheviks had burned all the best Tsarist pornography, so this spy was sent to America disguised as a perverted pornography student, and filmed beautiful American penises and vaginas to share with his Soviet overlords, who would also masturbate to the films in secret even though it was illegal because their godless state said their sperm was supposed to get smooshed up in a big lady with strong thighs to make the next generation of efficient faceless day laborers who weren’t allowed to masturbate.
The few women in the USSR who saw them would also masturbate to the films sometimes, but not as much as the men because women are more accustomed to ugly genitals because of balls.
The hardest part of Carlo’s job was not the filming however, as Americans are whores and love having their genitals filmed. The hardest part was getting the film reels back to the Kremlin. The solution was to use massive Russian pack eagles, which could carry up to six reels of 8mm film on their backs. Any more would have disrupted their flight and they would have crashed in Canada and Canadians LOVE films of beautiful genitalia, even more than Russians, and the Soviets knew they would never see the films again. Canadians also eat eagles so it was also a matter of national pride.
By a fantastic coincidence, this zoo (the TerronZoo) had two mating pairs of the Russian pack eagles (known coincidentally as Russian Film Flyers) but the man who was supposed to watch them was a REAL pervert and was never around to count them. He was always away taking adult school classes on baking so he could masturbate to the recipes. So the eagles would be gone for weeks to deliver the dirty spy films all the way to Russia and the eagle counter wouldn’t even notice. Even when he did check on the eagles he wouldn’t be paying much attention and would lose count and have to start over a bunch of times. One time Carlo loaded up one of the eagles with dirty films and set it loose and it didn’t come back because some Canadians caught it and ate it and then masturbated repeatedly to the films of beautiful genitals. So Carlo replaced it with a Balkan Pack Owl and the eagle counter couldn’t tell the difference. His boss, the Bird Lord, had been trying to fire him for years because he was so bad at counting the eagles (and also let the eagles eat a kid once) but the eagle counter (whose name was Sam) was the nephew of one of the zoo owners and couldn’t be fired.
One day Carlo was at home sorting through his vagina films looking for his favorite one so he could masturbate to it when someone knocked on the door. This startled Carlo, because he had no friends in the US and his neighbors were all paranoid territorial American bastards who never talked to each other outside of church.
Carlo was terrified it might be the FBI or the CIA. The FBI and CIA are America’s most patriotic organizations and were invented by Richard Nixon. So he was right to be afraid and to prepare to beg for mercy.
It was the FBI. Carlo answered the door and the FBI guys were both very short and one had bad hair so Carlo was less afraid and did not beg for mercy because he was tall and had beautiful hair and nice teeth.
They said, “Hi. We’re from the FBI. Are you Carlo Yashkin?”
“Yes I am,” he replied, not afraid.
The FBI guys looked at him and his nice Soviet teeth and they were afraid.
“Okay then, thanks,” said the FBI guys. And then they left. The FBI was not good at its job of protecting American genitals.
After they left, Carlo closed the door and found his favorite film reel stacked with some fake pornography textbooks and he spooled it into his projector and jizzed his thick brown Russian jizz all over the place. It was a complete mess.
Sometimes Carlo was so horny he couldn’t even wait to spool the films into his projector and just masturbated to individual frames by holding them up to the light and putting his eye up close to them so they looked life size.
After Carlo was finished cleaning up his brown jizz, there was another knock on the door. Carlo was very afraid this time, because he thought the FBI guys had come back to detain him. But it wasn’t the FBI it was the CIA. The CIA guys were even shorter and very pale and they both had bad hair as well as dry skin and wrinkled pants. Carlo had no more fear when he saw how pathetic his American counterparts were.
“What do you want? You want know my name, as well, capitalist pigs?” Carlo had a heavy accent and under-utilized infinitives.
“We already know your name, Carlo Yashkin. The FBI guys told us.”
“That’s right,” said the other CIA guy, “interdepartmental communication is very important in the 70’s.”
At this Carlo became the most afraid he could be and prepared to beg for mercy. The USSR and the KGB underestimated the United States’ commitment to interdepartmental communication.
“We know you’re KGB,” they continued. “We just wondered if we could have a few of your films.”
The other CIA agent spoke up, “Our field agents in Canada tell us your work is the best they’ve ever masturbated to. Your identity is safe with us, if you’ll give us what we want.”
Carlo looked at the ugly American government agents, and realized their desperation. He pitied them and their dry skin and decided to share some of his best films of penises and vaginas in a gesture of diplomatic friendship. The CIA agents were especially interested in films of black women’s vaginas, which Carlo found very strange. To him, all vaginas were equally valuable and he wished he could fuck them all and smoosh brown cum up in them but that was just a pipe dream.
The CIA guys went away with a stack of Carlo’s films and were happy. Carlo went back inside and found himself even hornier than before and spooled yet another film and his brown Russian jizz tore out of him hot and hard in a single burst and he collapsed on the floor and fell asleep with his limp dick in his hand.
It was a big day.
3. The Bird Lord
The Bird Lord was the most wonderful man at the zoo. He loved all birds and he loved his job overseeing all the bird counters and cage cleaners, even if some of them only got their jobs by nepotism. Every day he made sure the birds were fed and happy and the cages (which everyone called “habitats”) were clean and colorful. But he hated the zoo, both because of the terror and because of the high admission. So every week he brought a homeless family he’d met at a local shelter to see the birds and even walk through the cages. The owners of the park didn’t like poor people in their park, especially homeless people (except for Lilly, who fucked them sometimes), so the Bird Lord would wait until after 5:00, when the zoo closed, to bring the families to the zoo of horror. He knew the owners would be back at their mansions in Walnut Hill, drowning their peculiar brand of capitalistic sadness in red wine and sedatives, while their kids got high and had unprotected sex with each other, spreading many venereal diseases.
When the Bird Lord brought these homeless families to see the birds, they were so happy. The children always laughed and got very excited. Some of them were scared and hid behind their mothers but then they saw the most beautiful birds and became brave. The mothers would always cry and the Bird Lord would cry a little too and tell them their children would be okay and for a little while the mothers would believe him. He did this every week with a different family and he would get ice cream bars for everyone and none of them would get diarrhea and the children always said they wished they could fly and sometimes the mothers would hug them and say “me too”. It was almost always mothers with their children, because all the fathers had jobs in finance or corporate law and had abandoned their families because they were so patriotic and liked money more and money is more patriotic than a family. Sometimes, though, there was no mother and instead it was the children’s father, and the fathers always cried the most of anybody, and this was the saddest thing of all to the Bird Lord.
The Bird Lord lived modestly out of one room in a simple house many miles away from the zoo. He was not rich like the zoo owners, but he was happy and he was the most beloved man at all the soup kitchens and homeless shelters in town. Sometimes he felt guilty, being a celebrity to the poor, but he made people happy and that made him happy. Meanwhile, the crooked owners got rich off the zoo and other real estate and commercial ventures and got drunk every night and had affairs and crashed their motorcycles and sports cars, which they could easily afford to replace, and their children were all drug dealers and sexual predators. That’s how things were in America in the ’70’s. It was a great time for irony. Actually, most times in America have been a great time for irony.
The Bird Lord didn’t like the owners, but he did like birds and he liked taking care of them and he liked sharing them with other people, even though some people were ungrateful. Some people even hated birds, and would tell him, even while he was giving them a tour.
“What’s that one?” they’d say.
“Oh that’s called a Northern Speckled Sky Bird,” the Bird Lord would say happily.
“I hate it. It looks like an idiot.”
“Actually, the Northern Speckled is one of the most clever birds in the Sky Bird family.”
“Why don’t you go fuck that bird if you’re so in love with it?”
The Bird Lord tried not to take these kinds of comments personally. He knew many people were just angry about their terrible lives visiting zoos of horror, and most of the seniors and children were forced to go, but it still hurt his feelings every time.
On his drive home after work he always recalled the worst conversations of the day, with the surliest zoogoers, and then came up with imaginary retorts he wished he’d have thought of earlier.
One teenager was there with his friends, and during a tour he said, “where’s the bats?”
“Bats aren’t birds,” replied the Bird Lord, “and this zoo doesn’t have bats anyway.”
“How you know bats ain’t birds? They fly don’t they?”
“I’m the Bird Lord. I know all about birds.”
“Oh so you know birds but you ain’t know shit about bats. Don’t tell me about no bats. Fuck your birds.”
The Bird Lord didn’t say anything and didn’t attempt to strangle the teenager. He was mad but had to be polite to the guests or he would lose his job as the Bird Lord and couldn’t help the homeless families or take care of the beautiful birds anymore.
The teenager looked at his friends, who were smoking, in that super cool way that teenagers smoke, “they ain’t got no bats and no Tyrannosauruses.”
His friend laughed and said, “this is a shitty zoo and the birds all look like idiots and in addition the tour guides are also idiots. Let’s beat it.” They all laughed and stamped out their cigarettes in the habitat and walked off to buy ice cream bars and illegal alcohol. Most of them would die young which was kind of sad but it’s okay because nobody cared.
On his bus ride home the Bird Lord thought of a perfect reply: “No, you’re just so shitty that when you enter this zoo, it becomes shitty around you, by osmosis.” The Bird Lord was not very good at comebacks and was basically a pacifist. Also, he would never talk that way because he was too classy.
But thinking of clever replies made him feel a little better. So most days the universe dumped its shit on him but the Bird Lord abided it and never retaliated even when he wanted to.
The Bird Lord was the boss of a handful of bird counters and cage cleaners. Bird counting was an easy job, so the owners always gave those jobs to their young, snotty relatives, like Sam the eagle counter, who was always late to work because of his perversions and like I said before let the eagles catch a kid and eat him in the cage. The kid was already pretty much dead though so it’s not that big of a deal.
The birds had to be counted regularly in case any of them escaped and started attacking the townspeople. Even though the cages were very large and the birds could fly around a little, they weren’t well-maintained due to budget cuts and sometimes the birds escaped and someone had to go catch them.
The Bird Lord hated having to capture escaped birds, because it often meant tranquilizing them and the zoo only had large animal tranquilizer which while effective at tranquilizing the birds also sometimes left them brain damaged. Several of the birds at the zoo were brain damaged and would never fly again and needed diapers and special care for the rest of their lives. Seeing a bird with brain damage made the Bird Lord cry and turn away. But the birds could not be allowed to roam free in town for long because many of them were violent criminals who were in cages for a reason.
The Northern Speckled Sky Bird was, in fact, very clever, and upon escaping would steal the whole town’s mail and burn it. He had no moral compass. Destroying the mail is a federal offense and the Northern Speckled Sky Bird belongs behind bars. It is impressive, of course, that the Sky Bird knew where to find everyone’s mail and also that he could control fire but he was very talented and some people say he had an English degree from Cornell. It is also impressive that the Sky Bird could finish a senior thesis but this is an unconfirmed rumor anyway and when I asked he told me he lost his thesis so I don’t know.
The Sky Bird had surrendered peacefully when he escaped so there was no need for the tranquilizer but he was such a headache for the Bird Lord that sometimes he wished the Sky Bird was brain damaged so he didn’t have to worry. The Bird Lord admired the Sky Bird but it was a complicated relationship.
His relationship with the other birds was simpler, though, and most days he had an okay time there, except for days when someone got eaten at the zoo which was happening on this day in the anteater cages. That’s just a reminder in case you forgot already.
…
63,293 words