The Beginning of a Book You'll Never Read

    He took a bus to nowhere and crashed it into a street sign that said “Vacant.”  A tumbled weed looked at him crossed.  He took his dick out and peed on the tumbled weed.  It tumbled.  The bus stunk like burnt oil.  The tires were bald.  The hazard lights twinkled like dying stars.  He took a deep breath and screamed something into nothing at no one.

    Every step sent a little poof of dust.  Each dust cloud seemed to propel him forward, further into vacancy.  His mind wondered the way a mind does when not paralyzed by input.  It wondered on the wind and the taste it has.  It wondered on the sound of steps leading toward nowhere and how they’re different from steps leading toward a church or a grocery store.

    His mind kept wondering and wandering until it got to something sharp.  He stopped and looked back to where the bus should have been.  It was still there, in the distance, but vultures had descended upon it.  They held their beaks up at the sky and choked down parts of the engine and the side mirrors and little strips of paint.  Their stomachs were fat and misshapen from all the parts.  One of them put his wings out.  Too heavy to fly.  They made noises like an argument at one another.  The bus leaned and groaned.

    The man turned away and giggled.  He giggled and walked until the giggle became a chuckle.  The chuckle became a belly laugh.  The belly laugh ran out of him and carried on with the tumble weeds.  Laughing like that worked like poison on his wandering thoughts.  There was no more dust under his shoes.  No more clouds in the sky.  No direction from which he came or where he was going.  Just the sound of his own laugh and the gasps that came between them.  It went on like this until his jaw muscles were exhausted.

    He looked around and the bus was gone.  He tried looking in another direction for it.  The vultures had gobbled it down to nothing.  Or maybe it was out of sight.  He thought about retracing his steps.  He spun in a circle.  There were no steps to trace back.  His shoes were gone.  The dirt had turned the creases between his toes good and brown.  Looking down at his own wiggling toes, they looked like they belonged exactly where they were.  They’d evolved in color to match their surroundings.  They moved without rhythm.

    Then he began walking again.  This time his mind went to things he missed.  Soft things.  Things that were warm in his hand and in his belly.  He thought about all sort of things.  About rubbing them with his fingers and about lying his entire body on them.  The things slowly dissolved and dropped onto the ground.  It was like he had a hole in his pocket and change was falling out.  Only the coins were thoughts.  More thoughts fell out and were left behind.  

    More thoughts appeared out of no where.  It wasn’t things anymore.  It was people.  People with familiar faces at first.  Then people with generic faces.  Faces like you see in big crowds when you’re too far away.  The faces got closer and more deranged.  They grew snouts and sagged at the neck.  Some of the faces contorted or blew off the skull entirely.  Faces with sharp fangs.  Faces with smiles that took up all the space.  They came and they went.  Some where good and some were bad.  Neither could be recalled once it was gone.  The faces too, dropped out of his head and onto the ground behind him.

    Then his brain wasn’t thinking about things or faces anymore.  It thought about ideas.  The ideas appeared like whales and swam by.  There are many ways whales can swim and he watched all of them.  All sorts of whales.  Whales with big mouths and teeth only on the lower jaw.  Whales in pods.  Whales with tail fins shaped like rudders on a boat.  Different color whales.  Everything swam by long enough to get a good look at him and then continue wherever they were headed in the first place.

    When the whales were gone, he stopped and looked around again.  He looked down at his feet.  He couldn’t differentiate them from the ground anymore.  The dust had work its way up his body, camouflaging all of it.  He eyes blinked and tried to focus on something.  It was good camouflage.  There was no edge to where his body ended and the ground began.  He didn’t think to feel for it with his hands.  His mind had retired all thoughts of things.  His hands were one of those things.  Without legs or arms or anything, he stopped walking right there.