Still more from FORLORN, Ira Idlebaum's Seminal Novel of Forlorness...Continued from Chapt. One...

...barking and barking and barking. It never stopped.

"HONEY!" yelled the over-ripe CMMDR "Did you FEED THE FISH?" The sheer amount of energy needed to communicate this pointless question across the yard and into the back window threw the human cul-de-sac down to the ground with the force of a Northridge Temblor.

A muffled feminine voice in the back recess of the suburban money-pit, a smallish house decorated as one might adorn a trailer after winning 2nd place at a Friday Night Bingo Game with the prize being a year's subscription to every magazine ever published, answered something the ENSIGN could only guess was an affirmative. Yes, the trapped tortured fish had been fed. Yes. Yes, a thousand times Yes. But, Why bother feeding them? he thought. Let them starve. Let them die. We'll all die sooner or later. We are born, we enjoy moments of joy in childhood, have alcoholic parents, take to drinking and 'acting', have agents who drop us, make friends with losers like the CMMDR, eat ourselves with envy of the SPOILER, and slowly start boring people with stories of a naked Laurence Olivier. Besides, who could live in this hell? This was Toluca Lake, for God's sake. Toluca Lake! The end of the Road. Even the word TOLUCA disgusted him: Mexican for "Place of Excess Cellulite" There was no life here. There was only Potatoes from a can. Beets from a can. Cans from Cans. Everything was from CANS. How could he not be sure, thought the compost eating has-been, the CMMDR himself had not been sprung from a Large Tanker-Type Can packed somewhere in China with a label that read "WARNING: Not to Be Given Sides"?

"WHAT?" sputtered the wide-load mammalian strip mall, again asking from thousands of feet away: "HAVE THE FISH BEEN FED?"


O, Fuck those fish. Fuck their feeding. He could take it no more. He wanted to go inside their house and dealphabetize the CMMDRs Junk mail. ENSIGN rose from his cot. His back felt like a Ginzu knife set. "They must have got this thing at a tag sale outside Treblinka," he thought. He was miserable. His urethra burned. His prostate doubled as his portable air-bag. His career looked like, well, nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

He rose up on his heels to pee in the sink. Let him smell it, he thought. Let that balding durigible smell my piss. As he unzipped and moved over the basin his eye caught the prosthetic head left over from the CMMDR's sci-fi sellout years. A disgusting display of pig-like features drawing the attention of the casual observer to a snout that resembled an entire frozen food section of pork products. Their eyes locked. He stared it down. In an instant he knew what he had to do. Waving his circumsized lifeless flesh toward the Hideous likeness of his Host the ENSIGN....

to be cont....