An Army of Lovers. David Buuck

the whimpering, the crying, the screaming.

      At first, while all of this went on, Demented Panda and Koki joined in, running in circles and thrusting their hips forward and back, spinning their paws and claws around each other, thrusting their thumbs up and over their shoulders, making airborne chest-to-chest collisions while air-stroking their cocks, stopping now and then to pantomime a series of heretofore classified but since wikileaked enhanced interrogation techniques, contorting their mouths into idiotic grins. But eventually, after eating his fill of doughnuts and arepas, Demented Panda, bereft of reason and unable to enjoy the performance any longer, began to utter complaints, with frantic contortions of his body, mumbling over and over to himself that all he had wanted to do was write nothing about an unremarkable place, write a picturesque story of a post-pastoral plot of land. His frantic contortions now hovered somewhere between the panic-tremors of bodily shock and some kind of ecstatic postmodern dance.

      Koki abruptly stopped and stood still and was silent for a long time, looking around and making the face, the not-quite-exasperated-yet-thinking-hard-about-it-but-also-frustrated face. And then she looked down at her hands. Koki’s hands were normally fuzzy with down and sharp black talons, but one of them had now mutated into a pink and fleshy handgun, oozing and dripping amniotic fluid. Koki knew this dripping flesh handgun of hers well, for her hand oozed and dripped with amniotic fluid whenever for some absurd reason she thought she was not a part of what was going on around her. Koki thus suddenly knew her role and, in the habit of Bacchantes, with her hair disheveled, her claw now a flesh-gun dripping and oozing amniotic fluid, went to the mouth of the tunnel of the heavy-rail public rapid transit system and began shooting from her flesh-gun hand an inextinguishable flame composed of native sulphur and charcoal. As she did this Demented Panda followed along behind her plaintively asking her what she wanted and she looked at him for a moment and then shrugged, as if the answer should be obvious to anyone who had spent the summer visiting a small plot of land in an attempt to write A Picturesque Story About the Border Between Two Cities. I want to burn it down, Koki said. And Demented Panda found it hard to argue with that and so stood beside her, his fur matted and covered with shit, feverishly rubbing his face as if trying to wipe the idiotic grin off his face, his eyes alight with the simple anticipatory pleasure of throwing more wood onto the fire.

      Everything burned. And when everything had burned and all that was left was smoldering ashes, the spell ended. The mobile production trucks, the buses, the oversize tractor-trailer trucks, the careening ambulances all vanished, the musicians, the breasty girls in top hats, the food hawkers, the clowns and acrobats all vanished, but the raw sewage remained. With nothing holding them together, Demented Panda and Koki sat there in the raw sewage. All that was left was the feeling of sitting in raw sewage and knowing lostness deep inside.

      There is an analogy, although far from perfect, that may shed some light on what went on that day. Imagine Edible Fig. Edible Fig was first domesticated outside his native region in Mesopotamia in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is today Iraq, and then he travelled to what is now California beginning in 1769. It is not clear to Edible Fig, nor to anyone else, how Edible Fig spreads into preserves and wild areas, but he does, and then once there he grows quickly and spreads vegetatively by root sprouts, forming dense thickets that exclude most other plants. This story is not just the easy and obvious one of invasion from afar. There are other ways that this analogy works. Most figs are dependent on a species-specific agaonid wasp and Edible Fig is no exception. And so, one afternoon, Fertilized Female Wasp squeezed through the scale-covered ostiole in the end of the syconia of caprifigs of Edible Fig and laid one egg in each of the short-style female flowers that Edible Fig was growing. Eventually, still inside the syconium, Adult Male Wasp emerged and quickly cut into the flower containing Female Wasp Larvae and mated with her. Female Wasp then gnawed her way out of the syconium two or three weeks after this and then she searched for another, younger syconium and squeezed through that narrow opening to reach the flowers inside. This opening was so small that some of the pollen on the body surface of Female Wasp was scraped off as she passed through. There she inserted her ovipositor down the style tube to deposit her eggs, but the styles of Edible Fig were so long that Female Wasp could not easily deposit her eggs, so she had to insert her ovipositor down the style tube again and again and as she attempted this again and again she deposited pollen and fertilized the flowers vigorously even though she realized that she would never be able to leave the syconium.

      THE SIDE EFFECT

      she had done what she usually did. Upon arrival at her office, she turned on all her machines, the lights and the computer and the recording devices and the printer, and then proceeded to go through the new stack of forms, along with the student papers, the administrative emails, the healthcare forms, the websites, blogs, status updates, voicemails, the photos and videos. As she did this she ran her left hand along her thighs, and then under her blouse, over her breasts and down her side, until she felt it. A brown-black tick, burrowed into her flesh.