DEC 31
"It's New Year's, Daddy Head! Yay!" Mack Smith took the large, dusty green pickle jar containing his father's head off the shelf. Its dead, moldy eyes stared up at him, its mouth grimaced into a permanent frown. Mack shook the jar lightly, as if trying to wake dad up.
"Aren't you excited?" Mack asked. The head, bobbing in the shaken, swirling green pickle juice, seemed to nod in return. "What will you wear?" Mack scrambled round his one room cabin like a yappy puppy till he came upon a red bow discarded three Christmases ago. He slapped it atop the jar. "There! You look so pretty!"
Mack set Daddy Head upon the uneven, bare dirt floor, followed by the rest of the collection from the cabin's lone shelf. Mommy Head, Big Brother Head, Bitchy Mean (but hadn't she been such a good girl since Mack operated on her?) Ex-Girlfriend Head, and Muffy and Buffy, two lost twin female hikers from the big blizzard last year. His eighty acres of Piney Forest had nurtured him well. Fresh, clean streamwater, squirrel and deermeat, plenty of wood for the fire ring in the center of the handbuilt cabin, and, occasionally, little treats like Muffy and Buffy.
"Ya'll," he spoke after arranging the heads in a friendly semicircle round the fire and garnishing each with festive bits of floor filth and dust bunnies, "it is time for resolutions. Jed, why don't you start?"
Big Brother Jed Head bobbed in his dank, crusty green water. Tiny bubbles escaped his nose. His jar, a pickled egg jar salvaged from the dump, had a small crack in the lid. Lately the incoming air had made Jed Head rot. His nose had grown shrunked and shriveled and his beard and moustache were clotted with bits of his eyebrows and forehead. Mack picked up the jar and clucked disapprovingly.
"Why didn't you get me anything for Christmas this year, bitch?!" he screamed at Big Brother Jed Head. And Mack had gone to all the trouble of putting a talkative pine cone in the jar on Xmas to keep Big Brother Head company. Mack threw the jar with all the force his emaciated arms could muster. It shattered on the creaking wall. Jed's face bubbled into a smear of green protoplasma.
Tears misted in Mack's eyes. Regret tore at his stomach. "Oh. Duh." No wonder Jed hadn't gotten Mack anything - two weeks before this Xmas, Jed Head, always the kooky, vivacious sibling, had announced his conversion to Zen Hassidic Islam.
Jed Head smeared into a puddle on the floor. Mack choked out an apology to it. Visions of Jed Head Puddle arranging a meeting with ACLU lawyers danced in Mack's brain - wouldn't this smashing, then, be considered a hate crime?
The stench from Big Brother Puddle seared Mack's lungs. He held his nose as he turned back to the party guests. "Sorry bout that. Extra hors d'oevres will be served, in light of the incident. Now, Mommy Head, what are your resolutions..."
Outside the cabin, men in black suits stood stolid amoung the trees. They weren't police, FBI or CIA. Worse: they were MicroSimp, Inc. And MicroSimp had already made its New Year's resolution. What with the Oklahoma City bombing trial and the Unabomber, serial killers were gonna be billion dollar business next year. MicroSimp planned to expand, to venture into previously uncharted profit-waters.
Mack Smith prototype Nintendo games, T shirts and action cabin playsets had already been manufactured.
(Excerpts from Happy #$*@ing New Year, the new novel by M.P. Madden, coming out in paperback from Erehwon Press in 1998. Enjoy, kids.)
FEB 8
There wasn't a dry eye in the house. The audience sniffled and sobbed, blew their noses into their official Mack Smith pickle jar dusters. The courage of one man, alone, fighting to save his family from themselves - therapia extremia, MicroSimp had coined the term, right after Mack used his profit margin shares (and putting the former CEO's head in a jar) to take over the corporation. A regular American success story.
"Actually, I killed two people on the way over here," Mack said to Margo Finley, hostess of the Margo show. The audience laughed. "No, seriously." The audience laughed harder. "No shit," he smiled.
Margo frowned. The word shit - that would have to be bleeped. And Margo had resolved this year to end censorship, along with world hunger and her fetish for lesbian chihuahuas in rubber and PVC boots. Oh well. Fuck 'em if they couldn't take a joke. The "shit" stayed.
Margo conferred with her producers. Keep "shit"? A bold move on daytime TV. Mack busied himself staring at a lovely young lady in the front row. She seemed deep in thought, as if concentrating on some vexing puzzle.
Assholes. They all had assholes. She could smell them. They need to be wiped, the lovely young lady thought as she grinned back into Mack's face. Now there was a man with a clean anus. She smiled and sauntered up to him after the show. Angel was her name.
That night, in the hotel room, he spread his hairy buttcheeks and showed it to her. It was clean, all right, and it smelled of his inner self. She loved that smell - the smell of the soul, of the inner wind, of his spirit. When the made love, she farted on his face, allowed him a whiff of her soul. But only once. Each poot, a little chip of that soul escaped. Constipation meant immortality.
At the wedding next week, a hundred dignitaries and celebrities attended. The wedding cake was a giant brown-icing anus with a real pickle jar stuck up it. The picture on the front page of every paper the next day showed Mack lowering wedding cake into a large jar containing Boris Yeltsin's head. The society pages' only comment was that they didn't understand why, among love, cherish and honor, Mack and Angel vowed never to eat beans.
MARCH 23
"Jars, Steve," the computer-animated multicultural female head floating in the mobile antigrav pickle jar 2000 slyly assured her coworker. "Jars be the way to go." Steve, the wanker with his head still on his shoulders, agreed. MicroSimp men entered to begin Steve's therapia extremia and the happy sounds of decapitation filled the screen as the commercial faded to black.
Profits were up. Mack had recently had President Doo Doo Brain and the stupid liberal congressmen therapiaed. Republican money was involved, but most newspaper reporters' heads were now in jars, so no one noticed. And Angel had had her anus surgically removed. Life was good.
Still, Mack missed Piney Forest. So did Mommy Head. Unlike Mack, she whined about it constantly, aloud. Mack emptied the pickle juice from her jar and replaced it with urine. While he did it she tried to suck his dick. Daddy Head grew jealous.
"Suck me knob, Mom Head!" Mack smashed Daddy Head and let Mommy Head complete the blowjob from beyond the grave. Oedipal complex satisfied, he turned to his sales figures.
Only thirty percent of Americans had undergone therapia. And it wasn't as much fun, Mack having his corporate whores do it instead of himself personally. Mack was too busy attending board meetings and profit/demographic projection assemblage conferences to chop and slop anyone anymore. He frowned as he looked round his spacious office.
Mack tried to make himself feel better by having his office at the top of the skyscraper converted to look exactly like his cabin in the woods. Beefy guys in T shirts pounded hard sod into the carpet and nailed ramshackle boards across Mack's Piccasso and Van Gogh. Mack had his new Head Family, the remains of the 8,000 or so Bosnian refugee children that MicroSimp so generously adopted and gave free therapia to, put into his office. Angel, at least, was pleased - her new 8,000 babies had no assholes, no not one of them, no buggery to be had.
Still, Mack felt unsatisfied. He pulled down his pants. He combed through hs pubes. There it was - he found it - his penis. So tiny, yet, here, at the top of the tallest and bestest corporation in the world, his dick strangely felt so big.
Angel laughed and laughed. When she was through, the world's population would have no anuses left for Microsimp to buttrape. They would be like her - beautiful, immortal, free.
Mack shook his head. "I love you most of all, Angel Head," he whispered, and reached for his machete.
(See you next year, kids.)