Motherfucking Sharks by Brian Allen Carr

Author:Brian Allen Carr [Carr, Brian Allen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781621051237
Publisher: Lazy Fascist Press
Published: 2013-12-04T05:00:00+00:00

Let us now think of Crick in the cage while his family’s devoured. He can do nothing but watch or try not to watch. He can do nothing but listen or try not to listen. The smell of blood and rain puddles thickens the air, and the sun stains Crick’s skin as the sharks swim around him.

Sharks ram the cage fruitlessly, their mouths sprawled open to reveal teeth stained by the blood of Crick’s loved ones. Their wicked, vacant eyes lock with Crick’s. They thrash their bodies as they swim through the air.

Slowly, Crick watches as the sharks’ forms pale away. Over the course of his two-day captivity, he sees their skins go transparent so the veins of them are visible, their cartilaginous skeletal systems apparent, and then they can be seen through like wax paper and then they lessen further until they’re no more.

Once gone entirely, Crick pulls the cage key from his waistband and unlocks his entrapment, and he weeps his way from skeleton to skeleton, picking up skulls and holding them to his face.

But, a skeleton is gone.

On the ground, beside the cage, he finds the bones of his boy’s arms, scattered haphazardly, the fingers of both hands jumbled together, but that is all.

The absence of the skeleton births a quest.

Let us now envision Crick as the wanderer he becomes.

Initially, he is not as our first encounter with him. He is not a streaked stranger inked with indigenous-mannered images. He does not travel with a one-eyed mule. He does not haul harpoons from town to town and profess the coming onslaught of motherfucking sharks. He is less the ancient mariner and more Rapunzel’s fallen prince. He bears no warning of things to come, he merely asks the questions as he progresses, “Have you seen an armless boy?”

An armless boy? An armless boy?

Crick crashes his way from town to town eating slop from trash cans and prickly pears foraged from cactus paddles.

An armless boy? An armless boy?

His history plagues him.

An armless boy? An armless boy?

“You look familiar,” some say.

Armless boy?

“Didn’t you make off with my piano?”

Armless?

“Tell us again about the orphans?”

Boy?

The nature of his twisted experience is made further unbelievable by the fact that his wake is burdened with falsities espoused.

“Sure, sure,” most people say, “motherfucking sharks. Armless boy.” They shake their heads. “Get to the point,” they tell him, “what are you trying to take me for?”

Still, there are whispers. “A carnival. A freak show. A circus act. Some strangers.”

Crick gathers shards of stories and crumples them together in his mind. “There was a boy. The boy was armless.” And Crick follows any line offered him from place to place through miserable weather and over lands shunned by God.

In some towns, his reputation is so badgered he catches beatings for returning. He sees jail time. In the cells he hears more. From convicts whose pathways chance avenues of ill repute where, as Crick sees it, armless boys may be forced to tarry.

Crick slips down these outlets, himself

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