The Fold-O-Rama Wars at the Blue Moon Roach Hotel and Other Colorful Tales of Transformation and Tattoos by A. R. Morlan

Author:A. R. Morlan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, dark fantasy, tattoos, origami, freaks
ISBN: 9781434446190
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

GONNA GET TAT IN QATMANDUDE

Useless to go back there.

My uncles too have all died out on me.

After my uncles all died out my aunts next fell,

to die.

Yes,

why is it I alone,

just I alone have managed to survive?

I survive.

“Lament for Eyak” (recorded, 1972)

I.

“‘Qatmandude’? You pronounce it like the place in that old Bob Seeger song, only with a ‘dude’.”

Another June night in Qatmandude, nothing much to do in the Babylon of the Great Plains but stake out a table close to the air conditioning vents in the Calorie Bomb (trademark pending) on Rasine Street, order up whatever was the longest-lasting off the “Two Bucks” menu, and hope that some of the Original Bodmods staked out their table (always the same table, closest to the doors, next to the big floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows which faced the front parking lot. At least that’s what Leax, Sirvat, Kisa and Giollabuidhe (which had been shortened back in kindergarten to G’bud) hoped for, especially on nights when they’d already seen the movies playing at the Rohais, and all the good DVD’s were rented out by the time they got off work.

The Original Bodmods were more like family than blood kin to each of them; not only had the (mostly) octogenarians founded Qatmandude fifty years ago come this August, but they were still the most out there group of people living in Tattoo Town (as the zoobies and jinny-canvas and Inkamish camera-toters who passed through the town daily to take in the sight of all that tattooed, pierced and otherwise branded/scarified/cinched and/or manually reconfigured human flesh routinely called Qatmandude...mainly because the correct pronunciation of the place still eluded most of them)—not so much for their outward embellishments, but for their attitude. Which was something their folks and their folks had gamely tried to cultivate over the decades Qatmandude had been in existence, but as Leax, Sirvat, Kisa and G’bud admitted to each other over their “Quaker Shakers,” the town had peaked long ago when it came to genuine weirdness.

But as long as the Original Bodmods, haughty Moreen Picnhos, Qochata Wikvaya the Native American dude who barely ever spoke, Roano Nobody-Was-Ever-Sure-What-His-Last-Name-Really-Was (who never voted or owned a land-line phone, so since he lived with his old lady, who paid the taxes on his house and the utilities, no one but the IRS knew for sure who he was), Gwynn Lawson, the woman with the “Braveheart” face, Calvino Burrell, the guy who had actually built the first Calorie Bomb (initially called just “C B’s” after himself, but Calvino being Calvino, he did a reverse Morgan Spurlock and made his food as fatty, carbo-loaded and so-bad-for-you-it-just-had-to-taste-better as humanly possible without just shaping lard into a burger patty and slapping it on a no-dietary-fiber-whatsoever bun), shortly after he and the other four former flash-scrap couriers—people who used to take bits and pieces or sometimes entire human hides all embellished with tattoos to the Iron Mountain underground storage units, to be preserved and climate-control-displayed between sheets of glass way down under the

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