"The Norbal of the Gorbal Vats".

The twirble and his sweetie go and get something to eatie. 

The Purple Water

I live with my brother Bob in an apartment in Massachusetts…. (Or was it California? I forget.) He likes fish.

I am walking walking, walking to work. I stack records, I’m not sure why. My boss Alfred whips me when I stack to slow. He is green and has long yellow hair that snakes into the air in rhythmic undulations.

I walk home. Giant white faces come down from the sky and try to sell me their latest products. They are evil and smell. I run home.

My brother is lying down on the couch. He is fat, naked and dirty. He is eating a bloody pencil and watching images that emerge from the television. They enter the room and do naughty, ungodlike things to each other involving various fruits. It reminds me of a painting I saw once, oncity once.

I lie on my bed and force my shattered nerves to calm. My every day is painful these days. A tube of toothpaste, a can of soda, and a fish fly in through my open window. I think to get the fish for my brother but my eyes close and my mind drifts off to sleep.

“Would you like to purchase the latest in scuba gear?” A voice wakes me with a crack. I stand upright, scuba diving would be fun. I dive out the window. I will worry about getting a credit card later.

I land in bushes, not water. I frown. I hate those fishes that get to be in the water all the time. That lovely purple water.

“Just give it a try,” the face says, his voice liquidy and strange, like he is having a big feelings. The faces don’t seem to have very large emotions so I stop for a moment to see what he has to say, then a glass of clear liquid appears in front of me.

I gasp in a very large amount of horror. I knew all about the clear water. I knew about it since…well I forget. It was poison; it would frickesea my insides and turn me into a blob of jelly, and then into nothing.

I run from him. I run past children lying on street corners and playing with the newest of dangerous toys, I run past people doing handstands in the mud and a pony named Bill that lost most of his limbs in a terrible war with France. I run until I come to the only place I know I can be safe.

I see the docks ahead, and the lovely purple sea that stretches out forever into a terrible sunrise. I run up the pier and dive in.

First the water shocks me, then its purple loveliness envelopes me. I am a baby in my mother’s womb. Beautiful, safe, and unchanged.

I had been another way once. I remember it like a painful and blurry dream. I remember feelings that I wish I could have again. Feelings of love and wholeness and of the steadfastness of reality, but such have my dreams always been. I should be satisfied with my life, as god has willed it.

A hand grabs me, I struggle as I am dragged out of my lovely purple water and the harsh air overcomes me. In seconds I am thrown to the ground and my head is pulled back. An unbearable burning sensation wracks my throat, mouth, and then my stomach. I fight and couch and wheeze. My eyes see nothing, my head spins. I run and fall and sputter and do jumping jacks and swallow nails, but nothing seems to help. I fall into a puddle of gushing sand and lie there, waiting to die