The Burbles

BY VAN AARON HUGHES

[ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT THE DREAM PEOPLE (D. Harlan Wilson, ed.) ]

 

Lincoln didn’t mind getting fired when the boss got the notion he put the piranha in her prize tropical fish tank or becoming impotent from tainted tofu from his vegan girlfriend who then ran off with the rent money and his best friend who only eats meat or Greyhounding to his folks to find the family home sold to Tibetan drug lords and his parents gone to Ecuador with no forwarding address or limping about on the broken toe the bus ran over or being flat broke from paying the bus fare and the contraband marine life dealer.

For Lincoln acknowledged only two states of being: pain and death. He had never been so alive.

What Lincoln minded was having to move in with Uncle Abe and Aunt Beatrice in Southwest Suburbia. Lincoln hated the quiet at night, the stockade fence holding the real world at bay. He was sure he had seen more of life in his 26 years than all five members of this family combined.

His fourth day there, Lincoln decided he could not survive one more evening refraining from comment as Aunt spent hours in the kitchen hauling a microwaved dinner to a table covered in clear plastic, as Pinhead Son #1 romeroed to his antique computer games, as Pinhead Son #2 shouted at referees on television while clinging to a football helmet as if coach might send him in to play tailback any moment, as Uncle stared at the game even though he hated football because he couldn’t bear to dislodge Woody the family cat from his lap, as Pinhead Daughter drifted through applying powder to a face already so caked up she looked ready to turn tricks if her overpowering perfume hadn’t driven away the johns.

Time to get snide, for sanity’s sake. Starting in the study, where Carter(PS1) sat before a computer monitor in a tall wooden chair turned around so he had to peer between the slats like an infant in a playpen.

“Good thing you dropped out of school, so you have time to play this.”

“Didn’t drop out, Cuz, I flunked out.”

“What the hell is that? Pac-Man?”

“Junior Pac-Man.”

“I’m sure some day you’ll graduate to the senior tour.”

“No way, Cuz, Junior Pac-Man is way harder.”

“You know, when the pilgrims invented these games, you had to go someplace to play them, so there was a social aspect.”

“They were like MMORPGs?”

“Except the fantasy world wasn’t virtual.” Did Pac-Man used to have a propeller beanie?

“Cuz, you want to stand further back from the screen.”

Was the yellow blob actually chewing the dots it gobbled?  As Lincoln peered closer, the screen bulged outward and Junior Pac-Man reared up and sank teeth into Lincoln’s cheek.

“Christ!” he shouted, pulling away. The screen popped back into place as blood flowed down Lincoln’s face. He could see the Pac-Man back in his maze, now trailing a smear of red pixels.

“Just be glad it wasn’t Ms. Pac-Man,” said Carter. “She always goes for the crotch.”

Scrambling to the bathroom for something to staunch the bleeding, Lincoln brushed past an emerging Uncle Abe. He tried to ignore his uncle’s stench as he grabbed some gauze under the sink. The mirror showed his cut wasn’t so deep as it felt.

Movement drew his eye to the odoriferous fumes visibly coalescing over the toilet. As he watched, they formed a three-fingered vapor hand, which flew at him and jammed two fingers up his nose and into his sinuses. He screamed and fell backward, but the fingers weren’t letting go as easily as Junior Pac-Man.

Then the pressure vanished, as for the first time Lincoln smelled Dora(PD)’s perfume with enjoyment.

“Now you know why I wear this shit,” she said, helping him off the bathroom floor.

Stomping into the family room, Lincoln stepped between the TV and Uncle Abe, who had resumed his blissful oblivion, scratching Woody behind the ear. “You might want to lose the cat and get control of your house, Uncle.”

“Incompatible, Lincoln,” he answered dreamily, as Aunt Beatrice called out that dinner was ready.

Intending to set the pet aside, Lincoln lifted Woody from Abe’s lap, to reveal a fantastically engorged part of the tomcat’s anatomy. Evidently the cat’s name had nothing to do with the movie Toy Story.

Lincoln tossed the cat in revulsion. Woody landed with teeth bared and launched itself at him. He turned aside from the cat’s rush, a terrible mistake. Woody slashed through his jeans with its leonine claws, and Lincoln screamed from sudden pressure. Lincoln tried to shake off the feline rapist, but it only dug claws deeper into his thighs. “I said, dinner!” his aunt shouted.

Next into the fray was cousin Eli(PS2), who tried to pry Woody off, his feet straining against the carpet as he dug his shoulder into the cat’s orange pelt like a tackling dummy. Lincoln endured hours of agony for ten seconds before Woody came free and turned its wrath on Eli, slashing at his face so viciously it would have left multiple scars if he hadn’t been wearing his football helmet.

“Third and final call for dinner!” Beatrice screamed.

“Shit!” shouted Eli. He threw the cat aside and bolted up the stairs to the dining room without stopping to remove his helmet. Ignoring the blood streaming from his legs, Lincoln raced after, in sudden dread that the plastic over the table was meant for something more than crumbs.

Lincoln dove into a chair and grinned at his new home’s unsuspected hecticity. Maybe this family wasn’t so bad, once you got to know them.

 

© 2011 Van Aaron Hughes

 

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