Harry rode shotgun. The white sedan flew through the night, past billboards, tall fast food signs, slabs and
tiers of aging concrete. A soft rust had gathered on the cars’ wheel wells, the tires were a little flat -
this was a 2003 Nissan, not too bad on the outside, at most a little beat up, but its interior, where Harry rode
somewhat uncomfortably, told a different story altogether.
Harry feet kicked around in the footwell as a schoolboy’s would - dangled, more like it - seeing as he
stood just 5 feet, 11 inches tall.
Driving was his “friend”, the one who had picked him up from the midnight roadside an hour earlier,
who called himself T o d d.
“Really?” asked Harry, who had heard that interested-sounding questions would get people to like you
more.
“Yessir,” half-replied his best friend ever, more intent on the vape pen dangling from his chapped
lip than on the dark road ahead of them. This brief reply had taken over a minute to arrive.
Thin Todd was also a manlet, standing a mere 6 feet 0 inches tall, but, as he had told Harry just after picking
the young hitchhiker up, “we can’t all be lanklets in this American globohomo burgerpunk reality. In
fact, little dude, our bodies are shrinking at an alarming rate - by 2100 we’ll all be pygmies lil
duuuude.” The Toddman extended a tattooed wrist in explanation - an ink infochart was displayed thereon,
detailing the falling heights of Americans across the homogoglobe.
Harry took a second to run his eyes over the tattoo, then got around to the question he’d started the
conversation for the purpose of asking.
“Where did you say we were going again?”
“Welp,” answered Thin Todd, “I’m going home to McVille #321, McState #32, which is
hereabouts ten hours away, and you said you wanted dropping off at someplace called “the
Ovum.”
“The Ovum,” remembered Harry, “that’s right.”
The word Ovum reminded him of Onion Rings.
The Ovum was a new-fangled Cosplay convention, sponsored by Onahole and Wendy’s. Attendees to the Ovum were expected to arrive Completely Nude, which justified for today Harry’s complete lack of clothing. Never had there been such a hub of degeneracy in the continental United States (which is to say excluding Hawaii and goddamn Alaska) - at least not since ‘03, when in New York City the website ebaumsworld was founded in the penthouse bedroom of Jeopardy! host Al###e///x Tre(()))((())####””””b****K.
“I DID NOT CONSENT TO THIS!” shrieked the dying TV stalwart, loud enough for the author of this text to hear him. Harry didn’t hear, however, (nor did Thin Todd),and so the action continued as follows with a bark from Thin Todd:.
“I’m famished, senpai.”
“I could use a pickmeup myself,” Harry agreed. “Look! There’s a McDonalds!”. He pointed as he spoke, extending a childish finger. Harry paused a moment, finger still poised. Something was wrong… Todd should have stopped, or at least veered in the direction of the McD’s. Nothing of the sort had happened. Harry recognised that the car was not actually and had not been moving. He supposed that they’d been idling in the restaurant’s drive-thru for some time before his almost certainly atheist friend had so tactfully made the suggestion.
“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” Thin Todd scratched his goatee facial “beard”, attempting to place his order.
“Take your time, gringo,” the girl radioed through for the eighteenth time. A snap of static muffled her thick Latino accent.
“Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh”
“Why not a Junior Bigmac,” Harry chimed in, “like I ordered?”
“Nah little dude I’m six foot, not 5 feet 11 remember”
The Latina drive thru attendant caught wind of this admission, and a great roar of Chihuahuan laughter could be
heard through the radio set.
“Hehe” chucked Harry. “I hate long goodbyes. How do we do this?”
Thin Todd hid his face in embarrassment. He exited the drive-thru line, merging back into traffic, toward the
highway, and a view of Cultural Revolution 人權 Human Rights 民運 Democratization
自由 Freedom 獨立 Independence 多黨制 Multi-party system
台灣 臺灣 Taiwan Formosa 中華民國 Republic of China
西藏 土伯特 唐古特 Tibet 達賴喇嘛 Dalai
Lama 法輪功 Falun Dafa 新疆維吾爾自治區 the
Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 諾貝爾和平獎 Nobel Peace Prize
劉暁波 Liu Xiaobo 民主 言論 思想 反共
反革命 抗議 運動 騷亂 暴亂 騷擾
擾亂 抗暴 平反 維權子 強制斷種
強制堕胎 民族淨化 人體實驗
肅清 胡耀邦 趙紫陽 魏京生 王丹
還政於民 和平演變 激流中國
北京之春 大紀元時報
九評論共産黨 獨裁 專制 壓制
統一 監視 鎮壓 迫害 侵略 掠奪
破壞 拷問 屠殺 活摘器官 誘拐
買賣人口 遊進 走私 毒品 賣淫
春畫 賭博 六合彩 天安門 天安门
法輪功 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh
劉曉波动态网自由门
Yes
YES
The mysterious billboard rolled away slowly, until it appeared to be miles and miles off - standing over a more
polluted part of town, though the distinction was hard to make.
“Dude,” said Thin Todd, breaking Harry’s focus on the oriental mystery, “we ain’t
ever leaving this town.”
Thin Todd’s absent heuristic would prove true, truer than anything the borderline invalid had said in his
23 prior years of life.
“Here’s a place we can eat!” said Harry.
It was a Wendy’s. Harry was back in Wendy’s - the megacorp’s sponsorship of the Ovum had reeled
in yet another gullible Cosplayer. Nowadays any eaterie whose logo hadn’t been featured in sponsored spots
no longer registered as such in Harry’s mind. If you’d walked into an Italian place he’d have
been surprised to find a pizza there. If you’d sat down and ordered you’d have seemed to him like a
person eating out of a dustbin. You know this isn’t a real food place right?
Wendy’s marketing synergy had long ago infected most all of Harry’s thought processes, causing him
to think of consumption even at totally inappropriate moments--for instance, the last time Harry saw his sister,
Hermoine, he remarked how similar their names were to protagonists of the mega franchise spawned by J. K.
Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce.” His mentioning it had caught his younger
sister off guard, not because she’d never noticed the resemblance herself, but because Harry had brought
it up, quite loudly, in the middle of their parents’ funeral.
Thin Todd pulled into the Wendy’s parking lot. He wouldn’t let another drive thru bitch safely height
shame him from behind an intercom, so he lent Harry a shawl to cover his privates, and the two walked toward the
beaming yellow-red establishment, Harry’s bare feet bloodied and syringe-poked by the time they reached
its entrance.
Harry adjusted his glasses to read the menu above the register counter:
动态网自由门 天安門 天安门
法輪功 李洪志 Free Tibet
六四天安門事件 the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989
天安門大屠殺 the Tiananmen Square Massacre
反右派鬥爭 the Anti-Rightist Struggle 大躍進政策 the
Great Leap Forward 文化大革命 the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
人權 Human Rights 民運 Democratization 自由 Freedom 獨立
Independence 多黨制 Multi-party system 台灣 臺灣 Taiwan Formosa
中華民國 Republic of China 西藏 土伯特
唐古特 Tibet 達賴喇嘛 Dalai Lama 法輪功 Falun Dafa
新疆維吾爾自治區 the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region
諾貝爾和平獎 Nobel Peace Prize 劉暁波 Liu Xiaobo
民主 言論 思想 反共 反革命 抗議
運動 騷亂 暴亂 騷擾 擾亂 抗暴
平反 維權子 強制斷種 強制堕胎
民族淨化 人體實驗 肅清 胡耀邦
趙紫陽 魏京生 王丹 還政於民
和平演變 激流中國 北京之春
大紀元時報 九評論共産黨 獨裁
專制 壓制 統一 監視 鎮壓 迫害
侵略 掠奪 破壞 拷問 屠殺
活摘器官 誘拐 買賣人口 遊進
走私 毒品 賣淫 春畫 賭博 六合彩
天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Winnie the
Pooh 劉曉波动态网自由门
Feeling a squishy sense of deja vu, (or deja vu byproduct), Harry glanced over at Thin Todd, who read the menu
intently, and whose glossy and void eyes suggested that he noticed capital-N Nothing out of the ordinary.
“Do you ever feel like the movie of your life has started recycling stock footage?” said Harry.
“Recycling?” Thin Todd turned from the menu to face Harry with a super-sized measure of hostility.
“What are you, little dude, some pussy-ass ‘Save the Whales’ nigga?”
Harry said nothing, but slunk back down into his ratty shawl. A healthy breeze from the restaurant’s carcinogenic AC unit tickled his dangly parts. He shoved away the cranial tingle of mystery with a mental-stick, and ordered his Little-Guy Surprise Meal - a Junior Whopper complete with small-fry, small drink, and a toy: a limited-edition Tom Cruise action figure, meant to promote Cruise’s upcoming grimace inducing vehicle, Mission Impissable X, Super Size Me Agent “The Rock” Johnson.
His friend ordered a smoothie (Mountain Dew-Infused "Jingleberry") and three Wendy’s vape pods.
“Do you guys have the ATHEISM-flavored smoothie?” His now atheist friend had asked beforehand,
hopefully.
“Sorry, sir” the cashier had answered. “We just ran out. A man in a fedora and a gleaming
white suit of armour came in ten minutes ago and bought the last of ‘em.”
Harry couldn’t stand in the same light as the cashier.
He was a tweenager, a gen-Z male still younger than Harry. A boy whose skin was wan and boogery - colorless
under the fluorescence of the Wendy’s interior lighting. Bits of dried cum clung to his face, to the
wispy, xenoestrogen-stifled peach fuzzes on his upper lip. But Harry imagined that this boy’s mother loved
him anyhow, and this was the thought that occupied Harry’s mind as he consumed his Little-Guy Surprise,
sat in his shawl across from his now confirmed-as-atheist friend. Out the window he watched semi trucks merge
lazily onto the freeway.
*
The boy woke sluggish. He raised his face from where it had stuck to the plasticky Wendy’s paper, and
hand-wiped the ketchup from his baby fat cheek. It was morning. A crisp and lightly-fogged morning, again
looking out, a few semis parked sleeping along the shoulder.
His progressively ever-more atheist friend was nowhere in sight.
Harry didn’t panic, but scooped up a couple of the raggedy fries left from his dinner, and made breakfast
by dipping them in the ketchup that had stuck to his cheek and forehead.
“Not bad.”
He exited Wendy’s from the back kitchen door, after half an hour trying the front and side doors. Harry was not quite nude, Thin T odd having left the shawl on him, graciously, or perhaps forgetfully, but what Harry had gained in clothing he’d more than lost in confidence. His newest friend had abandoned him. It would be another long and humiliating day of hitchhiking.
The Ovum was scheduled to start within the week. He would have to ditch the shawl on the way, sure - but did he really want to, when it was the one token of kindness he’d ever earned in his life? Now that Harry had tasted friendship, it seemed, his desire to prance with nude degenerates and cosplayers was in danger of falling by the wayside. Harry thought wistfully of the Sailor Moon costume he’d made for last year’s convention - though still a happy memory, it now felt strangely empty.
*
The Ovum, you’ll recall, was a new-fangled Cosplay convention, sponsored by Onahole and Wendy’s.
Attendees to the Ovum are expected to arrive Completely Nude, which still continues to explain Harry’s
lack of clothing.
“COLLABORATIVE NOVELS ARE the FUTURE OF PUNK LITERATURE,” cried Stanley Winks, event organizer of
the Ovum. “AND Harry’S JOURNEY BEING SYMBOLIC OF the SPERM’S JOURNEY TO the OVUM, TO the EGG
HATCHING LIFE ITSELF, I THINK THIS WHOLE MYSTERY HAS TAKEN A TURN FOR the … BIZARRE?”
The old pervert lay in bed within his 2000 sq- foot McMansion, the site of the Ovum itself. The Tiananmen Square pasta flashed through Winks’ mental webs, his eyes pulsating with Matrix-esque descending lines of vertical techno babble.
Winks both funded and hosted the event every year. It was a point of pride that pubescent and lithe boys such as Harry would arrive at his home, nude and dizzy with excitement. the Ovum was basically a Greek holiday, and Winks’ McMansion was the fucking symposium [eurobeat intensifies].
Winks had made his fortune in biotechnology, doing contract work for AIPAC and Walmart. He patented a new series
of mobile scooter devices, for use by the most obese and “mobility-challenged” consumers in the
nation. Mobile scooting was where Winks’ genius lay, sure, but his genuine appetite was for boys such as
Harry. His need had begun with the mysterious Chinese runes that Harry had witnessed the night before. That
hadn’t been the first time Harry saw the symbols - it was only a month earlier that Harry had been eating
Alphabet soup, when the same Chinese text block appeared in his steamy bowl.
“GET ME the CFO OF MCDONALDS ON the PHONE’ Winks sputtered.
“Right away, sir,” purred his assistant, a faux-hawked LGBTQ+ “person.” “Do you
want her cell or landline?”
“I’LL TAKE IT IN the BEDROOM” shouted Winks, without a hint of irony.
His assistant pressed a button on the massive switchboard at its desk. A series of alphanumeric LED characters
crept across the monitor.
Damn. Simplified Chinese, again.
A dial tone echoed from the house’s PA system, then was abruptly cut off.
“Mmmmmyellow?” It was the female CFO of McDonald’s - a newly appointed figurehead to divert
the public’s frustration from (((Them))). Her name was Downton Abbey, but instead of London, England she
was from London, Missouri. Blonde. Forty-six years old. Five foot nine at home, Six foot two in her gov’t
mandated dominatrix heels - and at 165 lbs she was exactly as firm and authoritative as needed.
Winks knew the bitch from college. Both were members of the Yale old-guard, and carried themselves accordingly. (Neither had ever eaten McDonalds in their lives yet harangued the public with promos and daily social media posts - managed, of course, by secretaries, handlers, interns who paid for the privilege, trying their hardest to depopulate the whites of burgerland so a new race of rootless and toothless halflings could replace them and be marketed to nonstop and without question, across the homo globe.)
It was the Chinamen again.
And Winks knew all too well what would come next.
动态网自由门 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Free Tibet 六四天安門事件 the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 天安門大屠殺 the Tiananmen Square Massacre 反右派鬥爭 the Anti-Rightist Struggle 大躍進政策 the Great Leap Forward 文化大革命 the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 人權 Human Rights 民運 Democratization 自由 Freedom 獨立 Independence 多黨制 Multi-party system 台灣 臺灣 Taiwan Formosa 中華民國 Republic of China 西藏 土伯特 唐古特 Tibet 達賴喇嘛 Dalai Lama 法輪功 Falun Dafa 新疆維吾爾自治區 the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 諾貝爾和平獎 Nobel Peace Prize 劉暁波 Liu Xiaobo 民主 言論 思想 反共 反革命 抗議 運動 騷亂 暴亂 騷擾 擾亂 抗暴 平反 維權子 強制斷種 強制堕胎 民族淨化 人體實驗 肅清 胡耀邦 趙紫陽 魏京生 王丹 還政於民 和平演變 激流中國 北京之春 大紀元時報 九評論共産黨 獨裁 專制 壓制 統一 監視 鎮壓 迫害 侵略 掠奪 破壞 拷問 屠殺 活摘器官 誘拐 買賣人口 遊進 走私 毒品 賣淫 春畫 賭博 六合彩 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh 劉曉波动态网自由门
The message seared the backs of his eyes, blinding him temporarily as he roared and shrieked in pain. Covering
his face, he fumbled about his bedroom for the phone receiver. the imprint of the text still flashed in his
retinas, pulsating with the blood in his forehead - xenoestrogen deficient but adrenochrome rich. What is that
“- chrome” stuff that they take from babies or w/e? I forget // (I think it’s called vernix
caseosa)
“ABBEY!!!” Winks screamed.
“Yes, Stanley?” she replied, entertaining his early morning insanity for the sake of their business
acquaintanceship.
“THE CHINKS, ABBEY, THEY’RE HACKING the burgerPUNK and STEALING MY BOY PUSSY!”
“What the Hell are you talking about,” reproached Abbey, “ I really, well, uh, think the
ADRENOCHROME has gotten to you. Have you taken your contra-pills this morning?”
“Darling, we all consume and torture-rape children,” Stanley reminded her. “You’ve
already forgotten pizzagate?” he asked, with the anachronistic foresight of the higher-level addict
“Talk about peak burgerpunk, eh? Anyway Abbey, have YOU taken YOUR pills?”
Stanley’s retort reminded Abbey that she’d skipped her birth control for several days. “Oh
… rats!” mewed the intimidating and green-eyed dominatrix, whose womb bulge belched (with love)~ She
tapped a quickdial contact on her iPhaggot device: “Planned Parenthood …”
It was past noon when Harry managed to flag down a ride. A late-model SUV with a stick figure family on the back
windshield.
Harry noticed something unusual about the stick figure family: each member wore a Chinese-style rice paddy
hat.
“Ruh-roh,” Harry gulped.
The family invited him into their sports utility vehicle, and he sat in the middle row, on a mound of hay,
between two precocious Chinese children. One child played with an abacus, while the other caught flies with its
chopsticks.
“LOL,” said Harry.
“Ror where?” replied the Father who drove extremely poorly. Harry suspected his eyes were opened but
couldn’t tell for sure.
Minutes passed that way.
Just as Harry became comfortable and things quieted, the family’s dog leapt out happily from the back and
into Harry’s lap.
“OH he rick you arr over!” the Mother laughed. “Teeheehee!”
“I didn’t know you Chinamen kept pets,” Harry said in between getting licked.
“He’s not a pet,” the father corrected him, sternly.
Harry had been nervous about choosing a restaurant, since he didn’t know what kind of food girls liked or didn’t like. In the end, he had decided on a little French bistro—the only French restaurant in the whole development.
It turned out to be a terrific choice. His date had ordered the escargot appetizer and sautéed sweetbreads
for a main course and loved them both. Harry himself was a little less adventurous, opting for vichyssoise and
veal in a buttery herb sauce, but he was happy too.
The wine was a Chateau Picard ’88—a good year, according to their waiter. The Date had high praise
for that as well. Harry just knew that the stuff made him light-headed. After dinner, he programmed his car to
take them to a secluded spot in the hills that overlooked the town. The vehicle stopped in the field of a two
hundred-year-old magnolia tree and Harry came around to open his Date’s door.
“You’re quite the gentleman,” she observed.
“I’m a graduate of the burger University,” he replied. “We’re all quite the
gentleman.”
“All?” she trilled!
“Well,” he told her, “we were all taught to be quite the same gentleman. I guess a few of us
forget who he was from time to time.”
“This gentleman,” she asked, “What exactly was his name?”
If Harry had been dumber he would have let his eyes narrow, or perhaps through a motion of the body or a twitch of the eyelid let on that this wasn’t the sort of question an innocent all-American date really ought to be asking pre-coitus. It was the kind of question that made a fella’ switch genres and start ta’ ask himself what this broad was up to. I mean, what she was really up to, behind all the sweet talk and the shared complementary mayonnaise packets. The way she’d got the snails out of their shells like she could have slaughtered invertebrates blindfold. Hell of a dame. Hell of a footgame.
Harry took a draw on the hand-rolled cigarette that had found its way into his mouth and said.
“Look, sweetheart, there was quite the gentleman once, let’s leave it at that. Now why don’t we forget all that alma mater business and get down to brass tacks, shall we?”
She swooned right onto the gearstick.
*
The following morning I was on video conference with execs from
burgerKing. Perhaps you know the company. Two years ago they caused a stir with their Marilyn Monroe
commercials: the singular way the dead actress, standing over that same New York steam vent she made famous
almost forty years ago, turns and invites the home viewer to try her brand of Onion Ring. Had burger King not
won a seat in the Senate that year, the lawsuits would have buried the company then and there.
The Onion Ring Association of America does not fuck around.