View from a Pedestal

          A woman prepares to leave her suburban home. She scans the sidewalk through her bay window. Her destination is the house next door, but life has taught her to be careful.

          Tate, fifteen years old and on the business end of Noxima withdrawal, notices the woman exit as he makes his newspaper delivery rounds. "Futher-mucking mammy-jammers! Wouldja lookit that!" he gushes, involuntarily braking his 10-speed with Terminator-like brutality. Tate launches headlong over the handlebars, his fall cushioned by a pane of now-shattered glass.

          The workmen carrying the glass are by turns thankful they are unharmed and angry at their pane's obliteration. Then one sees the woman's hair, black as his morals, trailing in the breeze as she traipses down her front walk. The second workman follows his comrade's gaze and erection, noticing the swagger of the woman's bosoms.

          "Hot diggity dang," says the first. "You see what I'm seein'?"

          The second nods. "Good God help me. I think my lugnut just had an aneurism."

          David—or "Double Dutch" as he is known by friends, acquaintances, debt collectors, and matriculating coeds—is on his way to work. Possessing a deep-seated fear of dying prematurely, he makes it a rule to drive 30mph below the speed limit, which in this residential zone is 25mph. Thus, he drives in reverse at 5mph, much to the consternation of fellow motorists.

          He backs past a vaguely ethnic-looking woman walking along the sidewalk, and swerves, slowly crushing two helpless workmen. His car also collides with the compressor attached to the rear of their glass delivery truck; it explodes, turning David's car into an inferno. His spirit gapes from the flames, undaunted, shouting with quadruple-Dutch ferocity: "Mother-raping matriculation without representation. Get a load of that shit!"

          Ron, a would-be serial killer, leaps from the shrubbery in front of the neighbor's home. With a single upward slash his knife opens the woman's belly and out spill her intestines. Ron turns to run but does a double-take, wallowing in the glory of her entrails. "Ding dong, the witch gives head! Get an eyeful!" he shouts, then sprints away at full speed without care—plunging straight into the fire.

          Vivian's biotech delivery van pulls up to a customer's home across the street. Neon lettering on the sides of her van proclaims: Vivisections in 30 mins. or LESS! She steps from her vehicle ready to work, but is stopped in her tracks by the sight of the woman bundling her own intestines and attempting to continue to her neighbor's house.

          Vivian scoffs. "Really? That visceral peritoneum is so last week. I bet even her epineurium is out of date." She grabs the tools of vivisection and crosses the street, preparing to give the woman a series of stainless-steel critiques.

          Tully, reporting traffic live from the 1News Chopper, spots the conflagration below. His cameraman zooms in only to locate the woman dragging herself onto her neighbor's property while failing to fend off Vivian's scalpel. Or, more accurately, locating a backside from beyond and ignoring all else.

          "Fiddle-ferking fiddley-ferk," Tully squeals into his microphone. "Check that out!" Before the helicopter's other occupants can chime in their vehicle veers wildly off-course, slamming into an errant UFO.

          On Gliese 581d, the Loreleian supreme ruler is alerted to the loss of a vital probe vessel on Earth, 23 light years distant. Bubbles rise to the surface of his homestyle-gravyesque exterior, demonstrating egregious displeasure. The final transmission from the failed probe includes footage of the woman. He exclaims a vulgarity so profound it cannot be translated into carbon-based language, emits a gas that triggers the Loreleian doomsday arsenal, and dies with the rest of his race.

          Roused from His meditations by the unplanned destruction of one of His more significant creations, God TiVos back through the final Loreleian moments. God sees what their supreme ruler observed and jumps from His throne. "Myself damn it! Yon female dost possess a stacked rack attack with a boom-boom back!" In addition to simultaneously gauging all other occurrences in the cosmos, this one stimulation proves too much, initiating a divine Wicked Witch impersonation. The flood of ectoplasm into which God devolves spawns galaxies, futures, rigid armageddons.

          In Hell, Satan backflips. On attempting to stand again, he achieves the same result, realizing the weight of God's chains is absent, causing his sudden imbalance. "Forsooth!" he grumbles, stroking the goatee. Suspecting a trap, he descries the source of this development in a pool of fermented bile. Into focus comes the Lorelei race, the Heavenly Father's demise, and the woman, bringing Satan's goatee to full mast.

          "Word 'em up, kid. The ineffable has suddenly become quite F——able…if ya know what I mean!" Satan feels the particles of his being lightening, the fires of his domicile extinguished, harps and halos replacing pitchforks and horns, causing him to shriek like an infant before the branding iron.

          The woman's neighbor, Dr. Jones, finally opens his door. Vivian, having also immolated via car crash, is nowhere to be seen. Dr. Jones finds instead a quivering pile of viscera and glistening bone on his front step. It turns its eyes up to him. "Doctor," comes the gurgling voice, "I need you to fix me. Make me beautiful. Make me complete."

          Dr. Jones agrees, having no plastic surgeries scheduled for the afternoon, and sets to work on his neighbor gratis; she is always good about sharing berries from her backyard, allowing his patients to park in front of her home, and ignoring the semen streaks on his windows.

          Afterwards the woman feels much better about herself. Still, she hesitates before leaving, watching through the front window. Life has taught her to be careful. Dr. Jones, tiring of the woman, shoves her through the door. "Honestly, what's the big deal? It's just next door! Dizzy broad."

          Outside, emergency responders busy themselves with the burning vehicle and bodies. They witness the woman emerging from the surgeon's home and the world around them erupts…









John Edward Lawson has published eight books and over four hundred works in anthologies, newspapers, and literary journals worldwide. He is a Bram Stoker Award finalist and a winner of the Fiction International Emerging Writers Competition; other nominations include the Rhysling, the Dwarf Stars Award, and the Pushcart Prize. As a freelance editor, he has worked for Raw Dog Screaming Press and National Lampoon among others, has edited six anthologies, and served as editor in chief for The Dream People. He lives near Washington, DC with his wife and son.