NOW HIRING

NOW HIRING-
BEWARE
I want twisted characters, capable of nailing a dog to a sofa and tipping a terrible waitress 50%. They need to have angles and rough edges and bad habits and obtuse beliefs, obsessions, and secrets and mildly exotic tinsel lives. I want them to keep the story rolling, to possess that bent plastic self-conviction that they have the power to control this mad ocean instilled with the honor of gradually gradually gradually drowning us-quickly. I don’t want these garbage cut out tofu Barbie dolls whose personal Nagasaki is a week-long nightmare involving worms like the imagination of Picasso. However lovely. I want flesh with bubble gum and happy meals for sensual favorites. I should meet my paper children on the streets, watch their worries drip out the cuffs of their pants, feel the zebiba on their forehead like god’s kiss, smell their caramelized urine and green apple shampoo and lasagna stains, and taste their bleached paranoia as they carry the weight of my eyes and their sin and dreams on the way to the nowhere of everywhere, the next great setting of their lives, a temple, where the curtain is torn, damned, and dumped in a gravel parking lot sold for 30,000 leaflets of painted tree skin. And they have no idea what I have in store for them, not a shred, and it makes them all the more pretty and innocent and darkly amusing, that I almost wish they were human. Hahahahaha…

Lucana

The patron leaned against the temple wall, fondling a smoke between wooden fingers, his eyes like a stenciled eclipse. Something poisoned his figure, maybe his bent shadow, or personage, the way he skinned the dirt road with his boot, or the smoking barrel of a pistol with a history of putting bodies six feet under a lead rose smiling in his coat pocket. Whatever it was didn't bother him. It only disturbed the backdrop, like a needling feeling in a room that raises hairs.

Conscience. An art conserved for the critically-acclaimed and damned.

"You understand- how delicate this is- a surgery- you strip sinew from bone, a tumor from flesh."

"Is understanding perquisite for action?"