Hello Devilfish! by Ron Dakron Read Free Book Online Page A

Big time fun dead!”
    â€œI dunno,” she peers closer, “you sure talk like him. Same dumb Manglish crap.”
    â€œHe—he’s gay! Eeep,” I squeak when she squeezes me. “That’s why I smell like him! We did the naxty in the sauna. Happy prick invasion life!”
    â€œNo way he’s gay,” Squidra giggles, “not with his grooming. You seen his ear hairs? They’re longer than surfboards.”
    â€œIf you hate him so much,”—why am I arguing with a fish?—“then why you stalking him?”
    â€œLove is mysterious,” Squidra coos.
    â€œNo it ain’t! Geeraa! ” I screech like a jailed mynah, “plus he hates you! Icky girl, icky!”
    â€œYou’re a feisty changeling,” Squidra squints closer—ewww, I can even see her slimy chin wrinkles. “But how’d you turn human? Wait—we were near some bio-factory—goddamn it,” she bitches when a rogue fire truck bonks her fin, “don’t these fuckers ever stop?” They do when she slaps that truck into the guzzling sky—and hee hee, drops me onto that gore-slicked street. “Bye!” I laugh, skittering knees and hands across a squid-wracked wasteland. What—I should stick around and fight—with this useless human bod? Hah—if fate will slay me, why, fate may chase my blue butt. Hello Devilfish! I got nothing to add.

/ 13 /
    Look—I really, really want to end Big Lit. I’m not kidding—join our censor lifestyle! It’s called Censor Life. But how to really, really end Lit? Every time you harass the wordy sucker—it co-opts you! You go slasher, sexist, gross-out, nonsensical—the meta-narrative simply absorbs you. I never met a narrative I didn’t hate. Next thing you know, some beardy dude is using you as a plot! Ahem, yes—my new book’s about a poem-hating stingray . He’s a sensitive little putz. Here’s what I’ve tried—you tell me if it worked. Crush presses, gulp pulp mills, chow down authors and critics? Lit goes ebook and mob democratic—now everyone’s a writer! With vague and boring needs. And don’t get me raving about gender skirmishes—dude writers were dumb enough—now we got a billion chicks picking their memory scabs! My sex-ed teacher ignored me. Grandpa spurned my bondage forays. Chicks live in the past like cranky fossils—Hello Devilfish! I’m big fun in a small can.
    Anyway, the skinny is I dodged raging Squidra by sprinting through some foundry prefecture, this pomo maze of smokestacks and girders and incomprehensible pictographs squirming on torn ads. This was def a Buraku district—everywhere stank from fish butts and despair. What are Buraku? They’re Japan’s untouchables—the caste that for millennia burned corpses and slaughtered pigs and ate all the carp guts. Tokyoites call them sluckers —don’t ask how that slur arose—and only a gaijan like me would even admit they exist. Who cares? Let them figure their own karma out—I was blue and needed pants. I looked like a Level 3 Smurf pedophile.
    Let’s have the pop reference! Truth be told—and it won’t—I was still more ray than human in my morphed biped mind. For starters, I couldn’t really walk—staggering like a drugged shark don’t count—and I still wiggled my arms like fish wings. Nothing to see here, folks—just another blue rube doing the funky chicken. I can haz James Brown? And then—ahem—there’s the power line incident. Which went down when I lurched and keeled through goofy streets and nearly tripped on duhn duhn duhhhhh —some downed power lines! Sizzling and writhing in voltaic knots. More of Squidra’s oeuvre, no doubt—us kaiju love to plow through watt towers, amp cables, cathode clots—anything that squirms like ghost ramen when you wreck it. Plus some voltage