LOVE BACKWARDS

Alright, SHRUBBERS.
I might now commit to writing about you all.
I began this story a week after the Boxcar Rocks, and I abandoned it the day I started.
Looking back, it's a twisted tale and it needs to be told.
I hope the beginning is as entertaining as it was fun to write.

Love Backwards: Strange Mythos in the American Wild
by
Edward Beard

“Where’re you going to?”
I had one eye on the road and one on Bane; Bane, who rode his silver space-ship scooter alongside my car.
“I’m off camping, Bane. To the Rocks. Remember?”
Bane bent his finger around his moustache, held it taught and let go. His mustache shines like plastic. Like Snidely Whiplash or like Mr. Potato Head. I am sure Bane has multiple facial accessories hidden in a posterior compartment. His mustache snapped back to a curl, like a balloon string having ridden the blade of a scissor.
“Yea, that’s right.”
Fake blood was crusted along Bane’s neck. The living dead of Newark roamed the streets just hours prior, now hiding their whiskey-laden minds from the sweltering sun. The night played host to a crowd of undead characters, each dressed to the nines in ghoulish uniform. Arnie from Pete & Pete. Paul Bunyan. Jesus Christ himself. All came out to win a stuffed bear filled with condoms, lubricants and miscellaneous sexual paraphernalia. And to drink. Good lord, to drown in drink!
Bane’s neck made me conscious of my own claret hue. My hangover prevented me from washing my face with much enthusiasm. And my fucking head. I—
Shit, the road—
“Christ man, where’s number sixteen at?”
Bane kept pace with the car as if his racer was an extension of his lower torso. A man on wheels. A road renegade, a Hell’s Angel who hijacked the body of a court jester and crashed it into Bob Dylan.
Bane could blow you a tune on a harp more naturally than he could have a conversation. He could slam his drum’s skins louder than Hell’s bells themselves.
But this isn’t about Bane.
It wasn’t about Bane.
It was about getting to—
“Sixteen man, look left.”
To sixteen. Bane didn’t even have to check the house number. A tiny, two story stack-of-cards-of-a-house was loaded with freaks in high-costume.
And Bane, the musical mustachioed cyber jester was off on his rocket.