Sir Boo snapped his head back at me. Maria had managed to claw deep red streaks into his face. His eyes were huge and all pupil. He was so mad they jumped around. I closed my hand around the lighter, drew it back and threw it at Sir Boo. Amazingly, it smacked him right in the middle of the forehead. However weakly, it made him let go of Maria. He looked at me and thumbed his mustache. Maria slid off the dresser and hit the floor with a thump. Boo moved toward the bed. I took off running, hearing his footsteps behind me.

I got to the top of the stairs and heard the gun go off. The bullet hit me in the back, to the right of my spine, the impact catapulting me down the stairs. Immediately, with the slightest exertion, both of my lungs started burning. There wasn't a lot of pain, but the pressure made it hard to breathe. I scrambled through the living room, managing to stand by the time I got to the kitchen. My breathing raggedly mixed with the whirring iron whumming and I slammed into the front door, fitfully trying to grab onto the handle. My body shook violently. I felt like I had to run to make that shaking go away. If I were to just stand, I'd have the overwhelming desire to rip my skin off.

I got the door open and ran out into the night.

The church was the only thing really lit up so I ran for that, some hopeless feeling telling me the doors would be locked. Where was he? Was he behind me? I couldn't hear anything over the breathing and the whumming. The church seemed a mile away. My body had shook itself into exhaustion. I felt like a gelatinous slab but, nevertheless, my legs carried me. Everything spun around me. One of my shoes flew off. I was dimly aware of the blood trickling down the crack of my a.s.s.

I reached the door, the iron handle feeling like a rare treasure in my hand. I put all my weight against the door and pushed the handle. It collapsed inward. I collapsed with it into the dimly lit interior.

At the far end, the baptismal pool cast a rippling white reflection against the wall. I lay in the deep red carpet of the aisle. I couldn't stand up. For a panicked minute I thought it was blood all around me, extending up to the pulpit area. I crawled up the middle of the aisle, those big heavy pews on either side of me. Then I had a thought.

I'm dying.

The f.u.c.kness had caught up with me, striking a final deadly blow. I rolled over, collapsing onto my back and staring up at the rafters of the church. f.u.c.k it, I thought. f.u.c.k it. f.u.c.k it. f.u.c.k it.

Everything melted away. The whumming, the ragged breathing, all of it melted away. If I was still breathing, and I couldn't tell if I was, it had to be through my skin. My chest wasn't moving.

Everything was quiet. I stared up at the rafters. The soft light. A flash of blue. Blue. White. A jagged razor of death. Boo Thiklet positioned over me. He lowered the barrel of the rifle down to my forehead. Still there was silence. It felt like everything happened through a thick plate of gla.s.s. I looked at his hand as he pulled the trigger, awaiting the explosion, the inevitable end.

Nothing.

Again he depressed his finger.

Nothing.

Again and again and again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. For a second, I thought it had happened and I just didn't hear it. I thought maybe I was watching everything from someplace above.

My body was numb. He grabbed me up, wrapped his arms around me and tossed me onto the edge of a pew. I landed on the floor and flung myself back into the aisle. Finish me off, I thought. Now Boo held the gun by the barrel and swung the stock at my head. It connected with a hollow- sounding impact. Every sound I heard came from inside my head. I lay on my side, my back resting against the row of pews. He grabbed my feet and pulled me up to the pulpit. I noticed my other shoe had come off in the meantime. I didn't see how anyone could brutalize someone whose shoes had fallen off.

A long wooden altar sat squatly in front of the pulpit. The scripture, "For he so loved the world..." was stenciled in blood red letters on the front of the altar. What was the rest of the scripture, I wondered? Why didn't they put it on there too? Boo turned me around, grabbed both of my horns and thrust my face into the floor. He rolled me over onto my back. Figuring out what he meant to do released some feeling into my body. Like I was cast suddenly and coldly back into life and reality. A wave of sickness burned in my stomach, turning my bowels and throat to acid.

He placed one of his brown construction boots on my left horn. Holding the rifle by the barrel and aiming it downward like a jackhammer, he brought the stock down at the base of my right horn. I didn't know how they were connected so I had no real idea of how he was going to go about the excision. Each impact of the rifle b.u.t.t sent a sickening bone impact through my body. I figured Maria had confessed our indiscretions to Boo. I wandered if she had confessed the small details of the fling also. He came down on it with increasing ferocity. I heard the horn first separate from my head with a sick wet peeling sound. My skin ripped as Boo bent down and yanked the horn to fully remove it. My head felt wet. More and more of my senses were coming back. It was like the more he tortured me, the more alive I became. He had the horn in his right hand, a giant hideous thing. The anger was still there, hopping around behind his eyes but it was a focused anger like he had some sort of renewed purpose, fulfilling a job he desperately wanted done. He slid the horn under the base of the still attached left horn, creating a fulcrum. This caused my head to turn to the right and I stared at his boot and the tip of the gun.

A violent force yanked my head to the left. I felt the horn give. He had brought his boot down on the tip of it. The whole thing made me think about trying to remove a tooth. Sir Boo brought his foot down again and this one went with a pop. I rolled to my right and vomited. The horn was still attached to my head by a thin string of skin, hanging with a sickening weight. In a smooth, continuous motion, I reached back, grabbed the tip of the horn, yanked it free from the skin, and swung it into Boo's knee. I didn't feel any pain with this one. Just the tearing tug. I got up on all fours, feeling the blood running down both of my cheeks. Boo raised a foot to stomp on me and I launched myself at his supporting knee. It went from being very rigid to oddly jointed. I spun off to the side. He tried to follow but his knee no longer pivoted that way. He went down, smacking his head on the pew and lying kind of dormant in the middle of the aisle. The gun was right beside me. I grabbed it by the barrel, the metal cold in my hot hand. I wrapped the other hand around it and used it like a cane to stand up.

Something surged over me, totally overwhelming and empowering. I stood over Boo, wielding the gun like an ax. I brought the stock down onto Sir Boo's head, the connection rattling through the gun and twinging my hands. A hungry rage swirled through me. I brought the gun down for Racecar, for the mother, for Mary Lou Dover and Bucky Swarth and Pearlbottom. I did it again and again, watching as Sir Boo's skin reddened, thinned, and then split. His eyes rolled around in his head. Exhausted and sickened, I couldn't do it anymore.

I turned the gun around and aimed the barrel at his head. I looked around the church. Most of the blood, mine and Boo's, had sunk into the carpet and it didn't really look like anything out of place had happened here. The baptismal pool continued making its slow magical ripples on the wall. I suddenly thought of Uncle Skad, standing in a bed filled with his parents' blood, unaware of what he'd just done. I thought of myself back at Toady's, surveying the carnage I'd created. This time, I'd been conscious all the while and felt as alive as I ever had at that moment, the barrel of the gun resting against the rubbery weight of Boo's face. I had hit him for all those other people and now I saw myself. I saw myself after I did this. Who would I be? If I pulled the trigger, would I even get the chance to try and define myself? Or would I be put into a system where society defined me?

I wasn't the boy with horns anymore. And I was tired as h.e.l.l of being Wallace Black.

I turned the gun toward the carpet beside his head and pulled the trigger. It went off with a thunderous explosion, tearing up the red carpet to expose the raw wood underneath. I dropped the gun on Sir Boo's b.l.o.o.d.y face.

Every bit of aliveness I felt drained out of me. Raced out of me. My body felt like a used condom. I had to get out of the church. I was suddenly overcome by the smells around me-the musty wooden odor of the church, the sour age of the hymnals, the smell of steel, cheap cologne, and beer clinging to Boo, and everywhere, everywhere hung the iron stench of blood. And beneath that. Yes, somewhere just below the scent of coagulating blood, was the scent of death. It wasn't Boo's death that I smelled. His chest heaved as he lay there on the floor, merely pa.s.sed out.

I turned toward the half-open door, the purplish blue light glowing outside. I dragged my feet along the carpet, feeling its damp squishiness, the door approaching me more than the other way around. My hands touched the door and I pushed it open and I was outside. Outside in a dense fog, the clear night sky above me.

I felt like I was floating away from everything around me, that power still pulling me along. I was sure I was dying. If not from blood loss, then from shock. The f.u.c.kness had got me, sneaked up on me and crushed me out. If I died, the f.u.c.kness would be over. Slowly, I made my way to the graveyards behind the church. The obelisks and headstones were stubby shadows in the fog. The night air felt warm on my skin, but I shivered uncontrollably.

The whumming screeched like a stopping train in my head. A red vision splashed all over my mind's eye. The fog out there was a prison. A glaucoma blanket over my physical eyes. I could feel myself falling. No, it was more like that grinding red feeling drove me to the ground, flattening me and rolling over me, a dark and violent fever dream. All of the faces, the hateful f.u.c.kness faces of the past came blaring through the red fog, angry and accusatory. All mingling in a huge screech. I collapsed onto the fiery ground, those people enveloping me, wheedling beneath my skin and along my nerves. They yelled incoherence in unison, a tattoo that beat out my last remaining breaths. I had the feeling death was right there next to me and these people were going into some new h.e.l.l with me. Like I was going to have to spend all of eternity hating them. They were inside of me, ripping at my viscera, tearing my brain to pieces, and vomiting on my soul.

I tried to fight them. There had to be some way to get them out of me. I tried to scream, tried to force them out through my mouth. There was nothing left inside. Inside, there was no me, only them. I didn't have the strength in my legs or lungs to run or scream.

I was on the ground but I still felt myself falling. It felt like I was falling from some place that was very very high, falling through the sky and the clouds and the dense powdery fog. There was nothing to catch myself on and I couldn't think of any reason for wanting to catch myself because the more I fell, the greater distance I went, the higher I got, so that when I landed I was right there with the stars, close enough to reach out and palm them with my hands. Then the stars came down on me like a net, coolly roping my body, and the people were gone.

I lay there on the cemetery ground waiting for death. Was I already dead? If I breathed, I was completely unaware of it. Not even like the skin breathing thing I did back in the church. I didn't breathe, I didn't need to breathe. I lay there and felt the dew on my back, watched the fog swirl around me, staring up at the few stars littering the sky, listening to the endless quiet surrounding me. The quiet, boundless silence. Maybe the soft rustle of a tree, maybe the low hum of a car somewhere in the distance but, there beneath it all was the quiet-no blood thumping behind my ears. No whumming in my brain. No screaming.

That's when I heard the scuffling shapes come out of the fog. They were spirits, I had no doubt, risen from the graves around me, ectoplasmic green against the gray of the fog. And they shambled toward me, a whole army of them, coming right up out of the ground, through the grave markers, all of them formless. They got to me and I felt their hands on me, the energy radiating from them and into me, strengthening me. They moved into me, through me, rebuilding me from the inside. The dead come to replace what the living stole. The nothing I felt was replaced with something other. Something completely indescribable because it was so all encompa.s.sing. They were healing me. They took away the f.u.c.kness. They gave me new skin, swelled my soul to the point of bursting and, as quietly as they had come, they disappeared.

I felt weightless and alive and real. Everything that had happened to me, every person who had conspired to hold me down, now surged through me and lifted me up. I took off running into the dawn, barefoot and stark raving mad with joy.

Conclusion:.

Happiness In Exile.

So that's my story. Only it's not really my story at all. It was only a period of my life. The period of heavy f.u.c.kness. Sometime later that morning I was whisked away to the hospital where I was put into the care of a bunch of nurses. They were like a flock of angels, moving around the white hospital rooms in their starched white uniforms. It occurred to me the hospital society might've been the lifestyle I'd been striving for all along. No one ever got mad. I could have flung my excrement at those nurses and they would have just smiled, casually wiped it off, and suggested I use a bedpan. I never had to leave the bed. I just lay there and they brought me things. I had to stay there longer than I normally would have because the doctors were convinced, from what I told them while ranting in my sleep, that I had suffered some sort of trauma, even though they couldn't find any type of physical evidence to substantiate that claim.

But they were all just tending to a moribund body that had seen better days. I guess it was my last hurrah.

Officially, I died of natural causes. I was a John Doe.

Wallace Black had died three days earlier in an arson.

Mainly what I thought as I watched myself all laid up in the hospital was that question Uncle Skad had posed: Are we who we really are, with all the ugly layers peeled away, or are we who we are trying to become? The more I thought about it, the more the question terrifed me. It seemed like if you took people and stripped away all their layers, you ended up with Boo Thiklet. If you measured most people by what they were trying to become, it seemed like you'd just end up with a lot of rich, self-absorbed f.u.c.ks. I don't really have any idea of what I'm trying to become or if it's possible to become anything in death, but I know there's always a small part of me that is going to remain the boy with horns.

As for G.o.d and divine punishment, I'm still really not sure. I know I was punished, though I question the divinity of it. There were feelings I had-the force, the rope, the inner pulling. If that was G.o.d, then I'd have to say he has a really sick and sort of mean sense of humor. And he has, quite clearly, exiled me from the kingdom of heaven.

The f.u.c.kness seemed to lessen when I left my body. It wasn't that the world seemed any less absurd. If anything, with a little bit of maturity and a little bit of death, things only seemed more absurd. I still don't understand why people do the things they do. I don't think I want to understand. Sometimes the reasons are far more ridiculous than the acts themselves. A man wears a tie because he has to. Why not wear two ties, or three or four, an insanely wide array of ties, just because he wants to?

So, somehow, I've blended in with this absurdity by not blending in at all. I stay on the outside, invisible. Once I stopped being Wallace Black, no one noticed me at all. There was the occasional person, usually a child, who could look at me and I could tell they understood everything. In life, there were a few adults, the people like Uncle Skad and maybe even Maria, but those were rare. With this invisibility I've been able to think about my philosophy of f.u.c.kness, structuring it into a politics of poverty.

I've tried to go back and find the people who helped me along the way, but they've all disappeared. Drifter Ken has drifted on. Johnny Metal said he came to me, so I didn't even know where to begin looking for him. Uncle Skad must have exploded into some blue electrical oblivion. The Thiklets' house had a sign that said "SOLD" out in the front yard. It may seem self-centered, but it felt like all of them only existed for a short period of time, there to help me through the heavy f.u.c.kness.

I don't know what happened to the horns. I have no signs suggesting they were ever there. Just like the doctors and nurses couldn't find any bullet holes or internal damage from the shooting before p.r.o.nouncing me dead. n.o.body at the hospital ever said anything about them. Maybe the church found them lying somewhere and took them. I hope they exorcised them first. I was kind of glad I couldn't find them. I never really want to see them again.

Just a few days ago I went back to Walnut. I finally had to know if the parents were really and truly dead. I think it took me a few years to do that because I had to punish myself. It was like, if I knew they were okay, then I couldn't feel the proper amount of guilt. And if I knew they were dead, then I could just stop thinking about them. I walked by their house, keeping to the opposite side of the street. It was a warm summer day and I stood there staring at the house. I knew I could never go back in there. That was one of the worst things, feeling like there was never really a place to go.

They had really fixed it up a lot. A fresh coat of white paint gleamed in the sunlight. Vibrantly colored flowers lined the ground. It was like an oasis there on Walnut. The mother and father were out in the front yard. The father had a shiny new wheelchair. The mother wandered around in an honest-to-G.o.d practical outfit, watering the lawn. A boy of about four or five stomped around the front yard, hurling a red Frisbee at Racecar. They must have adopted, I thought. Probably took on a foster kid for the extra income. Maybe they were just babysitting. The boy spotted me, creepily standing there, out of place in a world that wasn't really mine anymore.

"What's that man doing?" he said.

The mother and Racecar both looked across the street.

And that image dropped away. Three black kids stood in front of a low-income apartment building.

"There's n.o.body there," the oldest said.

"Yes huh. He's right there." The child pointed again.

"You're full of s.h.i.t."

I waved at the little boy, did a little dance for him, and skipped off down the street.

Other t.i.tles by Andersen Prunty.

The Sorrow King.

Slag Attack.

My Fake War.

Morning is Dead.

The Beard.

Zerostrata.

Jack & Mr. Grin.

The Overwhelming Urge.