This has ensconced my life for FOUR WHOLE DAYS, which, honestly, feels a bit excessive, but I wanted to be thorough.
So now, I sincerely hope that you enjoy the orange marmalade of my labor, decanted and disposed of entirely at my discretion. I scraped it together off the adrenaline sidewalks and plated it exactly how I see fit, health regulations be damned.
That’s the advantage of working alone: no hovering clipboards and self-indulgent administrative planners taking credit for nothing or divesting themselves of the same. No cooling rack committees and target demographics, and absolutely no one asking if that passage really needed that much zest.
Only you think it doesn’t Virginia, only you.
The lack of code compliance, incidentally, is why it’s free (but still copyrighted). Something I’ve learned is that the counterintuitive is often true. You might think generosity is easier when you finish ahead of schedule, but I learned it invites punishment when the teacher uses your American History essay pick on Hitler and the Third Reich, the cover-page portrait splayed out on her desk, as a reference comparison for those up-and-coming.
Please take a moment for self-care and read what follows: a heartwarming life lesson in which everyone learns the meaning of the season, more or less at the same time, and not necessarily in the way they expected. Think of it as a non-denominational holiday meditation for the chicken soup: warm, familiar, and served before anyone can argue about the recipe.
Please don’t consume this piece of media if you are pregnant, expecting, taking an MAOI, are allergic to prose, or an unaccompanied minor. In fact, don’t consume it at all because you can’t.
I’ve never seen anyone eat other people’s words like sustenance, only their own.
Be Mindful Now
ADULTS ONLY
Asher Kadar Wolfstein
December 2025
There is a place where the skies used to be bright blue and wide, and the humdrum of life itself held wholesome passions. But what of now? Her mindfulness app reminds her to be mindful, mindful of the now. She knows it’s the only advice she actually needs, and yet, it brings her little comfort these days.
When she walks down the street to pick up her centralized mail, she is always acutely aware that her family’s cookie-cutter house looms awkwardly at the end of the cul-de-sac on the edge of the subdivision, apart from the others. It just happened that way, nothing anyone did on purpose, but Betty felt it must always be that way, regardless.
It was closer to the neighboring family farmer’s dying cornfield than to people.
She could hear the white picket fences and the two and a half children in the yards whispering stock tips to the wind. As she walked up to the socialist mailboxes, she could see they were full of unsolicited invitations to conform. But, once again, Betty Lou was keenly stubborn about her Jell-O molds. They were to be the last sacrament before the great unspooling.
It was her last hurrah against the kale smoothie-skinned fakies that curate themselves into the doom scroll. An unnecessarily aggressive contrarianism against the notion that we all must swipe right on other people’s joy. In her home, the Jell-O stood, or wobbled, as it was, in a quiet, rebellious aspic of celery and Spaghetti-Os. She knew, deep down, that her place in the world as a stay-at-home mom, or what everyone sneered at as a tradwife now, was waist-deep in mushroom soup.
People like to say things, but they don’t really understand what ‘elbows up’ actually means.
Betty Lou Honeypot did.
She sighed, returning home after collecting the collector’s collections, and took in the chrome-plated pressure cooker she knew as her kitchen. It was timeless, or at least, that’s what everyone said. Like it was out of a movie. Oftentimes, Betty imagined herself as if she were in a movie. However, that reverie would usually shatter the moment she encountered someone who was. It was in those moments that the chaos remained below.
Today she was wearing her polka-dotted dress, and her blonde hair was coiffed with aerosol. It was time to start making dinner. Nothing fancy. She felt fortunate to be old enough to recognize that everything around her stayed fancy without any effort on her part, and that if there was anything fancy at all, it was just the camera.
As she contemplated the casserole, looking through her list, leftovers flashing through the pineal gland of her third eye, she abruptly looked up and out the window. The horizon, above the cornfield, was there. It was just there. Her mind slid.
Betty’s laughter ricocheted off the avocado-green cabinets in the pinball machine of her relationship, her hips grinding against the sink’s edge. She had never noticed the faucet dripped in Morse code, but why would she? Hank, that slab of post-war beefcake… post-war beefcake a la car mechanic… post-war beefcake a la car mechanic with a side of hot-dog drive-in gut, pawed at her blouse, buttons champagne cork popping.
They could beam her up any day now.
He growled, sultrily, repulsively, his breath reeking of Lucky Strikes and the tang of American dreams, “I been thinkin’, Betty—if things were meant to make sense, they wouldn’t come with instructions.”
He promised her the world, you know.
His hands, callused from riveting illusory rivets of carbon stability, shoved her skirt down to her waist, exposing thighs pale as Wonder Bread. They trembled with the seismic shift of suppressed seismic shifts.
She remembered a snort sprayed the flour for the church social cookies across the counter, as his palm tried to smack her ass cheek. It just thudded; his calluses formed an existential glove of permagrunge that simply was who he was.
In the now.
And that was where Mrs. Honeypot was.
In the now.
The horizon vanished, as it always did when Betty Lou Honeypot snapped back to reality. Betty often slipped away, her mind dredging up cherished memories to warm those blissful cockles, releasing the scent of love from the wax that was her heart. Her obligatory therapist, a thing she had gotten so she could fit in with the other wives at Bridge, told her this was preferable to the endless scrolls for validation. They said, “Betty. The only one who can validate you, is you.”
Such wise words.
She set the oven to preheat. She knew it was just for tonight, but an uneasy feeling inside her incited a brief riot of emotions. The sickly haze had been unsteadily fermenting ever since the permagrunge thud-slap, which stung like a stop sign with extra lights, because no one cared to notice it. To her, it increasingly felt like it was for the meltdown.
The One Where Everything Fractured Into What It Was.
Why was Hank in the station wagon with the babysitter?
Her son, Timmy, hop-stepped in with the precision of a 7-year-old ballerina. He looked up at her with overripe olive eyes stuffed with future conspiracy theories. He had come in from the backyard, where the atom-smashing sunset painted the hedges in hues of impending irrelevance.
Betty cooed, “Hi honey, what’cha up to?”
Timmy replied, surveying the counter for any leftover church cookies, or cookie churches, “Oh, nothing, just sniffing out the rot beneath the rosebushes.”
Betty arched her eyebrows, “Oh? Is that all? And what about your homework? Tomorrow’s school.”
Timmy winced, scrunching his face, “Aw, shit, I forgot.”
Betty put her hands on her hips and looked down at him like a Hallmark Christmas card, “Then go do it, young man! It’s not my job to pass third grade.”
Timmy bounded upstairs, “Okay, Mom! Dinner smells scandalous.”
She thought to herself, “Scandalous?”
Timmy’s head popped in from behind the wall, just his head, mid-air, and said, “Thesaurus word, like austromancy. Picked it up from the neighbor kids.”
“Mindfulness,” Betty thought to herself, unsure of why she was so anxious. It was just a horizon. It was just a sunset.
Maybe she should subscribe to Rosalind’s dog’s ASMR podcast. She knew the one. Everyone knew the one. It was up the street and liked to stare out the window. Everyone in the subdivision raved about Beowoof: Story of a Dog’s Life, featuring such episodes as Get Ready With Me For Mommy Walkies, and Mom Brushes My Fur With Mic Attached. It was so relaxing.
Or so everyone said. But Betty was quickly reminded by the phone attached to her hand that Beowoof never spoke, just stared, silent and aloof. She always picked up that the dog thought he was better than everyone watching. The content creator, what Rosalind called herself to encourage the pretense of legitimacy, tagged it #NoTalking, as if it were the superior experience.
But it wasn’t.
And maybe he was.
She repeated to herself in the voice her app made, “Breathe the now.”
Betty Lou Honeypot’s pussy throbbed, slick as spilled Crisco, as Hank dropped to his knees, burying his face between her legs. His tongue lashed her clit with the deleterious deliriousness of a man trying to get some before the bomb dropped. She bucked, scraping her heels against the new floor-heated linoleum. The linoleum’s design, a Magic Eye painting, vacuumed up all her unrealistic aspirations, sucking in each one before anyone could fulfill it. Hank’s permagrunge gloves kept grabbing at her pubic forest with abandon while the radio crooned, “Que Sera, Sera,” in that warbled, warping tone it had ever since Timmy’s microwave mishap.
As things go in lives of quiet desperation.
Betty shook her head in a prolapsed exhale, “Now, Mrs. Honeypot.”
She glanced at the darkening window one more time before pulling out the Pyrex bowl to mechanically gyrate up some more homemade Whip’N’Chill for the dessert salad she was preparing special for tonight. It was for the Bewitched all-night marathon, known all week and around town as the Bewitchathon.
Mr. and Mrs. Honeypot had this very moment planned as a respite for Hank from the grueling routine of the gonzo capitalist wasteland, a time to relax and spend quality time as a family: watching television. A dessert was in order, according to Dame Curtsey, so Betty dutifully chose a lime gelatin tower with mini-marshmallows as the obvious manifestation of the categorical imperative known as the TV tray. The marshmallows were a small gesture to Betty’s Midwestern lineage.
It was a sharp autumn in 1957, or whatever year the kitchen insisted on. The light inside had started to lean toward evening, and Betty paused to wipe a smear of sweat from her forehead, her eyes wandering off into half-formed fantasies of things coming undone, one after another, without asking permission.
The Honeypot house on Elm Street towered like something out of an evil video game nightmare castle: Hedge ramparts sliced the yard in defenses against elitism, but its pride served as a prerequisite of silent liberal arrogance that would only later be acknowledged, except only as just maybe a little smug for those too “sensitive” for actual civilization.
It stood there, like every other acceptable thing, as if the world wasn’t one button-push away.
A grudge-bearing ghost with apron strings pulled tightly around hips, seething with unspoken rage, haunted the kitchen and was known by the name Betty Lou Honeypot. Her hands, slick from Dawn Dish Soap, clenched the wooden spoon with white-knuckle determination as if it were a lover who couldn’t quite deliver, or Hank himself.
Moving on from the Whip ’N’ Chill, her companion that sat patiently within the freezer, she stirred the hot dish with mechanical intensity. Steam rose, a spectral exhaling of some primal buried thing that chuckled at her housely toil. The aroma of cream of mushroom soup and ground beef filled the air, an oily vow of “normalcy” in a neighborhood where no one knew about the fallout shelters lurking beneath their manicured lawns.
Betty’s thoughts crept into the shadows as she labored, her mind a playground that makes priests sweat anticipation. Thirty-two and ripe as the apple in her father’s eye, her blonde curls pinned like a noose, red lips twisted in a half-smile that dared the devil. Full breasts heaved against her blouse, nipples perking at the chill draft from the window.
She could tell the snow would fall soon.
That heat in her belly twisted sharper now, a dangerous itch demanding rough fingers to claw her thighs apart, a thick cock to ram her pussy raw until she screamed for mercy that wouldn’t come. She bit her lip, chuckling inwardly at the blasphemy, good Christian wives didn’t fantasize about being bent over the sink and fucked senseless, but oh, the thrill of that edge, like dancing on a razor wire over the abyss.
Outside, the lights hadn’t come on yet, to no one in particular. And so the suburb’s banality blared with lawnmowers and kids’ shrieks. However, a discordant hush, just beyond the noise, prickled the skin like static before lightning today.
The rotary phone cord coiled like a serpent ready to strike, silent but smirking.
Hank would be home soon from the garage, his burly, broad-as-a-barn-door frame reeking of motor oil and unspent fire, his cock heavy in his pants from a long day. It sounds romantic, but their bed was a battlefield of boredom. And, as the television and all her magazines told her, that just wouldn’t do. His shaft plunged nightly with pumps of clockwork, and spilled quick before he collapsed. She was always left aching and alone.
Except for the Saran Wrap, which mocked her appropriately.
The sun’s boundaries bled across the sky on schedule. The ambient shadows stretched, their fingers groping through gingham curtains. That’s when the THX hit: a vibration, low and through the floorboards, tickled her funny bone with menace.
The chrome toaster on the counter winked at her, its slots yawning wider, almost hungry, as if it might snap shut on a careless finger and swallow it whole.
“That’s ridiculous,” she laughed to herself, shaking it off like a bad dream, “You’re just Toaster McToaster, that’s all.”
She winked back.
But the air was thick, its feral charge fraying the edges of their counterfeit vignette. Hank’s truck growled into the drive. You might think the plague-like hacking was Hank’s smoker’s cough, but it was actually the engine, the automobile’s tires crunching gravel in a rhythm too much like approaching wurst-like thunder.
He lumbered in, oil-smeared hands flexing, the black streaks on his skin pulsing faintly, alive with a greasy gleam that made Betty’s pulse stutter.
“Honey, I’m home,” he rumbled, voice gravelly, eyes raking over her ass as she leaned into the oven, the heat between her legs flaring dangerously hot.
Those filthy fingers trailed along the doorframe, leaving dark smudges that seemed to writhe, and she caught herself grinning, a mad little laugh bubbling up. Because what else do you do when impending fascism feels like foreplay?
Unseen on the horizon, just beyond her clit, that rumble built, not rain but a dark snicker, poised to crack in a snickersnack. That chaos that had rutted so deep in the chasms was looming. They could sense it, perhaps, with the subterranean tendrils of their subconscious, but no one could ever finger it.
The Sunday School children, all young and innocent, would make alcohol marker drawings: the end of the world. It was just a fantasy, a desperate escape. There wasn’t anything visible to fear, no crash, no fire, no smoke. There weren’t really any bombs anymore, at least, none that anyone spoke of. It was all computers now, robots… allegedly. It was hard to tell through all the noise of everyone getting ready with each other.
You could say it was some Sharpie prophecy scrawled on the bathroom stall walls of 7-11s or strip-mall cafeterias.
But all that was mostly urban myth. Nothing really amounted to anything beyond some emo kid spreading, “Fuck me Satan!” across the stall door in a bad fanfic fever dream. Everyone knew demons were sexy; there was no need to announce it.
Maybe it was just a button. The type that clung to fabric and buried the throbbing veins of repressed housewives and the globular nerves of grease-monkey husbands, all waiting to erupt like a volcano denied too long, the starchy seams bursting and the pleated skirts disintegrating.
That disturbed malaise washed through Betty’s intestines again as she felt something first, anything, everything, but mostly the unspoken chaos that ran underneath, coiling in her gut, slick muscle begging to devour the facade.
She turned from the stove, her cheeks flushed not just from the oven’s glow but from the phantom grip of hands that weren’t Hank’s. Hands of no man. Hands that weren’t there, merely impressions from the world of Betty’s sliding mind; rough, insistent paws pinning her wrists while a tongue lapped at her dripping folds.
The animals from the backyard would shed their leashes, and to her libidinous horror, mount her in the grass. The intrusive thought made her thighs clench, pussy aching with the weight of what society had always shoved down: good girls bake pies, not spread their legs for the neighbor’s hound or the vacuum cleaner’s humming snout.
But tonight, as Hank kicked off his boots, his bulge straining against denim like a bomb primed to blow, she laughed. It was a sharp, giddy bark that echoed off the Formica counters.
That was why Hank married her. The first time he heard that unique laugh, it tore him out of a life hellbent on developing waifu body pillows that could carry you around to social events while you do nothing. It was love at first guffaw.
For half a pregnant second that seemed like it was eating for two, they stared past each other’s eyes.
In the heart of suburbia, where the cornfields whispered secrets to the rotary phones, or full-blown opera depending on who you asked, Betty Lou Honeypot stirred her notorious hotdish with the ferocity of a woman suppressing her inner Madonna. Betty’s mind was already time-warping like a faulty VHS tape stuck on fast-forward during Michael Jackson’s Thriller music video.
She reminded herself, “A good wife knows her place is waist-high in cream of mushroom soup,” just as before.
Betty wore an equally polka-dotted apron stitched together by the shattered dreams of a thousand Tupperware parties. The fabric strained hard against her bosom boulders so prodigious that, had they been any larger, their boobular mass would force cartographers to register them as minor tributaries on the local floodplain.
She looked back up at Hank, her hips swaying a bit. It wasn’t her neurodivergence, or her performative tradwife femininity someone had once tagged on her in the depths of disk horse, but so that she could avoid McCarthy’s blacklist while simultaneously ignoring the futility of trying to get into the Elk’s Lodge talent show.
She was suffocating.
Hank wrung his hands, his inexplicable swagger a signature quality he used to sign the mortgage. Betty stared at his permagrunge, now slicker than a Miami Vice undercover op.
But the lumbering giant didn’t use just any motor oil. He used the one Martha Stewart recommended! A little luxury in life anyone would understand. This motor oil was the Barry White of industrial lubricants, known for slithering with the sultry confidence of an oiled-up boa constrictor who attended too many Duran Duran concerts and now moonlighted as a backup dancer for Prince.
Even engineers are slaves to fashion, but, any other way, and they couldn’t justify dipping into Timmy’s funds for his first six weeks in college.
It dripped from Hank’s fingers in lascivious rivulets, each dropped bassline hummed so deep it could impregnate a carburetor at 50 paces. It began to pool on the linoleum.
“Welp,” Hank welped, his stature guttural. “Mr. Thompson’s Chevy purrs like a kitten on a catnip bender.” He slung his drawl over his overalls. A VFW rally flagpole was keeping them tented over an embarrassing bulge. His cock still hung, ready at a moment’s notice to meet the demand of everyone’s expectations.
“Honey,” Betty raised her wooden love-stick and cheerfully said, as if the camera were already on, “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas!”
They both laughed like they were about to puke.
But what about the oil? It was so luxurious that Betty knew it had been waiting impatiently for a recommendation video. It’s too bad Hank hated being on camera, dysphoric over his all too human appearance. Why couldn’t he be like everyone else and just let the computer represent him as his true self?
Betty didn’t have a whole lot of time to think about that, finding herself absentmindedly staring out the window again. The lights had finally turned themselves on, which is the only way to do it these days. The horizon was finally a dark red mundane abyss, but something about it struck Betty again. She really needed to close the curtains.
Fortunately, the oil had gained a mind of its own, crawling up Betty’s calf like a tentacle from a forbidden Lovecraftian dildo factory she never ordered from, and tickled her knee pits with whispers of satanic verses straight out of a Judas Priest album, or was it Dr. Seuss?
“One vag, blue vag, let me in your engine block!’”
Her eyes went wide. “What did you say, dear?”
Hank looked at her, not in shock, but as if his smile had known what was to happen today.
Satanic panic swept through the kitchen faster than a runaway campfire ghost story at a PTA meeting. Betty Lou Honeypot cried out, “Hank! The oil’s been possessed!” and stared at him, aghast.
“It’s Lucifer’s own WD-40, blessed by Beelzebub, bottled in Branson, and now, come to corrupt our Lutheran hotdish heritage!” She pleaded, “Just like the pastor-“
Now she knew she really was in a movie. The title was, “God Is Not Dead, He’s Just Motor Oil.”
Betty warbled, her voice ricocheting off the kitchen linoleum like a polka-dot band on bath salts. Before her next synapse could fire, the universe hit pause. The room was still and silent. Midsentence, the oven timer chimed out Billie Jean in underworld Casio, guided by the white glove itself. The infamous casserole a la Betty was done!
Betty thought she had been stirring, but apparently she was just moving the wooden spoon in the air, fueled by the fervor of Dionysus and Adderall, while staring out the window. But that’s not all. Betty’s raw-dog white-knuckling of her utility’s extension, whisking the air into a froth of molecules in just such a way, turned the table on.
Like, a lot.
The table, feeling cute in its recent coat of Lemon Pledge from Betty’s earlier dutiful fenestrations, unleashed its latent horniness upon suburban domesticity. Its wooded woody surfaces sweated slicker than a televangelist’s hairpiece and gleamed with an unholy luster born of ritual sacrifice. The oak leviathan lunged at Betty’s thigh with the gusto of a Viagra-filled centaur at a My Little Pony convention.
Damn her brony son and his stupid hamster games. She should’ve known letting him hang out with those 50-year-old Pokémon-obsessed weirdos at the game store was a bad idea. But who could’ve known it wasn’t just ADHD and social anxiety?
Who had she been to judge, the algorithm?
But, there was something else.
There was the mushroom cloud rising on the horizon, quietly stunning in its comprehensively momentous definition.
Betty Lou Honeypot was blown away.
Emotionally.
How, indeed, had she gone from church basement spit roasting to this demonic… what was this?
She looked down, her mind extremely focused on nothing now, to female gaze at the table in heat, or, you could say, a heated table. Then everything snapped back, and to Betty’s surprise, this wasn’t the slippage she was used to.
Acktually, it was the apocalypse.
“What in the Eisenhower administration is this?” Betty skreed lesbianly. Her total derangement failing to notice her artificial appendage clattering into the sink as the table revved its panpsychical engine, the Panpsychicon 25, into a frenzy of frottage. The lemon smell had parted suspiciously into a mix of patchouli and a Grateful Dead concert trying to bleed through the Iron Curtain. With the enthusiasm of the randy Labrador next door, as Betty was all too familiar, it rubbed up against her sensible cotton panties and ground coffee like it was auditioning for the Breakdance Olympics.
It creaked, groaned actually, “I’m just a piece of furniture.”
Mrs. Honeypot looked up at her husband, who just stared at her, and then out the window, watching the mushroom head start to peak.
The table, emboldened by generations of repressed midwestern furniture lust, burrowed against her entrance, sensibly through the cotton, with the cold, calculated subtlety of a jackhammer in church. If it wasn’t going to make it to the Olympics, at least it could retain its class as a Solid Gold Dancer… just replace the choreography with interpretive twerking, or something. It cried, “I may be hard and wooden, but I’ve got soft feelings for your soft curves.”
Betty’s eyes softened like margarine, and they spread like it, too. It was the sweetest compliment she’d ever heard from a piece of furniture.
The table went on, “They make me splinter with desire, m’lady.”
And just like that, Betty Lou knew she was dealing with a dreaded Nice Table. Just her fucking luck. Literally. The wordplay was so heinous that it curdled the milk, the carefully laid plans of Whip’N’Chill, and oozed the ick everywhere. Where was Julia Child when you needed her, because this dinner was already circling the drain. Company Chinese, this wain’t.
Hank stepped forward, his permagrunge stubs now permagrunge clear, the oil having become obscured, somewhere, and said, “Look, Betty, it’s magical! Your milkshake summoned the entire bedroom set, not just the bureau drawers, to the yard.”
He stared lovingly into her eyes, his hand cupping her cheek, “You could probably draw forth half the den furniture too, you’re so beautiful.”
Betty’s heart melted, much like the mushroom cloud in the distance began to do.
But she was scared. She was frightened of this kind of vulnerability, this sort of authenticity. She had never seen Hank’s emotions on his sleeve before, or on the floor, or up her skirt, quite like this. She always imagined he’d reveal all at her deathbed, and she could quote Edith Bunker, like a proper woman, and call him a “real pip.”
That’s how it was supposed to go, not like this. Not an unspooling of fallout, a lukewarm heat death of cabbage water.
But, as her high school history teacher, Mr. Sticklemeier, always said, “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?” The jackboot march of knowledge was strong in this one.
Mid-clap, as the table frottered harder, her body betrayed her. It was the weirdest timing anyone except me could have imagined, but shit happens: her hand dipped into the casserole, scooping a glob of tuna-and-tater-tot sin that she smeared across her heaving cleavage like it was edible body paint from a Prince concert. The oil joined the party, slathering her skin until she glistened like a greased-up Miss America contestant in a Jell-O Celebrity Deathmatch, but, Midwest style, with lime gelatin and marshmallows for that “extra touch.” It was the least it could do for Gran
It was a good thing.
Betty imagined her audience, the one across cyberspace she could never garner, that special audience composed of a thousand judgmental garden gnomes, all weeping tears of mayonnaise. If only she could have ever been.
But, she couldn’t, she wasn’t, and she didn’t.
This was the now.
Desire detonated into the kitchen with the force of a Pop Rock bingeing Teddy Ruxpin, the nuclear blast just starting to spread from the epicenter, and like a mascot from every 80s cartoon, specifically, Alvin and the Chipmunks Go Feral (Betty and Timmy’s favorite), Rufus the Raccoon tumbled in. He was not your average trash panda, but, instead, a radical mischief maker in a tiny Member’s Only leather jacket and obnoxious nondescript backwards baseball cap. His bandit mask was askew, somehow, as if he’d just escaped.
“Ring-a-ding-ding folks! Time for some paw-sitive frottage!” he yipped, his tail swishing like a faulty antenna.
He leaped onto the counter, and the romantically swept-up couple admired the rhinestone bedazzled jacket spelling out “YOLO.” Hank surmised that this had to be due to the time he lost a poker game to Inspector Gadget one late TV night; it just fucking had to be. He knew it. The TV told him!
But Betty seemed to be enjoying herself, “How cute!”
Rufus, like an out-of-control bowling ball, skid-launched over the pink Formica. Even though she was good at doing a lot of things, like animals, Betty wasn’t the best at everything, like color theory. Turns out you can’t actually have it all.
It reminded Hank of his youth, like the time he’d performed Grease Lightning at homecoming as a teenager, because he was made out of it. The epileptic procyon semaphore, knocking over Betty’s wobbling past, harkened back to that one green-tinted earthquake of ‘74. The fat raccoon flattened a Citrus Festival commemorative plate, one of five made that year, in preparation for a deft crotch-first launch at the salt shaker.
Almost no one had noticed the small bean vibrating with the anticipation of a maraca at its first salsa lesson, except, of course, Rufus, who made Sonic the Hedgehog look like a tax accountant. This meant the world to the container of sodium chloride.
Furry crotch crashed into glass, tumbling together until a still frame. Rufus had his arm over the white pillar’s metal clavicles, much as he’d just yawned in a movie theater, and announced, “You ever meet somethin’ that just knows you?”
Betty and Hank looked at each other and nodded in based agreement, “Mmm, yeah, I’m glad someone finally gets it.”
Then our furry hero got to work, howling as he bent the shaker over and started thrusting with the syncopated fury of someone trying to seduce a lava lamp. His rocket unsheathed like a pink Crayola at the weekly Etch-A-Sketch orgy downtown. Hank could swear the rhythm matched the song playing in his head, Walk This Way by Run-D.M.C., but he couldn’t be too sure. It was just interesting to think about.
The pepper mill shivered in the corner, scandalized and aroused, as the spice rack braced itself for an intervention.
Rufus gleefully yipped, his tip dripping sardonic seed like a novelty ketchup bottle at a clown funeral, “It’s ah-saaaalt!” The sound that followed wasn’t a mere laugh. It was the unholy cackle. It instantly triggered Betty Lou Honeypot’s trauma: the unsettling laugh of Timmy’s Baby Laughing doll he’d take to bed every night.
Betty often lay awake, her eyes as wide as Garfield clocks, haunted by the echo of the toy’s cacophony eagerly sliding over her son’s conscience. It was in those moments, what should’ve been midnight quiet, that her mind would wander to her love for her son. Her heart would clench with great spasming fear around the invading world beyond her comforting walls.
Every echo of that mechanical chuc- whatever nightmare it was, reminded her of the innocent heart she was trying to shield amidst the chaos. A vulnerability surged through her, grounding her amid the whirlwind of death that swirled around, even as that laughter echoed within the shadows of her mind like a taunt.
The dust was approaching. The couple thought to themselves that things better start moving fast and furious before it was all gone.
There was no need to alert the fuck trophy. The boy not only had nothing to do with what was happening, but he couldn’t. He was the future that would never happen: all the might-have-dones, all the could-have-beens. None of them mattered now.
Hank, ever the alpha male with a jawline chiseled from Mount Rushmore due to spending all his schooling mewing, which is why Rufus visits in the first place, dropped his pants faster than a stock market crash in ’87. His cock, a Frankenstein’s lab experiment borne from testosterone, government cheese, and cheeto dust, sprang free, veiny and throbbing, much like the national debt on TV, and already slick from the amorous oil that now coated it enough to deep-fry the Iowa State Fair; if it were a car.
“Betty, darlin’…” Hank’s eyes were wild as a possum and glowed passionately from a fire beyond, a DLC unlockable only at the world’s end. He smiled warmly, “Let’s show this varmint how we, the Midwest, wrangle a Category 5 subsidized clusterfuck!”
“Oh, Hank… I thought you’d never ask.”
He grabbed her by the apron strings and spun her with the finesse of a malfunctioning Tilt-A-Whirl, her first love, onto the table mid-frottage. It creaked in lemon-scented ecstasy. Hank dominated her with his own Oppenheimer, the nuclear option, plunging into her pussy with the force of a combine harvester plowing the back forty.
Betty moaned.
Hank had yearned for decades to hear that sound once more. It held the unforgettable beauty of a foghorn, mixed with dying bagpipes, reality-show meltdowns, and telenovela sobbing. Betty’s full, tight, spongy walls clamped down like a Venus flytrap at a hotdog-eating contest. The oil lubricated every thrust, making squelching sounds that echoed like a bad dubstep remix of Material Girl.
Together, at last, they wistfully drifted back to their first loving fuck at the abandoned haunted roller rink.
It was finally now.
Everything was now.
Rufus, pupils now wider than plot holes, spotted a pentagram in the spilled soup noodles and let out a shriek that sounded like a kazoo solo at Burning Man. “This isn’t dinner, it’s a portal to the forbidden buffet! The Appetizerpocalypse is nigh!” he trilled, spinning in place, much less Fabio, much more Beyblade.
“What!?” Hank and Betty’s traumabonding yeeted them right back, uncomfortably.
“The devil’s in the details! This hotdish is a gateway to hellfire’s hot wings!”
He scampered up Hank’s back, his tiny paws kneading like a squirrel with a PhD in #SwedishMassage (you know the kind), and in a display of raccoon acrobatics not seen outside cursed children’s television, Rufus unsheathed his furry flesh flute and pogo-thrusted it between Hank’s cheeks, slapping out a rhythm that reminded Hank of his Chippendale dancer rejection. While the table bucked beneath them, the raccoon hummed the theme to DuckTales, violently and without consent.
For a moment, time hiccuped.
Betty, sandwiched in the chaos, reached for the rolling pin she called Excalibur. Her tight twat energy was so pure, it rolled dutifully into her outstretched hand. She locked eyes with the window fern, the fallout spreading beyond the single-paned glass, and flexed a psychosexual whisper into the plant’s consciousness, “Bear witness, photosynthesizer.”
Then, with the solemnity of a Supreme Court justice, and just like one, instead of bludgeoning the oppressive patriarchy, she used it to peg the chair leg while belting with abandon, “I can do anything!”
The twitterpated Victorian wood vibrated in response like a possessed wizard’s broom from a Sears catalog gone wrong.
She continued in joyous abandon as the oil, that treacherous, mutable ooze, slithered into every available nook, poking Betty’s ass with the diplomatic insistence of a United Nations peacekeeping force, “I am chaos… destroyer of wood. Also, the IRS is a scam!”
Hank pounded away with the determination of a man struck with divine inspiration, his balls providing the percussive soundtrack. The room was devolving quickly into a faux-Scandinavian polka of depravity. And then, like an angel passing overhead, there was a singular moment of quiet, and everyone reflected on their fleeting happiness. The only sound was the wet, unenthusiastic ball-slap applause cradling Hank’s psyche as he realized all the Powerball numbers that flashed through his head were pointless.
For once, the spatula finally admitted to itself that, when it comes down to it, it should’ve gone to law school.
All there was, was now.
The seductive sludge of capitalist lubrication, the wealth of nations, percolated into cracks and crevices, fingering Betty’s ass with near-gelatinous tendrils while Hank continued pounding away like his life had nothing to do with it.
“Oh,” Betty moaned, “Oh, Hank,” she moaned again, “It’s like the oil’s jealous! It’s fucking me harder than you!” she finally gasped in veiled emasculation as a means to the ends of ejaculation.
The Machiavellian pillow talk fully draped the room when the masked bandit chimed in, “Yeah, this slick stuff’s got more moves than Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future!” Interest rates had piqued when Rufus climaxed prematurely, classically spraying raccoon cum across the counter like confetti at a satanic bake sale. It mixed with the casserole, creating the one fondue from hell.
Outside, a single goose honked in the distance before total annihilation.
Amidst the unmistakable scent of lost opportunity and imitation Gruyere, Hank grunted a response, sweat shining on his brow now, “It’s territorial, hon, but if it asks to see my birth certificate, I’m calling the governor.” He was deep in concentration, his political affiliations falling to the wayside. He was subconsciously stripping himself of all things as if he had a choice.
Fully embodying the electrifying experience of starring in a porno dressed up as a B-grade werewolf movie, Betty’s head rolled to the side. As she gazed across the chaos, the 36-year-old suddenly remembered she needed to buy more baking soda. The box in the fridge was nearly empty, and she wasn’t sure if she’d replaced it last spring or the spring before. She made a mental note to add it to the grocery list, right after canned peas and possibly a new sponge.
Scrub Mommy always worked better than the clippings of her armpit hair. Her mother taught her how to make sponges just like in the Depression, and she was about to write a blog post extolling its natural, unmedicated virtues before she decided to compare shop. Boy, would that have been embarrassing.
The old one was starting to smell faintly of pennies.
For a moment, she wondered if she should try the lemon-scented kind, but then decided that was probably just marketing. Besides, she didn’t want the table not to feel special. The kitchen clock ticked. Outside, a squirrel sneezed from the faint whispers of fallout. It was still out there because it refused to get a Ph.D. in #SwedishMassage, and because of that, its life sucked, and nobody gave a shit.
Then everything continued as before.
The oven exploded in a puff of purple smoke, having been voyeuristically breaching containment for weeks now as a pervert’s periscope. Hank bellowed, pulling out to Jackson Pollock Betty’s apron with ropes of cum thicker than gravy over biscuits. The table shuddered a stiff and wooden orgasm so bad it splintered a leg in ecstasy, while the oil pooled into a shape on the floor that looked suspiciously like Angela Lansbury in her Jessica Fletcher days and whispered ‘I love you’ in bubbles. Betty’s inner peristalsis was so therapeutic that it found its true self.
Clearly, the serpent hadn’t come out yet.
Neither had Betty.
Rufus was muttering something about living under the Bandstand near the West Corner of the Park, where nobody ever knew his name; Hank was spent and panting; Betty was fingering the dip, as you do; and the refrigerator was humming, consistent and unfazed.
“Well, Hank, that’s one way to spice up supper. Pass the liver, Satan can wait for dessert.”
Hank could hardly see straight, but was quickly recovering from the mental fog of a full day’s labor.
Suddenly, Betty ejaculated, “Gosh darnit, I even forgot today! Remind me to round the neighborhood for Canadian census envelopes. The useless things drifted in, and now they have nowhere to go. If their fake-ass government won’t dispose of them properly, I guess good ol’ American citizens will have to step up.”
Sitting up to rejoin the living for the remaining thirty minutes, Hank did a singular finger half-wag, like a tail might the dog. He performatively reaffirmed the validity of her existence with a single word, “Priorities.”
Finally, his wife was aroused. Old dog, new tricks, same wife.
The refrigerator hummed with artificial dramatics that went nowhere, having never finished a crossword. Its unrelenting B-flat buzz reminded everyone that, no matter how many orgies you witness, defrosting still happened every Thursday if anyone ever fucking cared to notice, Ethel.
Rufus was now missing a shoe and sporting a monocle, something everyone tried to ignore. He waved his arms around like he just didn’t care, a technique he’d learned after traveling Eastward in a forgotten episode, and tried to vanish into the ether by casting a spell involving the price of rutabagas. That’s the way teenagers did it back on the planet Twylar. When that didn’t work like it usually did, he started to panic a little.
The water never chops the wood, nor does the wood ever haul the water, even after enlightenment.
The smoke from the oven parted like a post-sermon crowd at a megachurch after someone shouts, “Jesus hasn’t appeared yet because he’s hiding behind God’s Instapot!”
Suddenly, Betty’s kitchen was less Sodom and Gomorrah and more back to the set of a faith-based film about casserole redemption. Marshmallows? Hank grabbed the bag with evangelical zeal, cramming Betty’s mouth full mid-word, her lips smacking around those sticky puffs like a youth pastor’s first communion.
“Take. Eat. This is my body, and also, Satan’s never survived a potluck with my mom’s Jell-O salad, so 86 the invite!” Hank declared, his eyes reflecting the righteous fervor of a man who’s just won a debate against a fictional atheist professor.
This whole experience so far had been as if one had “cloud-watched” at Reagan-era Bohemian Grove and then called it a spiritual podcast journey rife with military secrets and incestuous depopulation mind-control. Despite the merchandising opportunities, Betty was able to see through the dissipating acid trip smoke like a rational person for once and realized the kitchen resembled a warzone of erotic entropy.
“At least I won’t be stuck doing the goddamn dishes,” she thought to herself, curl-ironing her toes in fun, “Feminism for the win.”
“Suck that sugar. Suck it.” Hank whispered with great moral longing, “Somebody’s gotta sacrifice themselves for the greater good, Satan’s got nothin’ on corn subsidies.”
Hank commanded as if he were the decider, as if he could ever measure up to be a get-ahead man-child who mistook ritual for righteousness and performance for purpose. A momentary flicker of dissatisfaction crossed his face as he realized Betty hadn’t climaxed.
For Hank, the “s’more foreplay” was his way of grasping for control amidst the chaos, a more profound craving masked in self-deprecating humor that he took out on everyone else. It was his last shot at reclaiming something lost, a fleeting escape from the mundane campfire circle reality that often felt like over-proofed yeast rising in a sea of searing banality.
People thought he hated himself and was profoundly insecure. They really knew, for sure, as always, but reality arbitrated otherwise: all he ever wanted was to get their teeth out of his neck.
Meanwhile, the oil—an insatiable slick demon if there ever was one—oozed across the linoleum again, spelling JESUS SAVES before forming pseudopod-like comic book hands. The fascinating illustrations encircled Betty’s ankles and separated them non-con style with a great schloop that was disturbingly attractive to Hank, or so everyone had been taught. The motor oil had a Moses complex and was attempting to part the Red Sea, but, like most delusions, it crashed more near disappointment.
It’s what adults feel when they finally realize they weren’t careful about what they wished for, and the sound of grilled cheese really can’t slap the way you imagined it would. It sounded more like a plunger freeing a commie spy from the drain, like that meant something.
No one involved was still entirely sure whether this was real or a hallucination brought on by too much canned soup, especially Betty Lou Honeypot the Third. The kitchen filled with the scent of sanctified sin and the fitting ambiance of Baby Laughing laughing upstairs at Timmy’s “homework.” The promise of an altar call hung over the children’s dessert table, a dish known as the Book of Honey-Roasted Lamb.
The doubt tried to penetrate the inner ring of Hank’s mind, flickering throughout his Platonic caves, leaving shadows of distrust. Was it possible to truly find salvation in a casserole dish, or was he just filling the God-shaped hole with marshmallow fluff? His spent cock twitched again, this time like a televangelist confronted by a science fair.
Betty gagged on the marshmallows, her throat bulging as she swallowed. The woman giggled and then coughed, laughing and choking at the same time. Finally, she let out a noise that sounded like a sleep-deprived itty bitty shitty committee tuning the weekly haggis again. At that exact moment, the universe apported another creature into the fray. It was a skunk, its furry chest puffed like a peacock at a petting zoo protest, and underneath that a glued-on googly eye.
“Rufus!”
The raccoon froze.
“Rufus ya ol’ bastard, were you really gonna cut me out of the after-party?” the mysterious interloper squeaked, scampering up the splintered table leg, which still gibbered from its Pledge-induced climax.
“Leaving you out? Nonsense! I was, uh, trying to achieve astral projection,” Rufus declared in a voice that sounded like Werner Herzog imitating a squeaky toy. With a non-existent appropriate mourning period, he leapfrogged over the salt shaker to get over a puddle of cum-gravy, emotionally. Rufus did everything crotch first, and this was no exception. He also scaled the splintered table leg like a boring NPC.
His pink rocket was beginning to droop flaccid, now enigmatically sheathed in a novelty condom adorned with tiny drawings of rutabagas and as spineless as a lobbyist at a narwhal convention.
Somewhere in the further darkness, a potato clock chimed the call to prayer, which was strange, because clocks aren’t potatoes. It was a sound somewhere between Gregorian chant and the opening theme to Wheel of Fortune.
No one cared what time it was or where their children were, but everyone could agree that it was the right moment for nothing.
The raccoon looked skyward but could not see through the ceiling, which you’d think would mean something, but only so many animations fit on one disc. He stiffy fashion peeped, unlike the rest of him, and consulted the schizophrenic phrenological slide rule in his mind. It annoyingly normalized a habit of continuously and insistently informing everyone of the measure of man, all before it would ever consider putting on its mittens.
It had this habit- no, that’s not right, and in my dutiful effort to hold its boundaries, I’ll say that it had always been like this, turning whatever passed for observation into an announcement. Once it started talking about what a man was, or wasn’t, it couldn’t seem to stop, just kept saying it out loud to the room, to the counters, to nobody in particular. Too early. Too often.
Long before it ever crossed its mind that maybe the problem was the cold, or the hands, or the fact that nobody had mittens on because nobody thought they’d need them. Or perhaps they did. I’m just gonna put this here and then detach, having said my peace.
“The Dawning of the Spuds is upon us,” Rufus sonar-ed, using a voice he didn’t normally use, one he picked up somewhere and decided to keep. It wanted to be heard. The words bounced only once, a terrible metric all around. It felt relevant to the discourse for a second, but then it didn’t.
Canonization ceremonies echoed The Fuckening with out-of-character accuracy, but it wasn’t catchy enough to stick to the wall like teenage cum in high school bathroom stalls.
The kitchen lights flickered, heralding the appliance’s rehearsed performance for company. Toaster McToaster pirouetted; Blender McBlender, a recovering alcoholic, delivered a Shakespearean soliloquy on whether to margarita, or not.
The microwave microwaved itself, Microwave.
Nothing of importance was accomplished, the magical moment violently knocking the wind out of the loving couple as the oil continued its consensual rape.
Betty finally gasped from the onslaught of marshmallow and, hoping for an encounter of the orthopedological variety, felt the urge to recite her childhood phone number in reverse out of repressed spite for the police state while balancing a can of creamed corn on her head.
Her husband, a true simpleton of the gendered variety, tried to tame his hair with the antique hand-cranked egg beater, only to end up looking like the before photo in a shampoo commercial from the Saw franchise.
The raccoon whistled the national anthem of a country no one had ever heard of, and for a moment, all was still. But it was only because the potato clock was winding itself up again, ranting and raving in ancient tuber tongues.
Outside, the squirrel sneezed. Again. This time, everyone noticed.
The end, indeed, was nigh.
Hank refused to let anyone upstage him in this performance art of perversion, grabbing globs of tuna chunks from the cum-laced gravy lagoon and ladling them with the culinary finesse of a YouTube life coach drawing your soul mate. It was so influencer-obvious that the casserole cornware flashbacked to the personal attacks it had endured when Betty Lou used to stream on her Roku while waiting to pull out her yeast cake.
It could still hear the fatal slogan it had long mistaken for goodbye, “Smash that like button if you’ve ever mistaken existential dread for foreplay!” It could never tell if it was the TikTok therapist or just the blender fucking with it during a breakdown.
The masculine man, adorned in red flannel like a paper towel, ladled the slippery mess onto Betty’s tits, watching with avarice as the cascade dribbled down to her navel like an erotic TED Talk PowerPoint slide about the ecological dangers of dairy.
It was truly a farce of fornication, but Hank intended to fix that. Watching as the warm glop flowed down his luscious lover’s tits, the sight reminded Hank of the perverted fondue fountain at the church social. Did no one else really notice?
“Time for some supper service, hon. Eat up,” he dove in face-first, his tongue lapping at her nipples through the Velveeta sludge, sucking hard enough to draw out further moans so uninspired that they harmonized with the distant hum of the neighbor’s lawnmower.
What was wrong with that guy?
Hank’s face Skibidi toilet emerged, no cap, as he grinned, “Or get eaten!”
Betty arched, her pussy clenching on nothing but air, anticipation, and the promise of engagement, as the engine oil tendrils climbed higher, one probing her slick folds with oily insistence, fingering her clit like a mechanic tuning a carburetor for maximum revs.
Hank was proud of his progeny, but, in the end, as it was, like most fathers, the oil proved a better inspiration.
He channeled the confidence of a man who’s read two self-help books and now believes he’s qualified to diagnose Stockholm syndrome for money, and recommitted, sinking back in. His slurping muted the unceasingly unnecessary notifications of a wellness app.
Hank just knew he could do better than the psychoconsumerist detachment of an Instagram “relationship expert.” You know the type, prone to doing lube-sponsored posts on Reader’s Digest’s Better Homes & Gardens titled, When It’s Actually Okay To Accidentally Gaslight Your Casserole while crying about how they’re the quirky girl whose life could never be explained, and that’s why everyone called her a bitch.
She wasn’t a bitch. She was am-bitch-ous. Now admit your mistake and never touch her YouTube channel again. Power was to be democratized; this would’ve been the future, after all.
Satanic panic rebooted faster than Hank’s father flipping to the sports section of the Sears catalog every Sunday, always for the badminton net reviews and the subtle thrill of imagining a new putter.
“The casserole’s calling to Beelzebub! It’s bubbling like witch’s brew from the ‘Bewitched’ marathon airing on CBS at 7:33 PM, 9 Eastern!” Betty wailed, realizing they’d never again sit in front of the television, white frothy custard on their spoons and phosphor glow in their eyes, but her hips bucked involuntarily, grinding against the invading oil that now fucked her entrance with the metronomic precision of Hank’s dad critiquing the folding chair stats on page 47.
Enter Stinky McFume, Rufus’s skunk cousin from his time as a Carebear. He’d been here for a while, but was now a solidified punk rocker from a Motley Crue video shot in the lawn furniture aisle after dark. His black-and-white stripes gleamed under the LED lights, pretending to be a soft amber, like everything else.
“Smell ya later? Nah, smell me now bitches.” Stinky snarled, tail fluffed high as he sprayed a mist of aphrodisiac funk, “I call this the Elon Musk.” It’s incensuous lavender clung to the air.
Hank, oblivious to everything but getting his wife off, corrected her, “You mean the Bewitchathon.”
His mouth worked her breasts into a frothy mess. This was the sort of chaos that would have made his father quietly sigh and retreat to his recliner to reread the 1978 edition (the one with the fold-out spread of thermoses). A faint memory of Hank’s father’s monologue on the pros and cons of mesh gym bags floated across the room.
The skunk’s scent hit like the climax of a cocktail party gone off the rails. Adults regressed into shrieking toddlers, tossing olives across the room, while children, unsupervised, played Chopsticks and Für Elise on the hors d’oeuvre trays with manic, greasy fingers. Hank’s cock, fully revived now as if by the power of three martinis and an off-key rendition of ‘Margaritaville,’ slapped against Betty’s thigh, pre-cum and oil mingling into a boozy, slippery concoction that Rufus lapped at as if sampling punch from a communal bowl.
“Tastes like Indy 500 victory laps!”
Fulfilling Betty’s secret wish, he thrust against her big toe with the enthusiasm of a toddler hopped up on shrimp cocktail sauce. His sexy odiferous cousin rolled God’s dice and joined the mock stats-driven melee, mounting the back of Hank’s neck, grinding his sheath against the man’s ear.
Stinky’s own cul-de-sac dangled, his fur-covered balls gleaming with the luster of a well-fed pet, much like the horrific jewelry everyone dreamt of purchasing during the Four Seasons, at least up until now.
“This little piggy occupied Wall Street,” Rufus babytalked through the traumabonding.
The pink rocket was reloaded with the unwashed scourge of the packaged proletariat and was entirely equipped and ready to populate Mars.
His thrusts swayed in resignation. Like a terrorist hijacking a pedicure, he never chose this. Who would? Rufus, the raccoon known for his interdimensional travel and wacky hijinks alongside Boy George, had never known the burden of free will.
“This piggie’s an instrument of human flourishing, a true hero of selfish desire,” he robotically monologued, as if he were discussing the decline of modern origami. His failed dirty talk untwisted everything like a pretzel in a tornado.
Betty, once again lost in the lunacy, grabbed Excalibur again, dislodging it from the table leg. It was still at a high frequency after its table-pegging escapade, but that didn’t matter to her. Nothing mattered anymore.
She shoved it between her legs. The handle slid into her ass with a pop that echoed like a champagne cork at the final, successful, fantasy Tupperware party that fulfilled everything that ever was. At least, for a Midwest checkout queen.
She grabbed the flannel collar of her lumbering husband, that meat slab of drudgery we’re all stuck with, and pulled him closer like a foreman wanting everyone’s ejaculate yesterday, “Fuck me like the dinnerware!” she demanded, because apparently, that’s what normal people do when the china’s not looking.
Fulfilling the promise of 4chan, as an adult well-versed in Communism’s righteousness, KitchenTok was set to lead the cultural revolution and change the world for the better, had it lasted.
Excalibur buzzed inside her like an off-brand vibrator moonlighting as immigration enforcement. Her pussy, having had a LinkedIn profile in an effort to legitimize sex work for mayonnaise-crying lawn gnomes, got its 4-hour work week tag-teamed by career-minded industrial tentacles lacking the prerequisite integrity to resist nationalization.
Stroking with the dedication of a Big Pharma CEO mid-trust fall, one pistoned her mythological Grafenberg while the other motivated her outer framing. It had spent the better part of two years positioning itself as a peer sex counselor for no reason, and it was determined to prove that a weekend’s worth of preparation could run the world.
The civilized, mature, propagandistic Gorilla Glue of the hierarchy really knew that anorgasmia was intrinsic to the value of synthetic gas station 5-20. Being their brother’s keeper, they only humored its misplaced sense of importance while doing what mothers of the populace have done from the beginning of time: complain to their crowd-funded Discord server to farm sneering support.
Fueled by the successful Elon Musk, Hank flipped Betty onto all fours, a position familiar to her. Atop the table’s Roman ruins, he rammed his driveshaft into the intelligently designed orifice. His angular chassis, his only possession now, quivered. At last, he could see it: the red-flag arrows, viral and screaming, suctioned to her waxen ass and pointed inward at the already vitrified heart.
One catastrophically unnecessary and grotesquely over-engineered balls-deep shove split the moment in half. His possession screamed like a banshee that would never know true love. The will-o’-wisp imagined an inner-city middle school Sadie-Hawkins dance it would never go to and couldn’t stand the realism. That was how Hank Delulu Honeypot willingly marched into the valley of the shadow of deathgrip: pleased with himself.
The table, ever the eager participant, rocked beneath them, its remaining legs scissoring against Hank’s calves in a furniture frot that splintered more wood, sending chips flying like candy at a hellish fire department parade.
But, for what it’s worth, the spatula had regained a sense of composure before obliteration, when it reminded itself that it was still that fresh catalog item from the Williams-Sonoma collection of yesteryore.
Hank, in one final thrust of industrial collapse, rammed his “artisan sausage” into her as he’d just watched a YouTube tutorial called How To Please Your Partner (But Only If They’re Also Made of IKEA Particleboard). He went balls-deep in one emormonous mediocre thrust framed as heroic. Betty’s scream ripped through the room.
She was a PTA president who just found out the bake sale is gluten-free.
Hank smiled at his neurodivergent wife, knowing that now she knew the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in between, “Welcome to suburbia, sweetheart.”
The rotary phone on the wall blared the riff from Pour Some Sugar on Me. Def Leppard was obviously possessed by a Milton Bradley Ouija Board for girls and a 1992 telemarketing script. Rufus, dressed in the confidence of a raccoon with diplomatic immunity, answered it with his paw: “Yeah, we’re pourin’ tuna, cum, chaos, and three-for-one corn coupons! Who’s this, the Ghostbusters?”
The other side gurgled, “I’m from the San Diego Tribune…”
Rufus sputtered like a spud, “The IRS?!”
However, it was just the oil speaking through the receiver, as it was known to do from time to time, its voice a bubbling nightmare of tingles: “This is your final courtesy call. The call is coming from inside the house. Lubricate or die. Press 3 for a free sample.”
Hank pounded faster, his hips slapping Betty’s ass with wet smacks, the sound syncing to an imaginary drum solo from a Van Halen concert. Stinky, not content with neck-humping, slinked under Hank and latched his muzzle onto the man’s swinging sac, sucking one ball into his mouth with the commitment of a competitive oyster shucker at the Iowa State Fair.
Hank would come again, fueled by the ghosts of every disco ball ever dropped at a roller rink, if his life depended on it, which it didn’t.
Betty’s climax had been building like a nuclear family, quietly, officially, and under enormous pressure, until it fully erupted with the chaotic fervor of HOA enforcement at a yard sale kombucha tasting, her whole body convulsed as the rolling pin in her ass re-enacted that one episode of Mr. Wizard nobody ever talks about. The oil in her pussy followed suit, but being void of creativity, only lubricating flattery, iridescended into a fractal vortex, and Hank’s cock, with the confidence of an unsupervised megaphone, stretched her walls.
“This is it!” she shouted to everyone not in the room, “The seven-layer salad rapture!” Radioactive ranch dressing desire dripped from her lips.
She added for propriety, and without helping anything, “Prepare for lift off!”
This was enough. For everyone. Including the squirrel.
Rufus lost the mask of composure he’d been pretending to have and climaxed again, his enthusiasm spurting across Betty’s calves in hot jets, while Stinky followed suit, his musky and potent skunk cum punctuating Hank’s thighs.
The untethered duo representing all things furry scampered in circles, their fetish-like tails knotting in brotherly frott. They yiffed out the lyrics from Girls Just Wanna Have Fun but filked it into Critters Just Wanna Get Some. They were unaware that, to Hank and Betty post-climax, McFume’s fumes had Elon Musked so bad it would almost clear a Senate subcommittee.
Almost.
At the zenith of the greatest crescendo of sports cinematography ever not captured, Hank pulled out, flipping Betty over like a championship pancake and parking her face-first on the finish line. His cock erupted down her throat in thick spurts, which she swallowed with the gusto of a county fair funnel cake champion sponsored by Pepto-Bismol.
The oil, having developed a complex about lubricating the third wheel, gushed from her pussy in a jealous torrent, bubbling around the rolling pin still wedged in her rear like it was auditioning for a role in the Vegas after-dark account for Cirque du Soleil.
The enclosing quaintness now fittingly stank of mephitic demon casserole sex and an impending senseless dread. It was a scent so complex, it could only be described as “Yankee Candle, the Limited Edition (Notes of No-Nut November and Fallout: New Vegas)”. In the back, and off the side, where she stayed, the ghost of Martha Stewart decorated the chaos.
The sophistication of meatloaf and MTV countdowns hung in the air.
The phone clattered off the hook, crooning Every Rose Has Its Thorn.
Betty wiped her mouth with the dignity of a pageant queen who knows the tiara is plastic, “Hank, darlin’, if this is domesticity, sign me up for overtime. But next time, let’s invite the vacuum cleaner and make it a true ménage à ménage.”
“More like a Nicki Minaj,” Hank nodded, a whooshing sound escaping him, “But only if we can finally use the good extension cord, it’s been eyeing me funny.”
He narrowed his eyes, fixing the kitchen appliances with the suspicion of a mall cop at a flash mob. The balls of fur high-fived and moonwalked into the cornfields as the final blast wafted through, trailing only the faintest scent of Jell-O and unresolved therapy bills.
Quietly, the blender applied to grad school, and a single marshmallow contemplated the void. What else was there to do?
No one heard the faint whir of the toaster plotting its revenge.
And now, on the penultimate key, the house lurched like Aqualung in heat. Its walls ceased weeping wallpaper peels, more clingy than decorative anyway. They themselves stopped curling into cloying corridor ensnarements.
The post-structuralist kaleidoscope, a children’s toy of carnal catastrophe, sighed itself apart, Bacon Bits crumbling into the stock-tip-whispered winds, gray dust and moldy wall-pestilence billowing everywhere.
Moments earlier, unrecorded, the human monuments to pearl-clutching paragons of picket-fence piety had piled into their own pandemonium: Mrs. Abernathy, the bake-sale baroness, had been step-mom stuck in the fence, bent over her begonias as the garden hose rinsed her holes, nozzle nosing into her nether nest, water gushing in geysers that soaked her unknowable dignity.
In the chemistry sterilization of tomorrow, it would be blamed on allergies, ruining everything, but out here, in the blast’s consummation, it shone a brilliant flash of unmerchandisable vulnerability.
Further across the street, parked amidst cars of desire, the Andersons’ station wagon swayed on flaccid shocks, Mr. Anderson’s ass up in the engine bay, wrench wedged in his rectum. The radiator radiated radiation, its steam stroking his stem as it spurted against the serpentine belt’s slither. His wife, wild-eyed with window-wiper wanks, had straddled the steering wheel, leather licking her labia as horny horns horned.
The Andersons’ Afghan hound had mounted the mailbox, its knot knotting the flagpole in frenzied flags of fur-flying fornication, while the neighborhood tabby tomcat clawed at the curtains, tail thrashing as he tongued his own taint in tabby taboos.
The sky split ever wider, a warm red darkness bellowing the firmament, Autumn fallout flakes falling like filthy freezerburn. Each speck sparked the skin, sizzling and suckling at spontaneously sprouted sores.
The nuzzles were now necrotic.
All of it.
Gone.
All that remained was congealed spunk alongside the curbstompings. All traces of Betty were buried now in a burrow of bodies, and yet, she might’ve bit a blissful bullet due to the blender’s blades whirring against her clit. They pureed propriety into pulp as the horizon posted its final, fiery, fuck you.
For days, all that echoed across the holocaust was a tinnily recorded cacophonous joy.
Just in case anyone cares, it’s possible, purely in the technical sense, that my life is approaching a point of structural failure. Bodies do that under the right circumstances. If anything were to collapse, it would do so without my cooperation. Motivating tasteful little tragedies to like, donate, scroll past, and forget, into some sort of abstract consumable commodity makes my skin crawl with the irritations of meth withdrawal.
My parents were proud plowing plowers of cheese I could never eat, dammit, and they weren’t about to make it as a Times Square talk show side circus.
I’d like, for at least one brief period in my life, to have this happen again. I’d bind them up in a new book titled Supercumigrabiliciousfuckmealapokus. That sounds fun. These days, however, it seems like even that’s asking for too much, no irony intended.
It just happens.
I told everyone the world would get better because I knew it would. I suppose I just didn’t realize how. They always say that hindsight is 20/20.
I’m at the point in my life that, creating such a book is gonna have to cost someone some money. Although I have adult responsibilities, I am unable to enjoy the commitment of holding any sort of regular job.
You might be rolling your eyes right now, and I wouldn’t blame you, but it is a touch difficult to maintain a stature of outward respectability when those that advocate online about invisible disabilities laugh at your inability to fill out forms for Medicaid due to a disability that magically disappears whenever someone’s mad at you.
My shoes aren’t that different from anybody else’s, and yet, when I say that I stand apart they think I’m lying. They know better than I while doing nothing better than I.
I live on a fixed income (not from the government) that is in constant danger of being even less than the enough it already isn’t, like me. I don’t want it to be this way, and I’m trying to leverage my skills to chart a different future, but, the future is the future. It hasn’t happened yet.
What can I say, I’m a citizen of the United States of America. And, 42 years into my life, given everything else, the vast majority of it being me, myself, and I get in my way, I am confident that I’m not going to be going places any time soon.
My dark will, enshrined in the distant burning night, currently speaks for all of my time before I even wake up, and so, I now need motivations beyond goodwill. If you want such a book, you will have to make that possible by using my Ko-Fi. It exists for a reason.
And for whatever it’s worth, I genuinely hope, from the depths of my dear heart, that you get everything you’ve ever wished for in 2026 in all its fantastical glory. Just… be careful when it starts arriving, ’cause you never really know for sure.