Promotion

Promotion


1.

Later that night he licks the sarcasm from the rim of the toilet. He brushes his teeth with gasoline. He lights his breath on fire, burning down the house, where his wife and children sleep. Throwing a blanket over his shoulders like a cape, he dives through the window.


2.

Because he followed the directions by the letter, he is more than disappointed that he didn’t fly. His cell phone, he left inside the burning house; he cannot call the company to issue his complaint. His wife is trapped and screaming, so she can’t help, and anyway she never believed in his dreams. His kids are burnt to crisps by now, and he is ambling around the side lawn, his lips burned form his mouth, shards of glass stuck into his shoulders and neck, earthbound and naked, the towel around his ankles collecting blood.


3.

For killing his family and destroying all his possessions, he gets a raise, the boss honors him with a speech to the company about faith and sacrifice. “I’m sorry the flying thing didn’t work out,” the boss says to him later over by the water cooler, which is empty of water but filled with spider webs and the wrapped up bodies of moths. He doesn’t respond, just looks up, licks his teeth where his upper lip used to be and sighs. His boss unzips his pants and inserts his erect penis in the water cooler spout. The boss wraps his arms around the water cooler and mutters the latin alphabet as he thrusts in and out of the spout at an ever increasing rate. When he comes, sunflower seeds shoot from the head of his penis in slow motion and as they shoot up the seeds metamorphose into the nine planets of our solar system.


4.

The planets are immediately caught in the spider webs and the boss turns to our hero and says, nearly out of breath, “Okay, now, it’s up to you to deliver the sun. Don’t let me down. Without a sun we don’t have an orbit, without an orbit, those fucking spiders will suck everything dry.” The boss, exits the spout, zips up his slacks, puts a meaty paw on our heroes shoulder, bringing him nose to nose with the breath of coffee and time steaming like a volcanic fissure from every pore. “Tell me Johnson, do you have the balls to make a sun?”