Bourgeois

The guests arrived at seven-thirty. Their cars all drew up in unison. They were all black Mercedes with high quality speaker systems on which they listened to Nina Simone. The insides were beige, leather. Their exteriors, shiny. They had been polished by the servants as they always were before their owners drove anywhere.
The men got out of the car first. They descended, stiff and proud, from the driver’s seat of their car. They all wore black tuxedos. They examined their bowties. Raised their hats to the other guests. Then they walked around the front of the car to the passenger seat. Still in unison, like they were all walking to the rhythm of some cruel, absurd waltz. They opened the passenger door of the car, gracefully drew it open. One foot, and then the other, of the lady descended. They wore tall, black high heels. Black was in fashion. The ladies, all at one time, floated out of the car and graced the asphalt with the oh-so-lovely touch of their stilettos. Once they had gotten to the other side of the car, picking up their feet ever so slightly with each step so they looked as if they slid across the ground, the full content of their outfits was displayed. They wore slim, black dresses. They went down to about their knees.
Offering their elbows to the ladies, who naturally accepted with grace and poise, the men walked towards the mansion, and the ladies inevitably followed, seeing as they were rather attached to the men. They made their not-so-long and not-so-harrowing journey through the not-so-wilderness of the street on which the mansion was situated. They were thoroughly tired at about the halfway point and therefore decided to stop for some wine and cheese, after which they continued their walk. Being elegant is tiring. As they walked, they slowly formed into a single file line, with adequate space in between each couple. The first one arrived at the door. The man rang the bell. The host opened, greeted the couple with something like, you’re right on time, or, the early bird always catches the worm as they say. After this the couple was invited in. The second couple approached the door. Waited for the first couple to get comfortable. Rang the doorbell. The host greeted them with something like, second ones here! The third couple approached. Similar procedure. And on and on until the reservoir of elegant couples was extinguished.
Each couple sat across from each other at the table. The host sat at one head, the wife at the other. It was a rather long table. An abundance of silver covered it in the form of multiple spoons, forks, and knives for each person. The tablecloth was white and frilly.
The host stood up and tapped his champagne glass lightly with his dessert fork. It made a dainty tinkling noise, not unlike the sound of a champagne glass being lightly tapped with a salad fork. “I have an announcement to make,” he said, “I would just like to thank everyone for coming and I would like to tell you all tha–“ he was cut off by the champagne glass exploding in his hand. A barrage of bullets erupted from the tommy guns held by the two gunmen who had jumped through the doorway that led from the adjacent room to the dining room. People tried to hide, but it was no use, as the gunmen had obviously had a large amount of practice and were very quick and efficient in their jobs, gunning down a room full of people in about forty-five seconds. Blood leaked onto the expensive carpet from multiple bullet wounds. Expressions of shock and horror were imprinted on the dead. Their body positions resembled more a bag of potatoes than an elegant swan. One of the woman’s heels was broken.

The two gunmen surveyed the carnage. Nobody was alive.

One gunman turned to the other and said, “Bourgeois fucks.”

The other one said, “Yeah.”

Awake, But Still Screaming

I woke up, choked back a scream, a yell, some kind of exclamation of surprise, the kind you get when you just woke up from a dream that made you feel like everybody was trying to kill you and that they were damn good at it. Which was what I had just done, woken up from a bad dream, a bad, bad dream. I’d always been paranoid, but this was just too much, you know, when you can feel the pointy silver tips of the knives poking but not penetrating your skin, just waiting for the chance, for you to let down your guard, so that they can pounce, you know, just jump on you and stab and stab ‘til you’re just a mess, a bloody mess sprawled out on the floor waiting for some poor janitor to come around a say to himself, ay, dío, que lástima. Then he calls the cops and the ambulance, but, you know, they’re out to get you, too, so all you can do is lie there in pain and wait for the pigs to come and finish the job with semi-automatics or something like that. Anyways, that’s the kind of dream I woke up from, it was pretty scary, usually I’m just being chased by aliens. But these were humanoid and most definitely earthlings and most definitely out to get me. Get me good, you know, all out to get me and get me good.

It was pitch black like the souls of the people, 2 o’clock in the morning. I had work tomorrow so I decided that I’d better go to bed, you know, I didn’t want to come to work all tired, rubbing my eyes, my tie out of place, and my shirt not fully tucked in, with people giving me those looks out of the side of their eyes, criticizing me with their peripheral vision and in the whispered conversations they had while I was walking past. I lumbered downstairs like a five hundred pound drunk guy with balance issues in his cerebellum, I almost tripped somewhere around three times. I was going downstairs to get something I knew would help me go back to sleep, you know how it is, warm milk and cookies soothe you like nothing else. I walked into the kitchen and flicked on the light, and he was standing there. I shook my head, he can’t be back, he’s dead. I looked down at the floor and then nervously and slowly bent my neck back to a normal position, he wasn’t there anymore. Memories following me around like a sick puppy begging for food. I gave my milk and cookies to the puppy and went to bed.

The Plateau

The black sky closed oppressively in on the landscape, drowning the last cries of happiness in nature. I woke up on a plateau in Tibet. Some snow mountains and that kinda shit. A memoir of some obscure Hungarian hung on one of the branches of the tree on which I leaned my head so I could look up and examine the sea of blackness that hung damningly over my head. Clunk - the book fell off of the tree and hit me on my knee. I cursed loudly and then threw it at some nearby rock. I found two rocks to use as flints and hit them together to light a fire by holding it over a pile of dried brush that I had probably collected very recently. Once the fire was started and I was reasonably warm, I got to carving. Carved stuff, all over everywhere. Like a jack rabbit with a pocket knife, a line here, a line there, some squiggly crap over here 'Twas like a work of art that nobody would ever see because nobody came up here on this godforsaken plateau.

I was resting and sitting around when I felt something wet on my bare feet. Something started to smell bad, real bad. I looked up and there was something that looked like a winged alpaca. It seemed to think my dirty exposed big toe was a salt lick or something: it was licking it so fast and diligently that I thought that my foot would disintegrate from all of the saliva piled up on it.

BOOM. It exploded and my big toe was safe. Headline: RANDOM EXPLOSION SAVES BIG TOE FROM CERTAIN DISINTEGRATION BY THE HAND OF THE TONGUE OF A WINGED ALPACA.

I tripped and broke my knee. Damned Hungarian memoirs.
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EPILOGUE:

The rain came down hard and fast and washed away everything, and art was over. Into the puddles on the ground it went, despite all efforts for something to happen otherwise, to contradict the cruel reality that was the certain destruction and fading of art from the rock walls on the plateau in Tibet.