DEALER OF DEATH or, HE WHO SMELT IT by John Bruni

 “Dude. Pull my finger.” 

Todd looked at Pete who held out his index finger, waiting. Snot bubbled in his nostril, and his two front teeth were adult. He lacked many of his baby teeth, and those remaining looked like pieces of gravel. He smelled kind of like hotdog water. 

“No way, dude,” Todd said. 

“Come on. You know you want to.” 

“Fuck no. I’m not stupid.” 

“Come on! If you don’t, I’ll do it. And I’m gonna make it worse for you.” 

Todd weighed his options. Pete’s farts were notorious not just through third grade but throughout all the school. He also had a habit of farting on people. Judging by his general uncleanliness he probably didn’t wipe well. It was too possible that Todd would get some brown on him. 

“Fine.” 

Pete laughed so hard he snorted. “Go for it!” 

Todd sighed and gripped Pete’s greasy finger. He gave it a pull. Pete lifted his leg like a dog about to piss, and something ripped out of him. It sounded more powerful than a mere fart. At first Todd thought it was a joke, but the sound kept coming out of Pete. 

“Dude! Stop it!” 

Pete laughed, and the fart sounded like a jet taking off. It had a chemical reek to it, and Todd gagged. The back of his throat burned with bile, and he spat to clear it out. 

Pete strained, his face red, sweat popping out of his forehead, and the back of his jeans blew out, sending ripples of fire out behind him. It scorched the tree back there, sending flames dancing to the tippy top. 

The sound increased, and a gust of wind flared out with hurricane level winds. Birds caught in the vortex turned to jelly as their wings flailed like the arms of an inflatable dealership prop. 

Worry crossed Pete’s eyes. Brown fluid gushed out his ass and washed away the world behind him, drowning every living creature in sight. 

“Make it stop,” he whispered. “Please.” 

Todd couldn’t answer. His lungs couldn’t pull in enough breath to speak or even scream. His chest strained, and it felt like he was suffocating. His mucous membranes ripped, and his insides flopped out of his orifices like flags on a windy day. The pain overtook him, and he died before his organs were sucked out and away. 

Pete started to cry, and when he tried to cover his naked doom-spouting butt his hands exploded into flames, singeing them off to the wrists. He gaped at his cauterized stumps, hoping this was all one big dream. 

The earth behind him simmered with a heat wave mirage. The air rippled as fire spread across town, incinerating everything in its path. People and animals died screaming in the ever-growing conflagration. Swimming pools evaporated in seconds. Titanium melted. The ground collapsed in on itself, sending magma up to the surface. 

Pete could no longer make sound. His organs cooked inside his melting body. His eyes steamed away, and his body oozed in on itself. 

America perished under blood red clouds and puddles of lava. The rest of the world’s presidents, kings and leaders screamed in terror at their approaching deaths. The oceans died in clouds that blocked out the sun. Fire lit them to a bright orange that rolled across the face of the earth, killing anything unlucky enough to be alive. The crust of the planet was eaten by the magma that constantly flowed like pus on a teenager’s face. 

The seven angels with seven trumpets blew them before they, too, melted in the unholy fire that had consumed the earth and now consumed Heaven and Hell. God shrieked in horror. He thought He’d known it all, but He’d never seen his own death coming. 

A research team in Antarctica were the last humans on earth, and they’d gotten reports from all other nations as humanity perished in the fart death cloud. They had no loved ones to say goodbye to. They’d already died. They huddled together, clutching each other for comfort as Death closed the curtain on the human race. 

THE END 

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #685: 315

 It has been 315 days since my last drink. I think about that last drink sometimes, and I'm glad it was from my own personal aging barrel. I had a sneaking suspicion that it would be my last drink, so I made it count. And it was very, very good.

But it occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that I no longer have a preventative measure in my toolbox. Back in the day, whenever I started feeling sick, I would drink heavily as soon as humanly possible. If you catch a cold or the flu or things like that at just the right time with massive amounts of alcohol, you can save yourself from getting sick.

After 315 days without booze? I can no longer do that. If I start getting the sniffles, I could very well be fucked. I've gone many, many years of getting sick only once a year. I have a suspicion that I might start getting sick on a regular basis like the rest of you who chose not to go down the alcoholic's path.

I haven't gotten sick yet, but then again it hasn't been a full year yet. We shall see . . .

So we're going to take another break. I'm not burned out this time. This time, just like with the end of last year, I'm out of ideas for GF columns. Correction: I have one idea, but I want to save it for #700. Yes, it's the other one about Walter Bishop. It's pretty momentous, so it will be perfect for when I get to that one.

Last break I took was for a week. This time? I'm not sure. I'll just have to accumulate ideas again until I'm good to go. In the meantime, if you want to help me come up with ideas, be my guest. I'll talk about anything. Writing, reading, what it was like to live in a world where the internet wasn't a constant presence, how sexy I used to be, anything about Gramps I might not have covered, whatever. Let me know.

Goodnight for now, you glorious fuckers. Have a good Memorial Day. Don't die.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #684: SPECTREMAN

 

In my ever-ongoing quest to figure out the stuff I want to keep and the stuff I'm OK with never seeing again, I found what you see above. I'm pretty sure that's my childish handwriting on there from maybe when I was six or seven? If you can't see what it says, it's SPECTREMAN.

My cousin, Erik, and I loved Spectreman when we were kids. We were crazy about it, in fact. When we weren't pretending to be detectives or soldiers or what have you, we were pretending to be Spectreman and whatever monster he was fighting.

The problem was, the show came on when we were still in school, and that was back in the day where if you missed a TV show, you just missed it forever. Unless you lucked out on a rerun somewhere along the line. And TV shows didn't usually end up on VHS at the video store back then.

Although come to think of it, I might somewhere have a Betamax tape with some Spectreman episodes on it. My stepfather, for some reason unbeknownst to the world, was big into Betamax.

Anyway, my cousin and I would have Grandma record the audio for us when we were in school so we could listen to it later and let our imaginations run wild. Because that's the best we had unless we were home sick (or home "sick") from school and could actually watch it.

Yeah, Ultraman was cool, and we liked Ultraman, too, but he wasn't fucking Spectreman.

FREE BOOKS

 

OK, so I'm giving away some of my books. This is addressed to two kinds of people: my readers and anyone who has a book review website (or better yet, a print magazine you write for).

TO MY READERS: To the first ten people who buy a print copy of my new book, TRAIL OF BLOOD, I will send you a free signed copy of my previous book, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF HIERONYMUS ALOYSIS ZIEGE. I have three copies of Trail that you can buy from me personally for $13 even, no additional shipping. Otherwise, you can buy it elsewhere and send me a copy of the receipt at tabardinnedgewoodent@yahoo.com. First come, first serve. Remember, this is for the first ten readers. US only. Sorry, everyone else.

TO REVIEWERS: I'm going on the honor system here. I'm not going to check up on you, so if you're going to lie to me, please make it a good one and at the very least leave a review for me on Amazon and Goodreads. But if you are a book reviewer, I have a few copies of Trail of Blood that were not up to snuff for me. Some copies have super small lettering and aren't very well spaced, and other copies have a couple of typos (which is particularly embarrassing because one of them is part of the back copy). Contact me here or on my social media or at the email above, and I'll send you a copy free of charge in exchange for an honest review. As stated above, US only. Sorry, everyone else.

Any questions? Let me know.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #683: A LOST ART

 You know, while I'm telling you how to live your lives, I thought I'd bring up something else. It's a lost art in this day and age, and I think I know why.

As previously stated, I speak with about 100 people a day, and they are all on the phone. Before I sold glass I worked in telecom for about 15 years. Add to that I'm 44 years old, which means I grew up talking to people on an actual phone. I mean, attached to a wire. With a handset. So I know a lot about phones.

So it irritates me to no end when people just can't fucking talk into the phone. It used to be easy because of the handset. You put this end to your ear to listen. You put this end to your mouth to speak. Simple. Easy. But now that phones are just flat pieces of plastic (and other stuff), there is this odd urge to let it hang down your face instead of at your mouth. I get it. I feel the urge to do that until I realize that if I do, I'm going to sound distant to whoever I'm talking to, if they can hear me at all. We still know enough to put the top of the phone to our ear, but for some reason we let the bottom half down to just under our jawlines while we talk into the air.

Can we please, for the love of God and all that is holy, learn as a civilization to talk INTO the phone again?

And another thing. When you're on a video call, look at the camera, not at the screen. You'll make a better impression on who you're talking to. Every time someone just looks at the screen, I get the urge to say, "My eyes are up HERE."

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #682: STOP MULTITASKING

 I talk to about 100 people a day, and almost all of them are miserable. And I have a pretty good idea as to why. On the surface it seems that they don't have their shit together, and that's a vague way of putting it. It seems to make sense, but the important question is: WHY is it that way?

Everyone feels the need to fucking multitask, and it's ruining their lives. They can't just do one thing at a time. They have to take on a multitude of tasks all at once or they don't feel like they're accomplishing anything. Looking back at a lot of my miseries, the ones due to me not having my shit together, I know I was in misery because I was trying to do too much at once.

I know, I know. We all have a limited amount of time in this life. And none of us knows how long that finite amount of time is. So we gotta rush, rush, rush, right? Nope. It's quality of life, not quantity. If I dropped dead tomorrow, yeah, I'd have a lot of shit that I didn't get to do, but at the same time? The shit I *did* do? It gave me a life of quality, and I'm good with that.

You don't need to multitask. Stop doing that. Whatever you're doing at the moment, FOCUS ON THAT AND NOTHING ELSE. You'll find the quality of your life improving drastically.

I hear you have a lot of important stuff to do. OK, so do we all. And again, there isn't enough time to do it all. So you have to accept right off the bat that you can't do it all. Stuff is going to be left undone. That's OK. Learn to prioritize. Find out what is most important to you, and do that thing. Focus on it and nothing else. Then on to the second most important thing, then the third, etc. The stuff you don't prioritize can always be done another day because it's just not as important as the other stuff.

There is one flaw in my philosophy. What if you have kids? Sorry, but you're kind of stuck with multitasking on that one. At least for the first 18 years of their lives. That goes for caregivers, too. If you don't multitask, you'll never get shit done. So yeah, you're stuck being miserable for a long time. But the rest of you? Stop multitasking. Prioritize. Focus. Learn these things, and your life will be better for it. So will mine because you're eventually going to need auto glass, and you might wind up talking to me. And when I ask you questions I need answers for, you won't be driving and talking at the same time. You'll have all the information you will need at your fingertips. And our phone conversation will go very smoothly and quickly, and we can move on with our days.

Yeah, OK, you got me. I'm being selfish, but how selfish is it if my advice really does help you?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #681: BOOK SNIFFING THE LANSDALES

 

I am an inveterate book sniffer. And you'd think that we'd have a technical term for that by now. I know I'm not the only one who finds comfort in putting one's nose into the middle of a book and taking a deep whiff. There seems to be some traction for the word "bibliosmia," but it's still not technically a word for what I love to do.

The older the book, the better the smell. There is just some kind of spice in those pages that is perfect for the ol' olfactories. But sometimes it's a newer book that will do the trick.

Like the one in the picture above. I just finished reading it last week, and while I carried it around in my backpack, it really classed up my joint. Usually my backpack smells of the cologne I accidentally spilled back there years ago, but while this book was in there, it smelled like fresh leather.

Thunderstorm puts out good quality books. I mean, physically. And this one by Joe R. Lansdale and his daughter Kasey is perfect. I kept sniffing the cover every time I held it. Sometimes at work, if it was a particularly bad day, I'd smell the book. Whenever I was getting ready to go somewhere, I'd take a whiff of my backpack because the fresh leather left its scent behind.

It's a shame that my backpack is back to its old self. It was good while it lasted.

Oh yeah, the book is pretty good, too. Writing-wise, I mean.